by Jenn Stark
Table of Contents
Other Books by Jenn Stark
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Call of the Wilde
A Note From Jenn
Acknowledgments
About Jenn Stark
Wilde Child
Immortal Vegas, Book 7
Jenn Stark
Copyright © 2017 by Jenn Stark
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-1-943768-25-7
Cover design and Photography Gene Mollica
Formatting by Bemis Promotions
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase/Download only authorized editions.
Other Books by Jenn Stark
Getting Wilde
Wilde Card
Born To Be Wilde
Wicked And Wilde
Aces Wilde
Forever Wilde
One Wilde Night (prequel novella)
For Mike, Abby, Tyson and Danielle
No longer children, but still close to my heart
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand.
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.
~ William Butler Yeats
Chapter One
The austerely gorgeous nation of Iceland had about a dozen things to recommend it. The country boasted no mosquitoes, no strip clubs, no McDonald’s…and virtually no violent crime.
Then again, the night was young.
One long strip of bars on Laugavegar Street marked the capital city of Reykjavik’s sole nod to nightlife. Most of the drinking establishments tended toward hole-in-the-wall pubs and cafés versus anything remotely resembling a club. This didn’t blunt the locals’ level of enthusiasm, but it did narrow down the options of where Nikki Dawes and I would find tonight’s star attraction.
After two days of wallowing in eerily blue waters, slathered in so much thick white mud I was sure we’d sprout, we’d finally found good reason to return to dry land: Agnar Hilmarsson, the man about to lead us straight to a million-dollar prize.
First, however, we had to get close to the guy.
“We so need to have an op when you’re not dressed like a homeless person.”
The voice that carried over the hustle and thrum of the 2:00 a.m. crowd was no less dubious than it had been three hours ago, when we’d started tracking our pigeon at the city’s most famous luxury spa.
I glanced down at my outfit—dull black jeans, worn black hoodie, scuffed black boots. “It doesn’t matter what I’m wearing. I’m just here for backup. You’re who he’s interested in.”
“I think you’re wrong about that,” said Nikki, pursing her heavily lacquered lips. “Pretty sure ol’ Agnar colors inside the lines.”
“Not according to our intel, he doesn’t.”
I surveyed her with a critical gaze, but if there was one thing about Nikki I never needed to worry about, it was her sense of style. Six foot four in stockinged feet, she got an additional four inches from her black platform-heeled shit kickers. The boots contrasted violently with her flared white miniskirt and petal-pink angora sweater. Nights were cold in Reykjavik, after all, even in early September. Nikki’s icy blonde hair tumbled over her shoulders in ringlets that would make Godiva envious, and her lips, eyelids, and fingernails were painted shell pink to match the lavish pearl choker stretched around her throat.
“Even if he does, in that outfit, you’d make a man change his mind,” I said.
She grinned, but her eyes were flat and serious. Nikki Dawes was more than my best friend, more even than the newest hired gun for the House of Swords, a mercenary position known as an Ace. At one time, she’d been a cop covering Chicago’s deadliest beat. She hadn’t lost those instincts.
“Place is crawling with security, dollface. Our intel didn’t mention that.”
“Yeah.” It wasn’t for lack of the quality of our resources. One of the perks of the international syndicate I now ran was its enviable surveillance capabilities. In fact, it was in my role as head of the House of Swords that word of this artifact hunt had come across the wires…only, for once, nobody’d been looking to hire me. I must be losing my cachet.
“He’s arrived.” Nikki’s words were low, tight. “On the phone by the Rolls.”
Agnar Hilmarsson was the head flunky of Thor Bjornsson, Iceland’s richest man and owner of the artifacts we were currently targeting. Thor had, of course, caught wind of the fact that the items had soared to the top of the Artifacts Most Wanted list, the call for the artifacts going out over a secure cell channel more popular among the players of the arcane black market than QVC. Agnar’s arrival here in Reykjavik was undoubtedly the result of that call.
Technically, Thor’s minion had one job to do in Iceland: recover the coveted artifacts the whole world was buzzing about and whisk them away to the family’s main holding. But this was his home territory, far away from the eyes of his overseers in Europe. And, according to my crack research team, he had a weakness for vodka, oxygen bars, and unique dance partners.
Nikki was definitely unique.
“How do I look?” she asked now, patting down her skirt with one broad hand, her nails glittering in the streetlight.
“He saw you today with mud on your face, and he about stroked out. Trust me, he’s not going to know what hit him.”
He wouldn’t either. In more ways than one.
We had two options to gather the information we needed—Nikki could sweep Agnar off his feet and he could take her back to his fortress with me following behind, or she could work her Connected mojo on him in plain view of his security detail. God knew there were enough of his bruisers in the bar to stage their own thug convention.
