Defying Fate (20 page)

He shoved her hand away. “Don’t touch me.”

“You and Elise,” Neuma sighed. “The two of you are no fun.” She tilted her head. “So what’s this? He looks like you. Elise didn’t tell me you made any babies.”

“We didn’t,” James said coolly.

She slunk in a circle around Nathaniel. He shrank away from her. “A flower that ain’t bloomed.” She pinched his cheek, ruffled his hair. It was a weirdly nonsexual gesture coming from a creature in steel panties, almost sisterly. “Cute, though. He’ll be cute for sure.”

“I need you to call off the nightmares so we can get to a gate,” James said.

When she shrugged, it looked like her bra was perilously close to popping right off her body. “They aren’t mine. I can’t do nothing about them.”

“Some overlord.”

Neuma mimicked his tone. “‘
Some overlord
.’ Fuck you, asshole. You abandoned your city.” She wrapped her arm around Jerica’s waist. “At least we’re still here, picking up the pieces. You should be kissing my feet in thanks.”

“I can probably draw the nightmares off,” Jerica said.

“Not happening,” Neuma said, nuzzling her neck. “I don’t want you dead.”

“Nightmares don’t die. It’s no big.”

“Could you distract them for an hour? Long enough to do a ritual?” Nathaniel asked. His voice was tiny, barely loud enough to be heard over the bass seeping through the walls.

“An hour? That’s a tall order. I don’t think so.”

James sighed, rubbing his jaw. “Then we’ll wait until daylight.”

“Then you’ve got to deal with those Union jackoffs,” Neuma said. “What are you trying to do that requires witchy-dancing around the gates for an hour?”

“We’re trying to get to Araboth,” he said.

Neuma gave a low whistle. “You have
juevos
, I’ll give you that.” One of her hands snaked toward James. He stepped out of reach to prevent her from checking him for the aforementioned “
juevos
.”

“The problem is that there were only two doors to Araboth,” James said without missing a beat. “They’re both destroyed now. We’ll have to redirect one of the other gates if we want to get in. That will take time. Can you help us?”

“If you want a few safe hours in downtown Reno these days, no. We can’t help you. There’s gotta be another way in,” Neuma said.

“No, there doesn’t ‘gotta’ be anything. The garden is quarantined. All other doors were destroyed thousands of years ago. Only cherubim can get in now.”

“Actually, you just need to get into Limbo,” Jerica said.

All heads turned to look at her. The giant swell of bubblegum between her lips caught the light, showing the silhouette of her tongue poking through her thin lips. The bubble snapped, and she licked it back into her mouth.

“Limbo?” Nathaniel asked.

“It’s neutral ground. The
only
neutral ground.” She trapped her gum between her teeth, pulled a single strand out, and wrapped it around her finger. “It only has two entrances. One’s through Coccytus. The other entrance goes to Araboth.”

“How’d you know that?” Neuma asked.

Jerica’s sharp shoulders lifted in a shrug. “Malebolge is in the same dimension as Coccytus. That’s where most nightmares are born.”

“So we have to get to Coccytus,” Nathaniel muttered, opening his notebook, pushing a leather costume off of the vanity, and then using the space he cleared as a desk. “There’s no doors to Coccytus, so we’ll have to go in sideways.”

“What do you mean?” James asked.

“Skip dimensions,” Nathaniel said, writing “Coccytus
”
in a bubble at the bottom of the page and “home
”
at the top. “Go through fissures.”

“The fuck is a fissure?” Neuma asked, folding her arms underneath her ample breasts. She looked like she was going to smother on her own cleavage.

“The doors between worlds are only a convenience built by angels to make travel easier,” James said. “But all of the dimensions are interconnected. There are physical locations where they join together, like joints on a bone.”

“Not all dimensions are touching each other, though,” Nathaniel said, tongue sticking out between his lips as he continued drawing his map. “And Earth doesn’t have any fissures to Hell around here. We’ll have to take another gate and jump across a few dimensions to get to Coccytus.”

“Is that all?” Jerica asked dryly.

“Yup,” he said. “Give me a few minutes to look around. I’ll find a route into the garden.”

