by Tricia Owens
I rubbed my arms even though I wasn't cold. As Vale put away his phone and curled an arm around my shoulders, I stared down the street, though I didn't really see anything. "It was one of Dr. Morrow's creations," I finally murmured.
I felt him startle. "Dr. Morrow?"
I made sure to keep my eyes down the street rather than watch his expression change as I continued. "I'm glad you kept her alive, so don't blame yourself for that. You did the right thing. It was Vagasso who was wrong. He brought her to Moonlight and made her send one of her experiments inside the shop." My mouth was dry as I remembered the scene. I tried to swallow. It felt like I had a sock stuffed down there. "He was a monster, Vale. A mish-mash of everything awful. And I could tell…I could tell he felt that way, too. About himself, I mean. That's why I did it. He wasn't attacking me. He just…existed, because Dr. Morrow and Vagasso forced him to. So I—murdered him."
I didn't realize I was crying again until Vale came around to face me and gently wiped a tear from my cheek with his thumb.
"That wasn't murder. That was a kindness I'm sure he was grateful for. You had the strength to grant him what he needed. You saved him."
"I hope you're right," I said as I wiped my eyes dry. "But I also hope I don't need to be strong like that again. Not that way. I'll fight hard and I'll do it for days. And I don't care if I get hurt. But to win like that…that's not winning."
"Vagasso will do that again and worse." Vale slid a hand to the back of my neck and rested it there comfortingly. "We're dealing with evil here. We may not emerge from this as the same people we were going in, but that won't mean that we're worse, or tainted. Everything evolves, Moody. Even us. Even the person you had to send to another existence."
Everything he said made sense and they were things I believed, but I couldn't help feeling trepidation over how much I would evolve by the time this thing was through. Would I still be recognizably Anne Moody? Or would I be some woman with a thousand yard stare who could no longer enjoy rom-coms? Someone who periodically shot upright in bed in the middle of the night and yelled, "I'll kill you, you bastard!"?
"No matter what, Moody, I'll be rooting for you."
That made me smile crookedly. "Rooting for me? Does that mean you'll wear a cute little cheerleader's outfit?"
"If that motivates you, sure."
I laughed, a real, genuine laugh. It felt good, like I'd expelled a lung full of toxic air. That was what Vagasso was to me: a poison that wanted to seep into my very being. But I could expel him if I kept my head on straight and focused on what I was fighting for.
"I do hope you prefer me in jeans, though," Vale went on, his eyes twinkling mischievously. "Or maybe nothing at all."
"Both, actually. You've got a great butt."
"Yours isn't so bad, either."
By the time Christian showed up in his Audi, Vale and I were better. The sorrow I'd draped around Moonlight had lifted, allowing the shop to breathe again. But it might only be a temporary reprieve. Vale was right: Vagasso was evil, which meant fresh horrors waited on the horizon.
Maybe at the end of Las Vegas Boulevard, where we were heading.
"I've been waiting for your call ever since the sun went down," Christian confessed as he burned rubber down the street, heading for the I-15 South onramp. "I think we should set a trap for Vagasso. We know he's coming for the capstone, so we should grab him."
"What about the fact that there will be hundreds of non-magickals around?" I asked him from the backseat.
"Back in Tomes, Orlaton warned us that Vagasso will have to go all in to break the capstone," Christian reminded us. "We won't need to worry about witnesses. The entire city will know about the existence of magick once he gets going."
It was probably true, but I still didn't like it. The Oddsmakers had done one thing right, which was instilling in us a fear of revealing our community to the non-magickal population. Rivaling the Oddsmakers for the dread factor was the government, which would happily kidnap as many of us as they could get their hands on and begin experimenting on us. That could be a fate as bad as the Rift opening.
But setting a trap for Vagasso sounded appealing. Not only would we stop him, we'd be able to add a touch of humiliation. He deserved all the humiliation we could pile on him.
