by Jenn Stark
“This isn’t going to end well,” I muttered. He merely stood back and bowed to me.
He struck in one motion. First he was standing still, then he was flying, the very embodiment of the sword poured into human form. I could barely bring my own sword up to block him, and block was all I did—over and over again, but more and more weakly. He chopped at my arms, my legs, and though the sword was blunted, I could imagine the singing blade slicing my skin all the way through to the bone. This was my future, I realized. The strength of my hands gave way to uncertainty as our weapons changed again and I grew weaker, until finally there was nothing left but steel and blood. My blood, specifically. Mine and the House of Swords.
I couldn’t even say specifically when my test ended. One moment, I was flailing away, and the next, I was lying on the floor doing my best interpretation of a semi-squashed bug, my arms quivering like antennae right before death.
Kunh stood above me, scowling down. “You are resourceful but untrained,” he pronounced. “You are not in shape. You are strong but not disciplined. You are no warrior.”
“Thanks for the update,” I groaned, debating on whether it was possible for me to sleep where I lay for the next five years or so.
But Kunh wasn’t finished. “You are weak of belief but not of spirit,” he said, squatting beside me. “You are rash in your decisions but slow in abandoning a stance once you are committed. You would die rather than break, but so too would you also bend rather than die. You are not a warrior, but a messenger of spirit. And that spirit is strong.”
That sounded slightly better, so I managed an appreciative grunt. But my head was still ringing from the colossal clock cleaning I’d received, so I didn’t quite understand Kunh’s next words.
“What you need, Sara Wilde, isn’t a bigger spirit, nor a better-trained body, though the latter would certainly help you,” he pronounced solemnly. “What you need is a sword that will show you the way. The Honjo Masamune.”
Chapter Nine
It took another few hours before I was in any shape to leave the Soo compound, and when I did, I was buried in a phalanx of overprotection. Apparently, while I was getting beat up by Kunh, Nikki and Brody had been given a laundry list of Soo’s enemies by General Som.
There were…a lot of enemies.
To head back into the city, Jiao and General Som took a lead car, while Nikki, Brody, and I piled into his sedan. Behind us, another sleek roadster pulled out, driven by what looked like your average Asian thug tourist couple, out on the town.
Nikki’s pile of paperwork had grown in the interim, but her large hands clasped the thick folders without moving, her gaze on me. “Explain to me why we’re heading back into the city,” she asked, “if you’re now Public Enemy Number One.”
“I won’t be for long,” I said gloomily, staring out the window at the afternoon heat radiating off the desert plain. “And it’s not like we’re going to party. I just want to sleep. In my own bed.”
“That would be a hotel bed. The kind of bed that has seen thousands of bodies in its short life. You know that, right?” Nikki said dryly. “There were nine bedrooms in that complex, and one of them with its own private dipping pool. A pool. Meant for dipping. And we’re going back to the Strip.”
“Anything of Soo’s, I don’t own, Nikki,” I said wearily. “I won’t own it. So one hotel is pretty much like another to me.” I had more or less recovered from the beating I’d taken, but I was by no means in top form and I was still starving. “I’m pretty sure Jiao posted the results of my assessment to the House of Swords Facebook page. She and Kunh seemed less than hopeful that I was suitable Swords material.”
“Unless you can find this magical sword of doom.”
I creased my lips into a weary smile, but it was Brody’s voice that made me open my left eye a sliver. “About that,” he said heavily. “The trainer guy said the sword that’d help you out was the Honjo Masamune? He used that name specifically?”
“Yeah. I kind of got the impression he figured out what I do for a living and simply wanted me to track the thing down for the House.”
“You haven’t been approached by anyone else to find it?”
The question was odd enough that I opened my right eye as well and dragged myself higher on the seat. “I’ll check my planner, but no. I think I’d remember something called a Honjo.” I palpated a lump on my collarbone, helpfully located under the colder of the two jade pendants. “Why?”
