“Come on,” I said. “Your mom’s going to need you, but…not right now. I don’t think she’d want you to see him like that either.”
Melanie walked with me to the door.
“I don’t think I can cry right now,” she said. “I want to. I feel like I should, but…I can’t.”
“That’s okay. Maybe you’ll feel like it tomorrow. Or maybe you won’t. Grieving is like that.”
She stopped and gave me a look.
“My dad was a good man,” she said, as if sorting it out in her head. “He just made bad decisions.”
“The world is full of good men who make bad decisions,” I told her. “Sometimes it works out. Sometimes it doesn’t. You just have to figure things out the best you can. Make the best choices you can. Choices you can live with.”
“I’m going to go help the others. Those new guys, they’re gonna be pretty shell-shocked. Then I’ll check on Mom.”
I ruffled her hair. “Good thinking. You’re gonna be fine, Melanie.”
She tried to smile, but couldn’t quite get there.
“You sure about that?” she said.
“Trust me. I’m a magician.”
I found Caitlin ten feet from where I’d left her. She sat on a stack of drywall, using it for an impromptu bench. She leaned over her broken leg, massaging it, murmuring under her breath as she winced.
“Hey,” I said.
She looked up and gave me a tired smile.
“Hey yourself. Sit. Keep me company.”
I settled down beside her, wiping away some dust from the drywall with the edge of my hand.
“How’s the leg?”
“Hurts, but I’m already healing it. I’ll be up and limping in a few hours. I landed on it deliberately, had to make myself look helpless.” She glanced towards the ranch house. “Ben?”
“Dead. Emma did it. I think it’d be good if nobody told Melanie that. They’re going to have enough problems recovering from all this.”
“Agreed,” she said, and we contemplated the pit of stone in silence.
“Is Sullivan dead down there?”
She shrugged. “Probably. We can take a lot of punishment, but being crushed under ten tons of rubble isn’t anything you bounce back from. If he isn’t dead, he wishes he were. And he can keep wishing. For a very, very long time. Tomorrow morning we’re paving it over.”
I nodded. Sounded fair to me.
“So was it worth it?” she asked.
“What?”
She waved her hand idly. “All of this. Giving up the ring. Giving up a chance at…I don’t know.”
I leaned close, and she rested her head on my shoulder.
“I’ve got everything I could ever want,” I said. “Right here.”
We sat like that for a while, as dawn broke over the endless sand.
Every choice has consequences. Some you see coming, and some hit you right between the eyes when you least expect it. I knew the time would come when I’d have to pay the piper for everything I’d done, and for everything I didn’t do. I was okay with that.
Let the heavens war. Let the world fall down. Caitlin and me, we were doing all right.
Epilogue
He supposed things had worked out just fine.
Father Alvarez hummed a happy tune as he dusted the bookshelves in his office at Our Lady of Consolation. A ragged quartet of cambion had let him go at dawn, grim-faced and silent as they bundled him into their truck. They wouldn’t say where Sullivan or their other brethren were, but he could guess from their expressions that it wasn’t a happy story. They dropped him off at the church and drove east into an uncertain future. Now he was back at the church as if he had never left, like Alice stepping back out of the looking glass.
“Father?” a woman asked. She stood in the doorway, a shadow in a black sheath dress.
He smiled. “Yes? Can I help you, my child?”
Caitlin stepped into the room.
“I hope so,” she said. “I’m wrestling with a theological quandary. It might sound a bit strange, though.”
He chuckled gently. “Believe me, young lady, after the week I’ve had, nothing is ever going to surprise me again.”
“The question is this: if a prince of hell orders a man’s death, but the man is already dead, do you still have to obey the command?”
He blinked, stammering. “That’s…I’m sorry, is this some kind of—”
“Game,” Caitlin said, leaning over to sniff the white flowers in a vase on the priest’s desk. “It’s all a game, until it suddenly isn’t. These are Casablanca lilies, aren’t they?”
He nodded. “They are.”
She flashed a hungry smile.
“Those are night-blooming flowers. Aren’t they, Pinfeather?”
He froze, statue still, then dropped his hands to his sides with a sigh of resignation.
“You’re her,” Alvarez said. “Sitri’s hound. The Wingtaker.”
“In the flesh.”
“And to think,” he said, “I was leaving town tonight. Almost got away clean. How did you know?”
“Daniel put most of the puzzle together. I just added a few key pieces. Every time the Redemption Choir ambushed you two, we could trace it to Ben’s treachery or the wiretap on Nicky Agnelli’s phones…except once. Daniel’s apartment. Only a handful of people knew that address, and it was warded against scrying and divination. There was only one man in a position to spill the beans: you. When Daniel left you alone in his home, you called Gary Kemper to slip him an ‘anonymous’ tip. Gary came from back east, after all, and he still had contacts in your court. Gary told Sullivan, and the rest was history.”
Pinfeather nodded. “I needed to be captured. That was key to the entire plan, but your boyfriend was doing too good a job of protecting me. Admirable, but frustrating.”
“Yes, well, he still sees the best in some people,” she deadpanned. “I haven’t beaten it out of him yet. Then there’s the curious case of Father Fernando. Father Sullivan’s good friend, dead from a hit-and-run just a few days after you moved to this parish. I have a theory on that.”
“I’d love to hear it.”
