The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Read online

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said.

  “According to who?”

  His mouth hung open. He shook his head. Lost.

  “My old man,” Angelo said. “He always said I wouldn’t amount to shit. Always said I wasn’t shit. He said I was…I was an accident. My mom was old-school Catholic, you know. Wouldn’t get an abortion. So he was stuck with me.”

  One of the Calles handed me his pistol. A black matte .45, heavy in my hand.

  “I idolized him,” Angelo told me. “I know how stupid that sounds, okay. How do you look up to a man who hates that you were even born? But I grew up in his world. He was…everything. He was all I had. And this was my shot. My one shot to prove I was worthy of his name. That I could do what he does. That I could be a man of power, like him.”

  His head sagged as I stood before him.

  “I didn’t care about this city. Or you, or the money, or…any of it. All I wanted…all I wanted was to win, and go home. And he’d go into the fridge, and he’d take out two beers. And he’d crack them open and hand me one. And he’d say, ‘Son, I’m proud of you.’ That’s all I fucking wanted.”

  Three feet between us, but I felt closer than that. We’d both grown up in our fathers’ toxic kingdoms. I’d escaped mine. Would I have ended up like him if I hadn’t? Would he have ended up like me if he had?

  “That’s not a bad thing to want,” I told him.

  “I just proved he’s right. I’m everything he said I am. Worthless.”

  “No,” I said. “You fought hard. You did your best. That counts for something. And if he was worthy of you, if he was ever worthy of you, he would have told you so.”

  I thumbed back the hammer on the .45.

  “Close your eyes, Angelo.”

  He raised his head, his eyes glistening.

  “No.”

  Locking his gaze with mine, he reached up and put a finger to the barrel of the gun. Pushing it to the center of his forehead.

  “Right here,” he said. “Put it right here. And when you see him, you tell my father, you tell him that I went out like a man. That I faced the bullet. And I didn’t flinch.”

  “I’ll tell him,” I said. “You have my word.”

  The pistol boomed like a cannon. Angelo’s head snapped back; then he crumpled to the blood-spattered concrete.

  The reverberations of the gunshot, rippling through the parking garage, faded into a rumbling echo. Then silence.

  “One to go,” I told Jennifer.

  She nodded. “Damien Ecko.”

  “Let’s reel him in. Tonight, all debts are paid.”

  42.

  Bentley and Corman came in on a 9:45 flight from Orlando. By then a runner had brought the blue falcon amulet from the fortress. It rested snug in my pocket, a beacon shouting my location to Ecko every step I took.

  I couldn’t force Ecko to follow me, but I knew what he wanted: to hurt more of my family and friends, just like he’d done to Paolo, torturing me by proxy. And I knew if he sensed me at the airport, he’d want to know who I was meeting there.

  “Thanks for coming back on short notice,” I whispered to Bentley, hugging him tight as we met up in the baggage claim. “And for coming back at all. This is going to be dangerous.”

  “Fiddle-faddle. I’ve played many roles in my illustrious career, and ‘bait’ describes more than a few of them. Do we know if our fish is anywhere near the line?”

  I had spotters for that. A handful of Jennifer’s men, dressed in tourist clothes and lugging empty suitcases, prowling the concourse. My phone buzzed against my hip. As I pulled Corman into a hug, my arm around his shoulder, I turned and took a surreptitious peek at the screen.

  “Maybe him. Chairs by the AA baggage claim, behind a newspaper.”

  I glanced at the brushed steel of the baggage carousel. Couldn’t make out much but a blur in the reflection, but somebody was there. Sitting alone, twenty feet from us, face buried behind the front page of the Las Vegas Sun. I didn’t dare look closer than that, with my eyes or my magic: everything depended on Ecko believing I was in the dark.

  Bentley pressed something into my palm, burning cold on an icy chain. The Black Eye. The talisman, bearing the engraving of a crudely scratched-out eye on one side, defaced hieroglyphs on the other, sent a leaden ache up my arm.

  “C’mon,” I said loudly as we walked past the chairs, “need to get you two out of sight. It’s not safe here. You know the way to the ranch?”

