Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5

by Jenn Stark

  Eshe strode into the room, her stiletto platform heels sinking into the lush pile carpet but not deeply enough to keep her from making a grand entrance. Her dark, olive-toned skin and perfectly sculpted cheekbones needed no makeup, and for once she wasn’t wearing any, while her thick black hair had been swept up in a tight chignon. If anyone needed a cat-o’-nine-tails to round out her outfit, it was Eshe, but she already came accoutered with a large flat silver disk, about the size of her head. She lifted it now.

  “My thanks to you and Simon for recovering the shield,” she said, and what appeared to be a genuine smile creased her lips. “I’d thought it lost for eternity.”

  I wasn’t used to Eshe being nice to me, and I narrowed my eyes. “What do you want?”

  “To help you,” she said. She reached the collection of chairs and couches in front of Kreios’s desk and perched on the edge of an antique sofa, her gaze never leaving me. “You’re stronger now. You’ve been with Armaeus.”

  “Well, not been-with, been-with,” I said, too quickly, and the High Priestess’s smile turned condescending, which made me feel weirdly relieved. “But yeah, we chatted.”

  “He’s disappeared into that fortress of his, refusing to talk to anyone, buried in his lore and spells.” She tapped the edge of her scrying platter with a long, silver-tipped fingernail. “That makes me nervous.”

  It made me nervous too, but not as nervous as Eshe confiding anything in me. “What’s he doing?”

  “I would tell you that if I could put eyes on him. I can’t, not even this one.” She gestured to the center of her forehead, home of the third eye. “I suspect he is puzzling over the mystery of what you experienced in Hell. But you know him well enough to penetrate his defenses, should you wish to do so. Should you need to do so.”

  I considered that. I had peered into Armaeus’s mind—once. Briefly. But what I’d seen, I had misunderstood. I’d paid the penalty for getting too close to the Magician, wanting too much. Now everything that could lock up inside me did so with impressive speed, from my brain to my guts. I had no desire to pry Armaeus into the open right now. He could stay locked in his basement for the next ten years, and I’d be okay with that.

  “It doesn’t matter what I saw in Hell,” I grumbled, working to loosen my death grip on yet another of Kreios’s pillows. “That place was full of illusions.”

  She shrugged. “It appears Armaeus does not subscribe to the same beliefs. In the meantime, I understand you need to recover the Honjo Masamune. I thought I’d assist you in locating it.” She laid the disk on the table, and as I stared, something shimmered across its surface. A chill rolled down my arms.

  “Or, you know.” I shrugged. “I could simply ask the cards. That’s usually good enough.”

  “But your cards will help you more if you have a place to get started, no?” Though she was keeping up her side of the conversation, Eshe’s focus was on the shield. “You know what I say is true.”

  Her voice had already slipped into the overproduced cacophony I’d gotten more used to each time I watched her trance out. I could feel the pull of it and tried to maintain my hold on this reality.

  “I don’t need to astral travel on this job,” I said. “I need a rental car. The sword was taken by an American soldier. So it’s probably here, in the States. Sitting in someone’s attic.”

  “No.” Eshe looked at me, her eyes now covered in a milk-white sheen. “See what there is to see, Sara,” she said. And she pointed to the surface of the shield.

  Atop it now spun a blade that had to be the Honjo Masamune, the sword of the samurai. It gleamed in a pool of bubbling mist, long and perfect, unsheathed. There were lines and shadows etched into the blade as well as the crystals Kreios had described—but something more too, something apparent only as Eshe muttered and swayed, her hands drifting over the shield. An inscription—unreadable to me—glinted in the mists there, the promise of magic untold.

  Then again, if I was the one wielding that sword, it would need to bring hella magic.

  Eshe spoke again, chanting the words of traveling, and it wasn’t one voice but twenty, worming into my ears, my eyes, lifting me until my skin no longer seemed capable of containing me, my bones separating as I sank into the trance right along with her.

