Silver Bullet (4 page)

I tried to tell myself that this was no different than visiting Helltown—maybe even a little better. It was just one building, not an entire neighborhood. And while the OPA might have been mostly helpless to do anything about the demon-run neighborhood in Los Angeles, we could always just drop a bomb on a single building. Theoretically.

But Helltown was the devil I knew. This? This was something else.

“Ready?” I asked Suzy.

Her hand rested on her holster as she surveyed the building. The muscles in her shoulders were tense. “Yes, I’m ready.”

She didn’t sound ready.

I wanted to ask her if she was okay. I wanted to make her tell me what had been going through her mind ever since we got her out of the detention center. But the Bluetooth earpiece beeped, reminding me that we weren’t alone, not really.

Fritz’s voice came in over the earpiece, soft and clear. “Give the doorman my name. He’ll let you in.”

Suzy and I crossed the street. Her legs were a heck of a lot shorter than mine, but she lengthened her stride to reach the door first.

The look that the doorman gave her was somewhere between annoyed and amused. She was dressed for work, which meant a black suit, black necktie, practical loafers. She looked like she belonged in an office building, not downtown Reno at night.

“Whatever you want, it’s not here,” he rumbled, carefully enunciating the words around his tusks. “Beat it.”

“Fritz Friederling sent us,” Suzy said.

“Friederling, huh?” He stepped aside, holding the door open. Hot air gusted over the sidewalk. “Enjoy.”

I stepped through ahead of Suzy.

After everything Connie had said about Craven’s, I expected the casino to be a horror show. But I’d already been in a couple of the other casinos to avail myself of their greasy breakfast buffets, and the gaming room floor didn’t look all that different from those at The Eldorado or Circus Circus.

The carpet was covered in tacky geometric patterns. The walls were painted black with mirrored panels and a mirrored ceiling. The card tables looked like they were arranged at random in the sunken floor, half-hidden under a cloying cloud of cigarette smoke.

A cocktail waitress sauntered past, looking me up and down with heavy-lidded eyes. She was wearing a few strips of leather and not much else. And her body—oh man, no way could that body belong to a human. Not unless she had some kind of antigravity spell holding up her bare breasts. Her nipples looked like Hershey’s kisses. Her hair was silk framing her slender neck.

I thought about kissing along the line of her throat, nipping her jaw with my teeth. I thought about suckling the sweat out from between her breasts. As she returned my stare, I thought she had to know exactly what I was thinking about—and approved of it.

Suzy bumped into me deliberately, jolting me out of my glazed stare. “Thought you’d be done with succubi by now, you big dummy.”

A succubus?
That would explain a lot. I still couldn’t help but watch the waitress slink pass with the drink tray, hips swaying. She shot a sultry, inviting look over her shoulder.

“I’m just…thirsty.” Right. Thirsty. Even though I didn’t drink alcohol.

Suzy’s lips pinched into a frown. “Maybe you shouldn’t drink anything a demon gives you. Just a thought.” When I didn’t immediately respond, she jabbed a knuckle into my ribs. “Hawke! Pay attention!”

I blinked hard, shook the haze away. “Yeah. You’re right.”

Connie had talked about how inviting the cocktail waitresses were—and how deadly. And I’d still forgotten her warnings the second I walked through the door.

I made myself focus on Suzy instead. She was very pretty, but not succubus-distracting. Safe and normal. “What would I do without you, Suze?”

She just snorted and started walking.

“Where’s David Nicholas’s office?” Suzy muttered, two fingers touching her earpiece.

“Up the rear stairs. Up—don’t go down. Right above the ninth-floor high roller gaming room.”

We found the stairs behind the blackjack tables, hidden behind a pair of escalators that were marked with “Out of Order” signs. The stairs were narrow and spiraling and didn’t look like they’d be capable of supporting my weight.

“Nine floors,” I muttered.

Mischief sparked in Suzy’s eyes. “Not afraid of getting a little exercise, are you, Hawke?”

“I’m afraid of stairs collapsing and killing the both of us.”

“Grow a pair,” she said, elbowing me in the same place she had pinched me. It felt like I was going to bruise.

That was a little of the Suzy I loved.

