“Duly noted,” I told her. “Can you at least tell me what you are?”
“I already have. I’m Circe.”
I opened an overhead cabinet, stocking it with a row of cereal boxes.
“Feels like I’m doing the ‘who’s on first’ routine with an MIT graduate.”
Circe moved closer, standing behind me. Just off to the side, watching. “The heaviness I spoke of earlier was not the heaviness of your provisions. What weighs upon you?”
“Well, when I refused to hand you over to a very bad person, I busted a deal, and now I have to pay for it. There’s a lot of folks coming to kill me, and that’s just the start of what they’ve got planned. I’ve got one chance to find some evidence and squirm my way out of this mess. A real slim chance.”
“You don’t know me,” she said. “Why are you taking this risk?”
I set down the groceries and turned to face her.
“For a very long time, I defined myself by the few things I wouldn’t do. Not by my virtues, because I don’t have a whole lot of those. So I drew lines in the sand. I wouldn’t kill an innocent person. I wouldn’t pull the trigger on a cop. These were rules I set for myself, so I could look in the mirror every morning and pretend I’m not a complete bastard. You understand?”
She nodded, her eyes deep as an ocean.
“Well, lately, one by one, I’ve gotten shoved right across every one of those invisible lines. Or maybe I jumped across and told myself I was pushed. Either way, I don’t have much of a code left. And I am clinging—I am clinging tooth and fucking nail—to whatever moral stand I can still make.”
“So you can become a better person,” she said.
“No,” I said. “If I honestly cared about becoming a ‘better person,’ whatever that means, I wouldn’t be in half the messes I get into. No, it’s so I can feel good about myself once in a while. Or at least not hate myself. And I do a lot of shady business, but I do not deal in slaves. Period. That’s one line I won’t be pushed across.”
She lifted her chin a little as she studied my face.
“Would you like to pray with me before you go? For victory in battle?”
“I told you, I don’t pray. You still haven’t told me what god you’re supposed to be a priestess of, anyway.”
“You have forgotten your mother’s name, Daniel Faust.”
I turned my back on her. Went back to putting away the groceries. Bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. I felt like a violin string had snapped inside my stomach.
“My mom’s name was Holly,” I said. “She died when I was a kid. Pretty sure my dad killed her.”
Circe didn’t reply. I heard her walk away, soft footfalls on the hardwood floor.
“I will pray for you, then.”
She sat on the sofa and watched television. I put away the rest of the groceries.
* * *
I’d bought my ticket, packed my overnight bag. Changed into a clean black suit with a bronze silk tie. Sorted the groceries and made sure Circe knew where everything was, what to do if a stranger knocked on the door. Now I was standing at the window and staring out at the starless dark.
I glanced at my watch: 11:59. The seconds rolled over, bumping the minute hand to land on midnight.
The contract was live. And hell was hunting me.
“I’ve got a flight to catch,” I told Circe on my way out the door. “I’ll be back.”
27.
I rode into a Chicago dawn in a stiff seat overlooking the grimy wing of a 747. The sky bloomed tangerine and the sun rose like a bloody soft-boiled egg, shimmering and wet. A gunslinger’s sunrise. And here I was, without a gun.
Laying my hands on some weapons was a priority. I’d spent my last fistful of cards escaping the man with the Cheshire smile, and while I could enchant a fresh deck, it’d take supplies, privacy, and time. I doubted I was going to get any. My best hope was that I’d slipped out of town under the radar, and my hunters were combing the wrong city for me. Before leaving, my last act had been to warn my family and crew to lie low: just because the chainmen weren’t supposed to involve outsiders in their hunt didn’t mean they wouldn’t.
I joined a line of weary commuters trudging off the plane, rolling our carry-ons through a cold and drafty terminal where the off-white tile was perpetually smeared with fresh dirty tracks. There was always something grim about flying from Vegas to the Midwest. Flights to Vegas were party boats, full of bright-eyed soon-to-be winners. Outbound flights were a splash of cold water and a few hundred empty wallets.
