by Jenn Stark
Her words rang with a depth that surprised me. I wasn’t exactly sure what Gamon’s full capabilities were. She tended to kill first, conjure later. But one thing was certainly true.
“Your power would grow with gods upon the earth,” I said bluntly. “The hands that pushed around those stars would then be free to hold you up and push you forward.”
To my surprise, she shrugged. “True. But I have come to realize that my own psychic abilities have grown beyond the level that would please any creature who would call herself a god. And why would I invite that which could control me?”
And now her lips did twist into an ugly smile, but only in response to my startled expression. “You are not the only Connected on this earth who’s capable of change, Sara. Your mother nearly broke me with her betrayal, and I won’t let that happen again. Then, too, there was only one Connected who came to my aid when I remained in that broken state. You. You healed me, when you didn’t have to.”
“I did have to. I needed you.”
She rejected that with a dismissive wave. “You needed someone with half my skills, maybe. You could have brought me back weaker, even kept part of me broken. You didn’t. Ha!” Her barked laugh was so abrupt, it made me jump. “Your face. You can’t even imagine doing that, can you? To take the power away from someone you had every right to judge?”
“I had no right to judge you, Gamon,” I said quietly. “I haven’t walked in your shoes, endured your pain. I couldn’t let you cause any more damage, couldn’t let you release my mother on this earth, but—I do not judge.”
“Well, I do.” She leaned forward suddenly, crowding me, but I held my place. “I judge. I decide. I act. I can act for you, with you, or I can act against you.” Her smile was fierce. “I think I will act for you, though, Sara Wilde. For you, who came and healed me and gave up a part of yourself to do so. For you. Not for the Council. Not even for the Connecteds you are so dedicated to preserving. But if you call—I will come.”
A wave of relief swept over me, so powerful that my knees almost buckled. The next time I saw Mercault, I might just hug the man. Now, however, I merely nodded. And when I spoke, my voice was steady.
“You’re saying you will stand with us, then. Stand and fight when the gods make their run at Earth. Because it’s coming, Gamon. Like, right now.”
“It’s long overdue,” she said, sounding so much like the Frenchman, I almost smiled. “We will stand, and we will block them as we stood and blocked them in London. Where they’ll go—I don’t know. The veil is shredded now. Your precious Council would do well to solve that problem sooner rather than later.”
“They’re working on it,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. But she wasn’t wrong. We needed to fix the veil or come up with something different to contain the gods, and stat.
Gamon grimaced, looking more human than I’d ever seen her. “Well, tell them to work a little harder. But for now, for us, lead us into your foolish battle, Swords. The House of Cups will help you stand when all others would fail.”
Then she disappeared, leaving me to the sunset over Rio de Janeiro for just another moment, before I too began my own long journey home.
Chapter Nine
“You know, it’s probably not saying much about my bodyguarding approach that you’ve puked up your guts not once but twice on my watch today,” Nikki grumbled.
“I threw up?” Once again, I was the victim of lost time. I didn’t remember passing out, I didn’t remember getting back on the elevator…though it was clear we were moving down now. Down seemed like progress. I tried hard to forget the litany of expletives Nikki rolled out as we dropped the several hundred floors back to the lobby of the Luxor, but those might stay with me for a while.
As she manhandled me through the lobby, however, Nikki dropped her voice to a low, tight murmur. “We got Connected eyes on us. You feel it? The pressure?”
I nodded, or at least moved my head to as close to a nod as I could manage. It was more like a bobble. The words that came next were automatic, tumbling out before I could take my next breath. “Four, one at each corner. They have the scent of Armaeus on them, but their electronics are tied in to the Fool’s network, not here at Prime Luxe. They aren’t speaking, but they are recording us, video and audio.”
To her credit, Nikki didn’t slow her forward motion at this pronouncement, her no-nonsense lawyer stilettos sharply clacking across the marble floor. “We are going to have a long talk, you and I, about what precisely happened up there with you and David Copperfield.”
