Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Cait took him down quiet. We’re foxes in the henhouse at the moment.”

  “How long until shift change?” I asked.

  “She’s askin’ our hostages about that right now. They decided to act tough, so she’s explaining the need for open and honest communication.” I heard something in the background, an anguished whimper. “She’s getting her point across.”

  I worked the lock, picks delicately scraping, threading a needle in the dark.

  “How about those camera feeds,” I said. “Got any eyes inside the main house?”

  “Sorry, sugar, you’re going in blind. Either there’s no cameras in there…”

  She left the rest unspoken. Either there weren’t any cameras, or Drake’s house had its own independent security. The service door swung open. I drew my .38.

  I cradled the revolver close as I swept through the kitchen, then the gloomy, long gallery of the dining room, past a twelve-foot mahogany table and a double-wide china cabinet. When Drake won the lottery he must have dreamed about lavish parties, entertaining his friends in grand style. Instead, he wound up in a gilded prison. I still didn’t know why they’d targeted him, or what the purpose behind this charade was beyond siphoning his cash, but one way or another I was taking him off the board tonight.

  If he wasn’t completely brain-fried, he was coming with me. If he was, a mercy killing was the best I could offer him. Either way, I wasn’t leaving him in Fleiss’s hands. Not for one more night.

  Ears perked, I pushed a swinging door open just a couple of inches and eyed the foyer. A crystal chandelier hung in the gloom, chimes rattling in a chilly draft. No guards in sight. I padded up a long, curving staircase, footfalls soft on the blue velvet runner, and paused at the landing to get my bearings. Up a short hallway, a strip of light glowed under a closed door.

  I turned the handle, slow. It gave. The door opened with a long wooden groan.

  Drake was where we’d seen him last night: in his wheelchair and bathrobe, hair matted and stringy, staring at the window while a lamp burned at his side. The light turned the glass into a black mirror. I saw his reflection—and mine, holding a gun and shrouded under my dead-faced Reagan mask, right behind him. His eyes went wide and his mouth opened, like he was about to shout for help.

  I yanked the mask off. “Hey—hey, Cameron, wait. It’s me! I’m here to save you.”

  He blinked, tugging a stubborn wheel and rolling the chair around to face me.

  “M-Mr. Faust?” he whispered.

  “Yeah.” I tossed the mask onto his bedspread. I took him in—and my stomach clenched when I looked down at his bare feet. They were brutalized, covered in splotchy bruises and burst blood vessels, his heels black and three of his toes broken. “Jesus, what’d they do to you?”

  His jaw trembled as he swallowed. “Ms. Fleiss gets…impatient. It’s my fault. I made her do it. It’s all my fault.”

  “Hey, none of that. We’re getting you out of here, okay?”

  That’s what I said out loud. The debate in my head hadn’t been settled yet. Now I understood why they didn’t bother stationing guards in the house: Drake couldn’t walk on his own, and he wasn’t getting down that staircase in a wheelchair. I could wrestle his chair down the steps and wheel him out of here—and then we’d be a slow-moving target all the way to the escape car.

  A mercy killing was still on the table. Take him out, deny his resources to the Enemy. Quick, easy, and clean.

  He squeezed my hand. His eyes glistened wet, pathetically grateful as he looked up at me.

  “Thank you,” he whispered. “I’d given up hope.”

  Damn it. I hated doing the right thing. I sighed and tapped my earpiece.

  “I found Drake,” I said. “He can’t walk on his own, looks like Ms. Fleiss went all Annie Wilkes on his feet with a hammer. We’re definitely going to need that distraction.”

  “You want me to blow the generators now?” Jennifer asked.

  “Nah, hold up, still have to get what we came for.” I looked to Drake. “That Aztec dagger, the one I stole for you—do you still have it? Is it here?”

  “It’s…it’s in the basement.” He cringed. “It’s a bad place.”

  “Well, we really need it. Is Fleiss here? She’s not down there, is she?”

  “I don’t…think so. The days run together. They’ve been bringing food to my room. I don’t really leave anymore.”

  “What about—” I racked my brain, trying to remember his name. “Pachenko. That big slab of muscle she had with her last time I came here?”

