Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End

by Craig Schaefer

  “The only game you can lose,” Corman said, “is a fair game. That’s fine for baseball and poker night, but when all your chips are on the table? That’s when you do what Bentley and I taught you. Cheat. Rig the game. Do whatever you gotta do to come out a winner.”

  “What if Lauren cheats better than us?” I said.

  Corman snorted and shook his head.

  “Son,” he said, “nobody cheats better than us. Now stop worrying about could-bes and what-ifs, because could-bes and what-ifs aren’t worth a damn. You’re burning daylight. Get out there, do what you do best, and find a new angle. Lauren Carmichael’s just one more in a long line of people who thought they were immortal until they suddenly weren’t. Time we proved that to her.”

  Five

  An hour later, I was sitting in a booth at the Five Guys on Eastern Avenue, noshing on a big, soggy bacon burger and dipping into a greasy brown paper bag stuffed with Cajun fries. I’d rather have gone for Korean with Caitlin, but the fast food quelled the gnawing in my gut. The hunger pangs, anyway. It didn’t do much for the sense of dread that only got stronger when Harmony Black walked in the door.

  I’d figured out an angle, all right, but I couldn’t do it alone.

  Harmony was a short, full-figured blonde with wire-rimmed glasses and a penchant for men’s neckties. Today’s was forest green. She also had a penchant for putting guys like me behind bars. She gave the clientele a quick frisking with her eyes, making sure I didn’t invite her into an ambush, then slid into the seat across from me.

  “Tell me something I want to hear,” she said. Her words were clipped, edged with a faint New England accent.

  “Such as?”

  “Like you’re ready to take the deal and turn state’s evidence,” she said. “You called me, Faust. Don’t tell me I came all the way across town for the burgers.”

  I shoved the brown paper bag to the middle of the table.

  “Try the Cajun fries,” I told her.

  “Look at that,” she said. “Another thing you won’t get to eat in prison.”

  “I need a favor.”

  She reached up, pulled her glasses down to the tip of her pert nose, and stared at me over the lenses.

  “Excuse me?” she said. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear that correctly.”

  “The soul bottle. I need it back. Just for a day or two.”

  Harmony leaned back against the hard booth. She didn’t answer right away.

  “You want me to give you a bottle containing the spirit of a psychopath who murdered a hundred children. In what conceivable universe, Faust, would I have any reason to do that? What—please tell me, because I really want to know—what would possibly be my motivation to do that?”

  It was more like five hundred children, but correcting her history wasn’t going to help my argument. I bit into my burger while I worked out how much to tell her.

  “I have some indication that Lauren doesn’t need de Rais’s help anymore. You see the construction crews working day and night? The Enclave’s still going up. She’s shifting gears, finding a new approach.”

  “All the more reason to keep de Rais locked away forever. She might not need him, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want him.”

  “Except,” I said, “he knows what she’s up to. De Rais can tell us Lauren’s entire scheme, because whatever the Enclave really is, we know it’s based on something he started to invent centuries ago.”

  Harmony plucked a fry from the bag. She nibbled on it, thoughtful, then shook her head.

  “So what’s your plan? Let him possess someone, then interrogate him?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Then put him back in the bottle for good.”

  To give her credit, she actually thought about it while she ate another fry.

  “No,” she said. “Too dangerous. If anything went wrong, if he escaped, the fallout would be on my head. I can’t live with that. Find another way.”

  “The host will be chained to a chair. There’ll be armed guards—”

  Harmony leaned forward a little.

  “I said no. Possessions can go wrong with no warning. In case you forgot, you let that bastard get into my partner’s skin. You can’t tell me, after that, that you can guarantee anyone’s safety.”

  “So, what, we just let Lauren go?”

  “I’m already running my own investigation on Carmichael, off the books, with no help needed from you and your little friends. For that matter, there’s no way I’m putting a monster like Gilles de Rais in the hands of a pack of gangsters. Now, if you were to reconsider my offer and come inside…maybe, maybe you and I could come to an agreement. You know, once I felt reassured that you were on the side of the angels.”