“Nothing happened to me,” I said, surprised at my own sharp reaction. “I did it. I chose it.”
I owned it, the words sounded in my ears.
“You chose it, no problem,” she repeated, her voice flat. “I simply want to know what it is you chose.”
“Yeah, well, join the club,” I mumbled.
“I heard that.”
We exited the Luxor’s front doors, and there, idling beneath the covered walkway, was a very familiar brown sedan. A very familiarly ugly brown sedan, which made me far happier than it should have, no matter how unhappy the driver sounded when Nikki and I approached.
“About time,” Detective Brody Rooks growled, pushing his car door open and bounding out of the sedan. He grabbed me right before I stumbled against the slightly dented fender of his car, then let me ease myself down to brace against it. “What the hell happened to her?”
“Standing right here,” I said. The warmth of the car’s metal spread through me with an instant, welcome balm, and I realized that the vehicle had been sitting in the sun for hours before it had been driven here, its surface coated in the slightest sheen of Connected energy, as if it had been sloughed off from wherever it had been sitting.
“Okay, then, fine. What the hell happened to you?” Brody turned me to face him, and his touch sent a shiver of awareness to me, also not unwelcome. In a flash, myriad dots connected and lines linked, and I blinked at him, my third eye flicking open to take the man’s measure psychically. The man and the vehicle beside him.
“You’ve been at Dr. Sells’s clinic,” I said. “Overnight. Your car was surveilled. Attached to the bottom of the trunk above your back left tire is a tracker. Not Connected grade, but military. It’s recent, though. Probably put there last night, not before.”
“What?” The question was rhetorical, however, as Brody moved to the back of the car and a second later was letting fly with a string of expletives.
I shook my head, trying to focus. “What’s going on at the clinic? Is everyone okay there?”
“Tell you what, dollface, I think we should all find out that answer together.” Nikki made some sort of gesture behind my back, but my eyes were only for Brody as their gazes connected. An explosion of information blossomed in front of me. The detective was healthy, fit, his body no worse for wear despite his recent adventures on my behalf. He hadn’t slept enough last night, and his right shoulder would start showing signs of degeneration in another five years unless he started on a therapy plan. His mind was a scattered disorder of thoughts, but that was not unusual for the detective. Like most cops, he didn’t think linearly, but in a series of interconnected possibilities. That fluidity of his thought process had allowed him to be excellent at his job. It also, I realized with sudden, unexpected clarity, allowed him to process the continual volleys of crazy I’d been throwing at him since the moment we’d first met.
Another wave of dizziness seemed to hit me square between my normal eyes.
“You’re both cops. See, that makes so much sense, you know?” I said with a lopsided smile, swinging my head unsteadily toward Nikki. This time, I didn’t miss her end of the gaze between them. I’d seen Nikki panicked before, and panic didn’t quite cover this.
This was more scared.
Scared was probably bad, but I couldn’t quite focus enough to get a handle on why.
“Let’s get you in the car.” Brody’s words were gruff, and with their he
lp, I was folded into the backseat of his sedan. Nikki piled in beside me, and she both buckled me in and tucked me against her body, the length of her strong and solid and oddly reassuring.
“So, spill,” Brody growled, peering at us through the rearview mirror. “The Magician did this? Kreios?”
“I did this,” before Nikki could speak. “My choice.”
“Fine, you did this.” His gaze shifted hard to Nikki. “You want to fill in the blanks while Tinker Bell here gets her wings back on straight?”
“Well, I didn’t see this coming, that’s for sure,” Nikki said, her hands coming to rest over mine, which had unaccountably begun shaking. Her hands were large, solid. Cop hands. Friend hands. Nikki hands. Beneath their weight, I felt the reassurance of decades of taking care of others, the brutality of the Chicago streets she’d once walked as a beat cop, the laughter of her children she’d long since left at the request of their mother…children she thought of every day, children she still took care of, anonymously.
Ordinarily, given her unique psychic skills that had proven so useful to her during her years on the force, Nikki would be aware of my thoughts and would react in some way, especially if she was touching me. But she merely plowed on.
