The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6)

by Schaefer,Craig

  Past another octagonal hive room—this one with sheets of plastic tacked up on the walls, more plastic on the floor, and a scent like honey in the air—and down a dead-end corridor, the conference room awaited. I wasn’t alone. A woman stood sentry at the door, a tall Nordic goddess in black biker’s leathers, her long blond hair done in a waist-length braid. The skin-tight pants or the strategically low zipper on her jacket might have distracted me if I hadn’t caught a whiff of something darker than her outfit. She glowed in my second sight, her heart an onyx prism that sucked in the light and spat out shadows.

  Incarnate demon. And not one I’d met before. Not a local. As I approached, slow, wary now, she got in my way and held up one palm to stop me.

  “No admittance,” she said, her words dripping with a thick Russian accent.

  I could hear voices from behind the closed door, loud enough to catch the anger, too muffled for me to make out the words. I tilted my head, glancing past the woman’s shoulder, trying to be nonchalant and keep the sudden, simmering anxiety in my stomach in check. Winter was neutral ground for delegates from the courts of hell, just like the Tiger’s Garden was Switzerland for Vegas’s magicians. Only problem: I was a magician, not a demon. The “neutral ground” rule didn’t necessarily apply to me, and throwing down with an incarnate without preparing for the fight, especially with one you’d never encountered before, would be a great way to get your spine ripped out and your head used for a tetherball.

  And with that lovely mental image, I gave her my friendliest smile and established my bona fides. “It’s okay. I’m Faust. Daniel Faust. I’m with Caitlin.”

  “This one knows what you are.” Her nose wrinkled. “No admittance.”

  I sighed. “You got a name?”

  “Nyx.”

  The name rang a distant bell, but I couldn’t remember where I’d heard it before. “Nyx, hi. Look, Caitlin’s expecting me.”

  “She will expect you here, outside, when the meeting is finished. This one has her orders. No admittance to anyone, for any reason.”

  I took a step back, wondering just how badly I wanted to push it. Before I could decide, a sharp voice shouted from behind the door. Nadine.

  “What do you mean, ‘hands-off policy’?” she bellowed. “They humiliated my daughter!”

  Nyx winced. I had to feel a little sympathetic. She must have been one of Nadine’s bodyguards, part of her entourage from the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers. I couldn’t imagine that was a fun job.

  “Rough gig, huh?” I asked her.

  “This one is honored by her calling and her duties,” she replied.

  “Yeah, but you gotta admit,” I said with a nod to the door, “your boss is kind of an asshole.”

  Nyx stared at me. I felt the temperature drop, like the air around us had started to curdle.

  Then the door flew open. Nadine stood on the threshold, dressed for a Fashion Week runway, looking back over her shoulder. “I don’t care,” she seethed, “you fix this, or I will. Come on, Nyx, we are leaving.”

  Nadine stomped out, saw me, and her eyes lit up. The next thing I knew I had my back to the wall, slammed against it so hard I nearly lost my breath, with her forearm barred across my chest and her lips inches from mine.

  “You,” she said. “You had a run-in with Harmony Black, didn’t you?”

  Now I wasn’t breathing at all, focusing on my magical defenses, sparks of power struggling to shore up a wall of sandbags against the onslaught of her mind-bending touch. Tendrils of her jasmine perfume still slithered into my nose, into my mind, telling me to inhale. Breathe in. Breathe her.

  “I-I did,” I stammered. I couldn’t think of lying to her. With her skin against mine, I literally couldn’t comprehend the concept.

  “And you want revenge, don’t you? You want to kill her.”

  “No,” I said, forcing the words out one at a time, “I really, really just want to stay the hell away from her, thanks.”

  The next thing out of Nadine’s mouth was a strangled gulp. Caitlin was on her in a heartbeat, her eyes swirling orbs of molten copper as she grabbed Nadine by the throat, tore her away from me, and hoisted her up to her tiptoes.

  “Apparently I have not been clear,” Caitlin said, her faint Scottish burr tinged with irritation. “You do not touch my human. Ever.”

  Nyx hissed, her mouth suddenly lined with shark’s teeth as she circled the two, getting behind Caitlin’s back. I snapped my fingers, sharp, and a quartet of playing cards riffled from my hip pocket to my outstretched hand, fanning out like a sheaf of razors.

