The Castle Doctrine (Daniel Faust Book 6) Page 8

  “Then you want the pre-parade party. Tomorrow night. It’s a private fiesta for the city’s movers and shakers. The mayor, a few aldermen, the wealthier half of the chamber of commerce. In a word, boring. In two words, fucking boring. But if you can get past the front door, you’ve got a better-than-average chance of bending Dominic’s ear. It’s at the Willowbrook Ballroom; they rent the whole place out for the night so they can talk about…I don’t know. Hedge funds? Whatever boring old men talk about. Security is tight, too. They don’t want any reporters sneaking in and recording anything naughty.”

  “Sounds like our best bet,” I said. “Any chance you’ve got a line on a guest list?”

  Freddie downed her drink and waved her empty glass. “Amy. Amy, Amy, Amy. You are expressly needed.”

  I recognized the young woman, rail-thin in a pinstripe pantsuit and black silk blouse. Amy Xun had been a big help the last time I was in Chicago, though she was the one who came out ahead of all of us, walking off with the stolen prize at a poker tournament, her hands clean as the driven snow while we set up Ecko to take the fall for it. Coming out ahead in every deal was pretty much her thing. She favored me with the slightest bow of her head, her dark eyes sizing me up and quietly assessing the size of my wallet.

  “Guest list for the Willowbrook Columbus Day party,” Freddie told her. “Can you get it?”

  Amy held up a finger. “Five minutes.”

  It took her two. She came back to the nook as silently as she’d left, cradling her phone and giving the screen an appraising glance.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And?” Freddie replied.

  “I will trade it for the location of the gravestone of Goody Naughton.”

  Freddie rolled her eyes. “Want me to throw in the Holy Grail and the Shroud of Turin while you’re at it? It’s a guest list for a holiday party. Get real. I’ll give you fifty bucks, cash.”

  “Five words,” Amy said, regarding Freddie with an appraising eye, “of the true chant of the Polarian jeremiad.”

  Freddie sighed. “One word.”

  “Three.”

  “Three, and they come from any part of the chant I want.”

  Amy pursed her lips and thought it over.

  “Deal,” she said. She and Freddie stepped away from the nook, looking for a quiet corner to confer in the shadows.

  Freddie came back just as my phone buzzed in my pocket. She gave me a faintly smug smile as she dropped onto the plush divan, cradling a fresh cosmo.

  “She just texted you the list,” Freddie said. “Such a drama queen. You’re welcome, by the way.”

  Caitlin inched closer to the edge of her divan, a glass of Malbec resting on the curve of her knee. “Grateful as always. We’ll repay the favor.”

  “Anything for my BFF. But I know that look: something else is making your world all topsy-turvy. Dish.”

  Soon enough, Freddie and Halima were sitting side by side on the couch, eyes wide as they read the screen of Caitlin’s phone.

  “Some of the details in these books.” Halima fell silent for a moment, shaking her head. “You just can’t do that.”

  “That’s what I said,” I told her.

  Freddie’s lip curled in a pout. “And yet, no mention of a glamorous and devastatingly witty fashion-designer-slash-socialite. Zero out of five stars, would not skim again.”

  “I’ll be sure to mention that when we drop in on her.”

  Halima’s eyes met mine. “I wouldn’t advise it. Paying a visit, that is.”

  “Yeah? Why not?”

  She handed the phone back to Caitlin.

  “Consider,” she said, “that a very powerful foe orchestrated your imprisonment and intended for you to die there. You escaped, throwing a pole into the spokes of his plan, and disappeared. Now an anonymous ‘friend’ points you toward a freshly published novel obviously designed to get your attention. You’re being called out, Daniel. This feels like a trap.”

  “Sorry, Doc, but my curiosity isn’t going to let me walk away from this.”

  “I know. Which is exactly why it feels like a trap. And at the very least, a dangerous distraction. Damien Ecko isn’t going to wait patiently while you go hunting for strange authors.”

  “Like I said, he’s gonna have to get in line.”

  Freddie stretched languidly, almost purring. “At least the next few days shouldn’t be boring. So, Cait, seeing as the party isn’t until tomorrow night, how about you and I finally go out and get a bite to eat together?”

