The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Page 7

  “I met Angelo Mancuso back in Chicago,” I said. “This whole deal is his baby. He’s looking to step up and prove himself to his old man. But that doesn’t mean the old man signed off on it.”

  Jennifer put her hands on her hips. “You think he’s going behind the don’s back?”

  “I think this whole war is some stupid, reckless bullshit instigated by a stupid, reckless punk with a trust fund. Angelo’s a hothead who wants to play big shot. On the other hand, his dad Dominic has been running the Chicago underworld since the seventies. You don’t keep the throne for over forty years by being sloppy. So…I’m gonna go talk to him.”

  “Talk to him,” Jennifer echoed, her voice flat.

  “I’m not on the Commission. I’m not a target.”

  “Maybe you’re forgettin’ how they framed you for murder.”

  “Okay, so I might have pissed Angelo off a little,” I said. “Fair enough. But his dad’s a businessman. He has to be. So I’ll go, I’ll be nice and friendly, and we’ll talk business. If I can show him how far off the rails his kid’s gone, he might yank Angelo’s leash for us.”

  “Still rather put two bullets in him,” Jennifer said.

  “No argument here, but you heard what Angelo’s soldiers pulled this morning. I was there, Jen. I saw the bodies lined up on the sidewalk. Civilians. And dead civilians are bad for business. Metro’s on red alert, and they’re gonna be crawling up all of our asses, looking to lock up anybody they can get their hands on. How about, before this bomb really goes off, you give me a chance to snip the fuse?”

  Standing behind us, Yong cleared his throat.

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” he said.

  I held up a finger. “Didn’t ask you, but thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “Fine.” Jennifer relented with a frustrated sigh. “I’ll round everybody up and find a cozy place to lay low in the meantime. You be careful out there. Just because you didn’t take your seat on the Commission don’t mean they won’t assume otherwise.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m hip-deep in this mess. Whether I like it or not.”

  10.

  Two hours later I was nestled in a blue vinyl seat on an American Airlines flight, traveling first class, winging it east over a blanket of white-silver clouds. Caitlin sat next to me, one leg primly crossed over the other while she tapped out emails on her phone. Bringing Caitlin along for the ride hadn’t been my original plan. I’d just asked her if she could call Royce and guarantee I wouldn’t have any trouble from the locals. The Court of Night-Blooming Flowers could get a little territorial even at the best of times.

  “Nonsense,” she told me. “Give me ten minutes to rearrange a few meetings, and I’ll come with you. Yes, I could make a courtesy call, but Royce’s protection only counts for so much these days. I think Nadine is angling for his job. And considering the encounter you just had with her and her daughter—”

  I thought back to Nadine, visiting me at Eisenberg. How one of her lackeys had cut our reunion short, telling her that her kid was about to go on some kind of a hunt.

  “I heard she had a daughter,” I said, “I’ve never met her, though.”

  Caitlin tilted her head at me. “Of course you did. At Winter. You were talking to her when we left the conference room. It’s very cute that you pretend you don’t look at other women, but I’d think all that black leather would stick in your memory a bit.”

  I felt the blood drain from my cheeks.

  “Oh. Her. Oh. Huh. I just assumed she was Nadine’s bodyguard or something.”

  “She is. Bodyguard, assassin, quite a skilled bounty hunter, and an elite member of the Order of Chainmen. Why?”

  “I…might have called her mother an asshole.”

  Caitlin stared at me. She didn’t need to say a word. Her look was eloquent enough, making me feel like a little kid with a bad report card.

  “I,” she finally said, “am definitely coming with you. You clearly need to be chaperoned for your own safety.”

  At least she upgraded our tickets. I wasn’t a big fan of flying, but extra legroom and a glass of merlot—or three—went a long way toward easing my anxiety. Our plane glided down from a golden sunset, wings glowing like hammered brass in torchlight, and below I saw the lights of Chicago ignite like fireflies in the long shadows. Cars snaked along the ribbon of Lake Shore Drive, tiny as toys and jammed up solid, the city’s commuters emptying out the town on their nightly exodus to the suburbs.