  “Ladies,” Royce said, dressed in cultured arrogance and black Armani as he strode out to join the impending fight. “And…gentleman. Please, respect the Cold Peace and the rules of hospitality. We are the elite of our courts. This is deeply undignified behavior and reflects poorly upon our princes.”

  Caitlin slowly lowered Nadine to the ground and let go of her throat. Nadine stepped to one side, rubbing at her neck, glaring daggers. Nyx still looked jumpy, and closer to Caitlin’s back than I liked. I kept my card hand high. We froze that way, just for a moment. Then Nadine shot a glance at her sidekick.

  “We’re leaving. Now.”

  Deflated, Nyx’s head drooped as she followed in Nadine’s wake like a puppy on a leash. A razor-fanged, killing machine kind of puppy. Caitlin turned my way, her eyes back to their usual sea-glass green, and touched my shoulder.

  “Are you all right?”

  I pocketed my cards and gave what I hoped was a rakish, devil-may-care sort of shrug. “Sure. Day at the office.”

  “Sorry about that,” Royce told Caitlin. “Honestly, I had no idea she was going to follow me here. Somebody thinks a bit too highly of her position.”

  “She is Prince Malphas’s favorite,” Caitlin observed.

  “And I’m his hound. Our business is none of her business. At any rate, I should be going. A pleasure as always, Caitlin.”

  “Hell prevails.”

  “Indeed,” he said, turning his back and walking up the corridor. As he vanished out of sight, swallowed by the darkness and gold neon, Caitlin slipped one arm around my hip. She leaned in, tilting her head, and our lips brushed.

  “That was a curiously hesitant kiss,” she murmured. “Care to try that again? Once more, with feeling?”

  “Sorry, just…what was that all about, back there? About Harmony Black?”

  “Court intrigues, pet. Royce’s court and mine appear to have a common enemy in the shadows, which he was kind enough to come and warn me about.”

  “Great. What’s she up to now? She’s not coming back to Vegas, is she?”

  Caitlin laughed and shook her head.

  “I don’t mean your dear Agent Black, no. The problem is a bit more…nuanced than that. Don’t worry. This is nothing you need trouble yourself with. And as for Nadine, well, she’s just a sore loser. As always. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m famished.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing I got reservations for us at that new Cantonese place,” I said, my worries melting under the warmth of her smile. She took my arm.

  “You do have your uses. That sounds absolutely—hold on, let me see who this is.”

  She eyed her phone, then took the call.

  “Dances, how are you? Are we still on for—what’s that? Certainly, one moment.”

  She switched the phone over to FaceTime and lowered it so we could both watch. The screen became a camera, focused on a wall of stainless steel lockers. And a close-up of a familiar face: Fredrika Vinter, fashion mogul and queen bee of the Chicago occult underground.

  “Dahling,” she said, “you look amazing. As always. When are you going to model at one of my shows? I’m not taking no for an answer. And oh good, my favorite thief is with you. My BFFs, we have a problem here. And by ‘we’ I mean mostly you.”

  “Hey, Freddie,” I said. “What’s up?”

  She pulled the phone back and took a long, slow pan of the room. Tho
se weren’t lockers behind her. They were mortuary drawers. And they were empty. The morgue was a wasteland of knocked-over gurneys, shattered lab flasks, and scattered tools, ransacked from top to bottom.

  “Corpses,” Freddie said. “A whole bunch of them, that’s what’s up. As in, they got up, and walked right out of here.”

  4.

  Freddie passed the phone to the man at her side. Thinning hair, a bulky turtleneck under his lab coat, deathly pale skin, and the hint of rouge on his cheeks. I recognized him: Herbert, one of my tablemates at a poker tournament I’d played the last time I was in Chicago.

  “Ahem, yes,” he said. “I arrived this morning to find my workplace quite violated, and the security video is harrowing in its stark portrayal of a nigh-unthinkable reality. The dead became restless and perambulated as one, formed in a line like…like…”

  “Like a conga line,” Freddie said. “But without the booze. Or the fun.”

  Herbert held up an unsteady finger. “There are only two scholars in this city who possess any expertise in the revivification of the dead. And since I am quite blameless in this matter…”

  He didn’t need to finish the thought. We all knew exactly who to pin this on.

