Execution (The Divine Book 6) (18 page)

I had to hail a dozen cabs before I got the one that was being driven by Joey Lincoln. Half of them were plain old ordinary mortal driven while the rest were a mix of the Touched and the Turned. I didn't tell any of them who I was, and they had no idea on their own. They drove me the short distance I requested an dropped me off without any trouble. I wasn't looking for trouble from cabbies.
 

Only from Rebecca.

I still couldn't believe that she had done this. Well, there was a part of me that definitely could believe it. After all, I had fallen for her with little to no background information on who she was or what most demons were like. She just happened to be the first thing I had bumped into during my sojourn into defending humankind, and I had been an easy mark.

The ghost thing? That was something else entirely. She had been stabbed by the Redeemer. Her soul had been cleansed, and God had given her a second chance. She had done well to help save me, and to help save the universe, and yeah, maybe God should have given her a little more credit for that. But maybe He had also seen inside of her, to the true depths of her being where that resident evil still lurked. I wasn't pretending to be good while at the same time thinking evil. I wasn't pretending to be either. I had my strengths and my faults, my benefits and my vices. I got mad when I didn't get what I wanted, too, but I didn't plot the end of the world in retaliation.

"Joey," I said, sliding into the back seat.

He turned his head to look at me, surprised. "Do I know you?"

"Yes, but you wouldn't remember. My name is Landon."

He kept looking at me. It still wasn't registering. "Okay. What can I help you with, Landon?"

"I need to see your boss."

"What boss?"

I didn't have time to play the game. I decided to be blunt.

"You're Nicht Creidem. I'm the diuscrucis. Take me to your leader."

His eyes grew wide, and he stammered out an affirmation. "Uh... oh... okay."

We pulled away from the curb. He was a little erratic at first, struggling to contain his anxiety and keep the cab within the lines.

"Relax," I said. "I'm not going to hurt you. To be honest, I need your help."

"You do?"

"What do you know about ghosts?"

"You mean spirits? Or, like, Slimer?"

"More like spirits."

"Not much. I know they're real, but ninety-five percent of people who say they've seen one haven't."

"Have you ever seen one?"

He laughed. "Me? No. I heard there's one that's been spotted around the city a few times in the last couple of weeks." He paused. "I probably shouldn't be telling you this."

He had already told me enough. That ghost had to be Rebecca. "Who spotted it?"

He didn't say anything.

"Joey, I can either listen to you answer my questions, or I can kill you right now."

His face paled. "Don't you need me to take you to my boss?"

"I have other ways to find people. I thought this would be faster, and I'm in an awful hurry. This ghost that you said has been spotted? She killed one of my best friends three days ago."

"Are you kidding?"

"Do I look like I'm kidding? Have the Nicht Creidem figured out that Abaddon is back in play yet?"

"I had heard some rumors about something like that."

"They aren't rumors. He's here, right now, and the ghost knows where he is."

"Shit."

"You can say that again."

"Shit. I hope I don't get busted back to bicycle messenger for this. We've got a guy. His name is Bradford. He's got these sigils on his forehead. He calls them his third eye. Said he initially lifted it from a tattoo mag because he thought it looked cool, not because it let him see ghosts."

"Where is Bradford?"

"I'm taking you to him. He's not the boss man, but he's been a Nicht for a long time, and he's pretty badass. I'm sure Bianca will let you talk to him, once you tell her what you told me."

A tattoo on the forehead. Elyse had once had something similar, until her father burned it off her, along with all her hair.
 

"How long will it take to get there?"

"We have to head over to Jersey City. You're lucky it's late, or it would take forever."

"Just get us there as fast as you can, unless you want to watch everything in the city die."

"My city? No way." His foot dropped further on the accelerator, and we raced ahead.

"Hey, do you have a cell I can borrow?" I asked, pulling mine from my pocket. It hadn't survived Hell.

He leaned forward, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out an old candy bar cell. He tossed it back at me. "It's a prepaid. I keep it for situations just like this." He laughed. "Not like this, exactly. For normal riders who need to make a call and have a dead phone."

I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes, trying to remember Alichino's number. Once I had it, I gave him a call.

"Yeah, what do you want?" The checkered demon's voice was raspy and tired.

"Alichino. It's Landon."

"Who?"

"Landon Hamilton."

I waited a few seconds for the name to resonate. "Oh, hey Landon. It's been a long time since-" He paused. "No, wait. Just checked my log. It hasn't been that long. What can I do for you?"

"Is Dante there?"

"Nope. I haven't seen him in three days."

I felt a stream of cold rush through me. The timing couldn't be a coincidence.

"I have a feeling he might be in trouble," I said.
 

"Dante? How is that even possible?"

"I don't know. What were you two working on the last time you saw him?"

"He wanted me to see if I could find a way to destroy Abaddon. I guess he's back in town?"

"Unfortunately."

"Tell me about it. Yeah, so I've been doing a ton of research. I'm talking, comb the entire internet, hack into a few intranets, and scan the darknet research. Not specifically about Abaddon, but how to destroy the soul of a demon completely enough that it can never return."

"What did you find?"

"As far as I can tell, it can't be done. I mean, there was the Redeemer that could turn the demon good, but that's not the same thing."

"And the Redeemer is gone."

"There is that. I haven't found any other way."

It wasn't what I wanted to hear. At least I had the Fist to try to trap Abaddon.

"Alichino, do me a favor and see what you can dig up on ghosts. From what I've heard, they can't be destroyed, only banished. That's not good enough for me."