We’d agreed on option B, despite Nikki being amused enough by Agnar’s instant attraction to consider giving him more than just an eyeful. But safety first.
“Go on inside,” I said. “I’ll head in through the back.”
She gave me one last disappointed glance. “You know, you could at least have made the attempt to look hot. It wouldn’t have killed you to lose the hoodie for one freaking night.”
“No one’s going to be looking at me.” I gave her a push. “Go.�
�
“I’m going, I’m going.”
Nikki turned on one towering thick rubber heel, then strolled with eye-popping swagger to the front of the line. It parted like the Red Sea, the bouncer at the door letting her in with an easy nod. We’d paid him well to do so, but it was an effective bit of business. Across the street, standing next to his double-parked limo, Agnar pocketed his phone and watched Nikki with unmasked interest. As his gaze swept over her statuesque form, his lips actually parted.
The House of Swords’ data geeks might not have pegged all of ol’ Agnar’s on-site security, but they’d definitely gotten the man’s kink down.
That said, it hadn’t been the eggheads who’d first caught wind of this particular buy. That had come through Nigel Friedman, the chief Ace of the House of Swords and a finder himself, his ear ever to the deepest, darkest ruts of the arcane black market.
A buyer who preferred to remain nameless but who’d been verified through all the usual channels wanted the Gods’ Nails, a particularly mysterious Norse treasure. Thor Bjornsson, apparent owner of said artifacts, hadn’t been interested in selling. Not to be diverted, the buyer announced he wanted the nails no matter how he got them. He’d ratcheted up the finder’s fee on the item, and every international hunter with a need for cash—which was to say, all of them—now had the job on their radar screens.
Ordinarily, Nigel wouldn’t have paid much attention to any of this—jobs went up and came down all the time. According to the rumors behind the rumors, however, the artifact was a binding tool, able to freeze anyone in their tracks…even the most powerful Connecteds. Since I happened to be a Connected with a not-insubstantial skill set, color me interested.
It’d taken some doing to take on the job myself, of course. My years as an artifact finder were, technically, behind me. I had a House to run and easily a dozen finders at my fingertips who could do my wetwork.
But some habits were proving exceptionally hard to break.
Besides, I’d never been to Iceland. A quick trip to the island sounded like just the thing to avoid all the administrative duties lingering after the untimely death of my predecessor, Annika Soo.
Nigel hadn’t been a fan of me getting involved personally. He’d urged me to throw the entire weight of the House of Swords at the problem, including all our bristly bits.
I, however, wasn’t keen on putting my minions at risk. I’d barely gotten them unwrapped. More importantly, the vast resources of my international syndicate were spread out over multiple continents, about to be deployed on a much bigger cause—protecting the most innocent members of the psychic community. I’d need time to figure out how to use those resources effectively, and time was in short supply on this job.
It wasn’t like I was going alone anyway. Nikki Dawes was a more than capable wingman.
The artifacts on this job were also proving satisfyingly mysterious. All we knew about them was that they were an ancient Viking relic from the era of Thorolf Most-Beard, one of Iceland’s founding fathers. But were the Nails actually nails? Knives? Bones? No one seemed to know. And Thor Bjornsson most definitely wasn’t talking.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to. His agent would do just as well.
Per the plan, I skated into the back of the bar, peeling off my hoodie to reveal the club’s black logoed T-shirt. I grabbed a tray and loaded it with several complimentary drinks the bartender had just queued up, an apparent ploy to get the crowd to loosen up their wallets. I slipped into the crowd.
It wasn’t difficult to find Agnar. The tall, blond, ascetically thin aristocrat had a tight knot of security that circled him at five different points, though they seemed to pay no attention to their counterparts already set up at all exits of the bar, near the restrooms, at both ends of the counter, and spread throughout the room. Thor should be paying the club extra for rental space.
I buzzed through the crowd, my tray steadily growing lighter. Every time I glanced over to Nikki, she seemed pulled further into Agnar’s net, the poor sot apparently not realizing he was the one being hunted. His security detail, as fierce as they were, had no problem letting the man sidle up to Nikki. Once she got close enough to touch the man, he was hers. A few random references to generic nails, and Agnar’s mind would undoubtedly stray to the Gods’ Nails he’d been sent to Iceland to retrieve. After that…
“Þjónustustúlka?” The word barely penetrated my ears, but it was one of the few Icelandic terms I’d forced myself to learn, given the givens. It meant “waitress,” and I swiveled around with a broad smile on my face, planning to nod vigorously and move off as soon as possible.
I froze.
Not because I couldn’t actually speak Icelandic either. I didn’t have to—another waitress had heard the request of the tall, slender man as pale as a ghost, his clipped Nordic accent right at home in the Viking capital of the North Atlantic.
