Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5

by Jenn Stark

  “Gamon has mastered this battle,” Armaeus murmured, his words once again deep in my soul. “To drink so long and so fully of such power as quickly as she has can lead to madness or transcendence, the same transcendence savored by the enlightened. The abyss is an easier place to start—it’s so much easier in the shadows. And nearly impossible to survive in the end.”

  “Then why are you showing it to me?” I moaned, but I couldn’t turn away from raw power surging beneath me. It wasn’t promise of riches, or the surety of dominance. It was the safety of my friends, the protection of the Connected children. It was the flash of the Honjo Masamune, the vindication of Annika Soo and all she fought for. It was the validation that my own foster mother had not died in vain in her misguided attempt to protect me all those years ago.

  And it was deception and insanity too.

  “There must be another way,” I gasped, and Armaeus’s laugh was low and dangerous.

  “There is another way, Miss Wilde. There is always another way. But it lies through me.”

  Alarm bells clanged through every one of my cells, but the Magician’s voice kept on, inexorably. “Should you wish to take part of the fullness of power, to prepare yourself adequately for the battle you will fight in the coming days and the terror you will face on its heels, you need simply to give yourself over to me. To commit to me, body and soul. To join with me in every sense of the word but with no barriers between us, no block to my touch in the deepest reaches of your mind. Then there will be no secrets of yours I do not know, no emotions I have not plundered. Then there will be no you where there is not also me. But you will have power and riches of the spirit untold, an access to the divine power of manifestation unparalleled in any of the mortal realm.”

  As he spoke, Armaeus solidified himself beneath me, once again becoming the Magician I knew instead of the portal to an alternate dimension filled with screeching, untamed magic. His fierce eyes searched mine; his grip tightened. I could see the truth of what he was offering me. I would have ultimate power but give up ultimate individuality—and worse, his words had been very carefully chosen. He would not be giving up that prize. He would not be sharing all of himself the way I would be sharing. He would still be in control.

  “And the power behind Door Number One?” I gritted out, my heart quailing as the overlay of Armaeus’s humanity slid off like rainwater, revealing once more the aching maw of power within him. “That’s permanent?”

  “No,” he whispered. “If left unfed, it is spent like a drug. Unlike the magic of the ancients, born of light, darkness cannot sustain itself in isolation. It must have more darkness. Cut off the source, and you cut off the power.”

  I eyed him. “But you’re the source.”

  “Now and evermore.” Armaeus’s words were tight, almost desperate, and the roiling field beneath me snapped and hissed. I realized suddenly how close he too was to the edge. “But I can control what I keep—and what I give.”

  For now, at least, were his unspoken words. I could sense them, hanging between us as I witnessed his struggle.

  “You could take me now, couldn’t you,” I said. “The way you were saying. Plunder everything without stopping.”

  “This close to you, Miss Wilde, I could do whatever I wish,” he said, his dark words ending a sibilant hiss. “But I don’t want to take by force what will one day be freely given.”

  I jerked back from him bodily, the assurance in his voice suddenly more frightening than anything the black well of doom could hold for me.

  “No!” I snapped.

  Before I could think, before I could question—I dove into the sea of blackness.

  The waves reached up to take me and pull me under, hard and sure, and suddenly I was swimming for my life. A problem, since I couldn’t swim. But that didn’t stop me from flailing out, my limbs churning in all directions. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t even scream. Then, without warning, the full ocean of darkness didn’t simply surround me, it twisted and shuddered, and somehow I was drawing it in, drinking it even as it gathered me close. As if I was the mouth of the world and it was a cup poured forth, the tide of black fury not banking until the last of it sluiced into my body, over my skin, not splashing away but sinking into every pore, every cell, swamping my ears, my mouth, my eyes.

  “Miss Wilde!”

  The voice was distant, too distant and wrong, but it was pulling at me nevertheless—no, the voice alone wasn’t pulling. There were hands at my shoulders, my arms, yanking me, dragging me bodily forth, but there was no need to rescue me anymore, no need for fear.

  Because the whole of the world was in me, and I was strong.

  Strong.

