Run of Luck (Veil Knights Book 4)

by Rowan Casey

  Run of Luck

  Veil Knights #4

  Rowan Casey

  Contents

  Series Summary

  Veil Knights Newsletter

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Cloak of Fury excerpt

  Veil Knights Newsletter

  The Veil Knights Series

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  In book one of the Veil Knights series, THE CIRCLE GATHERS, stage magician and sorcerer extraordinaire Dante Grimm brings ten strangers together, informing them that they are the living avatars of the original Veil Knights, brave men and women reincarnated many times through the millennia, most recently as the Knights of the Round Table, who pledged their lives to protect mankind from supernatural threats and enemies.

  In the distant past, the Veil Knights had combined the power of several arcane talismans into the Caeg Dimmre, the Key of Wickedness, which was used to construct a mystical barrier between our world and the Demimonde, preventing the supernatural races that inhabited the realms on the other side from continuing to ravage our humanity. The talismans were then split apart and hidden away in the far corners of the earth, there to remain until the time should come when they might be needed once more.

  That time is now.

  The Veil is falling, weakened by age and the machinations of those on the other side. Grimm knows that unless the pieces of the Caeg Dimmre are brought together again, the Veil will fail entirely, releasing the darkness that it has kept locked away for so long.

  In desperation, Grimm convinces the knights to assume their mantles once more, to undertake the quests necessary to bring the pieces of the Key back together so that they can be used to strengthen and reinforce the Veil.

  These are their stories.

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  1

  Two years ago

  It was raining the night I killed my sister.

  The superbike twitched between my legs, like the 170hp machine was a living, breathing creature hungry for speed. I opened the throttle, commanding more, hugged the fuel tank, tucking myself in behind the tiny windshield, and tunneled through traffic. Slick asphalt steamed. Red taillights and dipped headlights reflected on the cars I passed. My heart raced as fast as the V-twin engine, fear and adrenaline combined in that heady, lethal concoction, pushing me to demand more, to race harder, faster. The invisible racing line glowed in my mind, open and inviting—demanding. There was no slowing down, not now.

  Kari was close. We had stripped the mirrors from our bikes to lose weight and slim them down for traffic, but I didn’t need to look to know my sister was behind me, hugging my tail, folded into my slipstream, eking out every drop of speed and storing it in her signature move that would take me in the last few hundred meters. Not this time. Kari was fearless, but I had luck on my side.

  Time slowed, the world and my existence in it became nothing but two points: my place in the race and the finish marker. I opened the throttle, the bike trembled and lurched, trying to snap free, but I had it tamed and under my control.

  A family sedan swerved. It happens. At the speed we were traveling, drivers —faced with two superbikes carving up their inside line—forget how to act rationally. There was always at least one civilian hurdle in a street race. I yanked on the brake lever, opened the clutch, toed the gearshift and dropped down the box, controlling the drift from the rear wheel and carving around the sedan in a fraction of a second, but a fraction was all Kari needed.

  She saw the sedan cut across my line and taking advantage, shot past my left shoulder—a blur of white leather on a white machine. Behind her visor, she would be smiling. Her bike didn’t have taillights, or mirrors, or anything surplus to racing. Slimmed down to little more than a sleek body wrapped around an overclocked engine, it was an unforgiving beast, but Kari knew how to handle it.

  Tucking in, I followed close. The revs redlined, the bike screamed. I could still win this. I blinked, and time slowed, unfolding. The road glowed with rivers of golden threads: luck, made real, made tangible. All I had to do was take.

  Kari faltered. Her bike wobbled. It could have been anything, a missed gear, a crack in the road—bad luck. I took her, slingshotting forward out of her slipstream. The race was mine. I glanced and saw her face, her eyes were smiling.

  A semitrailer pulled out ahead. Reports would say the driver took a wrong turn. He shouldn’t have been on that street; just bad luck. It was bad luck that he didn’t see us, bad luck that the streets were wet.

  In a split second the race changed. There was nowhere to go, no escape.

  I braked, twitched the bars, and ditched the bike, dropping it onto its side. Crashing isn’t the worst part of coming off at speed. The worst part is being a passenger to fate and having no control over the outcome. My race leathers tore away from my leg, hip, and arm, exposing skin. I was lucky, they said. The leathers did their job and held me together, lucky I didn’t hit anything. So damn lucky.

  I didn’t hear the explosion but I felt it. The heat, the blast of grit and debris.

  By the time I’d stopped tumbling and crawled up onto my hands and knees, flames had engulfed the trailer. Cars were scattering around the stranded semi, brakes squealed, sirens wailed—or that could have been the ringing inside my head.

  I pulled off my helmet, vision broken, body numb. The flood of noise and heat hit my senses. I heard screams. Maybe my own. I don’t remember running to the semi or the bystanders holding me back. But I remembered the fire and how it devoured everything, I remembered the noise of metal buckling and glass popping.

  Lucky, they said…that I survived and Kari didn’t. But they didn’t know. Nobody knew. I am luck, and that night, luck killed my sister.

