Made for Sin

by Stacia Kane

  “I’m going to check the rest of the place,” he said. “Maybe he’s got some notes or something in his bedroom.”

  “See if his safe is in there. That’s where the really good stuff will be.”

  He headed across the hall, into the neurotically tidy bedroom. The bed was made, of course; on the bedside stand was a book, with a bookmark still in place. God. It occurred to him that when Mercer placed that bookmark two nights before, he hadn’t had any idea that he’d never get to finish. He’d had no idea what was waiting for him.

  But then, who did? Certainly not him.

  And standing there thinking morbid thoughts—and trying not to think about just what the hell he was doing with Ardeth—wasn’t getting them anywhere. This was important. If he could find some clue about who Mercer’s client really was, he could get Doretti off his back and focus on his plan. And maybe save his life.

  Mercer’s drawers were full of neatly folded clothing, color-coded and arranged according to style—short-sleeved T-shirts in one drawer, long-sleeved in another. Speare methodically went through all of it, feeling seams, checking pockets, inspecting the drawers themselves for false bottoms. Nothing.

  The bedside table yielded a notepad with several sheets torn off the top. Good. There might be some impressions on the lower pages. Even Mercer’s bedside stand was obsessively organized; aside from the book—a thriller about a serial murderer, how uncomfortably appropriate—he had a couple of nudie magazines and some lube, the usual things.

  The safe was in the closet, concealed inside a cabinet that also held a velvet-lined pullout shelf full of cuff links and other pieces of jewelry. It was the same kind of safe Speare himself had, although his wasn’t hidden in what looked like a custom-built cabinet. And his didn’t make the beast quiver with interest like it was doing now. “I found the safe,” he called.

  “Be there in a minute,” she called back.

  While he waited he kept searching, bunching every item of clothing in his hands to feel for anything unusual, looking inside each pair of shoes neatly fitted into a wooden shelving unit. Nothing. Especially not the combination to the safe, which sucked. Ardeth could probably break into it, but it would be a lot faster if he could just unlock it.

  He was running his fingertips along the bottom of the jewelry shelf, checking to see if anything had been taped under there, when Ardeth’s voice broke the silence. “Speare!”

  Instantly he drew his gun and dropped into a half crouch, ready. Ardeth hadn’t sounded panicked, necessarily, but whatever the reason she was calling his name, it wasn’t good. There was a tone in her voice, a particular tone that felt like a hand pulling at the hairs on the back of his neck. He didn’t like that tone, and he especially didn’t like the idea that she felt scared or threatened. Which didn’t bode well for him, but there was nothing he could do about it just then.

  He ducked his head through the doorway, scanning to see if anyone lurked in the hallway. No one. No one in the bathroom, either, when he quickly peeked in there as he crossed the hall to the office.

  And no one in the office except Ardeth, sitting at the desk with a file open in front of her and a face even paler than usual. Her eyes were very large in her face as she spoke. “It’s a process.”

  He blinked. “Going through the files, or—”

  “No,” she said. “G—that word. The name of the mirror. It’s the name of a process, the process of bringing a demon into this world.”

  Which was basically what Nielsen had told him, or at least Nielsen told him what the mirror did. He opened his mouth to say as much; luckily she continued speaking before he could, since he hadn’t mentioned that to her yet.

  “It summons a demon,” she said. “Any demon who’s near it on the other side, you know, in—in hell. But that’s not all it does. It doesn’t bring the demon into our world to live independently. It puts it into a vessel. Into a body. They can’t survive in their own natural form here, so they need to live in a human body.”

  The beast. He knew she was thinking it; of course she was. So was he. She was probably also coming to the same realization he was—she definitely was coming to the same realization, if the horror in her eyes and the queasiness of her expression were any indication.

  “The body they’re building,” he said, wishing he didn’t have to. “They’re not going to animate it through witchcraft or the power of darkness. They’re going to put a demon into it. It’s a house for a demon.”

  She hesitated. Her next words were read from the file she held. “The body used as a vessel must be impure or touched with some aspect of the other world. Otherwise a demon cannot inhabit it without feeling pain.”

  It took him a second to get it. He actually stood there, staring at her and wondering why she looked so upset, so sympathetic and tragic at the same time, before the connection finally clicked in his head. A demon could live only in an impure vessel—an impure body—without pain.

  A demon lived in his body. Without pain.

  He’d been right. All those years he’d spent thinking it must be his fault the beast lived in his head, that there must be something about him that had attracted it or made it decide his body was as good a place to set up as any. All those years, and he’d been right.

  It was him. The beast lived in his body because he was inherently impure somehow.

  The worry in her eyes made him want to run. Instead he nodded. “Well, a vessel made from the body parts of people murdered by a demon-sword is impure, all right. At least now we know for sure what their plan is. Where—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t act like—”

  “It doesn’t matter.” He said it as confidently as he could, put as much strength in his voice as he could. It even sounded convincing to him. “It really doesn’t.”

  “ ‘Impure’ could mean all kinds of things.”

