A Plain-Dealing Villain (12 page)

Six hours later, I waited in the baggage claim at O’Hare in a stiff blue vinyl chair, idly watching a bank of monitors. Flights came and flights went, white block numbers flickering and shuffling by the minute. Every now and then, one of the conveyor belts in the vast room would kick to life, sending suitcase after battered suitcase to the clustered waiting crowds.

I was surprised when I saw Mack and Zeke steaming my way. Not that they found me, but that it had taken them so long. I didn’t bother getting up. They loomed over me, triumphant.

“We’ve got you now,” Zeke said with a sneer.

“Curses,” I deadpanned, rolling my eyes. “Foiled again. I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you kids and your meddling dog.”

“Hound,” said the man who casually strolled up behind them, speaking with a breezy English accent. “The proper title is hound.”

Mack and Zeke parted to make room.

“We spotted you twenty minutes ago,” Mack said. “We called the
big
boss.”

The “big boss” glowed like a black diamond and felt like a barbed-wire whip on the edge of my psychic senses. He could have been a retired supermodel, with cheekbones carved from marble, an aquiline nose, and eyes the color of fresh-cut grass on a summer morning. A jet-black tattoo poked out from underneath his tight V-neck sweater, caressing his neck and left wrist with the curling tips of a thorny rose vine.

Him, I stood up for.

“Daniel Faust,” he said, squinting just a bit. “You have a penchant for dangerous living.”

“We haven’t been properly introduced,” I said.

“I won’t tell you my full use-name, because you wouldn’t be able to appreciate its history. Or pronounce it. You may, like most, call me Royce. A simple name for simple minds”—his gaze flicked left and right, toward Mack and Zeke—“but I’ll admit to growing fond of it over the years. You’re in the wrong place, sport.”

“Still a free country, last I checked.”

He chuckled and shook his head, giving me a condescending smile.

“Freedom. You humans do love to prattle on about freedom, and you barely understand the word. How much agency do you think you actually have? From the cradle to the grave, you’re bombarded with media, advertising, cultural and social pressure to conform…it’s amazing you can think at all.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “what choir did you say you belong to?”

He inclined his head and held up an open hand. “Touché. Yes, like my prince, I am a child of Greed, and my bloodline has shaped me well. But I posit that I’m more aware of the outside influences in my life than you are. And I can prove it. Right here, right now.”

“Go for it.” I wished I felt as confident as he looked.

“I’ve been following your exploits,” Royce said, “and there’s a question I’ve been
dying
to ask you. One simple question.”

He inched closer to me. His voice was a low, intimate purr.

“Wasn’t it
easy
?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“If I understand what happened—this is largely secondhand, so please correct me if I’m wrong—you rescued Caitlin, my counterpart in the Court of Jade Tears, from enslavement.”

“That’s right.”

“Knowing she could, and likely would, reward your kindness with a horrible death.”

I put my hands on my hips. “I didn’t care who or what she was. I wasn’t going to stand by and watch any woman be treated like that.”

“And I believe you,” he said. “But…she did kill two men in front of you. Slowly. Made you watch, right?”

“I was in a protective circle at the time. I didn’t have a whole lot of travel options.”

Royce shook his head. “No, that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is…how quickly you fell in love with her. You dreamed about her that very night, didn’t you? Kept thinking about her scent, the fall of her hair?”

I didn’t know how he knew any of this, but I didn’t like where he was headed. “Get to the point.”

“It’s so convenient, love at first sight, isn’t it? Especially when the Ring of Solomon was still in play, and Caitlin
needed
a willing human to do what she could not. She couldn’t get near the ring without risking her freedom again. But
you
could. And then…ah, the
pièce de résistance
. There you were, with the ring in your hand. Power. Glory. You could have been the savior of Earth. Then Caitlin just batted those beautiful eyes of hers, and what did you do?
You threw it away
. You even thought it was your idea.”

“It
was
my idea,” I said. “That ring would have put a bull’s-eye over everybody I care about. It wasn’t a gift. It was a time bomb that would have started a war. Taking it off the table was the best choice I could have made.”

“But you did it for her,” Royce said. “You actually think you’re in love.”

“We
are
in love.”

Royce kept smiling, but there was something wistful in his eyes.

