Redemption Song (13 page)

I sat up and looked at the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. That should get me back to Vegas.

I pulled out of the lot nice and slow, not wanting to attract attention from the villa. I thought I was free and clear until the tower bell rang out, a shrill and endless peal that set my teeth on edge. They must have found Tyler’s body. I cursed under my breath and stomped on the gas, gunning it up the dirt road toward the iron gate.

One of the cambion ran out of the guardhouse next to the gate. He clutched a hunting rifle like he’d just picked it up for the first time in his life. I hit the brakes and leaned out the window, dropping a bead on him with my stolen pistol before he could line up a shot.

“Drop it!” I barked. The rifle fell to the dust.

I nodded to the heavy latch on the gate. “Open it.”

“I—I can’t let you go,” he stammered. “I’ve got orders—”

I shot a round into the dirt at his feet. He jumped back.

“
Now
!”

He unlatched the gate. I gave him just enough time to jump clear before I launched the pickup truck into full gear, crashing through with a screech of twisted metal and flying sparks. Hitting the highway with the speedometer kissing eighty and the engine dancing on the redline, I left the mission in the dust.

I aimed the pickup southbound, flying past a sign that read “Las Vegas–80 Miles.” Once I’d gone a good distance and figured nobody was following me, I eased off the gas. Getting pulled over for speeding in a stolen car, with a recently fired pistol on the passenger seat, was the last thing I needed.

I reached for my phone, then remembered I didn’t have it anymore. They’d taken it from me at the mission along with everything else in my pockets. I’d have to track down Caitlin and Emma the hard way. As for Nicky, I wouldn’t call him if I could. By now he’d know that Father Alvarez and I had never showed up at the safe house last night. I hoped he could put two and two together and realize he had a snitch inside his gang. In any case, next time I talked to him, it’d be face-to-face in a room swept for bugs.

My next stop was Our Lady of Consolation. If my hunch was right, Sullivan needed two things: the “road map to hell” and Father Alvarez to finish translating it. Alvarez was optional, but people who can read ancient Coptic weren’t exactly a dime a dozen. I was reasonably sure he wouldn’t hurt the priest, at least until his usefulness was at an end. Keeping the manuscript out of Sullivan’s hands would pile a lot of sand into that particular hourglass.

Dusk clung to the city like a wool blanket by the time I got there. The desert night would come soon, bringing some respite from the heat, but for now the streets were a tangle of sweltering shadows. I rolled toward the edge of the church’s lot and backed into a parking spot behind a line of overgrown bushes, keeping the stolen truck as far out of sight as I could. Then I slipped my gun under my shirt and went inside.

The front doors still hung open from yesterday’s invasion, the lock broken under a cambion boot. All the lights in the chapel were dead, though. Fingers of dying light pushed through the tall stained-glass windows, painting the church in shades of ochre and swamp green.

Something rattled in the back office. I pulled my gun.

I inched my way closer, moving between the pews as fast as I dared. My ears perked at the sounds of rustling paper and books thumping to the carpeted floor in Alvarez’s office. I hadn’t gotten here first after all.

A shadow loomed in the office doorway. I ducked behind a pew and took aim, balancing my forearms against the rough wooden seat back.

“Drop the book,” I called out, “and you can walk away.”

The shadow spun, dropped to one knee, and opened fire. I hit the floor as two bullets chewed into the pew to my left, sending splinters flying. I took a deep breath, held it, and jumped up. I ran to my right, squeezing off one, two, three shots that boomed like cannon fire, trying to pin the thief down. He answered with a fusillade of bullets, forcing me to dive for cover. When I dared to poke my head up again, he was long gone, and the back door of the church slowly swung shut in his wake.

Following was suicide. If he was out there, watching the door, he could gun me down in a heartbeat. Instead I ran out the way I’d come in, shoving through the church’s front doors just in time to see a lime-colored Mustang launch down the street with its tires screaming.

I slammed my fist against the door. I’d lost the priest, and now I’d lost the manuscript too. Game, set, and match.