  My stomach rumbled in sympathy. “I could go for some dinner myself.”

  Freddie and Caitlin both looked my way. Freddie, visibly amused, batting her eyelashes at me, and Caitlin with a barely audible sigh. Freddie sidled onto the divan on my other side and leaned in close to whisper in my ear. In my peripheral vision, her face rippled and changed. A cheek charred black by arctic frostbite. A blue and half-lipless mouth, curled in a leering smile.

  “You’re always fun to have around,” Freddie said, “but where we’re going, you wouldn’t care for the cuisine.”

  On my opposite side, Caitlin patted my knee and rose, still cradling her wineglass.

  “I’ll meet you back at the hotel, pet. Don’t wait up.”

  Halima watched them go, arm in arm. She glanced my way.

  “Do you like shawarma?” she asked. “I know a good spot, not far from here.”

  * * *

  Shawarma it was. We sat across from each other in a booth in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant down the block from the Bast Club. The brown vinyl bench was understuffed, and the hard coil of a spring jabbed into the small of my back as I looked over a paper menu speckled with suspicious stains. Slabs of meat sizzled behind the front counter, slowly turning on fat skewers and filling the air with a spicy, gingery aroma I could almost taste. We split an appetizer, a dish of hummus surrounded by lemon wedges and strips of beef like the spokes of a savory wheel. Halima squeezed one of the lemons with careful fingers, drizzling a glossy trail over the pureed chickpeas.

  “Something I don’t get,” I said. “You and her.”

  “Hmm?” She looked up at me, uncertain.

  “You’re not…like a lot of people in the underground. You work a legit job, you stay away from the shady stuff, you’re, ah—can’t think of a word for it.”

  “A decent human being?”

  “Ouch,” I said. “I was gonna go with something like ‘rigorously ethical,’ but okay, that shoe fits.”

  “I try to hold myself to certain standards,” Halima said. “I don’t always succeed, but that’s the nature of existence. We are flawed creations, faced with one choice: to fall further into our flaws, or strive for something better. Inshallah, I will continue to strive.”

  “So what’s with you and Freddie? I mean, you two are tight.”

  “Best friends,” she said. “Have been for years.”

  I dipped a strip of beef into the hummus. The flavor, rich and lemony and touched with a hint of cinnamon, made me think of olive groves in some Mediterranean paradise.

  “You know what they’re probably doing tonight, right?”

  A tiny smile rose to Halima’s lips, though her eyes held a trace of some distant sadness. She glanced over her shoulder, making sure nobody was close enough to overhear.

  “Is that a delicate way of asking,” she said, “if I’m aware that my dear friend dines on human flesh? And that she—along with your paramour, I might add—is hunting for a suitable victim at this very moment?”

  “More or less.”

  Halima shrugged. “Dances has a condition which necessitates a very strict, very specific diet, once every month or so. I think gazelles are beautiful, but I don’t fault a lion for eating them. Every creature has to survive in its own way. Besides, her methods of selection are quite rigorous. She hunts…other hunters. Predators. People who degrade the world by their very presence. It isn’t ideal, but she makes the most of her situation. I notice you don’t seem
to be having ethical qualms over it.”

  “We’ve already established that I’m a lousy person. And Caitlin…Caitlin is Caitlin. She’s gonna do what she’s gonna do.”

  “What she’s going to do,” Halima said, “is mourn your passing, if you don’t attend to your priorities. You’re running in five places at once, while Damien Ecko moves in only one direction: toward you, as swift and as inerrant as an arrow dipped in cobra venom.”

  I rested my hands on the table. “Look, Doc, I realize you’ve got history with the guy and you’re skittish. I know he’s not a cream puff. Believe me, I’ve seen his zombies in action. But at the end of the day, he’s just a necromancer with a tiny bag of tricks. I’ve faced bigger guys than him. They’re all in the ground, and I’m still here.”

  “Just a necromancer,” she said. “As one might say, just a nuclear weapon. You think you know what you’re up against. You don’t.”