  “Damien Ecko,” I said.

  Herbert’s head bobbed. “An appalling, blasphemous stench hangs over this grim display. No, this is not the bold moral clarity of western science but something fell, like the taboo non-Euclidean geometries of old Araby or worse, the mad-eyed, savage rites of blackest Afri—”

  Freddie snatched the phone out of his hand.

  “I’m sorry, brainiac here can’t go thirty seconds today without saying something super racist.” She glared at him. “Seriously, what is your problem? Do you have a condition?”

  “It was merely an observation.”

  “I will eat you.” Freddie turned back to the screen. “So yeah, Old Dusty came out of hiding just long enough to steal about twenty corpses. Either he’s a closet Michael Jackson fan and he’s filming a remake of Thriller, or he’s headed your way and looking for payback.”

  “You sure he’s coming here?” I asked. “I mean, as far as anybody outside our circle believes, I died at Eisenberg Correctional.”

  “Does he know that? A lot of people died in that riot. They weren’t exactly putting up lists of names on every TV channel. He might not even know you were locked up in the first place.”

  She had a point. I was safe from the government and the law as long as I kept my head down, but that didn’t mean anybody else had been fooled. Still, I couldn’t help but dig my heels in. It wasn’t so much that I couldn’t believe Ecko was coming for revenge—he had every reason, seeing as our last encounter ended with him fleeing the wrath of two infernal courts, framed for a crime I’d committed—but I just didn’t want to. I had tunnel vision, a tunnel with the Enemy waiting at the other end, and I couldn’t let myself get distracted from the hunt. Not now.

  “How do you know he’s coming here?” I asked. “I mean, yeah, he’s got it in for me, but there are demons from here to Miami hunting for his head right now. That’s a hell of a risk.”

  “Let’s just say he left a pretty bold clue behind.”

  The phone swung around, camera pointing to the far wall of the morgue. Letters, scrawled in flaky, dried blood by a corpse’s unsteady hand, left a message: “Faust. Lighten Your Heart.”

  “‘Lighten my heart’?” I asked. “The hell does that mean?”

  The screen tilted back toward Freddie’s face. “He apparently thinks you know. Anyway, my darlingist darlings, you’d best keep your eyes open. I’m looking forward to a vacation in Vegas as soon as I can tear myself away from work, and I’d like everyone to be alive when I make my dramatic entrance.”

  Caitlin’s eyes were hard, intent. “Thank you, Dances. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

  “Ta! Kisses.”

  The screen went black.

  “Well.” Caitlin lifted her chin. “This is excellent news.”

  “A psychotic necromancer is coming after me with a posse of zombies. How does that constitute ‘excellent news’?”

  “Because I have a running bet with Royce. If I kill Ecko first, he owes me dinner. Speaking of, shall we?”

  My assent came out as a shrug. My appetite had withered on the vine. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to confront Ecko; after what he’d done, trapping my old buddy Coop inside his own rotting flesh, using his tortured soul as leverage over me, I intended to take him down hard. Just not now. There was too much at stake to let myself get sidetracked.

  We stepped through the honeycombed galleries arm in arm. Pausing at one point on the edge of a gathered and silent crowd, so Caitlin could admire one bold exhibitionist’s artistic technique with surgical needles. That didn’t help my appetite either, but the artist’s model didn’t seem to be complaining. Much. That’s about when, casually scanning the room as an excuse to look away, I noticed we were being followed.

  Not that Juliette and Justine were hard to spot. Two identical platinum blondes tended to stand out in a crowd, especially when they were accustomed to grabbing the spotlight by force. They were cambion, hell-blooded, progeny of a demon from the Choir of Pride. Strangely subdued tonight, though, almost sheepish, as Caitlin and I moved on and they followed us like bashful shadows.

  We got as far as the stairs before Caitlin and I shared a knowing glance and turned as one.

  “What?” I asked.

  Juliette cringed. Justine put her arm around her twin’s shoulder, the two of them taking a timid left-foot step forward.

  “We have to ask you something,” Justine said.

  “And it sucks,” Juliette added.

  Caitlin and I shared another glance. “Okay.”