Seventeen

I
dumped the pickup and the gun a few blocks away after wiping them both for prints. The pickup I left parked on a side street, where it would be towed by morning. The pistol I stripped to pieces and tossed the bits into three separate Dumpsters. I liked the idea of having a gun, under the circumstances, but I had no idea where that piece had been or what kinds of evil business a forensics expert could tie it to.

I caught looks from the twentysomething hipsters lined up outside Winter, snug behind ropes of black velvet. I wasn’t sure why until I took a good look at myself in the tinted window of a parked car. My hair was a mess, my pants were caked with dirt, my shirt had rips from Sullivan’s cane, and I looked like I hadn’t slept in a week. Not my best moment.

The bouncer gave me the stink eye. I fished Caitlin’s business card out of my wallet and flashed it. He nodded like he’d just met the president and pulled the ropes aside for me. It helped to know people in this town. Inside the door, a vortex of strobing blue neon and eardrum-blasting dubstep swallowed me whole. The icy bar looked inviting. I needed alcohol right now like a man in the Sahara needs water, but my business was down below.

The locked door to the club’s underbelly was right where I remembered it, as was the man in the gas mask and the black leather overalls. I wondered if it was a uniform the guards wore in shifts, or if just this one guy stood here, ominous and ready, night after night. He remembered me, like Caitlin had told him to, and he let out a rattling wheeze as he punched in the door’s combination.

I wasn’t alone down in the catacombs, surrounded by black leather and gold. Candles burned along the corridor, casting flickering shadows into rooms where revelers laughed, whispered, and cried out. I passed a nook where a naked man dangled from a harness of leather straps and buckles. His lover took him from behind, biting his neck as they coupled with quiet, primal urgency. A small semicircle of observers stood around them, cradling wine glasses and commenting in low whispers like patrons at an art gallery.

Deeper into the maze, I found Emma. She was dressed for business, not play, sitting on a bench with her cell phone out and a portfolio on her lap. I guessed she’d come here to escape the musical onslaught in the club upstairs.

“No,” she said, irritated. “If he wants a salary increase, I get to extend his contract. If
he
gets something,
I
get something. That’s how this works. You know better—”

She looked up, saw me, and hung up the phone.

“Daniel,” she said, standing. “What happened? You look like a truck hit you.”

“Yeah, and the truck’s got a name. Where’s Caitlin? I need to talk to both—”

Emma got in my way and pressed her hand over my heart.

“No. You don’t. Caitlin is…indisposed.”

“This is important.”

“Daniel,” she said, trying to be delicate, “Caitlin is in a very, very foul mood tonight. I gave her one of my toys to play with. She’s busy, at the moment,
breaking
him. Please trust that you do not want to walk in on her right now. Come here. Sit down and tell me what’s going on. If it’s that bad, we’ll go interrupt her together.”

I let her sit me down. I wasn’t sure where to begin, so I started with a name.

“Sullivan.”

Emma’s eyes narrowed to slits. Black pupils sank under swirling splotches of dark copper.

“
Suulivarishisian
? What do you know about him?”

I lifted my shirt and showed off his handiwork, the angry welts that crisscrossed my chest and back.

“He said something about Caitlin I didn’t like,” I said with a shrug, dropping the shirt. “So I felt obliged to defend her honor. Didn’t work out too good.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t kill you. No, you absolutely cannot see Caitlin tonight. She can’t see those marks. That’s a calculated insult on his part, telling her she’s not strong enough to defend her own property. She’d go into a rage.”

I held up a finger. “Pretty sure I’m not anybody’s property.”

Emma shook her head, near frantic, looking like she was trying to follow three trains of thought at the same time. “I forget you’re not one of us. Too ignorant to know when you’re being honored. Not the point. Where did you see him? Where is he right now?”

“This ‘Redemption Choir’ outfit you guys are so worried about? He’s their leader. And I saw him in a fortified compound about a hundred miles north, but I’d bet they’ve long scattered by now.”

I gave her a rundown of the fun and games, from meeting up with Alvarez to my little shootout at Our Lady of Consolation.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, frowning. “A route allowing someone to bodily travel from Earth to hell and back? That’s like you, physically, stepping into an electrical outlet and riding a power line until you feel like hopping out again. One realm is solid matter, one’s spirit. They don’t interact that way.”

