by Jenn Stark
“Well, that sounds ridiculous—no offense intended—but yeah. The first thing was a series of numbers, so of course I joked to my mom that they were for the state lottery, and she went right out and got a ticket.”
I winced. “And you won.”
“It was three million dollars,” she whispered. “More than enough to take care of me, my mom kept saying. She didn’t want to tell my dad that she’d even played the lottery, but she went and got the money anyway, and after she deposited it, she caved. We had a meeting that night, and my dad told me not to tell anyone. They’ve been super scared ever since. I hate that.”
“Of course,” I said, keeping my words low and easy. I looked at her dog again, and he stared back at me with earnest sincerity. “What else did you see?”
“I saw more numbers, but I refused to play after that first time, refused even to tell my Mom about it so she wouldn’t check. But it wasn’t only numbers. It was people and situations too. And some of what I saw was terrible. My grandmother fell in one of my visions, and my Mom was so freaked out she made my aunt go spend the night with her. Grandma didn’t fall that night, of course. Which kind of made it worse.”
“Free will,” I murmured, and I realized I’d picked up the cards and was shuffling them. “You can very often affect the outcome of an event simply by changing one element leading up to that event. Your aunt being with your grandma was not an expected action, and it forestalled an accident.”
“But the problem is, what happens if I see something and don’t do anything about it? I’ve tried that too.” Her words broke on a sob. “There was an accident.”
“Oh, honey.” This time, I did say the words aloud.
“So my question is…is it wrong for me to want to go back to the way I was? To not have this burden on my shoulders anymore? Is that wrong? Or should I, like, embrace it.” She gestured awkwardly around the small tent that she couldn’t see. A tear slipped from Lainie’s eye and flowed down her face, but she kept going. “Honor the ability I have, try to do some good with it?”
I placed the cards in front of her and folded her hands over them. “Go ahead and shuffle. When you’re ready, cut the cards. I’ll just do a three-card spread to see what message the universe has for you.”
And the universe had better not dick me either.
Whether Armaeus heard that or not, he didn’t respond.
“Okay,” Lainie said, her voice soft and scared. She shuffled and cut the deck, then sat back. I chose the second pile and put it on top of the first, then quickly drew three cards, laying them out.
Her brows leapt as she stared down at the table. Then she reached for the cards.
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry. “You can see them?”
“I can.” Her hand started to tremble. “That’s a picture of a tower, like, with fire,” she said, correctly identifying the Tower card while neatly avoiding any mention of the people who were falling out of said tower. “And that’s a lady in a chair. Actually, both of these are ladies in chairs.” She gently touched her fingers to the other two cards. “One with like those weighing scales things, and one with like a little moon above her head.”
“The Tower, Justice, and the High Priestess,” I said, pressing my hands over hers. She was the only one trembling, but it was a near thing. Because Lainie Grant was sighted, even though she could not see, and the cards could not have been clearer about where she needed to go, or who could help her. “You were right to come here today, and your path was right to lead to me. But I’m not the one who can help you, ultimately.”
She looked up hopefully. “Someone can?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, grimacing. “She’s known as the High Priestess, and she knows her stuff. But brace yourself. She’s kind of a drama queen.”
“I’m okay with that.” Lainie nodded. “Really. I just want—I just want to understand.”
I lifted my hand, eyeing the young woman’s dog, who also seemed to be regarding me with a placid “don’t do it” expression on his face. And in truth, it really wasn’t my place to heal this woman. She hadn’t asked for it. She’d only asked for understanding. Eshe, the High Priestess of the Arcana Council, could give her that. Or she could give her a headache and a deep desire to smack something. It was kind of a toss-up.
But the pressure inside me to help grew too strong, and I broke beneath it. I drew in a deep breath, my fingers starting to tingle despite the dog’s low, cautionary whine. “So, um, in addition to understanding, is there anything I can do for you?”
“This card.” Lainie reached out and pulled another card from the deck, handing it to me. “You can pay attention to this card.”
“I—ah, what?” I took the card from her, glancing at it before setting it faceup on the table. “That’s Temperance. That—that doesn’t make sense with your situation.” Temperance was all about finding harmony, blending disparate forces, and making primal magic, but it didn’t feel at all right for the blind seer in front of me. It also was a card I’d never been a fan of. No one would accuse me of going out of my way to find harmony in life.
“It’s not for me.” She shook her head, confirming my suspicions. “It’s for you.”
I made a face Lainie couldn’t see. “Well, thanks. I’ll add it to my next meditation cycle.”
The flap of the tent fluttered again, and all three of us jumped at the noise, two of us craning our necks to see.
“Ah, Mistress Malificorem?” Brody asked, shooting a startled glance at the woman in the querent’s chair. “Sorry to interrupt. But we’ve got a bit of a problem.”
Chapter Eight
Brody and I stalked across the festival grounds, which once again looked entirely too normal for everything that had gone on today. Celtic music played cheerfully over in Celtlandia, while some strange tribal chants were happing in spectral warrior-ville. But neither group so much as looked at each other, so it appeared that, for the moment, the Hatfields and McCoys had signed a truce.
Which was weird.
