by King, R. L.
“What’s this about, Al?” Jason demanded. “What’s so important it couldn’t wait till tomorrow?”
He didn’t answer, but instead led them into the living room and indicated the couch. So far, his expression remained unreadable. It showed no sign of anger or annoyance—but no sign of anything else either.
After they were seated, his gaze flicked over Jason and settled on Verity. “So,” he said. “Does anyone have anything they’d like to share with the class?”
“Huh?” Jason asked. Following Stone’s line of sight, he, too, focused his attention on Verity. “V?”
Verity remained silent for a moment. Then, with sudden defiant energy, she blurted: “Okay, so I did it!”
“Did what?” Jason felt suddenly as if he had stepped into the middle of a play where he had no idea what had come before.
Stone, still impassive, said, “Verity here has unilaterally decided to invite another member into our little secret society.”
Jason’s gaze shifted between them. “Al, what the hell are you—?”
“I told Madame Huan,” Verity said.
Jason stared at her in shock. “Told her—?”
“Everything, apparently,” Stone said. “In significant detail, so I’m informed.”
Jason didn’t even know what to say. He felt like he had just taken a hard shot to the gut. “You...told her? When?”
“A few days ago.” Her eyes flashed. “Somebody had to do something. You know it too, Jason. I thought Madame Huan would be somebody Dr. Stone would trust. Somebody...older, that he might listen to.” She glared at Stone. “You know we have to go to Vegas. And—well—I was getting worried about you. It was like you’d…given up. So…I told her.” She looked at him as if daring him to refute her words.
Jason still hadn’t gotten past her revelation. “You told her? You actually went over there and told her everything?”
“Everything,” she said. “I told her about the Evil, and the Forgotten, and the portals, and what happened in West Virginia, and what we need to do in Vegas. And I’m not sorry I did it. Jason, tell me that you wouldn’t have told somebody if you thought you could trust them. Tell me the truth.”
He looked down at his lap. He couldn’t deny her words. For a long time, he’d felt like a very lonely member of a very small club, and it was wearing hard on him. He looked at Stone, who had remained silent, his blue gaze locked on Verity. “Al—don’t be too hard on her. She’s barely more than a kid—this is a lot of stress for her, especially after everything that’s happened. We can—”
“Madame Huan called me the night after Verity came by,” Stone said, as if he had heard nothing of the previous exchange. “We had a long talk.” He took a deep breath. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the past few days. I see now why you’ve been avoiding me, Verity, and I’ll admit that your absence was probably for the best. It took me a day or two to work through—everything.”
Verity regarded him, wide-eyed, fearful. “You’re—not going to cut me off as your apprentice, are you? I mean...I know I went behind your back and I probably shouldn’t have, but—”
For several seconds the mage just looked at her, to the point where she began to squirm under the intensity of his scrutiny. But then he let his breath out and broke the gaze. “Verity, I won’t lie to you—when Madame Huan first called me, I was angry. Not so much that you told her about everything—what we’ve been through is every bit as much your story as it is mine, and you have the right to tell anyone you like, if you want to. No, I was angry because—” Another pause. “—because as you might have worked out, I’m a very private sort of person, especially when it comes to my own problems. I’m not fond of other people knowing that I’m struggling with something. I’m not proud of that—it’s probably not one of my more psychologically healthy character traits—but there you are. So having Madame Huan call me out of the blue one night, tell me my wayward apprentice had dropped quite a load of troubling information on her, and ask me about my sudden reluctance to deal with the situation, I wasn’t in the most charitable of moods.”
Verity started to say something, but Stone cut her off. “But as usual, Madame Huan was able to cut through my various bits of bullshit and get right to the crux of the matter. As I said, we talked for a long time. Eventually I just gave up and went over to see her, and we talked longer.” He looked at Verity. “You were right. She was able to talk sense into me, in a way that neither of you two, by virtue of who you are and our relationship, would have had any chance of doing.”
“So,” Verity said after a few seconds passed, allowing a little bit of hope to seep into her expression, “does that mean—?”
“What that means,” he said, “is that first of all, you went behind my back and I’m not fond of my apprentices doing that, so there will be repercussions. However,” he added when Jason started to protest, “those repercussions will be cancelled out by the fact that you took the sort of initiative I didn’t really expect from you at this stage in your training. I like that. Initiative is one of the things I value highly in an apprentice. So therefore...” He paused a moment. “Therefore, I expect you two to be ready to go first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Go?” Jason asked, still confused.
“To Las Vegas,” he said as if that were obvious. “I’ll pick you up at your place. I’ve already arranged our lodging and informed Marta that you’ll be taking some indefinite time off. I’d like to arrive by tomorrow night—we’ve got a lot of work to do and we might as well get on with it. The sooner this is all over, assuming we survive the experience, the happier I’ll be. And since I’ve had quite enough of both airplanes and portals, we’ll be driving. Seven o’clock, then. Don’t keep me waiting.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Stone was true to his word: the black BMW idled out in front of Jason and Verity’s apartment building promptly at seven the following morning. He didn’t get out to help them as they stowed their bags in the trunk and climbed in. Jason noticed that a good portion of the trunk was already full of what looked like bags of magical paraphernalia. As soon as they were settled, Stone guided the car smoothly out of the parking lot and set off without a word.
