Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2

by Jenn Stark

  “What’s happening?” Brody gritted out. “The sound just amped up about six times.”

  I managed a bleary glare around me. The Connecteds remained definitely affected, but their reaction had taken on a new character, almost an excitement instead of pain. They were quivering like tuning forks. And they were all angled toward the black van.

  I blinked. Even I felt better, sort of. Stronger. More alive. And about to come out of my skin.

  “It’s—the van. SANCTUS,” I tried to say. “Need to—get—”

  “I know. We’ll get you there.”

  When I tried to take a step and failed, Brody practically picked me up, pushing me forward. From this vantage point, I couldn’t see all the men Armaeus had transfixed in front of the Bellagio. The ones I could see, however, weren’t doing so well. Their weapons lay on the wide concrete sidewalk in front of the fountains, smoking and twisted. And the men themselves had their hands slapped over their ears, writhing in agony.

  I straightened a little, frowning at that. They weren’t reacting the way they should be. The Connecteds in the street all seemed to be rallying, but these men…

  Armaeus stood between the back of the van and the Bellagio fountains. His hand was held high like some modern day Moses in front of the roiling water. He wasn’t commanding the seas to part, however. Instead, he twisted his fingers toward the van, and the pitch of the electrical tone jumped several more notches. “You—are hunting—the wrong prey.”

  The wrong prey? I pulled myself up, using Brody as a human prop. “Don’t do anything stupid, Sara,” he managed. “I don’t feel so great all of a sudden.”

  I glanced at him. I felt …actually a lot better. With the elevation of the tone’s pitch, something new was rolling through me, something that couldn’t quite be classified as pleasure but was a lot better than the cocktail of pain that had been ramming through my system up to that point.

  Behind me, the worst of the screaming had stopped too. Progress.

  But Armaeus… Armaeus was on his last legs. Four equidistant flares of red shone on his torso, and though a haze of magic beamed from him, creating a shield, within that shield he looked gray with fatigue. The smallest scroll case was open at his feet, and he was bathed in its waves of energy. But were those waves helping or hurting him?

  We cleared the remaining several feet and came around the end of the van. Brody and I seemed to be the only non-Arcana Council members still coherent.

  Armaeus paid no attention to us. His focus was on the back of the van, and renewed fury swamped me when I saw what was inside. A screen showing a room full of black-robed clerics glowed from the van’s interior. Men I knew. Men I’d seen, while spying on them via astral travel. But these men, these SANCTUS elite, weren’t amorphous images anymore. They were real.

  And they’d done enough damage for one lifetime.

  I surged forward in Brody’s arms, memorizing their faces. Each of them had the blood of hundreds of people on their hands. Possibly more. Many of them children. So much needless death. So much needless agony for them to repay.

  They were apparently putting a down payment on that bill right now. They sat transfixed in their chairs, gripped in the Magician’s thrall.

  “You must…pay.” Armaeus shook his head hard as I stared at him. Had he picked up my thoughts? He rallied. “You must see the truth of what is worth fearing.”

  The sound flowing out of the van grew worse again, seeming to set my bones on fire. The vehicle was clearly some kind of transmitter, except Armaeus had taken the controls. And now he was faltering.

  Beside me, Brody moaned, and it was my turn to hold on to him. “Hang in there, big guy,” I muttered. Then I reconsidered. “Or give me your gun.” He’d commandeered mine before he’d let me in his car. Blasted cops.

  His answering laugh was sharp with pain. “Not a chance.”

  Armaeus’s exultant words thundered out. “See the truth!”

  With that, he turned, and the scroll case at his feet burst forth with light. I knew what those cases had been built for. I knew the language they contained. Language Armaeus now held in sway.

  And worse, or better…I could hear that language too. It filled my mouth and ears, a benediction begging to be spoken. It filled my heart and soul, a fury begging to be unleashed.

  Armaeus threw his head back as his hand shifted again, and the sound was so loud, my molecules seemed to come apart. “You would—”

  A voice boomed from the Bellagio fountains. “You will fail!”