  Drake shook his head. “Nobody comes around after dark. Just me. And the voices. Sometimes the walls whisper at night.”

  I sighed and jammed the .38 into the back of my belt, under my windbreaker. Needed to free my hands up. I walked behind his chair and took hold of the handles, wheeling him toward the door.

  “Pal,” I muttered, “you’re gonna need a hospital and some serious therapy when we get out of here. Maybe not in that order.”

  I eased his chair backward down the foyer steps one at a time, wincing at every thump of his wheels against the runner. It sounded like a drumbeat calling out the guards, but nobody came to check it out. By the time we reached the bottom, one shoulder was aching and my back felt like I’d been digging a ditch.

  He pointed toward a side corridor off the foyer, opposite the way I’d come in. An elevator stood at the end, with a single sliding door and a brass button.

  “You have an elevator,” I breathed. “I just hauled your dead-weight ass down that entire flight of stairs, and you have an elevator.”

  “It doesn’t go to the second floor. It only goes down.”

  “Peachy.” I pushed the button. It lit up with a cool amber glow. “What kind of security you got down there? Is the knife in a safe? Some kind of vault?”

  “It’s sitting on a pillow.”

  The door glided open. A spacious cage, wood-walled and somber, waited on the other side. I wheeled him in. Sure enough, there were only two buttons on the panel inside. I hit the bottom one.

  “Lots of therapy,” I said.

  I braced for trouble. Ms. Fleiss—and the Enemy, by extension—had gone to a lot of trouble to get that dagger. If it was really just sitting on a pillow, no vault, no locks, I fully expected that pillow to be stuffed with nitroglycerin.

  Or more likely, they trusted sorcery over electronics. There were more ways to lay a whammy on your loot than I could count. Curses, hex-wards, conjured and bound guardians. Any or all of them could be waiting for me, and I’d have to move fast to identify and defuse whatever defenses Fleiss had concocted.

  The elevator sank like a stone. And kept sinking. I didn’t know how far down this basement was, but if I had to guess, we were a good fifty feet under the house. It finally jarred to a stop and the door opened onto a long and unfinished corridor. A smooth stone floor, unadorned drywall, nothing but a string of bare and dangling bulbs overhead to light the way.

  One by one, the bulbs flickered to life on their own. All the way to the door at the far end of the hallway. Slate black, with a polished brass handle.

  “I don’t want to go in there,” Drake whispered.

  “I can’t leave you here,” I told him. “Some guard comes along and finds you, we’re both screwed. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe.”

  The corridor was just long enough to feel like a march to the electric chair. I studied the door at the end. No lock, no keypad, just a handle waiting to be turned. I took hold of it, the brass cold under my palm, tingling with static electricity. The door opened onto darkness.

  And a stench. It wafted out on a gust of humid air, almost shoving me back a step. Cloying, and rotten, and coppery-sweet. Blood. Not from a cut or a wound, not even from a single body. Bodies. Hundreds of them. It was a slaughterhouse smell.

  I held my breath and pushed Drake’s chair over the threshold.

  18.

  As we stepped through the black door, fire
s roared to life. The flames billowed, bellowing like twin lions from great brass braziers, and lit the chamber in flickering shades of scarlet and gold. The room was a vault, stone floor and unfinished walls like the corridor outside, at least fifty feet high and twice as deep. A vault built to hold a four-sided pyramid of weathered stone.

  The pyramid, a burning brazier at the two closest corners, bore a staircase along each of its faces. The steps rose to a flat summit about seven feet up, where a stone altar stood beside a trio of low, round pillars. Carved serpents ringed the pillars, and engraved faces—jaguars, herons, animals I couldn’t begin to guess at—leered out at us from the basalt steps.

  I tapped my earpiece. My voice came out softer than I wanted it to.

  “Caitlin? Jennifer?” I listened to the faint hiss of static. “Anybody?”

  Four mirrors of polished obsidian, each tall as a man and twice as wide, stood on wooden frames around the pyramid summit. Their black reflections captured the altar and the pillars—one bearing a jade bowl, one a clay flute, and the third an emerald silk pillow. I couldn’t see from the foot of the pyramid, but I was willing to bet I’d find the dagger nestled on top of it.