  “Nicky skipped town,” Justine said, “and he paid us a lot of money, but he’d usually, like, put it in a bank account for us, and we don’t even know where it is because he always bought us everything.”

  “We are poor as hell now,” Juliette added. “We can’t be poor, Danny. We’re too hot to be poor.”

  “You don’t have any way of reaching him? None at all?” Caitlin asked. She tilted her head, curious, calculating.

  “No. When the FBI raided the Gentlemen’s Bet, he just left. And Danny, you’re the only person besides Nicky who ever answers our phone calls. Nobody else realizes how amazing we are.” Justine swallowed hard. “We need your help. We need…a jay. Oh. Bee.”

  “A job?” I asked.

  The twins flinched at the word, as if I’d slapped them across the face.

  “You’re always stealing things,” Juliette said. “We can steal things! We can be your steal-thing-helpers!”

  “As…enchanted as I am by that mental image,” I told them, “I’m kinda between jobs at the moment myself. Look, if anything comes up, I’ll call you, okay?”

  Justine bounced on her tiptoes. “You promise? Pinky swear? That means we can cut your pinky off if you don’t do it.”

  “That is not what that means,” I said.

  Caitlin hooked one arm around my shoulder and steered me toward the stairs, waiting until her back was turned before she rolled her eyes. She held her silence until we were out on the street, feeling the cool desert night breeze as we strolled past the steadily growing line to get inside. I could hear her mental gears turning.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” I told her.

  “Nicky fleeing the city to escape arrest, that’s understandable. I’m sure he had some sort of contingency plan, should his luck ever run out. A quick getaway to some sunnier climes without an extradition treaty.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Never known Nicky not to land on his feet. What about it?”

  Caitlin’s eyes squinted, just a bit, as she cast a glance back over her shoulder.

  “So why didn’t he take the twins with him?”

  She had a point. As long as I’d known Nicky, Juliette and Justine had been his constant companions. Sure, he got as exasperated with them
as the rest of us, at least once in a while, but they’d come up together. Started from nothing, and carved out an empire. I could look past the bad blood between Nicky and me, far enough to give him a little credit: even if he had to cut and run to save his own skin, leaving them behind just wasn’t his style.

  That mystery would have to keep for now. I hit the remote unlock for the car, my rolling lime letting out a deflated squawk from the curb. Caitlin turned toward the sound and paused.

  “That’s…what you’re driving now, is it?”

  “For now.”

  “Right.” She took my arm and wheeled us around. “Other direction. Parking garage. We’re taking my car.”

  Dinner was all right, I suppose. The food was perfect, the ambiance quiet and cool, the company pleasant. I didn’t really taste the meal, though, and it took all my effort to keep my mind from drifting as we talked. I’d come up with a plan to dig up some information on the Enemy. A plan I didn’t dare tell Caitlin about. Not Bentley, either. Not just because I was trying to take our last discussion to heart—failing, but trying—but because it meant putting my neck on the line.

  I woke before dawn, roused from a shuddering sleep and nightmares I couldn’t quite remember, like a warning on the tip of my tongue. I rolled off Bentley and Corman’s couch, shaved, showered, made myself presentable, then packed a mini cooler for my trip. Some protein bars, bottles of water from the fridge—then another few bottles, just to be safe. I put on a checkered button-down shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and a clean but sturdy pair of jeans.

  I was leaving town for the day. Driving into the desert, far from human eyes, to find the closest thing I knew to sacred ground. Sacred ground I had no guarantee of leaving alive.

  5.

  I drove toward the rising sun, its molten-metal glare turning the highway to a strip of steel in a bed of powdered bone. Weaving through the light traffic, pouring on the speed, and drifting back to a morning just like this one, seventeen years ago. The first and only time I’d made this pilgrimage before today.

  I left the highway, not on a paved off-ramp so much as the suggestion of a dirt road, veering off toward the swell of rust-red rocks on the horizon. No signposts, but there was a marker: a squat boulder on the roadside about two feet high, daubed with what looked like the image of a broken arrow in faded ocher paint. Another ten miles, with the Spark’s wheels skidding in the rough and the engine whining, and the road stopped dead at a second, identical stone. End of the line. I cracked a bottle of water, guzzled it down, and got out with my mini cooler.