“It was never about Circe. She never wanted Circe in the first place.” I pushed away from the door, pacing the apartment. “First Naavarasi got me firmly in her debt, and even made me think I was getting a bargain when she did it. Then she sent me on the heist, backing everything up through Caitlin and the laws of the courts. We thought she did that for leverage, just in case I found out Circe was a real, living person and balked at handing her over.”
Emma’s voice went soft as she followed the trail. “It wasn’t a contingency. You were supposed to figure it out. She wanted you to refuse.”
“Exactly. She sent me on a job that she knew I wouldn’t finish. Suddenly, I’m a thief, and thanks to all that groundwork she’s got the green light to send the chainmen after me. I tried to find proof that she was lying. When I was in Chicago, a sniper took a shot at me. Their first shot missed. A professional killer wouldn’t have missed. The second shot took out the guy I was trying to save. Emma, do you know how long the human soul stays with the body after death?”
“Sixty seconds, give or take.”
“Right,” I said. “So why would a chainman use a sniper rifle? They have to get up close and personal so they can harvest their victims. That wasn’t a bounty hunter up on the roof. It was Naavarasi or somebody working for her. She wasn’t trying to kill me, she was trying to destroy the evidence. Which she did, and I had to flee the city just ahead of a demonic posse. Step by step, she cut our options down. Maneuvered us into a corner with no way out. And her whole plan hinged on one thing. One thing she knew for an absolute fact.”
“Which is?”
“That Caitlin loves me,” I said. “And that when we finally ran out of moves, Cait had one last play up her sleeve: taking the fall in my place, just like I would do for her. This was her plan all along, Emma. It wasn’t about Circe. It wasn’t about me. She wanted Caitlin.”
“We can’t let this happen—”
“We won’t. I won’t. I promise. This ends tonight.”
I hung up the phone. Circe stared at me. Her head tilted slightly, contemplating.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“I’m going to do whatever I can to save her,” I said. “Whatever it takes.”
“Bring me with you.”
I shook my head. “You don’t owe us anything.”
“Will you go where Caitlin goes? Even into hell itself?”
“If I have to,” I said.
“Then you may need a guide. Catch me.”
Circe ran toward me, jumping and twisting in the air as her body jackknifed. Collapsing upon herself, shrinking, flesh turning to hard, cold obsidian.
The jade-hilted dagger landed in my outstretched hand.
* * *
The line outside Winter stretched around the block. A bouncer in a muscle shirt unhooked the velvet rope for me, but he gestured me aside.
“Hey, Mr. Faust. Uh…tonight might not be so good.”
“Lousy DJ?”
He forced a chuckle. “You kidding? We never have a lousy DJ. No, uh, it’s…kind of a rough crowd downstairs, if you know what I mean.”
“Suits my mood just fine,” I said.
Down the back corridor, along a winding path of blue neon, the gas-masked sentry stood beside the door to level two. He keyed in the code and ushered me through. I descended into the honeycombed labyrinth below, the driving dance music reduced to muffled thumping, and navigated the gold-and-black halls by memory.
I emerged into a shadowed gallery, with my target in sight at the other end: a windowless steel door with a second keypad alongside it. The door to the third level.
I wasn’t alone. Figures emerged from the alcoves and archways around me. Most I didn’t recognize. A few I did. Nyx, in her Nordic-goddess disguise, planted herself square in my path. The others, gathered around me in a loose circle. Eight in all. No way out.
“Wow,” I said. “You assholes really picked the wrong night to start something.”
39.
A yellow-eyed cambion to my right raised a broken fingernail, pointing at me.
“You cost us money, Faust. I chased your ass from here to Chicago and back again, and got nothing for it.”
“What do you want me to say?” I asked. “Sorry you’re a loser?”
Nyx swept out her hand. “This club is neutral ground for our kind. You are nothing but easy prey, especially with your whore of a lover about to be kneeling at Naavarasi’s feet.”
“We won’t get paid for tearing you apart,” said one of the hunters at my back, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t get some satisfaction out of it.”
