by Jenn Stark
“Oh, geez.” Dixie Quinn, the horoscope-reading director of Vegas’s Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars, had her finger on the pulse of all the city’s psychics. And if that pulse was currently hammering… “That’d be bad.”
“Real bad,” Nikki agreed.
We started walking again, my gaze hitting image after image of the depressing posters. “Have you seen me?” each of them asked. The pictured kids had that eerily familiar look that all kids on missing persons flyers had, the kid you might have seen anywhere, around the corner or in the grocery or playing on a subdivision sidewalk. Their hair and smiles school-picture perfect, and their age-progressed pictures achingly innocent, cheerful gazes reflecting nothing of what must have happened to them…
Suddenly, I stopped short. It took Nikki a few steps to realize I wasn’t right behind her.
“What is it, dollface?” she asked, coming back to stand by me as I stared at the fourth flyer in the series of posters.
The fourth.
“I know that girl,” I said, lifting a hand to the child’s face. The curly hair, the bright smile, the laughing eyes. “I know that girl. I—she was one of the…” I shook my head. The age-progressed image showed the same girl, the same smile, the same eyes. Her face was fuller yet more heartbreakingly beautiful, and her hair was long, only a hint of the riot of curls from her childhood hairstyle remaining.
“What’s this doing here?” I muttered as I glared at the copy beneath the pictures, but I couldn’t make out the words at first. “She disappeared nowhere near here.”
“Says here she’s from Memphis,” Nikki supplied. She looked at the picture to the right. “This one too.”
“What?” I glanced at the flyers to the left and the right of the girl I’d recognized. The one to the left was a stranger to me. The one to the right, however…
“No.” I scanned the copy rapidly, but it had only bare-bones information. Date of disappearance, age at the time of disappearance and present age, number to call in case of sighting. Not a Memphis area code number either, but a number I already knew all too well. Brody Rooks. The LVMPD detective I’d first worked with ten years ago in Memphis, with me as a fledgling psychic and him as a rookie cop. And what we’d done…was search for kids.
“What’s Brody doing digging this up?” I snapped. “What angle is he working?” I glared at Nikki. “Did you know about this?”
“Nope.” She shook her head, confused. “All these kids—these were the ones you guys were searching for when you were a teenager?”
“No,” I said decisively. “Not all of them. That’s what makes this even weirder.”
I went back to the first poster, racking my brain. I’d never seen that child. I couldn’t have forgotten him. When I’d worked with Brody, there’d been only three kids we’d been tracking. Two from inner-city Memphis, one from the burbs. Three had been enough. These other three… I didn’t know. I pulled the flyer from the wall, staring at it. “I don’t know this boy, this Jimmy Green. I swear he wasn’t one of ours. And these age-progressed images… There’s something off about this.”
Nikki pulled another poster free. “They look like photographs, you ask me. Not computer renderings.”
I nodded sharply. That was exactly what was off about them. “And there are three new ones. If Brody somehow has linked more kids to the same crime…I can’t imagine it.” Outrage rippled through me as Nikki moved along the line of posters to the end. “What is Brody doing? And why are these here?”
“Sara.” Nikki’s voice was a whip crack, and I looked up. She was standing at the end of the line of posters, her diamond-hard nails already peeling away the flyer from the wall. I moved toward her as I pulled more posters down, memorizing the names, the photographs, especially when I once again got to the ones I knew. Hayley Adams. Corey Kuznof. Mary Degnan. Children whose faces I’d seen in my sleep years after I’d left Memphis. Children whose faces I could never forget if I’d wanted to. And there’d been many times when I’d wanted to.
I got to the end as Nikki freed the last flyer from the wall. She turned it toward me.
The face staring at me had been one I’d seen all too often as well.
MISSING: SARIAH PELTER
There was an image of me at seventeen—not a school photo either. A snapshot at a moment I hadn’t been looking at the camera, not intentionally. I’d been staring beyond it, eyes intent, expression hard. There was an age progression too, but instead of it being a generic recreated image, it was a blown-up digital photo of me standing by a brick wall. I could have been anywhere in the world, but I knew exactly where I’d been when that photo had been taken. It was barely four weeks ago. I’d been next to Nikki on a sidewalk in downtown Vegas, about to head inside Binion’s Casino.
Which meant someone had been following me. Someone who knew who I’d been. What I’d been. Before I’d gone to ground. Before I’d changed my name. Before I’d stopped finding children myself and instead used my skills to finance other people doing that work. People who could do it better. Who wouldn’t fail when it mattered most.
I took the sheet from her, then turned sharply away, ripping down the last two posters on the wall. “What is this about? What is Brody thinking?”
Nikki didn’t have time to answer.
Without warning, a shot rang out in the night. Nikki grabbed me and thrust me forward toward the closest protective line of cars and roared, “Gun!”
The lights came around the corner of the parking garage so quickly, it took me a moment to understand what was happening, blinded as I was against the plywood wall. Another peal of gunfire helped clarify the situation. Nikki and I scrambled away from each other, splitting the focus of the shooter as we dashed into the lines of cars. As I ran, I heard Nikki’s bellow into her phone, demanding the police, the National Guard, the pope if he was handy. I watched the swing of headlights bounce around to me and realized the truth of it quickly.
