The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(89)

“Bold words, but I can hear your heartbeat. I can taste your fear on every petal of my body. All this aggression, and for what? You should be welcoming me. Celebrating.”

“Call me crazy,” I said, “but I’m not seeing anything to celebrate here.”

“No? This world is choked with evil, Mr. Faust. Drowning in it. It’s everywhere you see. But where is the grace? Where is the touch of a loving creator? I will be that creator. I will begin with a purge. A small one, just enough to lower the planet’s population to more reasonable levels, room for my garden to grow.”

“You’re talkin’ about genocide,” Jennifer said.

“No, child. Genocides are targeted. They are actions of hate. My purge will be as indiscriminate as a plague, taking life without pattern or malice. Meanwhile, I will topple the institutions that helped drive this world into ruin. Every government, every church, and every bank, every dividing line that ever separated human from human will wither under my hand. Imagine it! No more wars, no hatred, no famine or fear. No child will ever go to bed with an empty stomach. No one will lack a roof over their heads.”

“Sweet deal,” I said flatly. “And it only costs a few billion lives and humanity’s freedom. Forever.”

“I am a merciful goddess,” Lauren said. “Let me prove it to you. Kneel down. Kneel down and worship me, and I will spare your lives. I will fill you with what I am, and send you forth as my first ambassadors to the world.”

I looked over at Jennifer, deadpan. “What do you think? Wanna go for it?”

“Sweetie, I like to think my taste in goddesses is a little more upscale. She ain’t a stitch on Bast or Hecate.”

“Yeah.” I folded my arms across my chest. “I’ve just never been much for going to church, myself. Sorry, Lauren, we’ll pass. We’re shutting this little freak show down, right here and now.”

Lauren giggled. An uneasy feeling crept up my spine.

“Yes,” she said. “Of course. I forgot. Because you turned Alton Roth against me, and he’s been spending the better part of the day slowly pulling my soldiers out from under me.”

Now the uneasy feeling turned into a hand of ice.

The fire-escape door banged open, and mercenaries filled the room. Angus Caine strode out ahead of his men, eight or nine of them. Enough for a firing squad. The mercs leveled their rifles. I raised my open hands. Jennifer did the same, keeping the barrel of her revolver pointed toward the ceiling. The grizzled man curled his lips into a nasty smile.

“Like I told you, boy,” he said. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I’d have you. I’d have your heart on a f*ckin’ plate.”

“Roth’s deception was…charmingly incompetent,” Lauren explained. “It wasn’t hard to discern his plan. He failed to learn from history. For instance, consider the mercenary condottieri of Renaissance Italy. They were powerful tools for warring city-states, but dangerous ones. It wasn’t uncommon for them to switch sides, literally in the middle of a battle. Sometimes more than once.”

“The lady made us a better offer,” Angus said. “So we decided to stick around and finish the job we were paid for.”

“That wasn’t my entire plan,” I said.

“No,” Lauren agreed. She pointed toward the bank of security monitors. One in the corner flickered to a new broadcast. “I believe this was.”

They’d captured Meadow Brand.

One mercenary held her with her arms pinned behind her back, another keeping his rifle trained at her head as she struggled to pull free. A third looked up into the camera, holding up a detonator. When he spoke, his voice echoed from the walkie-talkie on Angus’s hip.

“Sir! We found the target on the fifth floor, planting C-4 charges. All explosives have been recovered and disarmed.”

The vines hoisted Lauren back into the air. She hovered, her thorny feet dangling a yard above the marble floor, and smiled serenely down at us.

“You tried to send away my men,” she said, “to prevent the sacrifice. You tried to use the treacherous Ms. Brand to destroy the harnessing pattern. And you failed at both gambits. Utterly.”

I bit my bottom lip, almost hard enough to taste blood. My gaze turned to the security monitors. This was it. All chips in on the last hand of the night.

“How delightful,” Lauren said. “The great Daniel Faust, the trickster magician, caught with an empty sleeve. I wish you could see the look on your face right now, I really do. I’ll savor its memory.”

Movement on one camera, the view of the outside lot, caught my eye.

I smiled.

“Hey, ‘Eve,’” I said. “Think you’ve got some uninvited guests.”

Now they were on three monitors. Teams of men in uniform black, huddled down behind riot shields, forcing their way into the Enclave lobby. A tear-gas grenade exploded on one camera, blanketing the lens in white smoke. On the parking lot view, a swarm of police cruisers ringed the building.

“Oh, hey,” I said. “Looks like the whole Vegas Metro SWAT division is here. Plus the FBI, Homeland Security, and probably the IRS for good measure.”

Lauren shook her head wildly. Her plants quivered. “What? How? They have no reason to be here, no evidence against me! They have no right!”