Wilde Child 7

by Jenn Stark

  “I am capable of walking, you know,” the Magician said, falling into step beside me out of nowhere.

  I jerked involuntarily to the side, almost falling as Armaeus reached out a hand to grasp my arm, steadying me.

  “Stop doing that!” I hissed, though no one paid us much attention. Early morning runners swerved around us, their minds on whatever music was pumping through their headsets. Sidewalk cleaners pushed brooms alongside their rolling trash cans, and all the fountains along the Strip were silent, their mechanics exposed for checks and repairs. The maintenance of Las Vegas Boulevard always took place in the early morning like this, when the majority of the city was sleeping off the effects of the night before.

  Armaeus settled into his long-legged, easy stride, matching my pace. He released my arm, and I missed the contact instantly, but I folded my arms against my chest, twitching at the fabric of my sleeves to hide my awkwardness.

  After we’d passed the line of gondolas parked at the edge of the still waters of the Venetian’s harbor, the Magician spoke again. “We haven’t found any trace of Gamon’s body, nor indications of her death. We can only assume she’s still alive.”

  I nodded. I’d assumed as much. “Mercault?”

  “In a panic.” Armaeus’s voice dripped with derision. “Ma-Singh has confirmed that the House of Swords is not responding to Mercault’s outreach, and Simon has been tracking all of Mercault’s incoming and outgoing communication. He’s had no contact with Gamon that we can ascertain. His story seems to hold—she reached out to him, revealed her position as head of the House of Cups, entered into an alliance with him. A short-lived alliance, it would seem.”

  “Who’d she kill to get the spot?” It was unbelievable that between technology and magic, we still couldn’t identify two of the four leaders of what were supposedly the last organized syndicates of magic in the world. During my convalescence under Dr. Sells’ care, I’d spoken with Nigel about it, but he’d confirmed he’d only received orders from the House of Cups via coded messages. He’d never once seen the leader of the House or any of his or her generals. And now they were…gone. Vanished.

  “Unknown. And no one’s talking—yet. Cups were not players in the arcane black market, but there will be a leak somewhere, it’ll simply take time.”

  “Time and leverage,” I said grimly. “I suspect Gamon’s pretty convincing on the importance of keeping quiet.”

  “Gamon has long kept a tight hold on her people, and there’s no indication she’s easing that now. Folding in her own network with whatever exists of the Cups’ infrastructure will make her…quite powerful. And quite dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I got that part,” I muttered. I also got something more, something I wasn’t quite sure how to process—Gamon’s face, stark and staring as the goddess…alien…guardian of the galaxy or whatever the hell my mother was flexed and stormed before us. I didn’t know what my mother truly wanted in me, but Gamon would have gladly given it—might still give it, if my banishment of my own flesh and blood didn’t hold. “Gamon’s not the poster child for mental health, Armaeus. And she’s running a House.”

  “Houses that have remained on the sidelines for generations,” Armaeus countered. “Not even with the resources of the Council were we entirely sure about Soo’s operation until very recently. Mercault’s position slipped only because he prefers his vices over his need for secrecy. Even if Gamon is, in fact, leading Cups, we don’t know the impact—there may arguably be none.”

  “There’s some.” I shook my head. “She didn’t take on that role merely to lull Mercault into a side deal. She’s got an end game.” My lips twisted. “And, let’s face it, I haven’t been discreet about my role in the House of Swords. So from a collection of Houses shrouded in secrecy, the entire system is now all but revealed. Especially if Gamon is still alive. I think if we figure out Wands…”

  Armaeus completed my thought. “If we determine the leadership and structure of Wands, then yes, the puzzle will be complete. We’ll know how, or if, the Houses can work together to protect their own.”

  I snorted. “Well, based on the fact that Gamon is now one of the players, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.”