However, what stopped me was...I knew the speaker. Well. He’d been one of my top competitors during the bad old days when I was more mercenary than management, and he hated my guts with impressive enthusiasm. The fact that I’d snaked more than my share of artifacts out of his grasp had nothing to do with that, of course. But if he was in the hunt for the Gods’ Nails…
I turned as nonchalantly as I could, reconsidering the bar. The glee club of Agnar’s security personnel seemed to shift in my perspective, and without the veil of my assumptions, I could see them clearly for the first time.
They weren’t security at all. They were finders. Finders who even now were circling around Agnar like sharks in shallow water. These were people who knew the Gods’ Nails were worth a million dollars, minimum. And if even a few of them were working together…
Crap.
Turning abruptly on my heel, I shoved my way back toward the bar, careful to avoid the two operatives from Munich who I should’ve recognized immediately, given I was the one who’d inflicted that nasty scar on the bigger guy’s head. I slid my tray across the counter, reaching into the pocket of my apron for my cards. I hadn’t read them before tonight’s gig, which obviously had been stupid. But we were three days ahead of everyone else! Who needed to read Tarot cards when you had a non-metaphysical jump on the game?
Riffling the deck, I pulled out three cards, flipping them up on the counter in rapid succession. Ten of Swords, Five of Wands, Six of Pents.
I groaned. So not helpful. The Ten of Swords meant betrayal; well, duh. This job was all about backstabbing. We were backstabbing Agnar, and everyone else wanted to backstab each other, either singly or in pods. Moving on.
The Five of Wands presaged an imminent fight. That wasn’t technically part of Nikki’s and my plan, but now that we weren’t the only kids in the sandbox, it probably wasn’t avoidable.
But then…the Six of Pents? That meant, what—a gift from the universe? Coins falling from the sky? People begging for help? A loan coming—
It was the tiniest movement that signaled the beginning of everything going south.
Sometimes fights happened that way, with a turn, a cough, a sigh. This one began with a startled intake of breath three people away from me, at the precise moment that the blaring music died and the throng shifted. I caught a fleeting glance of the gasping woman as her hand came up, the glint of metal flashing in the strobing lights. As I did, I realized I knew her, though I hadn’t seen her since that business in Tibet.
“Gun!” I shouted in English, and across the room, Nikki stood up from her barstool, strong-arming Agnar behind her and decking the nearest thug to the floor even though he wasn’t even looking at Agnar anymore. He was looking toward me…
Toward me.
Wait a minute.
A gun fired somewhere in the back of the room, and Agnar’s bodyguard detail sprang into action while the crowd erupted into a screaming horde of running, panicked people. I twisted past two fleeing patrons and barreled straight into a tag team of mercs from Angola I recognized at the last minute, the force of my unexpected rush knockin
g them into a squalling trio of women who pushed them back like they were leeches. I spun the other way.
Suddenly, a second round of gunfire burst though the room, the bullets barely missing my shoulder as I launched myself over a table. Once again, these people were totally aiming at me, not Agnar. What was going on?
Keeping up my momentum, I tumbled to the other side and scrambled behind some chairs. That positioned me right in front of Agnar and his goons, and as a result, everyone in the room was now aiming at both of us.
Where the hell were all these people coming from? Who’d declared it International Get Sara Day?
Get Sara…
Everything tilted. My Tarot reading resettled along new lines in a brief, startling flash of insight. The Ten of Swords wasn’t Nikki’s and my scam on Agnar, or even him getting hunted down by the other finders. Those nails might have been a target, but they weren’t the most important target tonight.
I was.
This entire job was a setup. A betrayal. Classic Ten of Swords.
The fight presaged by the Five of Wands was already underway in bold relief, and the Six of Pentacles…well, I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean, but I knew what it could mean. And what it could mean…would be super helpful.
I laughed a little crazily, and behind me, Nikki caught my exact tone of nutter. One of the benefits of her being able to read the minds of those she was closest to.
“Sara?” she barked. “Don’t do anything—”
“Keep him safe!” I yelled back, then popped up like the jack-in-the-box I was, a shot zipping past my shoulder so fast, my brain couldn’t quite process the intense wash of pain that ripped through me.
Okay, so apparently, that round hadn’t gone exactly past my shoulder.
“Crap!” I ducked and ran for the door, grateful to finally be hearing the blare of sirens outside as cold air slapped me in the face. As expected, half the guns and their carriers followed me, tracking my zigzagging line as I reached deep inside and found an extra burst of speed. Faces vanished, traffic blurred, lights became streaks in the night as my body pushed past any normal human abilities to put distance between me and my predators—
