I flailed against him, pulling at his forearms, clawing at his wrists, but it was useless. He was made of concrete, and I was made of flesh and blood. Flesh turning purple under his squeezing hands, choking the life from my body. I’d done everything wrong. I’d gambled, I’d lost, and now my friends would pay the price. Spots blossomed in my fading sight as my breath failed, my pulse jackhammering in my ears while my heart raced to the bursting point.
In the corner of my eye I saw the shotgun, too far, impossible to reach. On the other side, Canton’s top hat, fallen and useless in the dirt.
“He was a stage magician in the forties,” Carolyn Saunders had told me. “Mostly forgotten today. Also, quite the skilled occultist. He concealed his affinity for real magic behind his sleight of hand. I believe you know a thing or two about that.”
“I’m not the first guy to work that angle,” I had said.
Canton’s wand. Truth and lies. A chip of Houdini’s bone inlaid on one tip, and on the other, a chip from Djehutimesu, Ecko’s first teacher. My mind raced back to Chicago, my dinner with Halima Khoury.
“Hmm. Interesting. Something just occurred to me.”
I remembered pausing, my pita halfway to my mouth. “What?”
“He was a bit of a trickster, they say. An illusionist, with a scoundrel’s reputation but essentially a good heart.”
Ecko’s voice slithered into my ear, jarring me from my reverie. “Give up, Mr. Faust.” His fingers clenched tighter around my throat. “It’s over. No hope, no salvation, not for the likes of you. All is lost. Accept it.”
And then I was back in the cave, out in the desert wastes. Sipping tea with the Mourner of the Red Rocks.
“You will come to a point where all is lost, where your foe’s fingers are wrapped around your throat. In that moment, as your last breath escapes you, remember one thing: a question. This question. Ask yourself, ‘Where would you hide it?’”
Ecko froze. He stared down at me.
“Why…” he asked, suddenly uncertain. “Why are you smiling?”
“Because,” I wheezed, spending my last breath on the words, “we’re all alike. Stage magicians. We try to be innovators, but we’ve all got the same fondness for the same old corny, classic tricks. Guess you could call it…respect for history.”
My hand plunged into Canton’s top hat. And kept going. Past the inner brim, which melted under my fingertips. And farther still. To a cold and airless void beyond, swallowing my arm halfway up to the elbow.
Something narrow and hard, a long, thin cylinder, floated against my outstretched palm. Gently pressed against my fingers by a cold and spectral hand. Passing on the torch.
“Now watch me pull a rabbit out of this fucking hat.”
Violet light exploded from the hat as I drew out Canton’s wand, a blast of raw power that threw Ecko like a toy, slamming him to the dirt. Wheezing for breath, I shoved myself up on my elbows and scrambled back. The wand pulsed in my hand. Mahogany, adorned with caps of ivory bone, a stylish tool from a stylish age.
Not Canton’s wand. My wand now.
I got to my feet. And I knew what to do. The wand sang in my inner ear, a song of lies and truth, and both ached to play their parts.
For a moment, I was back at the start of this mess. Across the street from Larry’s World of Liquor, weaving a simple spell while the Delaney brothers babbled at me. I’d caught a sense, in that moment, of something greater than myself. A glimpse of the legacy I’d inherited, the chain of sorcery stretching back through showmen and philosophers, through warlocks and heretics, all the way back to the first shamans in the first caves, discovering the magic of fire. I felt them all, felt myself standing at the end of their lineage, and I had wondered if they saw me, too.
Now I felt them again. Saw them, their ghostly visages ringing the clearing like gossamer mist. And as their silver eyes turned to face me as one, I knew the answer to my question.
I put on Canton’s hat, then picked up the gun. Wand in my left hand, shotgun in my right.
A fog washed in over the desert sand. An impossible fog, pea-soup thick and cloaking the world in swirling white. Ecko staggered to his feet, shaking his head to clear it.
