The Living End (6 page)

“You should probably listen,” Caitlin said.

The rakshasi slowly backed away, glaring. She swept out of the store without another word and slammed the door behind her. The bells clanged crazily, bouncing off the shuddering glass.

“Guys,” I started to say. “I’m sorry—”

“No.” Caitlin cut me off as she turned to Bentley and Corman. “
I
am sorry. That was inexcusable. Court business should never have been allowed to cross your doorstep.”

I shook my head. “She came tracking me down, not you. It’s my fault.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Corman said, leaning the shotgun back against his shoulder. “Both of you stop apologizing. Shit happens. She got the message.”

Bentley lowered his talisman, exhaling slowly as a stream of pent-up power dissolved into the air. He leaned his palms against the counter and took a deep breath.

“So that was a rakshasi,” he said. “I’ve never encountered one outside the pages of a book.”

“I think she might be the last one on Earth,” I said. “Hope so, anyway. You okay?”

Bentley nodded and gave me a shaky thumbs-up. “Fine and dandy. Cormie?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“The next time you see a Bengal tiger in our store? Do shoot it, would you? I wasn’t joking. We really could use a new rug.”

• • •

We took my car.

I’d been stuck without wheels since the Redemption Choir wrecked my old ride along with my apartment, but Jennifer’s buddy Winslow had hooked me up with the little passion project he’d been rebuilding behind his garage: a 1970 Barracuda with a widemouthed grill and a hemi under the hood, blacker than my heart and built for a knife fight. The car got a little more attention than I liked, making it hard to ghost my way through the city streets, but it had muscle when I needed it.

“It’s a trap,” Caitlin said as she slipped into the passenger seat.

“I was thinking the same thing. Naavarasi’s about to drop the boom on us, but I don’t see where it’s falling from. Would she risk a diplomatic incident?”

She shook her head. “No. She’s well-regarded by her court—despite not being one of our kind—and her star’s on the rise. She could lay some sort of an ambush for us, but there’s no profit in it for her. We’ll go tomorrow, when it’s light out. Stay alert, and if anything seems the slightest bit amiss, we pull up stakes and leave. So…how was the kiss?”

I almost dropped my keys.

“It was Roxy’s kiss,” I said. “I know Naavarasi had been watching me long before we met in Denver, but…it was Roxy’s kiss. Like she’d studied it, practiced it until it was absolutely perfect. Kept me from seeing through the ruse until you showed up.”

“Mind games are what the baron does. They’re her passion and her power. But that’s not what I asked you.”

I fired up the ignition and felt the Barracuda’s engine growl through the metal.

“It was just a kiss. Not as good as yours.”

Caitlin folded her arms and smiled. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

We slid through the night like a knife made of ink, only slowing down once we turned onto Las Vegas Boulevard and merged with the wall of traffic along the Strip. The casinos rose up around us in a neon bouquet of flashing lights and broken promises.

Dinner was at Saffron East, in a dining room with chintz drapes and table settings that could have served the royalty of old-world France. We had a table for two by the window, overlooking a man-made lake that glimmered with reflections from the casino lights.

“We’ll have the imperial Peking duck,” Caitlin told our server before I could even look at the menu.

I knew better than to complain. Caitlin’s habit of ordering for people she dined with would have been annoying, except that her choices were always perfect. The first course saw the duck served up in paper-thin crepes with scallions and cucumber, touched with a brown smear of hoisin sauce. The perfect combination of savory, fresh, and a touch of sweet. The next course brought diced duck meat served in wraps of butter-lettuce leaves sprinkled with shaved jicama root. While we ate, I brought her up to speed on my talk with Pixie.

“Lots of things can devour their victims whole,” Caitlin mused, “but they’re rarely found in this part of the world.”

I frowned while I chewed.

“I know one that’s here right now,” I said. “Naavarasi. Eating people is kind of what she does. You think she’d do some hunting while she was in town?”

“Without permission? Never. It would be a slap in my prince’s face. You’re right, though, I don’t like the timing. Do we have any news on Carmichael or Brand?”

“They’re phantoms, and I can’t figure out how to smoke them out of hiding. There’s something else. I got a call from Napa State Hospital today. Eugene Planck is dead. I can’t prove it, but I know Lauren killed him. She’s tying up loose ends.”

Caitlin’s eyes narrowed and her lips pursed.

