Redemption Song (Daniel Faust)

by Craig Schaefer

  I strolled around the lot, taking the long way, to come up from behind.

  Nine

  Bentley pulled up between the mark and the sidewalk leading to the building, cutting him off. Corman rolled down the passenger-side window, and as I approached, I watched the young man lean close to talk to him.

  “—my damn glasses at home,” Corman was telling him, showing the kid some scribbles on a sheet of yellow notebook paper. “Are we anywhere near the right street?”

  I walked up from behind and kept my footsteps light on the asphalt. I came in on an angle, making sure Bentley could see me. The kid squinted to read Corman’s chicken scratch.

  “You know, I think we might—” Bentley started to say, turning in his seat. The car suddenly lurched, just a jolt, as he pretended to let his foot slip from the brake pedal. The kid jumped, startled, and I plucked the clip-on lanyard from his belt like I was snatching a fly with chopsticks. People can only keep track of so many sensory inputs at once, half that if they’re caught off-balance. In the split second of confusion, focused on the car, he didn’t notice a thing.

  I speed-walked right on by, turning back toward the van. Pixie waited for me at the window. I tossed her the card. She caught it and disappeared into the back. Just when I was starting to get anxious, she passed it back to me. Across the lot, the kid pointed east, giving Bentley and Corman directions to the other side of town. They hit the road, their part complete. I broke into a jog and caught the kid near the front door.

  “Hey! Excuse me, is this yours?” I called out. He turned, and I showed him the card and lanyard. “I found this in the parking lot. Did you drop it?”

  He patted his belt and his eyes went wide.

  “Thanks, man! It must have fallen off when I got out of my car. You just saved me a trip to HR. You know they dock your pay, like, fifty bucks if you lose one of these things.”

  “Happened to me last month,” I told him. Ahead of us, the automatic door whirred open. I stopped in my tracks, snapping my fingers. “Speaking of forgetting, I left my presentation in my trunk.”

  Pixie had worked her magic in the back of the van, spinning the Wardriver’s electronics like a mad DJ at an all-night rave.

  “Easysauce,” she said. “These cards are just encoded magnetic strips, no RFID or anything. About as hard to clone as a Holiday Inn room key.”

  The console whirred and spit out a blank white card. She turned and held up her iPhone, tethered to the electronics with a slender white cable.

  “Say cheese.”

  She snapped my picture and fiddled in a Photoshop window on one of the flickering monitors. A few minutes later, a color copy of the kid’s ID—with my face in place of his—slid from the printer. Pixie handed me a pair of scissors and a pot of Elmer’s paste.

  “Here. Arts and crafts time. Cut that out, slap it on the new card, and you’re good to go. Your name’s Marvin Staniszewski, and you work in accounting.”

  Just stealing Marvin’s ID and going inside would have been a lot faster and easier, but the second the kid noticed it was missing he would have squawked to management—who would cancel the card and issue him a new one, leaving me with a useless chunk of plastic. This way, Marvin would go about his day, blissfully unaware that his doppelgänger was opening doors all over the building. If security reviewed the access logs they’d know something was up, but if I played my cards right they’d never have a reason to.

  I finished pasting the ID together and gave it a hard look. It would never pass close scrutiny. Then again, nobody in an office building ever looked twice at these things. As long as I looked busy and kept walking, I should be in and out like a ghost. I clipped the tag onto my belt.

  “Here.” Pixie passed me a briefcase I’d picked up at the local thrift shop. “I stocked your goodie bag. Everything you’ll need to rig the tap. When you get in there, you’re going to want to find the IT department. The server room shouldn’t be too far away. Watch out for the IT guys. If they see a stranger fiddling with their tech, they will want to know what you’re doing there.”

  “Wish me luck,” I said. I stepped out of the van and into the belly of the beast.