  “Sara!” This time Armaeus’s voice was sharp, a command that even the power now churning within me could respect. My eyes snapped open, and I quailed away from the Magician as he loomed over me, his hands outstretched, his eyes a glittering dark gold that would not let me go.

  “As small as a seed held in a child’s hand, a single grain of rice,” he proclaimed, or at least I think he proclaimed it. There were other words too, in Latin and Greek and tongues even more ancient, languages that had not been spoken since the dawn of the world. His hands reached for mine and held them fast even as my own fingers seemed to explode into flame, the mix of fire and acid scalding me bone-deep. Armaeus folded my hands over on themselves and caged them until the blaze dwindled down, down, down, its flame turning white and hard and cold. Finally, there was nothing left in my hand but the smallest grain of rice nestled against my palm. Armaeus lifted that and held it before my face. It dissolved into a powder so fine, my own breath blew it into nothingness.

  I stared at him.

  Armaeus leaned back on his heels. He was kneeling before me, and I vaguely remembered him starting out that way, but then…

  I cleared my throat. “What just happened, exactly?”

  He watched me carefully. “You took a measure of power into yourself to strengthen yourself against Gamon’s magic. Dark power. You took it willingly, and you will release it willingly when its work is done.”

  “Dark power.” Carefully, I stretched out my fingers, turning over my hands and scrutinizing them. No scars, no burns. “I don’t feel different.”

  “You won’t—you shouldn’t, until the need is great. The magic is perfectly warded and sealed within you until you call upon it. And then you will feel…” He blew out a breath, and I felt that breath move through me, as if all my cells were expanding to fill yet further with power. “Very different indeed,” he said. His jaw was set in granite. “But you will be safe, I swear it. Now and evermore, you will be safe.”

  The intensity of his words made my vision go white for a moment, and when my eyes cleared, I was staring into thin air.

  Armaeus was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I staggered to my feet and looked around. “Armaeus?”

  There was no reply.

  I padded over to the wall of windows, only partially surprised to see I was still wearing clothes. But the Magician had not touched me, in the end. As usual, he’d done everything with his magic, all of it illusion.

  Still… I lifted a sleeve of my shirt, and grimaced as I traced the curve of my arm down to my elbow, seeing what I expected to see. My arms were no longer damaged. I suspected my legs and torso had been healed as well. The slicing and dicing I’d received at the hands of Soo’s generals had been burned away in the conflagration of my time with Armaeus. It wasn’t the only thing.

  The gold ring of the Council no longer remained around my finger.

  I stared down at my hand with a mix of confusion and—weirdly—despair. Armaeus had untethered me, sent me spinning off to manage my own battle with only a weird magic bullet inside me. Still, I felt stronger than ever before. Was this yet another trick of the Magician’s?

  How could it not be?

  “Yo, dollface.” Nikki appeared in the doorway of the penthouse, and I turned to lo
ok at her. Another indication of time’s passage was her outfit. Instead of the gorgeous dress Jiao had given her to face the Council, she was back in a similar flat gray ensemble to the one she’d worn earlier in the day, a technical top and cargo pants. However, her boots were a magenta pink, and so were her nails. And her hair, for that matter.

  Just how long had she been with Kreios?

  Nikki lifted a glass holding a suspicious-looking green liquid. “You’ve been out for hours. Armaeus said to come get you, that you’d be hungry. Then again, Kreios said you’d be throwing up for days if you ate food-food, and the two of them got into a heated discussion in…Atlantean, I think. He recommended this.” She shook the concoction. “I tried it. It’s questionable at best, but if it keeps your stomach happy….”

  I turned toward her and caught sight of the sword, lying in a position of prominence on the desk. “What time is it?” I asked, my voice little more than a croak.

  “Half-past three. All’s quiet on the Western Front. Brody’s back on the streets again, bitching about not being able to find you, so if that doesn’t bring everything back to normal, I don’t know what does.”

  I grabbed my sword and we headed for the elevator. I dutifully took the shake from Nikki. “Do you have any idea what’s in it?”

