Redemption Song (33 page)

“Not to mention,” I said, “Lauren Carmichael planned to use it on you. That’s gotta sting a little.”

“Do you understand the consequences of what you’re offering me? No one with demonic blood can use the ring—it’ll work no mischief in my realm—but what happens when we move to claim your little world? You’re sacrificing the greatest advantage your species has.”

“I’m gambling that’s not happening anytime soon,” I said. “And in this world, the ring’s just as dangerous as it is helpful. Lauren proved that. In the wrong hands—”

“What about the right ones?” Sitri asked, a tinge of eagerness in his voice. “Given the right hands, couldn’t a mortal rise to greatness? He would be a champion of good. A savior of humanity and a beacon of light in a dark age. You could be such a champion. Aren’t you tempted, just a bit?”

I thought about that. I had thought about it most of the evening. I kept coming back to the same old conclusion.

“Nah,” I said. “I’m not that guy.”

Sitri chuckled. “No. You’ll betray your entire world, for the love of a woman.”

“Would you?” said the voice at my back.

I spun on my heel. Caitlin stood at the bottom of the steps. I hadn’t heard her come down.

“You would do that for me?” she asked. There was something in her eyes I hadn’t seen in a while. It looked like hope.

“In a heartbeat,” I told her.

“We shall see,” Sitri said, “if you can put your mettle where your mouth is. Produce the ring, and I’ll make your little dreams come true, warlock.”

“I need one thing,” I said. “Information. I’ve got a plan, but to make it work I need to get my hands on one of the damned. A human named Gilles de Rais.”

The Conduit went silent. Caitlin edged up to stand beside me. Our fingers entwined.

“Found him,” Sitri said as the Conduit’s body gave a tiny jerk, consciousness surging back in. “Could be trouble. De Rais belongs to a creature called Naavarasi. She’s a rakshasi—not a demon, but one of the elder races, her domain swallowed by hell’s expanding borders. A baron among the Night-Blooming Flowers, but as I understand it she bears the court little love, and little love is given to her in kind.”

“Maybe I can find something to trade her,” I said.

“Or perhaps you can do me a service,” Sitri countered. “We have a spy inside the court. He is on the verge of being discovered. Go to Naavarasi, and convince her that you and I are enemies. Offer to give her this spy’s name, in order to hurt me. Meanwhile, I’ll send the order for my agent to flee after leaving some false information behind. False documents pointing fingers in interesting directions and giving the Flowers something to fight each other over for years to come.”

I nodded. “Brilliant. Naavarasi gets a feather in her cap, you turn a crisis into a victory, and I get leverage.”

“We need to keep up a ruse,” Caitlin told me. “Until you’ve seized the ring, everyone needs to believe that we separated, or they’ll know something’s up. I can help you, but only from the shadows.”

I squeezed her hand.

“Then I’ll count the hours until the job’s done,” I said.

• • •

Sullivan clapped his hands together, rolling his eyes.

“Brilliant,” he said sarcastically. “So you weren’t at the banquet to steal the book after all. You were trying to grab the ring off the table. That was your goal all along.”

I nodded. “Like I said, it wasn’t about the book, and it was barely about you. You were just my in. My way to get to the table and up close and personal with Lauren Carmichael.”

“And you failed. Abysmally.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“Ben,” Sullivan said. “It’s time.”

Ben couldn’t take his eyes off Melanie. He pleaded with her softly, choking back tears. She didn’t even look at him.

“
Ben
!” Sullivan snapped. “Come here. Now is the time to be strong, to be pure. This is your hour of greatness!”

Ben slunk away from us, head hung like a whipped dog, to stand at Sullivan’s side. His expression changed when Sullivan took Ben’s right hand and slipped the Ring of Solomon onto his finger.

“I know,” Sullivan said, “because
I
took it. It was the first thing my hand closed upon in the confusion. Your trick with the lights worked on my followers, Mr. Faust, but I can see in the dark quite clearly. I never took my eyes off it.”

Ben clenched his fist, nodding to himself and staring at the gleaming ring. I could see the change in his face, the sudden rush of power as he realized what he’d been given.

Sullivan smiled as he looked at Caitlin.

“As I said, what a pleasure to avenge all the wrongs done to me. You saved me the trouble of hunting you down, my dear. Did you miss me?”