“Faust,” he bellowed, “come out! Come out and face me!”
I twirled the wand in my fingertips. I knew, instinctively, which end was which.
“Face yourself first,” I said. And with a slash of the ivory tip, I ripped away his illusions.
44.
The dapper, dusty old man was gone. In his place stood a rotting horror, a desiccated corpse wound in filthy, gore-encrusted bandages. Ecko’s jaw dropped on a broken hinge as he clutched at his body, at the amulets bristling under parched and sewn-up skin.
“Take a good look,” I told him and drew upon the air. Mercury billowed from the wand’s tip in a silver stream, hanging in space, blossoming to offer a smooth, shiny reflection.
Ecko saw himself, the true face he’d concealed for centuries, and screamed.
I darted around him, slashing the air, mercury streaks blooming in every direction. Mirrors confronting him everywhere he turned, forcing him to see his own decay, the depth of the corruption he’d hidden for so long. He bellowed from a raspy, sand-dry throat, emaciated hands flailing wildly.
It was a distraction. Just enough to let me slip up behind him and press both barrels of the shotgun to his back.
“This is for my friends,” I told him and squeezed both triggers.
Ecko’s chest exploded as the slugs tore through him, withered meat and chunks of stone and broken amulets flying across the dirt. He fell to his knees, let out one last, agonized hiss, then collapsed onto his face.
The mercury mirrors dissolved in puffs of silver smoke. The impossible fog cleared away, leaving nothing behind. Nothing but me and a dead man. I stood over Ecko’s corpse, catching my breath. Feeling the wand tingle against my hand, a comforting and dangerous caress.
“Is it finished?” Caitlin asked, standing behind me.
She looked like she’d just run a marathon. She, and Jennifer, and Mama Margaux. The three of them gasping for breath, spattered in a few buckets’ worth of blood, but none of it theirs.
“It’s finished,” I told them. “Ecko’s zombies?”
“Last one keeled over just as I was about to send it packin’,” Margaux panted. “You saved us about…five seconds of work. Try a little harder next time.”
“I’ll make an effort.”
We walked away, side by side. Jennifer squinted at me.
“You need to take that hat off.”
“This hat is worth a million dollars,” I told her. “And it just saved my life.”
“Yeah, but it looks ridiculous on you. Cait, back me up here.”
“You need to take the hat off,” Caitlin said.
“The hat stays.”
“Let him wear the hat if he wants,” Margaux said. “Just not if he’s going to be seen with any of us in public. But in private, he can wear what he likes. After all, I hear he’s…the guy.”
I grimaced. “Not you too.”
It felt good hearing my friends laugh, and laughing along with them. Laughter means you’re alive and breathing. Laughter means you’ve got something to feel good about, something to feel thankful for. And we had plenty of that to go around.
We’d just fought a war together. And we won.
* * *
The war wasn’t really over, of course. Not yet.
Five black SUVs, Explorers with tinted windows, rolled out of Las Vegas on I-15 North, aiming for Salt Lake City. And then, on to Chicago.
We hit the outskirts of the city on a cold, starless night. Halloween weather, and the lush lawns of Dominic Mancuso’s mansion were blanketed in orange and scarlet leaves. The sentries on the house’s wrap-around porch squinted as a heavy fog drifted over the grass, blotting out the world.
Then bursts of machine-pistol fire, muffled by sound suppressors, dropped them where they stood.
And I led the way, with my wand in one hand and a silenced nine-millimeter in the other. A general commanding my troops.
Double doors at the top of the stairs thundered open. Koschei the Deathless strode forth, cracking his knuckles in anticipation. He paused, curious, as my men cleared the way for a new arrival. Caitlin. She stepped into the house and smiled sweetly.
“So,” she said, “about that rematch.”
I could understand his hesitation. She wasn’t wearing an evening gown this time. She’d opted for something more utilitarian: a sturdy pair of overalls and a surgeon’s plastic full-face visor.
