Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(50)

I scribbled “I’d like to meet” on a scrap of paper, folded it, and slipped it through the mail slot. Message delivered.

I found a cheap motel up the road. They gave me a room on the first floor with a painting of pine trees on the wall and a mattress so stiff it could have been plywood. I didn’t care. I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow, plunging into dreams where I drowned in a whirlpool while lightning tore the sky.

The morning found me sore and restless. I pushed myself out of the stiff bed, rubbing the crust from my eyes, and froze as my bare feet touched the carpet. A business card lay just inside my door, slipped under the frame. I padded over and picked it up, pushing back the heavy curtains to let some light stream in.

It was an ordinary business card, rumpled and worn at the edges, advertising the Blue Karma. I flipped it over. A message waited for me on the back, inked in a spidery, feminine hand.

“Come to me.”

A fat cockroach crawled over the lip of the card and climbed onto my thumb. I flicked my hand out, tossing the card and the roach to the carpet. The roach scurried between my feet, zigzagging and disappearing under the dresser.

“Cute,” I muttered with a shudder, feeling like I needed to slap away invisible bugs as I stumbled toward the bathroom.

? ? ?

The strip mall was alive and bustling when I came back around ten. Solid citizens were out doing their shopping and taking care of their families, blissfully unaware of the monster in their midst. I almost envied them. I parked the Barracuda and tossed my duffel bag in the trunk. Where I was going, the gun wouldn’t do me any good.

Cheap tables and chairs, like leftovers from a clearance depot, lined the Blue Karma’s tiny dining room. A glass case up front by the cash register offered tiny elephant statuettes and fifteen flavors of chewing gum. A short, mustachioed man approached me with a menu, then paused.

“Mister Faust, yes?” he asked, his accent thick as chutney. I nodded. He pointed toward a beaded curtain in the back. Double layered, so nothing beyond the strings of heavy wooden beads could be seen. “You go back. She is waiting.”

I thanked him and steeled myself, taking one last look over my shoulder. If I got this wrong, if I made one misstep, I’d never see the sunlight again.

The hall beyond the curtain was too big for the building. I’d driven a slow circle around the strip mall, getting the lay of the land, and I knew there was no room for a thirty-foot-long hallway lined with black candle sconces. I knew there was nowhere for the hot breeze that ruffled my hair to come from, or the slowly building aroma of roasted, spiced meat. Yet here it was, and here I was, making my way deeper into the shadows.

Another restaurant waited behind another beaded curtain. The real one. A restaurant where furtive figures crouched over tables made of ivory and cold brass, hiding their faces from the sparse candlelight. A restaurant where splashes of blood smeared the dark wood walls and roaches skittered across the stained carpet. As I passed, a reedy voice whimpered from a recessed booth.

“Help me?”

I shouldn’t have looked, but I did. The silhouette of a bloated man cowered in the dark, extending a fat, trembling hand with half its fingers gnawed to stumps.

“Please,” he wheezed. “I can’t stop eating, and they keep bringing me more—”

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head and moving on.

In an alcove at the back of the restaurant, the table was set for a grand banquet. Piles of meat steamed on tarnished silver platters, flesh and gristle and glistening bone. Rich, hot spices hung in the humid air and clung to the roof of my mouth. Behind the table, on a long plush divan, sat the lady of the house.

She was an Indian woman in her late twenties, with skin like burnt honey and a wave of raven-black hair dangling down to the small of her back. Her nails were long and painted the color of old jade, matching her silk sarong dress.

I stood before the table and inclined my head in respect. “Baron Naavarasi, I presume.”

She smiled, flashing teeth a touch too white to be real. “Daniel Faust. You’re the talk of the town. I didn’t dare to hope that I was your final destination, yet here you are. Come. Sit beside me.”

I walked around to join her. A tiny snake, its scales banded in scarlet and deep yellow, slithered out from under one of the serving dishes and wriggled across the table. Naavarasi patted the divan at her side.

“Your tale is an all-too-familiar one,” she said. “Scorned in love, scorned in service, unappreciated, and cast aside.”

“You’ve done your homework,” I said, sitting beside her.

“As have you, I imagine. Tell me what you know. Tell me my story.”

I nodded. “All right. For starters, you’re not a demon, at least not as I understand them. You’re a rakshasi, sometimes called the Devourer of Innocent Flesh, or the Lady of the Foul Banquet. Still, you’ve been an honored member of Prince Malphas’s court since the 1400s at least.”

“Honored?” Her lips pursed in a frown. “No. Placated. Humored. Pandered to and spoken down to. Daniel, my realm was once a jungle, lush and verdant. The days were bright and rich with life, the nights marked by torchlight and screams in the dark, screams of agony and delight. My people spoke of caste, not choirs. Of pleasure and death, not the arbitrary rules of a bureaucratic hell. Can you picture it? That was my home, my children’s home.”