The Devil's Daughter Complete Box Set, page 95
part #1 of The Devil's Daughter Series
The professor aimed his pipe at Polly. “You’d better show them.”
Polly pursed her lips while staring at the professor. “A similar problem came up while I was teaching Dooly in life and Doodlebug in hell. The two of them speculated that eventually Doodlebug would join us in life. When that happened, Doodlebug didn’t want to be tied to our computer. If I remember correctly, her words were something along the lines of not wanting to be a bitch on a leash.”
“What did you do?” Sere asked, suspecting that she wasn’t going to like the answer.
Polly pulled a cell phone from the desk. “They each have one of these. Basically, they work like your healing bandage connection to Jennifer, except these can be better regulated and the energy doesn’t have to pass through hell. We used the carrier frequency Joe and Bart worked up for your phone—just amped up so it can transfer human energy to a doppelgänger.”
The professor aimed his pipe at his bank of computers. “Dooly’s is just a normal phone, but because Doodlebug’s works on doppelgänger frequency, the signal does pass through my equipment, though I have even less control over what’s sent than I have with what transpires between you and Jennifer.”
“And does Marjory know about this upgrade?” Sere tried to keep her frustration in check.
“It would be a pretty safe bet,” Polly said. “Had we known about Doodlebug’s connection to Marjory’s bridge of the damned at the time, we might have added in more safeguards.”
Bart put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “But what Sere does is just a quick infusion of human energy to heal her wounds. We’re talking about what a doppelgänger would need for daily living.”
Polly nodded. “Dooly already felt like a caged Guinea pig waiting to have more blood drained anytime Doodlebug got hurt. Marjory’s marionettes are just as dependent on their reals as Doodlebug is on Dooly. For them to function freely, she would need to have those reals locked away where they could be easily tapped if a doppelgänger got hurt.”
Bart’s breathing took on a slow, deliberate rhythm as though he was bracing himself for impending danger. “And like a vampire sucking on his victim, a doppelgänger might not know when to stop drinking from its counterpart. Daily blood draws might weaken the real too much for when an actual problem arises.”
Sere tried controlling her anger. “That phone doesn’t look any different from the one in Bart’s pocket.”
Polly set the phone down. “As Bart said, we’re not talking about the direct real-to-doppelgänger healing energy, just what’s needed to survive. Think of it like a plasma transfusion verses needing actual blood. This is just a regular cell phone. Doodlebug doesn’t need to call Dooly for a quick pick-me-up. Anyone would do. She just needs the app running when someone answers. The conversation doesn’t even have to last all that long.”
Bart pulled out his phone and stared at it like it was about to sprout fangs. “So a call about my vehicle’s expired warranty could actually be a soul-sucking doppelgänger on the other end, looking for a quick fix of human energy? No wonder those calls always leave me on edge.”
“That’s what we came up with, and we’re not all that devious compared to Marjory Laroque.”
Sere wondered why they’d even bothered visiting the professor, but then, if she’d wanted something to make her feel better about her life, she’d have stayed in bed with Bart. “Do you have any good news at all?”
The professor nodded toward his equipment. “If we can’t check on hell, neither can Marjory. That means Sanguine will be dealing with the residents of hell without human interference, which has to help. Can you give me any information on what’s happening on the other side of the gate?”
Sere wished she had better news. “Nothing you don’t probably already know. Sanguine plans on rehabilitating Jenna, but convincing the birdwoman to lay down the god title sounds all but hopeless to me. Is Jenna still powered by Jennifer?”
The professor got out of his chair and flipped on the virtual diorama of hell’s New Orleans. The translucent images looked like ghosts. “The projection is stable, so the people being modeled in life still have their information sent to the doppelgängers in hell. This hologram only shows where the mirror images should be, though, not where they actually are. As we know from Monty, that makes this little marionette stage all but useless. All I can tell you is that the information, including Jenna’s, is still being transmitted.”
Polly pointed at the virtual representation of the thirty-three-story tower by the river. “So long as the World Trade Center continues pumping out energy, we need to continue using the power to prevent another runaway reaction.”
“I’m more than familiar with the problem,” Sere said. “What you’re saying is that the realm is stable, at least as near as you can tell, and the Cormorant is unaffected by the closed gate.”
“That’s it in hell’s nutshell,” the professor said.
Sere held Bart’s hand as they walked back to the bikes. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. You’re right. We need to capture one of Marjory’s demons, though a dragon might be even better.”
“What do you have in mind?”
She grabbed her helmet off the bike’s handlebars. “I keep circling back to our idea about the tunnel that leads into the bank’s basement. Even if Marjory has all of the side entrances sealed or guarded, that shaft has to go somewhere. I think I’ll head over to Fisher’s office.”
Bart straddled his Ducati before grabbing his helmet. “That will give me time to swing by Joe’s old cache and grab some weapons. Even if Marjory doesn’t have a militia hanging out in the tunnel, if we’re right about her demon army being sequestered in the basement, we’ll need all the firepower we can get. At least we’ll have the benefit of constrained access. Those dragons won’t be able to fill the tunnel with fire if only one can stick his head in at a time. Now that we have a little more information, what do you think about making contact with Gerald?”