“We’re being toyed with,” she said. “And I
hate
being toyed with. We have to proceed as if circumstances have changed, and assume that Lauren no longer needs de Rais’s soul to finish the Enclave.”

I looked at her over my wineglass. “I still think our best bet is pumping de Rais for information. That’s only if we could get Agent Black to hand him over, though. Which we can’t.”

“If we can’t negotiate with her, is there any chance intimidation might work?”

“It’s Harmony Black we’re talking about here,” I said. “Trying to scare her would just make her dig her heels in harder. She’s got a stiffer spine than one of Meadow Brand’s puppets…”

My voice trailed off. I raised my eyebrows.

“Pet?” Caitlin said. “You’ve got that look. The one you get when you’ve done something clever.”

“The one angle we never checked. The goddamn mannequins. Look, Brand attacked us with at least twenty of those things at the Silverlode Hotel. Another two of them went with her to kill Sophia. She had another, what, maybe twelve of them disguised as servants at Lauren’s house?”

Caitlin nodded, following along. “She has no trouble producing as many as she needs, with very little time to spare. Which means—”

“Which means,” I said, “she’s not building them from scratch! There’s no way she has time to be Carmichael-Sterling’s full-time public relations director, serve as Lauren’s right-hand woman and hired gun,
and
sit in a woodshop for as long as it takes to carve and assemble dozens of life-sized wooden armatures from scratch.”

“She’s outsourcing,” Caitlin said.

“Exactly. Someone builds them; she animates them. Which means somewhere, not far away, there’s a woodshop getting some very distinctive custom orders.”

“A shop,” Caitlin said, “that will have her current address on file. How many woodworkers can handle that kind of workload? It’s not like when I was a girl, when—”

She paused.

“What?” I said.

“Never you mind what it was like when I was a girl. Let’s just say it was before plastics were in vogue, and skilled artisans were more highly valued than they are today.”

I made a point of never asking Caitlin her age. This seemed to make her happy.

I clinked my glass against hers and took a sip of pinot noir. “Tomorrow, after we see what Naavarasi’s got planned for us, we start hunting for woodworkers. When it comes to magic, Meadow Brand is a one-trick pony. That’s about to bite her in the ass.”

This felt good. Caitlin and me, bouncing ideas off each other, pushing each other to think of angles we never would have come up with on our own. It wasn’t something we had to work at—it just happened naturally, like we were two parts of a perfectly geared engine.

The sommelier swooped in, a tall Chinese man with a pristine white cloth draped over his forearm. He expertly refilled our glasses, twisting the bottle just right so as not to spill a drop, then glided away again.

“Speaking of the baron,” Caitlin said.

“I know. She’s the sommelier. And she was one of the valets outside the parking garage. I’m pretty sure she was one of the tourists on the elevator with us, too. Now that I’m not being blindsided with visions of my ex-girlfriend, I can pick up on her glow. Think we should say anything?”

“No,” Caitlin said. “I think she’s showing off. Don’t look impressed. You’ll just encourage her.”

“How should I look?” I said.

“You should look at me. All night long.”

“That,” I said, “is a plan I can get behind.”

I
woke up in my favorite place in the world: curled in Caitlin’s arms. She was already awake—she didn’t sleep so much as meditate—and her deep emerald eyes flickered open to meet mine.

“Hello, sunshine,” she purred. Her body pressed against mine in the swirling expanse of gray silk sheets, warm as a kitten’s fur.

“Hello yourself. Ready to live dangerously?”

“Every day,” she said. “Right after a hot shower and a good breakfast. Danger goes better with mushroom and spinach omelets.”

I rolled out of bed. “And bacon,” I said, groaning as I stretched my arms. “Bacon cures all ills. That’s a science fact.”

We hit the road around nine, cruising southeast under a cloudless sky with the mountains rising up in the distance. The address Naavarasi had given us was in Henderson, near the old Water Street District. With Caitlin navigating, I narrowed down the address and pulled the Barracuda up to the curb outside a prim little suburban nest with white vinyl siding and a shaggy postage-stamp-sized lawn.

The street wasn’t just sleepy, it was comatose. No birds, no lizards, not even the distant drone of airplanes. The mild breeze, staving off the worst of the morning heat, fell still as we stepped out of the car.

“That’s not ominous or anything,” I said, peering at the curtained windows.

