His eyes turned tiger orange.
“So,” Naavarasi said in her own voice, “what do you think? A superb imitation, no?”
I inclined my head. “You are a mistress of your art. None could dispute that. Thank you for coming.”
Her ego properly fed, she smiled. “How could I resist? I would never refuse to help a friend in need. And you are clearly in need. Your face, it’s bruised.”
I touched the skin under my eye and winced. It was still raw from my fight with Simms.
“Welcoming committee,” I told her. “I gave as good as I got. Mostly.”
“And your hair.” She tsked. “It’s…stubble.”
“Free haircut for all new guests. How could I refuse a bargain like that?”
“How were you captured in the first place? To be honest, Daniel, I expected better from you.”
“I’m hoping you can shed some light on that. The Chicago Outfit’s making a play for control of Las Vegas. As part of their opening salvo, they framed me for murder. Seems they’ve got a shape-shifter on their payroll, a rakshasi, like you.” I paused. “Rakshasa? What’s the word if it’s male?”
Her orange eyes flared, as if tiny flames blossomed behind her pupils.
“Impossible,” she said. “I am the last of my kind, the queen of a dead bloodline. Prince Malphas saw to that. And no child of mine would ever bend his knee to a human. You were evidently twice deceived.”
“I know what I saw.”
She laughed. “Foolish words from a man who should know better. I am a mistress of illusion, and you trade in tricks. Eyes do lie. You know this.”
“I also know that I’m here because I got played by a shape-shifter you say doesn’t exist. He walked me right into a police ambush.”
Naavarasi cocked an eyebrow. “And? You had weapons, yes? Why didn’t you just slay your way out, like a warrior should?”
“Because I’m not looking to gun down some poor beat cops who are just doing their jobs.”
“You’re a ruthless man,” she said, shaking her head, “but not ruthless enough.”
I leaned forward. Locking eyes with her.
“Not ruthless enough for what?”
“The future holds many possibilities. Why don’t you let me train you, Daniel? Six months in my hands and you’d be a weapon, forged from fire and blood.”
“A weapon in whose hands?”
“Caitlin’s,” she said with a tiny smile. “Of course.”
“I’ll take it under consideration. So. Did you bring something for me?”
“Maybe.”
I had to tread carefully here. Naavarasi had—or at least I hoped she had—the ritual I needed to break free. If I pissed her off enough, she might leave in a huff and ruin the entire escape plan. On the other hand, if I let on how badly I needed those pages…well, the rakshasi queen was hard enough to deal with when she didn’t have leverage on me.
“All right,” I said, resting my palms on the table. “Are we negotiating?”
“Well, I did drop everything and fly here in the small hours of the morning, then drive for miles in the desert, just to help you. And I had a lovely conversation with those two older gentlemen—Bentley and Corman, was it?—in which I did my utmost to forget how they insulted me upon our first meeting—”
“You threatened to eat them after masquerading as my ex-girlfriend, remember?”
“And? Your point?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Please, continue.”
“My time is valuable, and I don’t see any other means of acquiring what you desire, save through my aid. As such, I think I’m entitled to…five years of service.”
“Are you entitled to make bad jokes? Because that’s the worst one I’ve heard in ages.” I rapped my knuckles on the table. “Five years? Get real. Did you really come all this way just to waste my time?”
“I knew you’d say no, but I thought you might make a counteroffer,” she said. “With, say, one year of service?”
“Is that your new offer?”
“That’s my only offer.” Her orange eyes darkened. “One year of service in exchange for the ritual. Take it or leave it. Of course, if you leave it, I suppose I’ll be visiting you here for the next few decades.”
This was pretty much the worst-case scenario. She had me bent over a barrel, and she knew it. If I said yes and signed on the dotted line, there’d be no wriggling out of the deal. I’d be hers—lock, stock, and barrel—for a year of my life.
What kind of man would I be after a year under Naavarasi’s thumb? I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to know. I needed to throw her off-balance, come up with an angle to make her want to help me.
