The Long Way Down (17 page)

“Shh,” Caitlin said. “Now…you know I have to punish you for this. You understand that, right?”

A tear rolled down Melanie’s cheek. “I know.”

Caitlin pointed at the first corpse, the hilt of her dagger still jutting from his throat. “Go get my blade.”

Melanie wrenched it from the bloody corpse, her face pale, looking torn between tears and throwing up. She carried it to Caitlin, holding it loosely between two fingers.

“You will take this home with you,” Caitlin said, “and clean it until it is pristine. So clean you could cut your dinner with it, yes? While you do, I want you to think about what happens when people rebel against the law. You’ll bring the blade back to me tomorrow, and I’ll decide what to do with you then.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Melanie stammered. Caitlin waited until she’d vanished from sight before letting out a pent-up sigh.

“Melanie is a good kid,” she said, her tone suddenly casual. “She really is, but she’s going through a phase right now.”

“What are you going to do to her?” I asked. I must have sounded horrified. She took a look at me and giggled.

“Tomorrow? Nothing. She’ll spend all night torturing herself with guilt and then start agonizing over what I might have in store for her. She won’t sleep a wink. Docile as a kitten by tomorrow night. I’ll tell her I’m proud of her for learning her lesson and give her a big hug. It’s all psychology.”

“Pardon me for saying, you don’t seem like a hug person.”

“What, you mean that?” She gestured toward the two corpses on the floor. “That’s my job, Daniel.”

“Yeah, you’ll have to forgive me, I’m a little confused about that. And didn’t you, you know, go back to hell when I freed you?”

She walked behind my chair, sliding another dagger from inside her coat. She sliced through my zip-ties. I rubbed my aching wrists, clenching and unclenching my fingers against the bloodless tingling.

“Number one, you’re confused because you’re not supposed to know any of this exists. We’re irritated enough that you occult-underground types even know what cambion are, but that cat got out of the bag during the Dark Ages. Number two, I don’t live in hell; I live in Las Vegas. There really is a difference, though it’s sometimes difficult to tell, especially in August.”

“How did you know I was in trouble?” I asked. She sliced my ankles free, spinning the ivory-hilted dagger in her hand before slipping it back into her inner coat pocket.

“I’ve been following you, silly. I hoped that the people who set me up would come after you for revenge. Instead I snared a clot of feral little opportunists. Not the prize I wanted. Don’t give me that look; you were never truly in danger.”

“The people who set you up? Besides Artie Kaufman?”

“That pig had nothing to do with it. He was just the babysitter. He did what he was told. His brother’s the key, and I never saw his brother, just heard him on the phone.”

I stood up, shook my legs out, and contemplated Caitlin. She looked like she’d just stepped off a Paris runway, even after murdering two men without thinking twice about it. Corman’s words lingered in the back of my mind
. She’d gut you as soon as give you the time of day, no matter how nice she smiles.

Maybe I was falling for a pretty face. Maybe I was just dumb enough to want to ride this train a little farther, a little closer to the end of the line, to see what I’d find there. I could justify it all day long, talk about how I needed help closing in on Sheldon Kaufman, how it was necessary to free Stacy’s soul, but those were just excuses. What I said next, I said because I wanted to.

“We should compare notes,” I told her.

“Are you sure that’s safe?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye.

“Not remotely.”

“Smart boy. All right, but if we’re going to talk, we’re going to do it over a meal. I’m famished.”

I glanced nervously at the corpses, and she put her hands on her hips. “I don’t eat
carrion
,” she said. “Come on, my car’s outside.”

A white Audi Quattro with napa-leather seats sat in the abandoned factory’s parking lot. It squawked as she unlocked the doors from her keychain.

“Here’s all you need to know,” she told me as she strode toward the car. “A good-sized chunk of the western United States is under the authority of the Court of Jade Tears and its honored ruler, Prince Sitri. I am his hound, his whip-hand, the keeper of his law on Earth, and his court’s appointed persecutor—”

“You mean prosecutor?”

