Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3

by Jenn Stark

  No. Not all. I scanned up and to the left. The first six had shiny new labels, etched in plates of—

  I reared back as I recognized the last of the labels: MARY.

  “No!”

  As if triggered by the word, the drawers jolted open—all of them, not just the labeled ones—and suddenly the room was filled with flying ash. Ash and small bits of twisted metal and bone. I ducked and crouched away from the onslaught, but it seemed to follow me to the corner of the room, a room without a door, a room without an escape. And a voice pounded through my head, soft and kind and riveting and familiar, so achingly familiar, a voice I hadn’t heard for ten years and then only briefly, as a man with kind eyes and a scruffy beard and thick-soled shoes sighed and looked down at me and smiled and said:

  “If anyone can save them, it’ll probably be you.”

  “Miss Wilde!”

  Armaeus’s shout was a slap across the face, and I lurched awake again, still in his embrace, my arms flailing, my legs churning. Only the solid mass of his body kept me from running right through the enormous glass windows of his penthouse and out into the far open sky.

  “There were drawers, it was a mausoleum!” I blurted. “He killed those kids, Armaeus. He did it!”

  Certainty sank like a lodestone, drawing me down, back into the past and the nightmare of that job. The job that had taken everything from me. The job that had ruined my life. The job that had…

  “What did you see, Miss Wilde?” Armaeus prompted, pulling me back from the edge of hysteria. “Specifically, what did you see?” He paused. “Was Viktor Dal there?”

  “He…yes.” I drew in a deep, shuddery breath. “Well, his voice was there. But he said—he said something he’d said to me before, when I was a kid.”

  Armaeus relaxed his hold marginally. “And what was that, can you remember?”

  “That I…” All the adrenaline drained out of me, leaving behind a shell.

  Because Viktor had been taunting me all those years ago. And I hadn’t even known it. I hadn’t been able to save those kids. I hadn’t been able to stop…him. I shook my head again, clamping down hard on my thoughts.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said woodenly. “The kids are dead.” If anyone can save… “He murdered them.”

  I looked up, my gaze clearing. Armaeus’s face was impassive, and he looked at me without speaking. “I’m going to kill him,” I said into the silence. “Viktor Dal. If he’s still alive. I’m going to find him, and I’m going to kill him.”

  “And if the children whose names you saw are not dead?” He studied me. His lids flickered, and I sensed his touch on my mind. “Mary, Sharon, Jimmy. Harrison, Corey, Hayley. If they are still alive? If you can yet save them? What would you do then, Miss Wilde?”

  The sheer cruelty of his question took the breath from me. To hear the names of the children in his aristocratic, foreign inflection seemed to call them sharply to life once more—laughing, smiling videos of three kids I had watched over and over again, puzzling, obsessing, jumping at every thread of hope. And now there were three new kids in the same cheerful flat images, three kids I’d never seen before in my life. They had all simply…disappeared. And I had failed them.

  I jumped as my phone rang, the raucous sound battering my nerves. I pulled out the device, and my stomach cramped at the name on the screen. Brody. He’d need to know. He’d need to know what I saw, what I knew. I sensed the touch of Armaeus’s mind on mine. Resolutely, I pushed him out.

  “I have to go.” I pulled back from him, regaining my bearings. I refocused on the drinking horn, now empty on the table, then glanced back to Armaeus. “Are you—you going to be okay until I get back?”

  The Magician nodded, his gaze steady on me. His irises were now completely black.

  “I will,” he said. “And I’ll be waiting for you, Miss Wilde.”

  Chapter Four

  Brody was double-parked in the emergency vehicle space in front of the Luxor. He barely looked up from his phone as I got into his car.

  “Are you going to make a habit of this?” I asked gruffly, my head still too stuffed with pain to let it all out yet. “I’m not going to jump every time you call.”

  “I think you will for this.” Brody fired up the sedan and turned us back onto the Strip, but instead of heading toward the heart of the city, he turned south, driving toward the Mandalay Bay Casino and then past it, into an area that looked like a whole lot of nothing.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We have to talk.”

