The Long Way Down (34 page)

Margaux came on the line to the tune of distant drumbeats, a cacophony that swirled across the phone line and abruptly fell silent.

“Five minutes,” she said, her voice strained, and put her line on mute.

“Cormie’s meditating,” Bentley said. “He’ll be in a trance in no time, just a little rusty.”

“Don’t want to pressure anybody, but time’s not on our side here,” I said. I leaned against my car. We waited.

Jennifer looked over at me after a minute of pensive silence.

“So. Datin’ a succubus, huh?”

“Oh, we are
not
having this conversation right now,” I said.

“I’m just saying. I might’ve started looking for love on the fairer side of the street after we broke up, but at least I stayed inside my own species.”

“It just sort of happened.”

“Well,” she said, looking up at the Silverlode, “she seems all right. So far. Fair warning, if she messes with your head I’m gonna claw her eyes out.”

“Fairly noted,” I said. “And thanks.”

She looked at me with a smirk. “So, her lady parts, are they just like—”

Margaux’s return to the conference call saved me. She put us on speaker, the line crackling with staccato drumbeats and a strange, high-pitched and chaotic melody, like a flute playing inside a blender.

“The cause is true,” Margaux panted, “and the spirits have been paid. They’re gonna help.”

A wind blew across the parking lot, hot as steam, feeling like the breath of God on my back.

“Cormie’s there with you,” Bentley said. “He’s in the astral. He says the Silverlode—it’s like nothing he’s ever seen. He can’t even get near the edge of the tower, the wards are too thick.”

I nodded. “Roger that. We can see it too. Mama, are you sure your spirits can crack this piggy bank?”

“Like nitroglycerin. Don’t you doubt it, boy.”

The wind swirled around us. Hungry. Eager to fight.

“All right,” I said, “here’s how we play it. Jennifer blows the loading bay door. Mama, your boys take out the wards. Tell them to hit the outer layer and just keep plowing through until they come out the other side. Bentley, tell Corman to follow behind them as close as he can and warn us about any traps. Me and Jenny will bring up the rear.”

The C-4 really did look like a stick of butter, neatly wrapped in brown paper. So did the next brick she took from her trunk. And the next.

“How much did you get?” I asked.

She shrugged with a smile. “I called in some favors. Figured we might as well go all out on the shock and awe.”

Jennifer scrutinized the tall corrugated-metal door, sized for a truck, and stuck the clump of plastic explosive near the left seam. She fiddled with it for a moment, carefully shaping the putty, and stuck what looked like a spark plug into the middle of the mass. She set the next charge on the service door and walked around the corner to split the third brick of explosive between a pair of boarded-up windows.

I set the flower box on the hood of my car and untied the festive ribbon. Inside, nestled in a bed of crepe paper, lay my gift from Spengler’s safe room: his Benelli Nova Tactical, a sleek, black, pump-action shotgun with ghost-ring sights. I loaded four cartridges, feeding them in one at a time. I liked the idea of bringing Spengler’s gun on the raid. At least in spirit, the whole family would be together one last time.

Jennifer finished setting the charge and ran back to join me behind her car. She held up a detonator with a bright red, plastic squeeze-trigger.

“You ready for this?” She looked halfway between excitement and terror. I knew the feeling, my pulse racing as I readied for the charge. We’d win or we’d die tonight. No other options.

“Ready as I’m gonna be. Mama?”

“Just say the word,” Margaux whispered, her voice strained as she concentrated on her ritual. The drumbeats in the background quickened, echoing my pounding heart.

“Bentley and Corman?”

“Cormie’s astral body is floating about five feet above your heads,” Bentley said. “Says he’s fit as a fiddle and ready to go.”

I took a deep breath. The Silverlode loomed over us like a living thing, a hungry monster waiting to be fed. Or a dragon waiting to be slain.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s show these Seattle assholes how we do things in Vegas. Jennifer?”

She held up the detonator. I nodded.

