by Jenn Stark
But I still didn’t have my prize.
Crap.
Voices erupted on the other side of the panel, and a sudden tattoo of fists pounded on the door. I didn’t speak German, but I suspected I wasn’t gaining any friends. I swept the light around the room again, struggling to see past its crackling glare. Then I heard the sickening sound of the panel triggering the mechanism in the wall behind me…
Exactly as the wall in front of me spun.
I clicked off the hairpin and burst forward, plastering myself against the wall as it completed its semicircle—carrying me safely around until the wall clicked once more into place. I didn’t have time to congratulate myself, though, because in front of me—there was nothing. Not even a floor.
With a sickening lurch, I half bounced, half slid down a sharp stone slope, banging off no fewer than three concrete abutments before landing in a heap atop the remains of a ladder and one particularly creepy set of bones.
I didn’t generally have a problem with bones, truth be told. They usually meant their owner was dead. Didn’t mean I liked to land on them, though.
Rolling to the side, I flicked my crackling hairpin to life again, instant Zippo. The bones were shrouded in a simple woolen robe, the whole mess a sad puddle at the edge of the floor, as if the deceased had been doubled over when he’d shuffled off this mortal coil, lost in prayer next to the shattered ladder.
In…prayer?
Cautiously edging forward, I poked at the bones. First gently, then with more force. At the second shove, the robed skeleton sprawled over to the side, and from its center rolled a long silver-embossed cup. Not the famed “cup of a carpenter” at all, nor the goblet of a king, but a long Nordic drinking horn rimmed in hammered silver, a thin silver and leather braid attached to it in two places.
Armaeus had given me no indication of what the cup would look like. I’d completely assumed it would look more holy grail than ox horn, but who was I to judge?
More shouting sounded above me, along with some ominous pounding on the wall. I scrambled up, draping the horn around my neck by its braid, and swung my minilight in a wide arc.
The room immediately opened out into a cavern that appeared to have been hewn out of the very rock of Neuschwanstein. I vaguely recalled that there had been two older castles on the site before King Ludwig’s getaway had been built.
Whether or not this room dated back to those original castles, there was no question about what it had been used for since then.
“Sweet Christmas.” Every avaricious nerve ending in my body snapped to attention, reveling in the bounty spread out before me.
Dozens of crates were stacked in neat rows, many of them lined with neatly stenciled German words, exactly none of which I could read. Piled on the boxes, leaning up and scattered around, were statues and what looked to be covered paintings, as well as huge bowls and jars of pottery and friezes tumbled on top of each other like a Jenga game gone terribly wrong. Some of the boxes had other words scrawled on them—Cyrillic, Egyptian, French, Japanese. A hidden horde of artifacts moldering in the bowels of the Disneyland castle.
More of the famed Nazi stores? Had to be.
But how had it stayed secret so long?
Something rustled in the far shadows, and I swung around, stifling my urge to call out. A whirring flutter, the sound of a flock of birds hopping to a new ledge, whispered through the gloom. My third eye flicked open, and I staggered back.
Magic arced through the chamber in a kaleidoscope of crazy lines running over and under and through the items gathered within. These weren’t simply artifacts, they were magical treasures, a virtual cornucopia of the kind of items my clients would spend fortunes on. And I was here…alone…with only two hands!
I scanned the room wildly, forcing myself to concentrate on whatever glowed most brightly that was small enough to carry. In the Neuschwanstein Art Grab video game, I’d clearly made it to the bonus round. I was not leaving without some sort of prize.
Time, sadly, was not on my side. The sound of the panel cracking open high above me sent me fleeing deeper into the room, toward the far door I could barely see ahead. I scooped up one of the smallest boxes as I rushed past. It shimmered with such a white-hot frenzy that I assumed I’d singe my fingers, but I was happily surprised to find it cool to the touch. I tucked it against my body like a football and bent into my run.