“Is this about the boy handing out the postcards?” I asked, unable to contain myself any longer.
Brody shook his head. “No, we never found the boy. But there’s been no reports of anyone matching his description reporting any distress or going missing, nothing like that. So that’s a bit of a dead end, I’m afraid.”
“Of course it is.” Feeling uneasy about the fate of the towheaded child, I jerked my thumb back to the tent. “Did you see the girl getting a reading in there?”
“I heard you saying something about the high priestess. And I saw she was blind. You recruiting for a new Oracle?”
I stumbled a little, and Brody’s hand instantly went out to steady me. “What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong is…what you just said. Everything about it.”
“You mean—”
“Don’t say it again! Once was enough.” I held my hands to my temples, willing the sudden pounding of my brain to subside. I couldn’t, wouldn’t believe that the sweet Lainie Grant from the observatory was being led to the High Priestess of the Arcana Council as an acolyte, but perhaps more importantly, I didn’t know why the possibility of her doing that was upsetting me so much. Eshe wasn’t necessarily my favorite Council crony, but she had helped me in the past, and she more or less had my back. She was haughty, condescending, and cruel when she wanted to be—living over two thousand years would do that to a person—but she wasn’t a villain by any means. So what was I so worried about?
I pushed the idea away, tabling it until I had time to focus. “Okay, so Sariah, then. You found Sariah.”
“No, but I haven’t been looking for her. Sariah’s never lost by mistake.” There was a curious flatness to his tone, the universal pitch that exes who were left behind employed when speaking about the ones who got away. Brody seemed not at all in the mood to talk about his troubles with Sariah, but nevertheless, I persisted.<
br />
“What happened with you two, anyway? I thought you were chummy.”
“We’re plenty chummy. We’ll continue to be chummy.”
Okay, so maybe this wasn’t a good idea after all. The idea of Brody and Sariah together was charming in the abstract—at the time of Sariah’s creation more than ten years ago, my seventeen-year-old self had been hopelessly in love with Brody Rooks. So while I’d gone on to forge a distinctly Brodyless life by choice, Sariah had been holed up in Hell with nothing but her daydreams to keep her company. Brody was her first true love and—I’d thought—still her true love. But I preferred thinking of their romance against a background of Disney princesses and chirping birds, not Fifty Shades of Ew.
Brody, however, kept going. “But Sariah is kind of like an addict, and I know that type way too well.”
I frowned. “An addict of what?”
“That’s the problem. Everything. She’s constantly in search of the next high, only in her case, it’s not limited to drugs or booze. It’s experiences. It’s abilities. It’s feeling. She doesn’t know who or what she is and she’s more than ready to find out, but that problem is only made worse by her little kleptomania problem. She literally doesn’t know who she is, and when she finds something she likes, she knows she can’t keep it.”
“Yet apparently, she’s not the problem right now. She’s not where you’re taking me.” I didn’t know how to feel about Sariah, but I did want her to be safe. After all she’d endured, I worried more about her than I did myself, which, arguably, wasn’t saying much. But still.
He scowled. “No.” Then he clammed up and kept walking, leaving me to take in the rest of the festival. There remained only this last evening of it and tomorrow morning, then it’d be done again for another year, but for a moment, I wondered what it would be like if it wasn’t done. What if this was the future of the world, little enclaves of specially skilled Connecteds living in the open, offering magical experiences to non-Connecteds in a more visible way? Would they be accepted? Or would the almost pathological fear against the other eventually knock them back and keep them down?
Being left alone with these thoughts was less than awesome, but it wasn’t until Brody got me into his car—the beat-up brown sedan, unfortunately, not a sleek Town Car from the Justice Hall parking lot that had been allocated for my use—that Brody even looked at me. I could tell he was working up to a doozy of an announcement, but I didn’t know which way it would break. He wouldn’t have held out on me this long about Nikki, because then he’d be dead. Which left me with a whole lot of no ideas.
With a grim curse, he started the sedan and pulled it out into traffic, taking us roughly back toward the Strip. “Spill it, Brody,” I finally said, not bothering to hide my irritation. “It can’t be that bad.”
He drew in a deep breath, then released it. “Dixie called me. We’re heading to the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars. There’s been a death.”
“Okay, fine. It can be that bad.”
I deliberately avoided glancing his way. Dixie Quinn was one of the most well-known Connecteds in Las Vegas, and up until a relatively short while ago, she’d been dating one Brody Rooks. Why couldn’t all his exes live in Texas?
Still, this didn’t make sense. “I didn’t realize she was up and running again. Heck, I can’t believe she survived detox after the hit of technoceuticals she’d taken. How is she back to marrying off showgirls and sugar daddies?”
Dixie had gotten caught up in a low-level drug-running operation of high-level technoceuticals, drugs spiked with arcane or magical properties. Though not directly as a result of her transgressions, some people had died, and some—including her—had nearly died. She wasn’t my favorite person right now.
“She’s on probation,” Brody said. “That doesn’t restrict her ability to run her chapel. Which she’s been doing, quietly and successfully. Until tonight.”
“Who died?”