I turned, slow, taking them all in. Marking every face in the room in my memory.
“You all know who I am,” I said.
“This one knows exactly what you are,” Nyx said. “A human gutter-mage.”
“That’s what Lauren Carmichael and her cult thought,” I said. “I’d tell you to go ask them, but they’re all dead. The Redemption Choir wasn’t too impressed at first, either. If you want Sullivan’s opinion on the matter, you can find him buried under a parking lot. Oh, hey, here’s a name you’ll all know: Damien Ecko. He was the hottest bounty around, wasn’t he? Every hunter in America was gunning for his head.”
I locked eyes with Nyx.
“Except you’re too late, because I killed him. And when I got finished with Ecko, there wasn’t enough left to bury. Here’s a friendly tip for you: when my back’s against the wall, sometimes—just sometimes—I manage to punch above my weight class.”
“You can’t take all of us at once,” the cambion hunter snapped.
“And I won’t have to.”
I counted heads.
“Let’s see, we’ve got one, two, three…eight of you. Impressive little pack. Only problem is, you’re not friends, are you? You’re not allies. You’re competitors. Not one of you would shed a tear if the other seven got hit by a bus, am I right?”
Narrow-eyed glances and muffled grumbles, but not one word of disagreement.
“None of you want to make the first move. That’s a sucker bet. You don’t know what I’m hiding, what tricks I’ve got up my sleeve. Nah. Better to let somebody else take that chance. Now here’s another tip, something I really hope you’ll take to heart: for most of my life, I felt like I didn’t have anything to lose.”
I flexed my wrist. The wand dropped into my fingers, thrumming with power as I pictured Caitlin’s face. I drew the Cutting Knife in my other hand, feeling Circe’s dormant energy tingling hot against my grip.
“Tonight,” I said, “I’ve got everything to lose, and it’s not just my life that I’m fighting for. So I’ll promise you something. The first one of you who lays hands on me is going to die. The second one who lays hands on me is going to die. Eventually, yeah, you’ll wear me down. I can’t beat all eight of you.”
I took a good long look around the circle.
“And if you really want me that bad, all you have to do is decide who goes first.”
“He’s bluffing,” Nyx seethed. “Destroy him.”
One of the other hunters glared at her. “Then why don’t you do it, big shot?”
“I don’t have a lot of time,” I said. “So are we gonna do this or not? Either throw the fuck down or get out of my way.”
All eyes fell on Nyx.
“This one…” she said, hesitant, “will not diminish herself by wasting effort on such insignificant prey.”
She stepped aside.
I walked past her without a word and keyed in the access code for the steel door. It yawned open, revealing the rough stone staircase beyond.
The stairs wound down into a musty chamber lit by a single white pillar candle. The candle stood at the heart of the room, erected upon a stand of serpent-scaled brass. Its flame fluttered, struggling to reach the shadow-drenched corners. The air smelled of spices and dried oranges.
Chains rattled in the darkness.
A stench wafted from the far corner of the
chamber, like roadkill festering in the desert sun. Then a figure, skeletally emaciated, shambled into sight. His face was a mass of burn tissue, eyes and nose obliterated, buried under twisted scars. Only his mouth was untouched. He wore long, once-regal emerald robes, now caked with dried excrement and filth. His wrists and ankles were bound in golden chains that snaked into the shadows. He wasn’t tethered with manacles; the final links of the chains had been hammered through his flesh and bones.
“Fear me,” rasped the Conduit in a reedy voice, “for I only speak the truth.”
I’d been down here twice. I had never wanted to come back again. But the Conduit—a torn-souled creation that existed in both our world and hell, with a foot and a voice in both realms—was my one and only pipeline to the top.
“Prince Sitri,” I said. “I need to talk to him.”
“The prince is unavailable. He’s attending a court affair at the moment. A dispute to be resolved.”
My stomach clenched. I might already be too late.
“I need to get there. I need to get to Caitlin. Tell me how.”
The Conduit pulled back his lips in a mad rictus.
“Die,” he said.
