Call of the Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  I nodded, and she continued. “He explain why her, out of all the other gods?”

  “Nope. Could be he thought she’d be more likely to give up her god status. Hera’s kind of gotten a bad rap over the millennia.”

  “Jealous harpy wife of a notorious philanderer? I can’t imagine why she’d want to shake that.”

  “Yup. But to hear her explain it, the gods are just hanging around waiting for the call—if the call is loud enough to wake them. Or, if the veil happens to be weak right in front of their eyes, they can sense the brightness of earth. That happens, they wake up, and they can see. They can even reach out to Connecteds who are particularly strong or zealous. After that, it doesn’t take as much of a call to pull them through.”

  “And the veil is starting to weaken all over the place.”

  “So it would seem. The more the gods start waking up, the more likely they’re going to want to rekindle relationships with the human race again.”

  “Rekindle,” Nikki scoffed. “Sure puts a whole new spin on global warming.”

  Despite myself, I managed a weary grin. Outside the car, the sun beat down on the austerely beautiful Nevada terrain. Though Nikki continued to drive in circuitous loops, I gradually realized we were heading back toward the city—specifically, toward the House of Swords’ headquarters on its edge. And the more closely she zeroed in on the palatial lake house on Lake Las Vegas, the tenser she got.

  “Okay, spill. What’s the update?” I asked straightening in the backseat. The dash clock indicated that I’d spent exactly seventy-five minutes in denial before returning to my full-time gig as head of the House of Swords. Improvement. When I’d first taken on the mantle, I could spend days at a time ignoring reality.

  We turned onto an access road that shot across a broad expanse of desert, running alongside concrete pilings that indicated that someone, somewhere, had decided to expand the infrastructure of this state road. Which meant they expected population growth to spill yet farther out of the city into the arid plain. I couldn’t believe it. There was nothing out here but dirt and rocks and—

  The explosion from behind rocked us so violently, I flew forward, catching hard enough against my seat belt that I nearly vivisected myself. I slammed back in my seat as a second explosion smashed the car sideways, the entire front section of the vehicle slewing around. Nikki was trapped in a mass of airbag, and I smelled gasoline and metal and oil and a heavy, acrid stench so strong, I nearly gagged on it.

  “Nikki!” I screamed as a third explosion hit the front left of the limo. Where the hell was this coming from? Our vehicle looked like your standard-issue town car, but it was armored like a tank or we’d already have gone up in flames. Still, that didn’t mean we weren’t in trouble. I unclipped my belt and lunged for Nikki, but she’d crumpled beneath the impact of the safety bags, and all I could see was blood. I crawled over the seat and beat down the bags, which were even now deflating, and fought my way to her seat belt.

  “Madame Wilde!” The voice that came over the car’s speaker system was thick with fury. Fury, not fear. That made me feel better. So did its intensely Mongolian accent. That voice belonged to my second-in-command in the House of Swords.

  “What hit us?” I groaned.

  Ma-Singh’s response was terse. “Drone strike. Unmanned. Do not move. There are two additional vehicles approaching. Hostiles. Then police vehicles are heading your way from two directions, before and behind you, ETA ten minutes. We’re on our way in the air as well. We’ll remove the threat once we get close, ETA six minutes.”

  “So that’s a full six minutes where the bad guys can blow us up. You got that, right?”

  “They won’t. Strikes were intended to disable, but even if they’d been deployed with lethal force, you are safe within the vehicle. The auxiliary tanks have combusted to give the illusion of a successful hit, but the car’s interior mechanics will not explode.”

  “Comforting,” I muttered, pulling Nikki free of her restraints. Airbag powder and blood coated her face, and I eased off her wig, revealing a slicked-back pixie cut of deep chestnut hair. It looked incongruous against her too-pale skin and expertly applied makeup, and I felt the rage build inside me.

  “Who is it, Ma-Singh? Who owns the drones?”

  He ignored that. “I repeat, do not exit the vehicle. We’re in the air.”