  “Then enlighten me.”

  She didn’t say a word until we ordered our entrees, her lips pursed in taciturn silence. I could hear the cogs of her brain turning, weighing her options, deciding which cards to show and which ones to hold close. I dug into my dinner, chicken shawarma wrapped in pita, the flour-speckled bread seared with golden grill marks. Her order—chicken kufta kabobs, lying in a nest of greasy wax paper—sat untouched.

  “I’ll start at the beginning, then,” she told me. “Damien Ecko is just the latest of his many, many names. He changes them every few decades, discarding identities like soiled linens when he outlives them. His true first name is Kaemsekhem. Prince Kaemsekhem, of the Sixteenth Dynasty. And he is over thirty-six hundred years old.”

  12.

  “Much of Egypt’s Sixteenth Dynasty has been lost to the mists of history,” Halima told me, “and we have him to thank for it. I can tell you what I know: that the young prince had a talent for heka, the magical arts of his homeland, and a strong teacher. Djehutimesu, his father’s court magician, took Damien under his wing. Djehutimesu was a master of his craft, and…hmm. Interesting. Something just occurred to me.”

  I tilted my head at her, my pita halfway to my mouth. “What?”

  “He was a bit of a trickster, they say. An illusionist, with a scoundrel’s reputation but essentially a good heart.”

  “Sounds like a fun guy.”

  “I’m sure he was,” Halima said. “He was not, however, a good judge of character. He couldn’t see the shadow inside of Damien, his insatiable need for more and more power. When he learned everything Djehutimesu could teach him, the prince turned his eye toward…darker paths of knowledge. Tell me, have you ever heard of a creature called the King of Worms?”

  Heard of it? I’d met the thing, twice, on a trance-induced ride to the heart of madness. I’d stood at the foot of his colossal throne, gazing up at the moldering corpse in royal rags, and asked for a favor. Once out of rage. The second time, alone and trapped behind bars, I was just desperate for a weapon. Both times, the king had been happy to oblige. His gifts, he’d reminded me, were free for the taking.

  That is, if you can call a psychic maggot squirming across your brain, leaving slug trails of toxic filth in its wake, a gift. I shuddered at the memory, my scalp crawling like a blanket of lice. I ran nervous fingers through my hair, reassuring myself, trying to pass it off as a casual gesture. The king wasn’t a man, wasn’t a demon. He was something different, older, steeped in insanity and corruption I didn’t even have a frame of reference to understand.

  “You have heard of it.” Halima lifted her chin, squinting as she stared into my eyes. “No. More than heard. Oh, Daniel. What did you do?”

  “My back was up against the wall,” I told her. “I needed a little help.”

  “And that is how it always begins with his kind. Just a little. A little edge, a scrap of secrets, a helping hand when you need it most. And it’s always free. Then you go back, again, and again, and you take a little more, and a little more—”

  I set my pita down and folded my arms. I’d lost my appetite.

  “I’m not going back. And yeah, I know how temptation works. I’m dating a demon, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “Knowing and resisting are two different things. Damien, for instance, quickly became an apt pupil. The King of Worms taught him the art of necromancy. And inch by inch, with each new foul ritual he mastered, corruption overtook him. A rot from within that demanded he resort to extreme measures to preserve his own life.”

  “How extreme are we talking here?”

  “He used his defiling magic upon himself. With sutures and salt and clay jars for his organs and an iron nose hook for scooping out his own brain.”

  Halima reached for her Styrofoam cup, sipping ginger ale through a fat, red-striped straw.

  “In an act of supreme will and inconceivable suffering, Damien Ecko mummified himself,” she said. “And then he brought himself back to life. He is one of his own undead creations. Just as strong, just as relentless, just as indestructible. More so, in fact, given the wards and amulets that shield him from harm.”

  I stared at her.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “He’s a living mummy? Like, bandages and beetles and Boris Karloff?”

