A Plain-Dealing Villain (21 page)

Josh’s left eyelid twitched. Just a little.

“You’ve got nothing.”

“Got enough to beat your punk ass,” Corman said amiably.

“You’ve got
nothing
, old man,” Josh snapped. “You won a few lucky hands, but I’ve got your number now. I’ve clocked your body language, your tells, all of it. You’re keeping no secrets from me. And I’m telling you, you’ve got nothing.”

Corman shrugged and leaned back in his chair. “If you say so.”

“Fine.” Josh put both hands on the green felt and shoved his stacks of chips, sending the neat columns spilling over. “Fine, you want to play? Let’s get it over with. All in.”

“Kid, if you wanna gamble like a pro, there’s some important skills you need under your belt. Lemme tell you the most important—”

“Oh God,” Josh said, rolling his eyes as he flipped his cards. “Spare me the wisdom-of-your-elders bullshit. Just spare me. Here, see? Full house, queens in kings. Beat
that
.”

Corman turned his cards. The Queen of Hearts sat face-up on the felt, right under his fingertips. The room fell into a graveyard hush.

“Four of a kind.” He held up one of his chips. “The skill in question was how to be a graceful loser. Also, you should learn to figure out when somebody’s hustling you. That nervous thing I did with my fingers every time I had a garbage hand? Not an actual tell. Okay, now who do I have to bribe to get a cold beer around here?”

Applause exploded around us, thundering as Nadine’s jaw dropped and Royce, wide-eyed and on the edge of panic, shook his head at me.

“Why? Why would you
do
that?”

Caitlin held up her phone. It strobed with a sharp white flash as she snapped a photo of Royce and Nadine.

“Just so I could get a picture of the looks on your faces.” She checked the phone and nodded her approval. “Oh, this is going on
all
our holiday cards.”

“Peasants,” Nadine said, looking like she’d been hit by a bus. “Our tournament was won by
peasants
.”

Caitlin smiled pleasantly. “Don’t feel too badly about it. Corman’s not mine. So you still beat my champion—at
poker
—and your court still gets to puff its chest about it. I think I’ll ease the pain of the loss with…what was the grand prize? Fifty thousand dollars? And the Judas Coin, of course. It’ll look lovely in Prince Sitri’s trophy room. I think he might already have the other twenty-nine. He’s
so
hard to shop for.”

I strolled over to the table, where Bentley and Corman were wrapped up in each other’s arms. Corman normally didn’t go for public displays of affection, but sometimes you had to make an exception to the rule. I squeezed their shoulders and walked on by, sidling up to Josh. The kid looked shell-shocked, just sitting there staring at his cards.

“I’m gonna give you a piece of free advice,” I told him, “and I really hope you take it. Right now.”

He gave me a hangdog look. “What?”

Nadine was coming our way, her hands curled into claws at her sides, and her eyes were molten swirls of copper.

“
Run
,” I said and got between them.

“Out of my way,” she snapped.

“No.” I crossed my arms and stood my ground. “I’m not letting you hurt that kid. He’s an asshole, but he doesn’t deserve…whatever it is you’ve got planned. Not happening, not on my watch.”

“Daniel,” she said through a mouthful of shark teeth, struggling to sound calm. “He lost. He needs to be punished. Which means you need to get out of my way, right now, please.”

I looked back. Josh sat frozen in his chair, petrified.

“Not happening,” I repeated.

That was when she reached for me.

Caitlin’s hand shot out faster than a bullwhip and seized Nadine by the wrist.

“We’re here as visitors, under diplomatic protocol,” Caitlin said, “so I have to be forgiving of certain transgressions. That said? If you
ever
touch my man again, I start tearing off body parts.”

Nadine’s men circled us, four of them, and shadows swirled on the floor as their hands eased under their jackets. Freddie loomed over one of the men, coming up from behind, and I felt the heat in the room draining away like somebody had opened a walk-in freezer.

“If I see a gun,” Freddie snapped at Nadine, “your gigolo here sees
teeth
.
Believe
that.”

I glanced upward. Centipedes of shadow, ten feet long with wavering, clutching arms, squirmed on the ceiling. Ready to drop.

“Stop!” Royce shouted, his arms flailing. “Everybody, please, just—just stop. Let’s be reasonable about this.”

“You’re not leaving with the kid,” I told Nadine. “Not without a fight. And in case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got Management’s attention. If you feel like taking your chances, step on up.”

Nadine closed her eyes, her features softening, and Caitlin released her wrist. In a breath Nadine was fully human again and spoke with a voice smoother and softer than silk.

“Joshua,” she said, “you understand that sacrifices have to be made on the road to greatness. You know that pain makes us strong.”

His answer was a muffled, almost inaudible, “Yes.”

