Chicagoland Gail Martin (best novels to read for students TXT) 📖

I could imagine Capone keeping a vampire imprisoned here. Someone had patched up the outer wall after our minor vandalism.

“Davis said the vampire Mob helped to catch Capone because they blamed him for killing their maker,” Sarah said. “What if he didn’t kill him? What if he kept him prisoner?”

“Why?” West asked. “He had to know the vamp would get away sooner or later.”

“He might have been a hostage to ensure the rival Mobsters would do as he wanted,” Sarah replied.

I felt the pieces of the puzzle fall into place in my head. “He didn’t want the vampire—he needed his blood.” They both looked at me, trying to figure out where I was going with this. “He didn’t just bind a vampire. He also bound a demon. Maybe he started off controlling the wendigo and then Duval and his rougarou, so he took the vampire and increased his power. But I think the demon was what he was after all along.”

Remembering the conversation with Eddie and what happened at the murder house made me certain Capone had decided he needed a demon of his own, one that served him, not the other way around.

“So where is it? And why haven’t we run into it?” West asked, making a slow circle of the room as if mentally matching the scribbling on the walls to the photographs we had all studied long enough to memorize them.

“Whatever you do, don’t say the words out loud,” Sarah warned. “That never goes well in the fairy tales.”

I could almost feel the tumblers turning in my mind, thunking into place. “Didn’t you say Capone had another vault? A secret one?”

“Louise wasn’t entirely sure where it was—because, you know, secret. But she narrowed it down to a couple of possibilities,” Sarah replied.

“Were any of them near here? Because if Capone needed the vampire’s blood to bind the demon, he probably didn’t want to be traipsing all over the hotel with it,” I said.

Sarah consulted the notes she’d made and the rough map Louise had drawn for her. “Yeah—this one,” she said, pointing to the picture. “It’s on this level. I think he took another heavy-duty storage room and sank a vault into the concrete. I doubt the staff come down to this area anymore—all this old-fashioned equipment isn’t in use and probably hasn’t been for a while.”

If the staff had any intuition at all, they’d have steered clear of the area. Between the vampire and the bound demon, it should have given anyone with the least bit of sensitivity to the supernatural the heebie-jeebies.

“We need Father Kinsella,” I said. “Handling a vampire is one thing. But taking on a bound demon—it would be good to have backup.”

West looked askance at me. “I thought you and your ancient god sent the demon at the murder house back to hell?”

“That was an imp, a minor infernal creature. We have no idea how strong the demon is that Capone bound.”

“Won’t your patron think you’re cheating on him?”

That was a good question. Then again, I’d worked with priests before, and Krukis had still heard my prayers. Krukis had been worshipped long before a virgin gave birth in Bethlehem, before Rome, before Catholicism. He and the old gods had nothing to fear, nothing to prove. Those meant to follow them found their way to where they belonged.

“Krukis will be fine. The priest might be a little confused, but the friend who made the referral wouldn’t steer me wrong,” I said. If Sorren thought Father Kinsella was okay with our kind of problems, I trusted his advice.

“If Capone had a bound demon, how did the Feds catch him?” West asked.

“Something must have happened to weaken his protections,” I said. “Maybe it was the vampire escaping. Duval seemed to slip his leash pretty quickly too. It might also be that with Capone far away and unable to keep up his end of the bargain with vamp blood, the demon doesn’t feel like making good on his promises.”

“What about the items we found behind the other safe?” West reached for his pocket as if to jangle them, then stopped himself.

“We figured out the key,” I replied. “Spells often require objects that mean a lot to the caster as a focus or as ritual items in the process itself. Just because the knick-knacks look like junk to us doesn’t mean they’re worthless. They might have held a lot of meaning to Capone.”

“What now?” Sarah asked. “Stop and get your priest friend, or go looking for that vamp?”

It was just after lunch, so we could do some exploring and still get back to the room in time to call Father Kinsella and invite him over for dinner and demon banishing.

“Let’s explore a bit,” I replied. “That rogue vampire is around here somewhere, and if he’s got a nest nearby, I’d like to get him out of the way before we try to deal with the demon.”

I pulled the boots out of my bag and handed out flashlights. Many of the hidden passageways led from the upper floors of the hotel, one of them from Capone’s own bathroom. We could deal with those later, if need be, and not need our boots. I doubted the vampire had been rattling around behind the walls. Too much risk of discovery. He’d go where it remained dark, down in the lower tunnels, places that had been abandoned even by the desperate.

The coal and ash tunnels had working electric lights, although with enough distance between the fixtures that dark pools stretched between the glow of the bare bulbs. From the rust on the tracks, it didn’t look like this section saw a lot of traffic. The farther we walked from the Lexington’s secret exit, the more deserted the tunnels became.

“I think I read something about some of the above-ground businesses no longer needing the ash removal when they changed over their furnace systems,” West said quietly. “Guess that included the ones in this stretch.”

We stayed close together, flashlights slicing into the shadows.