She just rolled her eyes.

“Among other things,” she said, “many other things, this means policing the local cambion population to ensure they don’t do anything stupid, and protecting them should they need help. Most of them, like Melanie, are fine. The ferals are the problem.”

“Wait, that kid’s the norm? I thought they were all psychotics except for a few.”

I got in the car while she tossed her coat and weapons in the trunk. Underneath she wore a white silk blouse and a black pencil skirt, the hint of a silver pendant gleaming at her neckline. She slid into the driver’s seat. The engine purred to life. Her fingertips caressed the wheel.

“Most cambion,” Caitlin said, “are perfectly well-adjusted and normal, relatively speaking. You don’t know about them because they’re very good at hiding.”

“How many are there?”

“A generous handful. My prince’s court is one of the few that doesn’t have an open-season policy on them. Many feel that, being half human, they’re abominations and impure by nature.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. The Audi rumbled out of the factory lot and onto the street.

“We, however, deem them worthy of existence and protection so long as they obey our laws. As a result, more than a few halfbloods migrate in from the Midwest and East Coast, looking for a place to thrive. The other courts’ shortsighted loss is our long-term gain. As usual.”

“So you’re…the sheriff?”

She grinned. “The sheriff, the diplomat, the occasional guidance counselor. Any business of the prince’s on Earth is my responsibility. I do occasionally need to go home for work or pleasure, but by and large, this world is my oyster so long as I’m strong enough to keep the job. Ah! Here we are.”

A valet ran over to take her keys as we pulled up to the curb. We walked together through the casino, under a ceiling painted the color of a midsummer sky. When we got to the restaurant, I eyed the marquee over the doors dubiously.

“Uh, Caitlin? Isn’t this one of Gordon Ramsay’s places? Don’t you need reservations at least a week ahead of time to get in?”

She glanced over her shoulder at me.

“
I
don’t, no.”

Twenty-One

T
rue to her word, Caitlin only had to whisper a few words to the maître d’ and we were whisked away to a two-seater table with a view of the kitchen. The prices on the menu were the scariest thing I’d seen all day, but my pockets were stuffed with cash from Artie’s poker game and the company was nothing to complain about. Caitlin picked out a ginger liqueur with lemon and bitters from the drink menu, and I ordered a Vesper martini.

“Here’s what I don’t get,” I said. “How did you get snared by the Kaufman brothers in the first place? I’ve seen remnants of infernal contracts before. They’re always give-and-take, ‘you do this and I’ll do this.’ Not the one you signed, though, it gave all the power to Artie and left you…”

I was going to say “virtually a slave,” but I fell silent, seeing the storm clouds brewing behind her eyes. Her lips pursed in a tight scarlet line.

“I was sent a message, which I believed authentic, that my prince wished me to meet with one of his agents in a hotel room. It was an ambush. There were several people waiting for me, under hoods and masks, and they…forced me to sign it.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get it. What’d they do, hold a gun to your head? I doubt that would slow you down much.”

“They have something that they shouldn’t,” she said, seeming to choose her words with great care, “a bit of old magic that has no place in this world, something venomous to my kind. Its very existence is a sensitive topic.”

“How sensitive?”

Caitlin sipped her drink, giving me a hard look. “Sensitive enough that if you so much as knew its name, I would be obligated to tear your throat out. Find another question to ask.”

“So you were captured. Sheldon and his friends gave you to his brother, who kept you in that house. What did Detective Holt have to do with it?”

“He was the entire reason I was there. I had one purpose: to seduce him, addict him, and keep him pliable. He was vital to their plan. Understand that the Kaufmans had no idea who I was, beyond my basic nature. I heard them talking on the phone once, and Sheldon told Artie, ‘If she can’t do a job on Holt, get rid of her and I’ll tell our benefactor to find us another succubus.’”

I frowned. “So it wasn’t personal for them. They asked this ‘benefactor’ to find them some random succubus, and he or she led them to you.”