  I hugged Nikki to me, hunkering down in the cocoon of the vehicle. The protective panels had dropped in front of the windows at the first strike, and now we were both lit by nothing more than the dashboard display. I used my shirt hem to wipe the worst of the blood from my eyes, and Nikki stirred.

  “What the hell,” she managed groggily, and I tried and failed to beat back my exultation.

  “You’re okay, you’re okay,” I said.

  “I’m not okay,” she said, her eyes narrowing on me, then the wig lying on the dash. “You cannot get blood out of a wig, dollface.”

  A new blast of gunfire unloaded on the car, and we both flinched, binding tighter together. “Who are these asshats?” she growled, and I checked her eyes. Steady.

  “I need to find out. Can you help?”

  She nodded tightly, then turned to the side, spitting out more blood and maybe a tooth. We tensed through another blast of gunfire, then she let out a long, steadying breath. “I can’t let you go too deep, though. Lost too much blood, and I don’t want to pass out while you’re gone.”

  “It’s close. It won’t take much.”

  As a rule, I hated astral travel, the ability to leave my body and project myself somewhere else. Now that I was presented with the options, however, I found I hated getting shot at by strangers more. Nikki began speaking the words I’d first learned from the Arcana Council, and I slumped forward without a word of complaint.

  It took no time for me to burst free of our car which was hunched like a turtle against the desert floor, its tires blown out, its windows battered outside the protective shell of the interior panels. Ma-Singh had gotten it right—there were two vehicles set up on either side of the limo, gunmen out and laying down a heavy barrage of artillery. I considered them. Not government, and not Mercault, I was almost certain. The head of the House of Pentacles had been sucking up since he’d tried to kill me several days ago; attempting such an open attack would be foolish. Gamon? Some other player on the arcane black market?

  I turned away from the gunfire and searched the skies. Unmanned drones weren’t easy to find…but the acrid trail of a missile launch was another story. I blinked open my third eye, seeing the world the way it truly was, a series of electrical streams, and immediately latched on to the path of the missiles. From there, the exhaust from the drones were easy to spot. Spot…and follow. I soared through the desert sky, zeroing in on the target, and quickly hit pay dirt. The drones were angling down into a deserted box canyon west of the city, not all that far from Death Valley. There appeared to be no one there to collect them, but if I could just get closer…

  The force field struck me with the impact of a Mack truck. I went tumbling backward just as Nikki started screaming something in my ear. The combined sensory overload was too much, and I was yanked back into my own form almost against my will. I crashed back into it as Nikki hunched over me, the cut on her forehead bleeding heavily again.

  “What’s going on?” I gasped as the car rocked again. Not from direct hits, it seemed, but from the impact of nearby explosions.

  “Ma-Singh and the cavalry showed up with air support. And those sirens you hear aren’t the good guys, exactly.”

  “They’re not? But were the ones originally getting attacked here!”

  “Let’s just say our conceal-and-carry permit doesn’t extend opening fire on people who piss us off.”

  Sure enough, the whup-whup-whup of helicopter rotors gradually diminished, presumably as Ma-Singh got the hell out of Dodge. The sirens of incoming cop cars got progressively louder, however. Eventually, the panel
s of our banged-up limo dropped, allowing us a view.

  “It’s really too bad local law enforcement isn’t on our side,” I muttered, taking in the fleet of vehicles racing toward us by road and by open desert.

  “Good news is, it’s going to take them a while to sort everything out. Here.” With a deft move of her hand, Nikki smeared a swath of blood over my forehead, grinning as I flinched back. “It’ll take ’em a while to get us sorted out too.”

  “Should we get out of the car?”

  “Negative. These guys are going to be twitchy. You find anything out up top?”

  “Nothing that made any sense. The drones were down, but no one was there to collect them. But the electrical net they had up for protection was definitely premium grade. These people have bucks.” I paused, turning it over in my mind. “We’re keeping an eye on Mercault, right?”

  Nikki snorted. “Trust me, it ain’t him. No way would he strike you this close to home, unless he has a death wish. Which he does not.”

  “Come out of the vehicle with your hands up!” The order was issued with a bullhorn, and I winced against the noise.

