The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(20)
No wonder they don’t run away or press charges against you. They can’t.
I didn’t see a portrait for Stacy, but an indentation in the dust showed where it used to sit. He cleaned up fast. Another missing picture was more worrisome: Artie’s maid. She wasn’t on his shelf of enslaved starlets, so who was she?
Looking over his books, the answer came to me, dragging a razor blade of ice across the back of my neck. The collection included the Grimoirum Verum, Crowley’s private translation of the Goetia, even a rare first-edition printing of The Five Insights with the censored ninth chapter intact. Artie’s books of black magic shared a singular, insane purpose. I knew what the woman was now, why she was powerful enough to glow through the Black Eye’s muffling shroud, and the revelation scared the hell out of me.
“You stupid, stupid son of a bitch,” I breathed. “You conjured a demon.”
Rule number four of magic, the one that any responsible teacher drums into their students’ heads until it’s as second nature as breathing, is you do not f*ck with demons. Yes, I’m aware of the irony of a man named Faust arguing against trafficking with the powers of hell, but I’ve learned from hard experience.
Summoning a demon is easy. Getting them to do what you want, on the other hand, requires a contract and a binding ritual. Imagine facing a trial lawyer so ferocious he makes Clarence Darrow look like a first-year law student. Imagine that this lawyer has had literally centuries of courtroom experience and is incredibly pissed at you for yanking him across dimensions without permission. That’s what you’re up against when you bargain with a demon. And if you leave the slightest loophole in your contract, the tiniest escape clause, you’ll probably be torn to pieces and dragged down to hell, where things will get really unpleasant.
So, of course, Kaufman summoned one up, dressed her in a skimpy outfit, and made her serve beer. The stupid bastard was juggling with nitroglycerin and didn’t even know it. I would have laughed, except that if he gave the word, his pet demon would rip my spine out and use my skull for a bowling ball. On top of that, he probably had a “defend me at all costs” clause in his contract. Getting physical with Kaufman would make my life nasty, painful, and short. Before I took him down, no matter how I did it, I needed to get his demon out of the way.
I turned around and found myself standing face to face with her.
She stood in the closet doorway, watching. She stared at me like an entomologist studying a rare and exotic insect, or a rare and exotic insect studying its next meal. I had one chance to talk my way out of this, one chance to explain my invasion of her master’s shrine. One sentence between life and death.
“So, uh,” I said, “you come here often?”
It was not my shining moment.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“Are you going to tell on me?”
“If he asks me a direct question,” she said slowly, as if considering her words, “I am bound to answer truthfully.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
She didn’t answer. The hint of amusement crinkled at the corners of her eyes. I got the picture.
“He assumes you’ll just tell him what he needs to know, doesn’t he? Because he thinks he owns you.”
“I am…forbidden to speak ill of my master,” she said, the line sounding like she read it from a cue card. The look on her face told me what she really thought. I knew I was pushing my luck, but it was time to roll the dice.
“Too bad,” I said, “because I think he’s a dumbass of mythical proportions. In fact, I believe generations from now, bards and poets will compose epic verse to commemorate his staggering idiocy. Are you sure you can neither confirm nor deny these allegations?”
She smiled, flashing pearly teeth a little too sharp to be human.
“I am forbidden to speak ill of my master. And you need to go back before he thinks to ask me where you went.”
I could take a hint. I eased sideways past her, almost close enough to touch, and paused. “Will you tell me your use-name?”
A use-name is an alias of sorts in occult circles. True names have the power to conjure and bind, but we have to call each other something or else the entire supernatural world would be reduced to “hey, you” and “that guy over there.”
“Caitlleanabruaudi,” she said, or something similar to it, but my mind suddenly felt fuzzy and some of the syllables sounded like they could only be pronounced by a mouth with two tongues. There are some sounds, and some languages, that are so alien to our nature that the human brain naturally rebels at them. You’d think we’d take that as a hint.
“Caitlin?” I managed to stammer, the rest slipping away from me.
“Caitlin,” she echoed. A sliver of tongue flicked across her pomegranate lips, as if tasting the name and coming away satisfied. “Yes. You may call me that. Now go.”
I ducked into the bathroom on my way back, flushed the toilet, and washed my hands, making sure to leave them a tiny bit damp. Every con artist knows it’s easy to get away with lies the size of Mount Rushmore, but missing the tiny details will kill you every time.
“—barely have to pay them,” Artie was bragging to Paolo when I walked back into the living room. “You promise them points based on net profit. It’s called Hollywood accounting. Hey, look who’s back! I thought you fell in.”