Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Good news and bad news,” the Marquis said. “Bad news first. I don’t have the book. Had a line on it, but my informant turned up with a bad case of lead poisoning. See, this is a hot little commodity, and Nadia isn’t the only one looking for it. Adam wants it.”

  Marie shook her head. “Adam?”

  “I assume you know what the Network is.”

  “We’re acquainted,” Nessa replied.

  “Well, he’s the big man at the top—and I mean that literally, the guy’s built like a brick wall with a bad attitude. The kings allegedly tell Adam what they want, he hands down the marching orders and makes it happen. And he’s got a hell of a bee in his bonnet over the keys to Elysium.”

  “How do you know?” Marie asked.

  That got faint snickers from the Marquis’s men. One snatched up a half-empty bottle of beer from the table.

  “Nadia didn’t tell you anything about me, did she?” the Marquis said.

  “She said you smuggle occult artifacts.”

  “Any wand for hire can put his shingle out and play that game,” he replied. “What me and my crew do, that’s a little more specialized. We fill a…unique niche.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Network is big. You get that, right? They’ve got outposts on multiple worlds, mobile bases inside the Shadow In-Between. Big money, big power.”

  “Sure,” Marie said.

  “That means big bureaucracy. Big waste and big sloppiness, too. Network’s got a hundred hands, and fifty don’t know what the other fifty are doing. Me and my crew, we exploit those weaknesses. Passcodes? We steal ’em. Guards? We know which ones can be bought and stay bought. I can walk into any given Network base, and they treat me like I work there. Then I walk right out with armloads of loot. Money, precious metals, occult technology. Even alter the inventory logs while I’m there, so they never even know they got ripped off.”

  “Helps that the kings don’t trust each other,” one of his men added, digging between his chapped lips with a wooden toothpick. “Technically the Network’s a united coalition, but the kings play favorites and their top boys all collect dirt on each other for a rainy day. Dirt that we can use.”

  “And that’s how we get paid,” the Marquis said. His men chortled their approval and saluted across the table, clinking bottles together.

  “So if Adam’s acquired the book, why can’t you steal it back?” Nessa asked.

  “I said he’s looking for it, not that he has it. But in the process, he’s doing a real good job of killing off anybody who has a line on the thing. But I promised you some good news, right? I did some digging. Turns out you may not need the book at all.”

  “We only have the bell and the candle,” Nessa said. “We need all three keys.”

  “You know what I learned in my profession? There’s always more than one way to crack a security system.”

  The Marquis pointed to the window, and to the tangled graveyard of dead ships and debris in the void beyond.

  “There’s a wreck about six klicks out. The Logos. It’s a rarity, damn near untouched and unscavenged. Partially because nobody who tried has ever come back alive. Now it’s a Network target; they’ve got the whole area locked down and kill teams on site. And thanks to my little tap on Adam’s personal comm line, I know why.”

  “We’re all ears,” Nessa said.

  “These ships were never meant to land. They were built in the Shadow, they fought here, and they died here. That means there had to be a mechanism for moving troops on and off board, right?”

  “With you so far.”

  “The Logos was a flagship, fighting for the three loyal thrones.” The Marquis clapped his hands together in a gesture of prayer, bowing his hood. “Faithful unto the creator, for ever and ever, amen.”

  Hedy was the first to put it together. “A gateway. They’d have a gateway on the ship.”

  “To Elysium,” Nessa said.

  “Give the ladies a prize,” he said, parting his hands with a finger snap. “Fire that baby up and you’ll be knockin’ on heaven’s door, no keys or relics required. Most of these wrecks are beyond salvation, if you’ll pardon the play on words, but the Logos still has a functioning reactor. Nobody’s home, but the lights are on. Adam thinks that means the gateway still works, and I think, for once, the man’s dead right.”

  “But you told us it’s completely locked down,” Marie said.

  “By the Network. And I can get you in, quiet as a ghost in the machine.”

  Interlude

  “You’re not going to interrupt her?” asked the interrogator.

