Redemption Song (Daniel Faust)

by Craig Schaefer

  “That was the last time I saw my wife or my daughter. I got my divorce papers by mail. Didn’t contest it. Sullivan trusts me, I think, because the same thing happened to him.”

  “Hold it, he’s married?” I said. This was news to me.

  Gary shook his head. “Was. Human wife. He was trying to go native, see. He figured she was ready to learn the truth. She wasn’t. She freaked, came at him with a kitchen knife, and he hit her a little too hard trying to defend himself. Snapped her neck.”

  Given what I knew about the way Sullivan treated women, I had my doubts that Gary had the whole story. I believed he believed it, though.

  “He wanted somebody closer to the West Coast,” Gary said, “to keep an eye on things for the Choir and lay groundwork for expanding our operations. I was originally supposed to land in Los Angeles, but this was the only place I could get a transfer to.”

  “You aren’t Pinfeather,” I mused. I had thought he might be, but the timing was all wrong. According to Caitlin, the Night-Blooming Flowers’ super-agent was a recent arrival. Gary had been working in Vegas for years.

  “Who’s that?”

  I shook my head. “Never mind. So let me guess: you were out here spinning your wheels, and Carl Holt introduced you to Lauren Carmichael.”

  “It’s a complicated story.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, holding the gun on him. “I’ve got time.”

  Twenty-One

  Gary seemed to be thinking about how he wanted to phrase it, and I didn’t blame him. In his shoes, I’d be nervous too.

  “While Carl was, um—”

  “Covering up murders for Lauren and her crew.”

  He nodded. “He tried to get me on board. I didn’t want anything to do with it. Lauren said she didn’t need me for anything hard-core, just to keep tabs on the local cambion, which I was already doing, and report back to her.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t understand either,” Gary said. “Not at first. Then Sullivan rolled into town with twenty of his best friends and told me I was officially reactivated. Suddenly I had two bosses, and there’s no way I could tell Sullivan I’d been informing on the local cambion. I’d be a traitor. I’ve seen what he does to traitors.”

  “Three bosses, once Agent Black came into the picture,” I said.

  “Yeah. That was Lauren’s doing. She pulled strings with some senator to get a joint task force rolling after Nicky Agnelli’s gang, and pulled even more strings to put me on it. That’s what she does, Faust. I never wanted any of this, but she just pulled me deeper and deeper…”

  I felt for him, I really did. Another time, another place, we could have had a drink together. Right now, though, I didn’t have room for empathy. I needed him scared.

  “Save the sob story,” I snapped, lifting the gun a little to remind him it was there. “You made your own bed. Do what I tell you and you might live long enough to climb out of it. Why did Lauren send you to steal Father Alvarez’s manuscript?”

  “Change of plans. You’ve seen the Enclave, right?”

  “Seen enough to know it’s wrong to the core,” I said. “What is it? Really?”

  Gary shrugged. “You think she tells me? I just know it’s going to be something really big, and really bad. In private, she doesn’t call it the Enclave. She calls it the Engine. She needs a guy to help her finish building it. Problem is, he’s in hell.”

  “What guy?”

  Gary rubbed his temples, straining to remember.

  “Gilles something, something French. De Rais, I think? All I know is, Lauren based part of the design on some of his old journals, but there are chunks missing, and even she isn’t a good enough sorceress to fill in the blanks. So she’s looking to snatch this guy out of hell and make him do it for her.”

  Her effort to enslave Prince Sitri suddenly made sense in a whole new light. I had assumed she was just after raw power. What if she figured Sitri was a source of get-out-of-hell-free cards? After we burned down the Silverlode and ruined her plans, she’d be looking for a new angle to get what she wanted.

  “So what’s Sullivan’s game?”

  “Sullivan,” he said with a heavy sigh, “is convinced that Father Alvarez’s manuscript is legit. He’s also convinced that a cambion in this world who bodily enters hell would be just as powerful down there as an incarnate demon is up here. The purity of their human side granting them strength or something like that. He’s gonna hold the priest hostage until he finishes translating the manuscript, then put it to the test.”