His jaw worked, and the way his hands were clamped on the wheel, I was pretty sure he was going to pop a knuckle. “A young woman by the name of Alison Kay. She came to the chapel with another woman, Lenora Drake, earlier this evening, wanting to get married. Dixie, being Dixie, had no problem with that. Only, they didn’t want to get married to each other. They wanted to marry an absent party.”
My brows went up. “How absent?”
“Absent as in he was Skyping from Ireland.”
My stomach twisted on itself and doubled back, a Möbius strip of queasy. “Ireland.”
“You can see why I thought you’d be interested.”
“But how is that even legal? Isn’t there, like, marriage license paperwork that has to happen?”
“According to Dixie, the women appeared to have all their documents in order—separately—to marry the same man under two different aliases. But to be clear, she doesn’t make it a policy to refuse anyone a ceremony. A wedding at the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars doesn’t legitimize an illegal act, and she states that right up front. That said, if a man comes in and wants to marry his poodle, she makes it happen. That’s just who she is.”
“It certainly is.”
Dixie may have a unique capacity to jump on my last nerve, but the petite, vivacious blonde, known for her killer curves and pink cowboy boots, hadn’t officially done anything illegal…directly. She was a Connected of moderate ability who wanted to have far more of that ability than she did, and she was willing to do about anything to make that happen—including putting unsuspecting people at risk as she stitched together her get-Connected-quick schemes. She hadn’t been convicted of intentionally harming anyone, and she’d denied leading that technoceutical drug ring with every bubbling bounce of her being.
The real kicker was this: since the technoceuticals she trafficked weren’t controlled substances, her lawyers had argued that it would be the equivalent of her getting the book thrown at her for selling Love-Me-Not pills to lonely hearts with a daisy allergy. The judge had bought it, or the lawyer had bought him, if I was feeling uncharitable about it. Either way, Dixie was back in her chapel.
With a dead girl on her hands.
“How’d it go down?” I asked. “And why were you able to leave the scene to come get me?”
“Two women showed up, one knifed the other. We have the attacker in custody. And I could leave the scene because I didn’t catch the case. Despite the location, there’s been no whiff of a Connected connection. I wasn’t even tapped to ride shotgun. They’ve given that role to a rookie.”
I eyed him. “And that chafes your chaps?”
“Nah, she’s a good kid. She does seem to have a particular knack for working homicides, though, which is the second reason I wanted you along.” He shot me a weary grin. “Not that I have a problem with her being Connected, if she is, I just want to know what I’m dealing with.”
“Fair enough. And the first reason?”
“The guy the women were all hyped up to marry? He went by two names, both of which start with a G and a K. George Kerry and Geoffrey Kent.”
“And that’s important why—” And then I got it, of course, as I imagined the names in my mind’s eye. GK also stood for Green Knight. “Seamus McCarthy’s kid, Conal?” I asked. I’d sent the McCarthy family tree over to Brody earlier. Apparently the detective had been busy.
“We’re tracking down anything we can on the guy. Given that he’s operating across international boundaries, we’ve also pulled in Interpol.”
I grimaced. “Of course you have.” I’d had more than my share of run-ins with Interpol, and most of them weren’t pleasant. It was not that I didn’t understand their interest in me. Interpol had a particular interest in crimes that crossed international borders, and the Connected drug trade did that on an almost daily basis. I was the most connected Connected they’d ever spoken to, and they knew I was an important link. They just also weren’t entirely sure I wasn’t a criminal. It made for tense fireside c
hats.
“But you’re not involved in this case,” Brody countered. “I’m not involved in this case. And as of this moment, Interpol isn’t involved in this case. Which means you can come in, talk to Dixie, meet this rookie detective, and see what you see about the scene. I’ve already been to it, and something about it strikes me as hinky, but I can’t quite place what.”
“What does the rookie detective say?”
“Unknown. She’s working with her partner, and he and I aren’t mutual fans. So she’s playing it smart and keeping her eyes on the dead body right now.”
“Noted.” We swung into the parking lot of the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars, a lot it shared with several other businesses, none of which were doing a brisk business given all the police tape cordoning off the area around the chapel. Just another day in Vegas.
We exited the car as two CSI techs left the building, nodding at Brody with their grim, no-nonsense gazes. They paid no attention to me, but I was working on being unnoticed. This was a slightly different skill from being disguised, but I seemed to be developing the hang of it.
“Why, Detective Brody, as I live and breathe. You came back.”
Dixie Quinn was dressed in her usual attire of white minidress and pink cowboy hat and boots, only a bit incongruous given that a murder had just taken place at her chapel. Her gaze swung to me and widened. “And Sara! It’s been too long. How’s Nikki doing? We sent over a brigade of well-wishers as soon as we heard she’d fallen ill. That Dr. Sells is ever so prickly, isn’t she? But we convinced her that the best cure for Nikki was the love of those who loved her.”
Despite myself, I smiled. Love her or hate her, Dixie did have her moments. “I think that’ll definitely help.”
“Let me bring you right in,” she said. “I’m not technically allowed on-site, but Detective McGeery is being particularly charmin’ about all that. And I do appreciate it so.”
She prattled on as Brody and I exchanged a look. Even as rookies, homicide detectives were rarely charming.
