Twelve Shades of Midnight:

by Liliana Hart

  For his part, Aleksander Kreios tilted his head, studying Nikki from the tips of her streaked brown wig to the toes of her sharp-pointed shoes, pausing notably to study her impressive—and very expensive—assets. He held up a hand, a card having materialized in it, which he slid into the plunging vee of Nikki’s cleavage. “Please stop by my club anytime, Miss Dawes,” he drawled as Nikki’s eyes dilated despite the scorching sun beating down on us.

  She issued a sound that might have been a whimper, but, ever the professional, she dutifully opened the door for us. We slid into the cool comfort of the limousine, and I found myself relaxing for one precious moment. Just one—but damned if it wasn’t a good one.

  “Straight to the man in black?” Nikki asked again, her composure firmly back in place as she flicked a glance in the rearview mirror. I hadn’t seen if she’d palmed the card out of her bra or not, but knowing Nikki, probably not.

  “It’s a pity we don’t have time to stop at Fremont Street.” Kreios sighed. “So much unfinished business there.”

  “On Fremont?” I met Nikki’s eyes in the rearview mirror, and just like that, my moment had passed. So that was where the girls from Kavala were.

  Fremont Street was the home of the Las Vegas of yesteryear, where the city had really gotten its start before the heyday of the Strip had taken over with its ever-growing casinos and entertainment complexes. Though the Arcanans preferred the wide-open Strip for their immense personal dwellings, the older part of the city still drew its share of magic.

  It was just the darker side of magic. As in pitch-black. Nikki and her fellow carnies who worked the Strip had their hands full keeping the young and the newly arrived in Vegas from straying into that hellhole, but it wasn’t an easy battle. And each year, from what little she’d told me so far, it was getting a bit more difficult.

  “Yes,” Kreios sighed languorously. “The gentleman who gave me such poor information on my contacts in Hungary makes his living in the back of Binion’s, as it happens. I shall have to pay him a visit soon.”

  “Not the nicest casino anymore,” Nikki observed, and I turned to see Kreios’s smile grow craftier.

  “It suits him that way, I suspect,” he said. “The fewer respectable people in the front of the house, the easier it is to get his business done in the back.”

  “The back? You mean Vato’s?” Nikki regarded the Devil in her rearview mirror. “Nothing there but a highly questionable collection of stogies.”

  I cut short the inevitable conversation on cigars as Kreios’s interest was piqued. “And what sort of business would your one-time friend carry on in such an illustrious location?” I knew what Kreios was doing, but I also remembered his promise from the airplane. His penchant for the truth carried an eerie sort of excitement with it. He would speak honestly, I was sure, but that didn’t mean he would not still be deceiving us.

  “His newest venture is the recreation of the Oracle of Delphi, as it happens,” Kreios drawled. “He was very excited about it—so much potential. He spoke of his search to find perfect young women for his masterpiece, lovely, pure psychics who would feast upon the mix of gasses once available only on the mountain of—”

  “Cut the crap, Kreios,” I snapped, staring at him. “Where specifically is he keeping them?”

  Kreios’s eyes flared, and he tilted his head, almost as if he was scenting the air for corruption. “They are deep in the center of his holding,” he said. “To get to them, you must go through a raft of other young women, all psychics, all blindfolded and in most pitiable condition, I’m afraid. One who is even missing her ears.”

  “Hold the phones.” Nikki’s voice erupted from the front seat, startling me, though Kreios seemed unaffected. With a quick jerk of the wheel, she knifed the limo into a bus stop space, then turned in her seat. “What are you—”

  Her voice dropped off sharply. Kreios had vanished.

  Her gaze swung to me. “Those girls he mentioned—not the oracles, but the blindfolded ones. We’ve lost six girls from Dixie’s in the last three months, Sara. Six. All of them too damned dumb to live, but Dixie was doing her level best to keep them safe, like she does every pitiful soul that crosses her shadow. One of them”—she punched a long, lacquered nail to where Kreios had been sitting—“had had her ears removed when she was six years old.” Nikki’s lips curled into a snarl. “Because of the things she heard.”