“I knew something was up with where Armaeus dropped us—not his conference room, not his office. More like a library of the damned. In the back was a three-alarm fire in a straight-up fire pit, cauldron, smoke, the whole ball of wax, while Armaeus was rocking a low-rent Merlin costume. The Devil was there as well.”
“He was there to keep you busy,” Brody said, and there was no judgment in his words. Brody had seen firsthand what the powers of the Council were. He knew that Nikki’s protection could extend only so far.
“That he was, and that he did. But we’d played this game often enough that I wasn’t worried, even with the abrupt exit Armaeus engineered.”
Exit, I mused. I vaguely remembered Armaeus’s hand going up, and the Devil and Nikki no longer being in the room with us. I hadn’t felt alarm, exactly, but something had definitely been different about the Magician. He’d felt so…desperate, was the word. Afraid, almost. Not of me, exactly. But…of himself? I frowned.
“Anyway, not five minutes go by and I hear the mother of all screams, and it’s Sara, and the walls are no longer between us, but she’s far—so far away and there’s all these shelves and books and tables, and it’s all in my way.”
“Where’d Kreios go?”
“Don’t know, didn’t care. He didn’t try to stop me, though. I got the sense that he was satisfied, smug almost—”
Brody snorted. “He’s always smug. That’s his thing.”
I grinned at that, but Nikki rolled a shoulder. “He seemed pleased, not panicked, so even though I was moving like holy hell to get to Sara, I wasn’t so worried as all that, because the Devil wasn’t. Then I got to her.”
I glanced up to take in her profile. I was curious about this part in particular, but Nikki didn’t continue right away. When she did speak, her jaw was tight, so that she was practically gritting the words out through clenched teeth.
“She was alone, the fire was out, and the Magician was gone. There was nothing left of him but his robe, which was wrapped around our girl. Everything else was charred to a crisp.”
“Charred!” Brody interjected, and even I blinked. Had there been a fire?
“Charred. Sara was in a heap on the floor underneath that robe, her legs and arms out at all angles, like she’d been dropped from a cliff. Nothing was broken, though, nothing was cut, nothing even bruised. But she was wobblier than a newborn colt and, as you’ll find, can’t remember a damned thing from the experience. When she did start talking, it was worse. She seemed to—know things. Things she shouldn’t.”
“Yeah, I picked up on that.” Brody held up the tracking device, and his gaze zeroed in on me again in the rearview mirror. How the man was not running into the car in front of him, I had no idea. “You know who put this on my car? That parking lot has cameras at all corners, and the damned thing was lit up like a prison yard.”
“Runner, gray tracksuit, jogging in the lit parking lot like a family member of a patient looking for a safe place to exercise. Made two laps. On the second, his shoelace was loose, untied. He goes down, ties it, drops the tracker, then proceeds on his run. The other shoe gives him trouble two more laps in, and on the fourth lap after that, he slows to a walk, then reenters the hospital elevators.” I gave this information while staring at the device, the images springing to mind as if I’d watched the video feed myself. “Hired guy, nothing personal, doesn’t know why your car was tagged.”
Brody blew out a long breath. “You’re kind of creeping me out here.”
“Focus, love buns,” Nikki said, giving me a reassuring hug. “Who’d waste the money on a military bug? It’d be caught eventually.”
“No one local. No one’s been following us. I’d like to think I’d notice that, though I sure as hell didn’t think to check for a bug.” He chewed over the idea for a while, and I gazed out the window at the passing traffic. We were driving parallel to the Strip, and the distance allowed me to see the soaring domains of the Council—Prime Luxe’s spires over the Luxor, the Foolscap glass tower over Bellagio, the Devil’s lava lamp of a residence above the Flamingo.
The Hierophant’s white tower over Treasure Island seemed to shimmer in the afternoon sun even more than the rest. The Hierophant was stirring, I knew. Did he sense the influx of demons that had hit the earth two nights ago? He had to have.
