Made for Sin (13 page)

“Go on, now. You let me worry about this. Didn't I say I'd take care of it?”

“Yeah, you go,” Nielsen said. “I'll talk to your Mr. Speare for you.”

It didn't necessarily mean they'd get the truth from him, but they were over the first major hurdle, at least, and Speare could push his way over the second after she left the balcony.

Ardeth managed to look both disappointed and relieved at the same time. “You'll call me if you need something from me?”

“Sure, Ardi, sure.” Nielsen stood up. “Of course we will. Come on, Speare, let's go into my study.”

The study was located in the back of the apartment, down a long hall darkened with velvet curtains in a dusky blue shade. Something about it bothered Speare. At first he thought maybe it was because Ardeth wasn't coming—as they'd planned, she'd left them as soon as they got inside. But he realized as his footsteps began to echo oddly in his ears and his heart started to beat faster that it had nothing to do with her.

That was proven when the beast started to whine and twist itself around in his head. Its horrible skin made the most sickening dry rustling noises when it did that—when it was getting hungry, or when it was bothered by something—and it increased with every step they took toward the tall white door at the end of the hall.

Nothing Speare could do but try to shut it up and keep going, though. What was he supposed to do, tell Nielsen he was sorry, but they'd have to do this another time because the demon inside his head felt funny about the room where they were headed? Yeah, not the best idea.

“So I think Ardeth is just confused,” Speare said. Did his voice sound odd? Thick, or something? It felt harder to get the words out than it should have. “She said she's not very good at asking questions, and she doesn't want your feelings to be hurt, so she asked if I'd talk to you.”

“That's fine.” They reached the door; Nielsen paused with his fingers on the handle, one of those long silver ones that looked like question marks facing a backplate. His eyes, sharp and aware beneath papery lids, regarded Speare with a mixture of confidentiality and threat. “I don't want her hurt. I promised Mickey, God rest him, that I'd look out for her.”

“I don't want her hurt, either.” The second he said it he realized how true it was. “I just want to help.”

“You're not going to find the missing item.”

Well, wasn't that interesting. Nielsen wasn't even pretending not to know what discrepancy Ardeth might have found or they were looking for. “I'm pretty good at finding things,” Speare said.

“Not this.” Nielsen sighed. “But if you're fool enough—or want in her pants bad enough, is my guess—to want to try, I won't stop you.”

Jesus, the old man didn't hold back, did he? As if it had anything to do with Ardeth's pants. And as if he really wanted—well, no. He couldn't lie to himself and say he didn't really want to, not anymore. God, did he want to.

That wasn't the point, though. He opened his mouth to argue, but before he could formulate the words, Nielsen pushed the door open.

Whatever Speare was going to say disappeared from his head, thrown out by the thick, heavy wave of darkness that hit him in the face. Whatever he was going to say was lost beneath the beast's earthshaking, head-pounding roar, a sound so loud and deep and strong that it made his knees weak. Fuck, what—what was that? What the fuck was in that room?

Whatever it was, he did not want to get closer to it. He didn't want to see it, he didn't want to touch it, he didn't want to stand within ten feet of it, because the beast was thrashing around like a shark caught on a fishing line and he was scared, honestly scared, that it was going to burst through. It was too powerful, stronger than it should have been.

But Nielsen was already at the enormous, ornate gilded desk set off from the opposite wall, facing the door, his eyebrows high with expectation. “Well, come on.”

The first step over the threshold was like stepping into an arctic lake, a lake murky and teeming with serpents. It was so hard to take that step. His legs didn't feel connected to his body. His eyes didn't want to focus. Shit, this was bad.

Two of the walls were lined with bookcases, and on those bookcases sat all kinds of artifacts, expensive items, occult items. Skulls and orbs and silver caskets full of bones and relics, gemstones and blades and locks of hair in glass cases. The fruits of a lifetime of stealing from the greatest magical minds, the strongest and most powerful sorcerers. All of it there in that room.