It didn’t hang together, though I wasn’t sure how. Some detail nagged at me. The waitress came back.

“We’ll have the beef wellies for two,” Caitlin told her.

“The cambion,” I said as soon as the waitress walked off, “that’s the problem. Wait—you just ordered for me.”

Caitlin nodded. “I did. You’ll love it. Best thing on the menu. What about the cambion? They didn’t know anything; they were just acting out.”

“That’s the problem. They didn’t know anything. Just that you were gone, right? You up and vanished one day, and the toe-eater and his buddies figured it was party time.”

She narrowed her eyes as she put her cocktail glass to her lips. “Right, and?”

“So how did they know I was the one who set you free? Somebody had to have told them. We sure as hell didn’t leave any witnesses behind.”

“I haven’t spoken to anyone about it. You? Who did you tell?”

I had to think about it. Gossip was like breathing for Bentley and Corman, but they wouldn’t have said a word. I frowned, suddenly realizing who could have pointed the ferals my way.

“Nicky Agnelli, that piece of shit.”

Caitlin glared. “What
about
Nicky Agnelli?”

“You know him?”

“Of course I know him. He’s been a thorn in my side for years. He’s always wanted my job. Not to serve, mind you, but to use the office to further his greedy little ambitions.”

I gave her a quick recap of my week, from finding Stacy’s wraith in the storm drains to my unexpected interview with Nicky at Club Prive.

“I knew Nicky was either keeping tabs on me or on Stacy’s grandfather with his pet seer, so I used an artifact to shield myself when I went to Kaufman’s house. I took it off, though, on the night of the poker game. If his guys were watching, Nicky knows exactly what went down there. This was payback. He must have leaked the details to the toe-eater and figured the ferals would do his dirty work for him.”

“
Khlegota
,” Caitlin spat, the flensetongue word slipping into my eardrums and doing cartwheels of spite. “I imagine the Kaufmans paid him to track down a succubus they could capture for their little plan. By sending them at me, he earned his filthy money and got me out of the picture.”

I nodded. “That’s Nicky’s flavor, no doubt about it. As long as I’ve known him, he’s always been a five-moves-ahead kind of guy. So what now? Are you going to go after him?”

The waitress brought over our plates, and Caitlin fell silent, looking pensive. The rich aroma of the beef Wellington opened my eyes wider than a pot of espresso.

“I can’t,” Caitlin said. “Nicky wasn’t abandoned or cast out like most halfbloods. His father is a duke in Prince Sitri’s court, and he’s very protective of his family’s reputation. I don’t dare move against him without ironclad evidence.”

I sighed. “Which Nicky knows. He’s also the kind of guy, in my experience, who has a knack for keeping his hands clean.”

“Choir of Pride,” she muttered, slicing into her meat, “they’re insufferable, every last one of them.”

The first bite melted on my tongue, a perfect blend of tender beef and puff pastry, the juices laden with flavor. “This is fantastic,” I said. “I forgive you for ordering for me.”

“See? Trust me. What’s your next move?”

I scooped up a forkful of glazed vegetables and contemplated it.

“Well, now that Nicky wants to kill me, that has to be squared. It’ll keep, though. His gambit with the ferals failed, and he’s gotta be thinking I suspect him. He won’t try again anytime soon.”

“What makes you think he won’t just shoot you?”

I shook my head. “Because Nicky Agnelli has a very strained relationship with the Vegas occult underground. We leave his rackets alone, and he leaves us alone. If he did anything to change that though, like for instance going all Al Capone and capping one of us, or anything else that could be traced back to his doorstep…well, he’s tough, but he’s not tough enough to handle every sorcerer in the city coming down on his head at the same time.”

“Sounds like we both have scores to settle.”

“Not just with him. I’m going after Sheldon Kaufman. The only way to free Stacy is by getting my hands on that soul-trap and trying to put her back together somehow. I can’t go all guns blazing, so I aim to shadow him a little and see what I can find out about this ‘plan’ of his. How about you?”