  The lobby was just like I remembered it. Spacious, marble-floored and lined with overstuffed powder-blue armchairs. The security camera was where I remembered it, too, and I made sure to keep my face tilted away as I strolled under its sweeping eye. I worked to keep my movements slow, natural, relaxed. Nothing to see here, just another anonymous face in the corporate crowd.

  Where would they put the company’s electronic nerve center? Server rooms meant heavy equipment and heavier connections to the utility grid. The closer to the ground, the better. I slipped past the receptionist’s desk and started my search on the first floor. Smooth sailing until I passed a couple of guys loitering in the hall and caught a chunk of their conversation.

  “—understand why they’re worried, after what happened to the Silverlode. They’re saying it was some kinda ecoterrorist thing.”

  “Yeah, but dogs? I mean, that’s gotta be some kind of violation of our rights, right?”

  “It’s an at-will state, dude, we don’t have any rights. Besides, you’re just afraid they’re gonna sniff out that joint in your pocket—”

  Of all the security measures Lauren Carmichael could have taken, this was the weirdest, which made it the most troubling. Why dogs? Did she actually think I was going to slip a bomb into the building? She didn’t care about civilian casualties, but that wasn’t my style at all. I puzzled it over as I took a shortcut through the data-entry department. Rows of fabric-walled cubicles filled the long and open gallery. Typists, hard at work around me, didn’t even look up as I passed through the room like a ghost.

  I froze in my tracks as the answer to the riddle walked in the far side of the room. The security guard, a stubble-haired bull in a black uniform, didn’t worry me. The Doberman with him, though, padding ahead on a leather lead, made my heart skip a beat.

  When I first met Emma, I immediately knew what made her different from Caitlin. Caitlin was what we called an incarnate: her “body” was literally made out of raw accumulated energy, condensed and congealed, a trick only powerful and talented demons could pull off. Emma, on the other hand, was a hijacker. She found a vulnerable body and possessed it, imprisoning the original owner in some dark corner of her own mind while Emma wore her flesh like a tailored suit.

  I had a lot of experience with hijackers.

  The faint scent of sulfur and swamp water, something I caught in my gut more than my nose, told me exactly what Lauren had done. The Doberman wasn’t just a Doberman. He had a hijacker of his own, and the demon under his fur was sniffing for magic.

  Dogs, the guy in the hall had said. Plural.

  On the bright side, most demons weren’t in Caitlin or Emma’s class, either in terms of power or smarts. One that allowed itself to be bound into the body of a dog was probably close to the bottom of the infernal food chain. On the other hand, my chances in a fight against an eighty-pound Doberman? Not so good. My chances against that same dog juiced up on dark magic, plus his handler, and the revolver riding on his handler’s hip? Nonexistent.

  I turned on my heel and strolled back the way I’d come, trying to look casual. The only flaw in my plan was the second guard coming up the corridor from the other direction. I clamped down on a swell of panic. Only a clear head was going to get me through this. I tried to keep the cubicles between the first guard and me as I crossed the department, looking for a way out.

  One of the data-entry guys was surfing the web on his PC, looking up last night’s scores with a half-eaten McMuffin sandwich at his elbow. I cleared my throat. He jumped, and the web browser became a spreadsheet in the blink of an eye.

  “Sorry,” I said as he swiveled his chair around. “Need to update your antivirus. It’ll take about ten minutes.”

  “Again?” he said. I kept a casual hand over my employee badge. I was from another department, an inv
ading tribe. As long as I didn’t say or show anything to make him question it, he’d accept that I was another tech monkey here to make his day difficult.

  “Sorry. Just ten minutes, I promise.”

  “Okay, okay.” He pushed himself up from his chair and ambled toward the door. I ducked down behind the fabric half-walls and rummaged through his desk drawer. In my mind I was already sinking, falling into a waking trance, as my body moved on autopilot. My hands closed around a pad of yellow sticky notes and a marker. Gray would have been best, but black ink was fine.

