Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4

by Jenn Stark

  My eyes went wide. “Okay, maybe people do want to get into a fight on a boat.”

  Ren slammed his hand hard against the table and shouted something in Japanese, and half the men pounded out of the room. Then he grabbed his phone and snapped into it, clearly ordering the men in the water to keep going as he stabbed at the image on the screen. The water roiled around the divers, and they were having a hard time staying planted with the unit.

  “Ren, they aren’t going to be able to stay down there.” I stared at the weather screen. The storm reached toward us with hungry tentacles.

  Ren barked something else, and the men pushed the sonar unit forward once more, plumbing the depths of the stone. The entire screen snapped with a sudden bright light, then went to static.

  “General Asaki!”

  The well-dressed scientist was now at the traffic screen, staring at his monitor as his hands flew over the keys. “The waves—the speedboats are deflecting. They won’t be able to reach us.”

  “Impossible. The storm is not that strong.”

  “It seems… it seems there is something coming beneath their boats. Through the water. A para-electrical displacement of a mass equal to the storm.” He twirled the knobs on the unit, but the display started skittering out of control before devolving into static as well. He turned and stared at Ren. “It will hit us squarely if we remain.”

  “Get the men out of the water,” Ren ordered, then followed up his words with another burst of Japanese.

  A second scream sounded over the intercom from the stateroom, and Ren taught me a few new Japanese curse words. “What is going on?” He unholstered his gun and handed it to me, then pulled another for himself, all the while hurling orders at the scientists, apparently directing them to stay out of the fight. They appeared distinctly happy to comply.

  Then he raced out the door, the guards on his heels. I followed quickly behind, bolting up the stairs as I tore through all the possible meanings of the cards I’d pulled. The Five of Wands was easy—it was a fight, plain and simple, and there was definitely something of that sort going on in the stateroom. The Moon was multilayered, as the moon always was, but it presaged disruption, storms, murkiness, and…I slowed. And the occult.

  The tight knot in my stomach tied a few more macramé loops. Those “dark forces” that were causing the emperor to pay attention to his dreams—they could easily be the dark practitioners of the Connected community, men and women dedicated to the pursuit of psychic augmentation at any cost. Had they found us out, somehow? Did they want the Yonaguni artifact for their own?

  “Ren!” I shouted. I picked up speed again, but Ren was already out the stairwell and down the long corridor, heading into the stateroom. A few seconds later, I burst through the door as well, and nearly got speared for my troubles.

  “You!” the woman shouted, or at least that was what I thought she said as she drew back her sword and reset her position. Dressed in a simple shift and no longer saddled by the heavy Japanese kimono, the geisha remained serene, her face beautifully painted, her hair expertly coiffed as she carefully prepared to thrust at me again.

  She appeared to be a stickler for tradition. Fortunately, I wasn’t.

  I ducked and rushed her before she could strike, hitting her low and sending her sprawling with the unexpected hit. Then I clocked her with the butt of my gun and wrestled the sword free from her limp hand.

  Whirling around, I took in the situation. The women had beaten the dignitaries and politicians down and were engaged in fighting the guards, apparently with a specific goal of keeping them off the wide deck. The guards, not wanting to shoot any guests of the Chrysanthemum Throne without direct orders, I suspected, were allowing themselves to be herded for the moment. Who were these women?

  “Get back!” Another sword flashed in front of me, razor-sharp. I flinched and brandished my blade—only to remember I had no experience in swordplay as a new geisha fixed me with a steely-eyed glare and sank into warrior pose.

  I had no allegiance to these women and needed no permission to shoot them. Besides, what was so important about the veranda that they didn’t want us out there?

  I tossed the sword to the side. The geisha tracked the blade with a flick of her eyes, and I shot her in the shoulder, running for the open doors as she spun away from me with a pained cry. The ocean was white capped and furious, but Ren was right. The storm wasn’t that bad—high winds and an angry sky so far, with rain only just beginning to pelt down as I raced outside onto the deck.