“Like a case of the black plague,” Caitlin said. “And you’ve always been the hero of your own little sob story,
Suulivarishisian
. Nothing is ever your fault. You’re always the wronged one. The only thing I ever did to you, was refuse to be your victim anymore.”

He waved an irritated hand in the air. “History will remember things differently. Especially when you go before Prince Sitri’s assembled council and confess how you and the prince colluded to steal my estate. Humiliating you both will be a delightful appetizer before I march my armies into hell and take my rightful throne. And you
will
confess. You’ll say anything I want you to say, once you’re under the ring’s power.”

“Yes,” Ben ranted, almost hyperventilating as he stared at the ring. “Yes, I’m ready. I’m ready for this, just say the word. I’m ready for greatness.”

Sullivan rubbed his chin as he contemplated Caitlin. “I think I’ll have you tear your lover apart while I watch. That seems appropriate. But first, we’ll have a proper reunion. Ben? Use the ring on Caitlin, please. Make her crawl over here and lick the dust from my boots.”

Ben pointed his curled fist at Caitlin, brandishing the ring. “
Kneel!
” he roared in a voice that echoed off the desert flats.

Emma and I watched with horror as Caitlin’s knees began to buckle. “Can’t…fight it,” she gasped, her voice strained.

Then she grinned.

She was the first to break out into laughter as she rose back to her feet. Emma followed suit. I leaned into Caitlin, snickering into her shoulder as I gave her a tight hug.

“Holy shit,” I said. “One more second of that and I was gonna lose it. I could
not
keep a straight face.”

“Sullivan,” Caitlin said, choking back a fit of giggles. “You truly are a pathetic creature. Truly.”

Sullivan stared at the ring, dumbfounded. Ben just looked horrified.

“Yeah,” I added. “And by the way, that’s not the Ring of Solomon. We stole it first.”

“What?” Sullivan roared, “How? I told you, I never took my eyes off it! You couldn’t have swapped it for a fake, you never had the chance.”

“Well, that brings us back to the story of the real plan. See, Ben, your job was to feed misinformation back to Sully here, and you did a bang-up job of it. You had no idea what was going on right under your nose. Literally.”

• • •

“According to these specs,” Pixie had said, her face bathed in the blue glow of her laptop screen, “the security firm installed a Contender model 800-L behind a hidden panel in Lauren’s study. That was just last year, so unless she suddenly got an urge to upgrade out of nowhere, that’s what we’re up against. It’s the only place in the house secure enough to store something that valuable.”

“How tough is it?”

She shrugged. “Do I look like a safecracker? You need an expert.”

That was how we ended up in Nicky Agnelli’s office in the back room of the Gentlemen’s Bet, huddled around a sheaf of schematics on his desk. Nicky brought in a guy I’d worked with two or three times before, a willowy Southerner with a bleach-blond goatee. He called himself Coop. Wasn’t sure if it was his first or last name, didn’t care either.

“If time’s tight,” Coop said, “fastest way in is a jam shot. That or use a thermal lance, but then you’re risking a fire. Can we punch out the walls around it and just take the whole safe?”

I shook my head. “Out of the question. Whole house will be on you in five seconds. Besides, we can’t leave any sign that the safe’s been tampered with. At the end of the night, whoever ends up with the dummy ring—Lauren or Sullivan—has to believe they’ve got the real McCoy.”

“The 800-L is an electronic keypad model,” Coop said. “A good one, not the crap you find in most hotel rooms. There are autodialers out there, gizmos that’ll run through possible combinations faster than you can blink and brute-force the password, but they’re specific to the safe model. I don’t have anything like that for the 800 line.”

Pixie furrowed her brow. “What are they based on?”

“Specific algorithms, and the makeup of the circuit board you’re trying to talk to,” Coop said. “That’s all proprietary stuff. You’d have to have an inside guy at Paragon, or get into their company servers somehow.”

“Give me an autodialer for a safe like this one,” she said, “so I can see how they’re built. I’ll do the rest.”

Coop and Nicky both looked at me. I nodded.

“If she says she can do it,” I told them, “she can do it.”

• • •

“Remember the caterers who were already on-site when you got there?” I asked Ben. “Pixie and Coop were on that truck. They slipped out of the kitchen and were already stealing the ring when you showed up.”

