Redemption Song (Daniel Faust)

by Craig Schaefer

  Gary winced. “I’d…rather be here, if it’s all the same to you. I mean, I worked with those guys. I liked them. I wanna help with, you know, the arrangements—”

  “It’s not all the same to me,” Sullivan said sternly. “We’re on the cusp of our triumph. I can’t risk any trouble or drawing extra attention toward my people. You have two choices: you can leave town, or you can just…leave.”

  The way he said that last word, it was clear he wasn’t talking about a bus ticket to Idaho.

  Gary nodded meekly, his eyes downcast. “Yes, sir.”

  I felt a little bad about the fake-out, but I had to justify “Gilles” walking free, and the phony carnage bolstered my cover story. I couldn’t bring Gary in on the ruse. Sullivan would have seen right through his story if Gary didn’t honestly believe he’d seen a pair of corpses in the interrogation room. He wasn’t a good enough liar. Besides, he’d nearly shot me in the back less than twelve hours ago, so I wasn’t in the mood to be nice. I figured he’d have a happy surprise waiting when he got back from LA and found out his partners were still alive. By then, hopefully, Sullivan wouldn’t be.

  Thirty-Seven

  The Choirboys put Gary on a bus and me in the back of a Ford Explorer with windows tinted blacker than Sullivan’s heart. His new arrivals were a breed apart: quiet, hard-eyed zealots with moves like professional soldiers. I wondered if he had some kind of training camp back east, with obstacle courses and bomb-building classes. The Denver boys said little and smiled less.

  “Where are you taking me?” I demanded, playing up my part.

  The driver didn’t answer. The two cambion squeezing in on my left and right stared straight ahead, like robots waiting to be powered on.

  “I am a nobleman,” I said, poking the back of the seat. “I insist that you—”

  “Shut up,” the driver said. And that was the closest I got to a conversation.

  They stashed me in a room at the Value Lodge on East Tropicana. I took bitter amusement in the fact that I’d been here not that long ago, in the room right next door: Jud Pankow, father of a wayward porn starlet, had holed up here while I was tracking his daughter’s killer. Turned out the kid was collateral damage in a much bigger plot, and that job led me straight to Lauren Carmichael. And Caitlin.

  Things seemed a hell of a lot simpler back then.

  “Stay here,” the driver told me as he half shoved me into the room. “Sit down. Watch TV. Shut up. We’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  I gave them two minutes and peeked around the edge of the drawn curtains. Sure enough, they’d taken off. And why not? As far as Sullivan knew, the only people who’d been hunting for Gilles were Harmony and me—and Harmony was dead and I was possessed. Since “Giles” was bound by Sullivan’s command to stay in the room, and all his threats were neutralized, leaving guards behind would have been a waste of resources.

  I opened the curtains, inviting a stream of light into the spartan motel room, basking in the morning’s warmth. I’d pulled off the short con, but the hard work was just getting started. I needed solid intel, plans, coordination…

  I looked over at the twin bed and yawned hard enough to make my whole body shiver. I hadn’t slept in over a day, and my body had decided it was time to remind me I was too damn old for pulling all-nighters. I set the bedside alarm to wake me up in four hours. The moment my head hit the pillow, I was gone.

  • • •

  I woke up to a blaring alarm and seven voicemails from Pixie, each one pretending to be a wrong number. Apparently she was still worried about the NSA. I called her back and she picked up on the first ring.

  “OMG, Faust, where have you been?”

  “Did you just actually say the letters OMG out loud? Because that’s not a real word.”

  “Lauren’s on the move. Her email chatter’s off the needle.”

  I sat bolt upright in bed.

  “What have you got?”

  “I’d rather show you. Can we meet?”

  “Value Lodge, room four,” I said. “Come alone, don’t be followed.”

  “Gee, I was gonna lead a parade and a twenty-piece band right to your doorstep, but now that you’ve told me not to be followed I guess I know better.”

  I hung up on her and jumped in the shower. I’d just gotten dressed, still sleep-hungry but more clearheaded than I’d been in a while, when Pixie pounded on the motel room door. I opened the door and she came in full steam with a laptop clutched in her hands, setting up camp on a small table by the corner TV.