  I tried not to laugh in her face.

  “That’s funny,” I said. “Never seen an angel that looked like a rat.”

  She reached for another fry. Her pink fingernails pincered it as she held it up between us like the sword in the stone.

  “These,” she said, “really are tasty. When you get home, you should look up what you’ll be eating in Ely Prison for the next thirty years. Food for thought, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

  She popped the fry in her mouth, smiled, and winked. Then she got up and walked out the door.

  • • •

  I drove around for a while, not aimless so much as restless, trying to come up with a new plan of attack. A heist wasn’t in the cards. Harmony had stashed de Rais’s bottled soul in an unmarked evidence box at the FBI’s Vegas field office. A bank would be easier to crack. Besides, I already had enough heat from the feds to deal with.

  The sun leaned down behind the city. Long fingers of shadow stretched from the monoliths on the strip, that dusky hour before the lights blaze and the booze flows like an oasis spring. I cruised back to the Scrivener’s Nook and pushed through the glass door with just enough time to freshen up before Caitlin came by.

  “These are from my trip to Denver,” said the woman at the counter, showing pictures on her phone to Bentley and Corman. Bentley, the rail-thin Felix to Corman’s Oscar, leaned in and squinted.

  “I should really get my bifocals,” he said, then saw me and waved. “Daniel! Look who’s here.”

  The woman had her back turned to me, but in the skip of a heartbeat I recognized the way her auburn hair fell in tight ringlets, the delicate curve of her shoulder.

  “Roxy?”

  She still had a smile that could bring me to my knees, but I barely had time to register it before she ran over, wrapped her arms around me, and pulled me into a kiss. It lingered, burning, my heart pounding against her black sundress. She trailed the back of her hand against my cheek as she slowly pulled away, fingers glittering with the antique silver rings she’d always loved collecting.

  “Hey, lover,” she said. “Miss me?”

  My head was reeling, and not just from the kiss. The last time I’d seen Roxy was the night she packed a bag and took a bus to Reno, out of my life forever.

  “What are you—” I said, my voice catching. “What are you doing here?”

  She reached down and took my hand between hers, squeezing it.

  “I’m back. And I want to try again. A fresh start for us.”

  “Roxy, it’s…it’s not that simple. Things are different now.”

  I couldn’t get my footing. I felt like I was running along a freshly waxed floor in my socks, every fumbling step a prelude to a messy fall. Something in the back of my brain was screaming at me to slow down, to stop and collect my thoughts, but I chalked it up to being hit with too many surprises at once.

  “Of course it’s that simple,” she said. “You know how good we were together. You remember. Everyone said we were a perfect couple—”

  The bells over the door jangled behind me. Roxy looked over, the smile freezing on her face. I turned around, my hand still trapped in hers, and saw Caitlin in the doorway. Her expression was carved from stone.

  This looked bad.

 
“Cait,” I said, “this is—”

  “I know who she is,” Caitlin said.

  Then she crossed the room with three quick strides and backhanded Roxy to the floor. Roxy tumbled against a bookshelf and sent a few hardcovers thumping to the floorboards with her. She clutched her bleeding lip.

  “Cait,” I said quickly, taking a halting step backward. “It’s not what you think.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off Roxy.

  “No,” she said. “It is not what you think.”

  Roxy grinned. She leapt to her feet, suddenly liquid, and bent backward in a spinebreaking arc, hurling herself across the bookstore. In the air she bent and twisted and rippled like a heat mirage, sprouting a coat of tawny fur striped in midnight black. She landed on all fours. Five hundred pounds of Bengal tiger crouched in the aisle now, licking her fangs with an eager wet tongue.

  Now I knew why the alarm bells were going off in my head.

  “Goddamn it,” I sighed.

  “That would be redundant,” Caitlin said dryly.

  I jumped at the clattering sound of a round pumping into a shotgun. Corman had his Remington up from behind the counter with its fat black barrel leveled toward the tiger’s head. Bentley was just as quick to defend their home turf. A pewter talisman dripped from his raised right hand, pregnant with thrumming power aching to burst loose.