  The shield between us began to smoke, and more figures moved across its surface, eddies of a long-ago war fought with guns instead of swords.

  “The American who took the sword was not who he said he was, not sent for the purposes of the allies but for his own quest, his own surety,” Eshe intoned, and I watched the images her oracle was serving up.

  “Connected,” she moaned.

  On the shield, a young man dressed in an army uniform carried boxes of swords and placed them into his army jeep. He drove away from the home of a Japanese shogun until the jeep dissolved into the deeper mist.

  I dissolved more too. Eshe breathed the phrase “ley lines,” and the images dancing on the shield shifted. My perspective lengthened and widened, and I now drifted above a Google map of magical earth—an earth covered in a net of connecting dots. Those lights flared highest where multiple lines intersected. Eshe spoke the ancient words of travel, while the image of the sword spun above the map, then triangulated upon it, pointing first to the southwest, then up toward northern Great Britain, then east to Belarus. But it wasn’t until it shot deeper into Asia that the map transformed, an entire quadrant lighting up.

  “Go,” Eshe whispered, and the call to flight filled me, impossible to ignore.

  My mind detached from my body, and I soared free.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Untethered from gravity, I burst out of the Devil’s penthouse into the glare of the Strip at night, ripping over the imposing, glittering monstrosities of the Council’s homes. There was Scandal, the Devil’s domain, immediately below me, and Simon’s foolscap palace above the Bellagio hotel. The Emperor’s gleaming black tower hovered menacingly over Paris, but my attention was immediately drawn to Prime Luxe, the Magician’s domain.

  Somewhere amid all that stone and glass, if the High Priestess were to be believed, Armaeus had walled himself in with his incantations and spells. Somewhere, he was plotting ways to crawl inside my head and make himself comfortable. As little as I wanted him actually in my head, the idea of him thinking about me, wanting anything to do with me, swirled and eddied in my consciousness, a dark and heady desire unwilling to die.

  Focus.

  I shifted my gaze beyond the soaring turrets of Prime Luxe as I shot across the night sky. With astral travel, my vision was not a singular experience, but the result of a fractured perspective orienting on the earth’s surface, like the eyes of a thousand satellites all turning to the same point at once. And my focus was the discovery of the Honjo Masamune.

  As I gazed down, however, it wasn’t the curve of the mystical blade that pointed back to me, but swords of all descriptions, angling toward me at points across the Americas and on islands in the Pacific. I turned west, my gaze raking over the surface of land and sea, and the swords shifted their orientation too. These couldn’t all be the location of the Honjo sword—they couldn’t. That was a weapon of unmistakable mysticism, of power recognized through the centuries. These were…something else.

  I dropped into the mists of the world, soaring along the coast of California, far to the north. There were swords here, a half dozen of them, and I scanned the rocky coastline for their location. I flinched only slightly as I entered the building from which the strongest images resonated—an enormous compound perched on a cliff overlooking the stormy Pacific. I sank through walls and floors until I reached the swords. They were held by four men and two women, fighting in exact precision, executing training moves as elegantly as any dance.

  Though one of the benefits of astral travel was that I was rarely seen, something clearly tipped off the practitioners as I entered their training space. They turned as one, their eyes and faces alight, and shouted in fierce joy even as
I whirled myself away, my last sight that of swords being thrust in the air in triumph.

  I whisked free of the world’s embrace again and raced over the ocean, seeing more glints of light in the water—ships? Islands? These were weaker, less concentrated, individual swords tracking my progress across the earth.

  I heard Eshe’s voice in my ear, guiding me.

  “Concentrations of ley lines,” she said, and the web of energy glittered, superseding the placement of swords for a moment, before the blades took precedence once more. The islands of Japan and the coast of China radiated with concentrated swords, and I couldn’t ignore their call. I avoided Shanghai, dropping farther south as if I were pulled. Here again there was a bright flame of focus, and I slid closer to it, unable and unwilling to deny my curiosity. More swords. More members of this House that spread across the world in silent power. How many people had Annika led? How many had pledged themselves to her cause?

