by Jenn Stark
“Well, it was sort of new,” I shrugged. “I’ve always had a sense of intuition about a place, whether there was magic in it, whether a Connected was near, that sort of thing. But nothing to that level.”
She nodded. “That makes sense. The most easily accessible magic will simply build on what you already can do. But what the Magician is most interested in is magic that you couldn’t do before.”
I frowned. “You mean whatever I just dumped into Sariah? That included the observational stuff.”
“No, no. What you gave Sariah was only what she could handle. What is left is—so much more.” She spread her hands. “It could be anything. Teleportation. Time travel. Manifestation—you already have some of that skill, so be prepared for it to be stronger now.”
“Hmm.” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. Being a better manifester was good in theory, but it worked best with a disciplined mind. Discipline wasn’t exactly my strong suit.
“Back to that time travel,” I said, squinting at her. “Are you serious? That’s a thing?”
“If so, I want a Highlander, like, stat,” Nikki put in.
Sells kept her focus on me. “I’m saying you should be very careful. It would appear you have no idea what your abilities are—”
“Which is not at all something new,” Nikki interjected, apparently working on her stand-up routine today. I shot her a sour look, and she grinned at me. “Don’t try to deny it, dollface.”
“While in the past, that wasn’t as much of a problem,” Sells continued implacably, “now it could be. You’ll need to be aware of things changing around you that don’t fit the norm, as well as more obvious expressions of your abilities. Look for any outpouring of creative force or energy. That should give you a clue.”
I could feel my headache worsening, so that was something. I was pretty sure that wasn’t the result of an outpouring of creative energy, though. “Got it. And Armaeus gave you no clue of what specifically to look for in me?”
Again, the hesitation. “It’s a very dark magic that you accessed, Sara. Your nature is essentially good, wholesome, generous. Armaeus’s nature was not so filled with light.”
“And?”
“And there could be…a battle within you, as a result of this. It’s a very small chance, but—”
“Whoa, you mean her body could reject the magic?” Nikki demanded, her levity evaporating. “Like a transplant gone wrong?”
“Exactly like that. You should—”
A commotion at the door drew our attention away, Brody’s elevated voice carrying down the hall even as the orderlies braced themselves to block his entrance. Dr. Sells issued a sharp command and the men stood aside, allowing Brody to poke his head through the doorway.
“Are you guys done in here?” he asked brusquely. “Because we gotta roll. There’s been a drug bust down at the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars, and the place is already crawling with cops and Feds.”
“Feds?” My brows shot up.
“The chapel?” Nikki demanded at the same time. I grabbed the rest of my stuff, shoving my feet into my boots as she whipped her phone out of her bra. “I got no texts, no alerts of anything like this. When did this happen?”
Sells and I glanced at each other as Nikki barged out of the room after Brody, her strident voice peppering the man with questions. But I still had a few questions of my own to ask.
“Am I going to be okay?” I asked Sells, trying to put all my diminished powers of observation into discerning whether her answer to me would be truthful or a full ration of bullshit.
She met my gaze solidly. “Honestly, I don’t know. You could tap your power and blow up half the city, yes. You could tap your power and find yourself in the middle of a Native American encampment instead of a city street. I don’t think your body is going to reject the magic Armaeus exposed you to, however, primarily because he allowed the exposure to happen. He would not have risked you if there was any significant chance of damage.”
I sighed, my heart giving an unruly little thump as I thought about how urgently Armaeus had wanted me to level up. I sensed truth in Dr. Sells, but this was merely her truth. She maybe didn’t realize how afraid Armaeus was of squashing me like a bug with his influx of power and might. If it was a trade-off between him potentially endangering me with his magic versus him definitely short-circuiting me, possibly even killing me, I had a feeling he’d play those odds.
“Okay, but if I do reject the magic, how will I know? Will my skin start to putrefy like I have an infection? Will I get sick?”