“I dug up a seminary yearbook. You look so much like the real Alvarez, it’s uncanny. I assume you picked a victim with similar bone structure and faked the rest with makeup and some light plastic surgery. But Fernando knew the real Alvarez. You could fool a casual acquaintance or a stranger, but not him. He had to go.”
“As did the good Father Alvarez himself,” Pinfeather said. “He’s dissolving in a tenement bathtub, and his teeth are scattered in Dumpsters across the city. Crude, I admit, but that’s the cost of a perfect cover.”
Caitlin paced the room, like the detective in an Agatha Christie novel.
“You knew that Sullivan and his cult would cause trouble for my prince, but he hardly needed your help for that. Which brings us to the manuscript. The road map to hell, custom-tailored to feed Sullivan’s mad little fantasies of conquest. Was any of it real?”
Pinfeather smiled proudly. “Not a single word. I wrote the entire thing myself and artificially aged the paper by rubbing the pages down with a wet teabag. Old theater trick. Wouldn’t have stood up to anything more than casual inspection, but Sullivan never thought to doubt me. I love working with fanatics. You just wind them up, and off they go.”
“You had Gary Kemper’s ear more than once. You were the one who pushed for an alliance with Lauren Carmichael, and got Gary to plant that notion in Sullivan’s brain.”
“And why would I do that?”
“Because the Flowers didn’t send you here because of the cambion. The Redemption Choir was just a red herring. You wanted the same thing we did: to steal the Ring of Solomon. Word about Lauren Carmichael’s little end-of-the-world mishap had to have leaked, and it wouldn’t take much for your masters to put two and two together. You couldn’t steal the ring yourself, but you figured Sullivan could. So you let him ‘kidnap’ you, wormed your way into
his confidence, and steered him toward Carmichael.”
Pinfeather sighed and gave a tired shrug. “Letting someone else do the heavy lifting is usually the best course of action.”
“Once Sullivan had the ring, it wouldn’t take much, a moment of distraction perhaps, to get it away from him. Or maybe he planned to hand it to you all along, since you were such a good little convert. The ring can only be used by a human after all, and Ben was the only other choice he had. And Ben was…well. Ben.”
“That was the general idea,” Pinfeather said.
“Then what? You enslave Sullivan with the ring, I’m guessing. An incarnate demon under your command could wreak all kinds of havoc.”
“Two incarnates, actually. You were going to be my next target. My orders were a long-term campaign of destabilization and terror, aimed ultimately at getting Sitri ousted by his own ministers.”
“Hmm,” Caitlin said. “Good of you to admit that.”
“I’ve never actually been caught before. It’s surprisingly refreshing to unburden myself. I suppose this is what giving confession feels like.”
“I hope you’re not expecting me to assign you ten Hail Marys and let you go.”
“I’m expecting you’ll see reason,” Pinfeather said. He stepped closer to her, showing her his open hands. “Think of what I could accomplish as a double agent. I could feed information to you, disinformation to the Flowers—”
“You could lie, sabotage us, or simply vanish, too,” she said.
“Come on,” he said with a sly smile. “This is Las Vegas, right? So gamble a little. What have you got to lose? Let me go, and I’ll make things right.”
Caitlin studied him, deep in thought.
“You made one mistake,” she said.
“What’s that?”
Caitlin shook her head. “Gambling. This is my territory. My city. Your entire plan depended on betting against the house.”
A sharp crunching sound echoed across the cramped office. Pinfeather’s eyes went wide, his body rigid as a steel pole. He looked down. Caitlin’s hand was buried in his chest up to the wrist. A rivulet of blood guttered from his mouth as he tried to speak. Caitlin put her lips to his ear as her fingers curled around his pounding heart.
“Like you said, this is Vegas,” Caitlin whispered. “And in Vegas, the house always wins.”
She yanked her hand free. Pinfeather crumpled to the carpet, a look of surprise frozen on his face. She dropped his dead heart onto the ruins of his chest and went to find a bathroom where she could scrub her hands.
Caitlin hummed as she strolled away from the empty church, thinking about what to buy for dinner. Daniel was coming over, and for at least one night, they could relax together in peace.
She supposed things had worked out just fine.
<<<<>>>>
Afterword
And here we are at the end of another adventure. I hope you enjoyed the ride! If you want to be the first to know what happens next, head over to craigschaeferbooks.com and hop onto my mailing list for announcements about new releases. You can also catch me on Facebook , Twitter , or just drop me an email at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you.
Grateful thanks to Kira Rubenthaler (Editor Above All Other Editors) and James T. Egan (Cover Design Maestro) at Bookfly Designs. I couldn’t do what I do without ’em. Also thanks to the incredibly helpful and friendly staff at Battlefield Vegas, where I got some hands on experience with the less-magical weapons of Faust’s world. It was a super-fun afternoon of research and I can’t recommend the experience highly enough.
And for the record, yes, a Taurus Judge probably WILL blow a demon’s face off at close range.
As always, names of certain hotels and establishments have been changed for legal purposes, but fans of Las Vegas will probably be able to tell what’s what pretty easily. Winter, of course, is a purely fictional establishment.
That said, if the pulse of the music moves your feet down a certain back corridor in a certain Vegas nightclub, and you find yourself eye-to-eye with a silent man in a gas mask? I take no responsibilty for what happens if you go downstairs.
Redemption Song (Daniel Faust) Page 28