  No sooner had the Magician turned to the raging water than he faltered, going down on one knee. I did break free of Brody then. For I could see what lay beyond that watery curtain, billowing with fury. I could see what watched with unholy frenzy, twisting and roiling back on itself. I could see what Armaeus had ensnared and what he meant for it to do.

  I could see.

  I jolted forward, racing for the ring of magic crackling around Armaeus.

  “No!” Brody staggered away from me, dropping heavily to his knees, then collapsing to the ground.

  Armaeus wrenched his hand in a sideways motion.

  The world was split in two.

  I caught the flash of a robed figure, the light in its hands falling away. Water gushed out of the Bellagio fountains, churning, roaring. And there, within the waves, a monstrous creature thrashed.

  It was a dragon. A blue dragon, trapped on a field of red.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I knew a dragon when I saw one, of course. And I’d seen this one before. I should have been prepared when it slid forth from the water and raked the world with its serpentine gaze. Its wings flared. Its snout lifted. Fire leaked from its mouth.

  But I wasn’t prepared. Not by a long shot.

  Fear swept through me like a tidal wave, rendering me mute.

  I was the only one, though.

  The screams that began were most noticeable because of their depth. It wasn’t the women who started screaming first. It was the men. An ancient, almost primeval cry of terror that struck at the most basic of their protective instincts. The awareness that this, they could not take down with spear or club or bow. This, they could not vanquish. This, they could not drive back.

  To this, they and all they held dear…were char.

  The dragon opened its mouth, and the roar that issued forth was destruction and death, power and demand, and endless, oppressive servitude. It was a world swept with pestilence and pain in the service of but one true master, all talents and treasures bent to serve this one higher being.

  A being of storm and loss.

  “No!” Whether I spoke the word in the ancient tongue of the gods or in my own, the dragon heard me. So did Armaeus. Both of them turned their attention on me, and I was lifted in the vortex of their focus, struggling to breathe.

  Armaeus looked like I’d never seen him before. Filled with an unholy fire, he appeared several sizes too large, still marginally human but somehow spilling out of his body and occupying the space around him. His chest bled freely, blood streaming from him in crimson flames. Kreios stood beyond the edge of our protected circle, his post with the Empress abandoned. She lay like a crumpled rag doll to the side. But Kreios didn’t add his power to Armaeus—he couldn’t. He was on the outside.

  Only I could stand.

  And once more, I gazed out over a field of rage and fire and saw what was staring back.

  Llyr.

  An ancient and terrible dread filled me. I knew this creature, and it knew me. Though it had made no move toward me at the time, I’d seen it in a flash a decade ago when I’d watched my own home go up in a ball of fiery death. I’d caught glimpses of it in the years since, the blue dragon trapped on a field of red. I had known it was there, shifting in the darkness, but had no reason or understanding as to why. But it knew me, knew me and wanted me as its own, just as it wanted the world as its own.

  As the world had been once, and was fated to be again.

  My b
ones turned to water.

  The Magician kept speaking, but I couldn’t hear him any more. Couldn’t hear his incantations, his protests. I was trapped in the eye of Llyr, and my very blood slowed in my veins, agony coursing through me.

  “You feel it, don’t you?”

  That wasn’t the Magician speaking.

  I centered my attention on Llyr. It was staring right at me. Its gaze was bold, challenging, but it did not strike me as male or female, or sexual in any way. It was an entity made up of pure energy and pure malice, and I was nothing more than its tool.

  But I could be an extraordinary tool.

  “I will give you riches and power beyond your imagination,” it whispered, its words slipping along and through and over and around Armaeus’s, even as the Magician exhorted the leaders of SANCTUS to cease their battle on Connecteds and take up arms against this foreign threat. Llyr’s words were spoken aloud though, not in my head. I could hear them. The dragon was here. In this world. And it meant to stay. “I will return in triumph and glory, and you will be my general.”

  “No,” I managed, my word barely a whisper.

