Redemption Song (Daniel Faust)

by Craig Schaefer

  “You think I don’t know that?” Harmony said.

  For a second, I was speechless.

  “You…knew?”

  “Carmichael is one of Senator Roth’s biggest campaign donors. She pulled strings with Roth to form the task force. I pulled strings to get on it. Seattle’s my home office, Faust. Digging into Carmichael-Sterling’s been my vocation for the past three years. Whatever nastiness you think she’s into, believe me, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I came here to find out what she’s planning for Vegas and to shut it down cold. Putting Nicky and his whole crew, including you, behind bars is just a bonus.”

  “The charges will never stick,” I said.

  “Oh? There’s other ways of taking down a criminal. Accidents happen all the time.”

  “Not around you, they don’t. You don’t even carry a drop piece. You never would.”

  “And how do you know that?” she said.

  “Because I’m good at reading people. It makes me money. And what I get from you, Agent Black, is that you’re one of the good guys. Last of a dying breed. You do things the right way, or you don’t do them at all.”

  Harmony didn’t answer right away.

  “I suppose that makes me a sucker, in your book.”

  “What it makes you,” I said, “is useful. Because much as it pains me to say it, what I need right now is one of the good guys. What if I said that I could hand you, no strings attached, a means of screwing with Lauren’s plans?”

  “I’d say I wasn’t born yesterday, but even so, we should meet. Not at the field office. I don’t trust the locals. Carmichael likes to spread her money around. Where are you now?”

  “Out of state, but I’ll be back tonight.”

  “You know the underground parking garage at the Metropolitan? Meet me there. Nine A.M.tomorrow, fourth level.”

  I leaned back in my seat. “Clandestine meetings in a parking garage? Which one of us is Deep Throat?”

  “Like you said. I do things the right way, or I don’t do them.”

  “This is between you and me, right? You’ll leave your buddies at home?”

  “If you do,” she said.

  “Deal.”

  I hung up the phone.

  I had a good reason for keeping her partners out of the loop. I had to assume Harmony didn’t know Gary was a cambion himself, much less who he was reporting to. He was still my inside man on the task force, whether he wanted to be or not. Even so, I didn’t want him to know about the hand-off. If he thought Lauren could protect him, he might do something reckless to get his hands on that bottle.

  The Barracuda barreled down the highway, and I fiddled with the radio until I found a scratchy backwater blues station. B.B. King’s guitar played me across the Nevada state line and howled out over the desert, while the setting sun washed the world in shades of blood and gold.

  A couple of hours later, when the sky had gone black and left me navigating by highway reflectors, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Daniel,” Emma said. “I talked to Caitlin. Is it true? Is it over?”

  I considered my words carefully. Sitri and I had put a lot of moving pieces into play when we made our little deal, and keeping them all on the table meant I had to lie like a politician.

  “Everything happens for a reason. That’s what I’m told, anyhow.”

  “That won’t do at all,” she said. “Not one bit. We have to get you two back together again.”

  I forced a chuckle. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Come over for dinner tonight.”

  “I’m driving in from out of town. I won’t be back for a while yet.”

  “Ben and I are working late, doing quarterly projections. We’ll wait up for you. Please, Daniel. Do us the honor.”

  “All right,” I said. “I suppose I could use the company.”

  Besides, after enjoying Naavarasi’s hospitality, spending some time with a normal family sounded like a fine way to spend the evening. Okay, relatively normal family.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was the calm before the storm.

  Cicadas trilled in the dark as I rumbled up to Emma and Ben’s driveway. They lived in a respectable tan stucco house in a respectable suburban tract, the picture of upper-middle-class domestic bliss. They even had a minivan parked in the driveway with a bumper sticker reading “Our Daughter is an Honor Student at Palo Verde High School.”

  Ben met me at the front door. He pumped my hand like a salesman and patted me on the back as he led me inside.

  “Good to see you, buddy!” he said. “Hope you like pasta. I don’t cook small batches. Italian mom, can’t be helped.”