My hopes shattered. “Caitlin is already back in hell.”
“Actually…no. Prince Sitri requested a break with tradition, for reasons he did not care to divulge. The trial regarding the matter of his hound is taking place in the Low Liminal.”
I shook my head. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It goes by many names. Limbo. The Big Empty. The place where worlds touch, where spirit and flesh may mingle. Where the lost and the damned float adrift and dogs bray in the endless mists. No place for an untrained wanderer. I could send you there, but you likely won’t return.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “If you’ve got a way to get me to that trial, do it.”
He parted his robes. His chest was a fleshless mass of interlocking bones, like the lid of a scrimshaw trunk. And at the heart of the puzzle of bone, a keyhole.
“Open me,” the Conduit said. “Enter me.”
“I don’t have a key.”
His eyeless head nodded at my hand. At Circe. “Of course you do.”
I raised the knife and it began to change. Folding, twisting, sprouting a wave of black glassy spikes like a hedgehog’s rippling quills. Finally it sat dormant, its transformation complete.
In my hand I held a key of obsidian and jade.
I unlocked the door. The Conduit hooked clawed fingers in his chest, bones crackling as he wrenched his ribs open. Beyond the bones a tunnel of flesh, like a red and inflamed throat, snaked into darkness.
“Careful,” the Conduit said. “It’s a tight fit. And a long way down.”
He stood still, almost serene, as I crawled into his chest. The throat-tunnel squeezed tight around me, the wet flesh slick and quivering, and I had to pull myself forward on my forearms. I squirmed in, deeper, a few more feet…and I heard the door of bone slam behind me. Sealing me in.
I couldn’t see a thing. The tunnel of flesh, stinking of rotten meat, clung to me. Fighting me every inch of the way. All I could hear was my heart pounding in my ears. All I could do was keep moving. For a nightmare moment I thought the flesh tunnel would never end, that this was my hell, this claustrophobic and endless squeezing dark.
I noticed a shift. The tunnel was beginning to slant. Downward, just a little.
Then a little more. I wriggled faster, able to use my weight. The tunnel grew slicker, like the lining of the throat was coated with grease. The next thing I knew, I was sliding. The tunnel dropping hard, almost vertical.
Then it spat me out, and I fell.
Wind whistled in my ears. The world became a blur of color and light, spinning too fast to see as I plummeted through the air. Then a sudden jolt of pain as I landed on my shoulder, tumbling, rolling down a hill that clattered and clanked. Bones. I’d crashed onto a mound of bones, stripped clean and tossed together in a chaotic jumble. I bounced all the way down, landing flat on dead, dusty earth.
The hit knocked the wind out of me. I lay flat on my belly, stunned, staring bleary-eyed at the scattering of bones at the edge of the dead pile. A cracked bottom jaw, a leg bone…and bits and pieces that didn’t seem to belong to any earthly animal. Bones with strange curves and sharp edges.
A pair of sandals stepped into my field of vision. Circe, back in her human form, stood over me.
“We can’t stay here,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
I groaned and pushed myself to my feet. What I saw almost stole my breath a second time.
A parched plain stretched off in all directions, the cold earth cracked and barren. The dirt had an aroma to it, a faint, dry and spicy smell that made me think of church incense. Banks of white mist roiled in the distance, drifting by like clouds. The sky hung in perpetual twilight, somehow bright and dark at the same time, so perfectly azure it made my eyes ache.
There were three moons in the sky. A trio of crescents, so big and close I felt like I could reach up and touch them. I stared up at the craggy, ancient rock, the moons lit from behind by a soft scarlet glow. I could make out words there. Runes—they must have been unspeakably massive to be seen with the naked eye—were carved into the faces of the moons. Something tickled my left ear. A puff of breath. A whispered promise. I couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but gaze up in rapt wonder. If I could study the runes, learn the secrets they could teach…
Circe grabbed my chin and yanked my face toward her. I reeled, the spell broken.
“Not. Safe.” She shook her head, frowning. “Nothing here is safe. And those are not for you.”