  “We’re already talking,” I snapped. “That’s what people do when they speak to each other, they talk. Usually in coffee shops, not in cars heading out into the Nevada desert.”

  He slanted me a glance. “Do I make you nervous?”

  “Presidential politics make me nervous, Brody. You just piss me off.” I turned toward him, settling against the side of the door, putting as much physical distance between us as possible. The images crowding my mind pressed outward, but I couldn’t speak of them yet. Those six brass labels…

  “So what do you have?” I asked when Brody didn’t speak first. “You’ve found something out about the flyers? The ones from the Memphis PD.”

  “Not from the Memphis PD, actually.” Brody grimaced. “I called, and they had no idea what I was talking about. They had a record of the case, sure. But it’s long since gone cold. Ancient history. And no one has been sniffing around, demanding it be opened again.”

  “Right.” My throat suddenly seemed a little tight. Probably choking on chemicals from the archaic air-conditioning in the vehicle. But no way was I going to drop the windows, no matter how fast Brody was driving. Which… I shifted in my seat, forcing myself to focus on what my eyes saw, not my brain. “You working out some issues with the speedometer there?”

  Brody growled something indistinguishable but didn’t lay off the gas pedal. He left the main road without speaking, and we bumped through two subdivisions, each more depressing than the last: short, square, stucco-covered homes, hunkered down in the heat. When he pulled into the driveway of one particularly nondescript tract home, I knew where we were. No way could anyone live on purpose in such a pitiful little house unless he was a cop. There was no landscaping except for a few scrubby cactus plants, and the sunbaked concrete of the driveway was bleached white. The garage door, also bleached white, looked like it hadn’t been opened since the Cold War.

  “Please tell me you don’t have your dead grandmother in there.”

  He didn’t grace me with a response to that, and we exited the vehicle in silence. The heat was a wall of oppression that we had to fight through to get to his front door, but the moment we stepped inside his house, I relaxed. The house might be one sad sack of ugly, but Brody kept the place on arctic. Clearly, he was my kind of guy.

  Living up to the exterior’s promise, the house was spare to the point of Spartan, but as he led me into his office, I refined my reaction. Brody had toys, all right. They were just highly specialized. “Nice.”

  The entire space had been converted into a crime lab, with a map of Vegas taking up most of the far wall, pins assembled in clusters to denote gangs, white-collar criminals, popular targets of tourist violence. Stacks of reports and no less than three laptops lined the wall beneath the map, but the material showed signs of being pushed to the side recently, making space for the new crime that had occupied the detective’s interest.

  Six tattered flyers lined a table that had been shoved up against another wall, and the large-screen computer behind it blinked to life as Brody touched a panel.

  Unjustified panic surged anew in my throat. I hoped this wasn’t going to become a constant issue, or breathing might become a problem. “What is this, Brody?” I still couldn’t tell him what I’d seen. Six brass labels on drawers full of ash and bone. Six kids.

  If anyone can save them, it’ll probably be you.

  “This is how I spent the first few years after your disappearance.”
Brody’s harsh voice cut across my reverie. “I’m not happy to be back at it. Trust me, you’re only going to get the abridged version.”

  The screen flared to life, and three school-picture photos identical to the ones on the flyers flickered in front of us. “Hayley Adams, Corey Kuznof, and Mary Degnan,” he said grimly. “As they appeared ten years ago. We didn’t have age progressions then because the pictures were current. But these…” He tapped the flyers. “They hold up. We ran the images through our system at the LVMPD, and the pictures are solid.”

  “Except they have backgrounds. Real backgrounds, I mean. Those actually look like photographs.”

  Brody’s lips tightened. “Except they have backgrounds. So someone is messing with us, or these kids are alive.”

  I winced. “I don’t think so, Brody.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me, though. He brought up another set of images. “These three kids weren’t part of our original search. Harrison Banks, Jimmy Green, Sharon Graham. Taken from different small towns in Tennessee and Alabama. They weren’t reported right away, didn’t make it into the system when our case blew up. And there were other differences too. No reason to connect them to our case.”

