The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(9)

Five



As the derelict staggered toward me, I caught a whiff of sulfur on the wind. He giggled like he was laughing at some inside joke he couldn’t explain.

“No rules,” he rambled. “Hound’s gone. Hound’s gone, no rules.”

I dipped my fingers into my pocket, scooping out my deck of cards.

He paused and broke into a singsong voice. “With the dog away, the cats will playyyy.”

I didn’t want to be doing magic on Fremont Street. Dead of night or not, all it would take would be one * with a cell phone and a YouTube account and I’d be in for a world of pain. We didn’t have some austere high council regulating the world’s sorcerers and keeping the secrets of magic under their wise guardianship. What we did have was street justice and a collective burning desire to keep anyone from f*cking up our action.

Lesson one for any well-taught magician is the story of Prometheus. Lesson two is if you go around showing the world magic is real, if you’re lucky the worst thing that’ll happen is a corrective curb-stomping.

I only saw two real options, since whatever this thing was, I didn’t want those teeth anywhere near me. I could run, hoping he wasn’t faster than he looked, or I could bluff my way out, hoping he didn’t know how badly I wanted to avoid a magical throwdown. I’d already run once tonight and my pride still stung, so the choice was obvious.

I sighed with real exasperation and said, “Seriously, *?”

He blinked. That apparently wasn’t the reaction he was expecting.

“The door,” he said, waving his hand, “we all know the door, but we’re not allowed to eat. Never allowed to eat. It’s not fair. But now—”

“Yeah, yeah, the hound’s gone, you said that already. So, what, you were just going to hang out here all night and jump the first magician who walked out the door? The door moves, dipshit.”

I tried to be nonchalant, but my heart was pounding. This was bad news. The Tiger’s Garden was Switzerland for the occult underground: no matter what your beef was with anybody in the community, and we weren’t a big community, you left it at the door and you made nice. The unspoken rule was that the peace extended the length of Fremont; the idea of waiting outside the Garden and jumping a patron as they left wouldn’t even occur to one of us.

I needed to know what we were dealing with, and if this thing—whatever it was—was a lone nut or if we needed to get ready for a real fight. I reached out with my psychic senses, probing at him with a feather touch, trying to glean anything I could.

“Nobody can stop us.” His cracked lips spread into a grotesquely oversized grin. “No rules, we can take what we want. Eat what we want. Eat your toes. Toes are the tastiest.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The misbegotten children of the abyss.” His chin jerked and nose wrinkled. “The inheritors of Lillith. The progeny of filth and regret.”

His little rant lined up with what I felt in my gut. I sensed echoes of psychic distress and a wind of madness, halves of two different souls squeezed together with barbed wire and crammed into a malformed human body.

“You’re a cambion,” I said.

Cambion are what you get when a demon mates with a human. It generally isn’t consensual on the human’s part, and the relationship doesn’t end pretty. Cambion have one foot on earth and one foot in hell, born with the instinctive knowledge that they’ll never fit into either world. Not surprisingly, they aren’t known for being well-adjusted or sane. I knew there was a small clutch of cambion living on the outskirts of the city, but they’d always kept to themselves and stayed in the shadows.

That is, with one major exception. I used to work for a cambion who was quite the charmer when he wanted to be. He was also the most dangerous man in Las Vegas. We weren’t exactly friends anymore.

“I’m going to eat you now.” The cambion took another lurching step toward me.

“What’s Nicky Agnelli going to say about that?”

His foot froze in mid-step.

“I don’t work for him,” the cambion said, but I could hear the uncertainty in his voice.

“But you know his name. And I do work for him,” I lied. “As do my friends. Mr. Agnelli’s going to be very, very unhappy if he finds out you’ve been harassing us. Since I’m in a charitable mood, I’ll make you a deal. You walk away, right now, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

The cambion wavered. I stared him down, silent.

“Fine,” he snapped, looking like a kid who had just been denied a lollipop. “But I’ll find you. One night, one night, you’ll wake up in the dark and I’ll be crouching at the foot of your bed. I’m going to eat your toes first.”

“Turn around,” I said calmly. “Walk away.”

He spat on the pavement and turned, grumbling under his breath as he shuffled up the quiet street. I waited until he disappeared into an alley, to pull out my phone and rattle off a quick text message to Bentley, Corman, and Margaux. You can’t get a connection in the Garden—it doesn’t seem to be anywhere a cell tower can reach—but they’d see it as soon as they stepped out the door.

“Leave as a group and make sure you’re not followed. Psycho cambion on the street and he knows about the Garden. Put out the word, we need a meeting tomorrow night. Trouble brewing.”