  “What? That doesn’t even make sense! None of it makes sense.”

  “You think I don’t know that? When Sullivan obsesses over an idea, well, that’s it. No arguing. If he decided the moon was purple, you could take him outside at midnight, point to the sky, and he’d still say it was purple. It was never this bad before, but…Faust, I think he’s losing it. I mean, he was always a little nutty, but I think he’s really losing his goddamn mind.”

  “What is he planning to do? Lead his followers down into hell and start flipping tables?”

  Gary nodded, looking haunted.

  “Pretty much that, yeah. He’s got some scores to settle.”

  “Even if the manuscript is real, and I don’t imagine how it can be, the entire Redemption Choir would be slaughtered. Sullivan and everyone who stands with him.”

  Gary looked up at the ceiling, lightly thumping the back of his head against the wall, and shut his eyes.

  “You gotta understand, Faust. I lost everything because of what I am, because I was born this way. Sullivan found me when I was down and out, and he showed me a different path. I never went in for his quasi-religious revolutionary jive. But when I worked with him, I’d meet other people like me, people who had problems like me. And sometimes I could help them out. That made everything a little easier to take.”

  I listened in silence, letting him get it off his chest.

  “When he started talking about war and brimstone, I wanted out. But I made a lot of friends in the Choir, and they hung on every word he said. Leaving the Choir meant leaving them behind, and I couldn’t do that. So I stayed in, as close to the fringes as I could, just toeing the line and watching as it all got crazier and crazier. When he assigned me to come out here, I thought I was finally safe.”

  “Instead, he came looking for you,” I said. “And he’s about to pull a Jim Jones.”

  “He’s been scoping Lauren Carmichael from a distance. See, there’s this old fairy tale. You ever hear of the Ring of Solomon?”

  I wore my best poker face, even as my stomach clenched.

  “Rings a bell,” I said.

  “Well, there’s a rumor going around that she’s got it. The real thing, no myth. I think that’s bullshit, but Sullivan isn’t so sure, and he’s thinking he wants that ring on his finger when he leads the charge into hell.”

  The ring only worked for humans. I didn’t think even halfbloods could harness its magic, which was the only reason Nicky Agnelli didn’t move heaven and earth to get his hands on it. Good idea to keep that part of the story secret, I figured. Just in case.

  “So what’s he going to do about it?” I asked.

  “He’s thinking about a trade. He offers to dive down into hell and snatch this Gilles guy for Lauren, and she gives him the ring. Everybody’s happy. He’s still feeling her out, though, trying to find out if it’d be worth his time.”

  I rested the gun butt on one bent knee, thinking things over.

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s how this is going to go down. You’ve got a fourth boss now. Me. And I’m the only one who counts. Keep doing exactly what you’re doing, don’t draw suspicion, but if Lauren or Sullivan so much as sneeze funny, I want to know about it. That goes double for Agent Black, if you think the task force is gearing up to make arrests instead of just shaking trees.”

  He glanced anxiously toward the DVD near his leg, like it might spring from its plastic case and bite him.r />
  “Oh,” I added, “in case you’re thinking about bushwhacking me? Don’t. My friends made at least three copies. I vanish, I die, I develop a bad flu, copies go to Agent Black by overnight mail. My friends are under instructions not to tell me where they’re hiding them, so you can’t get the information out of me, no matter what.”

  “You’re a real son of a bitch, Faust. I’m in a twenty-foot-deep hole and you’re shoveling dirt on my head.”

  I pushed myself to my feet, still holding the gun on him.

  “You’re the one with the shovel. I’m just trying to put things right. Do what I tell you, when I tell you, and there’s a chance—not a promise, but a chance—you’ll live long enough for this whole mess to fade into a bad memory.”

  I ejected the magazine from his gun and pocketed it. Then I tossed him the empty piece. He caught it, still glowering at me.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” I said and let myself out.