And somewhere on one of those shelves, or in one of those cabinets, lay an item that made the beast throb with so much power Speare didn't know how long he'd be able to hold on to it. “So this item we're looking for. Why do you think we won't find it? Where is it?”

“I think you ought to tell Ardeth to let sleeping dogs lie.” Nielsen sat down in a big gold chair upholstered in ivory leather that matched the desk. It looked like it was trying to hide behind it, like the leather was camouflage. “So there's a minor discrepancy in the records, who cares? Some items shouldn't fall into certain hands. You tell her not to worry about this.”

Speare managed to shake his head—or he managed to shake it the way he wanted it to shake, because it was already trembling. His whole body was trembling. His joints ached; the beast was trying to break through, stretching his skin at the seams. “She's not going to go for that. She's not an idiot.”

Nielsen waved a dismissive hand. “She's not as smart as she thinks she is, either. Good thief—
great
thief—and good business sense. But the rest? Not so much.”

Ordinarily the comment might have been annoying. Maybe it would have pissed him off a little, if he was in a mood. But at that moment, hearing it made him want to leap across that pretentious desk and rip Nielsen Pollard's fucking head off. “It belongs to her. She has a right to know what happened.”

“And I'm telling you she doesn't. Nobody needs to know everything, Speare, especially not the weak. And if she's so smart, how'd she get mixed up with you? You think I don't know you, who you are? What kind of man you are? What kind of man Doretti is? Mickey would roll over in his grave if he knew you were sniffing around his girl.”

Jesus, he was in trouble. Nielsen's comments were not helping him refrain from killing the man, and that was not helping him control the beast. Pain shot up his arm; he didn't have to look at his right hand to know the skin had split over his knuckles. Holy fuck. “Just tell me what it is. What it's used for.”

“I'm not a snitch,” Nielsen said. “I'm a professional. I have standards.”

“Lives are at stake here. People have died. More people could die.”

Nielsen shrugged. “And I don't want to be one of them. I'm very sorry, but that's—”

That was it. Speare couldn't control both his temper and the beast at the same time, and his temper was definitely the lesser of the two evils. He lunged forward and grabbed Nielsen by the back of the head, slamming his face onto the desk. The beast wailed with joy, both at the violence and at the stream of energy that ran up his arm from Nielsen's skin. Whatever it was in that room that was feeding the beast so much, it fed Nielsen, too. It was his, his power, his darkness. “Tell me what it's used for, and who took it from her.”

Nielsen's voice was a husky whisper. “Oh my God. You. Oh my God, please don't—”

Another slam. He didn't have time for this. The beast was growing, expanding, winding its way down into his body. It felt awful. It made him want to be sick. He needed to get out of there, but he was not going to get another shot at Nielsen, and he needed that information just as much. “Who has it, and what's it for?”

That was the beast's voice. Not entirely, not yet, but he could hear it there. The redness around the edges of his vision was expanding, too. Fuck.
Hail Mary, full of grace…

“It's demon-made,” Nielsen said, in a thick, broken voice. “A demon-made item, the token of a lord of hell.”

“What else?” The prayer wasn't helping much, but “not much” was still something.
The Lord is with thee….

“I only know somebody gave it to Mickey. He wouldn't tell me who, and a few months ago he said somebody else asked for it and he wouldn't give it to them.”

Blessed art thou amongst women….
“But you don't know who asked. Would the others know? Les, or Martin, or Paul, would they know?”

“No.” But fear slithered into his voice when he said it, and the beast sensed the lie, and loved it. Damn it, it was hard enough keeping the thing from breaking through without Nielsen helping it along.

Speare raised his hand, and Nielsen's head with it. “Would the others know?”

Pause. “Maybe.”

“What about a demon-sword? The one that killed Theodore and Mercer?”
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus….
“You know it did. You know what's going on. Tell me who's got the sword.”

“I don't know.” Nielsen held his hands up—well, as much as he probably could, with his upper body being forced to get cozy with a slab of marble like that—in what Speare assumed was an effort to show he was being honest. “I was contacted by someone who called himself Mr. Dunhill.”

