I watched Grey depart, walking down the sidewalk, turning the corner, and continuing on his way. The day had warmed up enough to melt the ice, and the evening was misty, cool, and humid. The streets gleamed. It was very quiet. For a moment, I stood there alone.
“If you have a minute,” I said to the air.
Uriel suddenly stood next to me.
“Look at you,” I said. “Got your jet plane back.”
“Undamaged,” he said. “Michael is a good man.”
“Best I know,” I said. “Would you really have nuked Grey if he’d come in the yard?”
Uriel considered the statement for a moment. Then he said, “Let’s just say that I’m relieved that he didn’t make the attempt. It would have been awkward.”
“I think I’m starting to see the picture now,” I said. “Who was really moving this whole mess.”
“I thought you might,” he said.
“But I don’t get your role in it,” I said. “What was your angle?”
“Redemption,” he said.
“For Nicodemus?” I asked him. “You risked that much—your grace, the Sword, Michael, me—for that clown?”
“Not only for him,” Uriel said.
I thought about that for a second and then said, “Jordan.”
“And the other squires, yes,” Uriel said.
“Why?” I asked. “They made their choices, too, didn’t they?”
Uriel seemed to consider the question for a moment. “Some men fall from grace,” he said slowly. “Some are pushed.”
I grunted. Then I said, “Butters.”
Uriel smiled.
“When Cassius Snakeboy was about to gut me, I remember thinking that no Knight of the Cross was going to show up and save me.”
“Cassius was a former Knight of the Blackened Denarius,” Uriel said. “It seems appropriate that he should be countered by an incipient Knight of the Cross. Don’t you think?”
“And the Sword breaking?” I asked. “Did you plan that, too?”
“I don’t plan anything,” Uriel said. “I don’t really do anything. Not unless one of the Fallen crosses the line.”
“No? What is your job, then?”
“I make it possible for mortals to make a choice,” he said. “Ms. Murphy chose to act in a way that would shatter the Sword. Mr. Butters chose to act with a selflessness and courage that proved him worthy to be a true Knight. And you chose to believe that a ruined, broken sword could make a difference. The sum of those acts created a Sword that is, in some ways, greater than what was broken.”
“I didn’t choose for it to do that,” I said. “Seriously. There might be some kind of copyright infringement going on here.”
Uriel smiled again. “I must admit,” he said, “I never foresaw that particular form of faith being expressed under my purview.”
“Belief in a freaking movie?” I asked him.
“Belief in a story,” Uriel said, “of good confronting evil, of light overcoming darkness, of love transcending hate.” He tilted his head. “Isn’t that where all faith begins?”
I grunted and thought about it. “Huh.”
Uriel smiled.
“Lot of Star Wars fans out there,” I noted. “Maybe more Star Wars fans than Catholics.”
“I liked the music,” he said.
*
I took the extra box of diamonds and went to see Marcone.
Molly came with me, but I didn’t need her intuition to know who I would find there. When we got there, she looked at the building and said, “That bitch.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I knocked at the door of the Brighter Future Society. It was a small but genuine castle that Marcone had paid to move to Chicago. It was not lost on me that he had erected the damned thing on the lot formerly occupied by the boardinghouse whose basement I’d rented for years. Jerk.
The door opened and a man the height and width of a drawbridge glowered down at me. He had long hair, a mad bomber’s beard, and enough muscle to feed a thousand hungry vultures.
“Your name is Skaldi Skheldson,” I said. “You know who I am. I’m here to see Marcone and his guest.”
Skaldi frowned. Skaldi’s frown would have been intimidating if I hadn’t spent the past few days hanging out with the Genoskwa.
I bobbed an eyebrow at him and said, “Well?”
The frown became a scowl. But he stepped aside and let me in. I said, “Thanks,” and headed for the conference room. I knew right where it was. I’d visited when I was a mostly dead ghost. Skaldi hurried to keep up with me. The fact that I already knew where I was going appeared to leave him a little unsettled.
Wizard.
We passed several other Einherjaren as I walked through the building, and opened the door to the conference room without knocking.
Mab was inside, seated at one end of the table, her expression distant and implacable, her back ramrod-straight. Her dress and her hair were both pitch-black, as were her eyes, all the way across her sclera. She was here, then, in her aspect of Judgment.
People die when Mab shows up in black. The last time I’d seen her in that outfit, two Faerie Queens had bled out onto the soil of Demonreach.
Seated at her right hand, wearing a charcoal-grey suit, was Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, Baron of Chicago under the Unseelie Accords—and made so, at least in part, by my own signature. There might have been slightly more silver at his temples than the last time I’d seen him, but it only made him look more distinguished. Otherwise, he looked exactly as he always did: calm, alert, impeccably groomed, and as merciful as a lawn mower’s blade.
“You could have told me from the beginning,” I said to Mab.
She regarded me with flat black eyes and tilted her head, a curiously birdlike gesture.
“You were balancing the scales with Nicodemus,” I said. “But it was never about paying back a favor. And it wasn’t about foiling his scheme. This was full-scale political vengeance.”
Very, very slowly, Mab lifted her hands and placed them flat on the table in front of her. Her nails were black and looked sharp enough to slice silk.
“You set Nicodemus up from the very beginning,” I said. “You, Hades, and Marcone.”
Marcone tilted his head from one side to the other and said nothing.
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I said. “Why you sent Molly away—because she’d have known you were up to something. Why the plans to Marcone’s vault were available. Why the bodies got cleaned up, and why the cops didn’t crawl all over this thing when it was done. Hell, they’re probably spinning the shoot-out and the explosions as some kind of terrorist attack. And I’ll bet you anything that the squires found themselves offered a new job, now that their demigod has fallen from grace. Right?”
A ghost of a smile haunted Marcone’s lips.
“Nicodemus violated your Accords,” I said to Mab. “He kidnapped Marcone. He abducted the emissary appointed under the Accords. This was your payback. You arranged for him to get the details about Hades’ vault.” I turned to Marcone. “You built your vault specifically to create the link so that a Way could be opened there. All so you could set Nicodemus up, years after he wronged you both.” I met Mab’s unwavering gaze and said, “And you dealt him the worst pain you could imagine. You took away his daughter. No, you did even worse—you made him do it himself.”
Neither of them said anything.
But Mab’s raven black nails sank a fraction of an inch into the wood of the table, and her void black eyes glittered.
“Now he’s lost his lieutenant,” I continued. “He’s lost his squires. When word gets out of his treachery, he’ll lose his name. No one will want to work with him. No one will deal with him. From where you’re standing, you’ve done worse than kill him. You’ve wounded him, strangled his power, and left him to suffer.”
A long moment of silence passed.
I turned to Marcone. “And what did you get out of it? You got to build the vault, and to secure the clientele who use it. My money says that Hades was your first depositor. That when he made that gesture of trust in you, others followed his example—and that now you’re holding in trust a treasure trove like none in the supernatural world. And if you got a little payback on Nicodemus as a side effect of that, you didn’t mind it at all. And you’ll have plenty of money to pay to have him hounded down, now that he’s been weakened.”
Marcone’s eyes, the exact green shade of old dollar bills, focused pleasantly on me. Still, he said nothing.
Then Mab finally spoke, her voice sepulchral. “Do you have a point, my Knight?”
“I wanted you to know that I knew,” I said. Then I turned to Marcone. “There were people involved in the robbery. People who aren’t otherwise involved in this affair.”