  “Is that really necessary?” I muttered, but Nikki put a hand on my arm.

  “So back to that report you wouldn’t let me give earlier, there’s something you should probably know,” she said. “We found Gamon. Or what’s left of her.”

  I felt my brows go up. “She’s here? In Vegas?”

  Nikki made a face. “She is now. Nobody’s gonna be moving her again with anything but a spatula, though, not anytime soon. But she’s alive. And based on the shape she’s in, if she’s the one who ordered this hit, we got bigger problems than the Nevada Highway Patrol on our hands. Because she’d have to be working with someone who still has a tongue.”

  Chapter Five

  The boys in black didn’t give us any more time to chat, however. They approached our limo with their weapons drawn, hunched over in crouch walks, as if we were the dangerous criminals and not the people sitting in a shot-up car. The order for us to exit was repeated, and Nikki groaned, running her fingers through her blood-soaked hair. Even gravely wounded, she managed to make the look work. She slipped her cap back on her head at a jaunty angle, and the effect was more rakish than ravaged.

  “Me first,” she said. “If for some reason they aren’t Staties, I don’t want you to get out of the car.”

  “Ma-Singh would’ve told us that.”

  “Yeah, well, you can bet our phones are jammed, because this car sure as shit isn’t accepting any more calls. So follow my lead.”

  With that, Nikki pushed open the driver’s door and swung her legs around, settling one stiletto-clad heel to the asphalt and giving everyone a good, long look of her exposed gam before settling the second one. Nobody moved, but the nearest guys with a clear view looked even more tense than they had originally.

  “Candy from a baby,” Nikki sighed, slipping free another button at her neckline before she drew herself up out of the car.

  The guns followed her. “Hands at your head! Who else is in the car?”

  “Can I see some ID, please?” Nikki called out, leaning back against the doorframe, effectively blocking anyone trying to shoot inside. She appeared to have her hands up, but knowing Nikki, it was to strike another pose. The windows were bulletproof even without the special panels, but they were tinted too. I could understand the cops’ concerns about how many people we were hiding in here. “Just one of you will do. You look like a matched set, but a girl can’t be too careful.”

  As they talked, more vehicles roared up, additional doors slamming. I slid over to my side of the car and placed my hand on the door. I didn’t want to piss them off any more than we had to, and unlike Nikki, I didn’t think this was a setup. That said, she was my bodyguard, and, as a former cop, she had damned good instincts. The last thing I wanted to do was—

  A harsh, furious voice suddenly cut across the bickering. “Nikki! For God’s sake, Nikki, what—is Sara in there? Sara!”

  “Detective! As I live and still breathe!” The warmth of Nikki’s tone was unmistakable, and I grinned, opening the car door and half tumbling out of it. I sensed more than saw the barrels of a dozen weapons swing toward me, but I steadied myself on the doorframe.

  “Hands at your head!” came the bullhorn order, drowning out the familiar griping of Detective Brody Rooks, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. I turned and squinted into the bright sunlight, surveying the party we’d brought out into the desert. There were easily a dozen cars bunching up on both ends of the state highway, and off-road vehicles positioned in two wide semicircles around us. There didn’t seem to be any traffic piling up behind them, at least. Which was good, because this could take a while.

  Brody strode forward, still cursing a blue streak, which, given his line of work, seemed appropriate. “Can we get medical backup here? For God’s sake, they’re both bleeding.”

  Even as he spoke, I heard more sounds of sirens, and I grimaced. I hated hospitals. I especially hated hospitals when I wasn’t injured. Apparently, my cowed expression and huddled stance was enough to convince the detective I was in bad shape, though. Whatever worked.

  More doors slammed, then we were surrounded with cops. They pulled me a good twenty feet away from the car, patted me down, identified that I was ambulatory and more shaken up than injured. Nikki was another story, every jostle or bump eliciting a groan, sigh, or flat-out scream from her. She also went into a fit when she realized they were taking us in separate vehicles to the hospital, until Brody confirmed he’d be traveling with me.

  Then she passed out.

