Silver Bullet

by SM Reine

  Fritz finally stepped back, mopping the sweat from his forehead with a dishtowel. He was soaked in blood up to his elbows. “That pincer didn’t come from Connie’s daimarachnid form. Both of her pincers are intact, and it doesn’t match her species anyway.”

  “So there are multiple types of daimarachnid running around.” My mind flashed through the possibilities. The harvestman demons, the black widow demons—oh shit, maybe tarantulas twice the size of Connie’s ghost.

  I was going to go ahead and try to not think about that.

  Suzy took another long drink as I sat next to her on the couch. “And the cause of death wasn’t esophageal ventilation, was it?” she asked, mimicking my tone.

  “The poison definitely killed her,” Fritz said. “The informant had been prepared for suicide.”

  His phone rang and the BlackBerry buzzed along the edge of the counter. Isobel reached for it, but Fritz lunged across the kitchen to catch it first. He clenched it in his fist and shot a warning look at Isobel. “Don’t touch my phone,” Fritz said. He pointed at Suzy and me in turn, too. “That goes for all of you. Never touch my phone, or there will be literal Hell to pay.”

  Isobel rolled her eyes as she turned away.

  Fritz answered the call on speakerphone. The voice that responded was pleasant and female. I wasn’t sure if OPA dispatch was staffed by actual people or if the response was computer-generated. It always sounded like the same woman on the other end, day or night.

  “Director Friederling, your appointment has been arranged. The manager of Craven’s is expecting to meet your team outside his office at nine o’clock.”

  I glanced at the clock. A lot of time had been consumed by Connie’s autopsy; it was already seven.

  “Thank you, Nancy,” Fritz said.

  “You’re welcome. Can I help you with anything else?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Have a good night, sir,” she said, and the call disconnected.

  Fritz scrubbed his arms clean in the sink. “You two heard that, didn’t you?” he said to Suzy and me.

  “We can’t meet the manager of a demon casino,” I said, kicking my feet up on the coffee table. “We don’t know enough about dealing with the infernal community. Hell, we don’t know anything about dealing with the infernal community. I don’t know if you’ve forgotten, but there are OPA regulations about level of training required for teams before going on active duty.”

  “We’re not operating entirely under OPA regulations, but I do have a solution for your inadequate training.”

  Fritz dried his hands, retreated into his bedroom, and returned with a box moments later. He placed it on the counter to remove the contents: four small pieces of black plastic the size of my thumb.

  I took one and turned it over. It had a rubbery loop attached and a single button on the flat side. There was also an attachment that looked like an earplug.

  “Bluetooth earpiece,” Fritz explained. “And here are the receivers. You’ll clip these to your belts so that the earpieces will work even if you’re somewhere without wireless reception. They connect directly to a team line and OPA dispatch.”

  I’d seen folks wearing similar earpieces, but usually they were just douchebags talking too loudly on their cell phones at grocery stores. Now I got to be one of those douchebags. Professionally. “Thanks,” I said, placing it over my ear. It was surprisingly comfortable once I got it angled correctly, and the rubber insert canceled out most room noise on that side.

  “The button on the side is for initiating and terminating calls.” Fritz handed a second earpiece to Suzy. “I’ll be capable of listening to your conversation with David Nicholas and send information to you as the meeting progresses.”

  Isobel reached for the fourth earpiece, but Fritz tossed it back into the box before she could take it. Guess she wasn’t coming along.

  “I’ve requisitioned secure smart phones with access to the OPA database for more convenient access to information, but those won’t arrive until tomorrow,” Fritz said. “You’ll have to settle for this tonight.”

  “Tonight? As in right now?” I asked. The meeting was two hours away, and I’d promised Isobel that I would teach her to brew potions. I also really wanted to make myself a fresh pot of strength enhancers before I faced another demon.

  “Yes, tonight, right now,” Fritz said. “Your meeting is at nine o’clock.”

  “With all due respect, I think that going into a casino filled with demons after sundown is a terrible fucking idea.”

