by Jenn Stark
Wilde Card
Immortal Vegas, Book 2
Jenn Stark
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Stark
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 9781943768028
Cover art by Gene Mollica
Photography by Gene Mollica
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved.
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For Ayn
Chapter One
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even blink. Six foot two of hard-bodied ex–Special Forces operative was snugged up against my backside, and I was totally falling for him.
For about eight thousand more feet.
My helmet crackled. “You’re doing great.”
“Unghflun.” Worse, we were still spinning. They’d told me the spinning would stop, but it didn’t feel like it was stopping. It felt like we were dying. And of all the ways to die, French-kissing a cliff at a hundred miles per hour had not made my short list. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “terminal” velocity.
“Right on target.”
Something shuddered above us, and I shifted from sprawl to nearly vertical in a sudden blur. I squinted up past the man carabinered to me in not nearly enough places, to see that our parachute had deployed.
That would be the “Low Opening” portion of this joyride into the Siberian mountain range surrounding Lake Baikal. The “High Altitude” section had been covered by our plunging six-mile drop from a souped-up jet now well on its way to Beijing.
Getting off this rock without alerting the local military would be its own special kind of crazy, but I was down for that. Pretty much any kind of crazy that got me away from Vegas and the Arcana Council for a few days worked for me.
“Drop point,” echoed in my ear.
Beside us, two other barely discernible shadows rocketed through the predawn gloom. We were aiming for a strip of gravel tucked between two sheer cliffs where, according to my client, X marked the spot for the ultimate Mongolian treasure: the crown of Genghis Khan. Rumored to give its wearer the Khan’s magical mojo for protection, abundance, and crazy long life.
Then again, said crown was apparently resting on the head of a dead guy right now. So there was that.
Another crackle in my helmet. “Bend your knees.”
“If I had a dollar…”
My guide’s laughter carried through our final several hundred feet of descent, and suddenly we were on the ground, a tumble of arms, legs, and high-tech padding. With impressive military precision, mission leader Zander “Call me Zee” James broke up with me without remorse, thrusting me aside. I lurched drunkenly to my knees as he slowed his run then turned to his parachute and punched it into submission.
The other men landed beside us, neatly outrunning their chutes, and I ducked to avoid a fine spray of rocks stirred up by the movement. Zee stripped off his HALO suit, oxygen mask and gear like he was shimmying out of swim trunks, and shoved them into a we-were-never-here-sized nylon bagel for easy transport out. He flapped his hand at me for mine and I shoved them at him in a big ball. “Report?” he snapped.
Zee’s right-hand man squinted down at a device attached to his wrist. “No heat signatures,” he said, aiming the thing at the rock wall. “Wall” was being kind. The cliff face surged up as if an angry god had punched through the earth’s crust, all crags and fissures and sharp edges. “Seismic activity currently stable.”
As if to counter his words, another crackle of falling rocks sounded high above us. “Right.” Zee squinted up. “At dawn, this place’ll light up like the surface of the sun. We don’t want to be here for that. We get in, we get out, we get gone.” His gaze shifted to me. “Ready?”
I nodded, then tugged down the zipper of my tech suit to fetch my own tools of the trade, my trusty pack of Tarot cards.
With the deck as my compass, I could find about anything—for a price. As it happened, a hundred G was a heck of a price. That kind of money translated to at least three more Connecteds hidden away from the dark practitioners who wanted to use them for spare parts. Not enough to save them all, no. But enough to count. I had to believe that.
“Sometime today, princess.”
Double-tasking one set of fingers to offer Zee my opinion of his people management skills, I used the other to pull a scatter of cards out of the deck.
Here we go.
Four of Cups, the Magician, Eight of Swords, King of Cups. Two that made sense, one that didn’t, and one that might make me kill someone. But first things, first.
“Whaddya got?” Zee prompted. I shoved the cards back in place, rezipping my suit.
“We go up.” I squinted at the fissure-ridden rock wall. The Four of Cups typically showed a grumpy young man sitting at the base of a tree, focusing on three cups on the ground, totally missing the cup that floated above him. It could mean lots of things in lots of different scenarios, but in a game of hide and seek…
I peered high. The problem with the client’s choice of Mount Swiss Cheese here was there probably were a half-dozen holes that legitimately tunneled all the way into the mountain, along with a million and one false starts. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to waste. The place was heavily patrolled, with the next choppers due at dawn.
Fortunately, the cards were pointing the way. I looked yet higher. “Give me a boost?”
Zee moved into position beside me, cupping his hands. He braced me easily as I scrabbled up the side of the wall. I usually preferred to avoid climbing anything more challenging than a mound of pillows, but the tech gloves helped. So did the fact that Zee’s arms were solid, even fully outstretched. “You got something?” he asked.
“Hole.”
“We got those down here.”
“Mine’s better.” I glanced toward him. “But it’s going to be tight. You and Atlas Shrugged will need to suck it in. Boost me the rest of the way.”