“Well,” I said, “I do have an alternative offer in the wings.”
Her brow furrowed. “Alternative?”
“Mm-hm. You aren’t my first visitor. Nadine came to see me.”
“That…creature.” Naavarasi scowled. “What did she offer you?”
“A way out. All I have to do is go to work for Prince Malphas. Nadine and Royce are standing by to bust me out of here the second I say yes.”
She leaned back in her chair and laughed. “Oh, Daniel, you should stop trying to outwit me. It can’t be done. You would never accept an arrangement like that. Cross lines in the cold war? Turn against Caitlin? You would die first.”
“That was my first reaction too,” I told her. “But then, after a couple of nights in here? Locked in, shivering in a cell in the dark and thinking about spending the rest of my life in this place? That offer gets more and more attractive. Besides, you’re missing something.”
“Enlighten me.”
“You and I both know that you’re smarter than Royce, smarter than Nadine. I’m pretty sure you’re smarter than Malphas.”
That made her smile. “Well…yes, of course I am, but what of it?”
“Any deal I work out with them, I’m pretty sure I can wriggle my way out of. Might take some doing, but I’ll slip free eventually. A deal with you is ironclad. Like you said, I couldn’t possibly outwit you.”
“You do have a point.” She steepled her fingers, thinking it through.
“Of course, until I do cut loose, that’s bad news for whatever you’ve got planned. C’mon, Naavarasi. We both know you’re looking to stick a dagger into Malphas’s back. The only reason you haven’t already defected to Prince Sitri’s side is because you’ve got a plan in motion. Do you really want me working for Malphas, sniffing around, poking into things and generally making a mess?”
“You do have an amusing talent for causing chaos,” she said. “It’s more amusing when it’s not directed at me. All right. Perhaps one year is an excessive demand. I’m not helping you for free, though. I need a favor to balance the scales.”
“That’s reasonable. What do you have in mind?”
She smiled, and I didn’t like it. “The use of your talents. It’s true, I do have certain wheels in motion. At some point—not now, but soon—I’ll need a particular item. An item which does not belong to me.”
“You want me to steal something,” I said. “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s the score?”
“You’ll have to allow me a bit of mystery, Daniel. If you knew my target before I was ready to strike, it could be…problematic for me. I assure you, this object is well within your ability to acquire. Do you fear that I’m deceiving you?”
I didn’t fear it so much as know it with rock-solid certainty. Naavarasi had a fondness for trickery that bordered on the fetishistic. That said, I’d never known her to blatantly lie. She just chose her words with razor-sharp precision and spoke around the truth. A nasty suspicion occurred to me.
“And this item,” I said, “does it belong to Prince Sitri? Or Caitlin?”
She chuckled. “Clever boy. That would land you in hot water, wouldn’t it? But no. And if it helps to clarify, the item does not belong to any member of the Court of Jade Tears.”
That was one potential snare eliminated. Only a few h
undred possibilities to go. It was probably still a trap. Of course it was a trap. Even so, I wasn’t seeing a whole lot of alternatives.
“All right,” I said. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
24.
Naavarasi opened the attaché case, sliding out a blank piece of parchment and a green marbled fountain pen. As her palm slowly passed over the empty page, elegant calligraphy appeared in its wake. The jet-black ink blossomed like flowering vines, the rakshasi’s thoughts made manifest.
“Cute trick,” I said, pulling the parchment toward me and giving it a read. It was a contract, simple and to the point—and that bothered me. Nothing Naavarasi ever did was simple and to the point. It didn’t take long to read between the lines.
“‘Should the object not be delivered to Naavarasi by the deadline of her choosing,’” I read aloud, “‘Daniel Faust’s soul shall be forfeit’—oh, come on. You’ll just say the deadline is five seconds after you give me the job.”
Watching Naavarasi pout with J.T. Perkins’s face was unsettling.
“I’m hurt that you think I’d be so obvious.”