I reached the far end of the room and dived for an arched doorway as the first of the men chasing me shouted out in surprise and wonder. I knew their discovery of the room full of spoils would delay some of them, but from the sound of boots crunching on stone that continued to get nearer, clearly not all. I charged into the doorway—only to practically face-plant into a wall. The corridor beyond teed sharply. I swung right, then left, desperately shoving my crackling pin light into the darkness to see which direction was the better option.
A whistle was the only warning I had.
I flattened to the ground as the men burst through the doorway as well, their cries indicating they’d taken the brunt of the arrow blast I’d triggered. Clicking off my light, I scrambled down the corridor, away from where the arrows of death had emerged, keeping low, racing blindly.
Well, not quite blindly.
As I rushed forward, I felt a keen pressure in the center of my head. Then light pulsed above, around, and through me, illuminating the corridor with a glittering green glow.
My third eye apparently had a night vision mode. I vastly preferred relying on my Tarot cards, but any port in a storm.
A path lay dead ahead. As I gained confidence, I gained speed. The tunnel dropped precipitously, carrying me farther into the mountain. I twisted and turned and chose direction after direction, split after split, all following the pulse of energy. Exhaustion weighed on me, the drag of the energy expenditure tapping stores I didn’t know I had.
I’d pay for this later, I suspected. But I had to keep moving.
I wasn’t sure when the men behind me stopped following, but when the tunnel finally spit me out onto the rocky valley below Neuschwanstein’s sister castle, Hohenschwangau, I didn’t stop scrambling. Nigel and a posse of hired goons remained at the main castle. And unless he’d been lying to me—there were attack dogs up there too. Attack dogs were never good.
I swung around, squinting in the darkness, using my real eyes to lock down my position. I could see the glow of Hohenschwangau on the next rise. The auction’s overflow of parking would be in the village between the two castles, farther down the mountain. There’d be cars there. Motorcycles.
I sucked in a deep breath, preparing to launch myself forward. I could totally do this. With speed and luck and a decided lack of Fido, I could seriously—
“Halt.”
The absolute authority in the voice caught me up short. I looked up, then up farther. Ordinarily, I wasn’t much on following direct commands. Then again, ordinarily, I wasn’t being ordered around by people whose voices made my bones vibrate…and who were sporting honest-to-God wings on their backs.
I stopped.
Surrounding me were a half-dozen women, easily topping seven feet tall, their wings adding another few feet to their height and quite a bit to their width as well. They were beautiful in the way an ice storm was beautiful: cold, austere, and hard-angled, their eyes a brilliant light blue, their skin fair to the point of snow. Three were blonde, two brunette, one a deep auburn. They were dressed in long robes cut open over thick breeches, and they did not look happy.
Valkyries. Had to be. Except…were Valkyries a thing? Why hadn’t I known they were a thing?
I squared my shoulders as the nearest one gestured to me. When she spoke, her voice sounded of wind and rain, chilling me to my toes. “Mim’s horn is sacred to the swan king. It is death to those who drink from it. Are you so ready to die, Sara Wilde?”
I frowned down at the horn slung around my neck. Mim’s horn? I wasn’t up on my Norse mythology, but I vaguely recalled Mim and his compact
between heaven and earth, a compact sealed with…a drinking horn. Because that’s how the Vikings rolled.
The Valkyrie appeared to be waiting for an answer, however, so I gave the only one I had. “It’s not for me. But the person who asked for it isn’t big on dying either. It’s kind of a thing with him.”
The woman’s smile was wintry. “Death finds all, eventually, whether they seek it or not.” She tilted her head. “We know you.”
Given the mythological Valkyries’ penchant for identifying who would live and die, this wasn’t particularly good news, but her gaze next fell to the box I held clutched in my hand, her white-blonde brows lifting in surprise. She nodded. “Gather your weapons, then, mortal. Your battle is upon you.” She stared at me for a long moment, her lips curving into a ghost of a smile. “Tell Armaeus he owes us.”
She disappeared. A moment later, so did the other five silent women. I peered into the darkness, trying to process what I’d seen…
As the sound of baying wolfhounds cut through the brittle night sky.
Crap!
I turned down the mountain and ran.