They were following me, not Nikki.
And Nigel had warned me about this, warned me they were coming.
My spinning thoughts kept time with my pounding feet. Of course they were following me. I’d been the one in the pictures. I’d been the one back in Memphis. I’d been the one who’d lost the trail of those kids, who hadn’t found them, who’d—
A second blast of gunfire peppered the concrete, and I cursed, stumbling to my knees, then race-crawled between two cars. I could hear Nikki yelling for me, and I popped up in time to see her jumping over a guardrail onto the hood of a car on the next level down. She spat curses as she slid across the roof, then she disappeared from view. I heard the slam of a door. She’d found her car—but there was no way she could catch up to me, not with the shooter between us. Even now, a big sedan barreled into the row where I was hiding, and I risked a glance up. Were there other cars? Snipers somewhere?
Nikki gunned her engine and backed out of her spot, her horn blaring as she roared around the corner at the far end of the row. She was driving toward me, technically, but I wasn’t her primary goal, I knew in an instant. The gunners were. She wanted to find some way to distract them.
She succeeded.
I heard the first smash as I rounded the corner, arms pumping. I turned to see Nikki sideswipe the vehicle, then bounce back, and a new sound of gunshots blasted along with the sound of broken glass.
Crap! She was taking a chance there, but I’d seen the gun she kept stowed in her limo. It was about the size of my head. Another strafing round of gunfire opened up, this time aiming away from me, and Nikki’s car roared backwards, her own gun firing. She was drawing their attention, at least for the moment, which meant I needed to move.
I wheeled around another turn in the parking garage, and a new flare of lights kicked up, the car barreling down on me fast. There was a second shooter—this one a heck of a lot closer than the one accosting Nikki. I reached for my own gun, which wasn’t there. I hadn’t packed for firepower in Germany. I’d packed for brains and ma
gic. Stupid not to be prepared, though. Stupid!
Another round of gunfire kicked across the pavement, and I jerked back as a third set of lights squealed around the turn, the two cars trapping me.
Then the third vehicle started whirling in a frenzy of blues and reds.
“Sara!”
I turned instinctively at the sound of Detective Brody Rooks’s voice, diving between two other cars as he shot past me toward the other vehicle, which promptly squealed and backed around as Brody angled his car sideways. The passenger door popped open. “Get in, dammit!”
I raced toward the vehicle and piled in, shoving my papers at him. “Posters!” I gasped, as if this was far more important than the shooters, as if he needed most of all to understand that someone had hung up pictures that shouldn’t be here, not in Vegas, not now. “Brody, there were posters—”
“Later—close the damned door!” He reached across me to haul the door shut, then hit his siren. The two vehicles sped for the exit. Brody took off after them, bouncing his sedan through the parking garage as I hugged the side of the vehicle.
“What the fuck was that about?” he gritted out as we took another curve. “Dispatch patched Nikki through screaming at the top of her lungs. What were you doing out there? Who’s shooting at you?”
“No idea. But there were these—we were looking at these.” I uncrumpled one of the flyers and waved it at him again, though he was smart enough not to take his eyes off the road. “Six missing kids flyers, Brody, posted bigger than life, exactly where I’d see them.”
“Missing kids?” He scowled at me, raking his gaze over the flyers I held in my hands, though the one on top wasn’t a missing kid at all, not really. “Christ, that’s you!”
“That’s me, yeah.” I sank back in my seat. His shock was plain and that…relieved me. A lot. “So you weren’t the one who hung those up?”
“Are you fucking nuts? No.” Brody cut the wheel again and grabbed for the sheet, splitting his time between the tight turns and the flyer with my seventeen-year-old face on it. “That’s my goddamned number at the bottom there. I didn’t authorize this.” He tossed the flyer back at me. “That particular picture of you was police property, never released to the public.”
“So, what, Memphis PD is putting this out? That’s what’s happening here?” I gripped the console and the door as we slammed over the speed bump at the garage exit.
“No goddamned idea.” He glowered at me, then jerked his gaze up as a police cruiser bounced in front of us, lights roiling and sirens screaming. The car tore off toward the shooters, down the airport’s main drag. Brody turned his vehicle sharply at the next intersection, sending us onto a maintenance road.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m not focusing. They’ll go faster,” Brody said. He double-parked the car and turned on me.
“Give me those.”
I handed over all the flyers, watching him as he scowled. Brody Rooks wore his thirty-something years more comfortably than most men, for all that they’d been really hard years. Six feet tall, with a hard, functionally strong body that he dressed in rumpled suits and attitude, he was a grimmer, rougher-edged version of the man I’d known and massively crushed on as a teenager, when the two of us had worked missing children’s cases through the Memphis police department. But his scowl was the same, and he leveled it now at the posters, lingering over the kids’ images we both knew all too well. Without looking up at me, he kept talking. “Why were you in the airport? Where are you coming from?”
I stiffened at the accusation in his tone. “Not really your business.”
“You getting shot at makes it my business.” He lifted his head and speared me with his glare. “Where?”