He was silent until they’d gotten out of town and onto the freeway. “You’ve been studying up on Las Vegas, then, have you?” he said at last with a sideways glance at Jason.
“Uh—yeah. Quite a bit, actually. I brought along the books and the maps and stuff, and I’ve been reading through old newspapers at the library.”
“And—?”
Jason shrugged. “The place is a hellhole Evil-wise, if I’m reading things right. They’re doing their best to cover it up, but not a week goes by that they don’t have a multiple murder or a mob hit or a suspicious suicide or something else just as nasty. We don’t hear about them because they’re sweeping them under the rug so it won’t hurt the tourist trade, but they’re easy enough to find if you look for patterns.”
Stone nodded. “As I suspected. And I doubt it’ll get any better now that they’re down to their last remaining portal. I haven’t been doing much with those notebooks you brought back, Verity—thank you for keeping them safe, by the way—but I do want to take some more time when we get through all of this—if we do, of course—to investigate what I found a bit more. I think it’s highly interesting that the Evil don’t actually originate in the Overworld at all, which makes me wonder exactly where they do come from, and how they came to find the Overworld.”
They drove straight through to Las Vegas, stopping only for meals and gas fill-ups. Stone had no qualms about opening up the BMW once they hit Interstate 5, and since it was a weekday and there wasn’t a lot of traffic, they made good time. By the time they reached Barstow, Jason managed to convince Stone to let him drive the rest of the way; the mage spent the remainder of the trip going over Jason’s notes and maps.
“Have you ever been to Vegas, Al?” Jason asked.
Stone shook his head. “Never really appealed to me. I’m not much of a gambler, and the whole place just seemed rather crass and excessive to me.”
Jason grinned. “Some friends and I went for my twenty-first birthday. We saved up for months, then headed over there on a bus and spent the weekend getting drunk, chasing crass and excessive women, and losing all our money at the tables.”
“Sounds like tons of fun,” Verity said from the back seat, rolling her eyes.
“Hey, it was fun. Not something I’d repeat, but you only turn twenty-one once, right?”
“I’ll remember that when I do,” she said.
Jason gave her a quick amused look over his shoulder. “I’m not sure your kind of chasing women would be quite the same, V.”
“All right, you two,” Stone said, looking up from Jason’s map. “Let’s keep the debauchery to a minimum, shall we? You’ll have plenty of time for that after we’ve dealt with the portal.”
It was after nine o’clock when they rolled into town, past the famous Fabulous Las Vegas sign, a little the worse for wear with several of its neon lights out and a spray of graffiti—including a large Forgotten “bad place” symbol—across its lower half.
“Let’s check out the Strip,” Jason said. “It’s something to see at night if you’ve only seen it in pictures. Where are we staying, Al?”
Stone gave him an address and approximate directions, and a few minutes later they joined the stream of traffic filtering slowly through the electric neon wonderland of the Las Vegas Strip.
“Wow,” Verity said, eyes wide. “I’ve seen pictures, of course, but they don’t do this place justice. I didn’t think there was this much neon or that many light bulbs in the world. I’d sure hate to have their electric bill.”
They crept along, surrounded by taxis sporting ads for strip clubs, double-decker tour buses, limousines, and oblivious tourist pedestrians everywhere. The lights of the massive hotel-casinos blazed so bright that it seemed like a strange sort of daylight even though the sky was dark. They passed them one by one, with Verity craning her head from side to side to get a good look: Luxor’s black pyramid, the more old-style Dunes and Flamingo, the medieval-themed Excalibur, Obsidian’s featureless black tower, the sprawling complexes of Caesars Palace and the Mirage—each one vying with the others for how impressive a display they could make to lure in the herds of tourists. In front of each, out closer to the street, enormous marquees proclaimed the headliner acts appearing in the hotels’ showrooms—everything from old-school crooners to the latest in high-tech magic acts and cutting-edge stage shows.
Stone, after a few glances at the hotels, wasn’t watching them any longer. Instead, he leaned against the window and studied the crowds. “Interesting,” he murmured at one point.
“What?” Jason asked, his eyes on the road to avoid darting tourists and suddenly-stopping taxis.
Stone pointed. “Quite a number of what look like homeless people among the tourists. More than I would have expected here.”
Jason couldn’t look, but Verity did. “Yeah,” she agreed. “There’s a guy with a cart, and another guy there on the corner with a sign. But is that weird? I’d think this would be a pretty good place to beg, with all the people winning money.”
Jason made a noise halfway between a chuckle and a snort. “They don’t win money, V. Hardly anybody does. Those big jackpots you hear about—the hotels play them up to get people in. But when you think about how many people gamble in these places and how much they drop, the jackpots are nothing.”
Stone nodded. “These places don’t get this big and impressive without taking in equally impressive amounts of money.”
“I’d expect to see more homeless people downtown,” Jason said. “The casinos are a lot closer together, and not nearly as fancy as here. You think the Strip is tacky, Al, wait till you see the stuff down there. Not just casinos, but all kinds of places selling tourist crap. They’ve tried to glitz it up, but it’s still kind of a dump. Sort of like putting a silk dress on a pig.”