  There are few things more dramatic than Nikki Dawes in a flat-out swoon.

  I accepted a weird reflective blanket as they carted Nikki off, and turned back to the lead trooper on the case, a big, burly man who somehow managed not to look overstuffed in his uniform. His name plate read GRIMM, which somehow struck me as hilariously funny, though I thought better of pointing that out. He studied me dispassionately, his gaze flicking to Brody and then to the car.

  “There were no other passengers in the vehicle.” It was more a statement than a question, but I shook my head anyway.

  “No. I was traveling alone.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Nikki had hers in the front of the vehicle. Mine is in the trunk with my bag.”

  “Other weapons in the vehicle?”

  I hesitated. Shrugged. “Not to my knowledge. But it sustained a lot of damage, and it may not be stable. I wouldn’t get too—”

  As if on cue, the limo detonated behind us, the sudden flare of heat and the percussive blast of the explosion sending everyone sprawling. I was grateful for my protective blanket as I struck the ground hard. Brody, the state trooper, and I rolled away as one unit. Another flare of cursing started up somewhere near me, but it wasn’t Brody.

  Wasn’t the trooper either. His eyes were on me again, deep pools of suspicious gray. “You mind explaining that?”

  “I…” I gaped at the vehicle, going up in a conflagration of heat and fire. “I can’t.”

  “That’s your vehicle?”

  “I own it, yes. I own a lot of vehicles, though. I hadn’t ridden in that one before.”

  He raked a glance over my outfit, or at least what he could see of it under the blanket. I bristled but kept my mouth shut. An EMT showed up at our sides, and I dutifully turned toward the medic as Brody and the state trooper stepped off to argue some more.

  Something still nagged at me, though. I obligingly let the guy manipulate my arms, hands, survey for wounds, and put me through concussion protocol, but the whole time, I felt like I was being watched. But watched by whom? I scanned the horizon, but there weren’t any drones I could see. The crowd of gray-uniformed officers were well back from the blaze, and a fire truck was even now lumbering up the road, lights flashing and horns blaring. They wouldn’t be able to save anything from the car, of course.


  Then the crowd shifted, and I saw them. Two people not in uniforms, or at least not police uniforms. But their too-heavy suits and sensible shoes were unmistakable anyway, and so were their scowls.

  Marguerite Dupree and Roland Fiat. Agents of Interpol. What in the…

  “What’s the verdict?” Brody’s voice startled me, but he wasn’t growling at me but the EMT who was packing up.

  The man waved at something in the distance, gesturing it forward. “She needs to go to a hospital immediately.”

  “What?” I stared at him. “Are you crazy? I’m not—”

  “Sara,” Brody said repressively. “Shut up.”

  I suddenly became acutely aware of the many pairs of eyes watching us. “Fine. Hospital. I love hospitals.”

  The EMT remained stoic, Brody stalked off, and no one spoke as I was strapped to a gurney, hooked up with an oxygen mask that apparently wasn’t attached to anything, and bundled into a truck. The EMTs undid the straps the moment we were in the back of the vehicle, but at their low instructions, I didn’t move. Brody entered a few minutes later. The look on his face remained shut down until the doors slammed behind us. The vehicle started up, and he sagged in his seat for a moment, staring at me.

  “Take off that stupid mask,” he grunted as I sat up, swaying a little as the truck navigated around what I assumed were police cars. He pointed at a seat and I took it, buckling in.

  He rubbed his face. “What the hell just happened out there, Sara? And why are you suddenly on everyone’s shit list?”

  “What?” I didn’t mean to evade, really and truly I didn’t, but the latter part of Brody’s query was far more interesting than the former. “What do you mean, shit list?”

  “You think that kind of response is typical?” He jerked his thumb back at the chaos we were leaving. “Those guys were primed and ready to respond to a massive threat. And it was a blown-up limo—one car. Hell, not even blown up at first. Shot up. That happens every goddamned day on these highways, with the drug trade through here. Trust me, you would normally merit one car, maybe two. You got a dozen. And Interpol. Why?” His eyes narrowed on me. “Where did you just get in from?”