I didn’t expect a fight, given what we’d been told, but I’d come prepared for one anyway. My deck of cards nestled in my hip pocket. The deck vibrated eagerly and sent little pins-and-needles shivers down my leg.

Caitlin tilted up her face and sniffed the air like a wolf. “Demonflesh,” she said softly. “And a corpse. Not far away.”

“Let’s hope it’s just one,” I said and led the way up the short walk to the front stoop. “Okay, cover me.”

I fished my locksmith’s gear out of my other pocket. It was a thin folio of olive plastic stocked with a row of stainless-steel picks and rakes. The lock on the front door was a thirty-dollar model straight from Home Depot, not the top of the line but not the worst either. I picked out a torsion wrench and a half-diamond pick, bent down on one knee, and went to work. Meanwhile Caitlin stood beside me on the stoop, looking casual as she watched the street, ready to shield me with her body if a car drove by or a neighbor poked their head out.

The tumblers clicked and rolled. I pocketed the picks and slowly turned the knob, bracing for trouble. The door swung open without a sound. Just beyond, a plush burgundy rug decorated pale birch floorboards. Dust motes hung in the air and clung to a glass credenza by the door. Caitlin followed me in.

The house stank of sweaty socks and moldy pizza, like a frat party in a sauna. As we crept inside, my wrinkling nose picked up a stronger stench, that odor of gas and decay that only comes from one thing: a corpse left out to rot.

Voices echoed the next room. We froze. Then I heard the tinny echo of a laugh track and realized it was just a television set.

I poked my head around the corner, fighting to keep my stomach under control. The stench shoved its gaseous fingers down my throat. The living room might have been nice once, with a tan leather sofa set, thick shag rugs, and a sixty-inch television. That would have been before the place turned into a garbage dump of empty food wrappers, crumbs, and dirt, sweltering under the grill of a broken air conditioner.

The kid on the couch was maybe twenty. His
Call of Duty
T-shirt stretched over his bloated belly, and his cheeks bristled with a few days of rough blond stubble. He looked over, saw us, and waved.

“Hey,” he said listlessly. “I’m Pete.”

Most demons can’t do what Caitlin can, creating their own bodies out of raw power. They need to hijack a human or an animal’s skin to stay in our world for very long. Pete was a hijacker. My second sight showed me a web of veins under the kid’s skin, pulsing black and red, mapping the infestation’s trail.

I rubbed my forehead. The closer I got, the more tired I felt. I couldn’t concentrate, could barely remember why we’d come here.

“We’re here to help,” I finally managed to blurt out. “Came to get you out.”

Pete shrugged. “That’s cool. Whatever. You wanna watch TV?”

A king-size bag of Cheetos nestled on his lap. He grubbed around inside the bag and mashed a handful between his cheese-dust-stained lips.

“No, Pete,” Caitlin said, walking around the living room and poking her head in an open doorway. “We don’t want to watch television.”

She waved me over. My feet felt like lead bricks. Even so, the smell coming from the doorway almost knocked me flat. A dead man lay stretched out in a bed, his rotting corpse half-buried under a wool comforter. Fat black flies clung to his eyeless face, laying their eggs.

“I keep telling him he needs to get up,” Pete said. “Dude’s gonna be late for work.”

I stumbled back. “He’s dead, Pete.”

“He is?” Pete said. “Bummer. I liked that guy.”

I groped for a spell, something to ward off whatever was leeching my strength away, but my mind slipped around the edges. I didn’t forget my magic; it just seemed like way too much effort.

Next thing I knew, I’d dropped onto the couch next to Pete’s. I needed to rest, just for a second. It was such a long walk to the front door, and I just needed to rest first.

“You’re not with the Choir of Envy,” I said. “Are you?”

“Huh? Me? I’ve got everything I want right here. Just chillin’.”

Caitlin made a heroic effort, but it got her as far as I did. The couch, sitting right next to me.

“Choir of Sloth,” she breathed. “Damn it. And he’s no fledgling, not with this kind of power. Naavarasi lied to us.”

I shook my head. It was the most I could manage.

“No, she didn’t. Her exact words were, ‘Prince Malphas told me that he’s a fledgling of the Choir of Envy.’ Know how that happened? ‘Hey, prince, tell me that this guy is a fledgling of the Choir of Envy.’ ‘Okay, he’s a fledgling of the Choir of Envy.’”