  “Went on safari once,” Corman said. “Never did bag a tiger. What do you think, Bentley? Stuff it, or just mount the head on our wall?”

  “We could use a new rug,” Bentley said.

  I held up a hand to ease them down. “Gentlemen, please allow me to introduce the Baron Naavarasi. She’s not from around here.”

  The tiger’s form melted again, her body standing erect, fur receding and turning into a flowing wave of raven hair. Now she was an Indian goddess with dusky skin, draped in a jade silk sarong that matched the color of her fingernails. Her eyes were still tiger orange.

  She wasn’t a demon, not in the traditional sense. She was a rakshasi, a hunger spirit and apex predator. She’d been written up here and there in the occult world, usually as the “Devourer of Innocent Flesh” or the “Lady of the Foul Banquet,” after getting forcibly drafted into the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers sometime in the fifteenth century. She was still pissed about it.

  “Stay your hand, hound,” she said to Caitlin. “I am here as a formal and acknowledged emissary, and I have Prince Sitri’s permission to walk your court’s lands. You can check if you like.”

  “I’ll be doing that,” Caitlin said.

  Corman didn’t lower the shotgun one inch.

  “We’ve got a policy in our store,” he said. “Humans only. The young lady over there? She’s got an exemption. You don’t.”

  Naavarasi smiled at him. “But you liked me when I was Roxy.”

  “That was cruel,” I said. “That was just…that was fucking cruel.”

  She strode toward us. Caitlin put a hand on my shoulder. Gently squeezing, letting me know she was in control.

  “Cruel,” Naavarasi said, “was spinning me a web of pretty little lies. I thought we might have something together, only to discover you still in the Wingtaker’s arms.”

  “I didn’t betray you,” I said. “We bargained for a traitor’s name, and that’s exactly what I gave you. There was no trick there.”

  “Oh, I know, and my standing in the Flowers benefited handsomely for it. Even more so once I realized Prince Sitri tossed away a disposable asset and left a trail of false information for my court to fight over. I’ve milked that and milked it well. Don’t worry. I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  “If you’re here for a fight,” Caitlin said, “you’ll be fighting me. Just so we’re clear.”

  The rakshasi laughed. It sounded like crystal bells.

  “Why would I want a fight? I profited in the end. As one with a trickster’s reputation, I appreciate the value of a good trick. Still, it did hurt my feelings, just a little bit. So, Daniel, I thought I’d come over and hurt you. Just a little bit. Now we can both get over it and move on.”

  Bentley blinked at her, aghast. His talisman’s chain hung knotted in his fingers, like a hand grenade suspended by a cat’s cradle.

  “You came all the way here just for that?” he said.

  “No,” she said, “and not just for the kiss, though it was delicious. I am here on a diplomatic mission, with a request for aid that’s covered by the treaty between our courts. I need a boon, a very small and simple one.”

  “Name it,” Caitlin said.

  “No. Not you.” Naavarasi pointed her finger toward me. “I want him to do it.”

  Caitlin shook her head. “Daniel isn’t a member of my court. He’s not subject to our rules or our customs.”

  Naavarasi’s eyes, still a tiger’s, glittered.

  “Oh. So that means he’s not your consort?” she said. “Because…that would mean he’s anyone’s meat, wouldn’t it?”

  Six

  Caitlin let go of my shoulder and stepped forward, standing in Naavarasi’s way.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, rakshasi…stop thinking it.”

  “What? Me?” Naavarasi pouted, all mock innocence. “The only thing I’m thinking is that I need a boon. And you are treaty-bound to deliver. You can go with him, if it makes you feel better. In fact, I request it.”

  “What’s the job?” I said. I pretended not to notice the sudden looks of concern from Bentley and Corman.