“She got inside your head, sport. That’s what she does. That’s what she is. I’ve known Caitlin a long time, a
very
long time, and let me tell you, she’s one of the best. You’re nothing special to her. You’re just another useful human, in a very long line of useful humans, and they were all the apples of her eye…until she wrung them dry and tossed them aside.”

“And
you
,” I said, jabbing my finger into his chest, “are full of
shit
. I don’t know what your deal is, Royce. I don’t know if you’re too broken to get the concept of love, or maybe you’re just jealous. Maybe this is how you get your rocks off, trying to drive wedges between people. You’re forgetting something. I’ve
seen
Caitlin use her powers on people. I saw what she did to Carl Holt. If she snared me like that, even if she hid it from me somehow, it’d be obvious to everyone
around
me, just like it was with him.”

Holt had been a junkie with an insatiable craving for Caitlin’s heroin kiss. The addiction had destroyed him from the inside out, turning him into Lauren Carmichael’s pliable puppet. There wasn’t any love there, not even kindness. Holt took what he needed from Caitlin’s body and left her bleeding.

That wasn’t me. That
wasn’t
me.

“You’re starting to see the light,” Royce said, looking deep in my eyes, “but you’re not a true believer, yet. I can fix that. I have a houseguest who I’d like you to meet. She’ll open your eyes. I’d appreciate it if you’d come along peacefully, so I don’t have to force you.”

“
We’ll
force him,” Zeke said, eyes narrowed to slits. Mack gave him an uncertain nod.

Royce arched one thin eyebrow. “Zeke? If you touch this gentleman without my say-so, I’ll tear your fingers off. We’re trying to
help
him.”

“You can understand,” I said, “why I find that hard to believe.”

Royce chuckled politely. “My motives are entirely self-serving. Which is why, though I mean you no harm,
making
you come with me is still an option. I’ll hurt you only as much as I have to. So are you going to raise a fuss, or can we do this the easy way?”

“Don’t let him have
any
coffee,” Mack warned. Royce slowly turned his head and blinked at him.

My eyes flicked to the flight display. Then I glanced to my left, toward the nearest bank of escalators, and smiled.

“Sorry, Royce. Going to have to take a rain check. I’ve got five good reasons you aren’t taking me anywhere.”

Royce sighed, glancing down at my hands.

“Please,” he said, “tell me you aren’t about to punch me. I’m the hound of Prince Malphas, Daniel. I won’t even feel it, and you’ll probably break your fingers.”

“Huh?” I looked at my hand. “Oh. No. Reasonable assumption, but no. I mean
them
.”

Caitlin strode toward us, wrapped in her white leather trench coat and wearing high camel-tone boots. On her left, Bentley and Corman kept up the pace, pulling a pair of Burberry rolling suitcases. Corman wore his old Dodgers cap, slung low over his eyes. On Caitlin’s right, Margaux lugged a bulky woven tote over one shoulder, head craned to look at something on Pixie’s phone as the two women walked close together.

“My crew just got here,” I told Royce. “So can we do this the easy way?”

Royce’s smile vanished. “Mack, Zeke, disappear.”

They didn’t need any more prompting, rushing to fade into the crowd. As Caitlin approached, Royce extended his hand.

“Ah,” he said,
“Caitlleanabruaudi
, my old lover.”

She reached for my hand instead. Her skin was velvet soft and chased away the chill. Or maybe the warmth came from the faces of my family, the people who had dropped everything to fly into danger at my side.

I couldn’t go home until the job was done, so home came to me instead.

Caitlin gave him a bitter laugh. “We were never lovers, Royce. We fucked. For recreational purposes. It was fun, but you ruined all that when you turned traitor.”

He looked genuinely pained. “Me? It’s not treason to want to better yourself. I needed upward mobility. I couldn’t exactly become Sitri’s hound without killing you first, now could I? So I went where I had better job prospects.”

“You swore an oath to our prince.”

“Malphas has a better benefit plan. What
are
you doing here, Caitlin? This is our territory. You weren’t invited. A less generous man might see this as a hostile act.”

“Of course I was invited,” she said. “I heard about your little poker tournament. It’s open to everyone.”