  “Sure, kiddo,” Corman said, reciting his lines, “but I’d feel better if you were coming with us.”

  “Can’t risk it. I’ve got to find Ecko. And until I do, you’re safer if I’m nowhere near you.”

  Another text as we hit the concourse doors: “He’s following.”

  “Here’s where we split up,” I murmured. “Drive slow and make it easy for him. I’ll meet you there.”

  Gabriel was waiting down in the parking garage, near my rental car. I handed him the falcon amulet.

  “So I gotta bring this where, exactly?”

  “Everywhere,” I told him. “Take a taxi somewhere, doesn’t matter where, and toss it under the seat before you get out. That way it’ll be moving all over town, all night long. By the time he figures out it isn’t me, hopefully it’ll be too late for him to do anything about it.”

  He gave me a dubious look. “Hopefully?”

  “It’s gonna be a long night.”

  A long night that started with a long drive. Out of the city, into the desert.

  Ecko was a man long past caring for consequences. I had to get him away from civilians, away from anyone he could kill and reanimate to join his legion of the dead. I remembered the bloodless cambion back in his apartment, and his widow’s warning: Ecko had stolen a semi truck. I had a good idea what kind of cargo he was hauling, too. There were still twenty or so corpses missing from that morgue in Chicago.

  Emma wasn’t deigning to speak with me just yet—she was a pro at nursing a grudge—but Caitlin played ambassador and relayed her approval. The Silk Ranch, still a month from its grand reopening, was the perfect place for a showdown. The remote compound, with its antique-styled buildings and rustic front gate made from artificially aged driftwood, even looked like the set of a spaghetti western.

  I parked at the edge of the lot, thinking back to the last time the ranch had seen a showdown. And to Sullivan, buried—and hopefully dead—somewhere deep beneath my wheels and twenty tons of stone. Back then, renovations had just gotten started, construction equipment and pallets of drywall scattered everywhere. Now the work was down to the fine details. Fresh-laid ivory carpet adorned the floors of the main house, the welcome lounge windows decorated with frilled pink curtains. The decor fairly screamed “brothel,” but then again, it was supposed to.

  I wasn’t alone. Jennifer scurried from room to room, dispatching a handful of Calles—the most veteran, hardened shooters she had—to their posts to watch for Ecko’s arrival. While Bentley and Corman waited in a back room, Mama Margaux worked in the lounge, drawing an elaborate symbol on the carpet in glittering purple dust.

  “If he sends his dead men through that front door,” she told me, hunched low as she drew the sign, “cover your eyes. Gonna be one bright, beautiful flash, then a lot of falling bodies.”

  “Something I’ve always wondered,” I said.

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “Okay, Haitian zombies aren’t really zombies, right? I mean, they’re living people who’ve been drugged by a neurotoxin.”

  Her brow furrowed with concentration. “Mm-hmm.”

  “So…how is it you know so much about the undead kind of zombies, too?”

  Margaux stood up, dusting off her hands, and fixed me with a glare.

  “Daniel, do I come to your peristyle and tell you how to hold a Kanzo and rattle the Asson?”

  “Uh…I don’t know what any of that is.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “You don’t. Mind your business.
”

  I couldn’t argue with that. I made my way to the kitchen to sort my gear, the new stainless-steel appliances unplugged and still covered in protective plastic. Two fresh shells for Bessie, the sawed-off shotgun primed and ready. The Black Eye, waiting for me to put it on. And Howard Canton’s top hat. I still had no idea what it was capable of, if it was capable of anything at all, but Canton’s connection to both Ecko and the Enemy still taunted me. And when Ecko’s dead woman attacked Bentley and Corman’s apartment, there was no mistaking the sense of visceral loathing, something inside the hat reacting to the necromancer’s handiwork. So I kept it close, just in case.

  I would have felt even better if I had Canton’s mythical wand, but then again, I wasn’t going to be doing any magic with the Black Eye on. I could be powerful, or I could be invisible. Not both. And right now, I needed to be invisible.

  Caitlin found me. I was still looking at the Eye, weighing it in my hand like a block of ice.

