“Loud and clear,” I said.
After a short and bloody war with the Chicago Outfit, the New Commission—Jennifer’s bid to unify the Vegas underworld—was the last power standing. Seabrook was willing to work with us, to a certain deniable extent. She could turn a blind eye to our rackets, authorizing the occasional token bust but leaving our real operations alone, so long as we kept the peace.
Twelve dead teenagers, scions of some of Vegas’s wealthiest and most powerful families, was the exact opposite of keeping the peace. Seabrook wanted the city’s ink pipeline sealed up tight, as of yesterday, and the dealers…well, she couldn’t come right out and say what she wanted us to do, but then again, she didn’t need to. We were all grown-ups here.
“I had ’em stick the kid in an interview room once he started dropping your name to anybody who would listen,” Kemper told us. He shot me a withering look. “Not to protect your little back-from-the-dead routine, either. It’s obvious he’s got something rattling around inside his brain that shouldn’t be there, and I didn’t want him spouting off anything he shouldn’t in front of civilians.”
The occult underground protects its secrets, a hard job in an age where everyone carries a video camera in their pocket. Sometimes I wondered if we were living at the end of the line, counting down the final days of the greatest scam in history. It was only a matter of time before something big went down, something undeniable under the light of day, and showed the whole world what kind of nightmare they were living in.
Don’t get me wrong. We don’t keep magic a secret as a public service. We keep it a secret because it makes us money.
A jangling hoop of keys dangled on Kemper’s belt. He stopped at a reinforced and double-locked door, fumbling with the borrowed keys, trying them one at a time. I glanced left, to an observation mirror set into the wall. A kid, maybe seventeen, sat with his wrists shackled to a ring in a stainless-steel table. Dried blood spattered his high cheekbones and his preppy clothes, none of it his. As I watched, he turned his head and locked eyes with me through the glass.
Kemper glanced over his shoulder at me, still fighting with the keys. “You got your kit? You’re gonna exorcise him, right?”
“Little problem there. Demons I can exorcise.”
He frowned. “Point being?”
“He told you he was the ‘King of Worms,’ right?”
“Yeah.”
The kid spread his lips in a sneering smile, still holding my gaze through the one-way mirror. Then his left front tooth began to buckle under the pressure of his tongue. It pushed outward and slowly tore from his gums like a lifting drawbridge.
His tooth fell out. It bounced across the interview table, trailing droplets of blood in its wake. The tip of the kid’s tongue, glistening red, poked out through the gap and wriggled at me like the head of a newborn maggot.
“Far as I can tell,” I said, “that’s not a demon.”
Kemper opened the door, saw the blood and the tooth. His face went sweaty-pale. I spotted an unplugged security camera in the corner of the room, dangling dead.
“Aw shit, Faust, don’t let him do that—”
Jennifer patted his shoulder and skirted around him. “Stand clear, sugar. We got this.”
“A bold claim,” the teenager said in a voice older, more sonorous, than his spindly chest should have been capable of. Blood from the freshly yanked tooth drooled down his chin and spattered the stainless-steel table. He swung his reptilian gaze my way. “Lazarus.”
“Heard you were looking for me,” I said, trying to sound more nonchalant than I felt.
“He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. And you believed in me, in the bowels of that mortal prison.”
Eisenberg. Trapped behind bars with a target on my back and hired killers closing in, I’d done the only thing I could: reached out, for the second time in my life, to the King of Worms.
The king defied occult taxonomy. He wasn’t a demon, wasn’t a corrupted human soul or some ancient, undead sorcerer. He was something else, with names and epithets half-whispered down through centuries of occult grimoires. And as he had told me, when his desiccated, eternally rotting servants buried a lethal one-shot curse inside my brain, his gifts were free for the asking.
His “gifts” had nearly killed me, twice, and what they’d done to my targets was a fate worse than death. I was young, angry, and reckless the first time I called upon the king. The second time, I was desperate. There wouldn’t be a third.
“And lo,” he said, “you died within those prison walls. And rose again, resurrected and free. Thanks to me.”
“I thought there weren’t any strings attached to that deal,” I said.
“There weren’t. But how did you repay me? You lured my poor emissary into the desert and murdered him.”
My hand throbbed with the memory. I was flat on my back in the dirt, inches from my fallen shotgun as Damien Ecko ground his heel against my broken fingers. Storm clouds roiled in the night sky and blotted out the stars as he raised one clawed hand. He spat out an incantation, a ritual call to the shadows, and then…nothing.
“You abandoned him,” I said. “Ecko prayed to you, and you abandoned him.”
“The necromancer had grown complacent with the passing of centuries. Lazy. Against anyone else, I might have aided him, but you…you I’ve been keeping a curious eye upon. I wanted to see who would win. If he had slain you with his own magic, I would have considered him worthy of my continued investment. Instead, you’ve forced me to seek a new servant.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “This is the part where you tell me that you’ve chosen me to become your next emissary.”
He let out a wheezing, raspy laugh. “You think too highly of yourself. Lazarus received a miracle. He didn’t perform them. Arguably, his greatest contribution was testimony. Telling people of the glory he’d beheld.”
I leaned in. My splayed fingertips brushed the cold steel of the interview table. I stared down at the kid’s torn-out tooth and swallowed a surge of anger.
“I’ll be happy to tell everybody in town about you,” I said, “as soon as I figure out what the hell you really are. But to be honest, right now I just want to know what it’s going to take to get you out of that kid’s body without doing any more damage.”
He shook his head with a half-hearted snort. “The child is lost and damned. Not to your hell, but to mine. It was fated to be so, the moment the tainted sacrament melted upon his tongue.”
2.
The sacrament. Ink. The kids at the party had gotten a bad batch, all right, but even that didn’t explain the spontaneous possession. Thanks to Jennifer’s chemists, we’d sussed out the ingredients. Mostly a mild opiate, a dash of LSD for spice, and trace amounts of a magically active alchemical reagent. Why it was in there at all, we didn’t know. I was starting to get an idea, though.
Ink had boomed onto the drug scene overnight, but all the usual suspects were coming up empty-handed. The Five Families, the Bratva, the Cali Cartel—none of them were involved in the trade or the pipeline, and everybody wanted to know who was slinging the stuff. I’d found the answer. It was an urban legend come to life, an outfit called the Network whose operatives had a knack for melting into thin air. Their foot soldiers had their minds and their tongues bound with curses, and they were recruiting world-class sorcerers for upper management.
The Network had tendrils everywhere, and I had a feeling we’d only seen the tip of the iceberg. We didn’t have a clue who was pulling the outfit’s strings, not until now.
“It’s you.” I glanced sidelong at Jennifer. “The man at the top.”