“And you understand that you failed today. Which means you need to be corrected to encourage you to do better next time. Joshua…do you still
want
to be the best? Because if I was wrong about you, if you’ve lost your ambition, you’ll just break my heart, but I hope you’ll tell me—”

“I want it,” he said. My heart sank. “I want to be the best.”

“Very well.” Nadine turned to two of her men. “Take him. Prepare him for me. I won’t be long.”

They took Josh by the arms, hustling him toward the door. I felt sick. Nadine flashed a cruel smile.

“He’s leaving of his own free will. Which means if you try to stop him,
you’ll
be the one starting a fight.”

“You sick, sadistic—”

“
Winner
,” she said.

Corman cleared his throat.

“Actually,” he said, “
I’m
the winner. So I think there’s a prize or something? And I’m still waiting on that beer.”

Royce hung his head. The shrouded conduit watched impassively from the heart of the room, eye slits slowly turning to follow the metal briefcase as Royce brought it over.

“Right,” he said in a flat, drained voice. “It is my…great honor to announce that we have a victor, and the annual tournament is complete. All hail Prince Malphas, glory to his name, etcetera.”

The spectators broke out in a round of nervous, scattered applause as Management’s shadows slowly faded away. Royce flipped the dials on the briefcase, opened it wide, and froze.

“Er, Nadine? Where’s the coin?”

She touched her hand to her forehead, eyelids fluttering.

“In the case, of course. Why?”

He spun it around to show her the empty compartment.

“No,” he said, “your witch-eye is in the case.
Not
attached to the coin.”

Nadine thrust her finger at me. “
You!
You stole it!”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes. After failing to steal it, somehow I stole it anyway. Then we paid thousands of dollars in buy-ins and hatched an elaborate scheme to win it legitimately. After I already had it. Come on, Nadine, that doesn’t even make
sense
. What do you think, I walked in here with the coin in my pocket?”

“He has a point,” Royce observed.

“Fortunately,” I said, “I can help. When I was scoping out the coin a couple of nights ago, I put my own tracking spell on it. Apparently a subtler one than yours. Somebody bring me a map of Chicago and something to divine with. Does anybody here have a Ouija board?”

I was somehow not surprised that in the hushed mass of spectators, at least eight hands went up.

*     *     *

Ten minutes later, a big map of Chicago’s streets and suburbs lay unfolded on the poker table. I sat beside Royce, shoulder to shoulder, as we each laid two fingertips on a tiny planchette. The heart-shaped wedge of oak had a felt bottom, gliding smoothly over the map as our hands went around in languid circles.

“All right,” I said, feeling every eye in the room on my back, “I just need to reestablish a link with my spell. If this is working right, the planchette should orient itself at the coin’s starting point: right here.”

Slowly, tugging along, the planchette pulled our fingertips along a maze of streets and came to a dead stop with the pointer aimed directly at the Bast Club’s street.

“Feel that?” I asked Royce. He nodded, eyes wide.

Of course he did. The ideomotor effect—where you attributed your own unconscious muscle movements to an outside force, like a spell or a guiding spirit—could fool just about anybody, especially if you dressed it up with theatrics.

It was even easier if you cheated and gently moved the planchette yourself. I pulled lightly, careful not to give my movements away, pretending to be guided along with Royce as the wedge crawled across the map.

“Here,” I said, standing up sharply and pointing to where the planchette stopped. “That’s where the coin is, right now. If we get close, I’ll be able to sense the exact spot.”

We took two cars. I brought Margaux and Caitlin, Royce brought Nadine and two of her thugs, and we converged on an old brick warehouse down on Printers Row.

“It’s here, I know it,” I said, jogging across a strip of asphalt outside a shuttered loading bay. Royce charged up the back steps, took the measure of a windowless steel door, and spun into a brutal roundhouse kick that buckled metal and tore hinges. A second kick sent the door tumbling with a
slam
as loud as cannon fire, and I followed close behind as he strode over the wreckage.

“And I’m telling you,” Damien Ecko said, “I don’t have a clue what you’re—”

He froze. So did Stanwyck.

They stood in the heart of a cavernous warehouse, shelves laden with coffin-sized packing crates and dusty antiques. Ecko wore latex gloves and a bloodstained butcher’s apron over his shirt and tie, but he wasn’t carving up a roast: a desiccated corpse lay in a shallow standing tub, resting on a bed of glittering salt. A scattering of tools on a nearby tray looked like a cross between a modern surgical suite and a collection of archaeological relics.

“What is the meaning of this?” Ecko demanded, his gaze flitting from me to Royce.

“I would ask you the same thing,” Royce said.

I put my hand to my temple, eyes squeezed shut and brow furrowed, then pointed at Stanwyck.