  “Sure,” he said. “It probably does. Does the file mention how the ritual to use the mirror works? Or give us anything else we can use? We really ought to be—”

  “We ought to be talking to my friend Jared,” she said. Her expression told him he shouldn’t take her willingness to let him change the subject as her being done with the subject, and he should expect one hell of a heavy conversation about the purity of his soul later. Fun. “He’s a ritualist. Because if this mirror can put a demon into a body, it can probably take one out. Don’t you think?”

  “We have to find it before we can use it to do anything,” he said, like he hadn’t been thinking that exact thing for the last nine hours. “And we have to hope Fallerstein’s men haven’t found it first. If they manage to put a demon in that body they’re building…they’ll have an unkillable monster with no soul and no conscience, and who knows if or for how long they’ll be able to control it.”

  Chapter 9

  They arrived at the cemetery just after midnight. That baffler was worth twenty times its weight in whatever precious metal brought in the most money; it kept them hidden as they hauled their equipment across the green lawn to Mickey and Cliona Coyle’s final resting place in the Garden of Resurrection. Midnight on a weeknight might have meant privacy in another city, but not in Vegas. The traffic rolling past on Eastern Avenue was lighter than it had been during the day, but there were still plenty of cars, and plenty of people in those cars.

  “This way.” Ardeth nodded to her left. “They’re behind the Viatorian marker. It’s why he chose this place, at least that’s what he said. He used to donate money to them every year.”

  “Laz does that,” he said.

  Ardeth laughed. “He hedges his bets, too, huh?”

  “Of course.” A prickly discomfort crawled up his legs, up his spine, stronger with every step. It might be the beast’s reaction to walking on hallowed ground; it had been muttering and fidgeting ever since they arrived. But he was pretty sure that wasn’t it, or at least that wasn’t all. The beast was anxious about more than the prayers that had soaked into the dirt below Speare’s
feet. It was anxious about something else it felt in that dirt, and it was excited, and the fact of its excitement—its mixed anticipation and fear—made Speare more nervous than he’d been in years.

  All of those feelings the beast was having were caused by the mirror, and the mirror was definitely there.

  “Here it is.” Ardeth’s voice was softer, sadder. Shit, he’d almost managed to forget that they weren’t just standing in some random spot to gather graveyard dirt or coffin nails or anything else. They were at the grave of her parents.

  “Hey…I think I left something in the car,” he said. “Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll be right—”

  “It’s okay.” She smiled at him. Maybe not as brave a smile as he was used to seeing on her face, but a brave smile just the same. “I’m okay, I mean. You don’t have to come up with some excuse to give me a minute alone.”

  He shrugged. Well, she’d caught him. What was he supposed to say?

  “Thanks, though.” Her hand on his shoulder pulled him down so she could kiss him.

  Except that wasn’t enough. Something—probably the unwelcome-but-deep certainty that this was not going to work out the way he hoped, that the mirror was not going to be the miracle cure his idiotic fantasies wanted it to be—told him he might not have another chance to feel her lips against his, her body pressed against his.

  And even if he did, how many more would he have beyond that? How many more times would he be able to kiss her, touch her, before they both accepted reality? A couple? A dozen? A woman like Ardeth wouldn’t be alone for long; sooner or later she’d realize she was wasting her time with him, that she could find someone else who could give her the things she deserved to have. She’d realize he was nothing but a two-bit PI with mob ties and a satanic monkey on his back, and she’d cut him loose.

  So he yanked her to him and kissed her back. A long kiss, a real one, while traffic rolled by on the road and the cemetery spread silently out from their feet. He felt her surprise, felt as that surprise almost instantly turned into something else, and held her even tighter so she could feel his response, too. No one could see them. It would take only a second to get her pants down and his open, and the grass was soft and thick….

  Except they were in a graveyard. And that soft, thick grass covered the graves of her parents. The thought seemed to occur to both of them at once; his hands loosened their grip on her at the same time as hers fell from his neck and back, and they separated with a sort of sheepish silence.

  “Guess I’ll get started,” he said after a slight pause. “We need to get this done as fast as possible. I don’t want Fallerstein or his men catching us here.”

  She glanced at the street, the traffic flowing past them in a smooth river of light. “We weren’t tailed.”

  “We didn’t see any tails,” he corrected. “That doesn’t mean they weren’t following us or that they don’t have some other way of knowing where we are. If they’re looking for the mirror, and they know we’re looking for it—which they probably do—they’ll be keeping tabs on us.”

  “Probably do” was an understatement. If Nielsen hadn’t called them the second he and Ardeth left earlier, they’d know about it some other way; he’d be willing to put money down that they’d sent those snake-things to his house the previous night.

  And—he suppressed a shudder—there might be more where those had come from. All the more reason to get the hell out of there as soon as they could.

  She gave the headstones a few feet away from them one quick glance, a worried glance. “You know…this mirror, the one my dad owned, could be the one that was used—”

  “No.” Shit, he really didn’t want to get into this particular conversation. He didn’t even want to think about it, and he’d been doing a pretty good job of not thinking about it. “Don’t worry about that. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me.” She obviously meant it, too. The anguish on her face, barely concealed…the hint of guilt hovering around the edges of that anguish. He couldn’t imagine how she must be feeling, suspecting that her father had somehow conspired to put a demon inside his body. The father she idolized.