She licked her index finger and held it in the air, a ship’s navigator reckoning the flow of the wind. But there wasn’t any wind. All the same, she nodded to herself and picked a direction. I walked alongside her, carefully keeping my eyes at ground level.
I lost track of time. My feet ached like we’d hiked for hours, but it was still twilight. At one point Circe stopped short, throwing her arm across my chest.
“Wrong way,” she whispered and pointed.
In the distance, beyond a rolling bank of fog, a shadow swayed. The outline of a towering tree, a weeping willow at least a hundred feet high, its dangling boughs rippling in a breeze I couldn’t feel. Birds with vast wings and hard outlines, like living pterodactyls, wheeled in the air around it.
“What is that?” I squinted. “Looks like a—”
The boughs rose, snapping, and lashed around one of the birds’ wings to pluck it from the air. I heard the beast’s shrill screams as the tree bent back, its trunk splitting to open a gaping and toothy mouth.
“A faded god,” Circe said. “Give them no prayers, make them no offerings, pay them no mind. No gain in it. Faded gods are greedy, and they lie.”
We changed direction. I didn’t look back.
40.
We walked. Circe hadn’t looked happy since we got here, and the longer we hiked across the desolate, cold plain, the deeper her frown grew.
“You’d tell me if we were lost, right?” I asked.
“It has been a very long time since I’ve been free to walk these roads,” she said. “The Low Liminal has become…more troubled in my absence. Many faded gods prowling for food and worship, more than there used to be. My queen’s way-markers are in disrepair.”
“Your queen?”
“And yours, though you’ve forgotten her name. She still rules this place. I think.”
I glanced sidelong at her. “This queen of yours, is she one of these ‘faded gods’?”
Circe lifted her chin. Her worry vanished, replaced by an air of strength and a prideful smile.
“She is no faded god, Daniel Faust.” She paused, pointing, and we changed direction again. “This way. Have to be careful. This road shows signs of recent passage, and the tracks are…unclean.”
I looked around. “You keep saying ‘road.’ There’s no road.”
She
stopped, turning to face me. She moved close and murmured an incantation under her breath. Twisty words with hard edges and sharp loops.
“See as I see,” she whispered. Then she stood up on her tiptoes, leaning close, and spat in my eyes.
I flinched, pulling away, wiping at my face. “What the hell, Circe? What was—”
I froze. The endless cracked-earth plain was gone. Now we stood on a dirt road in the heart of a forest, the wilderness still cloaked in eternal twilight. A gray stone, maybe three feet tall, stood off to the roadside. Ancient Greek letters were engraved across its rough face, faded instructions I couldn’t quite make out.
“Where did we just go?”
“Nowhere,” Circe said. “I took away your illusion and gave you my illusion instead. Now we see the same way.”
“So what does this place really look like, then?”
Circe frowned, as if she couldn’t quite grasp the question.
“It doesn’t,” she said.
“The word ‘illusion’ implies an underlying truth.”
She shook her head at me. Her smile was almost pitying.
“You have much to learn. Come. This way.”
We followed the path. Lights shone up ahead. They were torches, spaced along the forest road about fifty feet apart, one after another. Their flames guttered, the pitch-dipped wood spitting curls of black smoke. I glanced at Circe. She was biting her bottom lip almost hard enough to draw blood.
“What is it?” I asked.
“She found us. I was hoping to take you to your lover and part ways before this happened.”
That didn’t sound good. “Can we take another road? Change direction? Look, I’m running out of time. I’ve got to get to Caitlin before—”
I heard the distant braying of hounds. A high-pitched howl that faded into echoes.
“She found us,” Circe repeated. “All roads lead to her now.”
The forest path ended at a crossroads.
Torches burned at the intersection where three roads met. Ours ending dead ahead, and two more stretching out to the east and west.
A woman stood at the crossroads. A spectral blur at first, her motions delayed, trailing, so that as she turned her head she seemed to have three faces. Then the three united and she took on color, form, and life.
Double or Nothing (Daniel Faust Book 7) Page 25