  I took a hesitant step toward the stairs, the blood stench overwhelming now. As I got closer to the pyramid, I could see why. The stone, naturally dark, had a sticky, flaky patina to it. The kind of dead-beetle sheen you get from spilling gallons of blood and leaving it to dry in the hot, stale air. I didn’t see any bodies, but people had died in this room. People had been murdered in this room.

  I opened my third eye, stretching out my psychic senses, and wished I hadn’t. My first trip to Eastern Pines, I’d sensed something malevolent beneath the house. Now I saw it. Human shadows, the remnants of souls, lay strewn across the steps. Psychic echoes of victims tortured, broken and bled to feed the thirsty stone.

  “It’s a battery,” I breathed.

  I’d seen this before. Lauren Carmichael had turned her casino penthouse into a psychic resonator, designed to harvest life-energy from human sacrifices. We had stopped her just before the grand opening.

  This one, though, was fully fueled. The pyramid thrummed with dormant power, ripe to the point of bursting. A powder keg just waiting for a match.

  “Do you see?” asked the voice at my back.

  I whirled. Ms. Fleiss stood in the doorway, one hand resting on Drake’s shoulder. Drake trembled, his face fish-belly pale and glistening with fear-sweat.

  “Do you see the glory?” Fleiss raised a languid hand and pointed to the pyramid. “Unbelievers sought to steal my lord’s magic and imprison him. But he could not be chained. And he would not be denied. Even in his weakened state, he sought other means of restoring his power.”

  I thought about my cards. Thought about my gun. The last time I tangled with Fleiss it had taken a firing squad to drive her off, and that only hurt her. The wand sat in my wrist sheath, dormant. No help there.

  “The Aztec relics your boy Marcel’s been stealing,” I said. “The bowl, the mirrors…”

  “Every world is a pearl, Mr. Faust, floating in the shadow in-between. Sometimes they bump against one another. Sometimes pilgrims cross over. And they bring things with them. Ideas. Beliefs. Relics.”

  She didn’t give any warning. One moment she was standing perfectly still. The next she was lunging at me like an Olympic fencer, crossing the space between us in a blur and throwing a knuckle punch. Her fist cracked against my sternum and my heart jolted with an electric shock. I fell back, landing hard against the bottom steps of the pyramid, the rough basalt shooting lances of pain up my tailbone. She swung up a stiletto heel and brought it down in an ax kick that whistled to a sudden stop against my throat. She leaned in. The pressure, just shy of breaking the skin, was a warning.

  “Don’t move,” she told me. “Do witness. Witness the glory.”

  I felt the pyramid shift. Blood-caked stone vibrated against my back, the buried power rising in voiceless recognition. Plumes of black smoke billowed from the obsidian mirrors, as if they were pits of oil and someone had tossed a match into their bottomless depths.

  “We once graced an Earth where the Aztec Empire had never fallen,” Fleiss said, wearing a fervent smile. “They greeted my lord as a god, as was good and right, and many miracles were performed before we laid that world to ruin. Pilgrims from that world crossed over to this one, over a thousand years ago, and carried trinkets that had been blessed with my lord’s touch. Kissed by his power.”

  The pyramid sang now, a tuneless keening somewhere between a hymn and a scream. My heart jackhammered, sweat plastering my shirt to my chest as the brazier fires rose and the vaulted chamber became an inferno of smoke. The air stank of cloying incense and burning corpses.

  “Do you see, Mr. Faust?” Fleiss hissed with a fanatic’s devotion, her gaze locked upon the roiling smoke and the obsidian glass. “Do you see what he is, now?”

  I saw.

  A figure stood on the pyramid, wreathed in black smoke. He had the form of a man but no depth, no color, just an empty void that crackled around the edges as he stepped forth. It was like some divine animator had sketched a charcoal figure in the air, erasing and redrawing him with every passing second, his edges never staying quite the same.

  He had no face. Only a pearly, inhumanly wide smile.

  “They mistook me for Tezcatlipoca,” he said. “The Smoking Mirror. But you know who I really am, don’t you, Daniel?”

  “The Enemy,” I whispered.

  He spread his arms wide, as if in greeting.