Brody shifted in his seat, his gaze not leaving the road in front of him. “We interviewed all the people attacked at the Rarity show a few months ago, including Soo. Asked them why they were here, what they were in the market for, you name it. Trying to figure out if they’d been targeted for what they wanted or what they already had. Soo listed a series of artifacts she wanted to buy. I don’t have the list anymore, but I’d swear that sword was on it.”
Before I could ask, he continued. “We didn’t go any deeper than that. We got her list of artifacts, we checked that they were legit or reasonably legit, and we were out. On to the next billionaire buyer. But if Soo listed that sword, she must have thought she could find it at the Rarity, or she at least wasn’t worried about anyone finding out about her interest in the thing.”
“That sounds more like Soo,” I conceded. “She had a pattern of letting her plans out to see what would shake out in advance of her actions. I never understood if it was strategic or stupid.”
The others let the obvious hang in the air. Soo was dead. That argued for stupid. And yet…
“So—what was the trainer guy like?” Nikki asked too casually. “They wouldn’t let me get close to that home gym they had set up, and I couldn’t see anything.” She tapped her head. “Not even here.”
Nikki had the Connected ability to see through another’s eyes. The closer her relationship with a person, the stronger her ability. If she’d been locked from my mind and Kunh’s, it made me wonder exactly how that fighting room had been constructed. But the answer to Nikki’s question was easy enough.
“About what you’d expect.” I shrugged, then winced. Even shrugging hurt. “Mixed martial arts, which I handled better than I think he expected, rods, which I didn’t handle badly, and swords at the end. That part went pretty quickly, but it was the worst.”
“No marks on you, though, no blood.” Nikki cracked a smile. “Couldn’t have been too bad.”
“There will be bruises later—I didn’t have skin exposed, and all the blades were blunted. He could have beaten me to death with one of those things, but he wasn’t going to flay me.” I cocked a glance at her. “You’ve used swords?”
“Never once,” she admitted. “Doesn’t mean I couldn’t learn.”
“Ha, yeah,” I said. “I can’t tell if I should get that sword and really go after this—whatever ‘this’ is, or get it simply to fail honorably for the betterment of the House.” I sighed. “I can’t decide.”
The words were solid—normal sounding. But once again they hung in the air at odd angles, awkward and unwanted. Because in some ways I’d already made the decision, and the conviction growing within me wasn’t something I was used to, or something I particularly enjoyed. Nikki didn’t seem to notice, and Brody straightened, distracted by whatever he was squinting at beyond his dashboard.
“What’s this about?” he said, scowling as he slowed to angle into the Palazzo’s parking section. “What the hell are they doing getting out?”
I peered forward as well. Sure enough, Jiao and General Som were exiting the car in front of the Palazzo as if they were arriving for a weekend getaway.
“I’m so not dealing with a sleepover, I don’t care how worried they are for me,” I said. “Make them go away, Brody.”
“Who’s the old dude with them?”
That made Nikki snap to attention as well. We both made the same realization.
“The owner of Grimm’s Antiques,” Nikki said, not bothering to hide the amusement in her voice. “I
totally knew that’s who designed that necklace. That’s the Devil, love chop,” she said, glancing at Brody. “Playing dress up.”
“Why is he here?” I asked.
Brody snorted. “Must be a slow day in CrazyTown.”
Brody pulled to a stop as a valet driver trotted down the stairs, and General Som and Jiao turned to us. To their credit, they did a good job scanning the area, as if trying to pick out snipers behind the plate glass hotel windows that surrounded us on all sides.
The Devil, however, paid no attention to anyone but the three of us as we exited Brody’s sedan and Brody ignored the hopeful-looking valet. His smile wide, Aleksander Kreios bowed obsequiously in the nervous manner of the sixty-something dealer he embodied—thinning hair slicked back with too much gel, smooth fingers with a jeweler’s manicure, the smell of expensive tobacco hitting us at a distance of three feet.
His eyes, however, were not disguised, and I resolutely didn’t roll mine as his gaze landed on me. The Devil of the Arcana Council had taken on this mortal illusion for a reason, and I was more than willing to let it play out.