I stepped out into the crisp morning air, traffic rumbling under a soot-stained concrete canopy and jets screaming as they took to the sky. I waited in line at the cabstand. My cabbie was an Armenian guy, heavy-lidded eyes, short on words. He tossed my bag into the trunk with an obliging grunt. I got into the back seat.
The opposite passenger door swung open and a stranger joined me. He was twentysomething, with feral eyes and a razor-cut shock of dyed yellow hair.
“Hey, taken—” I started to say. Then the barrel of a gun jabbed against my ribs.
“Truer words never spoken. Hooo-ee! You’re slippery as a sumbitch, but you ain’t gonna outrun us.” He slapped the Plexiglas partition with his other hand. “Let’s roll, driver.”
The cab pulled away from the stand, merging into traffic and heading for the freeway.
“Us?” I glanced downward. He had a .45 with inlaid ivory grips, a filigreed ornately engraved barrel, and a hammer plated in gold. A gaudy showpiece, not a professional’s tool. “Let me guess: you named your gun.”
His eyes flooded gooey yellow, and he leered with a mouth of jagged, razor-sharp teeth. “Au contraire, amigo! I’m Dean, she’s Belle, and we are the world-infamous Gruesome Two.”
He reached through the open partition and grabbed the cabbie’s shoulder. I caught the flicker of a shadow passing between them. Then the driver slammed on the gas, the cab’s wheels screeching and horns blaring behind us as he lurched into the fast lane. The cabbie cackled, speaking with a woman’s voice.
“Forget the rest, you just got lassoed by the best. Where am I drivin’, Dean?”
“Wherever’s clever,” he said. “Just find someplace nice and backstreet, where I can pluck this walking bouquet of sweet, sweet money.”
I glanced between them. “A cambion, teaming up with a hijacker. Never seen that before. So she rides around in the back of your head until you’re ready to get to work.”
“You never seen it before because we are unequaled and undefeated,” Dean told me. “Twelve confirmed kills, including two green-letter contracts. We slice ’em and dice ’em—”
“And bag ’em and tag ’em!” his partner crowed.
They were chatty. That was good. They were sloppy. Even better. Dean kept his showboat of a gun trained on me, but every time he talked to his partner he couldn’t help turning his head to look at her. I could use that. Right now, though, the cab was red-lining at eighty-five miles an hour, carving through freeway traffic like a reaper’s scythe. Brakes squealed and a semi’s air horn boomed behind us as Belle swerved into another last-second lane change. I swayed in my seat, unsteady. So did Dean, the muzzle of the gun slipping a little before he leveled his grip.
“I have to ask,” I said, “how’d you find me?”
“Client told us,” Belle said.
Dean turned his head again at the sound of her voice, but he was right back on me a second later. “Didn’t say why, but she knew you were gonna be here. I said to Belle, partner, you know early bird’s gonna get that worm.”
That was the best news I’d heard all morning. Not the fact that Chicago was about to be flooded with demonic bounty hunters, that part I could do without. But if Naavarasi knew I was coming here, she’d have to know why: that I was chasing down the history of the knife, and looking for proof that she never owned it.
And if she was worried about that, there was a damn good chance I was on the right track.
>
The cab rocketed down an off-ramp, cornering so hard we almost went up on two wheels. Dean’s hand swayed again. If I could get his partner talking, make him turn his head and time my move just right…
“So what are you waiting for?” I asked.
“Just lookin’ for a cozy spot to park,” Belle said. “The human soul only lingers with the body for about a minute after the moment of brain death, give or take.”
Dean leered at me. “Gotta scoop that sucker out and bottle it just right for delivery. It’s a complicated process, amigo! Not for amateurs!”
“Did I mention we’re the best?” Belle added.
“Really?” I asked. “Then how come I’ve never heard of you?”
In the rearview mirror, I watched the possessed cabbie frown. We sped up, just a little. Belle’s foot got heavy when she wasn’t happy.
“’Cause you’re plum ignorant,” she said. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be in this situation, now would ya?”
“You tell him,” Dean said, his head on a swivel.