  The corner of my boss’s mouth lifted in a smile. “Most demons won’t agree to meet us during the day.”

  So much for getting the cauldron a-bubbling. Hopefully, I wouldn’t need any magically enhanced strength that night. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Just had to avoid getting into a fight with David Nicholas, enigmatic demon manager of an evil casino.

  Easy.

  I tossed my latex gloves in the trash, grabbed my leather jacket out of the closet. I’d normally only wear suits on the job, but Connie had ruined the last one, so leather was all I had left.

  “Rain check on potions class?” Isobel asked, following Suzy and me to the door.

  “Rain check,” I agreed.

  She smiled. “Go get ‘em, tiger.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I’D THOUGHT THAT LEAVING for our meeting almost two hours before we were scheduled to arrive would make us embarrassingly early. Turned out Fritz wasn’t being as pushy as I’d thought. Suzy and I had to walk laps around the block for over an hour before we found Craven’s Casino.

  It wasn’t that it was particularly difficult to reach; the problem was that it was warded almost as much as the entrances to Helltown, and it resisted being seen. Suzy only discovered it when she realized that she couldn’t look at the space between two other buildings—an old hotel and a convenience store—and then she pointed it out to me.

  “There,” she said.

  I had to tilt my head to look at it from the corner of my eye. I glimpsed a building jammed between the others, one that was awkwardly tall and skinny. Its windows were boarded up. The sign was red neon—of course it was red neon—and it said “Crave’s.” The “n” had gotten smashed, leaving a gap in the word.

  Once I managed to focus on it the first time, seeing the casino got easier. I rubbed my eyes and took a better look.

  The streets downtown were still frozen and slushy from the last snowstorm, but the sidewalk in front of Craven’s was perfectly dry, as if warmed from underneath. The black paint on the exterior walls was peeling. The front door was guarded by a guy who had two giant tusks jutting out over his bottom jaw.

  I tried to tell myself that this was no different than visiting Helltown—maybe even a little better. It was just one building, not an entire neighborhood. And while the OPA might have been mostly helpless to do anything about the demon-run neighborhood in Los Angeles, we could always just drop a bomb on a single building. Theoretically.

  But Helltown was the devil I knew. This? This was something else.

  “Ready?” I asked Suzy.

  Her hand rested on her holster as she surveyed the building. The muscles in her shoulders were tense. “Yes, I’m ready.”

  She didn’t sound ready.

  I wanted to ask her if she was okay. I wanted to make her tell me what had been going through her mind ever since we got her out of the detention center. But the Bluetooth earpiece beeped, reminding me that we weren’t alone, not really.

  Fritz’s voice came in over the earpiece, soft and clear. “Give the doorman my name. He’ll let you in.”

  Suzy and I crossed the street. Her legs were a heck of a lot shorter than mine, but she lengthened her stride to reach the door first.

  The look that the doorman gave her was somewhere between annoyed and amused. She was dressed for work, which meant a black suit, black necktie, practical loafers. She looked like she belonged in an office building, not downtown Reno at night.

&n
bsp; “Whatever you want, it’s not here,” he rumbled, carefully enunciating the words around his tusks. “Beat it.”

  “Fritz Friederling sent us,” Suzy said.

  “Friederling, huh?” He stepped aside, holding the door open. Hot air gusted over the sidewalk. “Enjoy.”

  I stepped through ahead of Suzy.

  After everything Connie had said about Craven’s, I expected the casino to be a horror show. But I’d already been in a couple of the other casinos to avail myself of their greasy breakfast buffets, and the gaming room floor didn’t look all that different from those at The Eldorado or Circus Circus.

  The carpet was covered in tacky geometric patterns. The walls were painted black with mirrored panels and a mirrored ceiling. The card tables looked like they were arranged at random in the sunken floor, half-hidden under a cloying cloud of cigarette smoke.

