by Jenn Stark
“It’d be bad if he was in a meeting, though. Or on a date.” Nikki edged the door open a little more, her eyes glinting with excitement. “Maybe you should text. Or Facebook him, maybe.”
“Text.” I nodded. “I bet he keeps that on silent unless he’s getting pinged by official channels.” I keyed in the address and my suspicion of a break-in, downplaying the latter to a “possible.” Then I glanced back to Nikki with wide eyes. “Gosh, in the absence of official instruction, I wonder what we should do?”
Nikki laid a hand on her chest, her inky-black T-shirt and jeans perfectly offsetting her army boots, her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail below her SWAT ball cap. “Roxie is our friend. We’re very close.”
“It’s only to be expected that we would check on her.”
“She could be hurt. Or drunk. No one should drink alone.”
Despite the banter, our voices were tight, our movements precise. We entered the house without touching anything with our hands and edged the door nearly shut again behind us, both of us tense and alert. The place had the same feel as before—creepy mausoleum of the strange—but it screamed abandonment, too.
“Staff?” I murmured.
“Nothing feels dead here.” Nikki shook her head. “Place is a ghost land.” We moved into the theatre, passing the sign advertising five-dollar card readings. Nothing remained on the stage. Not the table, not the crystal ball. The rest of the tour of the house proved equally perplexing, until we stopped in the front room again. I scanned Roxie’s scrapbook pile. Something made me look twice at the overstuffed volumes, and I paused, frowning down.
“I wonder…”
The Connecteds of this world were a sketchy lot in many ways. As a fringe group living on the edge of society, they sometimes had very good reasons to make friends in high places. And sometimes even better reasons to make friends in low places. “Roxie became a Council member in the seventies, right?”
“Yup.”
I pawed through the stack of scrapbooks to get toward the bottom. The further back they went, the thicker but less glamorous they were. By the time I reached the 1970s, the book was heavy with old tape and bristling with news clippings, playbills, and fading photographs. Roxie hadn’t been a member of the Arcana Council then. She’d been a grifter searching for a score, and she wasn’t too choosy about who she made it with, if these pictures were any indication. Most of her photos had been taken on the arms of guys who looked like they were little more than thugs.
How much had she gotten in return sharing her gifts? So much profound magic in the world was seemingly granted by objects or conferred by spells, and people were always willing to believe something.
I paged through at a rapid clip. Roxie had made the rounds with starlets, musicians, politicians, and mobsters, each account more breathless than the last. Her face changed too, over the course of one year in particular—fuller, richer, more beautiful. Something had shifted in her, something important. I paged back further. And then I found it.
“Son of a bitch,” I breathed. I pointed at the picture, and Nikki squinted down.
“Is that Jerry Fitz—no, way too young. Then again, that family tree has gotta be crooked all the way down to the roots. Fitz’s dad?” She shrugged. “Well, she wouldn’t be the first to rub shoulders with a bad guy. He’s about as ugly as his kid was.”
“Not him. The guy next to him.”
Nikki frowned and leaned in. “Dude in the suit? Never seen him before.”
“I have.” I rocked back on my heels. “He’s a lot older now, and he’s upgraded to robes. That’s the future Cardinal Rene Ventre. I don’t know what he was doing in nineteen seventy six, but currently he’s the head of SANCTUS.” I stared at the picture again, memorizing it. “He was probably a foot soldier back then. He had to be somebody to be in that picture with her, considering where she ended up, and given that Fitz the younger was in bed with SANCTUS for at least a little while.”
“That’s not Fitz, though, that’s his dad.” Nikki shook her head. “She might not have known this Ventre guy at all.”
I took in Roxie’s wide, hard smile. “She might not have known what he was going to become, but she’d already had a lot of hard years in the grift logged by the mid-seventies. She knew how to spot someone important. Someone powerful. And some alliances, once formed, might be hard to back out on. No matter where your life took you later.” I focused again on the elder Fitz, thinking about all the pills his son had been hyped on, all these years later. Had the technoceutical market already been in full swing all the way back then?