  We moved up the stairs of one of the innumerable pedestrian walkways that now shuttled people above and along Las Vegas Boulevard, cutting down dramatically the traffic jams and accidents that had plagued the city in earlier years. At this hour, the escalators were almost all nonoperational, another victim of the Strip’s maintenance cycle. I glanced down the Strip, past the glittering glass fronts of the newer casinos, to where Prime Luxe hovered over the sphinx and obelisk of the Luxor. Even in the full sunlight, if I looked exactly right, I could catch sight of its towers and ramparts of glass and steel, rising over the end of the Strip like a sentinel.

  “There’s more to discuss than the Houses, though,” Armaeus said. “I lost contact with you at odd moments while you were traveling—sometimes at your discretion, which was always clear, but sometimes at other times, even when you weren’t deliberately blocking me.” The words were said without heat. Armaeus, more than most, understood the challenge I had with allowing him access to my brain. Mainly because I could never fully trust what he was doing when he was scuffing around inside it.

  Still, this was news to me. “Like when?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  “It was obvious, once I considered the problem.” He lifted a lazy hand, tapping the front of my left shoulder, where the slender bone shards of the Gods’ Nails rested inside my jacket. “When these were deeply set in your bones, or when you tapped their power, you were lost to me. Not at first—I could still connect with you when you were in Reykjavik. But as you grew more accustomed to the power of the artifacts, as you welcomed it…” He waved his hand as if batting back a fly. “Your mind was rendered completely blank to me, off-limits. It was quite unlike your focused intention to keep me out. This was…as if you were on another plane altogether, utilizing magic I have not encountered in all my years on this earth.”

  Since Armaeus had been kicking around the planet since the 1100s, this was saying something. “But you analyzed the shards. You gave them back to me. How did you not know this already?”

  “As I said, at first, it wasn’t even something I thought to check. Even now, the magic within the shards is inert. When they were used by Mercault’s assassin, I could plumb the depths of his mind easily, shattered though it was. Not so yours, when they were rightfully returned to you. I’d assumed you were blocking me, or that Mercault’s defenses had strengthened once more.” He shrugged. “I was wrong.”

  I frowned down at my chest, as if I could study the bone fragments through my hoodie. “Which means, what? That these aren’t from earth?”

  “That is the simplest explanation, yes. They are, quite legitimately, of the gods. Or the gods as prehistoric man knew them.”

  “You’re sounding like that Ancient Aliens guy again.”

  Armaeus actually chuckled, and something hard and fierce squeezed in my chest. It somehow was so much more difficult for me to be with him when he acted remotely human. I was used to him being an ass. He was good at it, and I understood it. But moments like these, when he seemed…almost normal…these were the hard times. These were the times that made me wish for something different for us, some alternate balance of power.

  He stopped and pointed to one of the towers down the Strip, and I squinted at it. Excalibur was a particular favorite of mine, for all that it was redolent of early ’90s Vegas kitsch. Its brightly colored domes and ramparts made it a favorite of families and young, less jaded couples, and it was just far enough away from the true center of the Strip to give the illusion of peace and quiet…as quiet as Vegas ever got, anyway.

  “There is a great deal I seem to have not been paying attention to,” he said. “That will need to change. Your concerns about Interpol’s interest in the Connected community were well-founded, and they have sent a ripple through the intelligence com
munity that is already generating alarming reports of psychic profiling and targeting. As a Council, we have lived through waves of such targeting in the past.”

  “The Salem witch trials?”

  “That’s one of many.” He nodded. “As was the Roman occupation. The Spanish Inquisition. The massacre of the Templars. More recently, state-sponsored genocides from extremist regimes in various pockets throughout the world. Those, we managed to get through. This, I’m not as sure we can. Coordinated at an international level, yet carried out just beneath the surface of public awareness, these communities could be expunged without anyone knowing they were gone. The very anonymity of the Connected community could lead to its undoing…an undoing we anticipated from outside the veil, not within it. Which…changes things.”