  “I’ll answer to that name, and many others if it pleases. How does the old saw go? You can call me anything you like, just don’t call me late for dinner. In my weakened, hungry state, I needed to amass some bits and pieces of my old magic. Just enough to get the ball rolling and begin opening my reliquary. A process that you, my friend, have made rather difficult.”

  “So that explains the Aztec stuff,” I said. “It used to be yours. Then you built this…thing. Harvesting life-energy.”

  The pyramid moaned against my back. I felt ghostly hands pressing against the inside of the stone, trapped in anguish.

  “One plan gives birth to another,” he replied. “With every step, my lost power returning.”

  “What’s the connection to Howard Canton, then?”

  As I spoke the name, Fleiss’s heel shoved harder against my throat.

  “Ah, good old Canton,” the Enemy said. “You have his top hat. Where is it, please?”

  “Go to hell.”

  Fleiss leaned in and pressed her foot down. My breath became a wheezing trickle, blood welling under the spike of her heel. I had one advantage: he didn’t know I’d found Canton’s wand inside the hat. It wasn’t much of an edge, but I’d take whatever I could get.

  “Don’t kill him,” he said to Fleiss. She gritted her teeth and the pressure let up, just a fraction of an inch. He shook his head and clicked an invisible tongue. “Not yet, anyway. Not here. It’s not your fault, Daniel. You’re an ant, drawn into the machinations of a god. How could you possibly understand?”

  “You’re not a god,” I said. “You’re nothing but a cosmic glitch, a bug in the system. Somebody told a story, back at the dawn of time, and the story came to life. You’re the villain.”

  “I’m the victor,” he said.

  “You’re trapped. Just like all the other characters. Doomed to dance the same dance, make the same mistakes, over and over again. For eternity.” I grimaced as Fleiss’s heel dug into my throat. “You think I’m scared of you? I pity you.”

  The creature’s smile faded.

  “And yet,” he said, “my imprisonment in that barren hell-dimension was an opportunity in disguise. You see, those righteous and good-intentioned sages who cast me into the Pessundation—thinking they’d seal me away for eternity—made a slight miscalculation. They wounded the cycle. The reincarnations fell out of sync, characters popping up on random worlds, the fabric of the universe fra
ntically struggling to keep the story intact. And that taught me something very valuable.”

  He walked to the pillars. His flickering hands picked up the Aztec dagger, cradling it, and he carried it over to the altar.

  “If the cycle can be wounded,” he said, “the cycle can be killed. It is my compulsion, my nature, and my fate to devour worlds one by one. That’s how the story was told. Don’t blame me, blame my author. This time, though? This time I’m playing for all the marbles.”

  “And it’s the Paladin’s compulsion, nature, and fate to kick your ass. I hear that’s part of the story, too.”

  The Enemy chuckled. He rested the dagger on the altar, placing it carefully, as if observing some sacred geometry.

  “And you are not the Paladin,” he said. “You can’t defeat me, Daniel. The fabric of reality itself will fight to stop you. Thanks to the power of the cursed story that spawned me, I’m fated to die at my nemesis’s hands and none other’s. And when I find the Paladin this time…”

  My sweat ran cold as I put it together.

  “The Pessundation,” I whispered. “You’re going to do to him what the people who locked you away did to you.”

  The Enemy clapped his hands. His Cheshire grin grew wide enough to split his shadowy face in half.

  “The only force in the entire universe that can slay me, gifted with eternal life and eternal imprisonment. That’s how this cycle of the story ends, Daniel: it doesn’t. It will go on and on, because I will go on and on, and this ‘cosmic glitch’ will be the ruin of the universe. I’m not a bug. I’m a virus with no cure.”

  He glided to the edge of the pyramid steps.

  “As for you, I’m afraid you’re destined for a rather painful and ignominious death. Seeing as I have a schedule to keep, you get to keep breathing for another hour or two. Lucky you.”

  “Shall I put him in his cell?” Fleiss asked.

  He shrugged. “Eh. Let him stay. Let him watch. Let an ant gaze upon miracles, and hope to comprehend.”

  The Enemy loomed over me. Even without eyes, I felt the heat of his steady gaze.

  “Before you die, Daniel, you will acknowledge that I am a god.”