  “It shouldn’t.” He reached out to take her upper arms, and caught her eyes with his to make her feel that touch as a connection between them, a physical augmentation of his words. “What’s done is done. Nothing your father did—if he was even involved, which we don’t know—has anything to do with you.”

  “But if—”

  He silenced her with a kiss, reinforcing his words the best way he could think of. “It doesn’t matter. And it’s not a conversation we should have right now. Let’s get our job done here. Then we can talk, if you still want to—but I don’t need to, okay?”

  That was true, as far as it went. He didn’t need to talk about it with her. He didn’t need to talk about it at all. What he needed to do was think about it, to sit down and really consider all the implications—implications he couldn’t even bring himself to admit at that moment. Not when there were so many other things to worry about, including the distinct possibility that at any second they might see a crowd of armed men coming at them across the wide expanse of the cemetery.

  Once it was over, once they had the mirror—the beast gave an impatient sort of grunt in his head—and once Fallerstein was safely in prison for murder, and the body parts of his monster-in-progress had been returned to their rightful owners…then he’d consider it. Then he’d ask some questions, too, even though his gut told him he wasn’t going to like the answers. For now, though, he had other work to do. Physical work.

  Ardeth looked at him, studied him, in that intense way of hers. He’d thought at the beginning that it was an adding-machine sort of look, a calculation made by someone who looked at people but saw dollars and cents. Now he realized it was just her way of trying to see the truth.

  Then she smiled, obviously trying to lighten the mood. “You know, he was always telling me to try new challenges. I’m not sure this was what he had in mind, but I’ve never stolen anything from a grave before, so…it’s new, anyway.”

  He stepped onto her mother’s grave. The thin trickle of energy he’d been feeling increased. So did the beast’s antsiness, the volume of its whining. Oh, yeah, the mirror was definitely here.

  And he had no choice but to dig it up. He knelt and started feeling around for the edges of the turf strips he knew had to be there. Especially over a fairly new grave. Maybe he’d be lucky, and the grass wouldn’t be fully rooted yet.

  Which it didn’t seem to be. Excellent. It took only a few minutes to use the tip of the shovel to cut through the material at the base of the turf, and he started peeling the strips back.

  “I guess this isn’t your first time,” Ardeth said. She’d sat down on her father’s grave, cross-legged like a child.

  “It’s not.” No point in lying about it. “But those graves were a hell of a lot older than this one. The turf here—I spent a summer laying turf when I was seventeen.”

  “Right. All Aces Landscaping.”

  “Yep.”

  “One of Doretti’s businesses. In somebody else’s name.”

  He leaned on the shovel. “Is there anything you don’t know about me?”

  Her eyebrows rose; she gave him a wicked grin. “Not much, anymore.”

  “So you think.” He returned the grin with one of his own, and dug the tip of the shovel into the exposed dirt at his feet. “I may surprise you yet.”

  “So I know,” she said. “But if you’re really nice to me I might let you surprise me again lat—”

  “Hey, hi, guys.”

  Majowski really was the king of timing. Whether interrupting that sentence of Ardeth’s made it good timing or bad timing Speare wasn’t sure, but it was probably for the best.

  And he’d obviously interrupted it deliberately. The darkness couldn’t hide the color spreading across his fair cheeks, or the too-hearty tone in his voice. Whatever he’d guessed or assumed before, he o
bviously knew things had changed.

  “Hi, Chuck.” Ardeth’s cavalier little half wave was like everything else she did: fluid, graceful. “It’s kind of cool to see you in jeans.”

  “Thanks. I guess.” Majowski returned her smile, though, before turning his attention to Speare. “So you weren’t kidding when you said grave digging.”

  “Why would I kid about that?” Another shovelful of sandy dirt landed on the pile he was making. This was going to take forever. And every shovelful fed the beast’s excitement, strengthened the feeling of power beneath his feet.

  “I don’t know,” Majowski said, a thoughtful expression on his face, like he was really considering and discarding various reasons why Speare would think “grave robbing” was some kind of punch line. “But I’d hoped you were, just the same.”

  “Did you bring a shovel?”

  Majowski held one up. The price tag still dangled from the handle. “I had to go buy one. Not much call for a shovel when you live in a condo.”

  “You mean,” Ardeth said, “you didn’t have one ready in case you had to help somebody rob a grave?”

  Majowski smiled at her. “I guess I fail at being prepared.”

  “Don’t let it happen again,” she said.

  “I won’t. I promise. But, hey, at least I found you guys. I thought at first that you weren’t here. Whatever that thing you’re using is, it works.” He yanked the tag off the shovel. “Whose grave are we robbing, anyway?”

  “My mother’s.” Ardeth waved her hand again, dismissing Majowski’s obvious shock and concern. “My dad hid something here. At least, we’re pretty sure he did.”

  “He did,” Speare said, dumping more dirt. “It’s here.”

  Ardeth nodded. “Okay, then. He definitely hid something here. We need to get it.”

  Majowski still looked unhappy. “Yeah, but…”

  “It’s not in the coffin,” Speare said. “Just somewhere in the grave itself.”