“Speculation.” Nikki pushed out her lower lip. “All we know is that Roxie went to a party where she was schmoozing it up with Fitz’s dad, and a very young, very green future cardinal was in attendance too. Doesn’t mean she wasn’t cutting deals with bad guys, doesn’t mean she was.”
“And if she did…and she subsequently was elevated to the Council…” I grimaced. “I don’t know how that works. The Council is about balance, dark to light. But if everyone knows you’re working with the bad guys? That’s not going to make you super popular at the dinner table.”
“Then again, she lived up here, not down on the Strip. So maybe she knew she wasn’t welcome.”
“But if you’re the Council, and you know you’ve got a traitor in your midst, wouldn’t you want to keep a closer eye on her? Pushing her away seems kind of dumb.”
“Dumb—or playing the long game. And let’s face it…their long game is a lot longer than most.”
At that moment an ear-splitting shriek sounded through the house, like the whine of a laser cutting through solid metal. My inner ears revolted, but Nikki responded far worse, the sound driving her to her knees in full collapse.
I flailed for my messenger bag and pawed through it, even as another burst of pain scorched my brain. The only thing I could think of—the helmet. The Mongolian crown. Whatever it was, I needed something to cover my ears. No matter what kind of crazy came along as a gift with purchase.
I shoved the thing on my head, and the pain suddenly…stopped.
That Genghis Khan was all right, I decided on the spot. Though I could hear the psyche-shredding noise on the outside of my helmet, it no longer crushed me.
“Oh, Sweet Mother Mary…”
I wheeled around. Nikki was sprawled on the floor, her long legs akimbo, her arms cradling her head. She was trying to wedge herself under a coffee table with questionable success. Her pain was as outsized as her body, and I stumbled over to her, dropping to one knee. I pulled on her shoulder, then jerked back, narrowly avoiding her elbow check. Using all my strength, I dragged her from the table, and she came around, fist flying.
“Ow!” My head rang with another sound, but it was Nikki who bounced back, grabbing her fist with her other hand, white with shock. “You hit me!”
“What is that?” she wailed, shaking out her hand.
“Here.” I wrenched the crown off my head, nausea swamping me. I yanked off her hat and pushed the helmet over her ponytail. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but she shuddered anyway, sinking back to her knees.
“ThankyoubabyJesus,” she moaned.
I wasn’t doing so well, though. The sound assaulted me from all sides now, riddling my bones. Worse, handling the crown was freaking me out. The last time I’d touched the thing, an entire phalanx of death-masked bodyguards had come crashing down on top of me. I hadn’t thought too much about them since leaving Mongolia, but my client had gone radio silent. Was there a reason?
I knew I needed to move, to escape, but without the crown to shield me, I couldn’t do anything but sink to my knees, my arms wrapped around my head, vibrating with sound.
“Sara—Sara!” Brody Rooks came pounding up beside us, catching me with one arm and hauling Nikki to her feet with his other hand. I blinked at him, trying to focus. “What the hell is wrong with you two? Why weren’t you waiting outside?” Pause. “What in God’s name is Nikki wearing on her head?”
/> Nikki moaned beside me, and I tried to focus on Brody. Not terribly easy, though, since there were six of him. “Can’t you hear that?”
He frowned at me. “Hear what?”
The sound threatened to cleave my skull in two. Twisting away from Brody, I jammed my hands over my ears. Only then did the sound dim enough for me to breathe, but barely. Nikki twisted away from both of us, stumbling back. At that moment, a new variation to the sound pounded through me, scraping at my lungs, my bones. Taking me apart and putting me back together again.
“What time—what time is it,” I gasped. “Has the sun set?”
“What?”
I staggered to the side, then attempted to move past Brody. He barked commands to the men and women who’d somehow appeared behind him, then his steady arm wrapped around me, propping me up.
“What is wrong with you?” he hissed again. But at least he was moving now, hustling me toward the door, as if he thought I’d magically recover when I got outside. I knew I wouldn’t, though. I knew the sound would just get worse.
I was right.
“Nikki,” I gasped.