  • • •

  Bentley and Corman’s loan had left me with enough cash for cab fare. I booked it over to the Scrivener’s Nook, wanting to get some research done before the name slipped my mind.

  “Gilles de Rais?” Bentley said, cleaning off their antique cash register with a feather duster. “The name’s familiar. Rode with Joan of Arc, if I recall. Fairly certain he was burned as a heretic.”

  Corman ambled up one of the narrow aisles, straightening shelves as he went. It was a lost cause. The Nook was in a perpetual state of slightly organized chaos, like it had been hit by a tornado followed by a slightly mad librarian with bold new ideas about the Dewey decimal system.

  “Deserved it, too,” Corman said. “He had an appetite for little boys. Killed them when he was finished.”

  I blinked at him. “And I thought Lauren was scraping the bottom of the barrel when she hired Meadow Brand. What does she need from a psycho like that?”

  Corman jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the door to the stockroom. “Check the private shelves. Should be something in the Pandaemonium.”

  The Nook’s stockroom was a maze of teetering, piled boxes and cobwebs. Secreted away in a back corner, in the shadow of an empty, rusting filing cabinet, was Bentley and Corman’s private reserve. These black varnished shelves held the books they didn’t put out for the general public, sold only by special request.

  Not many people would request a book like Zeller’s Pandaemonium, and I wouldn’t want to meet anyone who considered it suitable bedtime reading. The meaty tome was an encyclopedia of atrocities, a compendium of some of the worst monsters of human history with their known and suspected links to the occult underworld laid bare. The author spent thirty years putting it all together, sent it to a small press for a limited run of a hundred copies, and then he took a bath with a plugged-in toaster.

  De Rais had his own entry, all right. He’d started out well enough: commander in the Royal Army, fought in the Hundred Years War, even became Marshal of France. He ran out of battlefields, and that was when the trouble started. Spent years squandering cash on lavish pageants, even built a cathedral, and meanwhile he was murdering children and offering up their body parts in secret black masses.

  “Zeller was nuts,” I said, emerging from the back an hour later with the book still in my hands.

  Bentley shrugged. “Undoubtedly, but his academic work was solid.”

  “No, I mean, five hundred victims? Did he add an extra zero by mistake?”

  “It was the 1400s, Daniel, long before scientific criminology and DNA testing. You could get away with the most abhorrent things, especially with the privilege of a nobleman’s title.”

  “There’s another problem,” I said, pointing to the page. “Zeller claims that de Rais sold his soul to a demon named Naavarasi. Every other source I looked at said the demon’s name was Barron, with two r’s.”

  Bentley chuckled gently. “Middle English, Daniel. ‘Barron’ with two r’s eventually became ‘baron’ with one r, as in the title of nobility. Someone was having a laugh, I suspect. You’re looking for Baron Naavarasi.”

  “Who doesn’t seem to exist. I checked the Goetia, Lightman’s Compendium Rouge, there’s no record of a demon by that name.”

  “Use-names change, and anyone can claim a title. De Rais’s master could have been anyone. Could be anyone, today. Six hundred years is a long time.”

  Another dead end. The sun slunk low in the sky, sketching a shadow across the dusty floorboards. Sunset on my final day. Bentley saw the look on my face.

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “Talk to Caitlin. Tell her I did my best.”

  Even as I walked away, I already knew my best wasn’t good enough.

  Twenty-Two

  Usually, the elevator ride up to Caitlin’s penthouse felt like the space between heartbeats. Tonight, it was a convict’s slow march to the electric chair. I’d promised I would figure out a way to deal with Sitri’s challenge, find some way to outfox the demon prince at his own game. I couldn’t have crashed and burned any more miserably. Now I had to pay the price.

  In a curving hall of white paint and white light, I steeled myself and knocked on Caitlin’s door. She answered, her clothes rumpled, her eyes tired. She hadn’t been sleeping again, and I could guess why. She didn’t invite me in. She stood on the threshold, barring the way, looking in my eyes for some glimmer of hope.