Chapter Two
I spent the flight back to Vegas alternating between catnaps and attempts to pry open the ornate blue-and-green inlaid box I’d snagged on the way out of the Mad King’s castle. Neither proved very effective. A quick check of my accounts showed that the Council had wired me the cash, and I forwarded it to Father Jerome’s account.
Jerome, the French priest I’d met more than five years ago when I’d started my work in the arcane black market, wasn’t your average holy father. His vocation might have been the Church, but his crusade was the Connected children of the world—children now at deadly risk as the war on magic took progressively more sinister turns. I helped as I could, usually with cash. And though I was quickly coming to realize that money wouldn’t solve all my problems, it sure did solve a pile of them. Especially with the reports Father Jerome was feeding me from France: More psychic children were being targeted by the dark practitioners of the Connected community, which meant more money was needed to house and protect them.
The transfer done, I waited for Armaeus to contact me. He didn’t. Not via phone nor via his annoying habit of crawling around in my head until I noticed him. It was weird to have my brain all to myself, even though most of the time I was trying to shut him out of it. I should have been happy he was leaving me alone.
Oddly, I wasn’t.
To distract myself, I shuffled the Tarot cards yet again, though I knew just by touching them there’d be no answers from that quarter. I’d been casting cards on Viktor Dal off and on the whole trip, to try to figure out who he was, and why he’d picked Nigel for the job against me. Nigel, who I’d not particularly counted as an enemy, though if you were on the outside looking in, you might think he was. We’d been set at odds on enough jobs, after all.
Then again, Nigel hadn’t delivered me to the bad guys exactly. He’d located me, but he hadn’t incapacitated me, and he easily could have. So what game was he truly playing?
As they had all day, the cards once again came up Sixes and Sevens, Moons and Swords and I put the deck away in disgust. Sometimes, it really did hurt to ask.
Google was no help either. There was no way Viktor Dal could be the same Viktor from Memphis, but there was nothing on the Internet or the Darkweb about the guy, and nothing about his line of work. Had Nigel given me a false name? And if so, why? I wasn’t in the mood to play “guess the allegiance,” but something about Nigel’s involvement in tracking me down for Viktor was unsettling. It felt too…intimate. Too personal.
I thought about the Seven of Swords again. Something was going on I didn’t know about. That was a good way to end up dead.
I landed at McCarran International Airport as night draped Sin City. The box remained resolutely shut. The drinking horn remained about as generic as a horn could be. I remained surly and on edge. As we taxied toward the terminal, I swung my gaze out at the Vegas night and rubbed my face with my hands. Sleep hadn’t come easily, not even on Armaeus’s private jet. I needed to sleep in a real bed.
When we were finally cleared, I disembarked, leaving Mim’s horn and the blue-and-green inlaid case aboard the plane. Armaeus would know where to find them.
He’d know where to find me too. Whenever he got around to looking.
“Passport?” The bored woman at the immigration kiosk flicked me a dead-eyed glance as I reached her, and I obligingly handed over my documents. Las Vegas’s primary airport looked the same way it always did in the middle of the night—filled with tourists and wired for sound. The new rush of Vegas hopefuls spilled out of terminals and converged on the baggage claim area like ants swarming a honeypot.
I shouldered my own carry-on and glanced up at the TV screens as I pushed toward the exit. Stark missing persons announcements cycled across the screens in between flight listings, a blur of grainy images and clinical details. My mood soured further. How many of those notices had I seen over the years, long after I’d stopped officially assisting the police in the search for missing children?
Too many.
Made sense, though, to advertise at an airport, especially in a city that billed itself as the crossroads of corruption. I’d only recently started thinking of Vegas as home, but even that was a bit of a stretch. There were many faces to this city, and I truly knew only a few of them: the Strip, a few blocks off Strip, and the old casino district downtown. Who knew what other secrets the city held?
I moved with increasing fatigue past baggage claim, toward the constantly churning taxi line beyond the plate-glass doors of the airport. Flying the Arcana Council skies meant I could avoid the luggage carousels that I could see were already clogged with bags despite the fact it was two in the morning. A few more steps and I’d make a clean getaway from the airport. No muss, no fuss.