The stream of curses behind me verified that Nikki was being helped out by the boys in blue as well. Her hands were on either side of the crown, though whether she was trying to remove it or hold it steady, I wasn’t sure.
“Talk to me, Sara,” Brody growled. “I don’t know what’s happening to you. Do you need a hospital—both of you?”
“No.” I turned toward the Strip’s skyline. It gleamed merrily in the distance, the image-on-image exposure of the Arcana Council’s homes flickering like found video over top of it. Of all the casinos, this time it wasn’t Prime Luxe or Scandal that flared the brightest, it was a fragile fairyland castle, soaring over one of the most elegant hotels on the Strip: the home of the Empress.
And before that casino, steam roiled and churned, smoke without a fire.
“Sara!” Nikki’s voice sounded wrenched out of her body, and I turned as she pulled away from the cops, reeling toward me. In her hands, she held out the Mongolian crown, her eyes wide with stark pain, her entire body trembling. “Take this—go. You’ll… It has to be you, not just Armaeus. Saw it—you have to go!”
Without thinking, I grabbed the crown and jammed it on my head. Nikki collapsed back into the arms of two powerfully built policemen, out cold. I winced. She’d hate missing that.
I turned to Brody, grabbing his arm. His eyes practically bugged out of his head at the sight of me wearing my fancy Mongolian helmet.
“I’ll explain on the way,” I said, pulling him toward the knot of police cars. “Take me to the Bellagio.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
By the time we got there, it was clear that something seriously screwed up was hitting the Strip. The streetlights had shut down, rendering traffic an impossible snarl. Horns blared and drivers raged all around us. Brody had long since ditched his vehicle, and we were approaching Las Vegas Boulevard on foot from a side street, angling over and into the complete logjam of traffic.
All the mirror-bright Jumbotrons were flashing up and down the Strip, though, streaming several times faster than their normal rate. People in the streets were alternately fixated or running for their lives…
Or on their knees screaming in pain, their hands clamped over their ears.
Most of them I didn’t recognize, of course. A few of them surprised me. The ones I did recognize even if I didn’t truly know them—hadn’t seen any of them until earlier this week—made everything clear.
Connecteds were falling like flies.
No wonder SANCTUS hadn’t had a problem with wreaking judgment in the middle of a crowded city. No one but the psychics were being hurt.
Judgment.
My mind flew to the card I’d drawn in the Magician’s conference room not two days ago. In the rush and tumble of finding the scroll cases, I’d forgotten it, but here it was, in full living color. The Judgment card depicted an angelic being soaring high above the Earth, blowing a horn. At its call, those who were blessed would rise up, while those who were not…
Another piercing tone rent my eardrums despite the crown, and I winced, staggering against Brody. This wasn’t the Rapture. It couldn’t be. This was more like a Daft Punk concert gone horribly wrong.
“I get it, I get it,” he muttered, sounding like he had lockjaw. I tried to focus on him.
“You can hear that?”
“I’m not deaf, Sara. I heard it as soon as we turned onto the Boulevard. I don’t know why it’s making everyone flip out, but someone is clearly on the wrong end of a sound-system board and can’t shut it off. Gotta be some sort of electric malfunction in the grid, but if it’s not, if it’s a weapon, then it’s a damned effective one. At least for about a third of this crowd.”
“It’s a weapon.” My words were lost as he muscled us forward, his arms steady around me. He half pushed, half dragged me toward the Bellagio. I could see it primarily because the fairytale castle soared above it, lighting the way. We’d made it as far as Caesars Palace when I heard my name called out.
I wheeled to the side. Simon sat in a souped-up double cab monster truck, which was parked unceremoniously on the lawn in front of Caesars. Beside me, Brody bristled. “Who the hell is that—is he the one doing this?”
It was a reasonable assumption. Both of Simon’s cab doors were open, revealing a veritable forest of electronics. But Simon himself looked like he was barely hanging on. He was plastered against the back of the cab, writhing in pain, his hands jammed to his ears.