“Ah!” he said as we reached their small group. “Miss Sara Wilde. I’d thought it was you when Madam Peng asked me to reset the lovely jade disks. You have found them satisfactory?”
“It’s a very pretty setting,” I said, this time losing the battle with the eye roll. “Hopefully, it will remain strong through many wearers.”
Kreios frowned slightly in his guise of Mr. Grimm. “Yes, yes, you are worried because you are not well equipped. But come! I have made us a reservation inside at a quiet table. We can talk, and I will tell you all I’ve found.”
“What you’ve…found,” Brody said skeptically, and Jiao turned to him.
“Mr. Grimm suggested when he delivered the necklace that he could help locate any piece we might need. Upon speaking with Kunh Lee, I placed a call.” She turned to Kreios. “I did not expect you to find it as quickly as that, however.”
“And I shall tell you all about it—inside,” Kreios said.
The “quiet table” was located in the Palazzo Casino’s VIP room, and quiet was relative in a chamber given over to high-end slot machines and games of chance. The whirr and clatter of roulette balls and the fluttering snap of cards was strangely soothing as Kreios ushered us all into the roped-off section where our table sat. I didn’t need to ask how he’d gotten preferred treatment. What the Devil wanted, he usually got. Still, I contented myself with scoring a seat that gave me a prime view of the VIP room.
A half-dozen slot machines winked and glittered at the periphery, and at least a dozen baize-covered tables had drawn more high rollers than I would have expected. Then again—it was nearing nightfall in Vegas. That was when all the gamblers came out of the woodwork. Sort of like cockroaches and bed bugs.
“You are comfortable? Good, we are comfortable,” Kreios wheedled, and he smiled with his yellow teeth at the black-clad server who’d appeared to take our order. “Champagne all around, if you would.”
Beside me, Brody shifted. “We’re celebrating something?”
“We certainly are,” Kreios said, turning back to the table. “Madam Peng asked me to research the Honjo Masamune, which it has been my pleasure to do. But first you must understand that there is much to the Masamune blade that is sheer speculation. It is said to have been crafted near the end of the Kamakura period, perhaps around thirteen thirty Common Era, in the Soshu tradition. That tradition resulted in a unique line of crystals embedded in the blades, considered to be representative of a constellation of the night sky.”
He paused with a self-important smirk. “Forgive an old man his indulgences, but the crystals are the important part of this history. There are some who believe Masamune was a gifted sorcerer as well as swordsmith, and the crystals in his blade were channels for higher forces.”
Brody looked at Jiao curiously. “You know all this already, I assume?”
“It’s good information for us to hear anew, and important for all to understand,” Jiao replied, her smile devolving into a simper. Once again, my brows drifted up of their own accord. Was she flirting with Brody? The guy had to be twenty years younger than her.
Brody smiled back, and my own alarm ratcheted up. Was he flirting back?
Nikki didn’t seem to be fazed by the byplay. She focused on Kreios in his Grimm suit. “How did the sword perform in battle?”
“Well enough—but the greatest story attributed to it has nothing to do with true battle. It is said that a student of the Masamune tradition wished to pit his own sword against Masamune. This would ordinarily be impossible, as the two were born roughly two hundred years apart. Masamune would have been long dead at the point the challenge was made. Nevertheless, the old master appeared, sword in hand, and the two proceeded to thrust their swords into a fast-flowing stream. The student Muramasa’s sword cut everything in its path—leaves, fish, frogs—while the master’s sword cut nothing except leaves that had fallen from the trees, already dead. Muramasa declared himself the winner, but the story goes that the true winner was Masamune. His sword did not harm the innocent, which made it a benevolent blade.”
“Or a really dull one,” Nikki said dryly.
“The sword was borne by shoguns and samurai throughout history, until after World War II,” Kreios continued, warming to his tale. “It was lost in nineteen forty-six. Some rumors say it was given to a man named Sergeant Coldy Bimore, never to be seen again—some that it was another American soldier who took the sword for his own private treasury of memorabilia. But no matter which part of the story you believe, all signs point to the sword being in America.”
