Detonation Boulevard

by Craig Schaefer

“I’m sorry,” Marie said, “I’m honestly not great with faces—”

  “Tricia.” Her fingers brushed the buckles of her leather coat. “We went to SUNY together. Well, that’s overselling it. I mean, we were only together in one class.”

  Marie’s senses tingled, and it wasn’t from the magic-infused air this time. It was her cop instinct, the one that told her when someone was lying. “Tricia” hadn’t looked at her like someone she casually knew from college; she looked at her like a woman who just discovered her lover had amnesia. Crushed, and doing a bad job of hiding it.

  Marie glanced left, pretending to think back. “Tricia—oh, of course! Professor Hodgman’s class, right? Advanced calculus?”

  “That’s me,” Tricia replied, forcing her enthusiasm. “I usually sat a row or two behind you. Didn’t talk much.”

  The bartender was finished. Three drinks lined the brass rail of the bar, and Marie paid him with a trio of folded twenties. She bundled up the glasses in an awkward embrace and told him to keep the change.

  “My friends are waiting for these,” Marie said, apologetic. “I’ll be back in a minute, okay?”

  “Sure,” Tricia said with a smile, watching her go.

  Back at the edge of the parlor, the subject had swung and Freddie’s giddiness faded to concern. She plucked a cocktail glass from Marie’s arm and tossed half of it back in one swallow.

  “—and you’re absolutely certain you haven’t been hit on the head at any point?”

  “Positive.” Nessa took the second cocktail glass. “I’ve never been here in my life. Didn’t even know it existed before this morning. Whoever you met last year, it was someone pretending to be me. And doing an excellent job, by the sound of it.”

  Marie tugged Nessa’s sleeve and dropped her voice. “We need to go. Now.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got a double running around here too.”

  “No,” Marie said, “what I’ve got is a woman watching us like a hawk from across the room, and she’s studied up on me. Even knew where I went to college. I smelled a rat, so I asked if she was in my advanced calculus class. She said yes. I didn’t take calculus. And who’s been reading dossiers on us?”

  “The bounty hunters who were hired to kill us both,” Nessa said.

  Tricia wasn’t the only one watching them now. Over by the pool table, one of the yellow-eyed bikers stared at his phone, then at them, then back to his phone again. He gave the man next to him a nudge with his elbow and pointed. Back in one of the conversation nooks, a pale foursome had been huddled around a bizarre board game, a cross between a chess table and a three-level maze made of toothpicks. All four looked up as one, silent, and their doughy faces swiveled to fix on Nessa and Marie.

  “Bingo,” Marie said. “Time to leave.”

  Twenty-Three

  Some people would be dismayed by the threat of impending violence. Freddie Vinter lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Mysterious impersonators? Hired killers? If I’d known you two were going to be this interesting, I’d have paid for the drinks. All right, first things first, don’t get your hackles up. The club has a zero-tolerance policy about violence on the grounds.”

  “The people looking for us don’t really care about rules,” Marie said.

  “Not a rule, sugar plum. A policy. A policy enforced with swift, remorseless, and one hundred percent lethal brutality. Believe me, no one is going to start a fight inside the Bast Club.”

  “What about outside?” Nessa asked.

  “Outside is outside, which is why you’re standing in the safest possible place right now. Best formulate a plan before forsaking Management’s hospitality. If worse comes to worst, we’ll sprint across the parking lot and I’ll drive you out of here myself. That said, my Ferrari is a two-seater, so you’ll have to squeeze in.”

  “You don’t need to get involved,” Marie said. “These people have already killed at least one innocent bystander just to get at us.”

  Freddie sipped her cocktail. “So clearly, to protect myself, I should be neither innocent nor a bystander. I’m already guilty as sin, so all that’s left is to step off the sidelines. You know, I thought I wasn’t going to have any fun tonight. But if you were looking to keep a low profile, why did you come here in the first place?”

  “We’re looking for someone. A writer named Carolyn Saunders.”