"Let's check out the area first and see if we can figure out where the capstone might be," I said as we zoomed down the freeway. "The way Orlaton's described the situation, that might be a bigger challenge than capturing Vagasso."
We drove south all the way to Russell Road, and then swung back around to the Mandalay Bay property. Mandalay Bay was a gorgeous property, sheeted in gold-tinted windows. Oddly enough, it had been built on sand, which meant it had needed to be shored up by pilings buried deep in the earth or risk sinking. That sounded like a lot of extra work to me, and it made me wonder if the Rift extended this far south and the owners of Mandalay had chosen this spot for that reason.
"Park in the lot, don't use the garage," I instructed Christian. "We might need a quick getaway."
I didn't say aloud that every structure on the property might collapse if things got hairy. I think we all assumed as much.
Christian parked near an exit and on foot we crossed the huge lot and entered the casino. I liked the interior of the place and how spacious it felt, but I wasn't there to gamble or to enjoy the ambiance.
I'd been to the Reef before. Most locals had, just to see if the aquarium could make up for living out in the middle of a desert. It was a decent enough exhibit—my favorite was the jellyfish tank—and there were two acrylic tunnels you could walk through so you could be surrounded by sharks, stingrays, and turtles. The largest living beings were the sharks; dolphins could be found at the Mirage, which was farther north up the Strip.
When Orlaton had confirmed that the capstone was here, my first thought was that it must be located inside the tank with the sharks. That was the most logical place to hide something you didn't want people touching, right? So once we paid our entrance fee, a sense of urgency pushed me to lead Vale and Christian past the other exhibits to the final and largest one.
Attached to the second acrylic tunnel was a large room decorated to look like a shipwreck. It featured giant windows overlooking the enormous shark exhibit. I pressed my fingers to the glass, straining to identify everything I saw on the fake coral system that had been built along the bottom and sides of the million-plus gallon tank.
"We may have a problem," Vale murmured as he joined me at the window.
I turned to him in alarm, but he was smirking. I followed his gaze to the opening of the see-through tunnel connected to the shipwreck room. Christian stood in the center of the tunnel, blocking the flow of traffic to the gift shop and clearly not caring in the slightest.
Since I didn't have kids, I had to assume this was what parents felt when they took their young children to Disneyland for the first time. Christian had tilted his strawberry blond head back to watch a sea creature glide overhead. The humongous smile on his face reflected pure delight. He did indeed look like a little kid getting his first look at Mickey Mouse.
"Surely he's been here before," I said to Vale.
"He has. I've visited with him three times that I can recall." Vale grinned as he studied his friend. "He has the same reaction every time. It never grows old for him."
Unexpectedly, I felt a sting in my eyes. Dammit, I hated feeling like a crybaby, but it had struck me like an arrow to the heart that this was what I was fighting for. I wasn't fighting to keep Moonlight running or even for revenge of my parents, for whom such measures were pointless. I was fighting to keep people like Christian alive so they could find rapture in the pure, silent glide of a tiger shark. This was why I would battle evil. This was why it was worth any sacrifice I might make. To keep a water fey and others alive.
"He's beautiful," I sighed. It was more than how attractive he was, which was highlighted by the glowing water reflected off of his model-perfect features. I recall
ed the awe I'd felt when I'd watched him swimming in his pool after Vagasso had staked him out, and I remembered his tail, which was a gorgeous reddish gold, like the prettiest of goldfish. In that moment I appreciated every magickal being in the world which Vagasso and the Oddsmakers were determined to destroy. I would defend all of them through my last breath.
"I want him to go home when we've saved this place," I told Vale. "I want him to be by the ocean where he belongs."
"He will," Vale promised me softly.
Blinking rapidly to clear my eyes, I turned my attention back to the shark exhibit. There were a gazillion sea creatures in constant motion beyond the glass. Fish of all shapes and sizes, numerous varieties of sharks, huge stingrays, turtles…it was a challenge to ignore them all and search the comparatively unexciting reef for something that looked like the seal I'd seen on the cash display at O'Malley's Casino.