“You weren’t. That clause was to distract me from the better-hidden one two lines down.” I rapped my finger on the page. “The one that lets you redefine the definition of ‘success’ at will.”
“Language…is a fluid thing.”
I slid the parchment across the table, back toward her.
“How about this,” I said. “We shake on it instead. You give me what I need, here and now, and when the time comes I’ll return the favor. I give you my word.”
She eyed me dubiously. “And what is your word worth?”
I had to think about that.
“Depends on who I’m talking to. For you? More than for a lot of other people. Remember, I’ve got a built-in incentive to help you out: you’ve got it in for Prince Malphas. So does Caitlin’s boss. What makes you happy is probably going to make Prince Sitri happy, which makes Caitlin happy, and so on down the line.”
As she reached across the table, her hand—just her hand—rippled like a mirage. The skin turned the color of burnt honey, fingers lengthened, nails grew and flourished with jade-green paint. As we shook hands, a jolt of static electricity bit into my palm.
“Deal,” she said.
Her hand rippled again as she pulled away, the Perkins disguise firmly back in place.
She stashed the contract in her case and pulled out a short stack of papers. They looked like a recipe for eyestrain, covered in dense blocks of minuscule type and festooned with date stamps in faded blue ink.
“Um,” I said, reading, “I think this is the incorporation paperwork for your restaurant.”
“They said to bring ‘legal paperwork’ to conceal the ritual. That’s the only legal paperwork I had. If someone’s vexing me, I don’t sue them. I just…invite them over for dinner.”
I held the papers at arm’s length and squinted. They’d pass for legit at a casual glance. Under the first page was a sheet of loose-leaf notebook paper and Bentley’s familiar, cramped handwriting. His transcription of the ritual I needed. I had to smile. Just like Bentley to spend an hour copying lines by longhand rather than risk cracking a book’s precious spine on a photocopier.
“Is it what you required?” Naavarasi asked me.
“It’s perfect.”
When she spoke again, rising from her chair, she did it in Perkins’s used-car-salesman patter. “A pleasure doing business, then! I’m looking forward to seeing you again, very soon.”
She knocked on the glass door, and a guard came to let us out. He eyed the papers in my hand and I folded them protectively.
“Privileged communication,” I said.
Back in the hive, with the papers stashed under my cot, I found Jake and Westie milling around down on the crowded open floor. The sluggish air hung humid, choked with the stench of nervous sweat.
“Okay,” I told them, “here’s where it gets weird. I’m going to need you to do some things that might not make a lot of sense.”
“Brother,” Jake said, “I’m pretty sure things have already been weird.”
“Touché. Okay, correct me if I’m wrong. They’ll be storing Paul’s body on-site, until his relatives claim him, right?”
“Yeah, or they’ll just bury him in the potter’s field if nobody steps up,” Westie said, “but…his body? What’s that got to do with anything?”
I ignored the question. “And the morgue, is it close to the infirmary?”
“Spitting distance,” Jake said.
“The doctor on call, what’s his name?”
“Valentino. Guy’s all right.”
“What do I have to do to see him?” I asked. “If I tell the guards I’ve got a stomachache, that good enough?”
Westie snorted. “He ain’t the school nurse, friend. If you’re not bleedin’, the guards couldn’t care less.”
I was afraid of that.
“All right,” I said. “In that case, I need a razor blade.”
* * *
Whatever Emerson expected from the beginning of his shift that day, it probably wasn’t the sight of me rushing up to him with upraised, bloody hands, looking like something out of a zombie flick.
“You gotta help, man,” I groaned, clasping one hand to the side of my shirt. Blood soaked through at the hip, staining the beige fabric mahogany-dark.
“Whoa,” he said, taking a quick step back and pointing at me. “Do not get any of that on me. Why are you bleeding? What happened?”
I wheezed the words out like it took an effort to breathe. “Don’t know. Was just…just coming in from the yard, in a crowd of people, and suddenly I felt this horrible pain. Think somebody stabbed me.”
