Made for Sin (21 page)

Her eyes communicated more than that; he saw her worry, her fear, and he wanted to reassure her but he couldn't.

Majowski broke the heavy silence. “I could use a break myself, actually. I was just about to ask for one.”

He had to give Majowski credit. The guy obviously knew something was up, just like he'd obviously known earlier that Speare didn't have food poisoning. But he was gamely playing along anyway, pretending nothing at all was going on and making clear that even if something was, he wasn't going to ask about it.

Whether that was loyalty to Doretti or sensible fear—Majowski didn't seem to know much about the occult, so it would probably be even more uncomfortable for him than it was for someone like Ardeth—didn't matter.

And he didn't want Majowski to have to learn about the occult, either, at least not the kind of lesson that could result in his painful and messy death. “Thanks. Yeah, I think maybe I'll sit down for a minute or two.”

Away from the grave, and the mirror. That was where he'd sit down.

Ardeth handed him a bottle of water as he approached her. Her fingertips brushed his when she did, sending a shiver up his spine. That, at least, had nothing to do with the mirror. And its impact lessened when he stepped off her mother's grave, although that was offset by the beast's rage thundering through him.

“We're close to it,” he said. Speaking with the baffler in place still felt weird. “Shouldn't take much longer, and we can get out of here.”

“You sure?” Ardeth didn't look convinced. Yeah, well, neither was he, but he didn't want to give her a chance to ask more questions. Or to keep looking at him like that, her worried eyes scanning his face and making his heart ache. No woman had ever looked at him like that before. “Maybe I should dig for a while.”

“I'm fine.” Years of experience had taught him how to keep his emotions and thoughts hidden. Good thing, too, because if ever there had been a time when he didn't want to lie, this was it. “I'll be okay. I think it's as bad as it's going to get.”

She knocked her knuckle against his thigh, a fleeting, half-joking touch. “I'm not sure you're telling me the truth.”

He didn't know what to say to that. Probably best not to say anything at all. He patted her hand and got up, picking up the shovel as he did.

The beast stayed silent when he stepped back onto Cliona Coyle's grave. That was…really not good, at all. What the hell was it doing? Planning something? Waiting for something? He tried to press it, to see if he could get any images from it or any fragment of its thoughts, which sometimes worked. Not this time. Its mind was practically hermetically sealed. Maybe it was payback for the afternoon—okay, the afternoon, and the hour or so at Mercer's place—he'd spent shutting it out. Maybe for some other, much worse reason. He wouldn't know for sure until it acted.

The power was still there, though. It wasn't possible for the beast to shut him out of that. He felt it, stronger with every layer of dirt he and Majowski removed, until finally he dug in his shovel and a stream of pure, blinding evil raced from his hands and feet up his spine and to his head. The beast howled with glee. That was it. They'd reached it.

He fell to his knees. His hands scrabbled at the dirt without him telling them to—he didn't know if that was the beast's will or his own subconscious desperation taking charge. So close, the mirror was so close, and his head filled with images of a future he'd long ago given up hoping for but now seemed so close. Ardeth's and Majowski's voices penetrated the mental haze, but he ignored them. He didn't have time for them, not even when both he and the beast heard their fear. Later. Once he had the mirror he'd deal with them. The mirror came first.

And finally there it was, held between his fingers, the thick, round frame—some sort of dull black metal or onyx-like material, carved with symbols and designs his eyes couldn't seem to register but which the beast recognized—burning them. Burning everything inside him as he half-crawled out of the hole without being fully aware that he was doing so.

It was so much heavier than he'd imagined it would be, so thick and solid. Like the weight of the world in his hands. Maybe literally; the thing he held, its black surface rippling and shifting like a ready-to-burst caul as sparks of red and orange erupted across it, had the power to destroy the city, the state. It could destroy anything and everything the creatures on the other side of it wanted to destroy.

And there
were
creatures on the other side. He could feel them pressing against that elastic barrier, straining to be born. He could see it bulge as they butted against it, ramming into it. The horror it inspired, the frozen dread in his bones caused by watching a sharp horn stretch the surface or seeing a clawed hand grasping for freedom, made his stomach lurch.