  “He’ll be here any minute now,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She stepped close, her fingers trailing along my arm. “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

  “This amulet…” I shook my head. “It cuts you off from the flow of the universe. When you’re a sorcerer, you feel the winds of magic all the time. Like the air in your lungs. Even if you’re not actively using the power, you’re aware of it. No, you need it. You need it to survive. Putting this thing on, it’s like…jabbing needles in your ears and your eyes. All the light in the world goes out at once.”

  She took the amulet from my hands, her fingers light on the chain.

  “Then let me be your flame,” she said and clasped it around my throat. Then she held me as my soul went deaf and blind, and my knees buckled and the breath slipped from my lungs. She held me until I could stand again, until I found my feet and curled my hands into fists.

  “Now I’m invisible, just like him,” I said. “Equal footing, even odds. Do something for me?”

  “Name it, pet.”

  “When it’s time to throw down with Ecko, once we get his zombies out of the way…don’t help.”

  Caitlin arched an eyebrow. “Pardon?”

  “You remember when you killed Sullivan, right outside those doors? You asked me to stay out of it. Because it was your fight. You had to do it yourself.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Well, this one’s mine. I started this battle. And because I didn’t finish it when I should have, people I care about got hurt. That’s on me.”

  “You don’t have to make amends for that.”

  I reached for the shotgun.

  “It’s not about making amends for the past. It’s about being a better man, here and now. No more half measures, no more loose ends. Damien Ecko is my responsibility, Cait. And I’m going to live up to that responsibility by burying him right next to Sullivan.”

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  “We got movement!” came a shout from the second floor. “Headlights on the main road, coming in fast. Looks like a tractor-trailer rig.”

  Showtime. I strode out into the front lounge. “Mama, we good to go on our defenses?”

  “Every door and every window. He can come in, but his creatures can’t, not without gettin’ a nasty surprise.”

  “Okay,” I called out, “Mama and Caitlin, you’re on the front line against the dead. Jennifer, you and your guys are in reserve in case any slip past. Remember, everybody: forget about head shots, that shit’s for the movies. You aim for kneecaps and the spine. Immobilize them and stay clear of what’s left until Mama and Cait can mop ’em up. While you’re doing that, I’ll be hunting Ecko.”

  Simple plan. He’d be focused on finding Bentley and Corman, killing them to get at me. Meanwhile, I’d be sneaking up behind him, invisible to his magic, and putting two shotgun slugs straight into his heart of stone.

  “Uh,” called down the Calles sentry from above, “we got a problem—”

  I’d underestimated Damien Ecko one last time. One time too many.

  The front doors of the lounge exploded into tinder, walls buckling, roof groaning in, as the semi slammed into the house at fifty miles an hour.

  43.

  The next thing I knew I was sprawled on the torn carpet, choking on dust, blinded by the halogen glare of the headlights. The semi’s cab had breached the wall like a battering ram, front tires blown out and twisted at an angle, caught up on the splintered ruins of red velvet furniture. An air horn’s blare pierced my ears, blotting out the world with its raw scream. Coughing, throwing an arm over my face, I scrambled to my feet and skirted the side of the cab. The front door hung wide on a twisted hinge. No driver. Just a brick tied to the gas pedal and a man’s belt lashed to the steering wheel, holding the runaway truck on course.

  I climbed into the cab and killed the ignition, headlights dying as the horn bleated its last. Groans of the dead filled the silence. A horde of them, shambling, crawling, clambering in over the wreckage of the wall and the useless, shattered wards.

  Caitlin shot past me, enraged, grabbing one of the creatures from the edge of the pack by its throat and its wrist. She wrenched it around, hard, the corpse’s arm tearing free with a twist of dry red sinew. “Go,” she barked, her mouth lined with shark’s teeth. “We can handle this. Find Ecko.”

  Margaux darted by on the other side of the truck. In the corner of my eye, she was different. Taller, leaner, garbed in a purple suit that wasn’t there when I looked straight at her. Streamers of black light trailed behind her, following her outstretched fingers. A corpse lurched toward her, arms reaching out for the kill. Her fingers snapped, punctuating a burst of guttural Creole, and the dead man’s chest exploded.