Gary Zettel stood on the
deck of the dirigible, studying the ruined city spread beneath him.

James Faulkner was there somewhere. He had been seen in a silver Honda approaching the city, and even though he hadn’t been stopped at any of the guard posts, there wasn’t a single doubt in Zettel’s mind that the witch had made it through. The only question was what he was planning to do once he got there.

Zettel had taken out his earpiece so that there was nothing to disturb him as he stood alone on the platform in front of the bridge, hands gripping the railing, wind beating around him.

This high above the city, there was no noise. And with all of the spotlights illuminating the dirigible, there was no way that any of the millions of nightmare larvae could reach him.

If he hadn’t been preparing for war, it might have been peaceful.

The Union’s face recognition database was running full bore at the Fernley base. The instant Faulkner showed up on a camera, they would be on top of him—all three units that he had brought from Montana, and every unit stationed in Fernley. All of those units were preparing to deploy right now. Sierra Street and North Virginia were a parade of black vehicles bristling with spotlights, machine guns, and electrified metal cages that could each take down an elephant.

The sight of the pieces moving into place below filled Zettel with grim resolve. He was laying out his side of the board with everything that he could muster, and he still wasn’t sure if it would be enough.

Somehow, he doubted that James Faulkner would be taken unaware—or alone.

The door behind Zettel opened and closed. “We’ve found him, sir,” Dante said. He spoke with forced bravado, but there was no hiding the undercurrent of anxiety. He had taken over as right-hand witch for Zettel after Allyson’s death, but those were big shoes to fill, and Dante’s metaphorical feet were about as small as his brain.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes, sir. Our cameras spotted him entering a casino.”

Zettel felt no excitement at closing in on his prey. A sense of purpose settled over him, as serene as being battered by the wind on the deck of the dirigible. That determination filled the gaping hole in his chest that Allyson’s death had left behind. The night she had died, he hadn’t been sure he would survive—it felt like his heart and lungs had been ripped out simultaneously.

There was nothing quite like losing an aspis, and Zettel would make sure that Faulkner paid for that suffering. There would be no arrest this time. No chance for escape. Just a gunshot, an explosion of blood, and a death both swift and righteous.

“Which casino?” he asked, putting his earpiece back in as he followed Dante to the door.

“A place called Craven’s. It’s demon-owned.”

Zettel stopped inside the bridge, letting the door fall shut behind him. He was familiar with Craven’s Casino. It was the home of an infernal terrorist cell. From those hallowed halls, they distributed drugs, sacrificed human lives to the Night Hag, and organized uprisings. Zettel had allowed Craven’s to continue operating because it was too hard to attack without also dealing with the nightmare infestation.

If Faulkner was in Craven’s, then it must mean that he had aligned with them. Zettel may have had guns, witches, and tanks on his side, but Faulkner had a whole army of demons. “Clever bastard,” he swore under his breath.

“Sir?”

Zettel ripped open the cabinet on the wall. He donned a flak jacket and helmet. “Get ready. We’re going down.”

“Uh,” Dante said, glancing toward the door. Zettel could practically see him considering jumping off the dirigible. Like a swift death on the pavement would be better than diving into downtown Reno with six units at his back.

Allyson wouldn’t have even blinked.

What a fucking pussy.

Zettel didn’t even think before drawing his gun. He shoved it into Dante’s forehead. “Get dressed,” he said, voice cold.

“Yes, sir,” Dante said, reaching out a trembling hand to grab body armor.

Zettel holstered his gun and prepared to drop.

Faulkner was going to die.

XVII

Neuma led Nathaniel and James
back to the manager’s office so they could make their final preparations in privacy. “Nobody’s been back here since Elise disappeared,” she said as she unlocked the door for them. “Bet she still has a few toys around, if you want to play with them.” Neuma winked at James. “Not the fun kind. Sorry.”

The office had always been gloomy and lightless, but the destruction had made it even gloomier. The windows looking down on the gaming floor were cracked like ocean ice. The back half of the office was covered in debris from a collapsed roof.