  I tightened my own lips. “I never did like Binion’s,” I said. “But now that we’ve lost our fare…”

  “Maybe we should give it another shot,” she agreed. “Hang on.”

  Nikki wheeled the car around into traffic, and we shot back onto Paradise Road a minute later, weaving our way through the heavy knot of tourists. “Where’d pretty boy go, anyway?” she asked over her shoulder. “The Magician gonna be all hot and bothered you didn’t deliver him?”

  “I suspect they’ll find each other eventually.” And Kreios would have some explaining to do when they did. In my mind’s eye, I imagined the Devil securing his golden reliquary in one of the exhaust pipes of Armaeus’s private jet. The thing would have been incinerated immediately. I had a bad feeling that would reflect poorly in my compensation for this little adventure, but given that the thing had been turned into Kreios’s prison, I could hardly blame the guy for wanting it destroyed. Now I wondered if he had even entered the limo with us, or if he’d taken his leave after depositing his card into Nikki’s bra. “You still have his card?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s been keeping my altogether warm for the past twenty minutes. Which one is he, anyway? Not that I’m planning to pay him a visit, but—”

  “The Devil.”

  Nikki’s mouth clapped shut. Then she muttered, “Be still my heart.”

  We parked a quarter mile away from Binion’s. The “Fremont Street experience” included many things, but quick access to your vehicle generally wasn’t one of them. Nikki changed out of her chauffeur getup into her usual street wear, and now she lounged in a rare stretch of shade as she placed a call to Dixie at the chapel, sharing the plan and putting in an order for transportation. Shed of her uniform and cap, Nikki’s perfect brown mane of hair was pulled into an all-business ponytail, and her statuesque figure made the most of shiny black tights above her black stilettos. Her silky fuchsia halter top had a death hold on her chest, but her tiny bolero jacket was not exactly functional. Clicking off her phone, she looked down at herself in disgust. “Now how in the hell am I going to pack a gun in this?”

  “You’re not,” I said, reaching into my boot and tossing her the switchblade I kept there for special occasions. She made another disgusted moue as she slid the blade out of sight between her breasts. “I’m better with a gun.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I didn’t know Nikki all that well, as I never stayed in the city longer than a minute and a half if I could help it. But Vegas being Vegas, we didn’t draw much attention as we strode down Fremont Street, reaching the old casino in just a few minutes. The stench of the place—cigarette smoke embedded into the very walls—greeted us almost before we entered the door, but it didn’t take long to get used to the gloom inside. Binion’s was an old-style casino, if by old-style you meant broke down and wheezing, with just a glimmer of its old glory days shimmering beneath the worn façade. We pushed our way toward the cigar purveyor at the back of the building, and I slid my hand in my jacket, fanning through the cards. I pulled one out from the center of the deck and glanced down at it.

  “I love it when you do that,” Nikki murmured beside me. “What’s tricks?”

  Miss Wilde, what is it you think you’re doing?

  “Wheel,” I said, ignoring Armaeus’s voice in my head. Apparently he’d figured out that we were no longer on our way to his fortress with the Devil in tow. Why couldn’t Vegas be built on a lake? “Not like we didn’t just pass a half-dozen roulette tables back there or anything.”

  “Or, you know, not like there isn’t one right in front of us.�
�� Nikki smirked. The dark, stained-paneled corridor led down toward ominous-looking restrooms at the far end, but what Nikki was eyeing was an old clipping pasted to the paneled wall with a roulette wheel prominently featured. She scanned down the panel for a doorknob, but there wasn’t any in evidence. Still, the place just had the feel of a door. “You think—” Nikki began.

  “You ladies lost?” A gruff voice at my side drew me up short, and Nikki stiffened as well.

  Her voice, when it sounded next, was a study in tremulous fear.