  “They were never found either, I’m guessing.”

  He blew out a long breath. “They weren’t. And of course, we had you to add to that list after you left town.” He stabbed the flyer. “But I didn’t make flyers for you, Sara. It was considered an inside investigation, because we didn’t know the circumstances of your abduction or disappearance or whatever the hell it was.” His jaw was tight, a vein pulsing in his temple. “And we certainly didn’t know you were alive and kicking back in someone’s RV somewhere.”

  I grimaced. “It was a long time ago, Brody.”

  “And a long time where you could have reached out, contacted me. At least let me know that you were goddamned alive.” His voice cracked a little, and I winced again. He wasn’t wrong.

  “At the time, it seemed better to let the past be the past. I didn’t know what had happened to my mom. You were the only one who was left standing. I wasn’t going to risk that.”

  “And now?”

  I shrugged. “I still don’t want to risk it.”

  Something in my tone tipped him off, and he turned sharply to me, his eyes narrowed. “You said you didn’t know who was shooting at you.”

  “I don’t. But I seem to be pretty unpopular this week.” I blew out a long breath. I had to tell him. “I think—what are the odds, Brody that, um, Viktor Dal had something to do with the kids?”

  “Sara.” Brody’s voice sounded tortured.

  I turned back to the computer. “Seriously, hear me out. I mean, we knew back then that he was a shrink in my school district, but we had no reason to suspect Mr. Congeniality. Everybody loved him, he was super helpful. But what if… What is that?”

  I stared at the screen as Brody pounded on the keys. A new image came up. Then a second. Then a third. All of them of Viktor, all of them in places I’d never seen before, except one.

  “Brody.” My breath stalled in my throat. “What’s…that?”

  Viktor Dal stood smirking in front of a wall lined with brass drawers.

  “About three weeks after you disappeared, Viktor Dal became a person of interest in the kidnapping case. He was outraged, then obstructive. He would send us pictures of himself standing next to grave sites and funeral homes. Places like that.” Brody tapped the screen. “This one, he’d bought an entire mausoleum wall, filled six of the drawers with ash and bones from a local pet crematorium, and sent us the keys.”

  I stared at him. “A pet crematorium? You’ve got to be joking me.”

  “All of it was fake. We had to investigate it anyway. By then, of course, Viktor was well and truly in the wind.” He punched up more screens. “We dug deeper and eventually learned that he’d been a German money launderer, drug dealer, and sex trafficker. He’d only been at the school district one semester before the children went missing. We were certain that he’d expanded his market to child trafficking, but nothing ever came of that. We couldn’t pin anything on him. Eventually, he drifted away. Back then, we hadn’t thought beyond the few missing kids. Back then, I hadn’t known about the international Connected community, or that something called ‘Connecteds’ existed. Other than you, anyway.”

  I let that go. “And now?” I gestured to the screen, still unable to get past the image of Viktor smirking in front of those brass drawers. They’d held animal ashes. Animal. Had Armaeus known they were fake? If so, why hadn’t he told me?

  “Hasn’t been active for years, at least not at the level that would gain attention from Interpol. If he’s been a bad boy, he’s covered his tracks well.” Brody glanced at me. “No other kids were taken from Memphis with the same unique characteristics after that job either. And believe me, there were plenty of psychic kids in the city, or kids who fit the profile in other ways. I’d thought he’d moved on, but maybe he did simply…stop.”

  “What about these other kids?” I asked sharply. “You said they were different. Different how? And were any of them found?” I stared at the children’s faces.

  “Different in that they hadn’t shown any psychic ability. But hell, they were six and seven years old.” He pulled up a new screen. These recent posters list them as Memphis being the site of their abduction,” Brody said. “The original posters are these. Notice the differences.”

  “The cities, the numbers,” I murmured, scanning the images. “What am I missing?”