  He had been watching Carolyn with a growing air of anxiety, creeping closer to the edge of his chair as she told her tale. The King of Rust, placid, simply sat back with his three-fingered hands twined upon his silk-draped lap.

  “And why would I do that?” the fallen angel replied. “We’re finally getting some worthwhile information out of her. The last thing I want is for her to stop.”

  “But she’s lying.” He looked between them, head shaking. “She is lying, isn’t she?”

  “I hear only truth.”

  “It’s impossible. The idea that anyone could worm their way into our systems, undermine our security…” The interrogator stared at Carolyn. “She has to be lying. It’s a distraction. A story to send us on a wild-goose chase for a man who doesn’t exist.”

  The king’s chuckle was a basso rumble, the sound of distant thunder.

  “Tell me. Are you more afraid for the well-being of our organization…or that I might decide to hold you personally responsible for the breach?”

  The interrogator squirmed in his seat. “I’ll…I’ll carry out an immediate security audit. I’ll find him. I’ll bring you his head—”

  “You will find him, and you will bring him to me alive.”

  He glanced up. “My lord?”

  “He wasn’t wrong, you know. We do accumulate certain…useful information about our rival brothers and their chosen emissaries, just in case it might be needed someday. I would like to know what sort of treasures he’s found.” The king’s golden eyes focused upon the interrogator. “And we do, as he said, play favorites. If you would like to become one of mine, then you will find the Marquis and his crew and bring them to me for questioning. And you will say nothing about this to anyone. Not Adam, not anyone. Do you understand?”

  The interrogator bowed his head. “The secret won’t leave this room, my lord.”

  Carolyn leaned back and let out a sigh. “Are you two finished? Can I continue, please?”

  As if he could smell blood in the water, the interrogator sat up straight and glared at her.

  “Speak clearly, correctly, and truthfully,” he told her.

  “Don’t tell a storyteller how to do her job. Do I come down to where you work and tell you how to be an embarrassing failure?”

  The king snickered. The interrogator glowered at her, his hands squeezing the arms of his chair.

  “Moving on,” Carolyn said. “While Nessa and Marie were plotting a one-way trip to the pearly gates, back on my world, Las Vegas was reeling in the aftermath of one long, bloody night. Over a dozen people had been gunned down in the heart of a casino, and the shooters were gone in the wind. Until.”

  “Until?” the king said.

  “They made one tiny mistake. They didn’t clean up after themselves. And that tiny mistake was the spark to one hell of a fire.”

  Twenty-Six

  The security office at the Flamenco was a nest of eyes. Three walls bristled with screens, capturing every inch of the casino floor. Subtle cameras tracked the servers at the hotel bar and watched the cash-register drawer. The glowing squares of light pursued pit bosses and monitored hostesses as they passed out free drinks. For once, none of it was live footage. The ground floor of the Flamenco was still a crime scene, and emergency crews had worked through the night to tend to the wounded and drag out the dead. The hotel was technically still in operation, bu
t the checkout desk was packed with tourists cutting out ahead of schedule.

  One sharp-eyed sentry, in a crisp pink shirt and black slacks, pressed the nub of a joystick on his console. A screen zoomed in to focus on a dealer’s hands, tracking moves he made hours before the shooting started. Massacre or not, casino security had a job to do, poring over yesterday’s logs.

  Those weren’t the cards Harmony and Jessie were interested in. They stood behind the casino’s security chief as he replayed footage from the camera overlooking the elevator banks. They watched the spray of cards from Daniel’s hands, fluttering, multiplying, blotting out the view.

  “I don’t know how he did it,” the chief said. “Had to be some kind of air gun, right? Like a pneumatic tube? Figure he had all the cards up his sleeves and down his pants or something, all strung together. You know, it’s like that stage trick with the knotted handkerchiefs.”

  Jessie leaned close. Even indoors, she wore her dark glasses. She tugged them down as she hovered inches from the screen, and her turquoise eyes flashed. She was a panther on the hunt.

  “Something like that,” she murmured. “He’s a tricky guy. Show us that other angle again, on the shooters.”