  A cocktail waitress sauntered past, looking me up and down with heavy-lidded eyes. She was wearing a few strips of leather and not much else. And her body—oh man, no way could that body belong to a human. Not unless she had some kind of antigravity spell holding up her bare breasts. Her nipples looked like Hershey’s kisses. Her hair was silk framing her slender neck.

  I thought about kissing along the line of her throat, nipping her jaw with my teeth. I thought about suckling the sweat out from between her breasts. As she returned my stare, I thought she had to know exactly what I was thinking about—and approved of it.

  Suzy bumped into me deliberately, jolting me out of my glazed stare. “Thought you’d be done with succubi by now, you big dummy.”

  A succubus? That would explain a lot. I still couldn’t help but watch the waitress slink pass with the drink tray, hips swaying. She shot a sultry, inviting look over her shoulder.

  “I’m just…thirsty.” Right. Thirsty. Even though I didn’t drink alcohol.

  Suzy’s lips pinched into a frown. “Maybe you shouldn’t drink anything a demon gives you. Just a thought.” When I didn’t immediately respond, she jabbed a knuckle into my ribs. “Hawke! Pay attention!”

  I blinked hard, shook the haze away. “Yeah. You’re right.”

  Connie had talked about how inviting the cocktail waitresses were—and how deadly. And I’d still forgotten her warnings the second I walked through the door.

  I made myself focus on Suzy instead. She was very pretty, but not succubus-distracting. Safe and normal. “What would I do without you, Suze?”

  She just snorted and started walking.

  “Where’s David Nicholas’s office?” Suzy muttered, two fingers touching her earpiece.

  “Up the rear stairs. Up—don’t go down. Right above the ninth-floor high roller gaming room.”

  We found the stairs behind the blackjack tables, hidden behind a pair of escalators that were marked with “Out of Order” signs. The stairs were narrow and spiraling and didn’t look like they’d be capable of supporting my weight.

  “Nine floors,” I muttered.

  Mischief sparked in Suzy’s eyes. “Not afraid of getting a little exercise, are you, Hawke?”

  “I’m afraid of stairs collapsing and killing the both of us.”

  “Grow a pair,” she said, elbowing me in the same place she had pinched me. It felt like I was going to bruise.

  That was a little of the Suzy I loved.

  Our good humor was gone by the time we reached the ninth floor high roller room, slaughtered by a mix of fatigue and a serious case of the creeps. Everything between the first and ninth floors was dark—no resemblance to The Eldorado there.

  I glimpsed a restaurant on the second floor that smelled like sticky-sweet barbecue. Third through fifth were just dark hallways. Eighth looked like some kind of spa, with a front desk and a red-tiled floor, but the creature behind the counter definitely wasn’t human.

  It was a relief to hit the ninth floor, even if the typical casino décor had been replaced by velvet curtains and oil lamps. It was so dark that I couldn’t tell if there were demons or humans squatting around the tables.

  “Did you survive the nine whole flights of stairs?” Suzy whispered in a weak attempt to lighten the mood as we sidled along the wall, staying off the gaming floor.

  “Yeah, but my thighs are killing me. Not sure I could climb another step.”

  “Tough shit,” Suzy said, pointing. There was a separate staircase leading to the manager’s office, which was an enclosed loft overlooking the tables.

  I groaned, and not just because I didn’t want to go up more stairs. It was awful dark up there.

  “Look at the bright side,” she said, nudging me onward. “Your ass is going to look fabulous.”

  The stairs led to an antechamber outside the manager’s office, which was, like everything else, painted black. David Nicholas’s door was labeled “MANAGER.” I knocked on it. Even that brief contact made chills wash over my spine. My heart was beating a little too fast, like I’d just guzzled an entire gallon of energy potions. Faster than it should have after taking the stairs.

  “Do you feel that?” I whispered, waving my hand between us. It seemed like there should have been something tangible to touch, like a scratchy veil clawing at my face, making it hard to breathe.

  “Feel what?”

  All of the other sounds of the casino had retreated, like the hall separating us from them had grown a mile long, and I could only hear the faint echoes of life. Yet the antechamber itself felt smaller. Like it was contracting around me.

