Redemption Song (7 page)

“Demons,” I said.

Pixie’s eyes widened, but not in fear. She smiled.

“So if demons are real,” she said, working the math, “then…it’s all real. God. Heaven. All of it. There’s hope.”

Fuck, I hated this. I tried to play it off, hoping I could keep her just a little in the dark, just enough so she could be happy. Even as the words left my lips, I knew she’d see right through me.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”

The smile slid from her face as she looked into my eyes. I saw something new in her expression. Dawning horror.

“Jesus,” she said. “You’re
lying
.”

“Pix, don’t go down that road—”

“The
truth
, Daniel. I want the truth.”

“All right. You really want to know? The only angel I’ve ever seen was a primordial monster who would have incinerated every man, woman, and child on Earth if she’d gotten loose. As far as any God goes, the best-case scenario is he wound up the world like a clock and walked away a long, long time ago. Worst-case is, he’s insane or he’s dead. If there are any good guys out there, fighting the cosmic fight, I’ve never seen them.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said, her voice on the edge of breaking. “If the world is full of monsters, someone has to be keeping us safe.
Someone
has to be fighting for us out there.”

“Tell me something.” I stared out the window, at a vacant lot littered with windblown trash. “How many hours a week do you spend volunteering at St. Jude’s?”

She shook her head, frowning. “I…most nights when I’m not on a job, but what does that have to do with—”

I looked her in the eye.

“It’s you, Pix. You and everybody like you. Everybody who reaches out a hand when they don’t have to. Everybody who helps somebody get up on their feet, or gets in the way of a fist so somebody weaker doesn’t have to take the pain. Everybody who stands up in the face of evil and says ‘no more.’ Everybody who does what they can to make this shithole of a planet a little less miserable for everybody else.
You
are who’s fighting for us.

“I don’t know all the mysteries of the universe. I’m a small-time grifter with a knack for black magic, that’s all. Maybe there is some cosmic force of good out there, so subtle it can’t be seen. Believe in that if it makes you feel better, but this is what I know: what we have is us.”

She nodded, very slowly. Taking it all in.

“I wasn’t lying about the hope,” I said.

• • •

The Wardriver pulled into the Carmichael-Sterling Nevada parking lot. Pixie found an open spot and parked the van, quiet and anonymous. She was quiet, too. Hadn’t had a lot to say since our conversation. The office building was a three-story wedge of granite and glass on the outskirts of the city, gleaming bright in the morning sun.

Bentley and Corman weren’t far behind. The silver Caddy rolled in and prowled the lot in slow circles like a shark in shallow water. We were early enough that employees were still arriving, a few more every couple of minutes, giving me my pick of targets.

While Pixie set up her equipment in the back, I relaxed and focused on the building. Its reflection in the rearview mirror didn’t glow, didn’t shimmer with mystic traps or dangerous swells of occult power. It just sat there like a perfectly normal office complex.

That worried me.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. Corman.

“I don’t like it,” he said, and I knew exactly what he meant.

“They’re not expecting an attack here,” I said, “but they didn’t put up any wards. They practically laid out a welcome mat for us. It doesn’t make sense.”

“What about mechanical traps, like the ones at the Silverlode? You almost got a razor-wire haircut.”

I shook my head. “No way. Meadow Brand loves those, but they’re not gonna rig a building full of clueless citizens with deathtraps. They’d kill their own employees. Same goes for Brand’s mannequins. Can’t have those things running around in public.”

I thought about it for a minute and snapped my fingers.

“Because,” I said, “they’re not here. We know they don’t want a head-on fight, not until Lauren gets her strength back and brings in some new followers. She’s the CEO. She can work from home if she damn well wants to. Same with Brand. Hell, they can work from Bermuda. Wherever they’re holed up, it’s someplace remote, defensible, and with no civilians around to complicate things.”

“They could be using a VPN,” Pixie said from the back of the van. Her fingers flew over the keyboard attached to the console, two monitors lighting up at once.

“A VP what?”

“Virtual private network. Pretty common for telecommuters. Basically, they log in remotely. Their network traffic still runs through the building here, so they can access the company servers. Long story short, we’d still be able to see their email and activity just as if they were sitting in their offices.”