The beast didn't care. It lifted the mirror as it stood up, anticipation thrumming through its body into his and back, and looked into it.

Hell was on the other side of it. In that instant, as the beast fell silent and its memories stopped assaulting him, he saw the fires, saw things he'd only seen through the beast's eyes before. He saw other faces peering into the mirror, quick flashes of other people through the centuries who'd sought power or fortune and found themselves enslaved to evil. He saw blood. He saw death.

Most of all, he saw the beast. Its face. God, those eyes, those teeth, that hideous grin skittering like a cockroach across its skin so deathly, sickly pale. He shared his body with that. It lived inside him—that thing lived inside him. Finally he had a face for it; finally he knew exactly what he'd been dealing with for his entire adult life.

Pain erupted in his jaw, on his left side. Somewhere in the distance he heard a gasp and realized he was the one gasping, that the sound was himself combined with the beast. So the beast had felt it, too.

Just like it felt it when it happened again. The beast stumbled—they stumbled—and almost fell. Jesus, it was like trying to stay balanced on a seesaw in a pool of Jell-O in a hurricane, and the fact that a hard shove came with the pain didn't help.

Both of those things needed to stop. He gathered as much strength and courage as he could and dragged his gaze away from the grotesque image before him, slammed his mental wall down on the beast. It didn't close all the way, of course, but combined with the beast's distraction and fixation on the mirror, it was enough to push it back so he could think again. He forced his right hand to let go of the mirror, and reached for his aching jaw.

Only to be stopped by the cold touch of what was unmistakably the point of a sword on the back of his neck. Not just any sword, either. A demon-sword.
The
demon-sword. That dark, unpleasant energy made his skin crawl. The beast spun in his head, sucking up the power, and Speare braced himself. It was going to come through, just like in Nielsen's office, and Ardeth and Majowski had nowhere to hide, nowhere safe to escape to.

He wanted to warn them, but before he could even start to open his mouth the beast subsided. Watchful. Waiting. Uh-oh. Since when did it not take every opportunity to come out and entertain itself?

Since it was afraid of breaking the mirror, apparently, among other things. As his vision finally cleared he saw Ardeth and Majowski, both standing ten feet or so away, both staring at him, both gripped by thugs he recognized as Fallerstein's and both with guns pressed tight to the sides of their heads. Fuck. The beast had been—he and the beast had both been—so fixated on the mirror that they hadn't been paying attention to anything around them. Now it was too late, and he knew without looking that there were at least a dozen men standing behind him, because the beast could feel them. It knew those men could shoot and damage the mirror. It knew they could shoot Ardeth and it wouldn't enjoy playing with her as much if she was dead before it got to her. Gross, but true.

Another man, a tall, thin man in an impeccable black suit, crossed the grass to stand in front of him. Val Ingram. Fallerstein's man, the one who'd rented a room at the Spyglass. His silver-black hair was swept back from his high forehead; he carried with him the faint fragrances of mint and cologne and something else, something secret and unpleasant that lurked beneath those other scents. The beast whined; fear? Anger? Speare didn't know. He only knew that Ingram's smile made him itch to start punching it.

“Mr. Speare,” Ingram said. “I knew keeping an eye on you would pay off in the end.”

A sarcastic response flew to Speare's lips, but he choked it back down. Not while Ardeth had a gun to her head. “Let them go,” he said. “Let them go, and I'll do whatever it is you want me to do.”

Another smile. A smile like a slit throat, too wide and hideously unpleasant to look at. “You'll do that anyway, though.”

“You're making a mistake.” Well, he had to at least try to warn them. “Seriously.”

Ingram's eyebrows rose. “Really. Well, I guess I'll just have to make that mistake, then.”

He nodded at someone, one of the men flanking the demon-sword-bearer. Speare started to throw himself forward, but the fact that he stood right at the edge of the hole over Cliona Coyle's grave meant he had to try to duck sideways instead, and that split second of hesitation was too long. Hands, several hands, grabbed him.

