Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(93)

“Father?” a woman asked. She stood in the doorway, a shadow in a black sheath dress.

He smiled. “Yes? Can I help you, my child?”

Caitlin stepped into the room.

“I hope so,” she said. “I’m wrestling with a theological quandary. It might sound a bit strange, though.”

He chuckled gently. “Believe me, young lady, after the week I’ve had, nothing is ever going to surprise me again.”

“The question is this: if a prince of hell orders a man’s death, but the man is already dead, do you still have to obey the command?”

He blinked, stammering. “That’s…I’m sorry, is this some kind of—”

“Game,” Caitlin said, leaning over to sniff the white flowers in a vase on the priest’s desk. “It’s all a game, until it suddenly isn’t. These are Casablanca lilies, aren’t they?”

He nodded. “They are.”

She flashed a hungry smile.

“Those are night-blooming flowers. Aren’t they, Pinfeather?”

He froze, statue still, then dropped his hands to his sides with a sigh of resignation.

“You’re her,” Alvarez said. “Sitri’s hound. The Wingtaker.”

“In the flesh.”

“And to think,” he said, “I was leaving town tonight. Almost got away clean. How did you know?”

“Daniel put most of the puzzle together. I just added a few key pieces. Every time the Redemption Choir ambushed you two, we could trace it to Ben’s treachery or the wiretap on Nicky Agnelli’s phones…except once. Daniel’s apartment. Only a handful of people knew that address, and it was warded against scrying and divination. There was only one man in a position to spill the beans: you. When Daniel left you alone in his home, you called Gary Kemper to slip him an ‘anonymous’ tip. Gary came from back east, after all, and he still had contacts in your court. Gary told Sullivan, and the rest was history.”

Pinfeather nodded. “I needed to be captured. That was key to the entire plan, but your boyfriend was doing too good a job of protecting me. Admirable, but frustrating.”

“Yes, well, he still sees the best in some people,” she deadpanned. “I haven’t beaten it out of him yet. Then there’s the curious case of Father Fernando. Father Sullivan’s good friend, dead from a hit-and-run just a few days after you moved to this parish. I have a theory on that.”

“I’d love to hear it.”

“I dug up a seminary yearbook. You look so much like the real Alvarez, it’s uncanny. I assume you picked a victim with similar bone structure and faked the rest with makeup and some light plastic surgery. But Fernando knew the real Alvarez. You could fool a casual acquaintance or a stranger, but not him. He had to go.”

“As did the good Father Alvarez himself,” Pinfeather said. “He’s dissolving in a tenement bathtub, and his teeth are scattered in Dumpsters across the city. Crude, I admit, but that’s the cost of a perfect cover.”

Caitlin paced the room, like the detective in an Agatha Christie novel.

“You knew that Sullivan and his cult would cause trouble for my prince, but he hardly needed your help for that. Which brings us to the manuscript. The road map to hell, custom-tailored to feed Sullivan’s mad little fantasies of conquest. Was any of it real?”

Pinfeather smiled proudly. “Not a single word. I wrote the entire thing myself and artificially aged the paper by rubbing the pages down with a wet teabag. Old theater trick. Wouldn’t have stood up to anything more than casual inspection, but Sullivan never thought to doubt me. I love working with fanatics. You just wind them up, and off they go.”

“You had Gary Kemper’s ear more than once. You were the one who pushed for an alliance with Lauren Carmichael, and got Gary to plant that notion in Sullivan’s brain.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because the Flowers didn’t send you here because of the cambion. The Redemption Choir was just a red herring. You wanted the same thing we did: to steal the Ring of Solomon. Word about Lauren Carmichael’s little end-of-the-world mishap had to have leaked, and it wouldn’t take much for your masters to put two and two together. You couldn’t steal the ring yourself, but you figured Sullivan could. So you let him ‘kidnap’ you, wormed your way into his confidence, and steered him toward Carmichael.”

Pinfeather sighed and gave a tired shrug. “Letting someone else do the heavy lifting is usually the best course of action.”

“Once Sullivan had the ring, it wouldn’t take much, a moment of distraction perhaps, to get it away from him. Or maybe he planned to hand it to you all along, since you were such a good little convert. The ring can only be used by a human after all, and Ben was the only other choice he had. And Ben was…well. Ben.”

“That was the general idea,” Pinfeather said.

“Then what? You enslave Sullivan with the ring, I’m guessing. An incarnate demon under your command could wreak all kinds of havoc.”

“Two incarnates, actually. You were going to be my next target. My orders were a long-term campaign of destabilization and terror, aimed ultimately at getting Sitri ousted by his own ministers.”

“Hmm,” Caitlin said. “Good of you to admit that.”