Fuck. Finally he was getting somewhere, and that somewhere wasn't a place he wanted to go—or should have had to go. Mr. Dunhill wanted a demon-sword, and Mr. Dunhill was a man Speare knew, and that man worked for Fallerstein. Fallerstein, who wasn't supposed to be doing shit like ritual murder. Guess he'd decided that without Hardin all deals were off, just like Felix and Ardeth had suggested.

Speare knew where he could probably find Dunhill, too. But that still left questions about the mirror: Had Fallerstein tried to get hold of it before resorting to the sword, or did he want both, or what? Had Mickey Coyle had some kind of arrangement with Fallerstein? Was the mirror even related to the sword?

That second of distraction cost him; pain spiked across his left knuckles now, as the beast started to break through there. Right. Think later.
Holy Mary, Mother of God…
“Say that again.”

“He says he wants a sword. I contact Ardeth, she starts looking, but then he calls and says never mind, he knows where one is and he needs a man to procure it, a good lockpick. So I give him one, and he does.”

“Who?” But he knew already.
Pray for us sinners…

He was right. “Mercer. Mercer was the guy. It was an easy lockpick job. That's all I know, that's everything. Please, God, please don't—please just let me go. Just let me go now.”

Nielsen sounded genuinely terrified, and he wasn't lying again. Something about that bothered Speare, but he couldn't analyze it. Not then, with pain ratcheting through his body and every bit of strength he had focused on getting out of there without letting the beast take over. Without letting the beast do what it wanted to do, and kill Nielsen. He could hold it for another minute, just long enough to get the final piece of information…but no more than that.
Pray for us sinners…

“Why did you hide the mirror from her? What does it do?”

“It's a gateway,” Nielsen said. Promptly, too. Whatever ethical battle he'd been fighting with himself a few minutes ago, the desire to keep from being maimed or killed had apparently won. “A gateway into hell. A doorway. The Unholy can cross through it to our world, or back into theirs.”

Holy shit. A gateway. A gateway that demons could use to go back to hell. He didn't need the beast's excited gyrations in his head to tell him what that meant—what it could mean. If he had a gateway, if he had someone who knew the right ritual, he could send the beast back to where it came from. For one brief second, barely an eyeblink, the world opened up to him. All the things he'd missed, all the things he'd thought he'd never have, became his in that moment. No more constant sinning. Absolution. A real life. A—a relationship. A wife. Children. He could get rid of the beast and have a normal life.

But he wasn't rid of it yet, and that second, that one brief moment when his focus diverted from keeping the beast at bay, gave it the chance it needed to push itself out farther, to spread through him even more. His skin burned. His vision clouded.

He let go of Nielsen. It helped a little, but it was too late to stop it, of course, or at least too late to stop it instantly.
Pray for us sinners…

Leaving the room didn't help. He needed to get out of that apartment, away from it entirely, and he couldn't take Ardeth with him. The more doors he put between himself and that power, that soul-sucking, wicked power, the better, but he had no idea if even a dozen of them would arrest the process now that it had begun. At least not without a serious, mortal sin, and there weren't any he could commit at that particular moment; he wasn't about to kill Ardeth or the piece-of-shit liar she nonetheless cared about, or any innocent people living in the building.

Of course, if the beast came out, it would kill them both, and anyone else it could find, but not until it had played with them for a while first.
Pray for us sinners…

At least they were in a high-rise. If he had to, he'd run back into Nielsen's place and throw himself off the balcony. That still wouldn't kill the thing, or himself, but it would at least put them out of reach.

“Speare?” Ardeth's voice came from behind him as he sped out the front door and back into the hallway. “Is something wrong?”

“Give me five minutes. Stay inside.” So low, his voice was so low. It wasn't his voice anymore.
…Now and at the hour of our deaths.

Her footsteps got closer. The beast could hear them despite their lightness. It could smell her, an overwhelming fragrance that filled the hall. “What's wrong?”