  “We…we have questions that no one can answer,” Nikki said, her words barely a mumble, as if she’d mixed the wrong pills and downed the combination with a tumbler of vodka. “We were sent here for help. Please, honey—we have money. Lots of money.” I kept my head down, doing my level best to scuff my boots on the ground. I never could pull off feminine, so I did better with desperate and scruffy.

  “You’re looking for answers?” The man leered, sticking his face into Nikki’s chest. “You come back up front when you’re done, and I’ll give you all the answers you need.” He laughed at his own joke, then banged on the wall. The panel behind the roulette wheel image pulled back, clearly a one-way door, and red light poured out of the opening. “That way.” The bouncer jerked his thumb toward the ominous hallway.

  No, Miss Wilde, do not—

  The Magician’s voice was cut short as the bouncer shoved us forward, apparently either not expecting us to be armed or not caring. Stupid, but not surprising in the community of dark practitioners. It was as if the things of this earth somehow took a backseat to true mystical powers. We walked down the shadowy hallway, peering through the murky red light. The place stank so badly, it was a miracle anyone ever came back here on purpose.

  Then we were dumped into a much larger room with pounding music and the acrid smell of burning flesh heavy in the air. When my eyes finally adjusted, I revised my opinion. Based on what I was seeing, it was a miracle anyone made it out alive.

  The place was a demon hole.

  A favorite construct of the practitioners of the dark arts, demon holes were half-club, half-rave, all illegal. Bodies were packed into the tight space, writhing and churning, partiers of every shape and size, all of them clearly transported by any of a dozen synthetic cocktails mixing drugs, hallucinogenics, and magical stimulants. Music blasted from every direction, so loud the bass seemed to jump the floor. How had we not heard this outside? Then screams of delight went up, and we saw the central attraction as we passed along its outskirts.

  Six young women, undoubtedly the carnies from Dixie’s operation, were tied together on a long rope, blindfolded and standing in the middle of the room. Snaking around them was a sort of small labyrinth of flame made by ropes soaked in something toxic, sending up short, flickering curtains of blue-white fire. The game was immediately obvious and chilling in its cruelty: the girls were expected to work their way out of the maze without getting scorched, calling upon their apparent “psychic abilities” to get the job done. From the looks of their worn, emaciated forms crisscrossed with burns, their Sight was weakening along with their bodies.

  “Sweet mother of Jesus,” Nikki hissed beside me.

  “We’ll get them,” I promised her. But they weren’t the only lost souls in this den, and perhaps more importantly, they weren’t the ones who would give us the answers we were supposedly seeking. The guy at our back pushed us toward another door, this one flanked by two enormous bodyguards, their muscled bodies looking like something out of a comic book. Thick plugs stretched the guards’ earlobes and heavy metal horseshoes hung from their wide noses, and their soulless eyes watched us levelly as we approached.

  Their heavily pierced and modded bodies were also completely naked, a fact that was not lost on Nikki. “I do admire their personnel standards here, I’ll give you that,” she murmured. The men didn’t respond, but I could feel their gazes shift away from me to focus on Nikki, even as they stood aside at the sharp command of the man behind us.

  The door swung wide to welcome us into the room of Oracles.

  Chapter Ten

  The thick stump of a man at the center of the room was not the most interesting thing in the place, but he was the most important. Even better, I knew him. Sort of. Jerry Fitz had been one of the few buyers of magical artifacts I’d been told to steer away from by many of my earliest mentors in this business, though I didn’t realize he’d set up shop in Vegas. And the picture I’d been given of him five years ago when I’d gone after my first artifact had clearly been pre-body mods. Now it looked like Fitz had more metal and plastic implanted under his skin than the Terminator, with not terribly attractive results. But he did look scary enough.

  “What is your question?” he asked, turning away from his high-tech command center, with its knobs and screens and levers. He glanced at Nikki, smiling indulgently at her garish outfit, then switched his gaze to me.

  And froze.

  “You…” he said wonderingly, before barking out a command in some language that—once again—I couldn’t recognize.