  “I don’t. According to Kreios, though, you drink that, and you won’t harf up your intestines the first time you eat.” She eyed me expectantly as I hesitated. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. All’s quiet on the Western Front, but there is a front. A front with sharp, pointy swords that bad people want to stick into you.”

  “Gamon and the usurpers,” I grumbled. “Sounds like a rock group.”

  “Yeah, it sounds like a big problem, is what it sounds like. You go out there with the twenty-four-hour flu, it’s questionable as to whether you’ll get to hour twenty-five, you savvy?”

  I stared at her a long moment as the elevator doors swished open. Then I started drinking.

  The elevator ride seemed to take longer than usual, and I found myself bracing my legs wide, my left hand on the sword as I downed the shake. It tasted of cinnamon and chocolate and a whole lot of something herbal that could have been weed but was probably wheatgrass. Still, by the time we hit the first floor, even Nikki was glancing around nervously.

  “Bad enough that we take an actual elevator to a different plane,” she said. “But this thing was moving decidedly slow. I don’t like it.”

  I stared at the empty glass as we waited for the elevator doors to open. “How much of this did you drink?”

  She shrugged. “Kreios gave me my own sippy cup. I drank maybe half of what you had.” She turned to me, her eyes wide. “Dollface, no. That was not supernatural spinach.”

  “Well then, how do you explain…” The doors shushed open, and Nikki and I remained trapped in the elevator bay for a minute, drawing closer to each other out of sheer self-preservation.

  Everything in the lobby of the Luxor Casino…had changed.

  It went beyond the simple overlay of Prime Luxe. That was there and bolder than ever, but wasn’t the main issue. Instead, it was the people who had shifted. Colorful blobs of light extended from each tourist and worker as if they were being hugged by a technicolor gummy bear. We stepped carefully into the lobby, turning around, and the flow of color from the clanging slot machines in the next room almost blinded us.

  “Sweet Baby Jesus on a Tricycle,” Nikki whispered. “Are you doing this?”

  I could feel the dark twist of magic curl within me. “Let’s get to the SUV.”

  We walked forward, trying not to hold our arms out, to keep everyone at a distance, but it was a near thing. Two cops eyed us suspiciously, their gummy bear auras turning a muddy gray, and we picked up the pace ever so slightly. By the time we’d reached the sliders, another pair of cops was standing at the SUV doors.

  “That’s ours, officers,” Nikki said brightly, blinking quickly. Too quickly. “We’ll be on our way now.”

  I expected them to ask her if she was safe to drive, but instead, their attention slid to me, as if Nikki was part of my identifying cover. Then their gaze dropped to the sword.

  “Oh! Oh yeah,” I said, lifting my hand away from the blade. “Sorry, I just won the darn thing down at Circus Circus, and I couldn’t resist wearing it. It’s plastic, they said, nothing scary.” I frowned down at the blade, the epitome of the confused tourist. “I mean, I think it’s plastic.”

  “You’re Sara Wilde.” The question came out more of a statement, but with the second set of cops coming out of the Luxor, it didn’t seem worthwhile to deny it. The backup officers stationed themselves at the Luxor’s front doors, keeping the gawking tourists away.

  “Well, yes—” Then apprehension struck. “Why?”

  “We have a few questions we’d like to ask. If you’ll step over here?”

  “Dollface…”

  I didn’t need Nikki’s warning to realize something was terribly wrong. The men’s aura wasn’t gray anymore—it was black, and it was uniform. The same dark stain of power I’d seen in the bottom of Armaeus’s power pit. Though these men were dressed like Las Vegas’s finest, no way were they local cops.

  “Ma’am, if you’d step over to the side, please…”

  Nikki spotted the movement first, the telltale moment of the angled elbow and downward surging hand.

  “Gun!” she yelled, so loud that a car across the carport screeched its wheels, its driver cutting the wheel hard. Nikki body-blocked the first cop into the second, sending both of them sprawling in a bone-crunching pavement skid. She yanked open the passenger door to the SUV, scrambling over the seat to get to the driver’s seat.