“Sure, sure,” I said. “Hey, I know what it’s like. You’re new to this game, you’re up and coming. Sure, the real stars like Nyx keep rubbing their success in your faces, but you’ve got spirit. You’ll be successful someday.”
“Oh he did not,” Belle said, jaw hanging wide. The needle started to climb. Thirty-five, then forty, as we barreled down a suburban side street. Industrial sprawl loomed ahead, rows of parked semis and faceless corporate buildings like dirty white bricks.
“I will slap that name right outta your mouth,” Dean told me. “Ain’t nobody better than the Gruesome Two, and when you get to hell, you can tell everybody who sent ya.”
The road kinked up ahead. A mandatory hard left. I glanced down at the gun and judged the distance, adrenaline kicking in like a hot wire in my veins.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’d be too embarrassed to say I got taken down by a couple of amateurs. I think I’ll just tell everyone that Nyx killed me.”
Belle swung the steering wheel. The cab’s tires screamed and Dean leaned hard against the passenger door, his gun hand wriggling an inch to the left. “You son of a bitch—” Belle shouted, and he looked her way like a dog at the sound of his master’s voice.
I shoved his wrist and grabbed his elbow with my other hand, twisting hard. He pulled the trigger a half-second too late. The .45 boomed and the bullet punched through the divider, hot lead scoring the side of the cabbie’s scalp and spraying blood across the Plexiglas. Belle shrieked and fell against the wheel, stomping the gas.
The cab lurched, swaying like a drunken rhino on a rampage, as Dean threw himself onto me. Acrid drool leaked from the cambion’s broken teeth, spattering my face as we wrestled for the gun. It fired again, the round tearing into the back of a seat, and my ears rang like I was a hundred feet underwater. Then the vinyl seat dropped out from under me and the world went sideways as the cab plowed into the side of a parked semi. I saw flickers of shattered glass and blood droplets flying, heard the screaming of steel and the gunshot whump of airbags. I rolled, hit the front seats, fell to the floor on top of Dean. Wedged between the seats and stunned, he didn’t have room to aim. I put all my weight on his hand, shoving down, and heard his wrist snap. He let out an ear-piercing shriek and I ripped the .45 from his spasming fingers. Then I flipped it around and put two bullets in his face.
He stopped screaming. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear it, my tortured eardrums reducing the entire swimmy world to distant echoes.
I shoved open the taxi door. Got out, took one step, and collapsed to the street.
I had to remember how to stand up again. It took a while. The world kept slipping out from under me, icy-slick, like a bad dream where the laws of physics turn traitor. My head throbbed and my shoulder was a bruised and bloody mess, open cuts oozing and plastering my dress shirt to my back. My tie hung loose around my neck, a designer hangman’s noose.
I hauled open the dented wreck of the driver’s door. The cabbie was dead, pinioned between the seat and the airbag, looking like a human piñata. Belle must have taken off. A hijacker without a body to possess can’t hang around for long—they get sucked back to hell where they belong—but they tend to come back like a bad rash. I shoved the corpse’s leg aside and tugged the trunk-release lever.
I got my rolling suitcase out of the trunk, tossed Dean’s ivory-gripped .45 inside, and started limping. No direction in particular.
About a quarter mile down the road, I passed a couple of guys unloading a truck. They looked at me like I had two heads. “Morning,” I said. “Out of curiosity, where am I?”
“Franklin Park,” one said.
“And if I wanted to be in Chicago instead?”
They looked at each other. One shrugged. The other pointed.
“Train station’s about a mile that way.”
“Much obliged,” I told them. I kept walking.
At least I had time to think while I waited for my ears to stop ringing and my left knee to stop threatening to buckle with every step I took. Back before we crossed swords, Damien Ecko had run a pawn service for the Chicago underworld; he’d hold on to hot goods that were difficult to sell, like stolen artwork, in exchange for short-term loans to drug dealers. The dealers would purchase product with his money, sell it on the street for a quick profit, then buy the collateral back from Ecko.