  Clearly, I needed to brush up on my ancient tongues.

  In the space of a breath, two guards were at either side of me, bracing my arms so hard they lifted me off my feet. Another two guards held Nikki—the bouncers from the front door, as it happened, which I didn’t know was a good thing or a bad thing. Without being told to do so, they pulled her from the room and back into the chaos of the club, so I decided: good thing.

  Meanwhile, my personal set of guards had liberated the gun from my holster as well as my deck of cards, dumping both on the table in front of me, along with my box of Tic Tacs, cell phone, some stray euros, my tourist map of Rome…and a keyfob-sized Magic 8 Ball. I frowned at the last item. Granted, it was a really cute item to have on hand as a back-up to my cards, but it wasn’t mine. In fact, I’d never seen the thing before. Where the hell had it come from?

  That thought, of course, led me straight to Kreios. Had the Devil planted the toy on me when I wasn’t looking? And if so, why?

  Ignoring both me and my perplexing pocket pickle, Jerry Fitz leaned over the console in front of him. Suddenly the panels lining the wall slid apart, revealing two stunning young women collapsed on the floor behind a sheet of glass. I surged forward, but the guards held me tight. The two sprawled girls were nearly naked, their hair fanning out around them, but there was no question that they were the twins from Father Jerome’s list—matching black hair, pale skin, delicate features, long limbs. Greek goddesses in the flesh who moved only when a gong-like chime sounded at a flip of Fitz’s fingers.

  With an almost ghostly languor, the girls stretched upright, stirring toward wakefulness. Eventually, they pulled themselves to their knees, and then their vacant gazes swung toward the glass. Resolve knifed through me. These faces would not haunt me, dammit—they would not join the ranks of the missing whose lives I could not save.

  “It has taken many years to perfect the formula,” Fitz was saying, though no one had asked, fiddling with more controls as I forced myself to stand still. I couldn’t overpower the guards without my gun, so I scanned the room, trying to see anything that would help me. Nothing. The place was vintage Hugh Hefner, all silk pillows and shag rugs, rosy light and artful porn. Shelves filled with artifacts lined the walls, some of the pieces worth quite a bit to my trained eye, but none of them close enough to matter.

  An unearthly moan sounded over the speakers, and my gaze snapped back to the glass wall. The young women in the chamber were now swaying, colorful gas filling the room around them. Fitz turned another dial, smiling as their faces creased in pain. “I call it Pythene: methane, ethylene, benzene, and a few other nice additions to make the oracles more animated,” he said, watching the girls as if they were his prized pets. “Admittedly, the combination proves quite lethal after prolonged exposure. But there are always more voices to add to the song.” His oily glance slid over to me. “Like yours, my dear. I have a knack for sensing talen
t, I should tell you. Yours is exquisite.” His hand shook with his own pleasure, and I narrowed my gaze on his wrist. A large black metal cuff adorned it, etched with a glyph that looked almost like—

  “Speak!” Fitz commanded, still watching me, and I jerked my gaze back toward the girls. They now stood pressed up against the glass. Despite myself, I shrank away. Their eyes were dead, their mouths agape. And they were staring at me.

  “You are chosen,” they intoned, and Fitz leered at me.

  “You see? I am never wrong.” He turned back to the women. “Why is she here?”

  “Finder!” the woman on the right cried out, her hands lifting to her ears. “Chosen!” the other moaned before lapsing into unintelligible babble. They both rocked on unsteady feet, their loose shifts slipping off their shoulders, revealing the bodies of girls who were barely teenagers. They pressed their hands against the glass now as if straining to get out, their faces tight with pain. “Darkness is coming, beyond which you have ever seen,” they all but sobbed in near tandem, one echoing the other in some sort of twisted overdub. Revulsion coiled in my stomach at their words, their panicked faces. What must these women be seeing?

  Fitz almost giggled with excitement. “And so you have come to me, to achieve your potential.” With another sharp crack of command from him, the guards shoved me down to my knees. I was now eye level with my scattered cards.