  “Carolyn? Oh, this isn’t her scene. Especially after she made a scene, last time she was here. I told her, use a pseudonym and she’d be perfectly safe, but she had to get sloppy after a couple of highballs and drop her real name at the bar. Not a lot of fans in attendance, considering how she flouts the rules of polite underground society. Me? I think it’s hilarious.”

  Nessa had fallen silent. Retreating into thought, feeling like she was at the whiteboard in her old college classroom and trying to solve an equation with words.

  “You were here that night,” she said. “You’re here a lot, I take it.”

  “Of course! Most nights, really. Where else am I going to get the scoop on who’s been doing what nastiness to whom? I dig only the most freshly churned dirt. Believe me, if anything happens in Chicago, I know about it. We may not have New York’s cosmopolitan flair or the pizazz of Vegas, but we do know how to have a good time in this city.”

  “My impersonator knew you would be here,” Nessa said. “She picked a major event, the poker tournament, to show her—my—face and drop my maiden name. Nothing about this was random. You were targeted.”

  Freddie’s eyebrows lifted. “Targeted? You make it sound so malevolent.”

  “Ingenious, maybe. My double was wearing a coat you designed, you said. She knew you’d spot her in the crowd. More than that, she knew you’d want to talk to her. She had an instant conversation starter—a conversation with you, specifically—and she wore it on her back.”

  “It makes sense, but why choose me? I mean, beyond basking in the presence of a world-famous fashionista, which is a reward all its own.”

  Marie followed Nessa’s train of thought.

  “Because of exactly what happened tonight,” she said. “She knew that if Nessa ever found her way to the Bast Club, you’d almost certainly be here when she showed up, and you’d do exactly what you just did. Mistake her for the double, and approach her.”

  “There’s a tiny circular flaw in your theory,” Freddie said. “This person went to the trouble of impersonating Vanessa, and made sure she’d be discovered if the real woman ever turned up at the club’s door…for the purpose of making sure she’d be discovered? I’m seeing a lot of hard work with very little point behind it.”

  “It has to be something she said, or something she did while she was here,” Nessa told her. “Something she’d want us to know about. Think back—did she say anything strange to you, anything that stood out?”

  “Stranger than the conversation we’re having right now? That would be a stretch.”

  “Anything you can remember.”

  The silent, pasty-skinned foursome in the alcove were still staring. The bikers over by the pool table had abandoned their game in favor of a close huddle and some rapid-fire texting as they shot razor-edged looks in Marie and Nessa’s direction. By the bar, Tricia was still fixated on Marie. Unlike the others, she looked more worried than malevolent, but one of her hands had disappeared inside her buckled jacket.

  “We mostly talked about the coat, at first,” Freddie recalled. “I remember because she had a hundred questions about my process. She went to the coat check and we met up again later in the gaming room. She told me she was an anthropology professor from New York, and that she was married to a real-estate developer.”

  “All true, so far,” Nessa said.

  “She asked some more questions about my design process, and…well, then we played cards. She got up from the table after getting knocked out of the tournament and never came back. I didn’t actually see you leave. Her, I mean.”

  Nessa fell silent. Then her e
yes went wide.

  “Coat check,” she said.

  Freddie led the way, plowing through the crowd like a cocktail-swilling steamboat. The coat check was a long, narrow booth in a hallway just off the lounge, where a bored-looking woman perched on a stool and read Sartre.

  “My new BFF Vanessa may have left something here,” Freddie told her. “About a year ago? A coat, designed by yours truly? So it clearly stands out from the rest.”

  The clerk didn’t bother hiding the roll of her eyes as she slid off the stool.

  “It stands out,” she said as she rummaged through the racks, just out of sight, “because it’s been sitting here for a friggin’ year, taking up space. You’re lucky we still have the thing.”

  Freddie looked scandalized. “But what would you do with it?”

  The clerk poked her head back around the rack. They locked eyes.

  “Say it,” Freddie told her. “I dare you. I double dare you.”

  She opted for silence. Instead, she slipped a coat off an old wire hanger and thrust it into Nessa’s arms. It was a drape of shimmery black silk, almost a long poncho with an artfully ragged hem and rippling pleats that wavered like a crow’s feathers.

