Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(43)

“You’re a real son of a bitch, Faust. I’m in a twenty-foot-deep hole and you’re shoveling dirt on my head.”

I pushed myself to my feet, still holding the gun on him.

“You’re the one with the shovel. I’m just trying to put things right. Do what I tell you, when I tell you, and there’s a chance—not a promise, but a chance—you’ll live long enough for this whole mess to fade into a bad memory.”

I ejected the magazine from his gun and pocketed it. Then I tossed him the empty piece. He caught it, still glowering at me.

“Don’t be a stranger,” I said and let myself out.

? ? ?

Bentley and Corman’s loan had left me with enough cash for cab fare. I booked it over to the Scrivener’s Nook, wanting to get some research done before the name slipped my mind.

“Gilles de Rais?” Bentley said, cleaning off their antique cash register with a feather duster. “The name’s familiar. Rode with Joan of Arc, if I recall. Fairly certain he was burned as a heretic.”

Corman ambled up one of the narrow aisles, straightening shelves as he went. It was a lost cause. The Nook was in a perpetual state of slightly organized chaos, like it had been hit by a tornado followed by a slightly mad librarian with bold new ideas about the Dewey decimal system.

“Deserved it, too,” Corman said. “He had an appetite for little boys. Killed them when he was finished.”

I blinked at him. “And I thought Lauren was scraping the bottom of the barrel when she hired Meadow Brand. What does she need from a psycho like that?”

Corman jabbed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the door to the stockroom. “Check the private shelves. Should be something in the Pandaemonium.”

The Nook’s stockroom was a maze of teetering, piled boxes and cobwebs. Secreted away in a back corner, in the shadow of an empty, rusting filing cabinet, was Bentley and Corman’s private reserve. These black varnished shelves held the books they didn’t put out for the general public, sold only by special request.

Not many people would request a book like Zeller’s Pandaemonium, and I wouldn’t want to meet anyone who considered it suitable bedtime reading. The meaty tome was an encyclopedia of atrocities, a compendium of some of the worst monsters of human history with their known and suspected links to the occult underworld laid bare. The author spent thirty years putting it all together, sent it to a small press for a limited run of a hundred copies, and then he took a bath with a plugged-in toaster.

De Rais had his own entry, all right. He’d started out well enough: commander in the Royal Army, fought in the Hundred Years War, even became Marshal of France. He ran out of battlefields, and that was when the trouble started. Spent years squandering cash on lavish pageants, even built a cathedral, and meanwhile he was murdering children and offering up their body parts in secret black masses.

“Zeller was nuts,” I said, emerging from the back an hour later with the book still in my hands.

Bentley shrugged. “Undoubtedly, but his academic work was solid.”

“No, I mean, five hundred victims? Did he add an extra zero by mistake?”

“It was the 1400s, Daniel, long before scientific criminology and DNA testing. You could get away with the most abhorrent things, especially with the privilege of a nobleman’s title.”

“There’s another problem,” I said, pointing to the page. “Zeller claims that de Rais sold his soul to a demon named Naavarasi. Every other source I looked at said the demon’s name was Barron, with two r’s.”

Bentley chuckled gently. “Middle English, Daniel. ‘Barron’ with two r’s eventually became ‘baron’ with one r, as in the title of nobility. Someone was having a laugh, I suspect. You’re looking for Baron Naavarasi.”

“Who doesn’t seem to exist. I checked the Goetia, Lightman’s Compendium Rouge, there’s no record of a demon by that name.”

“Use-names change, and anyone can claim a title. De Rais’s master could have been anyone. Could be anyone, today. Six hundred years is a long time.”

Another dead end. The sun slunk low in the sky, sketching a shadow across the dusty floorboards. Sunset on my final day. Bentley saw the look on my face.

“What are you going to do?” he said.

I shook my head.

“Talk to Caitlin. Tell her I did my best.”

Even as I walked away, I already knew my best wasn’t good enough.





Twenty-Two

Usually, the elevator ride up to Caitlin’s penthouse felt like the space between heartbeats. Tonight, it was a convict’s slow march to the electric chair. I’d promised I would figure out a way to deal with Sitri’s challenge, find some way to outfox the demon prince at his own game. I couldn’t have crashed and burned any more miserably. Now I had to pay the price.

In a curving hall of white paint and white light, I steeled myself and knocked on Caitlin’s door. She answered, her clothes rumpled, her eyes tired. She hadn’t been sleeping again, and I could guess why. She didn’t invite me in. She stood on the threshold, barring the way, looking in my eyes for some glimmer of hope.

“The priest is alive,” she said. It wasn’t a question. She didn’t need to ask.

“I’m making progress. Look, I know what Lauren and Sullivan are both after. There’s holes, questions I don’t have the answers to yet, but I’m making progress—”