“Sound emission,” he groaned, shaking his head as we ran up to him. “I thought I had it contained, but it kicked up too fast. My abilities—tied to inner ear.” A new whine sang out over the Strip, and he sagged against his truck cab. “You’re going to need to do…”
“Oh, Hell no.” I took one look at the war room in his truck and made the decision easily. I yanked my helmet off and staggered back as the full assault of noise hit me. But I straightened and drove forward.
“Here,” I said, thrusting the crown at Simon. He stared at me blankly but didn’t protest when I fitted it over his head. It looked a lot more at home over his skullcap than Nikki’s ponytail, and Simon’s shoulders straightened, his gaze snapping to mine.
“What is this thing?”
“Use it, but watch out. Anyone run up to you wearing a Mongolian death mask, he is not fooling around.”
Confusion blanked his features, but I didn’t have time for explanations. He’d figure it out. Another blast of sound had him diving for his controls, while I fell back against Brody. The detective had swiveled his gaze back to the Bellagio too, apparently not as interested in playing traffic cop as getting to the bottom of the disturbance. I couldn’t blame him. A torrent of steam billowed up in front of the elegant casino. I staggered forward, and Brody’s arms went around me again. Despite the pain in my head, the solidity of him against my body felt right. It felt good.
Then another blast of sound jerked me off my feet and almost sent us toppling. “Christ, Sara, what is your problem?” Brody gritted out, sounding pissed. “It isn’t that bad.”
“Not for you it isn’t.” I braced myself against him. “Remember the sound at the Rarity party? Annika Soo toppling over like a sack of potatoes right before all the cases blew? This is that. Times a million.”
No one could accuse Brody of being slow. “Son of a bitch.” He stared at me. “The Rarity was a dry run.”
I couldn’t respond coherently to that, but it didn’t matter. Brody hauled me along and I held on to his jacket, my eyes swimming with tears. Gradually the pulse lessened, shifted, and I was able to lift my head again without the threat of hurling. I was one of the few, though. We moved through the crowd, and visibility got a lot better, mainly because so many people were collapsing right and left. Like Nikki in Roxie’s mansion, they were taking shelter under cars, under each other, or in the flimsy protection of their own folded arms. The people in the
cars weren’t faring much better. It wasn’t the metal in Simon’s helmet that was providing him protection, but something else. The stones? The magic left over in the crown itself? Something.
I didn’t have time to puzzle over it. The final knot of people gave way, and at last we were at the Bellagio. With a glance, the reason for the steam became clear.
The dancing fountains of the Bellagio Casino were an attraction known the world over. Placed in graceful lines and arcs throughout the pool, the fountains were timed to shoot streams of water against the backdrop of a precise selection of music, perfectly calibrated to both soothe and delight watchers, from toddlers to octogenarians.
That wasn’t what was happening now.
Geysers blew and swirled, moving water as if it was being dredged up from the depths of the Earth. Instead of a happy spray, the fountains were like a desert-born hurricane, localized barely within the edges of the pool.
A black van had been pulled up onto the sidewalk in front of the Bellagio, nothing special. It didn’t have the letters SANCTUS emblazoned across its panels, or a pope hat, tails, and dagger symbol. It wouldn’t have necessarily been all that out of the ordinary, except for the mini satellite dishes perched at its top. The whole effect made it look like a high-end cable or media news network van.
The back doors of the vehicle were open, and Armaeus stood behind it. Next to him, Kreios stood at his ease, holding Roxie. The Empress sagged like a wilted flower in his arms, and I couldn’t tell if he was being solicitous or keeping her from escaping. Either way, she wasn’t going anywhere fast. Eshe wasn’t nearby that I could see, but then sight was becoming more of a problem the closer I got.
Armaeus’s voice sounded in my head, scoring me with pain. Only he wasn’t talking to me.
“You dare. You dare to come into my home with your petty tricks, to paint a damning mark upon the most gifted of this world?”
For all his righteous fury, he wasn’t doing anything to stop said damning mark, and Brody winced beside me as my fingers dug into his arm. I squinted, trying to see Armaeus through the crowd. His voice sounded ragged, beneath his anger. Too ragged.
