Red Knight Falling (15 page)

TWENTY-SIX

There were two basic kinds of demons—that we knew of, at least. The worst were the incarnates, evil entities so powerful they could create their own bodies out of raw willpower. Go ahead and unload a .357 in an incarnate’s face: it’ll laugh and spit bullets while it’s tearing your intestines out. Fortunately, those were rare. I’ve encountered an incarnate only twice in my entire career, and twice was plenty.

Hijackers are your garden-variety demons; they can’t linger in our world without an anchor for very long, so they jump into a victim’s brain and commandeer their nervous system, working them like a marionette. Scudder was a hijacker, living in his stolen suit of human skin.

“A demon,” Cody breathed. His fingers brushed his throat, unconsciously tracing the scars Nyx’s claws had left behind. “Like in Talbot Cove?”

“Not that tough,” I said. “He’s not going to be turning into a flaming monster or anything like that. Hijackers are more about subtle corruption. He’s still a demon, though, and we know Scudder can do some magic, just like a human sorcerer. That makes him twice as dangerous.”

“How do you want to play it?” Jessie asked. “Pin him down and exorcise him?”

On the camera feed, the kid handed Scudder his stack of notebooks. Scudder hobbled to his desk, counting out a few bills and stuffing them in an envelope. He shoved the envelope into the kid’s hands and shooed him away like a stray dog, locking the front door behind him and turning off the neon sign. Good. He hadn’t blown it. Scudder had no idea he was starring on
Candid Camera
. I felt my shoulders unclench as the kid got in his car and drove off, out of harm’s way.

At least, I hoped he was. I caught the haunted look in his eye as he made his way to freedom. He’d innocently answered the wrong want ad and gotten sucked into a world of monsters and horrors, and now it was spitting him right back out again with nothing but tarnished memories and a story he’d never be able to prove. I thought back to Douglas Bredford, drinking his nightmares away in that backwoods bar, broken by all he’d seen and learned.

I hoped the kid wouldn’t break. As I watched him drive away, all I could do was wish him well and turn my focus back to the mission at hand.

Now it was just us and the demon across the street.

I watched him dial an ancient rotary phone, leaning against his desk and clutching the big beige plastic receiver, face etched in a permanent frown. “I don’t like it,” I said.

“Don’t like what?” Jessie asked. “Messing with demons? ’Cause I
love
it.”

“I don’t like him for the crime,” I said. “We just took down a listening post equipped with high-end electronics and stolen NSA surveillance gear. This guy? He runs a toaster-repair shop. Look at him: he doesn’t have a
cell phone
.”

“Appearances can deceive,” April mused. She leaned close to the screens, staring intently. “But the way we carry ourselves when we’re alone—or when we
think
we’re alone—tends to tell the truth. Look at that. Head tilted downward, excessive nodding, elbows close to the sides. Deferential body language.”

“I want to know who he’s on that phone with,” Jessie said. “Kevin, any chance you can yank the store’s call records?”

“The number’s public info—from there it’s just a hop, skip, and a hack. Gimme twenty minutes.”

Scudder hung up the phone. He bundled the notebooks up in his arms and trudged into a back room. The door swung shut behind him, blocking our view.

“He’s just another link in the chain,” I said. “The question is, is the real boss going to show up and pick up those notebooks, or is Scudder making a delivery run? I’ve got to get closer.”

“Why?” Cody asked. “We’re safe in the van.”

I pointed at the camera feed. “Because if he’s got a back room, he’s probably got a back door, too. And if he parked in the alley behind his shop, he could be leaving right now and we’d never know it. I need eyes on.”

I jumped out the back of the van and jogged across the deserted street, alone.

There was no direct way around back—the repair shop was sandwiched between a discount mattress store and a Chinese takeout joint—but the mouth of an alley just wide enough to squeeze in a couple of dumpsters beckoned to the right of the Chinese restaurant.

A narrow street ran behind the storefronts, with a tall wooden-plank fence on the opposite side. A mattress-store delivery van rusted away in the dark. No other cars in sight. Still, I crept closer to Scudder’s shop, seeing light from a grimy back window. Easing my way over, almost pressed to the crumbling brick wall, I took a peek from the window’s edge.

More clutter, more gutted toasters, and Scudder—sitting in an overstuffed easy chair in front of a ’70s-style Magnavox TV set, shoveling spoonfuls of ramen down his throat.

No. Not
his
throat. My stomach clenched in reflexive disgust. Somewhere inside that stolen flesh was the mind and soul of a human being, trapped, sealed away in an iron cage. How long had Scudder been using that body? Years? Decades?

