The Killing Floor Blues (Daniel Faust #5)(24)

I gestured at the wreckage. “Is this the future?”

She snorted, waving a wrinkled hand at me.

“How could it be the future if it already happened? Don’t think about past or present. Forget about time, boy, it won’t help you. Think sideways. Look closer.”

She pointed to my left, at the broken Ionic columns and flame-scorched steps. I looked up at the marquee and frowned.

“This is the Monaco,” I told her. “I’ve been here a hundred times. So why does the sign say—”

“This isn’t your home,” she said. “It’s mine. Call me Cassandra, if you’re needing a name. Not the one I was born with, but it suits me these days.”

Graffiti caught my eye, spattered across a leaning wall. A crescent curve like a sideways moon spray-painted in neon purple, lined with uneven squares. Chaos inside symmetry. It took me a minute to realize I was looking at a picture of smiling teeth.

“He’s the man with the Cheshire smile,” Cassandra said, following my gaze, “and rest assured, he is the reason you’re here.”

“Did he do all this?” I turned toward her.

“This?” She looked into the distance. Faint plumes of black smoke licked the cloudless sky. “This was only the beginning. Some people had a very good idea, though, my brother tells me. They couldn’t kill him, you see. He just keeps coming back. He’ll always come back. So they trapped him. Snared him in a land of smoke, under a black sun. Sealed away and left to rot in the darkness.”

Her words fired a memory in the back of my mind. My confrontation with Bob Payton, the rogue engineer who had conjured the smoke-faced men—the same creatures who nearly tricked Lauren Carmichael into triggering the apocalypse. He’d been giddy, telling me about the other realms he and his partners had plumbed.

“In our early work, we came across a world of absolute silence. An Earth stripped bare of resources, of life, of anything at all, crumbing under a cold and black sun. Lonely creatures walked the wastes, creatures born of entropy. The antithesis of life itself.”

And he’d opened a doorway from that world to ours. Just for a minute.

“Unintended consequences,” Cassandra said, her chapped lips spreading to flash a broken-toothed smile, “will f*ck you raw, every time. Remember the old woman who swallowed the fly?”

“Cassandra, who is he? The man with the Cheshire smile. What’s his real name?”

“I told you already, those are two different questions. And he plays with names. Sometimes he comes as a friend, sometimes a lover, always with a smile. Sometimes he plays at being a god, but that’s all smoke and mirrors—”

“Please,” I said, “tell me his name.”

“I just told you his name, if you’d listen. He’s the man with the red right hand, the unweaver, the unmaker. He’s the last word on the last page of the last book, and he does not believe in happy endings.” Cassandra raised her chin, her voice strident, echoing off the ruins. “He came here to test us, to judge us, and we were found wanting.”

She turned away. Her head sagged.

“We did everything wrong this time around. Everything. He barely had to lift a finger to win. Tragedy never visited the Paladin’s doorstep, and she ended up a backwoods sheriff’s deputy; that one needs pain to drive her ambition. The Scribe met his death at the bottom of a vodka bottle. The Witch never found her Knight; they’re supposed to be unstoppable, united…but only for a little while. I could go on: the Thief, the Killer, all the others…”

She looked back toward me. Her eyes downcast.

“And as for the Prophet,” she said with a bitter little laugh, “she was just an old bag lady with a shopping cart full of cans. And nobody listened to her until it was much, much too late.”





13.




“If you need a name to hang on his smile,” Cassandra told me, “call him the Enemy. For that is his nature and his role to play.”

I turned in a slow circle, staring up at the broken skyline, trying to wrap my head around the sheer scale of destruction. “And how do I stop him? How do I stop this from happening?”

“You don’t. You can’t.”

I looked back at her. I blinked.

“I don’t believe in no-win situations, Cassandra. There has to be a way—”

She held up a hand and shook her head, her tone almost gentle.

“The very fact that you’re here, standing in the Thief’s shoes, means the Enemy has already won. He’s changing the rules. Perverting the natural order of things. I fear he’s found a loophole.”

“A loophole? In what?”

She strolled up the sidewalk, leaving her shopping cart behind, and waved for me to follow.

“A very, very long time ago, a time old as language itself—as old as wisdom —a story was told. A very special story. A mark was made upon the wheel of worlds. And so these souls return, again and again, cursed to play out their parts. Bound to meet their dooms or their triumphs, and woe to any mortal drawn into their tale. Only the Paladin, the chosen one, can defeat the Enemy.”

She shook her head at me, smiling sadly.

“And you are not the chosen one, Daniel Faust. You’re merely a man. Here by the grace of cosmic accident and bad luck. Your best hope is to scurry out of the way, like an ant dodging the footfalls of elephants.”