Nathaniel stood in the middle of it all. His puppy-brown eyes tracked over the giant slab of a desk, the executive chair, the bucket filled with half-smoked cigarettes.

As soon as Neuma was gone, James made a quick sweep of the desk for anything dangerous, but all of the drawers were locked and the surface was clean. “You can work here,” he said.

Nathaniel settled into the leather chair. Its massive silhouette dwarfed him.

“Can I get you anything?” James asked.

“Privacy,” Nathaniel said. “Mapping is hard. I have to zone out.”

James’s eyes fell on a closet in the corner. “Very well. I’ll stay out of the way.”

He tried to open the door, but electricity shocked through his palm when he touched the doorknob. He jerked back.

“Well, what have we here?” he murmured, narrowing his eyes to study the magic sparkling around the doorframe.

It was a locking charm. That kind of magic required enough sentience to be able to tell who should be allowed in or out, and too much intelligence was a terrible thing for an inanimate object. They tended to get ornery as they aged.

“Open,” James said, shaking the doorknob hard.

The charm ignored him.

He gathered the force of his magic within him, letting it fill his words with power.

“I told you to open.”

He could practically feel the door raspberrying him silently, as if to say,
Yeah, right.

James pulled the plastic bag out of his back pocket. He was still carrying the skin that he had severed from Elise’s palm in the Vault, and he flashed it at the door.

“Recognize this?”

He thought for a moment that the door’s sullen silence meant that it was ignoring him. But it finally, grudgingly, swung open.

The room on the other side was looked more like a small storage room in a sadist’s house than a closet. Several spiked torture devices hung from the wall, and heavy iron shackles were bolted to the wall opposite the door. In comparison, the rollaway bed in the corner was totally unremarkable. Elise must have used David Nicholas’s closet as a bedroom when she had run out of money. That was morbid, even for her.

James closed the door halfway. Enough to give Nathaniel privacy without leaving him vulnerable. Then he lay down to rest on Elise’s bed. The pillow smelled like her shampoo; if he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine that she was beside him. But when he rolled over, he hit a hard lump.

He reached into the pillowcase and extracted a box of cigarettes.

A half-smile crossed his lips. He rolled a cigarette between his fingers.

James had been horrified when he’d discovered that Elise had picked up the habit, but he would have given anything to have her with him now—even if she were smoking those damn cigarettes and having tequila for breakfast. He might have even joined her for a drink or six.

Elise wouldn’t have cared that Hannah was dead. Not when danger was still on the horizon. A petty thing like death wasn’t enough to distract her from her mission, whatever it had been on any given week. She was a rock in the ocean, immovable, eternal. He could have used some of that himself.

James touched a mark on his knee and snapped his fingers. A flame hovered over his thumb.

He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag.

Several of the dancers in James’s old ballet company had picked up the habit to keep themselves skinny, and smoking had been an easy way to ingratiate himself with the “cool” people. Twenty-five years later, he was surprised to find that the smoke tasted even worse than he remembered—and was equally surprised when the third drag settled his nerves.

James watched the smoke spiraling from the tip. It curved and twisted like a woman dancing. Or fighting. He set it on a plate Elise had been using as an ashtray, still smoldering.

He was still holding the flap of skin from Elise’s palm. James contemplated the intricacies of the mark, wondering how hard it would be to transfer the tattoo onto himself. Merely drawing it wouldn’t be enough. The power wasn’t held in the shape of the symbol, but in the way it had been transferred to the skin by the cherubim. James couldn’t emulate that.

But there had to be a way for him to use the mark.

His eyes fell on a shelf near the door. There were a few pairs of gloves on the top of it.

He found an oversized pair of fingerless driving gloves that didn’t look like they had ever been worn. Elise always preferred them fingerless, just in case she needed to use her fingers to kill someone. That was the explanation she had given him, anyway. It wasn’t that she wanted to have an easier time eating, or brushing her teeth—she always wanted to be ready to kill.

James searched until he found a needle and thread, which surely must have been for the waitresses to repair their costumes. Elise wouldn’t have had any idea what to do with it.

Sitting back on the bed, he extracted Elise’s skin from the bag. It was drying around the edges.