  Emma sat hunched over a spray of documents at a glass dining table, squinting behind a pair of silver-rimmed bifocals. Their living room opened onto a gourmet kitchen with a floating island, white carpet separated from russet tile by an elegant curve of brass trim.

  She gave me a tired wave and said, “Just in time to save us. All the numbers are starting to blur.”

  “Long day?” I said. Ben walked around the table, leaning in to kiss Emma on the cheek. He slipped into the kitchen and pulled down a clutter of herbs and spices from the cabinets.

  “Long day, long night,” Emma said. “Trying to meet our budget quotas for the next quarter. The prince’s earthbound operations don’t fund themselves.”

  “Isn’t that what Southern Tropics is for?”

  “It’s a shell company. A front. We make money through investments, mostly, and those investments have to stay low-profile.”

  “What we need,” Ben said from the kitchen, “is a bigger piece of Silicon Valley. We’re playing too conservatively.”

  “Not having that argument again, sweetie,” Emma said with a glance in his direction. “Anyway, the Court of Windswept Razors is eating our lunch in terms of funding, and the prince is unhappy.”

  That name was a new one. “Razors? What’s their story?”

  “Small court, but they control New York,” Emma said.

  “Wall Street,” Ben added. “They make so much money they might as well have a printing press.”

  “Makes me sick to my stomach,” Emma said. “But enough of that. Let’s talk about you, and how we’re going to fix things for my dear Caitlin. Before she kills us all.”

  Twenty-Eight

  The story I spun for Emma and Ben was a custom-tailored version of the truth. Just factual enough to stand up under scrutiny, just enough of a lie to protect the secrets that needed protecting.

  “…So Lauren and Sullivan both want Gilles de Rais’s soul, and so does Prince Sitri. After all, Lauren did try to drag him to Earth and enslave him a few weeks ago. He likes the idea of throwing a wrench in her plans.”

  “That sounds like him,” Emma said. “So he’ll accept that as your service, in lieu of the priest’s death?”

  “It looks like it, but I’m covering all my bases—”

  “Do you have the soul? Where is it now?” she asked, a little too urgently for my liking.

  “Stashed someplace safe,” I told her. That someplace was the trunk of my car parked out in the driveway, but I didn’t feel like sharing that much.

  To pull them off the subject, I told them about my road trip to Denver, starting with my run-in with Mack and Zeke at the diner.

  “Satanists?” Ben said while he chopped onions on a white plastic cutting board. “Really? Wow. That’s so eighties.”

  Emma smiled, shaking her head. “The sad thing is, while we’ve sponsored certain musicians over the years, I don’t think we’ve ever dipped our toes into heavy metal. Too obvious. Country and western, on the other hand…”

  “Prince Sitri in a ten-gallon hat. There’s a mental image I didn’t need,” I said.

  “On the plus side,” Ben said, “have to give those kids credit for knowing which way the wind’s blowing, even if they’re a little misguided. The planet’s already lost. There’s n
o shame in joining the winning team.”

  Nice as Ben was, I couldn’t help but imagine him happily informing on his neighbors in Nazi-occupied France instead of taking up arms with the resistance. I couldn’t say a damn thing, though. It wasn’t like I had a moral leg to stand on.

  “So a source tipped me off as to where I could find de Rais’s owner,” I said. “A rakshasi out in Denver named Naavarasi.”

  I gave them a quick rundown of the deal, but I left out the part where I blew the cover of one of Sitri’s agents. I’d have to explain where I’d gotten the agent’s name in the first place, and that would have been awkward. Instead, I told them Naavarasi had been willing to hand over the soul in exchange for a favor to be named later.

  “She’s itching to make a move against Prince Malphas,” I explained. “I figure she’s lining up as much magical firepower as she can get. Saving favors for a rainy day.”

  “Still,” Emma said, gently chiding, “you know it’s never a wise deal, trading a certainty now for a mystery later. I suppose you did what you had to do. I’m just worried about the eventual consequences, and Caitlin will be too. I’ve heard of Naavarasi. All of her species are natural illusionists and tricksters, but she’s a breed apart. Mind games are her specialty.”