  I ran for the back door. Bursting out into the desert night, heart pounding. Crouched low and cradling the shotgun in my hand. With the Black Eye around my neck, the gun was my only weapon. The cards in my pocket were only cards. Canton’s top hat, perched ridiculously on my head, was only a hat. But just like I couldn’t track Ecko, he couldn’t track me.

  We were two snipers, pursuing each other across the ruins of a battlefield by the pale moonlight. Sight, sound, and gut instinct. That was all we had.

  I crept around the building’s edge, keeping to the shadows, eyes squinted against the dark as I stared at the outbuildings. No swinging doors, no telltale hints. He was out there, somewhere close, watching while his minions laid siege.

  A glimmer of movement caught my eye. The tail of a coat in the cold night breeze as its owner ducked around a corner. I held my breath, counted to three, then jogged across the open, dry ground between the two buildings. I crouched low on the other side, keeping my ears perked.

  Then I saw him. Ecko strode out into the open, his back turned to me as he watched the battle unfold at the broken wall. He didn’t know he was being hunted. I emerged from cover, slow and easy, and inched up behind him.

  No last words, no cute patter. I’d get close—close enough to be certain, since two shells were all I had—and blast him straight to hell.

  I closed in. Ten feet. Then seven. Then five. I took one more step, raising the shotgun, taking aim—

  —and he spun with blistering speed, slapping the gun from my hands. It clattered to the dirt and I hit the ground a second later, Ecko’s open palm smashing into my chest like a pair of brass knuckles. I felt a rib crack, my breath jarred from my lungs, the top hat falling from my head and rolling to the side as I landed hard on my back.

  “Interesting technique, shielding yourself from me like that.” Ecko tapped one of his ears. “I heard you breathing from twenty feet away.”

  I ripped the amulet from my throat and hurled it away. The universe came flooding back in, the winds of magic roiling around us like a gathering storm, singing their sweet siren song. I could breathe again. My cards leaped into my outstretched hand.

  Ecko’s foot came slamming down. I cried out as my splinted fingers snapped, cards scattering everywhe
re. He kept my hand pinned under his foot, regarding me with an amused smile. His other foot kicked the shotgun away, out of my flailing reach.

  “I have walked the Earth for over three thousand years, Mr. Faust. And you genuinely thought you could challenge me? Your insolence infuriates me more than your deeds. You’re an upstart with no respect for history.” He glanced at the fallen hat and laughed. “Oh my, is that…is that Canton’s hat? Good old Canton the Magnificent. You thought that would help, did you? Once again, you only know a sliver of the story. Just enough knowledge to get you in trouble.”

  “What’s the connection,” I grunted through gritted teeth. “Tell me.”

  “Oh, just another would-be champion looking to end my life. I faced him in…mm, want to say fifty-six? Fifty-seven? Good music back then. Anyway, I killed him. Too bad you couldn’t find his wand. Now that was a powerful relic. With that you might have had a chance. The hat…is just a hat. Sorry.”

  He crouched beside me, one shoe planted on my broken fingers, grinding his heel down.

  “You don’t have the power to defeat me,” he said, amused. “You never did. You never could. I am the chosen servant of the King of Worms, Mr. Faust. His acolyte, his emissary. And now…now I’ll show you that power firsthand.”

  He raised one hand high above his head, fingers hooked into claws as he spat an incantation in a twisting tongue. A spell, a prayer, a ritual call to the dark. I struggled, helpless as thunder rippled across the desert flats. The gathering storm clouds, blotting out the stars, rumbled in answer to his words. His voice rose to a crescendo and then…

  Nothing.

  He blinked, tilting his head at me.

  “Apparently, the king doesn’t feel like indulging me tonight.”

  “Your gods abandoned you,” I croaked. “Maybe he has too.”

  “Magic isn’t an exact science. That’s all right. We can do this the old-fashioned way.”

  Ecko straddled my chest, dead weight pressing down, and wrapped his fingers around my throat.