Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(14)

Why a priest? Of all the random people to put on a hit list, why would Prince Sitri think I cared if the target wore a white collar? He’d have to know I wasn’t exactly on speaking terms with any religion’s god. There was no added layer of taboo for me. Sitri could have picked somebody a lot harder for me to knock off if he really wanted a test of my determination. A volunteer at a pet shelter, maybe. Hell, if he wanted to make the “test” really impossible, he could have ordered me to kill a friend of mine.

The answer was easy: the target wasn’t random at all.

Sitri liked games. This Father Alvarez wasn’t some arbitrary chump picked from the phone book. He’d singled him out for a reason, dropped him in my gunsights even though he knew I wouldn’t pull the trigger. Figuring out why, that was my angle of attack. It was the only angle I had.

“All right, *,” I murmured. “I’ll play. Game on.”

I was almost out the door when Emma found me. Her silken skirt fluttered behind her as she stormed over and jabbed her finger in my face.

“What the hell happened down there?” she snapped.

“Nice to see you too.”

“I just saw Caitlin,” she said. “She is miserable. What did you do to her?”

I gave her the Cliff’s Notes version, and fast. I knew from past experience that having a pissed-off demoness close to your face is never a good position to be in.

“Khlegota,” Emma hissed in gutter flensetongue. The infernal word pricked my eardrums like a droplet of acid. Demonic language is toxic to mortal air. “He’s throwing his weight around, is what he’s doing. Typical.”

“You don’t sound like a fan.”

“I’m a loyal servant. That doesn’t mean I have to pretend to like what he’s doing, or be happy that Caitlin’s torn up over it.”

I tilted my head. “I…have to confess, this isn’t the reaction I expected from you. I kinda thought you’d be happy.”

Emma put her hands on her hips.

“You don’t get it. Caitlin and I spar. We compete. We cut each other, tiny cuts, because that’s fun for us. It’s only play. Right now? She’s really sad, and an unhappy hound means life is going to be misery for the rest of us. She does have a license to kill, you know. And torture. And maim. So come on, we’ll take my car and pay a visit to this priest.”

“I’m not going to—”

“Of course you aren’t,” she said. “I am. We’ll drive over there, I’ll force-feed him his own intestines, and I’ll tell everyone you did it. Easy. Efficient. Done.”

“You’d lie to the prince for me?”

Emma narrowed her eyes.

“No. I’d do it for her.”

I shook my head. “Much as I appreciate the offer, I can’t let you do that. Sitri wouldn’t buy it, and that’d just get all three of us in hot water. Caitlin’s giving me three days to take care of business. I’ve got some ideas.”

She looked dubious but handed me a business card. “Southern Tropics Import/Export, Emma Loomis, Director of Finance.” Caitlin had a card just like it. In the twenty-first century, even hell had field offices.

“If you need a hand,” she said, “call me. I want what’s best for Caitlin. Right now, that’s you, so don’t be shy about asking for help.”

“Thanks,” I said and meant it. Emma was more complex than I’d given her credit for at first glance. Sometimes I didn’t mind being wrong about people.

“Besides,” she added with a calculatedly carefree smile, her emotional mask firmly back in place, “if you two break up, how can I steal you from her? That’s hardly fun for me, now is it?”

? ? ?

I couldn’t sleep that night. It felt like an exercise in futility and besides, my clock was counting down. Around three in the morning, I booted up my laptop and shot an email over to Pixie, outlining my idea for handling our Carmichael-Sterling problem. I had an answer by 3:15. She couldn’t sleep either.

“Tricky,” she wrote, “but a friend of mine might be able to hook us up. Meet me @ St. Jude’s at 6 A.M.”

I found a ragged line outside the soup kitchen’s closed doors, the castoffs of Las Vegas queuing up an hour before the place even opened, but I didn’t see Pixie. Just tired, hungry people clinging to the last shreds of their dignity. The sun rose over the sleeping casinos a few blocks away, painting their mirrored faces in shades of scarlet and gold.

A tinny horn bleeped behind me. Pixie sat behind the wheel of an old Ford Econoline cargo van. Patches of rust speckled the eggshell-white paint, and the engine sounded like it needed a cough drop.

I walked up on the passenger side and looked in the open window. “What is this, the serial-killer special? All it needs is a sign that says ‘free candy’ on the side.”

“It’s called the Wardriver. Get in.”

I clambered into the van, looked back over my shoulder, and let out a long, slow whistle. It might have been a hunk of junk on the outside, but the back cabin had more gizmos than an FBI surveillance van. Amber lights glowed on a floor-to-ceiling server rack, next to a console festooned with audio jacks and small black-and-white monitors broadcasting a live stream from hidden cameras showing every outside angle. A bumper sticker slapped on the console read “This Machine Kills Fascists.”