“Okay, c’mon.” He unclipped the radio from his belt and raised it to his lips. “Central? This is Emerson, bringing an injured prisoner to the infirmary. Need a guard to cover my shift at point C-1 for about fifteen minutes, over.”
I limped alongside him as he hustled me out of the hive and through the maze of corridors. All the while, sucking air through my gritted teeth and letting out the occasional moan.
It wasn’t a complete exaggeration. My injury burned like a row of wasp stings. Back in the hive, it hadn’t taken long for Jake to score a contraband blade from a buddy of his. Then it was time to suck in a deep breath and take one for the team.
Most people have some degree of love handles. I was in pretty good shape, but I had a little padding there myself. Padding that came in handy when picking a safe place to cut.
Usually, on the rare occasions I cut myself, I’m standing in front of a pentacle and chanting in doggerel Latin. Blood magic is powerful stuff. Do it enough times and you develop a certain skill for the quick, shallow slice, the kind of cut that bleeds, but not too much. While Jake watched, I untucked my shirt and pulled it up, took a deep breath, and raked the blade across my pale skin. It took a second for the pain to hit, an electric burn that slammed home as a four-inch line of scarlet welled up and began to pour.
“Jesus,” Jake said, taking the blade from my trembling fingers, “you’re gonna need stitches for that.”
“Trust me, I’ve done this before. I mean, it’s usually my fingertips, but still. It looks a lot worse than it is.”
I pressed my palms to the cut, smearing them together, getting blood all over my hip. My shirt was next. I bent to one side, patting the fabric against the open wound. When I’d finally finished spreading the red around, I looked like a proper stabbing victim.
By the time we reached the infirmary door, I was pretty sure the cut was already clotting. Still, I played it up and clutched my wound with grim resolve as Emerson ushered me inside.
The infirmary looked like any other doctor’s exam room, albeit with cheap, shabby fixtures and an industrial-sized lock on every cabinet and drawer. The cold eye of a security camera watched from the corner of the room as Valentino, a middle-aged man with a thick black mustache and a white lab coat, waved
me toward a padded bench. I eased myself up onto the cracked tan vinyl.
“Got a bleeder here,” Emerson told the doctor. “Sounds like it’s pretty bad.”
Valentino fished in his coat pocket for a heavy ring of keys and fumbled through them one at a time, finally getting a cabinet unlocked. I was glad I wasn’t really dying. He slipped on a pair of disposable rubber gloves, then set a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a cardboard box of gauze pads on the counter.
“Let’s have a look, then,” he said and nodded to Emerson. “Thank you. I’ll take it from here.”
My attention was on the swinging door with the narrow, tall wire-reinforced window off to my left. On the other side, I could see a wall of stainless steel honeycombed with square doors. Morgue lockers. Bingo.
Emerson left and Valentino pulled up a stool. “Lift your shirt for me, please.”
I obliged. He soaked a gauze pad in alcohol and patted at the cut. My breath hitched at the sudden sting.
“Could have been much worse,” he murmured as he prodded at me.“This’ll heal up nicely. You’re a very lucky man.”
“That’s what everyone tells me,” I said.
I glanced at the clock on the wall, a sterile white face under a dusty plastic bubble: 10:04. He’d be calling a guard to take me back to my cell at any minute, and I’d lose my only chance.
Then the door opened with a faint knock. Zap, the trustee, stood on the threshold wringing his hands. He looked at me before he looked at Valentino.
Right on schedule.
25.
Back in the hive, before my self-inflicted injury, I’d gone over my “shopping list” with Jake and Westie.
“Twine, or thick string,” Jake repeated. “Sure, that’s doable. And…a pack of cigarettes? I thought you didn’t smoke.”
“They’re not for me. Now, I don’t suppose either of you has an ‘in’ with Brisco’s little trustee buddy?”
“Zap?” Westie asked. “We’re not exactly close, but we’re not on bad terms neither.”
“What would it take to get a favor out of him if it won’t put him out too much?”
The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust Book 5) Page 14