  “The priest is alive,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She didn’t need to ask.

  “I’m making progress. Look, I know what Lauren and Sullivan are both after. There’s holes, questions I don’t have the answers to yet, but I’m making progress—”

  She held up her hand.

  “Don’t. Daniel, just…don’t. Don’t say three more days, because in three days you’ll come back and ask for three more. My prince had a point to make. He made it.”

  My heart sank. The worst part, the worst part of this whole damn mess, was seeing the disappointment in her eyes. Knowing I put it there.

  “So is this—”

  She shook her head.

  “Don’t say goodbye.” Caitlin’s voice almost broke. Almost. “No. I won’t say it either. I don’t want to say it. I won’t do it. But this isn’t working. I’ve been pacing the floors, trying to puzzle it out, but all I find is the same brick wall. I want to be with you. I just don’t know how. As it stands, my prince has forbidden it. I can’t rebel against him—”

  I reached out, as if to touch her, then froze. My hand just hung there in the air between us, awkward and useless.

  “And I’m not asking you to,” I said. “I wouldn’t. You know that. I’m just asking for a little faith. Don’t count me out, Cait. I’m always at my best when my back’s against the wall.”

  She smiled. Her eyes were still sad, but she smiled.

  “I know,” she said. “So I’m not saying goodbye. Only goodnight.”

  She closed the door and left me standing in an empty hall.

  • • •

  When you’re flush and lucky, the Vegas Strip at night is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. When you’re down and out, though, all those beautiful lights are like bullets aimed at your heart. I moved like a ghost through the tourist crowds, anonymous and alone.

  If I’d done what Sitri wanted and put Father Alvarez in the ground, none of this would have happened. I’d have Caitlin, my home, my car, my cash…and I’d hate myself forever. Instead, I kept my principles and lost everything else.

  The demon prince must have known I’d refuse him, and he’d led me into a tangled maze. Sullivan was a lunatic chasing an impossible dream, building his plans around an ancient manuscript that couldn’t be real. Lauren aimed to snatch a dead serial killer from the jaws of hell. Trying to follow their schemes was like reading a map printed on a slice of Swiss cheese: I knew I could understand it, if only I had the whole picture instead of bits and pieces.

  The end result? They’d burned me to the groun
d, and I was no closer to untangling this riddle than when I started. Worse than when I started, even, since I’d managed to get Alvarez—the only decent, innocent man in this whole sordid mess—kidnapped and held hostage by a pack of lunatics.

  A fat tourist in a Hawaiian shirt shouldered past me, babbling into his cell phone.

  “It’s called the Martingale system,” he said, ranting like he’d just discovered gold in the desert. “It’s the perfect system, you literally can’t lose!”

  I rolled my eyes. The Martingale’s just as much a sucker bet today as it was three hundred years ago. The idea is, you double your bet every time you lose a hand, so that when you win you’re suddenly square again. Which works great, if you’ve got infinite amounts of cash to lose, or some guarantee you won’t hit a losing streak that breaks you. Half the tourists in Vegas think they’ve got all the answers, when they’re just making the same bad decisions over and over again, thinking something different will happen this time.

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “Sitri, you magnificent bastard,” I said. A guy handing out laminated cards on the corner, his orange shirt emblazoned with QUALITY ESCORTS TO YOUR ROOM, gave me a funny look.

  It was my pride that did me in. Happened every time. I was so determined not to be anyone’s pawn, so aggressively opposed to the idea of doing Sitri’s bidding, that I did the exact opposite. I could have just ignored his command. Instead, I sought out Alvarez, tried to save him from the Redemption Choir, and kicked off this whole chain of disasters. Worse, I kept doubling down, stubbornly committed to my course like a fly bouncing off a window when there was an opening just two inches away.

  Sitri played chess. I was playing checkers, a dope amateur whose every move showed from a mile away. Sullivan’s boys had thrown the Molotovs and the bullets, but it was Sitri walking me into their line of fire, punishing me for my stupid moves.