  Brody sighed. “The dates. They’re all the same date, Sara, in the revised posters you found yesterday. The day of the explosion. The day you left Memphis.”

  I blanched. I hadn’t noticed that.

  “What the hell is this about?” I reached out and touched the age-progressed image of Mary Degnan. She’d be seventeen years old this year, her wide smile and sunny eyes somehow making it worse. “You think he has these kids stashed somewhere? These pictures…” Hope shot through me again, despite my best efforts to shut it down. “They look so healthy. So real.”

  “They could be alive, Sara. But probably not. Not after all this time.” Brody’s words were gentle, but I couldn’t look at him. Could only look at the tattered posters he had lined up on the table. “The kids weren’t abducted in scenes of violence. They simply were—gone. Disappeared from parks, school playgrounds, the mall. Parents not three feet away in some cases. That’s why you got involved in the first place.”

  I nodded, forcing myself to recall the details of the abductions. I didn’t have to work too hard. The memories were baked into my brain. The cards had represented the abductor as the King of Swords—cunning, intelligent, cold. His positioning card had him being all about power. It had been the Emperor, which showed that his command base had been sound and his financial support robust. His focus had been children, as evidenced by the Six of Cups.

  Back then, I hadn’t mastered using the cards to pinpoint locations. I could get close, though, and that was why Brody and I had made such a great team. I’d narrow down the search area, and Brody would go door-to-door gathering details. But we never got close enough for those three kids. The best I could get was the Two of Wands. That had indicated a long journey.

  Once Brody’s captain had heard the words “long journey,” they’d rolled up the case to the FBI.

  Neither Memphis PD nor the FBI had ever found the abductor.

  I thought of the Valkyries choosing who would live and die. The three Memphis kids had been chosen too, in their way: marked for death because of their psychic abilities. But the appetites of child traffickers were not easily assuaged, not then, not now. I knew that all too well from my work with Father Jerome.

  Something didn’t fit.

  “You mean to tell me no one was isolating psychic kids after that? I find that hard to believe.”

  “Not in Memphis. And not in any other major city for the next few years, at least in a way that the pattern w
as easily definable. And believe me, I looked. I spent half a decade searching for anything that could help explain what went down that day.”

  “It’s not all that complicated.” My tone turned flat. I’d relived that day so many times, I finally had most of the answers. Or at least the answers as I knew them. “I upset…well, this Viktor Dal, apparently.” After all this time, I had a name, a face. My pulse slowed, my body stilled, every sense pricking as I focused on the grinning image of Viktor Dal. “Mom paid for it. My house was blown up, and I ran.” The curling anger shifted deep inside me, turning my stomach sour. “After I ran, the kidnappings stopped, the killing stopped. The explosions stopped.” At least outside of my own head, anyway.

  “We’ve never discussed it, you know. Not in depth.” Brody was staring at the screen too. The images of the kids scrolling through, the parents, the data. But I could tell he wasn’t really paying attention to the flow of images. He was slave to the same kind of internal picture show I’d been feeding myself for the past ten years. Except he had more pictures to fill out his catalog. Many more. “There’s never been a good time to discuss it. But if Viktor Dal is out there, targeting you again…”

  “What do you mean, again?” I jerked out of my reverie. “I wasn’t his target back then. I was a roadblock. A roadblock he effectively removed.”

  “So why is he back?”

  I thought about that. My campaign to save the Connected children was laudable, I supposed, but I was only one woman. Despite the assistance of Father Jerome and the network he was building in France, we could save only so many from the dark practitioners. It added up to not so many that someone would want to knock me out of the game, I was sure of it.

  “There’s been no evidence that he’s currently an active child trafficker, right? Connected or Unconnected, if he’s still moving children, he’d be on someone’s list.”

  “True.” Brody blew out a long breath. “Okay, so he’s not trafficking children. He’s definitely trying to get your attention, though.” He jabbed his thumb at the posters. “Those were a plant. The shooters were expecting you—you, not Nikki. Why? Why now?