  I pulled the quick release sash of my sword, and both the blade and scabbard came loose from the belt, landing solidly in my hand. Wielding the Honjo Masamune like a bat, I turned hard into the cop nearest me and caught him under the chin. He dropped, gargling, but the second cop wasn’t so easily fooled. He brought his gun up and shouted harshly, never mind the bunched-up vehicles and screaming tourists.

  “Stop! Police! I will shoot!”

  I didn’t have time to think, and what happened next showed it. I slid the Honjo Masamune out of its scabbard and leapt forward, attacking the cop head-on. His gun flinched upward, and he fired, the bullet ricocheting harmlessly off the ramparts of the carport, sending the tourists into another round of panic. He leveled the gun again but by then, I was arcing fast, my blade slashing down across his chest—not closely enough to cut him, but I did shred his shirt, slicing through what looked like a Kevlar vest. I whipped the sword up and spun it around, until its butt faced him. I punched the man’s forehead with enough force to drop a rhino. Then Nikki revved the engine and swerved onto the sidewalk, bumping into me as I clutched the Honjo and its scabbard against my chest with one hand and scrabbled for the door with the other.

  I got the door open just as a real cop car bounced into the Luxor’s driveway.

  “Get in!” Nikki hollered, and I surged into the backseat as she roared over the median, banking hard and shooting out the front of the Luxor even as the cop car’s lights flashed and sirens started wailing.

  I screamed unnecessary exhortations to go, to get, to move as Nikki peeled around the car park and headed out again, bouncing onto the Strip and speeding toward Mandalay Bay.

  “A little direction would probably be a good idea, dollface,” she snapped, laying on the horn as she blew through a red light, sending cross traffic skittering into each other. Sirens erupted behind us, a Strip-based symphony that was closing fast.

  “Crap!” I hauled myself upright, grabbing the pull bar as I threw the sword and scabbard across the backseat. Nikki hit a corner hard and I thrust my hand into my hoodie, swiping for my deck. She corrected, and the few cards I’d manage to yank out went flying, even as I lurched across the backseat.

  “Easy!” I sputtered, pawing for the cards.

  “Click it or ticket. We’ve gotta motor. Half the freaki
ng LVMPD is gonna be on our tail if we don’t move it like now. And I’m thinking our little death-by-cop greeting party was just an opening salvo sent by Gamon to let us know she’s ready to party, whether or not Usurper Joe gets his act together. We’ve gotta finish this.” She gunned the SUV. “Where’m I headed?”

  “I’m working on it!” I spit back. The cards had landed in a scatter, and I scooped them up, knowing there was no way I’d be able to replicate their original order. Still, a lot of times I could figure out which came first or last just by the images, and I fanned the cards out, gripping them so hard, the plastic warped in my hand.

  “Okay! Okay—we got two majors and two minors, majors are prolly bookends but hard to say.”

  “Not helpful,” Nikki said. She blew through another light, barely slowing on the side street.

  “Chariot—that could be the car or it could also be Luxor. Gotta be Luxor; that’s first. That’s past.”

  “Definitely past. What else, what are the other cards?”

  “Two wands. A trip of two hours, two days, or a long trip, choices, trip, journey. Two, something,” I rattled out. “Then there’s also Death and the Five Swords, Death is transformation, change—”

  “Or, you know, Death—”

  “And Five Swords is a fight, a fight you lose but should’ve won, or win but maybe don’t like the outcome for having done so. I can’t think—Death!”

  “I got that one already.”

  “No, the Two of Wands is facing left, toward the setting sun, that’s west. Two hours west on a journey to Death.”

  “Sweet Jesus and an armadillo, Death Valley!” Nikki crowed, and she roared around the next corner, running alongside the highway. As luck and the cards would have it, the interstate was I-95, a quick shot out of Vegas and up through the desolate landscape west of the city, until it jackknifed south onto Nevada-373 and eventually crossed the California border into Death Valley National Park.

  She jumped onto the highway, and we started speeding away, and it was only then that I realized there were no more sirens after us. “All’s quiet from the city,” I said, shoving my cards back into my interior hoodie pocket. “What’s that about?”