  “That,” I said, unable to put to words the growing tension.

  Suzy’s jaw tightened. “You’re imagining things, Cèsar.”

  I wasn’t. The walls were definitely getting blacker. It was getting harder to breathe.

  The office door opened.

  The sallow-skinned man who greeted us was my height, but about as thick around as one of my biceps. A leather jacket hung off the points of his shoulders. His shirt was stained with tobacco fingerprints. His cheeks were so sunken that I could make out the line of his individual teeth, and his eyes were endless, inky black.

  “David Nicholas?” Suzy asked.

  The corners of his lips stretched across his face, reaching from one earlobe to the other. “What have we here?” I could feel the words all the way in the core of my intestines. I was transfixed by the black sheen on his tongue as it undulated with speech.

  “Fritz Friederling,” I said. “He sent us to talk to you.”

  David Nicholas lifted a cigarette to his lips. He inhaled and blew smoke out the caverns of his nostrils. “Come inside.”

  He stepped back, leaving nothing between me and his office but a threshold. It was even darker inside than it was out on the landing. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go in.

  Our hesitation seemed to amuse him. His smile grew again.

  “Ladies first,” he said.

  Suzy lifted her chin and went inside.

  I couldn’t let her go in alone—I followed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WALKING PAST THE WINDOWS of David Nicholas’s office, I could look down to see the poker hands of every high roller below. The dealers handled the decks smoothly like they were extensions of their hands, flicking the white rectangles across the red felt, gathering up the discards, shuffling and stacking and redistributing. The motions were hypnotic and the card patterns were unusual. Grinning knaves and furious jackals.

  I was so distracted by the sight that I wasn’t watching where I was going. My foot caught on something. Only Suzy’s quick grab stopped me from falling. I looked down to see what I’d tripped on and immediately regretted it.

  David Nicholas’s office was a garbage dump. The trash was piled as high as my shoulders in some places. His desk was one giant ashtray, with used cigarettes scattered among the paperwork. A brass bucket on the floor nearby was filled with brown sludge. The upholstery on his chair was torn at the corners to reveal tobacco-browned padding.

  The manager slid through the mess without ruffling even a single candy
wrapper and poured himself into the chair. He propped his feet up on the desk. The bottom of his boots were caked in something gray—something that I didn’t think was mud.

  “Take a seat,” David Nicholas said.

  Suzy and I exchanged looks. There were two chairs for us, but they were both stacked high with yellowing reports. Looked like they must have been there for decades.

  I shoved everything off of the seats and sat. Suzy followed after a reluctant pause.

  “Friederling,” David Nicholas mused aloud, rolling the cigarette between his forefinger and thumb.

  My eyes flicked to the pile of trash to my right. Had it just…moved? What was lurking in there? It smelled like wet rot, even though I could only see paper and plastic from the outside.

  There was probably something dead inside.

  At least, I hoped whatever was inside would be dead.

  “Do you know Friederling?” Suzy asked.

  “I know the family,” David Nicholas said. “You might say we came from the similar cesspools.”

  I pulled a Steno pad out of my jacket, prepared to take notes. “Aren’t you a…?”

  “Nightmare?” he asked.

  I’d meant to say “demon,” but his office was definitely nightmarish. I couldn’t think of a better word for the casino, his office, or the man sitting in front of me, in fact.

  Fritz’s voice whispered through the Bluetooth earpiece. “A nightmare is a breed of demon. They’re born incorporeal, but gain human form after they’ve collected power for a few centuries. Only the strongest ones resemble humans.”

  “Resemble” seemed to be subjective. There was no mistaking David Nicholas for human, even with the sallow hair limp at his cheeks, the human clothes, the presence of two arms and two legs.

  But I got the message. This guy wasn’t to be fucked with.

  I wished I hadn’t worn my jacket into Craven’s. It was so hot and stuffy. Could barely suck in a lungful of air like this.

  “When was the last time you were in contact with an employee of Craven’s named Connie?” Suzy asked.