It was an obscenity. Every muscle in my body ached to kick in the back door and set things right. Bind him, banish him, and set his victim free.

And I couldn’t. We needed Scudder to lead us to his boss. This wasn’t just our best lead, it was our only lead: snip the chain, and we’d say good-bye to any hope of recovering the curse tablet. And then, whatever that thing in space intended to do when it returned, we’d be at its mercy. Compared to what was at stake, throwing it all away to rescue a single possessed soul just wasn’t an option. It was the simple calculus of war.

I thought of that old saying: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing. And nothing is exactly what I did. I slunk away from the window, leaving Scudder to his Ramen noodles, and his prisoner to his own private hell.

I jogged back across the street and climbed into the van, fighting the urge to slam the door as hard as I could.

“He’s not going out the back,” I said, “not unless he drives a delivery truck.”

We waited.

“Okay,” Kevin said, “this is weird.”

“Whatcha got?” Jessie asked him.

“Nothing. Which is the weird part. I pulled the shop’s phone records. You know that call we watched him make? It’s here: outbound call, four minutes, twenty-two seconds. But there’s no record of the number he called. Just a blank line, like AT&T’s database auto-redacted it.”

“Who can do something like that?” Cody asked.

Jessie and April shared a glance.

“We can,” Jessie said.

“Or organizations
like
ours,” April added, turning back to the monitors. “Potentially unfriendly ones.”

Scudder emerged from the back room with a canvas tote bag. He piled the notebooks into the bag, tugged it over one shoulder, and headed for the front door.

“Here we go,” Jessie said. I jumped behind the wheel. Keeping low in my seat, I watched Scudder lock up the shop and shuffle down the sidewalk toward a late-model Cadillac the color of dusty vanilla ice cream, parked at the end of the block. The Caddy sputtered to life, the engine sounding about three oil changes behind schedule.

I counted silently to four, giving him a little lead, and pulled away from the curb.

It wasn’t hard to keep him in sight, even from a block away. He drove like a retiree on a fishing trip, slow and casual, and one of the Caddy’s taillights was broken. I just kept the cherry cyclops eye in sight, matching his speed and keeping my distance.

Not being spotted, that was the hard part. I wasn’t sure if Scudder had been trained in counterpursuit techniques, but after four turns he’d have to be completely careless not to notice the same van had been dogging him on the deserted midnight streets for blocks. When I fell back even farther, now the traffic lights were a new obstacle: the greens he breezed through were strobing yellow by the time I reached them. I wasn’t worried about running a red light so much as a cop
spotting
me running one. If we got pulled over by the locals, we’d lose Scudder for certain.

Jessie’s phone pinged.

“Got word back from the Orlando field office,” she said. “They finished running records on those bodies from the mall.”

“Got any good news for us?” I asked, eyes on the road.

“Nope. The dead men on Steranko’s crew were his usual flavor of Eurotrash: two ex-Spetsnaz–turned–mercenaries, and a former German BND operative who got drummed out of the service for taking bribes. Nothing eye-opening.”

“What about Bette’s faction?”

“Less than nothing,” Jessie said. “Prints, facial recognition, dental—all a big fat goose egg. They aren’t in the system,
any
system. You know what that means, right?”

I watched Scudder’s Cadillac make a lazy left turn, the gleaming taillight swinging out of sight. I stepped on the gas, just a little, to reach the intersection before the light changed.

“Yeah,” I said. “It means I’d better not lose this guy. He’s the last clue we’ve got.”

We followed Scudder down narrow, broken backstreets, and under telephone lines where a murder of crows perched shoulder to shoulder, watching us pass with glittery black eyes. The neighborhood felt familiar, somehow. I’d never been there before, but I was sure I had a hazy memory of the street names, like something from a long-ago briefing. Then Scudder pulled into a parking lot behind a three-story brownstone with boarded-up windows, and I knew exactly where we were. From the way she groaned, Jessie knew it, too.

I idled on the street, giving Scudder time to park and get out of his car. Then I pulled in after him, easing the van between a black Mercedes with onyx-tinted windows and a $200,000 Lamborghini painted traffic-cone orange. There weren’t any security guards watching the lot, no cameras, just a single sodium lamppost that buzzed and popped in the dark.

“Well,” April said, polishing her glasses, “things just became a bit more complicated.”

Cody looked between us, head tilted. “Why? What is this place?”