Sells held up her hands helplessly. “I have no experience with the Magician allowing anyone to access his power. I don’t believe he’s ever done it in all the years that he’s been seated on the Council. Because to access that power, he would have to allow himself access to it, and that hasn't been something he was willing to do, not for the past four hundred years.” Something flickered across her face.
“What?” I demanded.
“There is somebody on the Council who has done this sort of thing, though,” Sells said. “You might ask her.”
“Her?” I asked sharply, but there was really only one possibility. I grimaced. “The High Priestess. Great.”
“Just something to eventually consider if you have questions you can’t readily find answers to. Eshe continued to serve as the inspiration for Greek and Roman oracles for hundreds of years after she ascended to the Council. There is no doubt in my mind that she helped them along in their ability to access deep magic. Some of those young women could have had negative reactions to that magic, especially if they were Connecteds of power.”
I nodded, then opened my mouth to ask another question.
“Sara.” Brody stuck his head back into the room, clearly irritated. “You coming or not? I gotta get down there, and Nikki said you might be able to teleport or some shit now, but the rest of us have to take a car.”
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I said, nodding to Sells. She watched me with keen interest, her gaze raking over my face in the exact same way that Armaeus was so fond of using—a scientist fascinated by his newest trapped butterfly.
Only this butterfly might be able to eradicate half of Vegas with a wayward flap of her wings. Fantastic.
I shoved those thoughts out of my mind as I hustled down the corridor after Brody, who was back to barking something unintelligible into his phone. It took us only a few minutes to reach his sedan, and I peered out the window, trying to determine if I could see anything I hadn’t been able to see when we’d driven up. So far, no. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
“So what’s going on?” Nikki demanded as Brody hung up his phone. “Did they actually conduct a bust? Of Dixie?”
It wasn’t as ridiculous a question as it would have been even a few short months ago. Dixie Quinn was arguably one of the best known Connecteds in the city of Las Vegas. The owner of one of the city’s quirkiest drive-through wedding chapels, and an accomplished astrologer in her own right, she recently begun aggressively seeking any way possible to improve her abilities, to jack her innate intuition. Furthermore, she was considered to be unofficial den mother of the Connected community, particularly those members who worked the Strip. Everyone knew Dixie, and she had her finger on the pulse of anything that was jumping within a hundred-mile radius of her chapel.
While Dixie could be mistaken as a bottle-blonde bubblehead spouting Southern charm and wearing about any outfit imaginable as long as it was cute and pink—extra points if it involved boots and a cowboy hat—she was no fool. She’d purportedly been trying to crack a technoceutical drug ring that was turning the Connecteds of the city into drug-addicted pill heads. A laudable cause, if it really was her cause, but one that was taking some decidedly questionable turns of late. Case in point—this drug bust.
And Dixie was complicated on a personal note as well. While she and Nikki had long been friends, that friendship had been strained somewhat with the stren
gthening bond between Nikki and me. Further, Dixie had dated Brody for several months, a relationship she’d cut short recently—presumably so she could continue her personal investigation into the technoceutical drug underworld of Las Vegas, without the drag of law enforcement on her tail. The fact that she could easily be killed by said underworld seemed of little importance to her.
I wanted to believe Dixie was on the up-and-up, I truly did, but there was something about the woman that had always struck me the wrong way. I tried to tell myself that that wasn’t because she had a thing for the detective upon whom I’d crushed pretty dramatically as a teenager. I wanted to think I was a well-adjusted adult who wouldn’t let that be a factor in my opinion of Dixie. But I might have been giving myself a little bit too much credit on that one.
Brody’s grim words recalled me to the conversation.
“Not Dixie,” he said. “Dixie was nowhere near the place. But she’d set an appointment with a couple who stopped by to tie the knot, and the door was open, so they went on in. Nobody home, but the place was trashed. Dixie’s office broken into, everything torn to pieces. Freaked-out couple tries Dixie’s phone—it rings in a pile of papers on the desk. They call the cops, cops find pills, chaos ensues.”