  A keyboard rattled, and the perspective changed, capturing a bird’s-eye view of Nyx and her posse.

  “We’re going to need the room for a minute,” Harmony said. “We also need this footage before we go.”

  The chief nodded. “Already done. I sent copies over to your office this morning, just like you asked.”

  She waited until he looked her in the eye. Then she spoke in a voice like velvet over steel.

  “And you’ll be erasing the footage from your servers before we leave. All of it. If it shows up anywhere, if one frame of it leaks to the media, you’ll be held personally responsible.”

  His head bobbed. “Understood.”

  “Good. Now, if you please.”

  She gestured to the door. He gathered his people, told them to take a fifteen-minute coffee break, and shut the door on his way out.

  “Well,” Jessie said, “this situation is all kinds of fucked.”

  Harmony took the chief’s chair. She nudged a joystick with the tip of her index finger, rewinding the footage. The dead sprang to life on the screen, bullet holes healing, pools of blood evaporating, and flashes of light sliding back into the shooters’ guns.

  If only it was that easy, she thought.

  “Let’s work the order of events,” she said. “After we parted ways, something happened to Marie Reinhart. Next time Vanessa Roth popped up on our radar, she was alone and on a crusade to kill her father-in-law. He wasn’t there, but about a dozen bounty hunters—half of them with demonic tats on their wrists, according to the Carson City morgue—were waiting for her. Again, courtesy of her father-in-law.”

  “And Calypso,” Jessie said. “About time to punch both of their tickets for good. But how did we get from there to here? Vanessa’s back with Faust in this footage. And they’ve got Carolyn Saunders along for the ride.”

  Harmony gestured to another bank of screens, capturing a pack of people creeping out across a card-littered and blood-soaked carpet.

  “And Marie’s ex-partner and her roommate, plus a handful of unsubs.” She checked her phone as it buzzed against her hip. “Speaking of.”

  She tapped the screen and set it on speaker.

  “Kevin. What do you have for us?”

  The young man’s voice echoed over the phone. “Bupkis, boss.”

  “On any of them?”

  “I’ve been running these stills through facial recognition all morning. NGI system, driver’s license archives, passports—hell, I even used my backdoor into Kairos; their database is better than the FBI’s. Wherever these people came from, they aren’t on anybody’s radar. And no joy with the hotel, either. Daniel Faust rented them a block of rooms with a credit card under his ‘Paul Emerson’ alias. No names, no nothing.”

  Harmony focused on Daniel’s hazy image, a shadow behind a flutter of frozen cards.

  “What are you up to?” she murmured.

  “You want me to keep looking?” Kevin asked.

  “Yes, please. Do what you can.”

  She tapped the screen and broke the connection. Jessie leaned in at her shoulder.

  “So much for ‘trust me, I can protect them,’” she said.

  “For once,” Harmony said, “and believe me, I never thought I’d be saying these words, but I don’t think this is Daniel’s fault.”

  Jessie mock-winced. “Ooh. I felt that. That had to hurt.”

  “Uh-huh. Look. Watch what happens here.”

  She rewound and hit Play. The silent screen captured Daniel’s raised hand, his moving lips. Another angle showed Nyx in her human disguise. Her nod, a subtle turn.

  “I think he’s telling her to take it outside. And Nyx might be an utter psychopath, but even she had to know what kind of heat a gunfight in a casino is going to rain down. Looks like she’s agreeing with him.”

  Jessie pointed to the screen as the man beside Nyx let his duffel billow to the floor, empty as he swung his rifle up to fire.

  “And her dipshit buddy was too trigger-happy to get the memo. The second he opened fire, it was off to the races. Wait. Back it up and freeze it.”

  The footage focused on the terminal moment, the heartbeat before the slaughter. Jessie’s fingernail tapped the screen.

  “What the hell kind of weapon is that? Looks like a prop from a science-fiction movie.”

  Harmony squinted at the wasp-yellow and black outline. “Full-auto, not a civilian model. Little blurry, but that’s definitely not an AK or an M-16, not military.”