  “Changes them how?” I didn’t mean my question to come out so pointedly, but any mention of the veil took me perilously close to thoughts I couldn’t quite process yet. The keeper of the veil, the Hermit, was a well-known Council member…and my father. Beyond that, all I pretty much knew about him was that he kept the veil stitched together. Not why, and not for how long. I’d assumed that was predominantly because he needed to keep a low profile, given that his enemies included creatures like Llyr, the ancient ruler of Atlantis whose banishment had precipitated a little historical gem of a story known as the Great Flood. But now I knew who else the Hermit had been keeping out of late: my mother. I just didn’t know precisely why.

  Armaeus wasn’t an idiot, of course. He sent me a cool glance that communicated that he knew what I was thinking about, then waved again. The ramparts above Excalibur seemed to extend upward far beyond its last fluttering flag, not a tower at all but a double curving staircase of easily a million stairs, shooting up into the clouds. At its top was a single domed building, more like a cell than anything approaching a residence.

  “That appeared on our horizon last night, while you were recovering in the hospital. But I have been expecting it for some time.”

  “You…” I swallowed. “You got a new member of the Council to turn up?”

  “Not a new one, and not for long, I suspect. But the Hermit of the Arcana Council has remained on the other side of the veil long enough.”

  I stared, barely willing to believe it. “The Hermit…my father…is coming for a visit. And you made up an extra bed for him. Because Prime Luxe is too small for him to stay in one of its seven thousand rooms.”

  Armaeus’s smile was thin. “The residence of the Hermit was his own creation, and subtly done. None may touch him there, affording him an oasis of calm in the chaos that his return is sure to bring.”

  “Oh?” I asked. Chaos didn’t sound good, but Armaeus merely shrugged. He turned again, gesturing. We were forced to mount another pedestrian walkway, this one taking us directly in front of Excalibur and its Hermit’s perch.

  “It’s inevitable,” he said at length, after we’d cleared the stairs and moved out over the street below. “It is not every day that a Council Member is made to answer for his crimes.”

  I stopped short, halfway across the pedestrian bridge, and stared at Armaeus. “Um…what crimes would those be, exactly?”

  “His decision to bring a child into this world is not one that we took lightly, but when it was discovered, it was determined there was no true harm. You were raised without knowledge of the Hermit’s actions, you were valuable to the Council, and he continued to do a job that very few people in this plane are capable of doing.”

  “You let it slide, in other words.”

  “We let it slide. However—he also did not disclose your true mother, merely assured us she would never pose a problem. As you can see”—Armaeus waved toward me—“that is most assuredly not the case. Her interest in you is concerning, though, in its way, inevitable. Her interest in the power she might wield in this plane, however, and the fact that she was able to penetrate what I suspect were highly fortified barriers…is far more problematic.”

  “And who is ‘she’ exactly?” Forcing these words past my lips was more difficult than I expected. It was one thing to learn your mother was a pain in the ass—a drunk, a drug addict, a criminal. I could handle that. I’d grown up with that, if I really looked hard enough at the truth. But this…

  Armaeus sighed, then shook his head. “We don’t know. In the time of Atlantis, the pantheons of gods that warred over earth was richer than you can imagine. The records of that time were deliberately expunged over the years except for the barest crumbs of information.”

  “But you don’t need records. You’ve got Michael. He was around then.”

  “The Hierophant withdrew into seclusion at approximately the same time your mother burst through the veil. He has been unresponsive since.”

  “Unresponsive?” I stared at him. “That’s not seclusion, that’s a coma.”

  Armaeus didn’t reply to that and I grimaced, feeling a renewed headache coming on. “So whatever Mom is, it’s bad enough to send the Archangel Michael into hiding. That’s…that’s not good, right? That can’t be good.”

  “It is neither good nor bad, until we know more. But your mother is definitely outside the realm of what we understand, and her ability to penetrate the veil at this particular time is disturbing.” Armaeus glanced coldly at the spiraling staircases atop Excalibur, faintly outlined in the bright, sunlit sky. “There’s far more going on within the Council than I suspected, and I think I have more than the Hermit to watch.”

