Made for Sin

by Stacia Kane

  “How do you know?” Majowski said it, but Ardeth’s expression mirrored his curiosity.

  How did he know? He knew because the beast knew. And even without that, he had a hunch that Mickey Coyle wasn’t the sort of man who’d put an instrument of evil into the coffin of his beloved wife.

  He didn’t feel like explaining that, though, so instead he shrugged and gave Majowski’s shovel a pointed look. “Are you going to help dig?”

  “Oh. Yeah,” Majowski said. “Sure.”

  Majowski may not have owned a shovel, but he knew how to use one—not that it was complicated, but still. They fell into a rhythm quickly, and the pile of loose dirt next to the grave grew higher and higher. They’d figured that the mirror was probably buried near the head, rather than the foot—well, Speare felt the thing more strongly at the head, though he didn’t specify that—so they focused their digging there, and after an hour or so they’d managed to get at least halfway down.

  “I feel like we should be singing a work song,” Majowski said after a while, wiping sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. “Or a hymn.”

  A hymn probably wouldn’t be a bad idea, given how much stronger the mirror’s effects were becoming. The beast growled and paced in Speare’s head, feeling the power, feeding off it. Already it was trying to spread out into the rest of his body, and while it wasn’t yet like what he’d felt in Nielsen’s office, he had no idea how bad it might get once they finally unearthed the mirror.

  None of which he could explain to Majowski, though. “How about ‘Fernando’? That might pass the time.”

  “Yeah, ha-ha,” Majowski said, giving him a half-sour, half-amused look. “You’re so funny.”

  “I thought it was funny,” Ardeth said, from her position on Mickey’s grave.

  Majowski turned to her. “You would.”

  She shrugged, smiling. “Sorry.”

  Speare scooped another shovelful of dirt. “I feel like we’ve had this conversation be—”

  A wave of darkness rolled over him. A thick, heavy, twisted wave that made his body go numb and made the beast howl. No, it wasn’t like what he’d felt earlier. Somehow it was worse. It didn’t feel like the beast was invading his body; it felt like it had already invaded. The sensation of being nothing but a speck of consciousness inside a shell he couldn’t feel was so much like what he felt when the beast took over that for a second—a terrifying second that seemed to last forever—he thought it actually had.

  “Speare?” Ardeth’s alarmed voice helped to remind him that he was still himself. So did the sensation flooding back through him. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he managed. “Just—it’s getting to me, a bit.”

  “Maybe you should take a break,” she said. “Go for a walk, or something.”

  Her eyes communicated more than that; he saw her worry, her fear, and he wanted to reassure her but he couldn’t.

  Majowski broke the heavy silence. “I could use a break myself, actually. I was just about to ask for one.”

  He had to give Majowski credit. The guy obviously knew something was up, just like he’d obviously known earlier that Speare didn’t have food poisoning. But he was gamely playing along anyway, pretending nothing at all was going on and making clear that even if something was, he wasn’t going to ask about it.

  Whether that was loyalty to Doretti or sensible fear—Majowski didn’t seem to know much about the occult, so it would probably be even more uncomfortable for him than it was for someone like Ardeth—didn’t matter.

  And he didn’t want Majowski to have to learn about the occult, either, at least not the kind of lesson that could result in his painful and messy death. “Thanks. Yeah, I think maybe I’ll sit down for a minute or two.”

  Away from the grave, and the mirror. That was where he’d sit down.

  Ardeth handed him a bottle of water as he approached her. Her fingertips brushed his when she did, sending a shiver up his spine. That, at least, had nothing to do with the mirror. And its impact lessened when he stepped off her mother’s grave, although that was offset by the beast’s rage thundering through him.

  “We’re close to it,” he said. Speaking with the baffler in place still felt weird. “Shouldn’t take much longer, and we can get out of here.”

  “You sure?” Ardeth didn’t look convinced. Yeah, well, neither was he, but he didn’t want to give her a chance to ask more questions. Or to keep looking at him like that, her worried eyes scanning his face and making his heart ache. No woman had ever looked at him like that before. “Maybe I should dig for a while.”