  “Not even an M-16 does that kind of damage. The casino wasn’t shot up, it was shredded.”

  “And last time we crossed paths, Nyx and her gang didn’t have anything like that. They had heavy firepower, sure, but all of it was conventional.” Harmony shoved her chair back. “That’s our trail in the wilderness. We find their dealer, we find Nyx.”

  * * *

  On the edge of Las Vegas, half a mile and a world away from the lights of the Strip, the Sunset Garage squatted under a grimy overpass. A neon sign, the tubing burned out long ago and its face caked in soot, depicted a lime-green Studebaker. The grizzled men out in front of the garage, working on their rides, preferred two wheels to four. They tuned up their bikes while guitars wailed on a tinny radio and dogs yowled, hurling themselves at the chain-link fence that guarded the back lot.

  Harmony and Jessie rolled up in an SUV with tinted windows. The bikers stood up straight. Some put their tools down. Some didn’t, keeping their wrenches handy.

  Harmony stepped out, holding her badge high. Jessie circled around to stand at her side.

  “I think you all remember me,” Harmony said.

  “Good news, everybody,” Jessie said. “I hate arresting people. Absolutely hate it. So all you have to do is give us what we want, and we’ll go away.”

  Winslow shambled out from the garage, squinting with a hand cupped over his eyes to cut the glare of the desert sun.

  “Well I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Agent Black, and you brought a friend this time. Last time I saw you…what’d I sell you, a flamethrower and a refurbished Street Glide? How they treatin’ you?”

  “Love the bike,” Harmony said. “The flamethrower I had to get rid of. I dented the tank.”

  “Yeah, you gotta be careful with those things. So. I assume this ain’t a social call.”

  The bikers were spreading out, forming a ragged semicircle. There were maybe a dozen of them now, another pair following Winslow out of the garage, and one of them dangled a crowbar at his side. Harmony quietly counted targets and picked out the ones she’d make a priority if she had to.

  “I’m not going to tell you about the massacre at the Flamenco last night,” she said. “After all, you were there. Security cameras picked you up, leaving in the aftermath.”

  “Going
in, too,” Jessie added. “With some very heavy bags. Looked less than heavy on your way out, though. Probably because you stopped in at your buddy Faust’s room on the twelfth floor.”

  “Faust?” He rubbed the stubble on his chin and scrunched his face up. “Daniel Faust? Afraid you got some bad intel, Agent. Daniel Faust died in a riot up at Eisenberg Prison a while back. I thought everybody knew that.”

  “Pick one of your boys,” Jessie told him.

  “Pardon?”

  “Pick which one we’re putting in cuffs and taking back with us if you bullshit us one more time.”

  “We know everything,” Harmony said. “We know about ‘Paul Emerson,’ we know about the New Commission, and we know you and Faust are on the board of directors. We’re not after him, for once. We’re not after you, either.”

  “We want Nyx,” Jessie said.

  Winslow held up his hands. “Hold up. I can’t help you with that, and that’s God’s honest truth. I don’t know her. I don’t like the weird shit, and I don’t want anything to do with it. Besides, I only do business with locals—you being the rare exception, not like you gave me a choice—and she ain’t a local. Far as I know, and this is secondhand, she only comes to Vegas when she’s on a job.”

  Harmony opened the back door of the SUV and reached for the blanket-wrapped bundle on the seat.

  “What we need,” she said, “is your expertise.”

  Inside the garage, beneath a curtain of shade that cut the arid heat, they clustered around Winslow’s workbench. His nicotine-stained fingers hovered over the hard lines of the assault rifle.

  “Whoo-ee,” he said. “Where’d you get this puppy?”

  “Evidence locker at Metro,” Harmony said. “One of the shooters died holding it, and the others left it behind when they ran. According to the surveillance footage, all of Nyx’s people had weapons just like it.”

  “Rare, if true.” Winslow pointed to the plastic parts on the matte-black rifle, cast in hornet yellow. “You see these? These are preproduction components. Temporary, for testing, until the design’s finalized.”