“That doesn’t mean you can just—”

Caitlin cut him off with a dismissive wave of her hand. “It does, in fact. Proviso four-four-point-three of the Terms of the Cold Peace, article seven. This qualifies as a ‘tournament, revel or moot,’ one which you have specifically designated as open to all comers. If
any
demon from a foreign court is allowed to attend, we
all
are. It’s an anti-collusion measure.”

“
Collusion
,” Royce echoed. “Really?”

“It’s my job to know the law. That’s what a hound is
supposed
to do, anyway.”

“Well.” Royce wrinkled his nose. “Hell prevails.”

“It certainly does.”

“You don’t even play cards.”

Caitlin brandished a sealed envelope of glossy, brass-colored paper. She slapped it into Royce’s hand.

“I’m not going to. Daniel is. I’m just putting up his entry fee. The Court of Jade Tears is officially sponsoring him as our champion.”

Royce cast his gaze across the rest of my crew, assessing them as he weighed the envelope in his palm.

“And these people are…?”

“Cheering section,” I said.

Royce looked like a man who knew something was deeply, terribly wrong, but he didn’t have the first clue about how to identify the problem, let alone fix it. He stood there for a moment, eyeing the envelope in his hand, running his fingertips over the shiny paper.

“Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll even note who he’s playing for, so we can all have a good laugh at your court’s expense when we send you home penniless.”

“I don’t know about that,” I told him. “I’m not bad at poker.”

“Perhaps, but you can’t bluff against me.”

“Oh?” I tilted my head. “Why’s that?”

Royce’s smile was a malicious thing, almost a leer as he looked from me to Caitlin and back again.

“Because if I want to know what
you’re
thinking,” he said slowly, “all I have to do is look in
her
eyes.”

I clenched my jaw and tried not to make a fist. Caitlin reached up, her fingertips caressing the back of my neck with long feathery strokes.

“See you at the tournament,” she told him.

“What did he say to you?” Caitlin wanted to know as soon as Royce was out of earshot.

I shrugged. “Just a bunch of bullshit.”

“Hmm,” she said. “He hasn’t changed at all, then.”

I tried to take the doubts Royce had planted in my head and shove them in a closet. I didn’t have time for that now. Or ever. If the memories of Carl Holt weren’t enough to prove Caitlin hadn’t tampered with my mind—and they were—the way her hand felt in mine did the job just fine.

I looked to the others. “Thanks, everybody. I know this was short notice, and I’m asking a lot—”

“Kiddo,” Corman said, “you apologize and I will smack you upside the head. Don’t think I won’t.”

Bentley rubbed Corman’s shoulder. “It was a turbulent flight, drink service was canceled, and
someone
didn’t get his vodka and orange juice.”

“Jenny sends her best,” Margaux said. “With Nicky being Nicky and Agent Black being, well,
everywhere
, it’s not safe for her to leave Vegas right now.”

“Thanks, Mama. I’m not sure it’s safe for her to be
in
Vegas either, but she’s a little headstrong.”

Margaux snorted. “Granite’s easier to crack. Left some of my spirits watching over her. Anything goes wrong, I’ll know before
she
does.”

Pixie had been fidgeting this whole time. “What about Coop?” she blurted out.

Pixie had worked with Coop before, the night we hit Lauren Carmichael’s mansion and made off with the Ring of Solomon. If it hadn’t been for them, cracking Lauren’s safe and planting a fake while I kept Lauren’s dinner party distracted down in the dining room…well, I didn’t like to contemplate what-ifs too much.

“Not a conversation for a crowded airport,” I told her. “C’mon, let’s all head back to my hotel room.”

Corman grumbled. “Just glad to be back on terra firma. I hate flying. Your room got a minibar?”

*     *     *

Back in my room at the Four Seasons, I gave them the grisly details. Not
too
grisly. Pixie didn’t need to hear that, and everyone else had a damn good idea of what Coop was going through.

“That kind of zombie,” Margaux mused, “is easy to raise up, if you know what you’re doing. Even easier to put down. Remember those soul traps Lauren passed out to her followers? The little leather pouches? Same thing, it’s just that Coop’s own
body
is the pouch. Force his mouth open, his soul flies free.”