“You think that’s likely?” I asked.

“Given how tight their network security is? I can’t imagine they’d invest that kind of money and then swap their dirty secrets over an unencrypted home network and a Gmail account. Yeah, I’d bet five bucks they’re on a VPN.”

“All right,” I said. “Did you hear that, Corman?”

“VPN, VCR, whatever. Bentley’s the computer whiz in our house. Bottom-line it for me, kiddo.”

“I’m going in. Wait for my sign. We’ll pull a Mr. Magoo with a bump-’n’-catch.”

“A what?” Pixie said.

“You have your lingo,” I told her, “we have ours.”

It didn’t take long to find a mark. The one who pulled into the lot in a VW hatchback with a Federation Starfleet sticker on the back bumper suited me just fine. He was a younger guy, maybe in his mid twenties, with a rumpled dress shirt and his employee ID clipped to his belt with a bright blue plastic lanyard. I got out of the van and gave the sign. Bentley caught it and swung the Cadillac around for another pass.

I strolled around the lot, taking the long way, to come up from behind.

Nine

B
entley pulled up between the mark and the sidewalk leading to the building, cutting him off. Corman rolled down the passenger-side window, and as I approached, I watched the young man lean close to talk to him.

“—my damn glasses at home,” Corman was telling him, showing the kid some scribbles on a sheet of yellow notebook paper. “Are we anywhere near the right street?”

I walked up from behind and kept my footsteps light on the asphalt. I came in on an angle, making sure Bentley could see me. The kid squinted to read Corman’s chicken scratch.

“You know, I think we might—” Bentley started to say, turning in his seat. The car suddenly lurched, just a jolt, as he pretended to let his foot slip from the brake pedal. The kid jumped, startled, and I plucked the clip-on lanyard from his belt like I was snatching a fly with chopsticks. People can only keep track of so many sensory inputs at once, half that if they’re caught off-balance. In the split second of confusion, focused on the car, he didn’t notice a thing.

I speed-walked right on by, turning back toward the van. Pixie waited for me at the window. I tossed her the card. She caught it and disappeared into the back. Just when I was starting to get anxious, she passed it back to me. Across the lot, the kid pointed east, giving Bentley and Corman directions to the other side of town. They hit the road, their part complete. I broke into a jog and caught the kid near the front door.

“Hey! Excuse me, is this yours?” I called out. He turned, and I showed him the card and lanyard. “I found this in the parking lot. Did you drop it?”

He patted his belt and his eyes went wide.

“Thanks, man! It must have fallen off when I got out of my car. You just saved me a trip to HR. You know they dock your pay, like, fifty bucks if you lose one of these things.”

“Happened to me last month,” I told him. Ahead of us, the automatic door whirred open. I stopped in my tracks, snapping my fingers. “Speaking of forgetting, I left my presentation in my trunk.”

Pixie had worked her magic in the back of the van, spinning the Wardriver’s electronics like a mad DJ at an all-night rave.

“Easysauce,” she said. “These cards are just encoded magnetic strips, no RFID or anything. About as hard to clone as a Holiday Inn room key.”

The console whirred and spit out a blank white card. She turned and held up her iPhone, tethered to the electronics with a slender white cable.

“Say cheese.”

She snapped my picture and fiddled in a Photoshop window on one of the flickering monitors. A few minutes later, a color copy of the kid’s ID—with my face in place of his—slid from the printer. Pixie handed me a pair of scissors and a pot of Elmer’s paste.

“Here. Arts and crafts time. Cut that out, slap it on the new card, and you’re good to go. Your name’s Marvin Staniszewski, and you work in accounting.”

Just stealing Marvin’s ID and going inside would have been a lot faster and easier, but the second the kid noticed it was missing he would have squawked to management—who would cancel the card and issue him a new one, leaving me with a useless chunk of plastic. This way, Marvin would go about his day, blissfully unaware that his doppelgänger was opening doors all over the building. If security reviewed the access logs they’d know something was up, but if I played my cards right they’d never have a reason to.