  Despite the rain, the sea was calm—too calm, I thought, and I headed for the railing. The men had surfaced below and were scrambling up the side of the yacht, but there was nothing following them in the water, despite what the scientist below had thought he’d seen. No kraken ready to pounce from the ocean’s depths.

  Ren strode out onto the deck as well, having also worked his way past the geisha shield. He spared a glance at the injured woman crawling toward us before signaling to his guard to handle her. “Akuma!” he growled. At my confused stare, he amended. “Demons. That’s all they keep saying. They serve the demon and protect his domain.”

  “But—” I stared all around. “There’re no demons here. Trust me, I’m getting to be an expert.”

  An unearthly howl from the heavens blew right through us, and the last card of my reading exploded into flames in my mind’s eye, singeing my retinas and kicking me in the head. Literally.

  The Hanged Man, my brain screamed. The card that turned everything upside down.

  The attack wasn’t coming from below…

  It was coming from above.

  I stumbled back as the clouds burst forth with a bellow of rage, huge straining tentacles plunging into the water all around the yacht and flopping onto the wide deck. The geishas screamed with exultant battle cries and renewed their attacks on the guards, who were unable to keep them contained inside the stateroom.

  “No!” Ren and I turned as one, but the women were the least of our troubles. A mighty thud lifted me off my feet as a thick, crackling tentacle hit the metal banister, creating a burst of sparks. I barely ducked in time to avoid another limb’s swipe as it punched into the main doors of the stateroom. Glass shattered and guards were leveled, while the geishas jumped lithely from ledge to wall to floor again, elegantly evading the snaking tentacles. A half-dozen more thick limbs dropped around the boat and spilled onto the veranda as I scrambled to the side, my handgun so useless now I threw it to the floor.

  “What is this thing!” I cried, but my words were lost as the wind began to howl and waves surged around us. More of the women raced forward, face paint leaking onto their clothes as they swayed in the storm, somehow managing not to get electrocuted or flattened by tentacles. Ren cursed and flung himself toward the sizzling banister to stop a woman from barreling overboard. I cringed back as a thick yellow limb blasted hard into the water, its impact against the ocean floor as loud as the sound barrier being broken.

  Another burst of tentacles uncoiled and dropped all around the yacht, and the Eight of Swords clarifying card flashed into my mind. It depicted a woman loosely bound, surrounded by swords that were shoved into the ground. But she could escape—she could.

  She simply had to take the first step.

  The rain doubled in intensity as Ren wheeled back toward me, struggling against the wind. Somewhere he’d picked up a semiautomatic rifle, his eyes alight with fury and fear.

  “No!” I shouted as he reached me. “It’s protecting the artifact—protecting it! We need to let it know we understand that!”

  “What are you talking about!”

  I beat on Ren’s gun arm until he lowered the rifle. “The artifact! Once we communicate that we’re not going to touch it, we’ll be okay. But I have to connect with that thing. So get the women back—get them back!”

  Blinding flashes of electricity crackled anew as another tentacle slid along the metal banister, slithering toward the guards who’d finally gotten the
geishas corralled again. More tentacles pounded into the ocean floor, sending the women’s screams into a fevered pitch. In moments the boat would be surrounded—or punctured. I knew I had to connect, and the Eight of Swords counseled taking a step out blindly to make that connection, but geez that step would suck.

  I didn’t have time to question, though. Squinting hard against the rain, I raced forward and threw myself off the side of the boat, wrapping my arms around the nearest tentacle as it flopped off the deck and back toward the ocean.

  For one endless second, the creature’s bellow of rage, confusion, and longing superseded the fiery blast of agony that raced along my nerves.

  Then my entire body was electrified with soul-shattering pain.

  This was so going to leave a mark.

  Chapter Two

  “Miss Wilde.”

  I jerked awake, which made everything in my body howl in muted agony. The muting appeared to be courtesy of industrial-strength painkillers and the fact that I was wrapped in enough cool fabrics to constitute a sensory deprivation tank.