  I spent most of the flight with my head back in Nevada. Remembering my pilgrimage to the Mourner of the Red Rocks and trying to make sense of her cryptic advice. That, and looking for an angle of attack. The Mourner’s warnings aside, I wasn’t going to stop hunting for the man with the Cheshire smile. Couldn’t stop. I shelled out for the in-flight WiFi, wincing at the twenty-buck surcharge, just to give my brain something to do.

  I had an email waiting, from an address I didn’t recognize. Short and sweet, just a link and a message that read: “Daniel. Care for some inspirational reading? — A Friend.”

  The link took me to a storefront page for a novel, released a week ago: The Killing Floor by Carolyn Saunders. I scrolled past the cover art, showing a grim-faced fantasy swordsman on the edge of an arctic plain, and read the synopsis.

  Nobody has ever escaped from the Iceberg. It’s a wizard’s stronghold deep in the hinterlands of the frozen north, staffed by brutal guards and surrounded by trackless tundra. Framed for murder and snared in a deadly curse, Donatello Faustus lands behind bars with a target on his back—

  “What the shit?” I blurted.

  Caitlin looked my way. I turned my phone, letting her read the screen. One pert eyebrow slowly lifted. She took out her own phone and paid for the WiFi.

  I bought the book and downloaded an e-reader app, skimming pages as fast as my fingertip could flick across the screen. Most of the book was harmless, just your average beach reading with a little gore and kinky sex to spice things up, but when the plot rolled around to the ordeals of “Donatello,” I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. It was a pretty familiar story. After all, I’d lived it.

  Donatello eyed the madman warily, and the potion in his trembling, outstretched hand. Could it really be magic? The man with the Cheshire smile had banished him to this prison, doomed him to rot forever. How could he pass up the chance, however slight, for an escape? He downed the potion, and the world swung dizzyingly around him as his stomach lurched.

  He found himself outside once more, standing in a vision. A vision of the city of Mirenze, laid to waste, its bell towers and salmon rooftops in ruin…

  The details were all over the map, like a story relayed through a game of telephone ten layers deep, but the broad strokes were all in place: my imprisonment at Eisenberg Correctional, meeting Buddy the Prophet, my first doomed attempt at an escape—the prison garage, in this version of the story, recast as a stable where the corrupt wizard-king kept his flying griffins. After that point the whole story went off the rails. Donatello Faustus, the master thief, went on to slay a dragon and bed a pair of leather-clad vampire vixens, both of which I was pretty sure didn’t happen in real life.

  “Even still,” I murmured. “What?”

  “Indeed,” Caitlin replied, her voice dry. She’d downloaded some of Saunders’s other books, speed-reading as we touched down on the O’Hare runway. Momentum pushed me forward against my seatbelt, my ears popping from the pressure as the brakes roared.

  A brisk evening wind whistled down the access tunnel as we disembarked. Caitlin still had her phone out, hunting and pecking with slender fingertips as we walked. Out in the concourse, we grabbed a plastic table at the half-empty food court.

  “This is flatly unacceptable,” Caitlin said. “This person not only knows about the courts of hell, one of her novels explicitly refers to the Court of Jade Tears. Ruled by Prince ‘Citron’ instead of Sitri, but still.”

  “Check this out,” I said, showing her my screen w
ith a highlighted passage. “The Tiger’s Garden. In her version, it’s a tavern for medieval wizards, but she describes the damn place down to the carpeting. You just can’t do that.”

  The occult underground had never been big on authority figures. Every now and then, some genius tried to start a Council of Magic or some other grandiose ruling body, and they generally wound up dead in an alley with portions of their own anatomy shoved down their throats. We only had one real rule, the one no sorcerer ever wanted to get caught breaking: just like Fight Club, the first rule of magic was that you kept your damn mouth shut about it. While she wasn’t exactly shouting the truth from the rooftops, there were enough nuggets of fact buried in Saunders’s books to get her in serious hot water.

  With me, first and foremost, seeing as I was the involuntary star of her latest epic.