She knew she’d have to approach the old man at some point, but without even a clue as to the demon army’s location, she wasn’t ready to cross that bridge just yet. Sere fired up her Triton. “We’ve got enough to deal with at the moment. If he makes contact, I won’t avoid him, but we need to figure out what we’re up against before dragging him into it.”
Bart gave her a curt nod before revving his engine then headed down the road. She had the urge to follow him, but it didn’t last. Though Joe’s old haunts still calmed her soul, melancholy would inevitably take over. She turned the motorcycle toward the French Quarter and left the professor’s lab in the dust.
The run from the professor’s lab to Fisher’s CPA office had become so well traveled that even the homeless population had stopped harassing Sere with their usual banter. She parked in the back alley next to a dude who’d created a bed from milk crates. “What’s the word on the street, Lester?”
“Strange sounds from under the bank late last night, but who ya gonna believe?”
She dropped him a dollar. “Watch my motorcycle.”
“I always do.” He stashed the bill in his tattered shirt.
As Sere pushed open the door, Linda barely looked up from her computer. “I’m not even going to ask.” She buzzed Fisher as Sere headed for his door.
As usual, the desk in the office was covered in receipts, but that had never stopped Fisher from pushing everything aside the moment she walked in. “What eruption from hell are you dealing with today, superhero?”
She angled her shotgun away from the chair as she collapsed into it. “What do you know about that tunnel that led into the bank’s basement?”
He pulled a key from his waistcoat and used it to unlock the bottom drawer of his desk. “I figured eventually you’d be looking for a way back into that shaft, so I did a little digging in the New Orleans Historic Collection. When the city had Storyville razed, they annexed part of the property to expand the cemetery. Your father wasn’t in any position to buck the puritanical tide, but he did manage to secure a couple of the new grave sites.” He pulled a copy of a bill of sale from the file folder and slid it across the desk to Sere.
“So this is the back door to the bank’s basement?” The map of the cemetery grounds listed each of the plots by number. A handwritten scrawl at the bottom indicated the ones the baron had purchased.
“I’m not sure I’d go that far.” Fisher thumbed through the file before pulling out a couple of photocopied newspaper obituaries. “The baron might have intended to create an escape route, but he didn’t bother telling any of his heirs. Over the last hundred and fifty years, a number of your kin have found their final resting places on those plots.” He handed over a dozen pictures that looked to have been recently taken. “After compiling the data, I took a tour of the grounds. From the engravings on the headstones, it’s clear that each of the crypts has been well used.”
Sere leaned back in the chair and examined the photos. “If there’s a secret passage, Marjory would have had a challenge creating an entrance with all of her ancestors clogging up the crypt.”
“It’s not impossible. She certainly would have had someone walk to the end of the tunnel, but any aboveground work would have been recorded. There is a piece of good news—even with her considerable financial power, she hasn’t been able to buy every building that lines Conti Street, though at present, I haven’t found any construction sites that might provide access to the tunnel.”
Sere continued to look at the aboveground crypts. “Even without owning the buildings, Bart and I figured Marjory would have bricked up the tunnel from inside.”
In his seersucker suit, Fisher looked far too respectable for the work she kept assigning to him. “That would make sense. The receipts for the basement remodel after your run-in with her last devil seemed suspiciously high. Still, so long as contractors look for basement drainage, they’ll be punching holes to access that tunnel. What are you planning to do?”
Unlike the professor, Sere never minded Fisher’s questions. More often than not, giving him information had ultimately resulted in her being rescued. “It’s less about what I have in mind than about trying to anticipate Marjory’s next move. If I’m right about her having a basement full of demons and dragons, she wouldn’t want to let them out through the teller windows. Having visible demons in the institution wouldn’t do much for business. She’s going to need a way to get them out without connecting them to her bank. It might be time to see if there have been any recent burials in the cemetery. She wouldn’t necessarily need one of the family plots, just a tomb with a deep enough ancestor pit to reach the tunnel.”
He closed the drawer, locked it, and returned the key to his pocket. “What do you think she’ll use her new pets for? She already controls most of the city. You make it sound like she’s preparing for an attack.”
“Maybe she is. So far, she seems to think one step ahead of us. According to Doodlebug, there was a war brewing in hell.”
Fisher leaned forward over his desk. “I know that everyone thinks with the hellmouth closed that communication has been cut, but do you believe that when it comes to Marjory?”
“I think if Marjory and Madam Laroque were standing in front of us, it would be impossible to tell the difference. Every real that I’ve met has shared a mutual mistrust with the corresponding marionette. The instinctual assumption is that hell’s puppets want to take command of the real people who inspire them. That’s usually enough to keep the two sides apart. However, I don’t believe that’s the case with Marjory and her double. I think they work in tandem. Even if they can’t talk to each other, they would still stick with the plan.”
“Sanguine is going to have her hands full.”
She smiled at Fisher, but she was worried about exactly that—eventually, Sanguine was going to need help. Sere pocketed the map and pictures. “I’ll need to talk to Bart, but I think the most logical play is for us to sneak into the cemetery tonight. If we can find an access, we’ll work our way down the tunnel. You’ve performed some impressive financial magic in the past, so anything you can do to help keep us out of Marjory’s clutches would be a big help.”