  “Tell me about it,” I muttered. Armaeus wasn’t the only one with personnel problems, though. Gamon was out there, Mercault was flopping around like a fish on a dock, and somewhere in the shadows lurked the House of Wands. If we stood apart, we should surely fail. But if we joined forces…and didn’t kill each other…maybe we wouldn’t need the intercession of the Council to fight our battles. Maybe we could fight them ourselves.

  I looked at Armaeus as he stared hard at the spiraling stairs of the Hermit’s domain. In fact, if we played this right…maybe for once the Council would be in our debt instead. I really liked that idea, I realized, and I liked the options it gave us. Options not only for the House of Swords, but for all Connected people everywhere, struggling to preserve their place in this world.

  A fierce emotion surged within me, quick and hot. I let a grin curve the corner of my mouth as I considered all the angles.

  This was Vegas, after all.

  You should never bet against the House.

  Call of the Wilde

  Join Sara in August, 2017 as the war on magic flares to sudden, brutal life, requiring her to summon the four Houses of Magic for an epically contentious summit. Together they must forge an alliance to preserve the Connected world as they know it—if they don’t kill each other first. Meanwhile, Sara must grapple with who (and what) her mother truly is, unearth a growing threat within the local Connected community…and come to terms with the newest member of the Arcane Council: a powerful, provocative sorceress hand-picked by Armaeus to serve as the Council’s new Empress.

  Want to keep apprised of the latest news of Immortal Vegas, get sneak peaks and free books? Sign up for my newsletter at www.jennstark.com/newsletter!

  A Note From Jenn

  Sara’s reading in the opening chapter of Wilde Child begins as a bit of a misdirection—showing that there’s always more than one way to read the cards. Those cards’ general interpretations are below, which fit most situations…unless you’re about to walk into a fight. In that case, keep your wits about you and your eyes sharp!

  The Ten of Swords

  The Ten of Swords is always a nasty bit of business to draw in a reading, symbolizing the feeling of being stabbed in the back, or utter defeat. While the dawn breaking on the horizon offers a hopeful note, typically this card indicates that you are facing an irrevocable ending, one that generally is accompanied by pain, regret, and sorrow. In a medical/health reading, this card does not signify anything more than you’re about to go under the knife (or are experien
cing pain in your back/midsection)—it’s not a negative card in medical readings so much as an indication of pain. When you draw the Ten of Swords, be willing to let go what you must (or brace yourself for an ending you might not be ready to make), and know that you are strong enough to survive this ending. Better things are waiting for you on the horizon!

  The Five of Wands

  Get ready for action! The Five of Wands is all about jumping into the thick of things, whether as part of a sporting event, competition, or flat out fight. You could have several people vying for your attention (or your services/products) or you could feel like you are in a tightly competitive market. Minor injuries can result from moving too fast or acting rashly, so be careful out there! When you draw the Five of Wands, make sure you’re psyched up for action. You may find that the competition is fierce—or simply that you’re thrust into the middle of a very active day, with lots of rushing activity that keeps you on your toes. You’ve got what it takes to make the most of your opportunities if you’re willing to play the game—but this card puts you on notice that you can’t sit on the sidelines any longer!

  The Six of Pentacles

  The Six of Pentacles is one of the most reassuring cards in the minor arcana, because it’s all about getting what is due to you. Granted, if you have been loaned money you may find that this loan is coming due, but most of the time this card symbolizes that whatever you’ve put out in the universe is coming back to you three-fold. Positive thoughts, forward-moving action, and sincere effort is all rewarded here, with the universe showering you with gifts. When you draw the Six of Pentacles, consider your own situation. If you don’t have any outstanding debts that you’ve been avoiding, you will almost certainly receive the blessings of the universe in some way. If you do have a debt, you may find the funds to repay it appear in an unexpected way. Pay attention, too, to how you can help others who are less fortunate. Anything you give is ultimately a gift to yourself.