Stolen being the keyword there. I didn’t need to figure out which luminary of the Chicago dope scene had held the knife last. Naavarasi’s photo showed me that once upon a time, before it became a bargaining chip for gangsters, the knife had been safe and snug in a museum display case. If I could figure out which museum and when, that’d give me a powerful lead on tracing its history.
Fortunately, when it came to antiquities of the ancient world, I knew a local authority.
28.
I knew I should have felt more or less safe as I climbed the towering steps of the Field Museum, suitcase thumping at my side. The chainmen might know I was in Chicago—at least some of them—but catching an expected arrival at the airport was a lot easier than finding one man in a city of almost three million. If the other hunters didn’t have magical means of tracking me down, escaping Dean and Belle had bought me a little time. I also didn’t think anyone would take a shot at me in the middle of a crowd. All the same, I felt like I had a target on my back.
Mammoth Ionic columns rose up at the top of the museum steps, and fifty-foot banners dangled between them, advertising the latest traveling exhibit. Vikings, this month, and I stared up at the prow of a longboat plowing through an icy sea. A cold wind mussed my unkempt hair, a greeting from November. An early winter was coming. I hoped I’d live long enough to see it.
I wasn’t thrilled to find the museum lobby mobbed by pint-size kids. Apparently it was a field-trip day, and half the elementary schools in Chicago were here. I had to keep moving. Like I said, I didn’t think my hunters would take a shot at me in public, but I’d only met two so far and they had seemed crazy enough to try. I wasn’t going to risk these kids’ lives on a bad roll of the dice. I waded through the horde on my way to a rendezvous with Sue.
Sue, the reconstructed T. rex fossil, reared up on her pedestal. Forty feet of skeletal dinosaur fury, her tiny arms clawing at the crowd as tourists snapped pictures.
“The Order of Chainmen’s members include incarnates, hijackers, cambion, and the occasional human,” I muttered under my breath. “No dinosaurs. I’m safe.”
“You are most certainly not,” Dr. Halima Khoury said, striding up to meet me. Her almond face, ringed by a powder-blue headscarf, fixed me with a dour stare. “Come with me. We have to get you behind closed doors.”
“Good to see you too, Doc.”
“Don’t be flippant.” She lowered her voice as she hustled me to a side door. “Hired killers on your heels, and you came here? There are innocent people here, Daniel.”
She punched a code into a keypad nex
t to a door marked Employees Only. Her fingers fumbled. Halima shot a death glare at the pad as a red light flickered. She got it on the next try, pulled open the door and pushed me inside.
“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t have to,” I told her. “I’m sorry. I’m in a bind.”
She sighed. “I know. And Dances is on her way; she’s picking up the items you requested.”
“Good. I need to arm up. All I’ve got is a gun with four bullets, and it’s a really embarrassing gun.”
Halima led me down a sterile white hall under harsh lights, and into her office. It was a cluttered little bolt-hole barely big enough for a desk and two chairs, the desktop piled with papers, folders, and a leaning tower of musty old hardcover books. The clamshell of a laptop computer sat skewed off to one side. She squeezed behind the desk and motioned to one of the visitor’s chairs. Then her eyebrows knitted.
“I shouldn’t even care,” she said, “but…how embarrassing?”
I unzipped my carry-on and tugged out Dean’s pistol, showing off the gold-plated hammer and ivory grips. Now that the gun wasn’t being pointed at me, I got a good look at the engravings along the barrel. One side read Certified in calligraphic script. The other read Badass.
She leaned over the desk, eyebrows raised, then sat down again.
“I think I’d almost rather go unarmed.”
“Right?” I put the gun away. “I’m not sure who I blame more here: the person who requested it, or the smith who actually did the job.”
I passed her the photograph of the knife. She opened her top desk drawer and fished out a slim pair of reading glasses, slipping them on. Her finger trailed over the tape stuck to the corner of the photo.
“I don’t recognize this as any kind of standard filing number,” she mused, “probably an in-house thing, unique to that museum. Can’t tell the location by the case the knife is in…let me check online.”
“I tried Googling ‘stolen Aztec dagger’ and struck out.”
Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7) Page 18