And the newly bought tool in her hands, a cordless forty-volt Black and Decker chainsaw.
The saw revved to life, the toothy blade whirring and eager to slice. I left Koschei in Caitlin’s capable hands. A small entourage followed me into the back warrens of the house, hunting down the man at the top of the pyramid.
I found Dominic in his office. He reached into his desk. I saw the flash of a gun just before my pistol barked, putting a hole in his shoulder. His piece thumped to the carpet as he clutched his wound.
“Fight’s over,” I told him. “You lost.”
He jumped up from his chair, pressing his back to the wall. “Don’t do this. Don’t, just—look, anything you want. I’ve got money, drugs, anything you want, name it—”
“I was thinking, ‘you, dead.’ Can I have that?”
The old man threw himself to the carpet. Down on his knees, his forehead to the floor as he whimpered and begged. I had expected rage, defiance, anything but this.
“Please, we can make a deal,” he said.
“Your son said the same thing.”
He froze, looking up at me. “My…son?”
I nodded to the man on my left. He tossed a burlap sack to the floor.
Dominic pulled back the folds. Just far enough to see his son’s severed head inside. A faint, strangled cry rose from the back of his throat. His trembling fingertips stroked Angelo’s hair.
“Hell of a thing,” I said, “discovering you do care about your son after all, after you sent him to die.”
“Please,” he whined, “I’ll call it off. I’ll call everything off, just let me go. I’ll do whatever you want.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t keep the disgust from my face.
“You know the saddest part?” I asked. “All he wanted was a little love. Have a beer with him. Tell him you were proud of him, once. That’s all you had to do. But I’ll tell you one thing: when the time came? He didn’t beg, didn’t cry, not like you. He stared down the bullet. He wanted you to know that.”
I aimed my pistol right between his eyes.
“I want you to know it, too. Because Angelo was twice the man you’ll ever be. Despite you.”
In his final moments, Dominic swallowed hard and mustered his last tattered scraps of defiance.
“This doesn’t change anything. We’re just one family. The Outfit is bigger than the Mancusos, lots bigger. And when the other families hear about what you did—”
“They’ll do nothing,” I said. “Because we’re proving, here, tonight, that we can reach out and destroy anyone who stands in our way. We can get at you in your homes. In your beds. And nothing can stop us.”
Dominic’s lip trembled as his gaze dropped, staring down the barrel of the gun.
“So tell me something, Dominic,” I said. “I was just thinking about our last conversation, at the Willowbrook. Tell me…do you think I’m a man of power now?”
I didn’t give him a chance to answer. I didn’t care. I shot him dead and walked away, my entourage at my back.
Caitlin had an entourage of her own down in the foyer, working feverishly to beat the clock. Two were mopping the gore from her surgical mask and unclogging the chainsaw. The rest were sealing Priority Mail boxes with heavy tape. Fifteen in all, each addressed to a different nonexistent address in a different state. Once they were mailed out, first thing in the morning, the various chunks of Koschei’s dismembered body would find a permanent home in dead-letter offices all across the country.
“Do you think it’ll work?” I asked her.
She wiped her hands on her blood-drenched overalls. “Either that, or we’ll end up with fifteen tiny Koscheis. So…I choose to believe it will work, yes.”
I put my arm around her waist and pulled her close.
“Let’s go home.”
* * *
No rest for the wicked. I had a full list of errands to attend to as soon as we got back to a welcoming Vegas sunrise.
First and foremost, hunting for a new apartment. Caitlin had promised to go looking at a few prospects with me that afternoon. My down payment secured, courtesy of a small loan.
A loan, not a gift. I wouldn’t take her charity. But I was about to start a brand-new job, and money wouldn’t be a problem.
I had a meeting to attend. A meeting in a rented conference room at the Flamenco, behind closed doors and two layers of armed security, at a long slate table with high-backed leather chairs. The luminaries of the Vegas underworld all in attendance, securing their claims as the heads of the New Commission.