  The Chinese city of Chongqing lay deep in the heart of the country, and the home I entered there was half temple, half mansion, enormous and full of industry. Everyone was moving, rushing, but it was the center of the building I was drawn to, where a shrine rested—a shrine in which a dozen men stood in white clothes, their heads bowed in prayer, though no statue, no altar stood before them.

  Once again, my arrival did not go unnoticed, but these men were not fighting, and their eyes, as they were lifted to me, met mine with recognition as much as surprise. They didn’t know me, but they knew what I was, if not why I was there. More alarmingly, they could see me, recognize me. And that shouldn’t be possible.

  I scanned the room around them and saw the swords, each resting in a position of honor against the wall. My heart caught in my throat as I willed myself away, but I’d seen what I needed to see. In the center of the collection of Chinese blades…stood a white one. One of these men served Annika Soo directly, or had been rewarded by her. I could not know which one it was; no man’s face betrayed anything more than resolution and fierce pride as I lifted my spirit out of the walls and soared once more into the ether.

  “Focus, Sara. These are not your people. They are but a gateway.”

  I frowned as Eshe’s words cut across my mind, instinctively rejecting anything the haughty priestess said to me. And yet—she was right, if what I continued to tell myself held true. I wanted succession; I wanted order. I wanted Annika’s rule—all that she had built—not to be destroyed by my ineptitude. Nothing more or less than that.

  And yet…

  Finally, the net of ley lines superseded the pull of swords, and I concentrated anew. There had been a reason for me to journey this far to the Asian continent, and the glow of my destination beamed mightily from a coast far to the south of Chongqing.

  “See what there is to see,” Eshe urged. I swept down, spiraling toward a location that was not ancient so much as redolent with history and mysticism and power. Past Laos and Thailand, down through the clouds, the humidity so thick it was as if it was raining in full sunlight.

  The sun had long since risen over the ancient monument, but the place was far from abandoned. Hundreds of people milled around, their tourists’ clothes startling against the ancient reverence of the enormous temple. The entire structure was over half a mile square, bordered on all sides by a wide moat, and its statues and architecture were a mix of centuries-old design and modern reconstruction.

  But there was something in this temple that did not belong, that had not been put there by its long-dead builder.

  There was something in the grasp of a god that called to me.

  I stared at the Bakan Sanctuary, the tallest spire in a forest of spires that made up the Cambodian masterpiece of Angkor Wat. The spectral light that spilled out of the tall windows and doors of the sanctuary nearly blinded me—there was no doubt this was my location.

  But even as I edged closer, I felt something pulling at me, drawing me away. I sensed a presence I could not ignore, grasping, straining toward me.

  “Sara.” Eshe’s voice held a note of caution, but I didn’t need her to tell me of the danger I was experiencing. I’d been seen by members of my own House, but this wasn’t the surge of interest and fascination. This was dead certainty.

  And I had felt this touch before.

  Gamon.

  She was trying to follow me.

  I shot up, scattering my focus as the swords flickered and winked out, the beam of light from the Bakan Sanctuary dividing to flow to all the points on the grid where the ley lines intersected. Now there were a thousand lit-up locations for what I sought, and I could sense the frustration of the woman who could not see what I saw, know what I knew.

  The robed and masked figure filled my mind’s eye anyway. And her laugh sounded across the planes of awareness to me, power redolent as she pressed against my mental barriers.

  She was Soo’s mortal enemy—and now my mortal enemy too.

  “You toy with a war you cannot win, should not fight,” Gamon said—though she spoke words in every tongue, as if she wasn’t sure which one I could hear most clearly. “You have no place in the House of Swords.”

  Irritation fired anew, but I didn’t want to argue with her. I wanted only to see her dead.

  The realization of that anger, that dread promise roared through me with an insistence I didn’t expect, and I threw up my hands at the image, forcing it back. It winked out almost instantly, but the violence of my movement shoved me back as well, even as the world brightened to an unbearable white.