Pixie sat beside her at the end table by the window, powering up her laptop. She glanced at Margaux over the screen. “That kind? How many kinds of zombies
are
there?”

“There’s the kind that eat people, the kind that don’t eat people…” Margaux’s voice trailed off as she thought it over. “Two. Two kinds. Plenty of variations, but when you’re looking at a dead man walkin’ your way, that’s the one question you need answered fast.”

“And don’t shoot for the head, that just pisses ’em off,” Corman said, nursing a whiskey and Coke he’d assembled from the minibar. He sat on the edge of the bed. Behind him, cross-legged, Bentley kneaded the tension from his shoulders.

Caitlin’s hands mirrored Bentley’s, though she was gentle with my bruises. We stood at the window, the sun slowly setting and coating Lake Michigan in sparkles of golden light, and she massaged the back of my neck while we talked. It felt like she’d had one hand on me at all times since she’d arrived. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to smooth my ruffled feathers, or if she was feeling awkward after running into an old flame. Either way, the nearer we stood, the more relaxed I felt and the happier she looked.

“Damien Ecko is keeping Coop in some kind of industrial building,” I said, thinking back to the video he’d sent. “Concrete floors, cinder-block walls, maybe a warehouse or an abandoned hospital. Looked pretty big. Pixie, he contacted me by phone and sent over a video file and some texts. Is there any way to locate him with that?”

“Might be, unless he covered his tracks. Is he tech-savvy?”

I rubbed my chin, dubious. “Don’t think so. He’s more into the twenty-first dynasty than the twenty-first century.”

“Most modern cell phones have a built-in GPS chip, even if you don’t have any kind of GPS software. Allegedly to make it easier for emergency services to find you when you dial 911.”

“Allegedly?” Caitlin asked.

“It also makes it easier for our burgeoning police state to keep tabs on innocent citizens,” Pixie said. “Have I told you what the NSA does with voicemail—”

I cleared my throat. “So we can track the chip in his phone?”

“He tracked himself
for
us. Everything you record on a smartphone—pictures, video, whatever—has geotags embedded in the metadata. You can’t see it, unless you know how to look, but it’s there. It’s a little hidden chunk of text that says not only when the image was recorded but where, latitude and longitude. It’s easy to scrub—even easier to fake if you want to make it look like you’re someplace you aren’t—but most people either don’t know about the geotags or don’t care.”

I thought back to Ecko’s jewelry store and his outdated motion sensor. Then I held up the burner phone and tossed it over to Pixie.

“I have a hunch he’s a little behind the times,” I told her. “See what you can get off that. And, uh…you don’t need to watch the video, okay? Nothing you want to see. So, next problem. Getting that coin out of the Bast Club.”

“We went there a couple of times in the nineties,” Corman said. “Does it still look like Jules Verne built a brothel?”

I nodded. “I think they call that steampunk now, but yeah. It’s also got free-roaming man-eating shadows for a security system. And does anyone know who owns the place? The locals just call it ‘Management.’”

“It was the same, back in the day,” Bentley said. “According to Halima, folks claim the club just
appeared
sometime in the 1950s. She’s fairly certain the lot it sits on didn’t exist before that either, like the streets moved overnight to accommodate it and all the maps changed to fit. Whoever Management is, he or she prefers to work from the shadows. And with the shadows.”

I glanced out the window. The lake was turning to turquoise as dusk slithered over the city, and the streets blazed with a thousand pinpricks of electric light.

“Can’t count on getting the coin the fair way,” I said. “I’ll play my best, but they call it gambling for a reason. Besides, I’m pretty sure Royce will do whatever he can to knock me out of the game, short of blatantly cheating. It’s a cheap way to insult Caitlin’s court.”

“Don’t rule out the cheating,” Caitlin muttered. Her fingertips squeezed the back of my neck a little bit harder.

Margaux shrugged. “I don’t see any other way to get at that coin, unless we pull an all-out siege like we did at the Silverlode Hotel. And then they’ll know we took it. You can’t cover tracks that big.”

“How do you steal from a theft-proof building,” I mused aloud, “especially when the guy who owns the prize already knows you’re after it?”

I snapped my fingers and pointed at Bentley and Corman.

“We pull a Kansas City Shuffle.”