And me, taking the seat at Jennifer’s right hand.
I held up the bottle of Veuve Clicquot from Larry’s World of Liquor. It had been sitting in Bentley and Corman’s refrigerator, waiting for the right time. That felt like now.
“Brought a little something,” I said. “How about a toast to a job well done?”
“Fairy piss,” Winslow grumbled, holding up his own bottle. “I’ll stick with my Bud.”
Everyone else was game, and the cork popped and the champagne poured. A quiet celebration, a toast to our survival and another day in the game. I raised my glass high.
“To the future,” I said. “May it be bright and shining, as rich and pure as solid gold.”
I gazed across the table, meeting every eye, and smiled.
“Because we’re going to steal it.”
Epilogue
The Play lay open on a desk of polished glass, scattered tarot cards all around it. The leather-bound tome was a treasure trove. A reliquary of a blasphemous faith that seethed with sealed power. Seals that had obediently shattered, one by one, surrendering their gifts to their rightful owner.
Until now.
Act Five, Scene One, read the page before him. The Thief is taken away to face torment and death at the hands of the False Warden.
The pages beyond it stuck fast as though they’d been glued together.
The Enemy hunched over his desk, flickering, his body an electric shadow. His pearly teeth clenched in frustration. Then he swirled away, gusting through the corporate halls of Northlight Tower like a cyclone of black smoke. He found Ms. Fleiss in the blue glow of the situation room, standing behind a team of technicians with her arms folded and her lips pursed. A dozen monitors siphoned data from all over the globe, sniffing for trigger phrases, listening for connections.
“My lord,” she said, turning and bowing her head. “He…escaped me. I’m sorry.”
“How?” he demanded. “I was assured that this Faust was nothing but a common street mage. A penny conjurer. How has he escaped your grasp twice?”
“It won’t happen again.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Marcel is back from Rome. I’ve put him in the waiting room.”
He paused. As he wavered, thinking, his outline looked like a stop-motion sketch brought to life. Vague scratchy lines of white chalk on black construction paper.
As they strode into the waiting room, the young receptionist primly stood and left without a word. Only Marcel Deschamps remained, the Frenchman rising from a beechwood bench, offering a cocky smile.
“I’m back, with gifts,” he said, offering them a bundle wrapped in jade silk. Fleiss took it from him and unwrapped it, holding the contents out for the Enemy’s inspection. His blurry-negative head nodded once. She wrapped the bundle back up again and set it on the reception desk.
“So,” Marcel said, “where’s the next score? Paris? New York? Keep crossing my palm with silver and I’m your man. You know there’s not a prize on this planet I can’t take.”
“I’m aware,” the Enemy said. “Alas, you won’t be leaving for the foreseeable future.”
“No jobs yet? That’s fine, I have a room in town. I can wait a few days.”
“You won’t be leaving this building,” Fleiss told him. She faced him as the Enemy circled around slowly, getting behind him. Marcel frowned.
“We have a problem,” the Enemy said. “I was…mistaken when I reported that Daniel Faust was deceased. He has yet to face his appointed doom.”
Marcel shrugged, uneasy. “So let’s find the guy. I’ll help.”
“That’s the problem. If you die before we can hunt down Faust, you’ll take the title of the Thief with you. Reincarnating on some far-flung parallel world, where it could take eons to find you again. And preventing me from unlocking the powers of the Fifth Act. I’m so close now, Marcel. So close to returning to my full strength. I can taste it.”
“Hey, I’m not going to die anytime soon,” Marcel said with a nervous laugh. “You know me, I’m careful.”
“You’re a cat burglar who likes to climb skyscrapers, drive Italian sports cars at high speed, and drink to excess,” Fleiss said, inching closer. “That’s a risk we can’t afford to take. So you’ll stay here, as our guest, until Faust is neutralized.”
“You can’t keep me here against my will,” Marcel said, turning. “That’s a load of—”
The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Page 27