He swiped the receipts off the table and into a box. “I’m on it.”
88
Chapter 3
Sere checked her analog army watch. “With the hellmouth closed, midnight should just be another tick of the clock, but my guess is those demons would feel right at home at that hour. If we’re going to snag one outside of Marjory’s cave, this would be the time.”
Next to her, Bart pressed against the cemetery’s brick wall with knives and guns stashed around his body. “So, what’s your plan?”
She peeked through the wrought-iron gate. Only shadows played between the crypts. “Though I’d like to see what’s going on in that bank’s basement, what we really need to do is to entice one of the monsters out of its hiding spot. I’d rather not kick over the whole hornets’ nest until we have some idea of what we’re dealing with.”
He looked at her, eyebrows raised in surprise. “That’s a remarkably reasonable approach. I half expected you to say we were going to conduct a full-out assault on the bank stronghold.” He made a quick scan of the grounds then ducked his head back into the shadows. “If I had a squad in hiding, I’d post a sentry somewhere they couldn’t be seen.”
She pressed harder to the wall to avoid a set of passing headlights. Even in their black riding leathers, she and Bart could still be visible to every eye in the neighborhood. She rested her hand on the butt of her shotgun for reassurance. “You’re the expert. Where do we look for the demon bastard?”
He knelt down and picked up a stick. Drawing a series of boxes in the dirt, he quickly rendered a map of the grounds. “A skilled commando wouldn’t want to hang around the entrance to the camp. He’d want to be far enough away that an invading force wouldn’t immediately know where to attack but close enough that he could skedaddle back to base if he saw trouble. He’d act as sentry, not engaging with the enemy but also not alerting his forces until he was sure there was a threat.”
She pointed at the cemetery entrance on the drawing. “We know the baron’s crypts are toward the back of the grounds. Our prey would want to be close enough to the gate to see it but remain hidden from anyone passing by. That means he probably wouldn’t have a perfect lookout. Do you think he’d be on top of one of the tombs? As a demon, he might try to pass as a carved gargoyle.”
Bart shook his head. “He would need to maintain an easy access to his forces. My bet is he’d be behind one of these two mausoleums along the second street of the dead. That would keep him in the shadows from the front gate, give him a running start back to his buddies, and involve minimal wandering around for him to keep an eye on things.”
Sere made a mark where Bart had indicated. “So we’ll need to get behind him if we want to capture him before he calls out his demon friends. I’ve gotta say, Marjory couldn’t have done a better job of picking an access point for her monsters if she’d designed it herself. No one goes poking around cemeteries at night.”
Bart got up and returned to the shadows of the wall’s irregularities. “And even if someone does go there, who’s going to go blabbing about seeing a monster among the tombs?”
Sere studied the map. “If we knew which structure he was behind, we could sneak past him. His line of sight on the gate has to be restricted.”
Bart scanned the top of the crumbling brick-and-plaster wall. “There might be a less obvious way around him. With one good hoist, I’ll bet I could throw you up to the top of this wall. You could wait there until I approach the front gate. While his eyes were on me, you could hop down and make your move.”
The reckless part of Sere savored the plan. With the iron gate between them, the demon wouldn’t be a threat to Bart. But her more cautious side made her ambivalent. When she worked with other people, however, they tended to get hurt. “You would honestly just stand there and let me take him down?”
He gave a sly smile. “I wouldn’t say that. I’ve been known to scale iron bars before. Either our prey turns on you and I get him, or he comes after me, leaving you to attack.”
“Or he does what you explained and heads hell-for-leather back to his buddies. But I suppose that’s where I intercept him. Okay. I don’t see a better plan. Just, please don’t twist your ankle or do anything stupid.”
“Look who’s talking. Give me your foot, and I’ll hoist you up.”
She put her hands on his broad shoulders and lifted her gator-skin boot to his waiting hands. Her hop off the ground felt like it had been spring-loaded. She landed on hands and knees like a cat on top of the brick wall. If the demon had spotted her, he didn’t make a fuss about it. Must be plenty of owls, rats, and other night creatures to ignore on a night like this.
A patch of clouds moved off, allowing the moonlight to bathe the grounds. She lay flat on the top of the wall and let her eyes respond to any movement below. If there was a demon down there, he wasn’t the run-of-the-mill idiot she’d dealt with in the past.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Bart’s hulky figure looming around the front gate like a tourist who didn’t know better than to poke his nose where it didn’t belong. She did her best to remain focused on the cemetery grounds. Come on, you asshole, show yourself. I’ve never known Bart to be wrong about military tactics, and Marjory isn’t stupid. She wouldn’t bring a platoon of demons and dragons across from hell then leave them unprotected.
Bart scaled the gate by grabbing the iron bars and pressing his feet to the brick wall. If Sere hadn’t known he was trying to attract the attention of a demon, she would have thought he was making a covert incursion. His jump to the ground, however, was loud enough to call forth any sentry. She remained hidden on top of the wall while he darted behind the nearest tomb.