That wasn't a problem, really. He could throw off hands, especially with the beast's help. The problem was that the hands weren't all that descended on him. Something else wrapped around him, something slim and strong that made the beast scream in agony. Fuck, a Molyous Rope, a cord made from fibers that killed any kind of spells or sorcery. A standard precaution if someone thought they were dealing with a sorcerer or someone with power—at least, he hoped it was just a standard precaution, and not that Ingram knew about the beast.

He didn't get a chance to ask. He didn't get a chance to fight back when the mirror was snatched from his grip, either, although he wouldn't have been able to do much. Something sharp sank into his thigh, followed almost immediately by a blossoming of cold, followed almost immediately by the heavy warmth of sedation.

Not enough to put him to sleep, of course, not with the beast's metabolism. But enough to make him feel a little loose, a little drowsy. Enough to make him realize they meant business, too, because if it was enough to make him feel that warm and fuzzy, it was enough to put a normal man down for the count.

Which he'd better pretend to be, if he wanted them to let Ardeth go, and if he wanted them to untie that rope.

And, of course, if he wanted to get the mirror back.

Pretending to be unconscious was harder than he'd expected, especially when Fallerstein's men took his cellphone from his pocket, dragged him across the ground, and hoisted him into the back of a van—he thought it was the back of a van—with the gentleness of miners hauling sacks of coal. Worse than that, though, was pretending to be unconscious when, over the continued irritation of the beast's whining, he could hear them forcing Ardeth and Majowski into another vehicle. Damn it. If they weren't riding with him, he couldn't take the chance of freeing himself and escaping.

He spent the long drive to wherever they were going trying to remind himself that Ardeth was sharp, and she was a professional. She'd been in tough situations before—hell, she'd apparently been roughed up before. She could take care of herself. Majowski certainly could.

Somehow knowing that didn't help him; what Fallerstein was doing was so far beyond the sort of thing he was used to—the sort of thing that the agreement between the Families allowed for—that he couldn't be sure the two of them would be let go. Murders were one thing. Magic, even, was one thing. But what Fallerstein was doing…that was something else entirely. A man who would do what he was doing would certainly kill uninvolved hostages, even if one of them was a woman and the other a cop.

No, he couldn't take that chance. He had to stay in the car, keep feigning sleep, until they got to where they were going and he knew what they'd done with Ardeth. Then…

Fallerstein obviously didn't know about the beast; if he did, they would have filled that needle with a much stronger sedative than the one they'd used, which was already wearing off.

And which was the same one they'd used to fill that dart they shot him with the other night, too, he realized, the one that had scraped him. No wonder it hadn't looked like a normal bullet wound. He'd noticed a little tiredness then, too, but nothing to make him think he'd been dosed. Not a surprise.

And not really important. The important thing was that Ingram and Fallerstein and whichever other goons were involved had no idea what they were about to unleash upon themselves, because the second that demon-sword blade touched his skin—touched it with purpose, to take his head—the beast was going to come out. He wasn't going to be able to stop it. And it was going to literally dance in their blood.

The van turned and headed down a hill, then swerved and slid to a stop. Parked, he assumed. They'd reached wherever it was they were going. Well, good. He wasn't sure how he'd manage to alert Laz or anyone else to their location, but he'd figure something out. All of the men in the car, and probably most of the ones he'd encounter after he freed himself, would have cellphones, so he could use one of those if he couldn't get his own back. Laz would send some men, he'd send Ardeth home with them, and once she was safely out of the building he'd get the mirror and get out of there.

They hauled him out of the vehicle and, thankfully, carried rather than dragged him up a staircase and through another door, where a smell assaulted him with memories. Every casino, every club, had its own particular smell, at least to the beast, and this one smelled familiar under the fading of age and disuse.

It smelled like the Silver Bell. That was where they were, wasn't it? Of course. Fallerstein had bought the place—an old cabaret club, with the requisite hotel and casino—after it closed in the midnineties, and had kept it shuttered ever since. But it smelled just like it had when Speare was nine and his mother spent five months doing a “special guest appearance” there in a show called
Cocorico.

He remembered the place. He remembered the backstage area, the way the dressing rooms were set up and the catwalk and light booth. He remembered the casino and the maintenance corridors and everything else; the only area of that building he didn't know well was the security office, because the guards had let him in there only a couple of times.