“It’s Grand Central station for psychotic assholes and occult deviants,” Jessie said with a sigh, “but the locals call it the Bast Club.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

In times gone by, occult know-how was an exclusive and secret trade, passed down from the allegedly wise to the hopefully worthy. When owning a magical grimoire could get you burned at the stake, you had to be careful about whom you came out to. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the old lodges slowly poked their heads out of the shadows, discovering a world that might laugh at you for believing in magic but
probably
wouldn’t lead an angry mob to your front doorstep.

The twentieth century gave us the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Astrum Argentum, and Freemasons who would actually admit to being Freemasons. The flakes and phonies multiplied along with the
How to Be a Real Witch
manuals down at your local bookstore, but so did the folks who had a genuine gift and might never have discovered it on their own.

And that’d be just peachy except that for a staggering number of budding occultists, their favorite pastimes included curse-murder sprees, mentally enslaving their lovers, conjuring demons for fun and profit, or any of a hundred other supernatural crimes. It wasn’t just the rush of newfound power—that was a part of it, sure—but for certain people, magic was more inherently corruptive than a seat in the Senate with a hundred lobbyists on speed dial.

Not me, though. I hoped. I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror between missions, questioning myself, making sure I wasn’t starting that slide on the long way down.

With the occult underground on the rise, it was only natural that some enterprising entrepreneurs would create a place for genuine practitioners to get together and talk shop, well out of the public eye. In Las Vegas, it was the Tiger’s Garden. In New York City, they had Dashwood Abbey.

And in Chicago, they had the Bast Club.

“This is all twisted up,” Jessie muttered. “We’re supposed to be spying on these freaks.
They
are not supposed to be spying on
us
.”

“Let’s hope he’s merely meeting his contact here,” April said, “as opposed to passing out our secrets like party favors.”

After I explained what we were looking at, Cody craned his neck to peer from the van’s front windshield, checking out the abandoned-looking building with wide eyes.

“I don’t get it. If this place is filled with the kind of people you hunt down, why do you let it stay open? Why not raid it and bust everybody at once?”

“We’re not out to get
all
sorcerers,” Jessie told him. “If they can keep their noses clean and avoid turning into Dr. Doom, they’ve got nothing to worry about. Places like this, you find a ton of dabblers. Maybe they’ve got a little magic under their belts, but not enough juice to really be dangerous to anyone but themselves, even if they wanted to be.”

“On the other hand,” April added, “those are exactly the sorts who hear useful things and have avenues of information we don’t possess. By letting the Bast Club remain in business, we can go in undercover and quietly tap it for intelligence whenever we like.”

Jessie threw the back door open and hopped out of the van. “Except now, somebody in there’s doing the tapping. C’mon, Mayberry. Let’s regulate. Everybody else stay in the van, eyes and ears open.”

“Seriously,” I muttered, “Talbot Cove was over two weeks ago.”

As I moved to follow her, Cody put his hand on my shoulder.

“I should go, too,” he said.

I touched his fingers. I’d seen the way he brushed at the scars on his neck, back when I said Scudder was a demon. Cody wasn’t over his encounter with Nyx, not yet, and I wasn’t sure he was ready for the things he might see behind the Bast Club’s boarded-over windows.

“I need you on backup,” I told him. “If we’re not out in one hour, come in after us, okay? Give us that long.”

“All right,” he said, and slowly pulled his hand away.

Jessie and I crossed the parking lot, side by side.

“You ever been in here?” Jessie asked.

“No, just briefed.” I thought back, trying to remember what I’d learned. “Building spontaneously appeared in the ’50s, streets changing overnight to go around it—none of the locals noticed. Owner unknown. Panic Cell tested their security a few years back and barely got out alive.”

“Believe that,” Jessie said. “Management’s got a thing for creepy-crawlies. Bottom line? Don’t start any fights. First person who throws a punch is the first person who gets chomped.”

She pounded twice, hard, on the door’s metal sheeting. Then we waited. The sounds of the city at night drifted all around us, distant horns and sirens and the cold wind in the streets, howling down granite skyscraper canyons.

The door swung wide and the faint strains of a violin quartet drifted out on a rose-scented breeze. The man on the threshold looked like a casino croupier, in a pressed scarlet shirt and trim black vest.

“Good evening,” he said with a smile, while his eyes gave us a visual pat-down. “I don’t believe you ladies are regulars.”

“We’re with the Church of Starry Wisdom in Rhode Island,” Jessie said.

“Just visiting friends in the area,” I added.

His smile grew wider, more genuine, as he curled his fingers and hooked them in a ritual gesture. “Ah, welcome, welcome! My cousin is a member; I had a delightful time visiting your congregation hall last summer. Hail to He of the Murky Deeps.”

“Hail to He of the Murky Deeps,” we chorused, copying the gesture. The greeter stepped to one side and swept out one arm, beckoning us inside.