  Naavarasi favored me with a smile. “A member of our court was summoned by a foolish pair of amateur magicians, not far from here. We know that he possessed one of the summoners and likely killed the other. However, he’s been bound in place somehow and hasn’t left the house where he was invoked. I need you to go in, erase any binding sigils, and exorcise him from the idiot’s body so he can return home. I’d do it myself, but my particular style of magic isn’t conducive to such work. Yours is.”

  It was a simple job. I’d done plenty of exorcisms in my day. If the demon was trapped in a botched summoning circle, it’d be safe enough. If he was actually cooperating, even better. I’d be in and out in fifteen minutes.

  Which was exactly why I smelled a trap.

  “What choir does the target belong to?” Caitlin said.

  “Right,” Naavarasi said. “I forget you people have that cute little system. Isn’t it stifling? Being locked into a tiny box, your emotions and powers restricted like that? I can embody any sin or virtue I like. Often several at once.”

  Caitlin’s eyes melted to the color of molten copper. Her voice went lower, slower, her Scottish brogue more pronounced. That was always a bad sign.

  “It’s more of a guideline. Some people say I’m more wrath than lust. Push me just an inch further, baron, and you’ll find out why.”

  Naavarasi caught the tone and waved an anxious hand.

  “All right, all right,” she said. “Malphas told me that he’s a fledgling of the Choir of Envy. Is that a problem?”

  Caitlin shook her head. “Not remotely.”

  “Delightful! I’ll send you the address. Shall we meet again tomorrow evening and talk about your brilliant success?”

  “Not here,” Caitlin said. “There’s a nightclub called Winter. You’ll meet me there. You will never come to this address again. Under any circumstances.”

  “But why? I like books.” Naavarasi glanced over at Bentley and Corman. “And snacks.”

  Corman patted Bentley’s back. Then he came around the counter, toting the shotgun loosely at his side. He walked right up to Naavarasi and stood close enough to feel her breath on his weathered cheeks.

  “Lady,” he said calmly, “I don’t know what rock you crawled out from under, but I do know this: you came in here under false pretenses, then you scared my husband, and you hurt our boy. That puts you about two notches lower than dog shit on the list of things I’m scared of. You’re gonna leave now, and if you ever set foot on my property again, I’ll end
you.”

  Naavarasi’s eyes widened. Her lips curled as she said, “You impudent little—”

  Corman swung up the shotgun, racked the pump, and pressed the barrel under her chin.

  “You should probably listen,” Caitlin said.

  The rakshasi slowly backed away, glaring. She swept out of the store without another word and slammed the door behind her. The bells clanged crazily, bouncing off the shuddering glass.

  “Guys,” I started to say. “I’m sorry—”

  “No.” Caitlin cut me off as she turned to Bentley and Corman. “I am sorry. That was inexcusable. Court business should never have been allowed to cross your doorstep.”

  I shook my head. “She came tracking me down, not you. It’s my fault.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake,” Corman said, leaning the shotgun back against his shoulder. “Both of you stop apologizing. Shit happens. She got the message.”

  Bentley lowered his talisman, exhaling slowly as a stream of pent-up power dissolved into the air. He leaned his palms against the counter and took a deep breath.

  “So that was a rakshasi,” he said. “I’ve never encountered one outside the pages of a book.”

  “I think she might be the last one on Earth,” I said. “Hope so, anyway. You okay?”

  Bentley nodded and gave me a shaky thumbs-up. “Fine and dandy. Cormie?”

  “Yeah, hon?”

  “The next time you see a Bengal tiger in our store? Do shoot it, would you? I wasn’t joking. We really could use a new rug.”

  • • •

  We took my car.

  I’d been stuck without wheels since the Redemption Choir wrecked my old ride along with my apartment, but Jennifer’s buddy Winslow had hooked me up with the little passion project he’d been rebuilding behind his garage: a 1970 Barracuda with a widemouthed grill and a hemi under the hood, blacker than my heart and built for a knife fight. The car got a little more attention than I liked, making it hard to ghost my way through the city streets, but it had muscle when I needed it.

  “It’s a trap,” Caitlin said as she slipped into the passenger seat.