“Germany. Pleasure trip.”
Brody’s snort spoke volumes, but I didn’t care about his delicate sensibilities. Nevertheless, it marked the second time this week that I’d been targeted, and even for me that was a lot.
“Um, you remember Viktor Dal?”
He hesitated a second too long, then handed me back the flyers. “Why? We’re going to the station. Why do you mention Dal? What the hell does he have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Why are we going to the station?” I tried the door, but he’d locked it. Figured. “I don’t want to go to the station. I want to go to my hotel.”
“Tough.” We drove in silence until we reached the familiar building, and he turned into a parking space, popping the locks on the door as he picked up the flyers. “Nikki’ll be here within the next ten minutes anyway, the way she was ramming her limo into anything with wheels. If she isn’t arrested, she’ll be making a statement as well.” He glanced at me when I didn’t move. “Why, you got someplace else you need to be?”
I tensed, waiting for Armaeus to speak in my head. He didn’t. I shrugged.
“I guess not.”
We went inside, and the rounds of paperwork and reports commenced. Night turned into morning, Brody growing surlier by the minute over the posters. He placed a lot of calls, but we weren’t getting any information back. To make matters worse, the police cruisers had lost the fleeing shooters.
Nikki never showed either. I had a feeling there’d be no official record of any cars slammed into by the Arcana Council’s town car.
Through it all, Armaeus remained radio silent. Frankly, this was starting to piss me off. Not that I particularly enjoyed his typical babysitting routine, but I’d left two major artifacts for him. He knew I was in town. He sure as hell probably knew that I’d been shot at—yet he couldn’t be bothered to make contact? Who was he with that was distracting him so much?
A completely unexpected curl of rage unfurled within me at that thought. I tried to stuff it back into the hole it seeped out of. Rage wasn’t helpful. No matter how good it felt.
Neither a Council car nor Armaeus’s private limo awaited me when Brody finally let me out of the police station, however. It wasn’t as if I expected special service, but up until now it had been Armaeus’s habit to fetch me back to him after certain incidents. Tonight had definitely qualified as an “incident.”
So where was he?
I hailed a cab. Miles rolled past with the chatty driver, yet still no peep from Armaeus during my ride over to the Luxor or on the way up to his rooms. By the time the elevator doors finally slid open into his opulent penthouse office, I’d worked up an impressive head of steam, which I fully intended to unload on the pompous, presumptuous, totally preoccupied Magician.
Right up until I saw him sprawled out on the floor.
Chapter Three
“Armaeus!”
I swept the room with my gaze as I raced forward. I saw the drinking horn on the table, the beautiful box I’d pilfered from the caverns knocked to the floor. I reached Armaeus’s side and pushed him over, checking for vitals. I’d never seen him so pale, but he was breathing, and his heart rate was steady.
“What the hell happened to you?” I demanded as his eyes flickered open.
“Horn—drinking horn,” he managed, and I scrambled back to the table, picking up the Nordic horn. It was empty, but there was wine and bourbon at the sidebar, and I grabbed both bottles before returning. I dropped back to the floor, eyeing the drinking horn and the booze. Maybe water would be better. Or maybe…
I scowled at him. “I don’t need to fill this with the blood of innocents, do I?”
He smiled weakly and shook his head. “Wine,” he breathed.
I uncorked the wine and filled the cup, never mind that it was an ancient artifact and probably had serious skeletal cooties on it. If it was what the Magician wanted, it was what he’d get.
I set the wine bottle back on the table, turned to Armaeus, horn in hand—then froze.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute,” I said, my fingers spasming on the artifact. This was Mim’s horn. And the Valkyries had said… “Won’t drinking from this kill you?”
“Not death.” He winced, his e
yes almost glassy as his gaze found mine. “Life. Mortality.”
“But you’re immortal—”
“Now, Miss…Wilde. I don’t have much time.”
Crap. Armaeus really did look bad, and he’d been kicking around since the twelfth century, so he arguably knew how to take care of himself. As I struggled with the idea of feeding him poison, however, his eyes slid shut. In case I wasn’t paying attention, he uttered a sort of death-rattley groan.
“Dammit, fine.” My stomach twisted, and I dropped beside him, gripping the horn with a hand now clammy with sweat. Cradling Armaeus’s head in one arm, I disregarded the usual zing of electricity between us as he allowed his weight to sink into my body. “What in God’s name is wrong with you?” I muttered as I lifted the cup to his mouth. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“Had to be this way,” he murmured, but his eyes drifted closed as he accepted the rim of the drinking horn to his lips and drew in the wine like he was receiving a benediction.
I felt the shift in him almost immediately…and not merely him. As the wine from the horn of Mim seeped into his bloodstream, an answering wave of power flowed through me, steady and sure. I hadn’t signed up for a psychic oil change, however. And I’d already learned that gifts handed down by the Arcana Council rarely came without a price.
“What is this, exactly?” I asked warily. “What’s happening here? This is a thing, isn’t it. I’m not a fan of things.”
Armaeus ignored me, and as he drank, I glanced around again. “And why are you alone? Isn’t there some kind of Arcana Council phone tree that should have been activated?”