Bentley’s eyes lit up. “Kansas City Shuffle.”

“Excuse me,” Pixie said, holding up her hand and looking back and forth between us. “What’s a Kansas City Shuffle?”

Corman grinned. “Bet you five bucks you can’t tell me what state Kansas City is in.”

Pixie frowned and furrowed her brow. “Well, it’s obviously not Kansas. Let me think, maybe a neighboring state…God, I suck at geography. Kansas River, drains from…Missouri? Is that right? I’m guessing Missouri.”

“Bzzt. Sorry, kiddo. There
is
a Kansas City in Kansas. But here’s the important question: why was that the first answer you thought of, and the first one you threw away?”

“Because it was too easy. You were obviously trying to trick me into thinking the answer was Kansas,” Pixie said. “Wait. It
was
Kansas.”

Bentley chuckled. “Most confidence games depend on the mark not knowing they’re being conned. The Kansas City Shuffle depends on the mark
knowing
it. Not only do they have to see you coming, they have to figure out your entire plan before it happens.”

“Problem being,” Corman said, “they’re working to stop the
wrong con
. You get ’em looking left, while you rob ’em blind on the right.”

“We can’t take the coin out of the building,” I said, “but Royce can. So let’s give him a reason to do it.”

*     *     *

My stomach growled, and I wasn’t the only one running on empty. We moved the party downstairs to the seventh floor. Allium, the Four Seasons’s in-house restaurant, invited us in with warm, dusky mahogany and candlelight. We didn’t have to wait long for a table.

“Forty-two-dollar strip steak?” Pixie murmured, looking over the menu. “For real?”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “Trevor Manderley, our kindly benefactor, is paying for everyone’s dinner tonight. And for your rooms. Serves him right.”

“And that’s the next piece of business,” Corman said. “So he’s sponsoring this Stanwyck guy for the tourney. I got two questions, kiddo.”

“Shoot.”

“Number one, can you keep it together when Stanwyck sits down at your table to play cards?”

I had to think about that.

“Yeah,” I said. “Payback will keep. That’s for later.”

Corman rapped his fingers on his closed menu. “Second question. What about later?”

“I promised Coop two things before he died,” I said. “One, I’d get his cut of the score to his wife. Two, I’d send Stanwyck to hell where he belongs. I’m keeping those promises.”

“The latter,” Caitlin said dryly, running a sharp red fingernail down her menu as she read it over, “can be arranged, with pleasure.”

“I’m in,” Pixie said. “Let’s kill him.”

The table fell quiet.

“You’re here to run intel,” I told her. “Then you’re going back to Vegas.”

I’d seen Pixie angry, and I’d seen her determined, but until that night I’d never seen her eyes that hard and cold.

“I said, I’m
in
. For all of it.”

I shook my head. “Pixie, you don’t…that’s not your kind of work.”

“Once you cross that bridge, you don’t walk back,” Margaux told her. She reached out and put her hand over Pixie’s. Pixie didn’t pull her hand away, but the cold resolve in her eyes didn’t soften.

“I worked with Coop,” she said. “He was a good guy. I liked him. And this man, Stanwyck, he just…he shot two people for what, a lousy six thousand dollars? And now Coop’s some kind of
zombie
? He needs to go. That’s all. Stanwyck needs to
go
.”

“Yeah, he does,” I said, “but that’s not your job to handle.”

I gave Caitlin a look. She shrugged.

“Don’t know what you want
me
to say,” Caitlin said. “I don’t understand why humans get so worked up over killing in the first place. This is pest control. You kill him, he goes to hell, he hopefully gets put to good use. Nuisance solved.”

“Listen to Daniel and Margaux,” Bentley said, his voice gentle. “Please, young lady. You’re no killer. That’s not a burden you should have to carry.”

The waitress swung by our table with a tray of drinks, throwing a blanket over the conversation. Still, as I took my Crown and Coke and waited for her to leave, I realized this was one more wrinkle I’d have to iron out. No way in hell was I letting Pixie anywhere near the Stanwyck takedown.

In the circles I ran in, innocence was a rare and precious commodity. Pixie was a criminal, sure, but her crimes were bloodless and her heart was usually in the right place. More often than mine was, anyway.

Damned if I’d drag her down to my level.