Our good humor was gone by the time we reached the ninth floor high roller room, slaughtered by a mix of fatigue and a serious case of the creeps. Everything between the first and ninth floors was dark—no resemblance to The Eldorado there.

I glimpsed a restaurant on the second floor that smelled like sticky-sweet barbecue. Third through fifth were just dark hallways. Eighth looked like some kind of spa, with a front desk and a red-tiled floor, but the creature behind the counter definitely wasn’t human.

It was a relief to hit the ninth floor, even if the typical casino décor had been replaced by velvet curtains and oil lamps. It was so dark that I couldn’t tell if there were demons or humans squatting around the tables.

“Did you survive the nine whole flights of stairs?” Suzy whispered in a weak attempt to lighten the mood as we sidled along the wall, staying off the gaming floor.

“Yeah, but my thighs are killing me. Not sure I could climb another step.”

“Tough shit,” Suzy said, pointing. There was a separate staircase leading to the manager’s office, which was an enclosed loft overlooking the tables.

I groaned, and not just because I didn’t want to go up more stairs. It was awful dark up there.

“Look at the bright side,” she said, nudging me onward. “Your ass is going to look fabulous.”

The stairs led to an antechamber outside the manager’s office, which was, like everything else, painted black. David Nicholas’s door was labeled “MANAGER.” I knocked on it. Even that brief contact made chills wash over my spine. My heart was beating a little too fast, like I’d just guzzled an entire gallon of energy potions. Faster than it should have after taking the stairs.

“Do you feel that?” I whispered, waving my hand between us. It seemed like there should have been something tangible to touch, like a scratchy veil clawing at my face, making it hard to breathe.

“Feel what?”

All of the other sounds of the casino had retreated, like the hall separating us from them had grown a mile long, and I could only hear the faint echoes of life. Yet the antechamber itself felt smaller. Like it was contracting around me.

“
That
,” I said, unable to put to words the growing tension.

Suzy’s jaw tightened. “You’re imagining things, Cèsar.”

I wasn’t. The walls were definitely getting blacker. It was getting harder to breathe.

The office door opened.

The sallow-skinned man who greeted us was my height, but about as thick around as one of my biceps. A leather jacket hung off the points of his shoulders. His shirt was stained with tobacco fingerprints. His cheeks were so sunken that I could make out the line of his individual teeth, and his eyes were endless, inky black.

“David Nicholas?” Suzy asked.

The corners of his lips stretched across his face, reaching from one earlobe to the other. “What have we here?” I could feel the words all the way in the core of my intestines. I was transfixed by the black sheen on his tongue as it undulated with speech.

“Fritz Friederling,” I said. “He sent us to talk to you.”

David Nicholas lifted a cigarette to his lips. He inhaled and blew smoke out the caverns of his nostrils. “Come inside.”

He stepped back, leaving nothing between me and his office but a threshold. It was even darker inside than it was out on the landing. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go in.

Our hesitation seemed to amuse him. His smile grew again.

“Ladies first,” he said.

Suzy lifted her chin and went inside.

I couldn’t let her go in alone—I followed.

WALKING PAST THE WINDOWS of David Nicholas’s office, I could look down to see the poker hands of every high roller below. The dealers handled the decks smoothly like they were extensions of their hands, flicking the white rectangles across the red felt, gathering up the discards, shuffling and stacking and redistributing. The motions were hypnotic and the card patterns were unusual. Grinning knaves and furious jackals.

I was so distracted by the sight that I wasn’t watching where I was going. My foot caught on something. Only Suzy’s quick grab stopped me from falling. I looked down to see what I’d tripped on and immediately regretted it.

David Nicholas’s office was a garbage dump. The trash was piled as high as my shoulders in some places. His desk was one giant ashtray, with used cigarettes scattered among the paperwork. A brass bucket on the floor nearby was filled with brown sludge. The upholstery on his chair was torn at the corners to reveal tobacco-browned padding.

The manager slid through the mess without ruffling even a single candy wrapper and poured himself into the chair. He propped his feet up on the desk. The bottom of his boots were caked in something gray—something that I didn’t think was mud.

“Take a seat,” David Nicholas said.