“Enjoy yourselves,” he said, “and please, remember our simple rules. Take nothing that does not belong to you, and lay no hand on another, save by their invitation. Speak no true names and tell no secrets, save those which are yours to tell.”

As we passed him by, walking down a corridor lined in Victorian burgundy wallpaper, Jessie leaned in and muttered, “Somebody’s breaking that last one, big time. This must be one of those ‘the rules are more like guidelines’ situations.”

While Jessie seemed nonchalant, I fought to keep my balance. A whirlwind of chaotic energy battered my senses as we stepped into the club’s parlor, the air thick with clouds of wild magic and invisible currents. I smelled words and tasted mathematics. In my breast pocket, my great-great-grandmother’s talisman—the ancient coin she insisted was a relic from the Oracle of Delphi—pulsed in panicky time with my heartbeat.

The parlor floor was an oaken mosaic jigsaw puzzle, bathed in the luminous glow of light sconces under lime-green glass bubbles. Heavy scarlet curtains concealed the boarded windows, all the fixtures done up in lush velvet and gleaming brass. The Bast Club hovered on the borderland between a sleazy hangout for lounge lizards and a Victorian fever dream.

We blended in with the crowd, trying to get eyes on Scudder. It was a busy night, packed from the divans and plush chairs in the conversation nooks to the antique pool tables across from the bar. I needed only one glance to realize we were on hostile ground.

“This room’s like a who’s who of our last twenty suspect bulletins,” Jessie said, keeping her voice low. “Obviously Scudder hasn’t given up our identities to everybody, because if he had, half the club would be trying to kill us right now.”

I spotted a pack of cambion in bikers’ leathers over by the bar, the demonic half-breeds’ spiderweb-veined faces and runny-egg eyes on open display. In one of the conversation nooks, a local fashion designer held court—specifically, a fashion designer we’d been looking at for a series of cannibalistic murders. “Over there,” I said, giving the faintest nod in the other direction. “Is that Amy Xun?”

The petite Asian woman, dressed in a tailored black suit, held an open briefcase on her lap and a pair of pewter amulets strung on leather cords between her fingers. It looked like a product demonstration for a small crowd of eager onlookers.

“Yep,” Jessie said. “Don’t know about you, but she’s my number one suspect right now. Do you see Scudder?”

Xun dealt in artifacts, just like Roman Steranko, but she was a lot more selective about her clientele and the goods she peddled. That was the only thing that kept her on the “more useful as a source than a target” list. Maybe she’d expanded her business to selling information, too.

We cut through the crowd, angling closer to Xun so we could get a better look at her entourage. No Scudder, and no notebooks in sight.

Jessie tugged my sleeve. I followed her gaze. In the corner, fifteen feet away, a curved door of hammered bronze slid open to reveal the rounded platform on the other side. An elevator cage. With Scudder inside, empty-handed.

He stepped off the elevator, coming our way, and we breezed right past him. Without the notebooks, he wasn’t our priority anymore. That elevator’s destination was. The door rolled, grinding shut, and Jessie got there just in time: she caught it with her shoe and forced it back open.

We got on board. Destination unknown.

As the door swiveled shut, sealing us inside the brass cylinder, I realized there weren’t any buttons on the wall. Before I could comment, though, the elevator whirred to life, and the cage gave a tiny kick, lurching upward on groaning cables.

“Either this elevator has only one destination . . .” Jessie said, voicing my thoughts.

“Or somebody knows we’re here,” I replied.

The weight of the Glock in my shoulder holster, snug against my ribs, wasn’t much comfort. Whatever was waiting for us upstairs, we had no idea what we were up against, much less a plan to take it down.

The elevator stopped. The door chimed.

“Get ready to improvise,” Jessie said as she drew her gun. I did the same, bracing the Glock with both hands and keeping the muzzle aimed low with my finger off the trigger.

The rounded door rattled open onto a burgundy hall. Green lights glowed behind orbs of spun glass, casting shadows on the walls. The lights were steady. The shadows weren’t. They followed us as we emerged from the elevator and cautiously advanced, shadows blossoming on the ceiling above our heads and dripping down the walls like rivulets of black blood.

Shapes emerged from the murky blobs. The outlines of fat centipedes, the shapes of swarming roaches, skittering to keep pace with us. A slithering serpent melted into the shape of a man’s hand, fingers curling, beckoning us forward.

At the end of the hall, off to the right, crackling firelight glowed warm behind an open pair of double doors.

“Ah, Agents Temple and Black,” a sonorous voice called out. “Please, won’t you join me?”