“But what about Dixie?” Nikki demanded. “Her phone was in her office, but she wasn’t? That girl goes nowhere without her phone.”
“Wrong,” Brody shot back. “That girl goes nowhere without a phone. When she and I dated, she had at least three. I thought it was suspicious, but she said they coordinated with her outfit, and I let it go.”
Nikki opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. “Well, shoot,” she finally muttered. “I could totally see her saying that.”
“But she did respond to me when I reached out five minutes ago, on a number she had programmed when we were—together, whatever,” he said, picking up his own phone and waving it at us. “And that’s where this shit gets even weirder. She’d been struck in a hit-and-run on her way to the chapel, pretty banged up, at the hospital now. I’ve already dispatched cops down there. She’s claiming there would be no drugs, no way in her office, and gotta tell you…”
“She wouldn’t be that stupid,” Nikki finished for him. “I’m right there with you. So what’s going on?”
None of us had the answer to that for the moment. Despite my new hesitation to try even the most basic of my abilities for fear of what would boomerang back to me, I opened my mind to the idea of contacting the Magician. He knew a lot of what was going on in the city. It was reasonable that he’d know this too.
Armaeus, it appeared, was back to refusing all calls.
We reached the chapel a few minutes later, and, as Brody had warned us, it was crawling with people. Police techs, crime scene investigators, uniformed officers, and even, yes, a number of people wearing FBI slickers. I’d always wanted one of those windbreakers, but now didn’t seem to be the time to ask for it.
“Homeland Security?” asked Nikki, and Brody nodded.
“They’ll roll out anybody they can on this one. Dixie Quinn is not exactly a low-profile target. This will get media coverage.”
Sure enough, a few news vans were already parked down the street, doing their best to obstruct traffic. Several uniformed officers were manning the taped-off area and waved Brody through into the parking lot.
We exited his sedan, and I shot a quick look across the parking lot toward the tattoo parlor, Darkworks Ink. Nikki followed my glance. “You think Jimmy maybe saw something?”
I shrugged. The manager of Darkworks Ink was a person of considerable interest to me right now anyway. “I think maybe he’s worth having a chat with.” I shifted my gaze to Brody. “You okay with me talking with him on my own? I don’t think he’d talk to a cop.”
“Well, he’s going to have to eventually, whether he likes it or not. But sure. Nikki can stay with me. Probably not a bad idea for you to stay clear of any law enforcement other than me for a little while, anyway.”
I arched a brow at him. “Why?” I asked. “I thought my various red and blue notices had been dropped by Interpol.”
“Technically, they have,” Brody said, shrugging. “Doesn’t mean Roland and Marguerite won’t be all over you if they think they have even the slightest cause.”
I made a face, thinking of the two French operatives who’d been tailing me for what felt like the better part of forever. They were about as useless as a baby brother, and every bit as tenacious.
“And if you find out anything from Jimmy, you tell me. You got that?” Brody’s words were unexpectedly curt, but I didn’t let them bother me. He didn’t have a good pulse on Jimmy, only that he was sort of a second in command to a Council member. That never recommended anyone.
I didn’t bother explaining that the guy might also be a reformed demon.
Chapter Twelve
Jimmy was sitting behind the front desk in the reception area of the tattoo parlor, arms crossed, feet up on the glass countertop. His eyes narrowed as I walked in the door. I paused, as much due to the fact that he was sitting down as to the expression on his face. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him sit before if he wasn’t working on a client.
“What?” I asked. I let the door clatter behind me, the cheerful tinkling bell sounding as oddly defensive as I felt.
“Death told me you’d be coming by.”
“Well, Death would know.” I made a show of eyeballing the décor of Darkworks’ lobby, though I’d been in the place often enough over the past few months that I should have memorized it all by now. In addition to the large books featuring happy client pictures of newly inked arms, legs, and other swaths of skin—all of said ink surrounded by coronas of angry red dermis—every flat surface in the place was covered in white paper with curling edges, festooned with every possible flash tattoo idea under the sun. I don’t think Jimmy had changed the wallpaper since the Nixon administration…which I’d now been given to understand he’d probably witnessed.