  “It’s mostly back-and-forth with Meadow Brand. Something big is going down tomorrow night. A banquet, at Lauren’s house in Red Rock. It sounds like Lauren’s trading with those Redemption Choir people to get her hands on a human soul. They dropped a name, Gilles de Rais, and I looked it up. Check this out: he was a Marshal of France who—”

  “Fought alongside Joan of Arc and murdered about five hundred kids for Satan,” I said.

  She arched an eyebrow. “You already know?”

  “I stole his soul, lost his soul, exorcised his soul from another person’s body, stuffed him in a bottle, pulled a short con, and now the Choir thinks I’m Gilles de Rais.”

  Pixie just stared at me. She rested her palms on the tabletop. “You have got,” she said, “to do a better job of keeping me in the loop.”

  “It’s been a really busy couple of days.”

  “Not a good excuse. Anyway, here’s the part I guarantee you don’t know about.”

  She swiveled the laptop and pointed halfway down the screen. It was a note from Lauren to Meadow.

  “Of course I’m not giving up the ring. Sullivan’s a madman, and with that much power he could pose a serious threat to our plans.”

  Meadow’s reply was straight to the point: “So I get to kill them?”

  “Yes,” Lauren had responded. “Once we have what we need. I’ll use the ring to enslave Sullivan, while you eliminate his followers. Do what you do best.”

  “That little double-crosser,” I said. “I’d feel bad for Sullivan—that’s the Choir’s head honcho—but I’m pretty sure he’s going to do the same thing to them.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Something he said to me. That I—meaning Gilles—wouldn’t be a problem for anyone after tomorrow night. Sullivan’s got no reason to want to help Lauren out. He also despises Gilles. I’ve got a hunch that as soon as he gets that ring he’s planning to put two bullets in Gilles’s head and banish his spirit back to hell.”

  “Wait,” Pixie said. “What’s this ring they’re talking about?”

  I hesitated. She was too good at sniffing out lies, so I shrugged and came as clean as I could.

  “It’s a relic. A damn powerful one. Nobody knows where it came from, but it’s not even supposed to exist. Look, Pix, here’s the thing: if word got out about what it was capable of…you know those Black Friday sales where people trample each other to death for a cheap television set?”

  She nodded.

  “Well,” I said, “imagine that happening all over the world. Except there’s only one TV.”

  “You know, there’s a problem with your plan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re going to be there, posing as Gilles,” she said.

  “Yep.”

  “Sitting next to Sullivan.”

  “Yep.”

  “And you have a hunch that Sullivan is going to shoot Gilles in the head. Meaning you.”

  “Ah,” I said, “but not until he gets the ring. So it comes down to which side pulls their double-cross first.”

  “So you’re betting your life on a coin flip,” she said.

  I shrugged. “So you think I need a better plan, is what you’re saying?”

  “Maybe just a little?”

  “Fortunately,” I said, “I’ve got one.”

  I grabbed a motel notepad and jotted down a name and address with a dying ballpoint pen.

  “Remember how you sent an email t
o Gary, pretending to be Lauren?” I asked. “Can you do that the other way around? Gary’s been taken out of play, and she won’t know it for a while yet.”

  “Taken out, like…?” Pixie pointed her thumb and forefinger at her head like a gun.

  “No, no, he’s in LA.”

  She shivered. “That’s even worse. Yeah, I can spoof his IP. Easysauce.”

  “Good. Pretend to be Gary, and tell Lauren that Sullivan is super-paranoid about catered food. Tell her that this company is the only one he trusts, so she should hire them for the banquet.”

  She squinted over her glasses at my scribble on the pad. “Why?”

  “Because that’s how we’re going to get a crew inside Lauren Carmichael’s house. This is the endgame. In one single night, we burn everybody down.”

  • • •

  As the sun set over the suburbs, the street outside Emma and Ben’s house sprouted cars like steel weeds. The neighbors probably thought they were throwing a dinner party. Close enough.