  On the upside, this meant someone was taking care of me. I wasn’t merely a burn mark on a sky kraken’s elbow. On the downside, I was apparently in pretty bad shape.

  But the voice that spoke in my head was as insistent as it was familiar.

  “Miss Wilde.”

  “I’m asleep,” I mumbled. I didn’t want the Magician in my head. I didn’t want him near me, not now, when everything on my body ached and I suspected that he wouldn’t merely try to heal me but give me a lecture as well.

  Laughter scored across my nerve endings, and the traitorous bastards felt better for it. “I’m here to help you. Let me.”

  “Go to Hell.” This wasn’t an unreasonable request. The Magician of the Arcana Council should already have left for Dante’s playground in search of the Hierophant, a Council member who’d been hanging out down under for going on six thousand years or so. For Armaeus to be lollygagging around so he could jump in to save me was both prescient and insulting at once. “You should have been there and back by now.”

  “Tomorrow.” He waited a beat. “You should not have done what you did.”

  I groaned, trying to shore up my mental barriers, to no avail. I was too weak and in too much pain to ignore the comfort that the Magician’s touch would give me. “Don’t I at least get healed first before the speech?”

  The Magician’s laughter expanded, and my mind broke like cheap glass. I lowered my mental barriers entirely to allow him to flow past my defenses, to flood my senses with a deep, soothing balm. It was an ebullient, effervescent, life-altering bliss that broke the charts, marred solely by the fact that he kept talking.

  “Allow me to restate. You should not have been able to do what you did. With the…” His voice drifted off or I did, and I dropped into decadent slumber. It wasn’t always this easy to let the Magician work his, well, magic. For the entire duration of our relationship, up until a few short weeks ago, his touch had incited as much panic as pleasure in me. I wanted his touch, craved it even, but I was terrified of it all the same. But recently, that had changed. The Magician had traded in his Immortal ID tags for a walk on the mortal side, and the result had been—

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I blinked back to awareness as the healing balm to my nerves drifted decidedly south. “I’m not burned there.”

  “You resist what you most want,” the Magician murmured. “I’ll never understand that.”

  “Work on it. Bad enough someone’s eventually going to come in here and find me healed. Let’s not have them find me happy as…ohh.” I sank briefly into subverbal instant gratification, before clawing my way back out again. “I said stop.”

  “You aren’t healed, exactly.” Armaeus said. “I can only do so much without touching you. But you will heal. And when I see you again, we’ll need to talk about setting boundaries.”

  I snorted. “That’s a first.”

  “Until then…” I noted the departure of the soothing mist immediately, but I sensed Armaeus hadn’t left yet, and my instincts were rewarded a moment later as I felt a soft, insistent pressure on my lips.

  My heart rate jacked, but I kissed him back anyway, reveling in the miracle that was his mouth, his skin, the essence of him around, above, and through me. I didn’t understand the Magician; I didn’t want to understand him. For now, it was enough that he existed and, for whatever reason, had the urge to put me back together whenever I broke myself.

  Considering how often that happened, I’d take it.

  “I won’t sense you once I leave this plane,” he murmured, his mouth moving hungrily along my jaw until it reached the sensitive skin below my ear. “Outreach is not that exact.”

  “Try,” I said, before I could stop myself.

  Armaeus paused, clearly startled, then pressed his mouth over mine again. “As you wish,” he murmured, making the last word drift across sixteen time zones as he dissolved.

  Too exhausted to come up with a Princess Bride comeback, I faded to black as well, my chart pinging like a Vegas slot machine. A phalanx of nurses burst into my room, but I truly didn’t care anymore.

  The next time I opened my eyes, however, I cared a little more. I did.

  I especially cared about the gloved hand smashed against my mouth.

  “Don’t scream.” The voice was low, guttural, and definitely not Japanese. “You can see?”

  I nodded once as the man waved a gun in front of my face, the silencer evident on its tip. I could smell too. The gloved man’s pistol had been fired recently. That was never good.