“
Light ’em up!
”

Forty-One

O
ne click of the detonator, so fast her fingers blurred, and the alley erupted in a blast of crumpled metal and flame. Superheated air blew past us, flowing toward the black, billowing smoke like oxygen filling a sudden vacuum. Margaux’s horde of disembodied wraiths slammed into the outer wards at a hundred miles an hour. The clashing enchantments screamed inside my head, a discordant howl like iron fingernails on a chalkboard.

“
Go!
” I shouted, charging down the alley, cradling Spengler’s shotgun in my hands and keeping my head down. The loading-bay door crumpled inward, punched by a giant’s fist, edges of the torn metal blackened and smoking. I jumped through the gap and hit a small storage room. Its shelves were empty and caked with years of dust. The door lay just ahead.

“Wait!” Bentley shouted into my earpiece, just as my foot snagged a length of fishing line.

The trip wire snapped. The ceiling groaned. I hurled myself to the bare concrete floor, landing on my shoulder and rolling just as a scythe blade on a wooden arm swung across my path. Behind me, Jennifer stopped short, the vicious blade sweeping half an inch from her nose.

“Gonna need a little more advance warning than that,” I breathed. Jennifer’s face was pale.

“Sorry,” Bentley said. “Up ahead, just past the door, three more trip wires. Two low, one high.”

We didn’t have time to catch our breaths. I led the charge, jumping and ducking around the fishing line, emerging onto the silent casino floor. Only the emergency lights were on, casting row after row of dead slot machines in a pale cemetery glow. All we needed to do was cross the room, get through the connecting hallway, and reach the hotel lobby.

A broad avenue of antique scalloped carpet ran through the heart of the casino. Meadow Brand stood there, waiting for us.

“Lauren thought you left town,” she said. “I knew better.”

I came to a stop about ten feet away from her, Jennifer at my side.

“So you came to greet us?” I said. “Very considerate of you.”

Something moved in the shadows. A figure darted past in the corner of my eye, slipping between the slot machines, vanishing from sight. A moment later, something flickered in my peripheral vision on the other side of the room, too quick to catch.

Bentley’s worried voice came on the line. “You’ve got trouble. Cormie says you’re not alone in there. He can’t tell what they are. They just look like blobs on the astral, blobs of dark heat. They’re…artificial.”

“Mm-hmm,” I murmured for both his and Jennifer’s benefit, “and they’re flanking us. Also, that’s not Meadow Brand.”

“How do you know?” Jennifer whispered.

“Because last time I saw her, I carved her face open. Either she got the world’s best and fastest plastic surgery, or she’s just psychically projecting herself onto one of her puppets.”

I took a step closer. There was definitely something wrong with “Meadow.” Her movements were too jerky, her expression too uneven, too plastic.

“Last chance,” I told her. “I know you’re up there with the others. Don’t open the Box. It’s not what you think.”

She laughed. A harsh and bitter sound.

“It’s exactly what we think. Power. Raw, beautiful power. All we could ever want. In less than an hour, hell itself will eat out of our hands. And we’re just getting started.”

“Daniel,” Bentley said over the earpiece, insistent, “more of them. At least fifteen, maybe twenty of those things, all around you. She’s stalling you while they get ready to attack.”

I felt them. Soulless creatures in the dark, closing in but staying just out of sight, their jerky movements like marionettes on a mad puppeteer’s strings. I waved Jennifer close and whispered in her ear.

“Get ready to run for it. She’s got more pets than we have bullets, so make every shot count.” I looked over to the Meadow-thing and shook my head, raising my voice. “You forgot your line, by the way.”

“What line?” Meadow demanded.

“When you rant about your master plan for world domination, you’re supposed to end with ‘but it’s too bad you won’t live to see it.’ I mean, if you’re gonna act like an asshole pulp villain, at least show some commitment to the part.”

Her hands curled at her sides. “Funny. You won’t be laughing when—”

I leveled the shotgun and blew her head off.