  “You cannot deny your nature, no more than you can deny your parents. Or do you still not realize who you are, Sariah Pelter Wilde? Or who you were?”

  The creature lunged forward, though it remained constrained in the boiling waters of the Bellagio fountain. Still, I stumbled back. My breath caught. My lungs burned. My eyes swam with blood and gore. In Llyr’s gaze, I saw death—death and pain, in that order. Surrounded with all the riches in the world and too broken to enjoy any of it.

  “The limits of your life would be swept away. I would give you what the Council would not. I would give you truth. I would give you past and future. You are far more like me than you know. Far more than you can imagine. Far more than your mother’s daughter—or your father’s.”

  That caught me. An image of my mother flashed before my eyes. How many years had it been? Would I ever get the truth of why she died? How she died?

  “You are asking the wrong questions.”

  The statement was so familiar, I was yanked out of my reverie. The creature’s maw opened, and what sounded like laughter emerged, laughter and rending fire. The flames licked along the sidewalk, setting aflame the Connecteds closest to the water. That woke them out of their stupor, and their screams galvanized the others.

  Without thinking, I stooped down to the concrete and lifted the scroll case to my face. Power suffused me, and I could see the bones of my fingers separate, the yellow pulse of flame and energy bursting up and out.

  “You’re not meant for this world,” I cried, holding the scroll case high. “You shall not rule!”

  “I will—”

  “No!” I steadied my hand and spoke the words of binding, words I didn’t know, couldn’t understand. But it was as if by positioning myself as a prism for the magic within the scroll cases, the word of creation would do the rest. My very blood caught fire then, my hair melting away, my eyes going wide, and still I didn’t falter—I couldn’t falter. There was no money in the world that would stop a creature like this. There were no jobs I could take on, no riches I could steal. But I would be damned if this thing broke through on my watch to take its due of the Connected. “No. You will not!”

  The dragon recoiled. Its scream was not one of pain or anguish. It was not of the wrongfully accused. It was not even of madness. It was intelligence and knowledge, and deep, abiding fury.

  More words flowed through me in the ancient language encoded within the gold scroll case, a language so secret it did not rest on tablets or papyrus, but was inscribed on the very air.

  All at once, the water reversed direction and rushed again toward Llyr, beating back the creature which was putting an enormous clawed foot on the sidewalk. The concrete buckled beneath the dragon’s weight, and it punctured the slab like it was Styrofoam, its talons wedging a deep groove as Llyr was dragged back toward oblivion.

  But I wasn’t finished yet. I was lit on fire, electricity sparking off me in every direction, my body suffused in a flowing robe that wasn’t my clothing but the arc of power that coalesced around me, bending the magnetic field in such a way that the deep underground currents of energy-infused ley lines beneath Vegas reverberated with power, shuddering throughout the city and far beyond. And I spoke the language that had no words, the slipstream of its images and form blending within me into a dance of deadly power.

  The water burst even more forcefully against the dragon, ensnaring it bodily within the bounds of the Bellagio pool. Llyr wheeled back as if struck by an unseen hand. Its wings spread mightily, tripling its size, but the power facing it was too great, too focused.

  Another shadow flashed across the gap between worlds. The watery veil thickened, rendering the image of the dragon blurred, harder to see. A hazy image of a robed figure flickered again, hunched and hastening, his lamp shooting a brilliance so bright that it could be seen across the dimensions.

  Then it vanished, and the portal with it.

  The dragon’s scream resonated along my nerve endings as it finally fell back into the hole from which it had been summoned, and was gone.

  Llyr was gone.

  The roar in my brain would not subside, however, and I turned—without thinking, with only knowing—and hurled the golden scroll case into the SANCTUS van.

  The resulting explosion rocked the whole of Vegas, a burst of magic so powerful and sure that it traveled all the way across the planet to find the seed of evil buried deep inside those who would root out magic for good. Found it and blasted it to nothing within its squalid hole.

  A part of me traveled with that burst. Traveled and witnessed, understood and reported, a million fractured images coalescing as one.