  “You can walk. We go.”

  This wasn’t a question, and I winced as the man ripped the luxurious bedcovers off my body with no further warning. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing a standard-issue hospital gown but a tunic and scrub-like pants, the skin beneath still damp with what appeared to be heavy-duty cold cream. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and the intruder hauled me to a seated position. He was small framed but strong, his face covered by a thin black mask. Another man appeared next to the bed and shoved my boots at me, but I fumbled the catch. Wasn’t this room guarded? Shouldn’t someone be noticing the fact that I was about to be abducted wearing nothing but scrubs and Noxzema?

  With a snapped order that sounded suspiciously German, the first man braced me as the second dropped to his knees and laced the boots on my feet, never mind socks. I decided this wasn’t the best time to bring up the subject of blisters.

  Hoisting me upright, Thug One let me walk a few steps. “Good.” He nodded. “We go silent. There is a garden, then a back entrance and car. You scream, you die. I get paid either way.”

  Not waiting for my response, he turned, the other man filing in behind me.

  Who would want me badly enough to send kidnappers here? I frowned, trying to force my brain past the residual morphine haze. The Japanese dark practitioners weren’t that organized, I was almost certain. Then again, the emperor’s yacht had been nearly surrounded by national security forces prior to the electrical storm. Had the military been there solely to protect the dignitaries, or were they after more?

  The Imperial Palace was eerily silent, and I blinked down the first darkened hallway we entered. There wasn’t a soul in sight. These two men were either the guards assigned to my room, or they’d killed the guards. Either way, they knew their way around the palace, which was another tick mark in favor of a military-backed operation.

  Still, why were they after me? I considered the unfairness of it all as we slipped down two more long hallways before the night opened above us and we stepped into a moonlit courtyard. I recognized the spot from the first time I’d visited the emperor—a narrow strip of green space between the palace and the outer walls, like a landscaped moat. Shadows hung heavily along the walls, and that was where we headed, skirting the garden and its cheerful fountains and shimmering pools.

  I ripped through my options as we trudged along. If these guys were being paid by th
e Japanese military, I needed out of the palace no matter what. Once on the street, I had maybe one chance. The goons hadn’t bound my hands yet, which meant I could potentially disable one of them with a punch to the eye or throat, enough to get his weapon. Then I’d have to shoot blind and run.

  It wasn’t a great strategy, but if I got into whatever car was waiting at the curb, I’d end up fish kibble after a potentially long and painful interlude with Ginsu knives. Any plan was better than that.

  We exited the garden through a side door that led to the wide paved apron of concrete abutting the side of the palace. I’d decided on Thug Two as my target, then Thug One abruptly stopped and I plowed into him. The curse he hissed in German was way too strong a reaction to me treading on the backs of his ankles.

  “No car. We—”

  One of the shadows moved suddenly to my left. I ducked and shoved myself into Thug Two’s stomach as I heard the slice of a sword through the air, then Thug One’s gurgling death rattle. Not trusting my access to Thug Two’s eyes, I knuckle-jabbed his throat instead and went for his gun as two more shadows materialized beside me. A knife flashed through the moonlight into Thug Two’s side, his gasp abruptly cut short by another slash to his neck.

  I swung around, my grip on the gun steady. “Back off,” I growled.

  “There is no time.” The voice was musical and precise, and a woman stepped forward. “We are here to help you.”

  I recognized her from the face paint. “Not you again,” I muttered, but I held up the gun.

  The geisha before me bowed, her serene face beautiful in the moonlight. “There will be more military here in two minutes,” she said. “I can take you to safety, but we must leave now.”

  A whispered hiss sounded from another shadow, and the woman stepped closer. “Now, Miss Wilde. We must go.”

  She tugged me into a run, and if I had any doubts before, the startled male shout from inside the palace garden silenced them. We darted up the access drive and into the main street, where a sleek limo waited, a woman at the door.