  “Oh,” Nessa said. “This is me. This is very me.”

  “And someone wanted you to have it.” Marie squinted at the fabric. “Is it…magic?”

  Nessa’s fingertips glided along the material, exploring by touch.

  “I don’t think so. It’s just a coat.”

  “Just a coat?” Freddie said.

  “You know what I—hold on. There’s something in the pocket.”

  Two things. Nessa dipped her fingers in, tentative, and drew them out one by one. The first was a tarot card, of sorts. The hand-painted frame read III: The Empress, and the portrait depicted a woman in a starry crown and a long gown covered in roses. She held a scepter aloft, and a shield at her feet bore the sign of Venus.

  The woman had Nessa’s face.

  Nessa turned the card over. The other side, colored midnight black, had been inlaid with intricate threads of gold. The geometric design was mesmerizing but mechanical, fixed with robotic precision.

  “I think it’s…a circuit board?” Marie said. “I mean, I’m not an engineer, but that looks like circuitry to me.”

  “It does,” Nessa said. She carefully unfolded the second item, a slip of crisp gray paper. A typewritten message waited within.

  Nessa, the note read, guard this with your life. When the time is right, you’ll know what to do with it.

  “Somebody out there likes you,” Freddie said. “Any idea who?”

  Nessa passed the card and the note to Marie. She made them both disappear inside the mirror bag.

  “No,” Nessa said, “but this isn’t the first time they’ve intervened, steering us this way or that. Helpful, but I still feel like a puppet on invisible strings. And I am no one’s puppet.”

  Marie glanced over her shoulder, back up the hallway. “Well, we found what we were supposed to find. And I think we’ve overstayed our welcome.”

  “I have a…well, let’s not mince words, it’s a lair,” Freddie said. “Let me put you up for the night. It’s not five-star accommodations and it smells like a slaughterhouse when the weather heats up, but it’s off the grid and it’s safe as a bank vault.”

  “And why do you have a lair?” Marie asked her.

  They emerged from the hallway. Freddie’s glib response died on her lips as she skidded to a stop. The room had fallen silent.

  “This one observes, as always,” Nyx said, “that perseverance pays.”

  The woman in black leather, eyes concealed behind dusk-tinted Wayfarers, dominated the heart of the club by sheer force of will. All eyes were on her, but no one got close, pushed back to the fringes of the room. One tried. One of the yellow-eyed bikers moved in from behind, saying, “Hey, we saw ’em first—”

  Two of his brothers grabbed him by the arms and hauled him back to the sidelines. “Are you fucking crazy?” one hissed. “Do you know who that is?”

  “Vanessa Roth,” Nyx said, “Marie Reinhart. You have been marked by the Order of Chainmen. Surrender and face judgment.”

  Nessa folded her arms. Her pert lips curled in casual defiance.

  “I don’t think we will,” she said.

  “We ran into six of your friends at once, back in Columbus,” Marie added. “We’re still here. They’re not. And you’re alone and outnumbered. Want to take a minute, think this through? Listen, just walk away and this doesn’t have to get ugly. We’re not looking for a fight.”

  “Ah,” Nyx said, “but this one is.”

  She took her sunglasses off. Her eyes were molten orbs of copper. The metal burned and swirled like lava. Thin wisps of gray steam rose from her eye sockets, weaving the ghostly impression of jagged horns above her head.

  “You faced amateurs, little girl. Now you face Nyx. Hunter of men. Reaper of souls. Harvester of final screams.”

  Nessa remembered the words of the last hunter, coaxed at knifepoint in their hotel suite. You’ve never seen a real demon, she had said. But you’re going to.

  “The thing about Nyx,” a man’s voice called out, over by the bar, “is that you can’t let the wrapper fool you.”

  The crowd parted to let him through. He sauntered out onto the floor, slow and easy, cradling a deck of cards in his palm. The cards leaped to his other hand in a riffling stream, then back again.

  “She may look like a beautiful woman,” he said, “but don’t be deceived. In reality, she’s just like so many of the sad and thirsty men who hang out here. By which I mean, she talks a big game, but at the end of the night she’s going home alone.”