  “I’m fine.” Years of experience had taught him how to keep his emotions and thoughts hidden. Good thing, too, because if ever there had been a time when he didn’t want to lie, this was it. “I’ll be okay. I think it’s as bad as it’s going to get.”

  She knocked her knuckle against his thigh, a fleeting, half-joking touch. “I’m not sure you’re telling me the truth.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that. Probably best not to say anything at all. He patted her hand and got up, picking up the shovel as he did.

  The beast stayed silent when he stepped back onto Cliona Coyle’s grave. That was…really not good, at all. What the hell was it doing? Planning something? Waiting for something? He tried to press it, to see if he could get any images from it or any fragment of its thoughts, which sometimes worked. Not this time. Its mind was practically hermetically sealed. Maybe it was payback for the afternoon—okay, the afternoon, and the hour or so at Mercer’s place—he’d spent shutting it out. Maybe for some other, much worse reason. He wouldn’t know for sure until it acted.

  The power was still there, though. It wasn’t possible for the beast to shut him out of that. He felt it, stronger with every layer of dirt he and Majowski removed, until finally he dug in his shovel and a stream of pure, blinding evil raced from his hands and feet up his spine and to his head. The beast howled with glee. That was it. They’d reached it.

  He fell to his knees. His hands scrabbled at the dirt without him telling them to—he didn’t know if that was the beast’s will or his own subconscious desperation taking charge. So close, the mirror was so close, and his head filled with images of a future he’d long ago given up hoping for but now seemed so close. Ardeth’s and Majowski’s voices penetrated the mental haze, but he ignored them. He didn’t have time for them, not even when both he and the beast heard their fear. Later. Once he had the mirror he’d deal with them. The mirror came first.

  And finally there it was, held between his fingers, the thick, round frame—some sort of dull black metal or onyx-like material, carved with symbols and designs his eyes couldn’t seem to register but which the beast recognized—burning them. Burning everything inside him as he half-crawled out of the hole without being fully aware that he was doing so.

  It was so much heavier than he’d imagined it would be, so thick and solid. Like the weight of the world in his hands. Maybe literally; the thing he held, its black surface rippling and shifting like a ready-to-burst caul as sparks of red and orange erupted across it, had the power to destroy the city, the state. It could destroy anything and everything the creatures on the other side of it wanted to destroy.

  And there were creatures on the other side. He could feel them pressing against that elastic barrier, straining to be born. He could see it bulge as they butted against it, ramming into it. The horror it inspired, the frozen dread in his bones caused by watching a sharp horn stretch the surface or seeing a clawed hand grasping for freedom, made his stomach lurch.

  The beast didn’t care. It lifted the mirror as it stood up, anticipation thrumming through its body into his and back, and looked into it.

  Hell was on the other side of it. In that instant, as the beast fell silent and its memories stopped assaulting him, he saw the fires, saw things he’d only seen through the beast’s eyes before. He saw other faces peering into the mirror, quick flashes of other people through the centuries who’d so
ught power or fortune and found themselves enslaved to evil. He saw blood. He saw death.

  Most of all, he saw the beast. Its face. God, those eyes, those teeth, that hideous grin skittering like a cockroach across its skin so deathly, sickly pale. He shared his body with that. It lived inside him—that thing lived inside him. Finally he had a face for it; finally he knew exactly what he’d been dealing with for his entire adult life.

  Pain erupted in his jaw, on his left side. Somewhere in the distance he heard a gasp and realized he was the one gasping, that the sound was himself combined with the beast. So the beast had felt it, too.

  Just like it felt it when it happened again. The beast stumbled—they stumbled—and almost fell. Jesus, it was like trying to stay balanced on a seesaw in a pool of Jell-O in a hurricane, and the fact that a hard shove came with the pain didn’t help.