"I'm not seeing anything," I said, frustrated.
Vale hummed agreement.
We moved to another window for a different angle on the tank. It took all my willpower not to elbow some teenagers out of the way who were using their phones rather than looking out into the awesome tank. Eventually Vale and I squeezed our way against the glass, but even after ten minutes of careful scrutinizing, we didn't see anything suspicious or unusual in the surface of the reef.
"So maybe it's not in this tank," I suggested to Vale, unable to hide my disappointment. It would have been nicely convenient to have been right.
"We'll try the other exhibits. There are plenty of places to look."
Leaving Christian to continue blocking traffic in the tunnel—though not many of the women appeared to have a problem with this once they got a look at how attractive he was—Vale and I headed back the way we'd come and entered the room that had been decorated to resemble an undersea temple. This room featured a touch pool in the center which Vale and I gravitated to because how could you not want to touch stingrays and anemone?
Listening to little kids scream and squeal when they touched the living sea creatures, I had to ask myself how Vagasso would infiltrate the place. He wouldn't fit in. Though there were a lot of families here, there were couples and singles, too. None, however, looked like an occult skinhead. Not to mention he gave off a vibe that gave people the heebie jeebies. Ordinary people would make the cross sign with their fingers and shy away from him. When he appeared, it would be glaringly obvious.
That was good, since I wouldn't have to worry about him sneaking up on us—we'd get plenty of warning from the other guests of the aquarium—but it suggested to me that the capstone might not be visible from this room either, since he wasn't here.
But Vale and I looked anyway, checking out the various exhibits.
At the jellyfish tank, I lingered. Vale's smirking face appeared in the glass beside me.
"Something tells me you're a fan of jellyfish."
"Are you kidding me? How can anyone not like jellyfish?"
"They're soft and slimy, for one. Many varieties will sting you."
"Sounds like someone's a big baby." Grinning, I pointed at an especially puffy variety that seemed filled with cotton candy. "Look at that thing. It's like a neon cloud. That's how the clouds around Las Vegas look. It should be our official State Sea Creature."
"Do we need one?"
I shrugged. "I think Christian feels underrepresented." I forced myself to turn away from the tank. "The capstone's not here. All that's left is the jungle to search, and I never thought I would say that while living in Vegas."
"We haven't hit the reef area." Vale pointed to the second acrylic see-through tube in the facility.
This tunnel was surrounded by reefs, which raised my hopes that we would find the capstone embedded somewhere within it. While I took one side, Vale took the other, and we slowly shuffled our way along the tunnel while streams of families and tourists passed between us.
"There's a fundamental problem with what we're doing," Vale said after several minutes of this.
I didn't tear my eyes away from my inspection of the reef. I was like an archaeologist gridding out an excavation. "What's the problem?"
"The capstone has existed for longer than Shark Reef has existed. Longer even than Mandalay Bay itself."
It was a good point, and something I should have considered.
"You're saying something as old as the capstone wouldn't be built into these plastic reefs." I gave up and turned my back on the section I'd been studying. Vale sensed me doing so and mimicked me so we faced each other across the tunnel. "Then why did my uncle and Orlaton both name this place?"
Vale crossed his arms in consternation. The water made his hair glow in blue waves. "Their information is out of date? It's been moved?"
"I don't think so," I said with growing realization. "This place was built on an unstable parcel of land. It's sand. They had to build huge pylons to brace the foundation. Why would anyone invest that much money and take the risk of the pylons not working when they could have moved up a half mile to firmer ground?"
He smirked. "I have the feeling you're about to tell me."
"Damn right, I am. It's because whoever had been involved with the choice must have been magickal. They influenced the build, encouraged the foundation to be poured here and only here because the capstone is beneath us." I laughed in amazement. "I'd assumed that a magickal being or some kind of sorcery was the capstone's protection, but it's being guarded by the casino property itself. Not even Vagasso can knock down a forty floor building."