  The problem with doing magic under pressure is that the pressure drowns out the flow, the rhythm. It’s like trying to play jazz with a gun to your head. I focused on my breathing. The handler and his hellhound made a slow sweep of the room, passing the cubicles one by one, letting the dog get a good sniff. My pen flowed over the sticky notes, drawing sigils of the moon, of silver and silence, flooding them with energy.

  I slapped the notes up on the cubicle walls around me, building a cocoon of spiritual darkness. I was silent, shadowed and gone, invisible. My refuge only had three walls, though. I rummaged in the paper sack next to the previous occupant’s breakfast and found a tiny paper packet of salt. Perfect. Crouching low, I drew a hair-thin line of salt across the blue carpet from one side of the cubicle’s opening to the other.

  The energy fired down the line like a circuit closing, a loop of power that shrouded the cube in anonymity. Now I just had to hope it was good enough. I sat down and typed gibberish into the open spreadsheet, trying to look like another cog in the machine.

  The handler and his dog rounded the corner, working this last row. I fought my instinct to turn and look, distracting myself with a stream of numbers, trusting the impromptu spell to hold. The muscles in my neck tightened as footsteps approached from behind, then paused.

  I held my breath.

  The footsteps kept walking.

  When I finally had to exhale, I dared to peek. The guard was leaving the department the way I came in, leaving me with a clear run at the other door. I tore down the sticky notes and shoved them in my pocket, scuffing the salt with the toe of my shoe on my way out.

  The server room wasn’t far. Like Pixie had predicted, it was right next door to the IT department’s lair. I waved my cloned passkey over the magnetic lock, listened to the satisfying click, and let myself in.

  I wasn’t expecting the two guys I’d passed in the hallway to be in there, hunched over the exposed guts of a computer along with three of their friends.

  “Help you?” one of the IT guys said, glaring. They were clearly having a bad day.

  “Oh, uh, hi,” I said. “I’m having a…problem. With my computer. Upstairs.”

  “Submit a ticket, and we’ll get to it when we get to it. Don’t expect anything before tomorrow afternoon.”

  “So you guys are gonna be in here all day, then?”

  One of them shot me a withering look. Departmental tribalism, again, and this time I was the barbarian trespassing on sacred land.

  “Until we get this box working again,” he said as if explaining something to a five-year-old, “which might take a little while, as you can probably see.”

  I apologized and let myself out. I needed a different strategy.

  Ten

  I wandered the back hallways, as far as I dared with those hellhounds on patrol, and found the closest emergency exit. I called Pixie.

  “You see how the parking lot makes an L-shape? Move the van around the corner, but keep to the far side of the lot. Server room’s occupied.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  I looked both ways, making sure the hall was clear. Then I pulled the fire alarm.

  “That,” I said as sirens squalled.

  The IT crew grumbled as they marched out of the server room. I slipped inside behind their backs and let the door swing shut behind me, leaving me alone in the windowless, cold clutter. Entombed behind the heavy server-room door, the fire alarm outside was muted to a dull squawk. Lights glowed green, amber, and red from the brushed-metal faces of a dozen server racks.

  “Talk me through it,” I told Pixie, “and fast. In about five minutes there’s going to be nobody left in the building but me and security, and getting caught would be a really, really bad thing right now.”

  “Look at the servers. Are they labeled? I’m looking for a serial number.”

  I craned my neck, looking on both sides of the closest rack. Each pizza-box-sized machine had a hand-lettered label on the side with a string of numbers.

  “Got it. Which one?”

  “It’s…one second, have to check my notes—”

  “Pix? Time. Not on our side.”

  “Here we go,” she said. “398215X.”

  I could hear employees shuffling around in the narrow hallway outside the door, dutifully leaving the building. If any of the guards poked their head in to check the server room, I was done for. I pushed the thought out of my mind and focused on checking labels.

  “Found it!” I opened my briefcase.

  “Unscrew the faceplate.”

  I was glad she’d packed a Phillips-head screwdriver for me. The metal plate quickly gave way, exposing a snakes’ nest of electronic guts.