  For a long, frozen moment, silence blanketed the Strip.

  My knees buckled.

  Slowly, far too slowly, I fell.

  And face-planted into concrete.

  The city rushed back to life, as if exhaling a collective breath. Above and around us, the lights of the Jumbotrons flickered and blared once more. From somewhere a horn sounded. At a far distance, a siren wailed.

  A strong set of hands held me and pulled me to my feet, steadying me.

  “Well done, Miss Wilde.” Armaeus’s voice was grave, resonant with the power he’d thrown. The irises of his eyes had gone from golden to completely black. He seemed otherworldly, staring down at me. I was pretty sure I saw smoke wafting from his ears. The bloody rents in his clothing were gone, the material clean, perfect.

  “What…what just happened?”

  Armaeus straightened, standing away from me. The smug smile I was so used to had returned to his face. “So many…fascinating things.”

  Around us, everyone stirred. The men beside the van stumbled to their feet, looking like they’d been hit with baseball bats. They blinked around owlishly, fear spreading across their faces. The van itself smoldered, a warped husk of twisted metal. The Connecteds in the street and surrounding the Bellagio fountains milled around with equal confusion. To my magic-amped eye, the world spit and spun with arcing lines of power, a bristle of electrical wires dancing with too much charge. But the un-Connecteds didn’t see this. Couldn’t see this. Even the Bellagio’s famed reflecting pool had returned completely to normal, dancing with happy abandon in the reflected lights of the city.

  My gaze dropped. Well, not completely normal. Four huge gashes marred the cheerful white concrete of the fountain area, extending backward toward the pool before ending right before they pierced the low wall.

  The SANCTUS paneled van smoked and steamed beside us, but it was no longer held in a thrall of magic. It seemed almost normal, actually.

  Right up until a golden scroll case rolled out of its open doors, then bounced across the sidewalk toward me.

  No one noticed as I picked the case up, stowing it in my hoodie. Everyone was chattering, Connected and otherwise, most in knots with each other. Other than the shatter
ed concrete and the smashed van, the rest of the world was acting like the last hour had never happened. Traffic rolled forward, people were talking, walking—like animatronics wound up and set to movement on the Strip.

  “Sara.” Brody’s words were less of a plea than an irritated snap, and I turned to him, reflexively reaching for his hand to pull him to a standing position.

  “Jeez, Brody, I’m sorry, I—”

  When our hands touched, I froze, my eyes going wide.

  “It’s okay.” Brody’s own momentum carried him forward, and he shook his head. “I have got a bitch of a headache, though.” He frowned. “Why the hell—how the hell did I get downtown? I thought we were meeting at Roxie Meadows’s house.” He glanced down at his hand, which I was still holding—now with both of mine. “Um… You okay, Sara?”

  “Sorry.” I dropped his hand as his gaze swung to the smoking hulk of a van. “The sound came from there?” he asked, wincing as he took his first step. “Shit, my head hurts.”

  He faltered, and I grabbed him again, taking his full weight. He smelled like heat and ash, and I couldn’t deny the zing of awareness that went through me. Except what I was feeling this time wasn’t the simple rush of pleasure and anxiety and hope and doubt that Brody’s touch had been exciting in me pretty much since I’d hit puberty. This was something else entirely.

  Brody was a Connected.

  “Not exactly, Miss Wilde.” Armaeus disentangled me from Brody and stabilized the detective, eyeing him fully in the face. For his part, Brody blinked at Armaeus as if he couldn’t fully see him, still shaking his head. “The purpose of the SANCTUS attack was to wage a sonic blast at a specific frequency which they knew to be harmful to Connecteds.”

  “Cardinal Ventre and Roxie,” I said. “They were working together all this time. She chose his strength over the Council’s in the end.” Nikki and I had been right about that much at least.

  “The initial pain you experienced was the result of their efforts, yes. It was,” he nodded, standing back from Brody, apparently satisfied that the detective wasn’t going to crumple. “Neatly done.”