  2

  Present day

  “You have the opportunity to make it right.” The Illusionist, Grimm, had told me three days earlier. I heard the same words in my head now as I scanned the bank of monitors. People milled about the casino floor like ants crowding islands of newly-discovered bounty, only the bounty here was cash and the winnings weren’t guaranteed. State of the art computer algorithms—Non Obvious Relationship Awareness (NORA)—studied the ebb and flow, seeking out behavioral patterns while facial recognition scanned for known felons. Live indicators blinked red and green, tracking the casino’s profits and flagged anyone on the floor who happened to be bad for business.

  And above it all, I watched, threads of luck poised at my fingertips, ready to be pulled. I was the casino’s last line of defense and the main reason this house never lost.

  NORA marked a target on the screen to my right. I tapped the crosshairs, zooming in on the culprit while the database searched for any public knowledge about the individual it had isolated. Male, mid-thirties. Lead designer at a well-known CGI studio. Mr. Mark Journeyman was on a winning streak. It wasn’t his first. Some people were innately lucky. Mark had some of the talent for attracting good fortune, but also a shrewd intelligence to back it up. And he was eating into the casino’s profits.

  “Make it right.” Grimm’s suggestion picked at my thoughts like a fingernail pulling on a s
cab.

  I plucked a pair of dice from my jacket and rolled them around my palm. One black, one white. Their edges had worn smooth overtime.

  Grimm didn’t know me. He couldn’t. Sure, he made a convincing case for knights and demons, and another world he called the demimonde. But if he was looking for heroes to join his cause, he had made a mistake in me.

  When I looked again at the monitor, Mr. Journeyman was sweeping his arm out to scoop up his chips. He’d gathered quite the crowd around him. I blinked, sliding my vision out of focus into a second-sight and there, wrapped around him like silken threads on a spool, was an abundance of luck. It rippled around everyone here, weaving through every individual, steering away from some, crowding others. Journeyman glowed as though encased in amber.

  I tossed the dice on the desktop. They skipped, bounced, and came to rest on double ones—snake-eyes.

  Balance.

  Spreading my hands in the air in front of me, I sunk my fingers into the stream. Journeyman’s surplus was easy enough to find and unravel. With the threads of his luck balanced on my fingertips, I singled out another figure on screen—a woman who the stream flowed around but didn’t touch. She could use a little boost, the unlucky were more likely to spend once they hit a winning streak. Luck twitched around Journeyman, bent toward my new target and flowed.

  “You’re still here?” Grace remarked from behind. Her matronly voice wrenched me out of the sight. I blinked, trying to refocus on the room and the casino’s head of security marching toward the monitors.

  “Thought you went home hours ago.” She stopped in front of the monitor showing the feed of the Blackjack table and tapped at the screen, probably isolating someone for NORA to track. “I knew it…” she grumbled. “I saw her here yesterday.”

  She finally looked up and recoiled from the heat in my glare. “Have you been here all night?”

  With broad shoulders and a wide stance tucked into a navy-blue pantsuit, Grace was the casino’s hardline of defense. But while her team were all scattered about the casino floor as obvious deterrents, Grace moved among the crowd—less of a snake in the grass and more of a gorilla who would happily punch your heart through your spine if you so much as considered stealing from the business.

  “You look like shit,” she grunted. “Is this about that Hollywood nutjob, what’s-his-name…Grant? Grimm? Let it go.”

  “What did you see on the floor? I asked, diverting her attention away from me.

  I had been forced to tell Grace about the illusionist and his request to find a missing artifact after she’d had the misfortune to be the first person to see me right after I’d witnessed Grimm summon a monster out of thin air and let it loose among those of us gathered at his club. Grace was too astute to let me shrug off why I was polishing off a bottle of whiskey at the bar alone, so I’d told her everything—omitting the monster part. If I told Grace that monsters were real she would look closer at me, and maybe decide I was one of those monsters. She wouldn’t have been wrong.

  I moved to her side and peered down at the view of the Blackjack table.

  “Nothing solid,” Grace added. “Just a feeling…check her out.”

  “Her” could only be the stunning woman propped up against Miles, one of our regulars. Miles was a true Blackjack junkie, he spent more time here than his own home, much to the dismay of his partner. The couple had had a few public spats in my time at the casino. The Aces High Casino, like any gambling, dancing or drinking club, had its faithful regulars. If the target of Grace’s gut instincts thought she was on to something with Miles, she would find her efforts wasted. Miles played with a different deck. Although, whatever charms she was working, she certainly had Miles smiling and laughing along in a way that I hadn’t seen from the middle-aged man in my two years at the casino.

  “She’s a shark,” Grace said, stabbing her finger at her suspect.

  “How do you know?”

  “I haven’t seen her stake a dime. She registered a few days ago, puts up the minimum deposit and then cruises the floor looking for easy marks. I’ve been watching her most of the night and all she does is go from mark to mark, buttering them up, but she doesn’t close.”

  “She was here yesterday?”