I knelt on the narrow ledge while Zee free-climbed up behind me, barely grunting with the effort. And… Bingo. Half-hidden beneath a rough outcropping, a fissure sank into the side of the mountain, maybe wide enough for a man so long as he wasn’t channeling Mr. Potato Head. I picked up a handful of rocks and tossed them into the hole. They skittered a few feet, then fell a fair distance before hitting what I assumed was “bottom.”
“Can’t see a damned thing,” Zee muttered, angling his flashlight beam into the opening. “Blast it bigger?”
Atlas pulled himself up beside us. “That would definitely make the seismic activity unstable. About a fifth of this wall is just itching for a reason to fall down.”
“Right.” Zee turned toward me and gave me his flashlight, along with a crooked grin. “Ladies first, then.”
“Such a gentleman.” Still, if anything went wrong, they could haul me out of that hole a lot easier than I could haul them. Sliding the flashlight up my sleeve and manfully resisting the bad joke, I flattened myself on my stomach, then wormed into the tight space.
It was claustrophobic enough to make me panic, but I wriggled ahead anyway, edging deeper and deeper. Using my toes to dig into the loose rocks against the side of the mountain, I snagged an outcropping to haul myself forward and—<
br />
Dropped into open space.
“Jesus!”
Zee’s curse cracked above me, and iron fists clamped down on my ankles as the stone I’d grabbed for crumbled into the cavern below. I hung precariously upside down in full possum for a long, queasy moment, then fumbled the flashlight out of my sleeve.
It only took a second to bring a smile to my face.
Dead bodies did that. Especially when they’d been dead a long time.
I wiggled my ankles to loosen Zee’s grip. “All clear!”
“Rolling!” Zee’s shout was my sole warning before he dropped me. I curled into a protective ball and plummeted down several feet, then somersaulted off a mound of scree and rock dust that had accumulated in the center of the room. I landed cheek to jawbone with the nearest skeleton. After an impressive amount of cursing, Zee dropped to the rock pile behind me, followed by his men. The thud of their boots echoed ominously, and I thought I heard the scatter of stones falling deep inside the mountain. The place must be as hollow as a honeycomb.
“Arrows,” Zee grunted, poking at the pile of bones and moldy clothes that circled our small mound. “Not friendly fire, I’m thinking. At least they’re old as shit.” He tossed me one of the long, slender shafts, then fanned his flashlight in a wide arc. “Those bars over there look a bit too solid, though.”
I nodded. “Eight of Swords.”
The light flared in my face. “Which means?”
“Well, for us it means restrictions we can get around, if we open our eyes.”
“That’s beautiful.” Zee stepped over the mounds of bones and strode forward, then ran a hand over the surface of the bars. “These are embedded in the floor and ceiling. We ain’t getting through this way.” He flicked his flashlight beam back over me. “What next?”
“Working on it.” I pondered the scene in front of me while Zee’s men bent over their Techzilla, Inc. readers and muttered observations on psychic energy levels. A few more rocks fell from the ledges above, bouncing lightly off the small mound of gravel in the center of the room. Magician, Magician, Magician…
One thing for sure: the Magician himself had better not show up here, not while I was on the clock for another client. Mr. Mongol back in Ulaanbaatar had hired me to recover a piece of his heritage, tacking on Team Armor All here for logistics and muscle alone. He would not take kindly to a tagalong, no matter if said tagalong was the leader of the Great and Mighty Arcana Council. The success or failure of this op was all on me.
Fortunately, Armaeus Bertrand did not fulfill my worst nightmare by poking his head through the hole in the ceiling, and I dropped my gaze again to take in the small holding cell. Around the rock pile in the center of the room, the remains of bones and clothes hunkered like kids circling a campfire. Something about that…
“Why aren’t there any bones in the center? Why just rocks?” I asked aloud. I kicked at the pile of rubble, then brushed more of the dust away as Zee turned his light on me. It didn’t take me long to find the reason. “Tool marks. Someone’s cut into the floor.”
Zee walked over, leaving his men at the bars. “Definitely tool marks.” Squatting down, he started chucking rocks toward the larger pile, revealing a graceful arc that had been carved into the stone. We uncovered it bit by bit. The curve met itself in the center, creating a perfect fat teardrop. Zee leaned down and shoved a particularly robust pile forward…and the cavern echoed with a resounding creak.
We all froze.
“What the hell was that?” Zee muttered, but all of us were looking at the same thing, caught in multiple flashlight beams. There was a distinct ridge in the floor right along the carved arc, where our ledge was a millimeter higher than the surface around it.
“Figure Eight,” I said suddenly, staring at the design. “We’re on half of it.” I met Zee’s confused gaze. “Infinity sign. It was on one of the cards I pulled. Two sides of equal size, joined in the middle. We’re on one side.” I pointed. “That pile is on the other. A pile you’ve made a lot heavier. Maybe it’s like a seesaw.”
“It’s exactly like that, I bet.” Zee stood, carefully. “We overload it enough, it goes down, we go up, then everything slides down to whatever’s waiting below.” He scowled at me. “Trap?”
“I don’t think—”
“Zee, we got trouble.” The man at the bars peered into the gloom. “No readings on the device, but something’s—”
“I hear it.” Zee yanked out his gun as a sound from deep in the mountain jolted us. It wasn’t shifting rock this time. This was more rhythmic. A lot more rhythmic: the sound of running feet.