  Both of those things needed to stop. He gathered as much strength and courage as he could and dragged his gaze away from the grotesque image before him, slammed his mental wall down on the beast. It didn’t close all the way, of course, but combined with the beast’s distraction and fixation on the mirror, it was enough to push it back so he could think again. He forced his right hand to let go of the mirror, and reached for his aching jaw.

  Only to be stopped by the cold touch of what was unmistakably the point of a sword on the back of his neck. Not just any sword, either. A demon-sword. The demon-sword. That dark, unpleasant energy made his skin crawl. The beast spun in his head, sucking up the power, and Speare braced himself. It was going to come through, just like in Nielsen’s office, and Ardeth and Majowski had nowhere to hide, nowhere safe to escape to.

  He wanted to warn them, but before he could even start to open his mouth the beast subsided. Watchful. Waiting. Uh-oh. Since when did it not take every opportunity to come out and entertain itself?

  Since it was afraid of breaking the mirror, apparently, among other things. As his vision finally cleared he saw Ardeth and Majowski, both standing ten feet or so away, both staring at him, both gripped by thugs he recognized as Fallerstein’s and both with guns pressed tight to the sides of their heads. Fuck. The beast had been—he and the beast had both been—so fixated on the mirror that they hadn’t been paying attention to anything around them. Now it was too late, and he knew without looking that there were at least a dozen men standing behind him, because the beast could feel them. It knew those men could shoot and damage the mirror. It knew they could shoot Ardeth and it wouldn’t enjoy playing with her as much if she was dead before it got to her. Gross, but true.

  Another man, a tall, thin man in an impeccable black suit, crossed the grass to stand in front of him. Val Ingram. Fallerstein’s man, the one who’d rented a room at the Spyglass. His silver-black hair was swept back from his high forehead; he carried with him the faint fragrances of mint and cologne and something else, something secret and unpleasant that lurked beneath those other scents. The beast whined; fear? Anger? Speare didn’t know. He only knew that Ingram’s smile made him itch to start punching it.

  “Mr. Speare,” Ingram said. “I knew keeping an eye on you would pay off in the end.”

  A sarcastic response flew to Speare’s lips, but he choked it back down. Not while Ardeth had a gun to her head. “Let them go,” he said. “Let them go, and I’ll do whatever it is you want me to do.”

  Another smile. A smile like a slit throat, too wide and hideously unpleasant to look at. “You’ll do that anyway, though.”

  “You’re making a mistake.” Well, he had to at least try to warn them. “Seriously.”

  Ingram’s eyebrows rose. “Really. Well, I guess I’ll just have to make that mistake, then.”

  He nodded at someone, one of the men flanking the demon-sword-bearer. Speare started to throw himself forward, but the fact that he stood right at the edge of the hole over Cliona Coyle’s grave meant he had to try to duck sideways instead, and that split second of hesitation was too long. Hands, several hands, grabbed him.

  That wasn’t a problem, really. He could throw off hands, especially with the beast’s help. The problem was that the hands weren’t all that descended on him. Something else wrapped around him, something slim and strong that made the beast scream in agony. Fuck, a Molyous Rope, a cord made from fibers that killed any kind of spells or sorcery. A standard precaution if someone thought they were dealing with a sorcerer or someone with power—at least, he hoped it was just a standard precaution, and not that Ingram knew about the beast.

  He didn’t get a chance to ask. He didn’t get a chance to fight back when the mirror was snatched from his grip, either, although he wouldn’t have been able to do much. Something sharp sank into his thigh, followed almost immediately by a blossoming of cold, followed almost immediately by the heavy warmth of sedation.

  Not enough to put him to sleep, of course, not with the beast’s metabolism. But enough to make him feel a little loose, a little drowsy. Enough to make him realize they meant business, too, because if it was enough to make him feel that warm and fuzzy, it was enough to put a normal man down for the count.

  Which he’d better pretend to be, if he wanted them to let Ardeth go, and if he wanted them to untie that rope.

  And, of course, if he wanted to get the mirror back.