  In the living room, Emma helped me set up a display easel while Melanie laid out trays of finger sandwiches on the dining room table.

  “You should go out with your friends tonight,” Emma told Melanie. “You can stay out past curfew, just this once. It’s all right.”

  “I want to be here, Mom.”

  Emma frowned. “You don’t need to be involved in this—”

  Melanie slammed a plastic tray on the table.

  “Damn it, Mom, stop sheltering me! Look, I’m not stupid, okay? When the Redemption Choir started causing trouble back east, the Flowers started wiping out all the cambion they could find. Now the Choir is here, and one thing I know is that history repeats itself. Prince Sitri could do the exact same thing the Flowers did.”

  “He won’t,” Emma said.

  “He could. And if the Choir gets a foothold here, he probably will. And I won’t get a special exemption just for being your daughter. As long as the Choir’s here, I’m not safe, and neither are my friends. I have a right to know what’s going on.”

  Emma sighed and looked across the easel at me. I shrugged and pitched my voice low.

  “She’s your kid,” I whispered. “Your call. But she’s got a point. If we can’t shut this whole thing down tomorrow night, eventually everybody’s going to have to step up and fight.”

  Emma nodded and looked back over her shoulder.

  “Finish putting out the sandwiches,” she said. “And you listen during the meeting, don’t talk, got it?”

  Melanie pantomimed locking her lips and tossing away the key, then snapped her hand up in a military salute.

  Bentley and Corman were the first to arrive. They were more than a little apprehensive at meeting the Loomis family—even if I hadn’t warned them in advance, they’d have sniffed out Emma’s and Melanie’s true natures on the spot—but they softened a little when Emma put a vintage Miles Davis record on the stereo.

  “Daniel tells me you two are scotch men,” she said. “What would you say to a glass of twenty-five-year-old Glenlivet?”

  “I’d say please and thank you,” Corman told her. Bentley still bristled, keeping Corman between him and the demon in the room, but he stayed unflinchingly polite and accepted a glass—a small one—with a nod of thanks.

  Mama Margaux and Jennifer arrived together, squeezing into Jennifer’s Prius for the drive over. They weren’t any more comfortable than Bentley and Corman at first, but I drew them into some small talk over by the sandwich spread and set them at ease as best I could.

  “Don’t know why we couldn’t have done this at the Tiger’s Garden,” Mama grumbled, glancing over at Emma.

  I shook my head. “Garden’s for magicians only, Mama. Half the guests wouldn’t be able to get in, or even find the front door. And much as I hate to admit it, we need more than just our little family this time. It’s going to take all hands on deck to fix this mess.”

  Jennifer, meanwhile, showed off her sleeve of ink to an enthralled Melanie. Emma watched disapprovingly from the sidelines. I wasn’t sure if her frown was because she knew what Jennifer did for a living, or because she didn’t want Melanie to think about getting a tattoo. Probably both.

  The next arrival brought two surprises of his own. I’d invited Nicky Agnelli to the meeting, but I didn’t expect him to walk in with Justine and Juliette hanging on his arms. The twins promptly cooed, breaking left and right, exploring the living room like a pair of fashionista locusts. I tugged Nicky aside by the sleeve of his Hugo Boss jacket.

  “I thought I asked you to leave them at home,” I said.

  “I tried, man! They followed me.”

  “This music is old!” chirped Justine, pointing at the stereo.

  Corman shook his head. “That’s called a classic, young lady. Miles Davis never goes out of style.”

  “This person is old!” echoed Juliette, pointing at Corman. To his credit, he just rolled his eyes and sipped his scotch.

  “Do you really think this plan is going to work?” Bentley asked me, keeping his voice soft.

  “Lot of moving parts,” I said. “Too many for my taste, but you work with the tools you’ve been given.”

  The doorbell chimed again.

  “I’ll get it!” Justine and Juliette cried in unison.

  “I don’t like the risk you’re taking,” Bentley told me.

  “Well, that’s leadership, right? The guy with the battle plan’s supposed to be the one up on the front lines. Besides, we won’t get an opportunity like this again.”