The illusion ripped away in a spray of steel shot and mahogany splinters. The creature before us was nothing but a jointed wooden armature doll, a life-sized version of the tiny puppets artists use for anatomy sketches. It collapsed to its knees, its psychic strings cut.

“When I interrupt you like that?” I said. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just easily amused, but I think that was pretty funny.”

The creatures loomed into view all around us. More mannequins like the first, but their hands were misshapen and melded with metal. Rusted iron hooks, sickles, and wickedly serrated knives glimmered in the dark, ready to rend and tear.

Jennifer took a stainless-steel razor blade from her pocket and rested it on the tip of her tongue. She clenched it between her teeth as she hissed a garbled, barbaric chant. Energy swirled around us like a slow cyclone, raw and brutal. I concentrated, lending my strength to hers, building the embryonic spell into something more powerful than either of us could do alone.

Moving as one, the mannequins attacked.

Jennifer raised her tattooed arm, her revolver clutched in her opposite hand, and viciously ripped the blade in her teeth across her own skin. Blood sprayed out around us, too much blood for the depth of the wound, too much for one human’s body, as the gathered magic crystallized and took form. The spray of blood hung frozen in the air, droplets suspended in space like tiny uncut rubies. Almost immediately her torn skin began to reknit itself under the writhing ink of her tattoos.

The first wave of mannequins hit the curtain of blood and exploded. They blasted backward in a fountain of twisted metal and shattered wood. Jennifer spat out the razor. We ran.

She broke left and I headed right, taking the long way around a bank of slot machines with the surviving mannequins hot on our heels. Her fat revolver barked again and again. I turned, feeling a shadow looming, and put the muzzle of my shotgun flush against another mannequin’s forehead before pulling the trigger. It flipped backward, tumbling neck over heels, and another two puppets clambered over its body before it even stopped twitching.

“Need some help here!” I shouted. The connecting hallway loomed ahead of us, a shadowy stretch of innocent-looking marble tiles and unlit electric wall sconces.

“Trip wire!” Bentley’s voice crackled. “Chest high!”

I hit the cold tiles with the shotgun clutched to my chest, rolling. Jennifer went down on her knees and slid under it, leaning back to fire off another wild shot. The mannequins kept coming in a relentless, silent tide of death.

“Ten feet ahead! Ankle height!” Bentley called. We jumped it as the pursuing mannequins hit the first trip wire behind us. It snapped with an audible twang. Saw blades screamed as they fired from hidden recesses in the walls, slicing the front-runners to kindling. The others didn’t hesitate, climbing over their fallen comrades without a trace of survival instinct. Jennifer turned to shoot, but her gun clicked on an empty chamber. I fired off another round, blasting a sprinting mannequin in half at the waist. One cartridge left.

The mannequins snapped the next wire. I looked back as tubes in the ceiling sprayed the horde with a watery mist. Ahead of us, a pair of wall portraits advertising long-dead lounge singers swung out from their frames, exposing a pair of nozzles angled to cover the entire hallway.

I smelled gasoline.

“Down!” I shouted, shoving Jennifer to the floor and covering her with my body just as the nozzles erupted. Gouts of flame streaked over our heads, hitting the gasoline-drenched mannequins and sending them up in a bonfire.

We crawled under the nozzles and crossed the threshold to the hotel lobby. Heavy footprints marred the dust on the floor, most leading to the main elevator beside an abandoned check-in desk. They’d blocked the front doors the crude way, stripping bed frames and desks from the guest rooms and piling them in a makeshift barricade.

Even without mouths, the mannequins screamed behind us. The wordless shrilling throbbed inside my brain as they stumbled over one another. They slammed off the hallway walls, burning and confused and dying. I pointed to the barricade.

“Can you clear enough room for us to get out?”

“Where are you going?” Jennifer said as I vaulted the check-in desk. I threw my shoulder against the door behind it, the flimsy wood cracking under the blow.

“I’ve gotta get those sprinklers working!”