Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(28)

“Safer than the last one?” he asked. I didn’t blame him for sounding dubious. I changed the subject.

“I’ve been thinking. You said your hobby’s…translations, right?”

He nodded. “I don’t want to boast, but I’m fluent in several languages. My work’s been published in liturgical digests, here and there.”

“Do you ever, and forgive me for the phrasing, buy your source materials from anybody shady? Like, somebody who might have criminal connections? Smugglers, grave robbers, anybody like that?”

His eyes went wide. “Absolutely not! I mean, I don’t dig into the life stories of the people I buy from, but I’ve never heard anything disreputable about them.”

One more dead end for the pile.

“These translations, it’s all church history? Like, Pastor Zebediah’s Sunday sermon from a thousand years ago?”

“About that dry.” He chuckled, weakly. “Every now and then, though, I find something really entertaining, like the piece I’m working on now. It’s a Coptic Christian manuscript from around AD 1000, not long before a major schism in the church. The author was a bit touched in the head, but it makes for a great read. I’m still trying to find a journal who might want to publish it once I’m done, maybe as an April Fools’ article.”

I cradled my drink. “Yeah? What’s it about?”

“A road map to hell, if you can believe that.”

My fingers clenched around the glass.

“Road map?” I said, trying to sound casual.

“The author claimed there was a literal road to perdition, not far from Alexandria, and that he’d navigated it and returned to tell the tale. It’s not quite a ‘road,’ as such—it’s a list of landmarks and ritual steps to perform at each one, and the exact way to travel from point to point—but the end result, he claimed, would allow a soul to come and go from the underworld as they pleased.”

“The manuscript. Where is it right now?”

He caught the edge in my tone. His brow furrowed.

“It’s all nonsense, you understand. The poor man had spent too much time meditating out in the desert—”

“People murder each other over nonsense every single day. Where is the manuscript?”

“It’s in my office back at Our Lady,” he said, shaking his head. “But I don’t understand. Why would anyone go to these extremes for a little thing like that? All they had to do was ask, and I’d have happily shared it with them.”

“Sometimes it isn’t just about the having. Sometimes it’s about the keeping-it-away-from-somebody-else.”

I downed my drink and left a crumpled five on the bar for a tip. Maybe it was all a coincidence, maybe I was grasping at straws, but I had a hunch Father Alvarez’s innocent hobby had made him a marked man from here to the edge of hell.

Out in the valet drive, a sleek white limousine with livery plates waited near the end of the sidewalk. A buff guy in a gray jacket stood by the door, holding a hastily stenciled sign reading FAUST.

“That’s our ride,” I told Alvarez. “Don’t worry. You’re going to be safe now.”

The driver held open the door for us. I clambered in and stretched out my legs, happy for a little luxury.

I was less happy about the two men sitting across from us. One of them had a nasty little pistol aimed right at my face. The other was a demon.

He looked like a genteel, thin-faced man in his fifties, but he glowed like black diamonds, vibrant and seething in my second sight, a font of raw malice. His tailored suit was pure Savile Row, and he cradled a walking stick of polished mahogany in his slender hands.

“The answer to your first two questions,” he said in cultured, dulcet tones, “is yes.”

Alvarez noticed the gun as the passenger door slammed behind him, sealing us inside. The locks clicked shut in grim unison.

“What questions?” The priest looked at me.

I slumped back on the leather seat. “Question one: Is that an incarnate? Question two: Are we f*cked?”

“An incarnate what?” Alvarez asked. The limo started to roll. The demon chuckled.

“You’ve kept the good father in the dark. Not surprising. Allow me to be the bringer of light. And the answer to your third question, Mr. Faust, is no. Nicky Agnelli did not betray you. He just has a leak in his fortress walls.”

“Someone, please,” Alvarez said, squirming in his seat, his head whipping from me to the gun and back again, “tell me what’s going on here.”

The demon twirled his walking stick in his hand. The silver tip resembled the head of a roaring lion.

“My name is Suulivarishisian, but I invite you to call me Sullivan, as my mortal friends do. I do hope we become good friends, Father. I am the leader of an organization called the Redemption Choir, and I am here to save your life.”

The Choir’s leader is a demon, I thought. A demon at least as old and powerful as Caitlin. That kind of information was worth its weight in gold.

That was how I knew they’d never let me out of there alive.

“He,” Alvarez said, pointing at me, “is trying to save my life. You people were shooting at us!”

“We were shooting at him,” growled the cambion with the gun.