"Brilliant. But why are he and the Oddsmakers so determined to keep you away from here if no one can reach the capstone?"
My smugness evaporated. "That I don't know."
And it could be a problem.
Vale opened his mouth to respond when the sound of screams tore through the facility. My blood turned to ice and my knees actually trembled with trepidation. Even though mentally I'd been prepared for another confrontation with Vagasso, emotionally I was apparently a limp noodle.
"I guess we'll soon have our answer," I choked out. "Come on."
We ran against the stream of terrified-looking people who sought to escape whatever had caused all the screaming. We burst out of the temple room and leaped into the shipwreck, and that's when I saw something I thought I'd encounter only in my nightmares.
chapter 9
Sometimes I had nightmares where I ran down empty streets, chased by something I couldn't identify, and it didn't matter how fast I ran—whatever was chasing me was faster. This wasn't that nightmare, nor was it the one where I showed up in class for the final exam and for some reason only then realized I'd missed the entire semester. That one reeaally sucked.
This nightmare was like one I had after I'd watched a horror movie that pushed me beyond my psychological limits. But this was far worse. This nightmare was real, and it had burst to life in the middle of the shark tank exhibit.
I should have pieced it all together. Vagasso wasn't impulsive. He planned. He gathered cronies to him. He hadn't scooped up Dr. Morrow just because she was strange and sadistic like he was. Sure, they shared a love of hurting me, but that was no basis to begin dating. And it wasn't a strong enough reason to band together for something as important as opening the Rift.
Or so I'd thought. Turned out, it wasn't what they had in common that had made Vagasso recruit her. It was her unholy ability to create monsters which defied imagination. And I was seeing the results of their partnership now.
This was Cthulhu and the Kraken's love child, with a dose of Nellie, the Loch Ness Monster, thrown in for good measure. Hundreds of gallons of displaced water sloshed out of the top of the exhibit because this thing was the size of a large elephant and it barely fit between the tank's walls.
Its body was slightly elongated and tapered at the end, like a polliwog's. And just like that early-stage frog, its skin was translucent in places, revealing several purple and blue beating organs that didn't look like anything I'd seen in high sch
ool science class. These were deformed and covered in pulsing white veins. The monster's skeletal structure seemed to be comprised solely of cartilage that provided only the barest of support. This wasn't a body meant to bear its weight on land. It had been designed for this one environment only.
It had started out as a sand tiger shark. I surmised that because of its rows of vicious needle-like teeth which circled around its conical head, not quite meeting in the back. The nearly 360-degree bite wasn't typical, but that double-row of pointy teeth was sand tiger all the way. The dinner plate-sized black eyes seemed shark-like, too. The rest, though, was Dr. Morrow's insanity come to life.
Triangular fins the size of paddles whacked at the plastic reef, tearing pieces of it off to dirty up the water. Each time the four fins struck the sides of the tank or the acrylic tunnel walkway, the sound boomed throughout the Shark Reef facility as though torpedoes were blowing up underwater. In addition to the fins, the monster's globular body sported tentacles, because apparently in the Villain's Instruction Manual there was a chapter on adding tentacles to every damn thing you could. I had to admit that it was an effective strategy. Everyone cringed when the tentacles appeared, including me.
Since this was a Dr. Morrow Special, this monster didn't simply have a thatch of tentacles sprouting from its slimy body. Oh, no. There was hair. Long, green hair streaming like seaweed around the body, caught up in swirls as the animal thrashed and beat at the floor of the exhibit with its single giant crab claw.
Yeah, crab claw? I saw that coming a mile away. This thing had to be aggressive, after all, and why go with a fin or a hand when you could toss in some gnarly shellfish action?
"This woman is seriously sick," I complained as I reluctantly took in the sight of this eldritch monster through the curved glass windows of the shipwreck. "Not to mention dozens of people have seen this."
"YouTube is the least of our concerns," Vale gritted out as he pounded the glass with frustration. "That thing is going to break through the foundation and access the capstone."