  Chapter 10

  Pretending to be unconscious was harder than he’d expected, especially when Fallerstein’s men took his cellphone from his pocket, dragged him across the ground, and hoisted him into the back of a van—he thought it was the back of a van—with the gentleness of miners hauling sacks of coal. Worse than that, though, was pretending to be unconscious when, over the continued irritation of the beast’s whining, he could hear them forcing Ardeth and Majowski into another vehicle. Damn it. If they weren’t riding with him, he couldn’t take the chance of freeing himself and escaping.

  He spent the long drive to wherever they were going trying to remind himself that Ardeth was sharp, and she was a professional. She’d been in tough situations before—hell, she’d apparently been roughed up before. She could take care of herself. Majowski certainly could.

  Somehow knowing that didn’t help him; what Fallerstein was doing was so far beyond the sort of thing he was used to—the sort of thing that the agreement between the Families allowed for—that he couldn’t be sure the two of them would be let go. Murders were one thing. Magic, even, was one thing. But what Fallerstein was doing…that was something else entirely. A man who would do what he was doing would certainly kill uninvolved hostages, even if one of them was a woman and the other a cop.

  No, he couldn’t take that chance. He had to stay in the car, keep feigning sleep, until they got to where they were going and he knew what they’d done with Ardeth. Then…

  Fallerstein obviously didn’t know about the beast; if he did, they would have filled that needle with a much stronger sedative than the one they’d used, which was already wearing off.

  And which was the same one they’d used to fill that dart they shot him with the other night, too, he realized, the one that had scraped him. No wonder it hadn’t looked like a normal bullet wound. He’d noticed a little tiredness then, too, but nothing to make him think he’d been dosed. Not a surprise.

  And not really important. The important thing was that Ingram and Fallerstein and whichever other goons were involved had no idea what they were about to unleash upon themselves, because the second that demon-sword blade touched his skin—touched it with purpose, to take his head—the beast was going to come out. He wasn’t going to be able to stop it. And it was going to literally dance in their blood.

  The van turned and headed down a hill, then swerved and slid to a stop. Parked, he assumed. They’d reached wherever it was they were going. Well, good. He wasn’t sure how he’d manage to alert Laz or anyone else to their location, but he’d figure something out. All of the men in the car, and probably most of the ones he’d encounter after he freed himself, would have cellphones, so he could use one of those if h
e couldn’t get his own back. Laz would send some men, he’d send Ardeth home with them, and once she was safely out of the building he’d get the mirror and get out of there.

  They hauled him out of the vehicle and, thankfully, carried rather than dragged him up a staircase and through another door, where a smell assaulted him with memories. Every casino, every club, had its own particular smell, at least to the beast, and this one smelled familiar under the fading of age and disuse.

  It smelled like the Silver Bell. That was where they were, wasn’t it? Of course. Fallerstein had bought the place—an old cabaret club, with the requisite hotel and casino—after it closed in the midnineties, and had kept it shuttered ever since. But it smelled just like it had when Speare was nine and his mother spent five months doing a “special guest appearance” there in a show called Cocorico.

  He remembered the place. He remembered the backstage area, the way the dressing rooms were set up and the catwalk and light booth. He remembered the casino and the maintenance corridors and everything else; the only area of that building he didn’t know well was the security office, because the guards had let him in there only a couple of times.

  Well, that helped. That helped so much he almost grinned. Unless Fallerstein had done some serious renovations, which he doubted, he had a good idea where the exits and escape routes were, the places to hide. For the first time that night, luck was with—no. Luck had been with him that afternoon, more luck than he’d ever had in his life. But it still felt like a good sign.

  They carried him down a hall with several turns—past Housekeeping, he thought, which meant they were heading for the cabaret club—and through another doorway. Yep, into the club. He could still see his mother on that stage, hear the applause when she walked out into the center of it and the Silver Bell’s middle-aged-to-older clientele recognized her. Her smile at that, the way she lit up the room…

  He wasn’t afraid. The beast wasn’t going to let him die, not while it still needed his body to live. He was, honestly, in no more danger than he would have been sitting on his own couch at home watching football—in fact, it might end up being the best night of his entire life, the night he finally became free of the beast.