“There! He has the coin. It’s in his left pants pocket.”

Stanwyck slowly dipped his hand into his pocket. It came back out with the Judas Coin, the tarnished metal clutched like a proclamation of doom between his trembling fingers.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said, sounding like he didn’t even believe himself.

He was right, though. It wasn’t what it looked like.

For that, we had to go back earlier in the day, just before we faced off in the Bast Club. Amy and Bentley’s double collision, knocking Stanwyck into me, was a classic pickpocket-gang move. Your brain could only process so many inputs at once, so when you were suddenly startled and had people pawing at you from all directions, it was easy for a skilled hand to slip something out of your pocket.

Or slip something into it.

Then I just needed to scare Stanwyck into leaving the tournament early, giving us plenty of time to set him up for the kill. That honor went to Amy, who waited until he left and then phoned him from the club. She’d given him a fake name and said she was calling with an important wheelman job for a heist to go down in a couple of hours. Very urgent, very high-end, very risky. Could she pay three times his usual rate? Of
course
she could.

Given Stanwyck had just lost his shirt and still owed enough gambling debts to get his kneecaps broken twenty times over, he jumped on her offer like a starving man going after a twenty-ounce steak. So she called him back just as we were leaving the club, with the directions to meet his new boss, directions we’d gotten courtesy of Pixie decoding Ecko’s location. I figured Stanwyck must have arrived a couple of minutes before we did.

As for my “tracking spell,” same deal, thanks to Pixie. It’s easy to use magic to find a place when you already have a street address.

“I get it now,” I said to Ecko. “I couldn’t get my hands on the coin, so you hired this guy to do the job instead. Pretty clever.”

“No,” Ecko said, glowering as he figured it out. “
No
. You arranged this. You’re setting me up.”

“Have some dignity,” Royce said. He seemed to get bigger as he moved closer, his form subtly shifting in the dimly lit warehouse. “And spare me the protestations. Now, neither of you gentlemen are under my court’s authority, so I can’t
technically
pass my formal judgment upon you. I think…we’ll just call this a double homicide.”

“I’m afraid you’ve forgotten an important rule of magic,” Ecko said. He looked angry but not worried, and that worried
me
. Doubly when his lips curled into a smug smile.

“Oh?” Royce asked. “What’s that?”

Ecko swept the flat of his hand across the room as an orange, baleful light shone behind his eyes.

“Never strike at a lord of the dead while you stand within his kingdom.”

Wood splintered and tore like tissue paper as a leathery fist punched through one of the packing crates by the door. To my left, the lid of a second shipping box fell free, and a corpse wrapped in moldering bandages opened its eyes and pulled itself out. We closed ranks as wood broke and dust flew around us, the air filled with a cacophony of wheezing groans. That and the sound of Ecko’s mad laughter as the half-dissected body on his operating table sat up, baring its teeth in a rictus grin.

I couldn’t count fast enough. There were fifteen, maybe twenty of the things, trailing ragged strips of linen as they shambled toward us from all sides. Nadine’s thugs pulled their guns and moved to defend their mistress, unloading on one of the mummies at point-blank range. The bullets hammered its chest, staggering it backward a step, each impact bursting with puffs of white dust.

Then it grabbed one of the gunmen and tore his jaw off as easily as a child snapping a wishbone, leaving it dangling from raw, red sinew.

As the mutilated man fell to the floor, screeching and clutching his face, Nadine clicked her tongue and snapped her fingers at his partner. “Fail. You. Do better.”

He tried, right until a filthy linen-wrapped fist punched straight through his rib cage and tore out his heart.

Caitlin jumped into the fray, flashing a feral grin as she charged one of the risen dead. She spun low, swept its leg out from under it, and stomped her bootheel down on its face with a brittle
crunch
. Royce was right beside her, ducking and weaving like a boxer as he met one of Ecko’s creatures punch for bone-snapping punch.

One of the mummies stumbled into Margaux’s path, groping for her. I shouted a warning, but she just lashed her hand out and clamped her palm over the creature’s face.

“Sit
down!
” she snapped.

The mummy collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, dead for good. Margaux’s hands blazed with hazy, violet-black energy, like a three-dimensional oil slick, as she turned and shot me a look.

“Might have been his kingdom,” she said, “but it’s
my
house now. This is what I
do
.”

“Can you do that to the whole room?”

“Can if”—she paused, stumbling back, ducking as one of the creatures grabbed at her—“if you buy me some breathing room and herd all these things into one spot!”

I looked over at the fallen mummy, lying still in its ragged, ancient linens, and got an idea.

“On it. Cait, Royce, protect Margaux! Nadine, come help me.”