Well, that helped. That helped so much he almost grinned. Unless Fallerstein had done some serious renovations, which he doubted, he had a good idea where the exits and escape routes were, the places to hide. For the first time that night, luck was with—no. Luck had been with him that afternoon, more luck than he'd ever had in his life. But it still felt like a good sign.

They carried him down a hall with several turns—past Housekeeping, he thought, which meant they were heading for the cabaret club—and through another doorway. Yep, into the club. He could still see his mother on that stage, hear the applause when she walked out into the center of it and the Silver Bell's middle-aged-to-older clientele recognized her. Her smile at that, the way she lit up the room…

He wasn't afraid. The beast wasn't going to let him die, not while it still needed his body to live. He was, honestly, in no more danger than he would have been sitting on his own couch at home watching football—in fact, it might end up being the best night of his entire life, the night he finally became free of the beast.

But he couldn't help wishing for one second, just one lonely, horribly sad second, that he was nine years old again watching his mother make the crowd love her, safe in the knowledge that she was the most beautiful woman in the world and full of pride that he was her son. He hadn't felt that in a long time.

She wasn't there at the moment, though, and this was not the time to get maudlin or sentimental. Someone else was there—more than a few someone elses—and those someone elses weren't there to dance in feathered headdresses or give him a party like the one his mother had given him there when he turned ten during her run. They were there to try to cut off his head and unleash an evil worse than anything the world had ever seen. And they were going to fail, but he kind of needed to at least try to talk them out of it before the beast killed them all. Not because he especially wanted them to live but because he'd feel guilty if he didn't make the attempt.

He mumbled and stirred as they laid him down on some sort of platform or hard bed. The beast gave a horrible little shiver of pleasure. That bed was the one they'd committed their other murders on; the smell of blood, of death, clung thickly to it. Power clung to it, as well, the power of murder and darkness. All of it combined to make the beast wiggle with excitement, even beyond what it already felt about getting the mirror. That was in the building, too, and it knew it, and it wanted it back. Speare wouldn't have agreed to take Val Ingram's place at that moment for anything, not even for his freedom.

“Is he still out?” That was Ingram's voice.

It was also a cue he couldn't resist. He opened his eyes and glared in the general direction the voice had come from. Don't ask about Ardeth, he told himself. Letting them know she was important to him was just giving them more ammunition—against her and against him—and that was a bad idea. “You're making a mistake.”

“I think we have different definitions of the word ‘mistake,' ” Ingram said.

It wasn't very bright in the cavernous space—he'd been right, it was the theater of the Silver Bell—and he didn't see Ardeth when he scanned the room. All he saw was the tattered relic of the grand place he remembered; of course, he'd been a child, but he was sure the padded velvet covering the walls hadn't been threadbare then, faded by dust and grime from its vibrant crimson to a dull, bruised-looking rose color. He was sure the enormous chandelier hadn't cast so many shadows from dirt and missing crystals then, and that several of the chairs hadn't been broken and leaking stained yellowish stuffing like fungus.

The ravages of age and neglect could be very harsh, although being used as a ritual-murder party chamber by a gang of psychopaths probably had even more of an effect. Twenty years wasn't long enough to cause some of that damage. “Is your version of ‘mistake' one where you end up dead? Because that's my version, and believe me, it's going to happen if you do what you're planning to do here.”

“You seem awfully confident,” Ingram said, “for a man lying on a mortuary table.”

“You seem awfully confident,” Speare replied, “for a man who's about to die. Along with all of his associates.”

Ingram sighed and turned away, heading for the center of the room where he lit two candles on either side of the mirror. The beast started whirling with excitement in Speare's head, excitement turning into frustration when the Molyous Rope kept it from bursting through. That wasn't a problem either, though, he realized. In order for their ritual to work they'd have to remove it and tie him down with something else, and any other rope or cable or chain in the world would break when the beast came out. Easily.

This time he didn't bother to hide his smile. Partly because it was fun not to, and partly because he hoped Ingram would see that he really wasn't nervous, and decide this whole thing was maybe a mistake after all.