  A wall of crackling energy rose up all around me, robbing me of sight, of breath, of sensation—

  “Sara! Sweet Jesus, someone get a blanket!”

  Nikki’s strident voice rang loud enough next to my ears for me to flinch away. A blanket was wrapped around me, the sensation completely disorienting. I blinked my eyes open, and only then did I realize that something was on fire.

  Me, as it happened.

  My screams shorted out as Nikki threw me to the carpet, beating out the flames that scattered into mist as Kreios and Eshe stood over us. I rolled to my side in a fit of racking coughs, my lungs suddenly filled with smoke. The two Council members stared at me in wonder as I finally stopped wheezing, like I was that night’s final carnival trick.

  “Get off me,” I rasped. Nikki fell away, pulling the blanket free. What was left of my scrubs hung from my shoulders and hips, the light material scorched in several places.

  I scowled at Eshe from my position on the floor. “Really? You set me on fire?”

  “You stopped speaking,” Kreios said before Eshe could respond. “When you travel, you speak—you always have. If you do not speak, we cannot guide you. You stopped.”

  I considered that, pulling myself upright. “And the fire was necessary because?”

  Nikki flicked ash out of my hair. “I go out for doughnuts, and this is what I walk into,” she muttered. “The human torch.”

  “Your abilities cannot be contained within your body any longer.” Eshe’s eyes still had remnants of their milk-white sheen, her hold on her oracular powers evident. “You are at great risk the longer you remain on this path.”

  “Gee, thanks.” I blew out a breath, and could taste the heat against my teeth, as if I’d been charred from the inside out. That’d happened before, but not from a simple trip across the world via mental expressway. “What went wrong here? When did I stop talking?”

  “You relayed the sword’s location at Angkor Wat.” Kreios gestured, and an image flickered to life in the space beyond his desk, the same colossal temple I’d seen moments before. The sun had now fully risen over the temple, but everything else was the same—minus the light pouring out of the tallest spire. “It seems our American thief was better traveled than you expected.”

  “Cambodia’s a long way from Kansas City.” Nikki’s wide eyes fixed on the temple. “That’s where he stashed the Honjo?”

  “I think so,” I said, though my gaze sheered away from the Bakan Sanctuary.
Too much had happened on my journey for me to fully process.

  I looked at Eshe. “I could be seen, this time. By people attached to Soo’s House. What’s that about?”

  “You’re undisciplined, and you foolishly put yourself at risk,” she said, not hiding her annoyance. “Your task was the sword, not the House. You’re not a true member of the House of Swords.”

  Her vitriol took me back a step. “What, you’re angry too? I didn’t ask for Soo’s little legacy to fall into my lap.”

  “But you are considering keeping it,” she said coldly. “You speak of succession and choices, but there is a part of you that yearns for this role—yearns for it even though you have no idea what it entails, the sacrifices you will make, the damage you will cause.”

  I lifted my hands. “You wanna enlighten me?”

  Her smile turned craftier. “That would be foolish of me, I should think. Far better that the Magician is so distracted, he’s turned his focus inward and is no longer seeing all that he should see. As head of the Council, he too walks a dangerous path following you. Perhaps I shall let him keep following that path. Let him and you both make choices that will be your undoing.” She shrugged. “Perhaps.”

  I scowled at her. “You’ve been hanging around Viktor too long.”

  “The Emperor is better suited to leading the Council at least in one respect,” Eshe retorted. “He knows you for the mortal you are. Gifted, certainly.” She flicked her hand at the shield. “Useful, without question. But you are only a mortal, Sara. You’ll always be only a mortal. And mortals have a ceiling on what they can and will do.” She curled her lip. “Otherwise, don’t you think the Emperor would have remained one? He was one of the greatest sorcerers of his time.”

  “He was also buddies with Hitler. So I wouldn’t be singing his praises all that loudly.”