“I wonder how many Forgotten are here,” Verity said.
“That’s probably one of our first priorities,” Stone replied. “Locating the Forgotten community, if there is one, and getting acquainted with them. They’ll likely be able to give us information we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.”
“They wouldn’t know where the portal is, would they?” Jason asked.
Stone shrugged. “Probably not, but they might be able to give us some idea about where the highest concentrations of Evil are. Remember, like they were able to tell us about the club in San Francisco—the area where the Forgotten didn’t go.”
Jason nodded. “Yeah, true. Do you want to go look at Downtown now, or wait till tomorrow?”
“It’s been a long drive—let’s get ourselves settled in, and then decide if we want to do anything else tonight. It’s true that we need to hurry a bit, but I doubt one night will matter. And it might be best to familiarize ourselves with the town during daylight before we start trying to wander around at night. Even in a town that never sleeps, I suspect it gets a lot more dangerous after dark.”
“Yeah,” Jason said, “But I’m betting that the people we need to talk to are only gonna be out after dark.”
Stone had arranged for a three-bedroom suite at one of the local medium-term residence inns about a mile off the Strip. They checked in, stowed their gear— including the two boxes of magical paraphernalia from the trunk—in their rooms, and met up in the common room a short while later.
“Way too early for bedtime,” Jason said. “And not much point getting up early—that’s one thing I do remember from my trip here: the town’s pretty much dead till sometime after noon. We might as well just get used to staying up late and sleeping most of the day.”
Stone shrugged. “I suppose we could go out to one of the casinos, have a drink, and take a look around. I was just planning to spend some more time going over my notebooks, but frankly I doubt they’ll be of much help this time around. Good a time as any to start mucking about with our sleep cycles.”
“We’ll have to be careful,” Jason said. “V’s under twenty-one. I don’t think they really make a big deal about it, but—”
“What are you talking about, Jason?” she asked with a grin, pulling her wallet out of her bag. “You didn’t think I got rid of that sweet fake ID I got to get into that club in SF, did you?”
Jason rolled his eyes, half-amused, half-annoyed. “You know, things were a lot easier when I could tell you what to do.”
“Easier for you, maybe.”
“Ahem,” Stone interrupted with a raised eyebrow. “Shall we, then?”
They got in the car and headed back toward the Strip. “Let’s go to the Mirage,” Verity said.
“Any particular reason?” Stone asked from the driver’s seat.
She shrugged. “I like white tigers?”
“Fair enough.”
Stone insisted on parking the car himself when they arrived. “Normally I’d just hand it off to the valet,” he told Jason and Verity, “but who knows what’s riding around in his head? I plan to take no chances.”
Inside was like another world. Verity, who had never been inside a casino, slowed down for a moment to stare and take it all in: the riot of colors, the flashing lights of the slot machines, the muted clanging and buzzing and whirling intermingling with the equally muted murmur of hundreds of voices occasionally punctuated by a whoop of cheer as someone’s slot machine hit a jackpot. It was all a little overwhelming. “Wow,” she said. “This is a lot different in person than it is on TV.”
“Yeah, and a lot smokier,” Jason said sourly as a middle-aged tourist couple wandered by, both puffing away on cigarettes and leaving a noxious cloud in their wake.
They passe
d the massive registration desk and skirted the casino proper, heading for a small bar overlooking the gaming tables. People of all sorts moved past them in eddies: cocktail waitresses, chubby tourists in Bermuda shorts and T-shirts with tacky slogans, laughing knots of buzzed college students, youngish men in expensive suits with purposeful expressions and hard eyes. Nobody paid any attention to Stone, Jason, and Verity as they found a table and sat down.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Verity said suddenly.
“Huh?” Jason gave her an odd look. “Why?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it. It just feels—wrong.”
Stone regarded her, frowning. “Do you want to leave?”
“No—it’s not bad. It’s just kind of a low-grade hum of uncomfortableness.”
Jason looked around, checking out the people as they walked by. “I don’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
“Nor do I,” Stone said, “but I haven’t lasted as long as I have by ignoring instincts—mine or anyone else’s. Let’s stay on our guard. I’d advise against more than one drink, if any.”
The waitress came by and took their orders. Verity didn’t even try ordering anything alcoholic; she seemed restless and twitchy, unable to sit still as she craned her head around trying to look in every direction at once without seeming too obvious about it.
“V, you look like you need to use the bathroom,” Jason said. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I can’t explain it,” she said. “It started as soon as we came in, but I figured it was just all the lights and stuff.”
Stone didn’t reply, but Jason noticed that he was keeping a closer eye on Verity than he had before. Their drinks arrived, and they sat there for a half-hour or so, nursing them and continuing to people-watch. From their vantage point, they could see into the casino itself; the oval-shaped pits of the tables were interspersed with banks of slot machines both small and large, with a couple of shiny new Corvettes parked on conspicuous raised platforms surrounded by more banks of slots and large flashing signs exhorting gamblers to try their luck for a chance to win one of them.