  “I got that impression, yeah.”

  “That hall and back room that was too big to fit in the building? I wouldn’t be surprised if you were ushered into a broom closet and hallucinated the entire thing. She can do that.”

  “The food,” I said with a faint shudder of mingled craving and revulsion, “was real. I’m sure of it.”

  Emma shook her head. “She probably fed you perfectly ordinary lamb, just to mess with you. Really, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”

  Easy for her to say.

  “Speaking of perfectly ordinary food,” Ben said, carrying over a steaming ceramic serving bowl. “Pasta fagioli!”

  Emma clapped her hands and cleared away the scattered papers, bundling them into a neat stack. “Perfectly delicious, you mean. I’ll open a bottle of wine.”

  Ben dished out the food, and I noticed he gave Emma a slightly bigger serving. Living with an envy demon, moves like that would come automatically over time, I figured. The pasta was good. The company was better. We got off the shoptalk and acted like three regular people for a night. We talked about television shows I hadn’t seen and the latest government scandal, and once we were done eating Emma broke out another bottle of wine while Ben rummaged in the hall closet for a Scrabble board.

  “BETRAY,” Emma said twenty minutes later, laying tiles onto a maze of snaking words. “Triple word score!”

  I was pretty sure Ben was letting her win. Me, I was just lousy at Scrabble. I looked at the alphabet soup in front of me and tried to come up with a better word than “CAT.” Maybe I was distracted. My gaze kept drifting to the empty fourth seat beside me.

  The front door rattled, very softly. Emma gave a knowing glance at Ben, and they both turned in their chairs to watch. Melanie crept inside, shutting the door behind her as quietly as she could, making like a thief in the night until she noticed her parents were staring at her from across the room. She froze.

  “Melanie,” Emma snapped. “Do you have any idea what time it is, young lady?”

  “I, uh, lost track of time,” she said, running her fingers through her rumpled mop of blue hair.

  Ben shook his head. “Your curfew is eleven o’clock, hon. You know this. How many times are we going to have this conversation?”

  “Like I said. Lost track of time. It’s not a big deal.”

  “It certainly is a—wait a second.” Emma’s nose twitched. She jumped from her chair and stormed across the room. “What do I smell on your breath? Have you been drinking?”

  “It was a party,” Melanie said, her voice laden with the kind of exasperation only teenagers can summon. “It’s not a big deal. Nothing bad happened.”

  “This time,” Ben said. “Nothing thing bad happened this time. You know you have to keep control of yourself. If you don’t—”

  “There weren’t even any humans there. It was just me and Annie and a couple of the new folks. Jesus.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Emma said. “I can’t…I can’t even deal with you right now. Go to your room. We’ll discuss this in the morning.”

  “Mom, c’mon—”

  I could see Emma’s eyes flash copper from across the room, glowing like orbs of pitch and fire as her voice went guttural, dropping too deep for any human throat.

  “To. Your. Room.”

  Melanie didn’t need to be told twice. She vanished up the hallway. Emma straightened her blouse, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she turned back to face us, she was perfectly tranquil.

  “Sorry about that,” she said.

  “Kids,” I said, shrugging. I wasn’t sure what else to say.

  “It’s not like we can complain,” Ben told me. “Her grades are great, she does volunteer work. She’s a good kid. She just sometimes forgets that she has some…special challenges to face that her friends don’t. Things she needs to remember to do, and things not to do.”

  “Like not downing a couple of beers and flashing her real teeth at a panhandler,” Emma said, in a tone that suggested it wasn’t a hypothetical situation. “Or necking with her boyfriend, getting excited, and clawing his back so badly he needs stitches. Hushing that up was the highlight of my week, let me tell you.”

  “She’ll be fine once she gets a little older,” Ben said. “That’s what they tell us, anyway. But…she’s seventeen. That’s rough no matter how old you are. I mean, I was no prize at that age.”