  “All right,” I said, “one crisis at a time. Let’s do what we came to do, stop this gang war before it gets any worse, and then we’ll track down our wayward author.”

  Caitlin pursed her lips, reluctantly putting her phone away. “Agreed. And how did you find out about this…story?”

  “An anonymous tip. I’m gonna sic Pixie on it, see if she can trace the sender. Somebody wanted me to find out about this, but I’m not sure what they’re trying to—”

  I realized Caitlin was looking past me, over my shoulder. I turned in my chair and followed her gaze. Mack and Zeke were marching straight for us, just a pair of ordinary college kids wearing pro-wrestling T-shirts and murder in their eyes. Mack had put on another ten pounds since the last time I saw him.

  “No,” I said, holding up my hand as they approached our table.

  “But—” Mack started to say.

  “No,” I said. “We’re busy. Zip it.”

  “You can’t just—” Zeke said.

  “No,” Caitlin told him. “Leave.”

  “We’re calling our boss.” Mack bristled.

  “Buh-bye,” I told him. I waited until they’d stomped off, swallowed by the tourist crowds, to look at Caitlin. “Seriously, Mack needs to lay off the soft pretzels. I’m starting to worry about that kid.”

  “I assumed it was the cinnamon rolls. He had a dribble of frosting on his shirt. Shall we take our leave?”

  “Definitely.”

  We jumped in a cab, riding against the nighttime flow, from the outskirts of the burbs into the concrete canyons of Chicago, rattling over bumpy pavement and swerving around construction cones. We sat under the rusty canopy of the elevated train tracks at an intersection. A train rattled past above our heads, trestles shaking, leaving us with the dentist-drill squeal of metal on stubborn metal. We got out of the cab two blocks from our final destination and walked the rest of the way; where we were headed, that was considered a general courtesy.

  The parking lot was the same as always: Italian sports cars and Bondo-sprayed wrecks parked shoulder to shoulder under the pale glow of a fizzing sodium light. No security guards. They didn’t need any. I knocked on the back door, knuckles rapping on cold and battered sheet metal. The door swung wide, and a thin man in a scarlet vest and a black tie greeted us with a carefully reserved smile as he looked us up and down.

  “Hound of the Court of Jade Tears,” Caitlin said, cutting him off before he could say a word, “and her consort. You’ll let us in now.”

  The doorman’s eyes went wide as he scurried out of our way. He beckoned us in with a sweep of his arm.

  “Of course. Welcome, esteemed guests. Welcome to the Bast Club. Please observe our simple rules: speak no true names, lay hands on none without their invitation, and speak no secrets that are not yours to share.”

  Nice rules, in principle. In practice, more like shaky guidelines, enforced at random by the club’s absentee landlord. As far as I knew, Management had never made a personal appearance. He preferred to work through proxies—like the shadows that wriggled and squirmed along the Victorian-era wallpaper, silhouettes of millipedes and crouching spiders that didn’t line up with anything in the room. Caitlin and I walked arm in arm across a grainy hardwood floor cut to look like pieces in a massive jigsaw puzzle, stepping out into the main lounge.

  It took me a second to get my bearings. At least the local magicians’ hangout back home, the Tiger’s Garden, had the tang of familiarity. A visit to the Garden was like a trip to the old neighborhood watering hole, all friendly faces and drinks mixed by a bartender who always knew exactly what you wanted. By contrast, walking into the Bast Club felt like taking a hit of bad acid. The air crackled with wild tangents of loose magic, dancing like DNA helixes in my second sight and playing bursts of static mingled with discordant chimes in my inner ears. I had to take a breath, steadying myself against Caitlin’s arm, until the rush passed and I found my footing again.

  Another rush was coming on fast, a burst of adrenaline on two legs cutting her way through a crowd of bloody-eyed cambion. Fredrika Vinter—Freddie to most, Dances to her close personal friends—cradled a martini glass in one hand and reached out with the other, cooing her delight. Her curly mane of fire-engine-red hair flopped over one shoulder of her silk dress, the fabric adorned with oversized and ruffled accents.