  The stream of cards flowed back to his left hand in an overhand arc, painting the air with an ivory blur.

  “Most of you know me. For those who don’t, my name is Daniel Faust. And these women are under my protection.”

  Twenty-Four

  Nyx’s fists curled at her sides. Her molten-copper eyes blazed. “This business does not concern you, Faust. Walk away before this one decides to break you.”

  “Actually,” he said, “it does concern me. The ladies here have a very important meeting to attend, and I’ve been hired to deliver them safe and sound.”

  Marie’s hand dipped into the mirror bag. She didn’t pull her gun, not yet, but the textured grip was a reassuring weight against her palm. Something concrete and real, something she could understand.

  “They have been tried and sentenced in absentia,” Nyx said. “They will be executed.”

  “What law did they break?” Daniel asked.

  She gave a little start, her head twitching, like the question hadn’t even occurred to her.

  “Hrm?”

  “Your order exists to punish people who violate hell’s laws.” Daniel waved his open hand, casual, at Marie and Nessa. “These two don’t have any connections to the infernal courts. They haven’t made any deals with your kind, so…what law did they break?”

  “Not your business,” she seethed.

  “Or maybe,” he said, playing to the crowd as much as he was talking to her, “you know they’re innocent, but that doesn’t matter because you’re acting as Senator Roth’s hired gun. The Order of Chainmen, hell’s guardians, defenders of infernal order…reduced to nothing but thugs for hire. Honestly, I’m embarrassed for you. Does your mother know you took this contract?”

  Nyx’s braided ponytail began to sway. It slithered from side to side at the small of her back, serpentine. The skin along her neck rippled, pale flesh turning to a rash of black and chitinous scales, then back again. She took a deep, shuddering breath.

  “You have no right to interfere,” she told him. “Your court will not protect you from the consequences.”

  Daniel shrugged. “That’s the thing. The person who sent me is a lot scarier than you or anybody else you can bring to this party, so…I care, but I also don’t. Let me bottom-line this for you and e
verybody else in the room: these women are under my protection. I’m taking them out of here, we’re going on a little road trip, and anybody who stands in my way is getting dropped.”

  Freddie cleared her throat. She downed the last of her cocktail and raised her empty glass.

  “Under my protection too. Just throwing that out there.”

  Nyx wheeled around, squinting at her. “Why? You have no cause to interfere.”

  “I certainly do,” Freddie said. “I’m bored, you’re a bitch, and I don’t have anything better to do tonight. That’s three perfectly valid reasons. Can someone please bring me another drink? I’m getting dangerously close to sober here.”

  A door of brass, curved like a pneumatic tube, stood in the far corner of the club. It chimed once, ringing out like a crystal bell, and the door rolled open. A man with dusky skin stepped from the elevator cage. He was a vision of refinement in his Edwardian waistcoat and silk cravat, his beard trimmed and his silver hair bound in a ponytail, like a Persian take on a gentleman from a Jane Austen novel.

  “Ladies, gentlemen,” he said in a sonorous voice, “while I prefer to manage this club’s operations from a distance, circumstances demand my personal intervention. I am al-Farsi, and this is my establishment. I must remind one and all that violence on club grounds is strictly forbidden.”

  Nyx didn’t even look at him.

  “You made yourself an enemy of this one’s family once before,” she said. “Do you wish a second taste?”

  “What I wish, madam, is for you to leave my club.”

  Nyx nodded, considering his request. Her lips curled into an ugly smile.

  “This one will leave.” She turned, slow, addressing the entire crowd. “This one will leave and regroup with her compatriots outside. Twenty of them. Heavily armed. In one hour, she will return in force and burn this place to the ground.”

  Al-Farsi’s jaw dropped. “Now—now look here, madam. This club has survived for over a hundred years thanks to a universally upheld tradition of—”

  “All things die.” Nyx’s voice washed across the room like a tidal wave. “To interfere with the Order’s hunt is to become our prey. That is hell’s law, and none of you will be spared. But this one can be merciful. You have one hour’s amnesty. Leave. Now. When this one returns, anyone remaining will join these four in death.”