I shrugged. “Well, Sullivan believes it, or at least his followers do. Maybe it’s just a new angle on his scam?”

“It’s not a scam. Well, not like you’re thinking. Sullivan believes every word he says, Daniel. He’s mad as a hatter. He was exiled from our court for being an insufferable rabble-rouser. The Court of Night-Blooming Flowers gave him sanctuary, and eventually they kicked him to the curb too. That must have been when he started the cult. Operating without sanction here on Earth, building a following of cambion right under everyone’s noses.”

“Wait. So he actually thinks he’s helping these people? He’s fucking with their heads, Emma. He’s teaching them to hate themselves just because they were born different from everybody else.”

“And he hates himself even more deeply,” she said. “He’s merely sharing his disease. I’m embarrassed to say he’s a member of my choir, though a degenerate one. When I want something that someone else has, I take it. If I cannot take it, I strive for it. Work toward it. My envy makes me strong. Understand?”

I nodded, looking more certain than I felt.

“Sullivan envies things that cannot be taken. He covets the colors in flowers, the notes in songs. Other people’s experiences, their lives, not anything tangible. He developed this fixation on humanity about a century ago. It’s only gotten worse with time. A single, driving, all-consuming obsession. And of course, since humanity is the pinnacle of perfection in his eyes, this absolute ideal he’s built it up to be in his fevered mind—”

“Then what he is, or any part of it, has to be the exact opposite,” I said. “Filthy and impure.”

“Exactly. He poisoned his own heart, long before he started infecting the cambion with his self-loathing madness.”

“How does he know Caitlin?”

Emma sat back, taciturn. She folded her hands in her lap.

“Come on,” I said. “You know I’ll find out, one way or another. You’re her friend. I’d like to hear it from you.”

She sighed. “A long time ago—and I mean a long time—Caitlin and Sullivan were an item. Their relationship was…problematic. You do understand that Caitlin is atypical of her choir, yes? The sons and daughters of Lust aren’t renowned for having a lot going on between their ears. Most of them end up as arm candy or playthings for more powerful demons, and they’re happy for their lot.”

I frowned, trying to remember something Caitlin had told me. “Isn’t Sitri from the Choir of Lust?”

“He’s the rare exception that proves the rule, as is Caitlin herself. When she was young, though, Sullivan was enraptured by her looks, and he claimed her for his own. He didn’t expect she had a mind and a backbone to go with her beauty. He didn’t like that very much. He enforced his will with the back of his hand. She was young, she hadn’t yet come into her full power, and she lacked the strength to free herself from him.”

Just when I was starting to pity Sullivan, I found myself hating him again. “What happened?”

“She refused to be his victim. And she grew strong. She worked quietly, bettering herself, learning the potential of her bloodline, while making social connections in Sitri’s court. Sullivan served under the prince, you see, as a minor cabinet minister. One day, when she was finally ready, she sprung her trap.

“She confronted Sullivan before the prince’s throne and the entire gathered peerage, with documented proof of his failures and lapses in duty. She petitioned that he be stripped of his rank—and that it be granted to her instead, as her proper spoils for uncovering the truth. Sullivan went berserk and physically attacked her on the debate floor.”

I leaned closer. “Did she win?”

Emma grinned. “I imagine it could have gone either way, if they’d had a proper fight, but the prince intervened to stop him. Then Sullivan screamed for a vote, only to learn that he had no friends left in that hall. Not one. Caitlin had spent
years
secretly forging pacts and negotiating trades of support with more than half of Sitri’s inner cabinet. They wanted her in Sullivan’s chair, since she’d proven she’d be far easier to work with.

“The prince decreed that her elevation had already taken place, at the moment she demanded it. Therefore, this was a case of a commoner daring to lay hands upon one of Sitri’s personal elect. A most serious crime. Sullivan lost more than his job. His lands, his thralls, his wealth…they literally tore the clothes from his body before casting him out into the street. As is custom, the prince took half of everything Sullivan had, and Caitlin was granted the other half. Thus began her rise to power. She became Sitri’s hound not too much later.”

I thought the story over. All the parts of the plan that could have gone wrong, all the variables. Only one possibility stood out in my mind, and I couldn’t help but smile.