  “You and me both,” I said.

  “Of course, if she had more human friends and stopped hanging out with those cambion kids,” Ben started to say, cut short by Emma’s glare.

  “She needs exposure to both of her cultures,” Emma said. “We’ve discussed this. I won’t have her pretending to be human.”

  “What, you want her walking around in public looking like—like she really looks? We’ve done nothing but teach her how to pretend since she was a toddler. It’s for her own safety.”

  Emma frowned. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. It isn’t about passing for human, it’s about who she is inside. Melanie needs to understand where she came from. She needs to appreciate her heritage.”

  “And yet,” Ben said, “every time it comes up, ‘appreciating her heritage’ only applies to your side of the family.”

  I held up a hand. “I should probably get going.”

  “No,” Emma snapped. “Stay. I mean…it’s late. And we’re being rude. I’m sorry.”

  Ben nodded. “Really, take our couch. You could probably use a few hours of peace and quiet.”

  I got the feeling that both of them wanted me there as an excuse not to get into a shouting match. I was okay with that. They were friends, after all, and after three glasses of wine I had to admit my eyelids were getting heavy. I nodded my assent, and Ben found an extra pillow and a fluffy blanket in the linen closet.

  I helped clean up, and Emma and Ben disappeared into their bedroom up the hall. Hushed voices carried through the still house, but nothing I could make out over the hum of the air conditioning. One click of the lights bathed the living room in darkness. I slipped under the blanket and got as comfortable as I could. Couch-surfing was my default mode since the apartment burned down, and I wanted a real bed again. My bed. Under my roof.

  “It’ll work out, you know.”

  My eyelids flickered open. Emma stood at the foot of the couch, a vague smudge in the darkness.

  “You sound confident.”

  “I have faith,” Emma said, and then she was gone.

  • • •

  I woke up with the dawn, restless, eager to get this meeting with Agent Black over with. Stashing the soul bottle with her was my best option out of a whole bunch of bad choices, and that wasn’t saying much. I stumbled up the hall a
nd took a hot shower, turning my back to the spray and letting the heat pulse against my aching muscles. The welts from Sullivan’s cane were starting to heal. They’d faded down to a spray of angry bruised lines across my body, like a broken and confused spiderweb.

  My pride would take a little longer.

  When I finished cleaning up, the reflection in the mirror looked like a presentable, if rumpled, human being. I stole a splash of Ben’s aftershave and patted the pale bristle on my cheeks.

  I ran into Melanie in the hallway. She looked like a recent inductee into the wonderful world of hangovers, her eyes heavy-lidded and her fuzzy slippers dragging on the carpet. She wore an oversized Bauhaus T-shirt for a nightgown. I wasn’t sure if she was a fan of the band or just being ironic.

  “Hey,” she muttered.

  “Hey yourself. Somebody had a long night.”

  She followed me into the living room, trudged into the kitchen nook, and rummaged through the refrigerator.

  “I maybe overdid it.”

  “Maybe a little.” I couldn’t help smiling.

  She pulled a bottle of Bud Light from the fridge. “Hair of the dog. Want one?”

  I snatched the bottle. Reaching around her, I grabbed a bottled water from the next shelf down and pressed it into her hand.

  “Uh-uh. Water. You need to rehydrate. Take it from somebody who’s been there. Water and something greasy. Cook yourself some bacon or something.”

  “Pfft. Rather have the beer.”

  “Not while I’m standing here,” I said. “You’re underage.”

  She puffed air up against her fallen bangs, making them flutter. “Aren’t you, like, a thief or something?”

  “Or something, sometimes.”

  “But you won’t let me have a beer,” she said.

  “Nope. A man’s got to have standards.”

  Melanie pulled a sealed package of turkey bacon out of the fridge and reached for a frying pan.

  “Ooh,” she said sarcastically, “the code of the criminal underworld, just like in the movies. Like you won’t shoot women or kids, right?”