So why wasn’t I feeling better about the world?
“Yo, dollface! Sorry I’m late.”
I jerked to a stop as I focused on Nikki Dawes coming toward me fast. She was wearing a perfectly crisp chauffeur’s outfit despite the hour—smart cap set atop her lush auburn curls, a black tuxedo and bright white blouse open at the collar to display the barest hint of her impressive assets. The only concession she’d made to the cool desert night were the long, sleek leggings that stretched down her mile-long legs instead of her typical skin-tight miniskirt, and her platform heels had been replaced by knee-high stiletto boots. As usual, she turned heads in a long line of appreciative admirers, men and women alike.
She grinned as she reached me, eyeing me with approval. “Glad to find you in one piece. But Armaeus needs to learn the difference between ‘cell phone lot’ and ‘my apartment’ next time he thinks it only takes me three minutes to show up at the airport.”
“He contacted you?” I frowned. “He’s been radio silent for me. I was beginning to think I’d pissed him off somehow.”
“Pretty sure you’d know if that was the case. He’s not exactly the shy and retiring type.” Nikki cocked her head. “And, to be fair, maybe it wasn’t Armaeus with the wake-up call. Maybe it was just me shooting bolt upright in bed with an urgent freak-out that you were at the airport.”
I snorted. “Well, I appreciate it, no matter what.” Nikki wasn’t the most powerful Connected I’d ever encountered, but her abilities as a member of the psychic community were impressive and very focused. She could see what others saw either with their eyes or their minds, whether those people were in front of her or halfway across the world, as long as she was keyed into that person. The more she got to know you, the sharper her visions. It’d made her previous career as a cop a successful one, and her current career as a Strip-based psychic and occasional Council gopher lucrative as well.
“I gotta say, I assumed the Council had made plans for your safe return.” She grinned. “Then again, I’m here, and you’re here. So maybe I was the plan all along.”
“Maybe.” However it had come to pas
s, I was glad. Nikki had attached herself to me over the past several months that I’d been working in Vegas, and I’d grown used to having her by my side when I was in the city. Especially given how crazy the city had gotten of late.
I breathed more easily as the doors spit us out into the cool Vegas night. Rubbing the worst of the grit out of my eyes, I fell into step with Nikki as we picked our way across the lanes of traffic, heading for the short-term parking garage.
Minutes later we angled alongside an ungainly construction site that jutted out from the wall of the main parking ramp, skirting tarp-draped plywood. The temporary walls were already showing signs of wear, yellow caution tape and orange hard hat stickers warring with graffiti and random flyers. We’d almost reached the main opening when a line of blue-and-white signs caught my eye. The same blue-and-white missing persons posters I’d seen on the airport’s interior screens, only here the images marched down the plywood barrier in lockstep, each more heartbreaking than the last. It was always the kids that were the worst.
Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to look at the first face, because—you never knew. Especially in a city like Vegas.
My focus wavered as I considered the reality of the city I was walking back into. A city I’d helped change recently, and not necessarily for the better. “How are the other Connecteds on the Strip?” I asked. “They recovering?”
“Nope. Still jacked and loving it.” Nikki grinned as I stopped and turned toward her. Several days earlier, Vegas had served as the latest site for the war on magic, and Magic hadn’t taken it lying down. The resulting energy spike—which I had helped channel—had left everyone riding a psychic high that had nowhere to go but down. Only that high was lasting a lot longer than I would have thought it could. “Fortune-tellers are raking it in,” Nikki continued. “Card readings have been off the charts, and there’s rumors of excluding psychics from the casino VIP suites for fear they can predict the outcomes of hands. Everyone’s walking around with a chip on their shoulders. If this wears off, when this wears off, there are going to be some disappointed Connecteds out there. Dixie’s already bracing for the technoceutical market to jump when that happens. If the Connected can’t get amped by natural means, she figures they’ll do it by artificial.”