  “Oh, wow, your glasses!” I heard Justine cry. “They’re amazing! You’re, like, a hipster. And hipster is totally dead as a fashion statement, which makes it ironic, which makes you totally hipster!”

  “Uh, thanks?” Pixie said.

  “Oh no,” I said, turning on my heel. “Hell no.”

  The twins were all over Pixie, circling her like hyenas on a bleeding gazelle.

  “And she has a laptop bag made from environmentally responsible recycled products!” Juliette said.

  “Are you a real geek girl?” Justine asked. “Or a fake geek girl? These are important questions!”

  I stepped into the fray, gently guiding Pixie away from the front door.

  “What the fuck was that?” Pixie hissed between gritted teeth. Her fist hung clenched at her side, and I had a feeling she’d been one snarky comment away from using it.

  “Welcome to my world. Come over this way. Bentley, Corman, this is Pixie. You kinda-sorta already met, when we stole that passcard for the Carmichael-Sterling office. She was in the van, running the show.”

  Bentley rose, taking her hand as if he were Rhett Butler. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, miss. All good, I promise.”

  “You guys sit with Pix for a second and show her the lay of the land, point out who’s human and who isn’t. I’m going to stop any more potential fights from breaking out.”

  Given that we hadn’t even gotten to discussing the plan yet, my grand vision of teamwork was going down like a bird with a missing wing.

  Thirty-Eight

  By the time I made another circuit of the room—and pointed out Pixie’s arrival to Jennifer, figuring the newbie could do with another familiar face—I found the twins swarming around Melanie.

  “You’re so thin,” Juliette cooed. “How do you do it? Anorexia or bulimia?”

  I didn’t have to step in this time. Emma strode up behind the twins, grabbed them both by the scruff of the neck, and hoisted them up on their tiptoes. From the looks on their faces and the strangled noises they were making, Emma had her claws out. Literally.

  “You don’t talk to my daughter,” Emma said. Her voice was steely calm.

  “No,” Juliette squeaked, struggling against her grip. “We don’t! You’re absolutely right! You’re so very right!”

  “You are going to go sit in the corner now,” Emma said.

  “Right!” Justine said, trying to nod with tears welling up in her eyes. “We we
re just going to do that. That was our plan all along.”

  Emma let them go. They dropped from their toes, wincing and rubbing the backs of their necks. Justine reached for a sandwich, and Emma slapped the back of her hand.

  “Corner. Now.”

  “Everyone is so mean to us,” Juliette whined as they slunk away.

  It was definitely time to get the meeting started.

  We’d dragged every chair in the house to the living room, making a ragged semicircle flanking the sofa set. Everyone migrated to distinct camps: the magicians, my family, in a tight cluster on the left along with Pixie; Emma and Melanie sitting front and center on the sofa; and Nicky and the twins off to the far right. I stood next to the easel and felt like a high school kid about to take his first public-speaking class.

  Not long after, the doorknob rattled and our final guest arrived. Ben came in, looking sheepish, and hung his raincoat in the hall closet.

  “Sorry everybody,” he said. “Work ran late and my computer was on the fritz. This was the fastest I could get back. Did I miss much?”

  I shook my head and gestured to the couch. He walked over and sat close to Melanie. Emma leaned in and whispered, giving him a quick who’s who.

  “Not at all,” I said. “We’re just getting started.”

  I took a deep breath, looking out over the cluster of faces. Some I’d known for years, some I’d just met days ago. I only knew one thing for sure, and it chilled me to the bone.

  One of them was a traitor.

  At least three times now, Sullivan had been a step ahead of my plans. The answer wasn’t luck or supernatural prowess but something a whole lot simpler: someone was feeding information to the Redemption Choir.

  Now I was about to reveal my entire plan to that person.

  Here was the trick: that was also part of the plan.

  “What about Caitlin?” Nicky called out, and caught a dirty look from Emma.

  “She’s…not in on this,” I said. “Let me get started. First, I want to thank you all for coming tonight. Every element of the Vegas occult underground is represented here. We have the magical community, the cambion community—”