  “You’re looking for a ribbon cable,” she said, “with a gray box on one end. You’re going to need to hook up the dongle I gave you.”

  I was no engineer, but she walked me through it step by step. With the job done and the faceplate back in place, there was nothing left to do but make my escape. I held my breath and stepped out of the server room, not sure what I’d find on the other side.

  What I found was an empty hall and a propped-open fire exit. Crowds of employees milled around in the parking lot, cradling coffee cups and chatting, with another pair of dogs making slow, lazy passes around them. A siren heralded the arrival of a pair of fire trucks, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea to make room.

  That was my chance. I blended in with the crowd, easing my way through the knot of people and out the other side, staying clear of the dogs. The Wardriver was a short jog away. I hopped in the front seat, and Pixie tossed me the keys.

  “You drive,” she said. “I’m working.”

  I put Carmichael-Sterling Nevada in the rearview mirror and brought the rickety old van up to a slow cruising speed. I waited an entire thirty seconds before asking if she was done yet. I thought that showed restraint on my part.

  “So far, so…good!” She pumped her fist in the air. “Perfect. I’m in. I can’t get any old data, but any email that passes through their network from this point on is going to make a tiny detour to my computer first.”

  “You’re a genius, Pix.”

  “You’re biased. So what now?”

  “Now you watch for anything that has Lauren Carmichael or Meadow Brand’s name on it. Me, I’ve got to go work on my other big problem.”

  “Problem?” she said, walking up from the back of the van and slipping into the passenger seat.

  “Somebody wants me to do something I don’t want to do, and they’re holding a gun to my head. Same old song and dance.”

  Pixie shrugged. “Can’t you, you know, do some magic?”

  “Wish it was that easy. Their magic’s bigger than mine.”

  We rode in silence for a while. She shifted in her seat. Thoughtful, and not liking her thoughts.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I’m sorry I brought you into all this. I’m sorry I told you the truth.”

  “What you told me,” she said, “is that things are bad all over, and we’ve all got to work together to survive in this world. That we’ve got to take care of each other. I knew that when I woke up this morning. All you did was raise the stakes.”

  We stopped in the parking lot outside my apartment. I passed her the keys and the steering wheel, and she left me standing alone in the afternoon sun. I didn’t want to go home. No answers there. While I was sorting out my options, my phone rang.

&
nbsp; “Hey, it’s Ben, Emma’s husband? Emma gave me your number, I hope it’s okay that I called.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But if it’s an accounting problem, I can’t help you.”

  He laughed. “No, nothing like that, it’s just…well, I heard about what’s going on. The task the prince gave you. I’m sorry, man, that’s rough. I mean, I don’t know what I’d do in your shoes.”

  I paced the lot as I talked, kicking up loose gravel.

  “Sitri’s writing wolf tickets,” I said, “and that’s his business, but I’m not buying any. Back down for one bully, you’ll back down for all of them. I’ve known that since I was a kid.”

  “What are you going to do, though?”

  “I’m thinking about paying the good father a little visit. Sniff around a little, see if anything seems off.”

  “Good luck, Dan. If I think of anything that could help, I’ll let you know.”

  I hung up the phone. I knew Ben’s hands couldn’t be all that clean. He’d married Emma, after all. Still, I couldn’t help but like the guy. He reminded me a little of Pixie, weirdly enough. A decent person knee-deep in the weird, just doing the best he could.

  That was exactly why I’d decided to keep them both at arm’s length. I had a bad feeling about Sitri’s game, a lingering feeling of doom in the pit of my stomach, and I didn’t need any more decent people getting hurt on my account.

  Time to go to church, I thought with a bitter smile. Hope I don’t spontaneously combust when I walk in the door.

  • • •

  Our Lady of Consolation stood on a lonely corner with a vacant lot on one side and a half-dead strip mall on the other. The parking lot sat empty, but just a few blocks away the skyline of the Vegas Strip lit up in preparation for another roaring night on the town. The church couldn’t compete with that kind of action.