I decided to cut straight to the chase. “So Death also sort of mentioned you’re a demon. You, ah, mind explaining how that works, exactly?”
He dropped his feet to the floor. “Was a demon. Big difference,” he snapped, standing and placing his palms flat on the countertop as he leaned toward me. I’d never seen Jimmy this ratcheted up before, and I had to say, I wasn’t a fan. I felt even worse that I’d been the one to cause the reaction.
Jimmy Shadow was a gaunt-cheeked man with the physiology of a zipper, his teeth permanently stained with nicotine and his sharp eyes always looking like he was coming off a three-day bender of whiskey and car exhaust. He wore his bad habits like a road map sketched over his sallow skin, and his faded clothes and long, lank hair were kept in a permanent state of probably-should-have-been-washed-a-week-ago. But I’d never seen his hands as anything other than rock steady—a bonus in someone who etched permanent drawings on people for a living.
Now those hands were trembling hard enough to shake the glass counter.
“Okay, you were a demon,” I amended. “You remember how you managed to pull that off? The whole not-being-a-demon-anymore thing? Because, as you may have noticed, we’ve added a few to the rolls.”
“I did notice that.” The glass beneath Jimmy's palms gave a tiny cry of distress, and we both glanced down. A series of cracks spiderwebbed out from three of his fingers on his right hand, and he muttered a word I couldn’t quite hear, rubbing at the glass. “Wondered if you were behind that shitstorm.”
“Well, behind it might be overstating things a little…”
“How’d it happen?” he asked me in turn, pushing himself off the counter and turning toward the large tablet that functioned as a cash register for the store, fussing with random knickknacks sitting on the counter: a Chinese good-luck cat, some jade beads on a string, a plastic My Little Pony. “Were you the summoner?”
“Not at all. Not, you know, technically,” I hedged. He still wouldn’t look at me, so I felt like m
aybe a little give might be in order to help facilitate some take. “I went up to the Deathwalker coven to find out more about what’s coming with the war on magic. They called up someone who was around when the gods were dispatched beyond the veil the first time, and I sat in. Let’s just say the invitation pulled in way more RSVPs than we expected.”
“Yeah, I felt it,” Jimmy said.
Huh. That was interesting. The leader of the second wave of unwelcome visitors to Danae’s mansion had made a similar comment. “Is that something that all…um…ex-demons feel? There’s a connection there?”
His voice was flat. “Dunno.”
Okay… “Well, it was supposed to be a single informant. Unfortunately, Llyr followed him through. After we got a little bit of information, the target collapsed, and Llyr let fly with your basic demon horde. Over two hundred of them, dumped into the sewers and subway tunnels of Chicago, though we were able to throw some of them back over the fence.”
“It wasn’t only there,” Jimmy said. “That was sort of a repeater station. A portal that a god with the right kind of knowledge could replicate for so long as the circle was functioning. Those kinds of circles opened up all over the world, each of them releasing the same number of demons, two hundred and sixteen.”
“Two hundred and sixteen? That seems a little…exact.”
He shrugged. “A little numerical cosmic joke. You’ll figure it out.”
“Doubtful.” I shook my head. “Math isn’t my strong suit. Or even my weak suit. I really don’t have any math in my closet, if I can avoid it.”
Jimmy rolled his eyes. “Six-six-six, Sara. Multiply them together and you get…”
I hazarded a guess. “216? Cute.”
“Not as cute as this,” Jimmy said, leaning forward. “The demons roaming the earth—they’re going to be smart. Cagey. They’ll go to ground as soon as possible and keep well out of sight until they get a fix on this new world they’ve been granted. There’s only one rule for demons—don’t mess with God’s children. They avoid that, they can probably stay for awhile. Still demons but…not demons targeted for immediate annihilation.”