Suzy and I exchanged looks. There were two chairs for us, but they were both stacked high with yellowing reports. Looked like they must have been there for decades.

I shoved everything off of the seats and sat. Suzy followed after a reluctant pause.

“Friederling,” David Nicholas mused aloud, rolling the cigarette between his forefinger and thumb.

My eyes flicked to the pile of trash to my right. Had it just…
moved
? What was lurking in there? It smelled like wet rot, even though I could only see paper and plastic from the outside.

There was probably something dead inside.

At least, I hoped whatever was inside would be dead.

“Do you know Friederling?” Suzy asked.

“I know the family,” David Nicholas said. “You might say we came from the similar cesspools.”

I pulled a Steno pad out of my jacket, prepared to take notes. “Aren’t you a…?”

“Nightmare?” he asked.

I’d meant to say “demon,” but his office was definitely nightmarish. I couldn’t think of a better word for the casino, his office, or the man sitting in front of me, in fact.

Fritz’s voice whispered through the Bluetooth earpiece. “A nightmare is a breed of demon. They’re born incorporeal, but gain human form after they’ve collected power for a few centuries. Only the strongest ones resemble humans.”

“Resemble” seemed to be subjective. There was no mistaking David Nicholas for human, even with the sallow hair limp at his cheeks, the human clothes, the presence of two arms and two legs.

But I got the message. This guy wasn’t to be fucked with.

I wished I hadn’t worn my jacket into Craven’s. It was so hot and stuffy. Could barely suck in a lungful of air like this.

“When was the last time you were in contact with an employee of Craven’s named Connie?” Suzy asked.

David Nicholas popped the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. “Not since you killed her.” The words fell hard, like he’d just swung a sledgehammer and smashed into both of us with the accusation.

I didn’t know how to respond. The nightmare was looking at me—looking
into
me—and it felt like he knew everything rattling around inside my head.

“He knows that Connie is dead but not how it happened,” Fritz said, his voice tinny and distant. “That means he doesn’t know anything at all. Don’t worry about it.”

I wanted to ask Fritz what the hell he meant, but I couldn’t talk to myself without looking crazy.

“We were in contact with Connie because of concerns about unusual infernal activity in the Reno-Sacramento territory,” Suzy said. “Do you have any information about that?”

“Reno-Sacramento territory,” David Nicholas echoed. His eyes flicked between us and then settled on me. “You a kopis?”

I didn’t need Fritz’s definitions to understand that question. Kopides were a class of super-strong, super-fast humans that were born to hunt demons. All of them were men—something about the ability being carried on the Y chromosome. Many of them were employed by the Union. So I understood what he meant when he asked me if I was a kopis, but I didn’t understand why he would ask that in response to Suzy’s question.

I hesitated to answer, hoping that Fritz would fill in with more information. He didn’t.

“We’re witches,” I finally said.

David Nicholas snorted and sat back without continuing that line of thought. Smoke curled out the opposite corner of his mouth. “Always thought it was queer to call men ‘witches.’ Should be sorcerers or something. Unless you’re queer, mate?”

He was trying to provoke me. He was going to have to accuse me of something actually insulting if he wanted to do that. “Everyone who casts magic is called a witch.”

“Queer,” he said again. “Very queer.” The last millimeter of cigarette burned away, smoldering at the filter. He flicked it into the brass bucket of sludge. “You’re not a kopis and aspis trying to take up residence in the territory. So who the fuck are you, and why is any of this your business?”

“He doesn’t know about the OPA,” Fritz said immediately. “Don’t tell him.”

Shit
.

I couldn’t whip out our usual cover story, which was that we worked for the FBI. Demons knew that the FBI was officially unaware of the preternatural.

I looked to Suzy for a suggestion, and she looked back at me. Her face was colorless. She was being hit by the horrible aura of David Nicholas’s office just as bad as I was, and she looked like she was on the verge of passing out.

Double shit.

I said the only thing I could think of saying. “We’re concerned citizens.”
Smooth, Cèsar.

The weight of the air in the office grew as David Nicholas stood. I tensed, but he only drew out a pack of cigarettes.

He said nothing as he extracted a new cigarette, lit it, stuck the box back into his pocket.