  “Yeah. I was going to let it slide and then here she is again, doing the exact same thing.”

  “Did she leave with anyone yesterday?” We occasionally had a few opportunistic men and woman looking for other ways to relieve punters of their winnings.

  “No. She’s alone and she stays alone.”

  “Maybe she just likes being on the floor?” The noise, the rush, it could be addictive even without the thrill of winning. “It’s not unheard of.”

  “Or she’s scoping the place out for nefarious purposes.”

  I leaned in and narrowed my eyes on the mystery woman. I wasn’t seeing anything noteworthy in her behavior. Her dark blue dress—cut just above the knee—was almost too subdued among the casino’s rainbow of lights, but the rest of her could have been popped from a supermodel mold. She wore her long sun-bleached blond hair with one side pinned back, revealing a sharp facial profile fit for the cover of Cosmo.

  “What does NORA say?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” It was unusual for NORA not to find something, but it happened.

  Grace crossed his arms. “Nothing on facial recog, nothing on behavior patterns.”

  “When she registered, she must have left the voluntary information blank. Maybe she genuinely doesn’t know anyone here. It’s not a crime. Not everyone is out to screw over the casino.”

  Grace snorted. “Yes, they are.”

  My smile soured, twisting on my lips. “People aren’t here to win, no matter what they tell you. It’s the game that keeps them coming back.”

  She didn’t argue but by the twitch of her jaw, I could tell that she wanted to. “That woman is trouble.”

  In the two years since I’d had a spectacular run of luck and won the casino from a failing businessman and stepped in as its manager, Grace’s instincts had proven right every time. She didn’t need my permission to pull anyone off the floor, but lately she had sought it anyway. I suspected the real reason for her sudden appearance in the control room had nothing to do with the mysterious woman and more to do with the fact she had heard I hadn’t left the building for two days straight. Not since Grimm’s revelation.

  “Reel her in,” I said. It would keep Grace occupied on something besides me. “See what she’s all about.”

  “You wanna sit in?”

  “Ya know, I think I’ll head home.”

  She nodded in silent acknowledgement and avoided eye contact as though her life depended on it. “You gonna forget about that Grimm guy?”

  “What Grimm guy?”

  That earned me a silent chuckle, which was the closest Grace ever came to laughing.

  Her earpiece squeaked. She pressed his finger to her ear. “Say again.” Her cool blue eyes flicked to me. “All right. She’s here, I’ll let her know.”

  I knew that look: Trouble.

  Grace stepped back and looked up at the live external camera feed. “There’s been an accident outside.”

  Strobe-like flashing lights flooded the camera’s lens, obscuring its view. On the floor people were stirring from their games and heading toward the exit.

  “Car mounted the curb, hit a pedestrian. Rodriguez on the door says it ain’t pretty.” Grace sucked in a hiss through her teeth. “We might need to open up the back doors, have people file out that way rather than, ya know, parade out front.”

  Her voice faded beneath the too-loud thudding of my heart. Make it right. Icy fingers shivered down my spine. I sank a hand into my jacket pocket and squeezed the dice.

  “A guy in a green hoodie?” Please, no!

  Something in my voice snagging Grace’s instincts, but I was already turning away, hiding my face. I reached for the door handle, fingers trembling.

  “R
odriguez didn’t say,” Grace was saying, but the sounds of my thudding heart were drowning her out. “Poor bastard was a customer. The cops will probably want to see the camera footage…”

  It could only have been minutes ago. Journeyman must have left the table, cashed in his winnings and stepped outside where a heavy dose of bad luck took his life.

  Bile burned the back of my throat. “Close the casino, get everyone out the back.”

  “What? It’ll cost thousands—”

  “Do it.”

  “Where the hell are you going?”

  I couldn’t run, even though every instinct screamed for me to run, to escape, get away from the guilt. This wasn’t my fault. I didn’t mean to. The luck…I was interrupted.

  One foot in front of the other, that’s all I had to do. If I could just get outside without anyone stopping me, I’d be okay. But Mark Journeyman wouldn’t be.

  I’d killed him.

  Just like before.

  Make it right.

  A tight knot of nerves lodged in my throat. I swallowed hard and jabbed at the call elevator button.

  “Hey—”

  The elevator pinged its arrival. I stepped inside and kept my gaze well away from Grace marching down the hall toward me. I couldn’t handle her questions or her keen eyes that would surely see the fear in mine.

  She planted her foot against the elevator door, jolting them to a stop, and stepped inside the car. “Okay, we close the casino. But I want to take a look outside first. If it’s down at the end of the street, we don’t need to knee-jerk, okay?”

  “Sure.” I swallowed.

  Grace gave me a heavy dose of side-eye, clearly wondering why I was fraying at the edges. She wouldn’t let this drop. But just like Grimm, she didn’t know me. Not really. Nobody at the Aces High Casino knew the real Jazmine Archer, a woman on the run from her past.

  “I’m just tired.” I told her, trying to wrestle with a smile, and hoping it didn’t come off as a grimace.