“Weapons up!” On the heels of Zee’s bark, two sturdily built men burst into the room, dressed like desert ninjas in long tunics and trousers, their faces covered with enormous Mongolian death masks—one a dragon, the other a wolf. Zee shouted for them to stand down. Instead, they immediately drew their bows, notching them with arrows. Arrows that looked eerily familiar.
“Fire!” The crack of semiautomatics shattered the silence, but the death-masked men didn’t fall. They simply staggered back like they’d been hit with a feisty paintball round, then lifted their bows again. Another crack of gunfire, and more bullets punched through them. This time, though, one of their masks half exploded. That had more effect, and the creature howled, dropping to his knees as he blindly sought to recover his bow.
Zee let fly a third round, then holstered his weapon. “Keep ’em busy. We’ll get this done.” He turned to me, clamping his hand on my arm. “I don’t want to wait for these guys to call up reinforcements.”
He pushed me toward the Crazy 8 in the floor while his men provided covering gunfire. I launched myself onto the rock pile, Zee right behind me, the two of us landing hard. The roar of scraping stone was barely discernible as the floor dipped slowly. Too slowly. We jumped up and down again. The slab wobbled, slipped, then suddenly gained momentum and shot completely vertical, dust and rocks sailing down on us. We dropped down into sheer blackness.
About three point five seconds later, we slammed into a flat surface. The gravel and dust continued falling around us, but not all of it, not completely. My hand connected with a strip of metal even as my knees and feet broke through the floor.
“Iron mesh,” Zee barked. “Also old as shit. Get off this thing.” We scrambled to the side like startled spiders, then whipped around after we reached solid rock floor. Zee swung his flashlight, the arc of its light barely cutting through the dust. In front of us, a thick mesh of bars crisscrossed the floor, rendering the surface makeshift human net.
I pounded Zee’s arm. “Undead, Zee? Really? nowhere in my contract did it mention undead.”
“We didn’t know either.” He flicked his flashlight around and up. The room emptied into a downward sloping corridor. Above us, the ceiling was easily twelve feet up, once again perfectly sealed. The Magician’s infinity symbol glowed in the center of an elaborate scrollwork etched into the stone.
Okey-dokey. That kind of Magician I could handle.
“After the others get clear, they’ll assess whether they come down here or bug out. Let’s make that choice easy on them.” Zee squinted, leaning forward to tap the wall. “Crypt’s gotta be on this level, though. That’s hammered gold.”
As we pulled ourselves to our feet, the sound of an enormous gong reverberated through the room. Gonging was never good.
Zee apparently agreed. “Move out.” We turned and raced down the corridor. The walls were plated with every precious metal of the ancient world—bronze, gold, silver, iron. Then we reached a large center room, with fully a dozen corridors snaking off it. Darkening shadows and various stages of stink indicated that each passageway held its share of crypts.
Zee stopped long enough to fish his Techzilla reader out, pointing it at the open doors. At the third one, it bleated. “Pay dirt.”
“Yup.” I wasn’t perfect at reading energy—that was what I had the cards for. But even I could sense the zing of this last ro
om. The zing…and something else.
“Wait,” I said as Zee traded his reader for his gun. “You hear that?” A faint whooshing sound shivered in the distance, almost inaudible, marred briefly by another burst of gunfire far above. “Is that water?”
He shrugged. “We’re on a lake, princess. There’s water goddamned everywhere.”
“King of Cups.” I shook my head. “Last card I drew. It was the King of Cups. Cups are water. That’s important.”
“And Khan was a king. Also important. And my guys will run out of ammo soon. Most important of all. Let’s hit this.” Without another word, Zee ducked into the low entrance, leaving me to follow behind.
Bodies lined the deep cavern, lying in perfect symmetry and draped in exceptionally well-preserved furs, their heads covered in yet more ritual death masks. Unlike their brothers upstairs, these guys really did look dead.
We didn’t stop to make sure.
The shrine in the center of the room was some sort of fancy stone coffin perched on a thick pedestal. With Zee ahead of me, taut as a bowstring, we crept up the small staircase to get a closer peek.
I let out a soft breath when we saw what lay inside the open coffin. “Hey there, old guy.”
The corpse was not, as I expected, Mongolian. Granted, he’d probably been dead a long time, and death could really take the stuffing out of a guy. But the cadaver appeared far more Russian than anything else—maybe even European, with pale, papery skin, sunken cheeks and wide-set eyes. He’d not died in a moment of violence either: his features were untroubled, the visible skin of his face and neck unmarked.
But while the dude was a total white guy, the crown was all Mongolia, all the way.
Unlike the spiky-pointed version of its Western European cousins, this headpiece looked more like a helmet, with long metal flaps that came down over the ears and a hardy construction that gave the impression you could wear it into battle. The entire surface of the crown was studded with orange, blue, and green stones, glinting in Zee’s flashlight beam. It was pretty enough, but if it followed the pattern of most magical artifacts, the embedded jewels didn’t mark its true value.