“So tell me,” he said, in as conversational a tone as he could muster, “how do you plan to control that thing you're making?”

“That's not your problem.” Ingram shifted the mirror a little to the left, then to the right, apparently trying to find the perfect spot. Like
Satanic Homes and Gardens
was coming to do a pictorial or something. “You won't be alive to care, although, of course, certain of your memories—your qualities—will remain locked in there. Part of the spell.”

The beast snarled again in Speare's head. Not because of Ingram's sadism or his plans for Speare—and, Speare figured, Doretti—both to die, but because Ingram kept touching the mirror.

Suddenly Speare noticed something. He could see Ingram's reflection in the mirror; Ingram's smug face showed clearly as he turned it this way and that. But that's all it was: just a reflection in a mirror. No hell, no nothing. Interesting. He didn't know if it mattered, but it was interesting just the same.

Ingram either didn't know or didn't care what he was thinking. Probably the latter. “How fun it will be, to watch Doretti die at the hands of a creature with your head, and to watch his face as he does.”

“I guess it would be, for you,” Speare said. “It'll never happen, though. Really, I think you should do yourself a favor and stop this. Let me go. We'll just pretend this never happened.”

Apparently Ingram was satisfied with the arrangements, because he stepped back and turned to someone out of Speare's line of vision. “We're ready. Bring it in.”

“I hope you made a will,” Speare said.

Ingram rolled his eyes in reply and headed stage left. A low trunk or case of some kind—Speare couldn't see it well from his position on the table—sat there, just in front of the curtain, and Ingram lifted a few items from it. Items that interested the beast quite a bit; it started moving around again, pacing, eager to get started.

Eager to see hell again. It was almost sad how desperate it was, how excited.

He probably would have been more sad if it weren't for the things it was so eager about. It longed for torture, for agonizing screams, for the ability to do things so depraved that Speare didn't even want to think about what they might be called.

It longed to play with the things Ingram laid out on the floor at the base of the mirror's stand, too, the bones and pieces of flesh and hair. Not just because they were parts of dead things, but because they'd obviously been collected in a way that made them powerful. Their owners had been murdered, tortured. The beast loved that. It loved the incense Ingram lit, the heavy scents of patchouli and clove, lobelia and devil's shoestring, making it feel warm and comfortable. That incense was the smell he'd noticed on Frank Mercer's body, Paulie's head. Probably the smell that clung to Theodore's clothes, too, the incense of powerful demon ritual and danger.

And all the while Speare wondered where Ardeth was, and if she was even there. Had they stowed her in the lighting booth or one of the dressing rooms? Was she in some separate location? He didn't want her in the room when the beast came out, but if they'd set up some plan where she'd be killed if Ingram didn't call at a certain time or something, he needed to know it now. The beast might—
might
—be willing to leave Ingram alive before it escaped through the mirror, and Speare could then force him to make the call.

He had to ask, because Ingram looked ready. He could try to mask the question as much as possible, though. “Where's Majowski? And the woman?”

“The woman you've been sleeping with, you mean?” He hadn't thought it was possible for Ingram to look even grosser than he had before, but the man still managed to do it. The lasciviousness of his smile seemed especially perverse, like he was trying to hold back his drool as he pictured it all in his head.

He was not going to feed that leer, not if he could help it. “The woman from the graveyard.”

“The one you've been sleeping with,” Ingram said again. “She's coming, don't worry. And the cop. We couldn't have them alerting anyone, could we? They'll be excellent test subjects for our new toy.”

It took him a second to realize he'd tried to leap off the table, that the rope and his muscles were straining with the effort. God, he really hoped the beast might let him take over for a second while it killed Ingram. Just so he could have some little part in the process. The thought of Ardeth being at the mercy of some demon-thing made of corpse parts…of Ingram and Fallerstein standing there watching it attack her, offering it praise or something like they were training a dog…it was hard to focus on anything with those images in his head.

Ingram's cool smile didn't hide the flash of fear in his eyes. Nor did the condescending pat he gave Speare's stomach. “Now, now. You won't be here to see it. At least, not really.”

“Neither will you,” Speare managed to say. “It won't happen. But I'm surprised you want to bring witnesses into this.”