I didn't like the idea of ending Rebecca, even now. She wasn't leaving me with much of a choice.

"You all like to keep asking me to do the impossible, don't you?" the demon said. "Why don't you just ask me how to solve the freaking Hodge conjecture?" He hissed into the phone. "Fine. I'll see what I can do. You're going to find Dante, right?"

I had a feeling I knew where Dante was. The same place Rose was. Maybe the same place Rebecca and Abaddon were.

The question was whether he was a prisoner or not. He couldn't stay out of Purgatory long without losing his power, so I was very much hoping for not.

"I'm going to try," I said.

Joey drove the cab through a roll-up and down a ramp, into a garage full of other cabs. The place was dingy and ugly and smelled like motor oil and urine. I was glad Alyx wasn't here. I could only imagine how she would react to the smell.

The hood on one of the other cabs was open, and someone in overalls was leaning in, working on something. Joey gave the horn a quick burst to get their attention, and they straightened up and looked our way.

A pixie-haired, narrow woman who could have been easily mistaken for a junkie or a bulimic stared through the windshield at us. Joey stopped the cab a few feet away from her.

"That's Bianca," he said.

"She's the head of this Chapter?"

"Yes."

"And she's fixing cars?"

"She says it relaxes her."

I opened the door to the cab and climbed out. Getting a closer look at Bianca, I could see the slight resemblance to Elyse. The Nicht Creidem had spent hundreds of years building their immunity to the Divine, and limited inbreeding were only one of the ways they had achieved it.

"Joey," she said.She didn't look happy that he had brought a passenger. "What is this?"

"This is the diuscrucis," I said, walking toward her. "Landon Hamilton. It's a pleasure." I put out my hand. It was a flippant way to introduce myself, but I wanted to see how she would react.

She reacted by making a blessed dagger appear from somewhere and using it to slice a neat line across my outstretched palm.

"Ouch," I said, closing my hand to keep the blood from dripping on the floor. I healed the wound and opened my hand again. "I'm not a demon, and if I were an angel, I'd be able to attack you right now."

She dropped the dagger on the floor. "It really is you."

"Yes."

"Why are you here?"

"He wants to talk to Bradford," Joey said.

"Bradford?"

"I'm hunting a ghost," I said.

She nodded. "Funny. So are we."

Sometimes it was a good thing when my goals aligned with the Nicht Creidem's. Sometimes it wasn't.
 

"Why do you want her?"

"How do you know it's a female?" By her reaction, I would guess she hadn't.
 

"I know a lot of things. It's my job."

"It's my job, too," Bianca said. "And if the diuscrucis is involved, I want to know. Who is she?"
 

"You give me something, I give you something," I said.

"I figured as much." She picked up a rag sitting on the fender and wiped off her hands. Then she slammed the hood closed and gestured for me to follow her. "I'm sure you already know about Abaddon?"

"Yes."

"And you know Randolph Hearst is involved," She said it as a statement of fact.

"I made a deal with him not to interfere. Then I interfered. He didn't like that. He and the ghost killed my friend. You might have known her. She used to be one of yours. Joe's daughter, Elyse."

She nodded while she opened the door to the offices behind the garage. "I knew her. We met a couple of times while she was hunting for relics. I heard she got shot by a deli clerk. I was suspicious, but now it makes sense."

We moved past the offices, to a locked door in the back. She knocked a beat out on it, and it opened a moment later.

"It's okay, Rudy," she said as we walked past the guard, a big guy who reminded me of Obi. "He's with me."

We began to descend a stairwell.
 

"What's your play in this, diuscrucis?" she asked.

"The usual. Stop Hearst, get rid of Abaddon, avenge my friend. There have been a few complications, but I'm managing."

"Are you?"

I shrugged. "I'm trying to. That's why I'm here."

"You can't see ghosts, and you can't fight something you can't see."

"Exactly."

We kept going down for a hundred feet or so. There was another guard stationed at the bottom of the steps, and he knocked another pattern on the door to have a third guard open it.

"You've got a lot of security in here," I said. "Expecting trouble?"

"We're always expecting trouble."

I called her on it with a sidelong glance that told her I knew she was lying.

"Fine. We're worried about how Hearst is going to move. This is a power grab unlike anything I've seen before, and even HQ is worried about the fallout. Now you're telling me Hearst bought you off-"

"He didn't buy me off. I bought myself some time. At least, I thought I did." That move hadn't worked out. At all.

 
"Well, you knew what he was doing, and you didn't stop him-"

I interrupted her a second time. "You don't think I would have if I could? Like I said, there have been some complications."

We were in a long corridor with doors on either side. Bianca stopped at one of them and knocked.

"Now you're here because you need our help," she said. "And I'm inclined to help you because neither one of us wants the world to end. At least not if it isn't on our terms."

Nobody answered the door. She knocked again.

"Come on, Bradford," she shouted.

We waited another ten seconds. Finally, she took a step back and kicked the door. It bent off the hinges, collapsing inside.

"Whoa. Shit. What the hell?"
 

Bradford was in the room, laying on his bed, headphones over his ears and a comic book in his hand. He was naked, sort of. He had no hair and wasn't wearing any clothes, but he had so many tats and scars that there was no way to tell where the flesh was below it.
 

He shifted and sat up, pulling the headphones off. "Geez, B. You almost made me piss myself. And I was laying down, so that would have been messy." He grabbed a pair of boxers from the floor and slid them on. "What's so important you busted my door in?"

"The ghost we've been tracking," she said.

"What about it?" He looked at me and put out his hand. "Hey, Bradford Smith. How you doing, bro?"