While Caitlin and Royce fought through the crowd of animated corpses, getting Margaux between them, I ran over to one of the broken shipping crates. I grabbed the edge of a plank, put my shoe against the side of the crate, and heaved as hard as I could. Slowly, as rusty nails popped and the wood splintered, I wrenched a sturdy chunk free. The piece was fat and jagged, about as long as a baseball bat and nowhere near as streamlined, but it would have to do.

“Keep ’em off me,” I told Nadine and got down on one knee next to the corpse Margaux had taken down. I grabbed the edge of a loose bandage and pulled, peeling it from around the mummy’s arm. The linen came away sticky and stiff, clotted with dirt, dead flies, and ancient herbal pastes that smelled like someone had sprinkled incense over a pile of rotting meat.

I wrapped the linen around one end of the plank, tucking it in as best I could. Then, finding a heartbeat of serenity in the midst of madness, I conjured a single, stray spark of magic to my fingertips and flicked it through the air.

The linens ignited like they’d been doused in gasoline, flaring up and leaving a blue spot in my vision as my chunk of wood became a makeshift torch. While Nadine wrestled with one of the mummies, her dress torn at the hem and a cut along one arm oozing black blood, I saw another one closing in behind her. I ran up, waving my torch in its face, and it fell back with a strangled gurgle.

I advanced, relentless, and the mummy lost sight of anything but getting away from me. So did the next one I waved the torch at, slowly herding them toward the far corner of the warehouse. Every muscle in my body wanted to start hitting them with the torch, but I didn’t, for the same reason I didn’t try to light them up with my magic. In a room filled with old dry wood, linen, and shuffling corpses, the last thing I wanted was to start a full-fledged blaze with all of us trapped inside.

Ecko’s creatures didn’t know that, though. All they had were animal instincts—and all animals were afraid of fire.

Caitlin got the idea, and she tugged Royce’s sleeve. They flanked me, backing my advance and shoving away any stragglers who tried to go around us. As my makeshift torch blazed, the fire devouring the linen and wood, we got the surviving mummies penned in one corner.

A shout in Haitian Creole cracked through the air, carried on a gust of black light. The risen dead collapsed as one, tumbling to the stone floor in a tangle of unmoving limbs and glassy eyes.

I rolled the torch in Ecko’s standing tub, snuffing the fire in the mounds of salt. Finally, the warehouse stood in silence.

Margaux, face drenched in sweat, looked like she’d just run a marathon. We all did. Still, she held up her open hand and gave me an expectant look.

“Whose house?”

I slapped my palm against hers, still trying to catch my breath. “Mama’s house.”

The necromancer was long gone. None of us had seen him slip out in all the chaos. Royce glowered at the carnage and put one hand on his hip.

“Damien Ecko is finished in Chicago. Scratch that—in the Midwest. I’m putting out a kill order to my entire court. Nobody assaults a hound and lives.”

“That goes double for us,” Caitlin said. “And we’ll catch him before you do.”

Royce pursed his lips. “That sounds like a wager in the making.”

A shrill scream turned our heads. Nadine, pleased as a cat with a cornered mouse, dragged Stanwyck out of hiding by his hair and one bent-back arm. He’d taken refuge behind a jumble of crates during the fight and probably hoped we’d leave without looking for him.

Bad assumption.

“It wasn’t me,” he cried. “It wasn’t me!”

“Do shut up,” Royce said as he strode over, digging his hands into Stanwyck’s pockets. He plucked out the Judas Coin, holding it up to study it in the dim light.

“I was
cut
in that fight,” Nadine said. “Actually
cut
. I want recompense.”

“Hmm?” Royce looked over at her. “Such as?”

She gave Stanwyck’s hair a vicious tug, making him yelp. “I want this one. I have some aggression to work off.”

Royce turned his back on them with a careless shrug. “Fine, fine, long as he suffers, have a ball.”

Stanwyck looked my way, tears in his eyes, as Nadine dragged him toward the exit. “Tell them it wasn’t me, damn it. I’ll do anything you want. Just
tell them it wasn’t me!
”

I could hear him screaming as she pulled him out of sight, then suddenly nothing but wet, agonized choking. I didn’t know what Nadine had done to shut him up, and I didn’t want to.

Bye, Stanwyck
, I thought.
I promised Coop I’d send you straight to hell. Looks like you’re taking the long, scenic route instead
.

I’d be lying if I said I gave a damn.

Royce flipped the coin through the air. It spun in a glittering arc and landed in my open palm.

“Tournament’s over,” he said. “Here’s your prize. Do me a favor and get out of town before you destroy anything else.”

“Always a pleasure,” Caitlin said sweetly.

We waited until he and Nadine were long gone. I had one job left, one thing I needed to do before I could put Chicago in the rearview mirror.

It was time to find Coop.