  “Darlings,” she said and pulled Caitlin into a hug. They kissed each other’s cheeks, and then Freddie paused as she looked her over. “Dear, who are you wearing? Really, now.”

  Caitlin tilted her head, looking vaguely offended. “It’s Prada.”

  “It should be me. The answer should always be me. I’m sending you a new wardrobe.” Freddie looked my way. “And you brought my favorite thief! Old Dusty hasn’t found you yet, I take it.”

  “He’s gonna have to get in line,” I told her. “As threats to life and limb go this week, Damien Ecko isn’t even in the top five.”

  “I wish you’d take him more seriously,” said the woman who approached us from the side, her long, oval face wrapped under a powder-blue headscarf.

  “Doctor Khoury,” I said, inclining my head as I looked her way. “Good to see you again.”

  “He is not to be underestimated.” Halima turned to Caitlin. “Take it from those of us who have lived in his shadow for many, many years. His madness is that of the fox, not the rabid dog. Desperation will only amplify his cunning and his determination to survive.”

  Freddie tossed back her glass, drinking deep, then eyed the goblet like she wasn’t sure where all the booze had gone.

  “And on that cheery note,” she said, “I need a refill. Let’s grab that nook over there and get caught up.”

  Halima furrowed her brow, standing up on her toes to look over the heads of the milling crowd. “I think it’s occupied.”

  “They’re saving those seats for us,” Freddie said. “They just don’t know it yet. I’ll explain it to them.”

  11.

  Five minutes later we were seated on plush red velvet divans in a recessed nook, comfortable on the sidelines of the chaos. A waitress in a dress lined with bright copper buttons whirled past with a tray of drinks, and the first sip of Jack and Coke sliced through my nervous tension. I’d spent two weeks sidelined from life’s little pleasures—alcohol and sex, mainly—after the concussion I’d earned trying to bust out of prison. Now that Doc Savoy had finally written me a clean bill of health, I was making up for lost time.

  “Happy as I am to see you,” Freddie told us, “I’m not sure Dusty’s hometown is the best place to hide from him.”

  “Not hiding. We’ve just got bigger fish to fry.” I paused, something occurring to me. “Did you show Halima the video from the morgue?”

  “I have no desire to see such things,” Halima said, her voice soft.

  “It’s just that, well, you know him pretty well, right?”

  “An accurate statement.”

  “He wrote something on the wall,” I told her, “and I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. It was a message to me: ‘lighten your heart.’ Any idea what that means?”

  Halima sighed, cradling a glass of club s
oda in her cupped hands.

  “Damien still believes in the old gods of Egypt, though he’s forsaken them—and they, if they exist, have forsaken him. It was once believed that the spirits of the dead stood before Djehuty, lord of wisdom, and their hearts were weighed on a scale against a single white feather. If your heart was as light as the feather, you’d be welcomed into the afterlife.”

  “And if not?” I asked.

  “If not,” she said, “you’d be thrown to Ammit, the eater of souls, to be devoured and consigned to eternal darkness. Damien is telling you to prepare yourself for judgment. And he is promising, by the strongest words he knows—the words of his heritage and his homeland—that he will not stop until he has sent you there.”

  “Cheerful,” Freddie said, breaking the silence that descended upon the nook. She tossed back a swig of vodka. “Flag the waitress down. I’m going to need another of these in about five more minutes.”

  I contemplated my glass. “Look, Ecko’s a problem, sure, but there’s a lot more on the line right now. I need a sit-down with Dominic Mancuso. His kid’s running riot all over Vegas. There’s a detective in Metro who knows about my miraculous resurrection. If I don’t cool this feud down before it boils over, it’s my neck on the line.”

  “Not the kind of social circles I run in, darling,” Freddie said. She glanced up to the light sconces, soft tongues of fire flickering behind frosted green glass. “I am an artist. That said, it is Columbus Day weekend. Not the shindig it used to be, but Chicago still throws quite the parade. And the elder Mancuso—in his capacity as the city’s favorite philanthropist and entrepreneur—will be the grand marshal as usual.”

  “I was hoping for something a little more intimate.”