Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(8)

“Made use of?” I asked.

“Made use of,” she said.

? ? ?

We ate and we lingered until the small talk ran out, and Ben said he had to get back to the office. I noted, as Emma ushered her family out the door, that she left us to pay the entire check.

“Happens every time,” Caitlin said. “Can you come upstairs for a bit? Do you have to leave?”

There was something in her eyes, a tiredness that made me worry. I took her hand and we walked though the hotel together, on our way to the elevators.

“Out of curiosity,” I said, “was she hitting on me?”

“Of course she was. You’re mine. Choir of Envy, Daniel. The only thing she likes more than having new things is taking them away from other people.”

“Ben must be a very patient man.”

She gave me a faint smile as she pushed the call button.

“Ben’s a devoted father. It doesn’t matter what Emma does. He stays for Melanie. Thanks for not mentioning her little adventure, by the way. I think she already learned her lesson.”

“Eh, she’s a good kid,” I said with a shrug. We got onto the elevator, and as soon as the doors closed, leaving us alone in the cage, she slumped against the mahogany walls and closed her eyes.

“Hey.” I touched her arm. “You okay?”

“I’m just tired, Daniel. That lunch is the first real meal I’ve had since our dinner two nights ago. I’ve been working around the clock. As it turns out, Emma’s wonderful plan is neither as smooth nor as carefree as she’d like to spin it. Of course, she doesn’t have to do the hard work either. The refugees are…a problem.”

“What, are they ferals, like the ones that jumped me?”

The elevator chimed and the doors rumbled open on the fifty-sixth floor.

“Worse,” she said, leading me to her door. “Potentially, they’re zealots.”

Caitlin’s penthouse could have been featured in a music video from the eighties. In fact, I think it might have been. In her living room, an original Nagel painting looked out over an expanse of polished hardwood, black leather, and chrome, all cast in the glow of track lights. I sat Caitlin down on the plush sofa and stepped into the kitchen, picking out a light chardonnay from a stainless steel wine rack. I came back with a pair of glasses, pausing by the stereo to put on her favorite Howard Jones album.

“You’re not working now,” I told her, pouring out a glass of the pale white wine and handing it to her. “You need to relax, and I’m not leaving until you do.”

She gave me a half smile, clinking her glass against mine and taking a sip. “What’d I do to deserve you, hmm?”

“Something terrible, probably. Here, turn around.”

“Why?”

I motioned for her to turn and knelt up on the sofa. She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly as I kneaded her shoulders. Her muscles felt like steel cables under my fingers, gradually yielding to the massage.

“I shouldn’t let you distract me like this,” she murmured. “I’ve got too much work to do.”

“Consider it a briefing. Tell me about these zealots.”

“The pogrom in the Midwest wasn’t a random act of cruelty. There’s a subculture among the cambion, a cancer calling itself the Redemption Choir. Even their name is a calculated mockery of our traditions. Instead of seeing themselves as halfway to perfection, they believe themselves to be humans with a horrible curse. They actually want to be freed of their demonic heritage. Self-loathing and miserable, the lot of them.”

I let the “perfection” comment slide. I slid my hands down to her upper back, kneading in slow, circular motions. She leaned forward and groaned with pleasure.

“You’re good at that,” she said.

“So they want to be human. Is that even possible?”

“No. So they take out their frustration on any ‘spawn of evil’ they can find. And they like explosions.”

“Cambion terrorists,” I said.

“Cambion terrorists who tried setting up their headquarters in Saint Louis, square in the heart of the Court of Night-Blooming Flowers’ territory. Hence the purge. Only a tiny minority of cambion belong to the Redemption Choir, but slaughtering them all is an easy way to root out the problem. Now we’ve got a steady stream of refugees making their way west, and there will be Choir members hidden in their ranks.”

“So why doesn’t Sitri close the borders? Say ‘thanks but no thanks’?”

“My prince has his plans. He always does.”

I wasn’t so sure. Just a couple of weeks ago, Sitri had gotten caught with his pants down and would have been taken out in a coup—not to mention triggering the end of the world—if Caitlin, me, and my friends hadn’t been there to stop it. Now he was sponsoring an amnesty program guaranteed to bring bomb-throwing trouble into his own backyard. For a player who was always supposed to be ten moves ahead, he didn’t seem to be on top of his game lately.

I didn’t say any of this out loud, though. Caitlin would get twitchy when people badmouthed the guy.

“Every one of the refugees has to be vetted, investigated, and documented,” she said. “Tracked and monitored. Every one of them. Worse, there’s a spoiler in the mix. The Flowers have a favored agent, a spy and saboteur of legendary skill. All we know is the agent’s pseudonym: Pinfeather. Could be a man or a woman, or both with the right magic. According to our mole inside the Flowers, he, or she, is here.”