“It’s got to be Interpol,” Brody said, the statement so absolute that it pulled me from my distraction.
“Interpol?” That also sharpened my attention. “What about them?”
“Both Roland and Marguerite haven’t been seen in the last twenty-four hours, and they were mostly closeted with brass before that,” Brody said, naming the two Interpol agents who’d been plaguing me for weeks. “I’ve been expecting summons to the meeting for the last several hours, but so far, nada. To be honest, I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation without having a chance to talk to you first.” He shot me another glance. “Of course, I didn’t realize you’d be operating under the influence of crazy.”
“Hey!” I straightened in my seat, shaking off Nikki’s hold. “You want to know what happened to me up in Prime Luxe, I’ll tell you what happened. I opened myself up to the same kind of magical mystery tour I sent the Magician on this past week. He plumbed the depths of his abilities, so I took a swim in them as well.”
Now both Nikki and Brody were staring at me. “And what’s the upshot of that little expedition?” Nikki asked. “Other than your stint as Ollie the Observationist.”
“And is that something that’s going to last?” Brody interjected. “Because I have to tell you, that kind of skill could come in seriously handy.”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. I glanced back toward the Strip, and this time, the Emperor’s soaring black tower over Paris caught my eye. It was a flat, dark black, with no life in it at all. I’d have to come to terms with Viktor, I knew, and soon. He would be delivered to Judgment.
I blinked, the phrase sliding uncomfortably through my mind. Delivered to Judgment…
“Interpol got any new beef with Sara that you know?” Nikki asked as Brody turned the car into the parking lot of Dr. Sells’s clinic. It was a modern, state-of-the-art regional hospital and lab, paid for completely by the Council. As such, it was the only facility in the area that had the equipment and temperament to handle the most sensitive of patients—the psychically sensitive ones.
“Nothing that’s come over the wires,” Brody said. “Last we heard, the Red Notice was taken down, though nobody seems to know why or how. While they’re sorting that out, Sara here was determined to no longer be a person of interest, but I don’t think for a moment that they’ve given up poking around. It’s just all gone underground.”
“They’re regrouping,” I said, but without
the same force of conviction with which I’d issued my earlier proclamations. I met Brody’s and Nikki’s glances. “I don’t know that for sure, I’m guessing. But it’s a sense I have, a strong sense. Almost like a premonition, but not quite a knowing.”
“I’m good with whatever gets them off your back,” Nikki said. “We need the extra time.”
We exited the cars and made for the front doors of the clinic, both Brody and Nikki flanking me. “Anyone can see us here,” Nikki complained. “There’s nowhere to hide. We’re going to have to rethink transpo.”
“No, we won’t,” I said. “We’re not going to be tracked down and discovered unawares then stuck in some black-site hellhole. That’s not how this is going to go down.”
Once again, I didn’t have the same intractable belief in my own words as I had with the tracking device and the surveillance in the Luxor. But it was still…something I knew. Something I trusted. “When they meet with us, it’ll be a civilized gathering of rational souls…souls with a purpose and an agenda. Which can mean only one thing.”
Nikki blew out a long breath, and even though she might no longer be able to read my mind, she could read the situation easily enough.
“They want something,” she said.
Chapter Ten
The doors to Sells’s clinic slid closed behind us, and it took a second for my eyes to adjust to both the dim interior and the sudden wash of air-conditioning. I squinted to the people seated in small, tense groups in the waiting room, the TVs all turned to variations on the Weather Channel, some with maps covered in bright orange, some featuring the upcoming solar eclipse, one tuned to some video of dogs frolicking in a backyard kiddie pool. That was the TV most people were watching.
As I swept the area again with my gaze, a figure emerged from the elevators, crisp, controlled, and lab coated.
“You’re here. Good.”
Dr. Margaret Sells was one of the Magician’s most trusted lieutenants. She’d worked with Armaeus since he had come to Las Vegas in the mid-1940s. For her service, the Magician had elevated her to immortal status. Totally gave a new spin to the gold watch at retirement, but it seemed to work for her.