“Well, that narrows it down some,” I said, and Kreios glanced at me, his gaze filled with pure, indulgent humor. I shrugged and looked past him at the blinking arcade games. One of them was a five-card-draw-style slot machine, constantly running, so the cards blinking up on the screen would show three cards, then four, then five. I watched the spinning combinations distractedly, lulled by the blinking lights.
“That Madam Soo came to the Gold Show in part to locate the sword is telling,” Kreios said. “There was no record of weaponry like the Honjo Masamune being at the exposition. That said, she was regrettably rushed from the Rarity without completing any transactions, to our knowledge, and she did not return.”
He pulled out a card from his breast pocket with a flourish and laid it down on the table. “These are the names of the American vendors at the Rarity, and their specialties,” he said with triumph.
Brody leaned forward and grunted. “None of those people are weapons guys.”
Jiao leaned in too, their heads close enough to touch. I met Kreios’s eyes over them, and judging by his amused glint, he noticed the energy between Brody and Jiao too.
Jiao’s voice held more inflection than I’d heard in it before. “Their focus varies distinctly. European, South American, we can discount those. There are three with Asian ties. We start there.”
“Well, all of them have outlets in LA, Chicago, and New York City—still, doesn’t narrow it down much.” Brody countered.
Kreios smirked. “That’s smoke and mirrors in the main. Half the people in the show operate out of their homes, with their finest artifacts hidden in their basement, palatial though those basements may be. You find the home address, you find the sword, I suspect.”
I flicked a glance again to the slot machines as the Devil sat back with obvious self-satisfaction. Nikki, Brody, General Som, and Jiao started arguing rapidly, debating the pros and cons of contacting the possible sword owners. I couldn’t focus on anything but the glittering digital cards.
They’d…shifted.
I straightened carefully in my seat as I squinted at the machines. Before, there’d been a mix of hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades as the cards flashed up. Sometimes there’d been a straight, but more often, the cards had been a mess. But the last few rounds, they’d been flashing up spades with more regularity—and not j
ust any spades.
Seven. Five. Ten. Knight. All spades. And then a random Five of Clubs.
Five. Knight. Ten. Nine. All spades. And another Five, this time of Hearts.
Three. Ten. Seven—
“Too many swords,” I muttered, and Nikki looked up at me, her gaze going to where mine was focused. She scowled, but not at the machine.
“Where’d, ah, Grimm go?” she asked. “He was just here.”
I blinked and then turned out toward the VIP section again, but the Devil was nowhere to be seen. General Som and Jiao looked up, their expressions puckering, and Brody reached for his gun—
Right about when the bullets started flying.
Chapter Ten
The screaming followed hard on the heels of the gunshots. To my shock, Jiao fell immediately, General Som right behind her, both of them collapsing into the cushioned seats. Security guards came running toward the VIP suite, but Brody had already yanked me hard out of the booth and shoved me toward the EXIT sign to the back of the room.
“Get out now. Nikki will follow,” he growled. “Go!”
I flung myself to the floor as his cop voice roared out above me.
“LVMPD! Get down, down! Police!” he yelled, and Nikki was right next to him, body-blocking General Som’s and Jiao’s still forms in the banquette. Three assailants took up position behind the game machines. Most of the gamblers had dropped to the ground along with the dealers. I crawled between the tables as another peal of bullets rang out. Additional gunshots came from farther out in the lobby, and I reached the door in another fifteen seconds, leaning on it hard and bursting into a long hallway.
Another EXIT sign blinked urgently at the far end. Drawing my own gun, I headed for it. Everything had happened so quickly, I was on autopilot and running hard. This didn’t feel right, though. It felt too rushed, too stupid. Where had the Devil gone? Surely the Council hadn’t set me up. That made no sense. And General Som and Jiao? They were bleeding out—they couldn’t have been behind this, right?