I finished pasting the ID together and gave it a hard look. It would never pass close scrutiny. Then again, nobody in an office building ever looked twice at these things. As long as I looked busy and kept walking, I should be in and out like a ghost. I clipped the tag onto my belt.

“Here.” Pixie passed me a briefcase I’d picked up at the local thrift shop. “I stocked your goodie bag. Everything you’ll need to rig the tap. When you get in there, you’re going to want to find the IT department. The server room shouldn’t be too far away. Watch out for the IT guys. If they see a stranger fiddling with their tech, they
will
want to know what you’re doing there.”

“Wish me luck,” I said. I stepped out of the van and into the belly of the beast.

The lobby was just like I remembered it. Spacious, marble-floored and lined with overstuffed powder-blue armchairs. The security camera was where I remembered it, too, and I made sure to keep my face tilted away as I strolled under its sweeping eye. I worked to keep my movements slow, natural, relaxed. Nothing to see here, just another anonymous face in the corporate crowd.

Where would they put the company’s electronic nerve center? Server rooms meant heavy equipment and heavier connections to the utility grid. The closer to the ground, the better. I slipped past the receptionist’s desk and started my search on the first floor. Smooth sailing until I passed a couple of guys loitering in the hall and caught a chunk of their conversation.

“—understand why they’re worried, after what happened to the Silverlode. They’re saying it was some kinda ecoterrorist thing.”

“Yeah, but dogs? I mean, that’s gotta be some kind of violation of our rights, right?”

“It’s an at-will state, dude, we don’t have any rights. Besides, you’re just afraid they’re gonna sniff out that joint in your pocket—”

Of all the security measures Lauren Carmichael could have taken, this was the weirdest, which made it the most troubling. Why dogs? Did she actually think I was going to slip a bomb into the building? She didn’t care about civilian casualties, but that wasn’t my style at all. I puzzled it over as I took a shortcut through the data-entry department. Rows of fabric-walled cubicles filled the long and open gallery. Typists, hard at work around me, didn’t even look up as I passed through the room like a ghost.

I froze in my tracks as the answer to the riddle walked in the far side of the room. The security guard, a stubble-haired bull in a black uniform, didn’t worry me. The Doberman with him, though, padding ahead on a leather lead, made my heart skip a beat.

When I first met Emma, I immediately knew what made her different from Caitlin. Caitlin was what we called an incarnate: her “body” was literally made out of raw accumulated energy, condensed and congealed, a trick only powerful and talented demons could pull off. Emma, on the other hand, was a hijacker. She found a vulnerable body and possessed it, imprisoning the original owner in some dark corner of her own mind while Emma wore her flesh like a tailored suit.

I had a lot of experience with hijackers.

The faint scent of sulfur and swamp water, something I caught in my gut more than my nose, told me exactly what Lauren had done. The Doberman wasn’t just a Doberman. He had a hijacker of his own, and the demon under his fur was sniffing for magic.

Dogs, the guy in the hall had said. Plural.

On the bright side, most demons weren’t in Caitlin or Emma’s class, either in terms of power or smarts. One that allowed itself to be bound into the body of a dog was probably close to the bottom of the infernal food chain. On the other hand, my chances in a fight against an eighty-pound Doberman? Not so good. My chances against that same dog juiced up on dark magic, plus his handler, and the revolver riding on his handler’s hip? Nonexistent.

I turned on my heel and strolled back the way I’d come, trying to look casual. The only flaw in my plan was the second guard coming up the corridor from the other direction. I clamped down on a swell of panic. Only a clear head was going to get me through this. I tried to keep the cubicles between the first guard and me as I crossed the department, looking for a way out.

One of the data-entry guys was surfing the web on his PC, looking up last night’s scores with a half-eaten McMuffin sandwich at his elbow. I cleared my throat. He jumped, and the web browser became a spreadsheet in the blink of an eye.

“Sorry,” I said as he swiveled his chair around. “Need to update your antivirus. It’ll take about ten minutes.”

“Again?” he said. I kept a casual hand over my employee badge. I was from another department, an invading tribe. As long as I didn’t say or show anything to make him question it, he’d accept that I was another tech monkey here to make his day difficult.