“How?” Ben said. “How did you get people on both trucks?”

Emma half smiled, but it didn’t hide the anger in her eyes. “Nicky Agnelli
owns
Saguaro Catering. That’s why Daniel picked them. The hijacking was another layer of the lie. Those people were Nicky’s men, and they knew we’d be there. It was all a show to make you believe you were in on the real plan.”

“Didn’t it all go a little too smoothly?” I asked Ben. “In retrospect?”

“But how did they get out?” Ben said. “We left with the rest of the caterers when the lights went out, and we never saw them.”

“Remember the blueprints of the house?” I asked. “You pointed it out yourself. Lauren’s escape tunnel. The one that ran directly beneath the dining room.”

“But the alarms were wired to the house’s generator! They couldn’t have gotten through there without…” He fell silent as he figured it out.

Sullivan’s eyes narrowed. “The ploy with your little poker chip. It wasn’t your escape route. It was
theirs
.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I stalled until Pixie called me. Three rings and a hang-up was the signal that they were waiting under the house, ready to go. My spell killed the power, and they slipped right out. They’d already taken the ring and replaced it. What Meadow Brand removed from that safe—and you stole from her—is a nice little reproduction. My buddy Winslow made it for us. Jewelry’s kind of his hobby. You know, Ben, I told you this was going to happen. You were warned.”

He blinked at me, still clutching the worthless copy of the ring in his hand.

“How? When?”

I smiled and spread my hands.

“Think back to the meeting. What did I say? We were going to do a magic trick. When you’re looking at my left hand, all the action’s happening in my right. The audience always looks where the magician
wants
them to look. And if they think they’re the ones in control? That just proves they’ve already been fooled.”

“Fine,” Sullivan snapped. “Very clever. Very creative. It changes nothing. You have the ring. We have the guns. Hand it over. Now.”

I shook my head. “It’s hidden, but it’s not somewhere you can find it. Trust me on this one.”

Forty-Three

W
e had made a little detour on our way out to the Silk Ranch.

Two blocks away from Lauren’s house, with sirens wailing in the distance, Caitlin pulled her car to the side of the road. The Wardriver rolled up, and Pixie leaned out the driver’s-side window. She held out a small burlap bag, but didn’t toss it to me.

“I still have questions about what we did here tonight,” Pixie said. “About this whole mess.”

“I know,” I told her.

“One question,” she said. “One question, and I want the honest truth.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Were we the good guys tonight?”

I had to think about that one. Finally, I nodded.

“As good as it gets, Pix. As good as it gets. You can only expect so much, you know. We’re only human.”

She chewed that over, decided she could swallow it, and tossed me the bag.

Back in Vegas, the crowd in front of Winter parted like they knew we were coming, and every door opened wide without a word being said, all the way down to the cellar. The Conduit waited for us, still and silent, beside a single burning candle.

“You did it,” Sitri’s voice said with the Conduit’s lips. “You actually did it.”

“
We
did it,” I said, standing at Caitlin’s side.

“So you say. But now, the proof.”

The Conduit pulled back its soiled robes. It hooked its fingers against the center of its mottled chest and pulled. Leathery skin tore and bones cracked like dry twigs as the creature slowly ripped open its own chest.

What lay beneath the muscle and bone was a starless void.

I stared into that vastness, deeper than space and infinitely more bleak, and my blood turned to ice. The Conduit’s lips curled into a broken smile.

“Choose, Daniel Faust. Wear the ring, and become humanity’s champion, or sacrifice it for your heart’s desire. I won’t stop you. In fact, if you keep it, I’ll even let you walk out of here alive. You would be an interesting opponent.”

I looked to Caitlin, but she shook her head.

“It has to be your choice,” she said. “Yours alone.”

I weighed the ring in my hand. Two futures, neither of them certain, both liable to end in disaster. I didn’t need magic to look down the road and see what was coming: trouble brewing, blood on my hands, and a shadow dogging my heels. Same as it ever was.

It might be nice to be a hero for once in my life. To fight for a cause, to have something to really believe in. For all Sullivan’s empty talk about redemption, here was the real thing being handed to me for free. A shot at making up for the wreckage of my life. A shot at being a better man. A shot at forgiveness.