  She nodded. “The man you see is not his true guise. He’s cloaked himself in the semblance of life, using the illusions Djehutimesu taught him. He can’t bear to see his true face, not now. Not after centuries of rot and vile magic have taken their toll. His first teacher, I might add, also became his first victim. Djehutimesu confronted his wayward student, trying to turn him back to righteousness. Damien swatted him like a fly.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Hard to know,” Halima said, “as our records of the Sixteenth Dynasty crumble at points. There was a plague, you see. A blistering pox that swept across the land, killing cattle and men alike, leaving them to rot and choke upon their own bile. Cities toppled and the throne fell as the corpses piled high.”

  “Ecko,” I said.

  “An offering to the King of Worms. Destroying his own people, along with the last scraps of his humanity. You know as well as I, Daniel, that nothing is truly free. Payment always comes due in the end.”

  We fell into an uneasy silence. I poked at my food, thinking back to my last encounter with Ecko, in a warehouse packed with his resurrected monsters. A glimmer of hope sparked in the back of my mind, spurred by the memory.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “This is good news. We’ve killed his creations before. About a dozen of the damn things, in fact. They’re afraid of fire, they burn like Roman candles, and I know a vodou priestess who can drop the living dead as easy as snipping puppet strings. If he’s like them, this’ll be no sweat.”

  “Like them, but a higher order of being. He’s no animal, going into a panic at the sight of an open flame. And he’s had thirty-six hundred years to master the arts of sorcery. Beyond his own spells—and he’s forgotten more about magic than you or I will ever learn—he’s crafted traditional amulets of warding and sewn them underneath his skin. He has all the benefits of the undead, and none of the weaknesses.”

  “Help me out, Doc. If he’s coming for me, I need a plan. There’s got to be some way to take him down for good.”

  Halima bit down on her bottom lip, thinking it over. She tapped the tip of her straw.

  “There is one way,” she said. “Damien Ecko has a heart of stone, and I mean that quite literally. It’s his amulet of animation, carved upon a fist-sized rock and sewn inside his chest where his human heart used to be. Destroy the stone and you destroy the man. But it’s not that simple. If it were, I would have done it myself. His speed and strength are incredible. He doesn’t sleep, ever. He can hear the buzzing of a fly’s wings from a hundred paces away. The only way to get at his heart is to take him by surprise, and he can’t be surprised. You’ll be dead before you try.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I can come up with some neat surprises when I put my mind t
o it.”

  After that, there wasn’t much left to talk about. I took a cab to the Four Seasons. Then I lingered alone in a gloomy bedroom and listened to the steady, strong hum of the air conditioner, waiting for Caitlin. I drifted off to sleep, only stirring at the sound of the shower running, alarm clock glowing 2:47 in the dark. She slipped between the sheets, molding the curve of her warm body against mine, and I drifted away again until the sunrise.

  * * *

  We spent the morning with a couple of caramel macchiatos and the party guest list, looking up the who’s who of the local political scene. I had a plan for getting into that ballroom, but the target had to be just right. Nobody who traveled with heavy security, nobody who would raise any alarms if they went missing for a few hours. In other words, we needed the least-important important people in the room.

  “These two.” I circled the last couple of candidates. “Connor Townsend and his wife Lois. He’s an investment manager who dabbles in philanthropy, and a big investor in the mayor’s reelection campaign. Looks like that’s the only reason they snared an invite: they’re cash machines on legs.”

  “All right,” Caitlin said, “and what do we do next?”

  “Didn’t Freddie say she was going to fix you up with a fresh wardrobe? Might want to give her a call. We’ve gotta look presentable for the party.”

  She looked more than presentable. Caitlin eyed herself in a floor-length mirror, sheathed in a light cream gown that hugged her curves like snakeskin and shimmered as she turned left and then right. I was a little less fashionable, dressed in a shabby chauffeur’s outfit we rented from a costume store on the other side of town. A squared blue cap sat flat on my head, the brim smelling like old marinara sauce, and a starchy black tie coiled tight as a noose around my throat. I’d rented a tuxedo, too, but for now it stayed safe in its plastic dry-cleaning shroud.

  The next thing I needed was a gun. I figured hunting one down would take most of the afternoon, but Freddie slipped her hand into her purse and obliged me with hers: a slim nickel-plated .22 with a snub nose.