Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4

by Jenn Stark

  I wasn’t the girl I’d been in Memphis, and I was getting used to the loneliness of the new me. The new me wasn’t going to be duped with illusions that couldn’t last. The new me would understand that love was for other people. The new me wasn’t going to be taken in by offers that weren’t real. The new me would take, and leave, and not spend so much time thinking about what could never be.

  I stared around the hospital room. The new me had work to do.

  “Anything on Gamon, do you know?” I asked Nikki.

  “That would be negative. The guards who were captured lost their tongues.”

  “Yeah, figured that.”

  “No, really, dollface. They lost their tongues. They were in lockdown at the precinct house, the lights flickered, and then the screaming started. They had their tongues removed and the stumps cauterized. Most of them blacked out from the shock, and now they’re at the hospital, drugged to the gills. The LVMPD is not happy, and neither is Homeland Security. Pretty major breach.” Nikki shook her head. “Whoever this Gamon is, he’s one bad dude. And he’s coming up out of nowhere, fast.”

  “No one comes from nowhere,” I said, my gaze drifting back to Blue. She was no longer at the boy’s bed, but several beds over at the station of a little girl. She was starting with the youngest victims first, I realized. That was right. That was good.

  “Sara.” Brody called my name at the head of the room. “We gotta talk.”

  I started for him, but a sudden realization struck me, so hard and sure I knew immediately I was right. I stopped abruptly, my adrenaline jacking out of control, and Nikki bumped into me from behind.

  “What?” she asked, her voice strident as I swung around. “What’s wrong?”

  “Soo.” I bit out. “This auction—these people—it’s all a distraction. A trap! And we got sucked into it.” I shook my head fiercely, yanking out my phone. “Gamon wasn’t trying to stage an auction. He wanted to lure Soo to Vegas. He couldn’t do it with the drugs, so he did it with her people. Now she’s here. I know she’s here. And Gamon knows it too.”

  Across the room, Death looked up, her steely eyed gaze meeting mine. I turned and ran for the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  One of Death’s ink posse was gracious enough to give me a ride into the city. From the back of his motorcycle, I texted Soo I was coming. She texted back immediately, reassuring me that she was very much alive—and safe. And at the Bellagio.

  Of course.

  Two men in suits stretched tautly over their heavy muscles greeted me at the hotel, clearly part of Soo’s entourage. We entered the Bellagio’s perfumed lobby without comment, the sound of soft music lilting through the air as both tourists and guests milled about in a brightly colored synchrony.

  I strode quickly across the space, thinking of the last time I’d been dropped in front of a lavish hotel to see Annika Soo, half a world away. The one thing missing…

  The tinkling of stringed instruments caught my attention, and I glanced across the enormous lobby to a roped-off area surrounded by phone-camera-wielding tourists. In the center of the raised platform beyond the ropes were a half-dozen geishas, four of them dancing the sedate, elaborate steps of a ritual dance, two of them playing tiny guitars.

  I blinked.

  No. Way.

  “Through here, Miss Wilde.” The man’s Asian accent softened the words, but not his level of authority. He stepped forward, blocking my view of the geishas, and ushered me into the waiting elevator bank.

  The head of the Chinese syndicate occupied a different floor than another kingpin, Guillaume Mercault, had when he’d stayed at the Bellagio a few days earlier. Soo no doubt had determined where the Frenchman had staged his rooms and wanted to avoid giving any appearance of following in his footsteps. But the suite of rooms she’d chosen was no less grand, and I walked into the sumptuous space silently, thanks to the deep-pile carpets and heavy tapestries lining the walls.

  Soo waited for me in a giant drawing room, her hands folded over her stomach. Her long-sleeved suit was a deep india ink, and her hair was caught simply at the nape of her neck. She watched me approach without speaking, and when I reached her, she bowed to me slightly. “Gamon cannot reach me here,” she said. Reproach laced her words, though not heavily. She was angry at my impertinence maybe, but more distracted, I thought. Maybe she was a little worried after all.

  “I’d double up your guards anyway, now that you’re here,” I said. “And I have what you sent me for. It hasn’t left my sight.”

  I glanced at the guards, and Soo gestured. The men visibly relaxed and backed off a few steps, and I leaned forward, lifting my hands to my neck.

  “Stop,” Soo commanded, and I froze. “What is that?”

  I glanced at the device affixed to my left hand’s ring finger and grimaced. “Not a wedding ring, trust me. Council tracking device. I received it earlier today and don’t know if it’s bugged for sound. So if you’re going to say anything bad about Armaeus Bertrand, speak loudly toward that hand.” I kept moving and slipped the double row of amulets off my neck. I offered the first to her. “Your grandmother’s amulet,” I said, nodding. I held up the other. “And yours.”

  The expression on Soo’s face was beatific as she took her grandmother’s amulet and gazed at the one I held. “It is the correct one,” she said, her words little more than a sigh. “You have found it. My mother did not die in vain.”

  I nodded, struggling to speak past the lump in my throat. The moment carried more weight than I’d intended it to, more meaning. “And now it’s yours again.”

  Soo reached out her left hand for it, and the edge of her sleeve lifted slightly, revealing the long, sinuous tail of Gamon’s mark.

  The explosion that rocked the room was so shocking, so unexpected that I thought I was back in Hell again, once more the prisoner of illusions that made no sense. The huge main doors to Soo’s suite burst inward, and a swarm of soldiers flowed in, looking like human-sized beetles with hard-cased armor and black spindly limbs bristling with weapons. In their midst stalked a tall, slender man in a dark robe and black, featureless mask.

  “Gamon!” Soo cried, but she didn’t sound surprised—or even particularly scared. She sounded exultant. Which made one of us.

  Quick as a blink, Soo whirled away from me, and her mother’s amulet went flying. Diving for it, I missed and stumbled to the side, then scrambled toward the nearest guard, weaponless. I don’t usually pack heat at the Bellagio, but if this sort of thing kept up, I was going to have to reconsider my approach.

  Soo reacted to the intrusion with almost superhuman speed, her hands up and out as her men and women also responded with clockwork efficiency—every one of them down to the chambermaids turning on the soldiers and attacking with fists and feet and knees and elbows, kitchen knives and comfortable shoes. One of the soldier’s guns skittered toward me, and I dove on it, coming up hard and taking out the farthest men from the action. I couldn’t afford the chance of missing Gamon’s bad guys and hitting some of Soo’s. In the hierarchy of evil, Gamon and his goons definitely topped the tree.

  As I dodged bullets and fired off my own rounds, I watched Soo and Gamon square off. Soo hadn’t dropped her mother’s amulet, I realized in a flash. She’d thrown her grandmother’s, the one that held no energy for her. Her mother’s was now around her neck, and Soo seemed to almost float above the carpet, surrounded with a miasma of power.

  Gamon noticed it too. He rasped out another laugh as he stood back from Soo, the two of them an island of serenity amidst the chaos of their battling minions. In the distance, I heard sirens, but they would be too late. No matter what happened here, they would be too late.

  I finally got close enough to snatch up her grandmother’s amulet, slinging it back over my neck as Soo and Gamon attacked each other. The fight seemed on one level to be purely physical, and on a second level to be a battle of minds and hearts. I’d already been on the receiving end of Soo’s mad ninja skills
, and she slashed and kicked and rushed at Gamon with the same elegance with which she’d wielded a blade. Gamon’s quick blocks and feints and return shots were also elegant and impossibly fast. Soo was a trained combatant, but Gamon quickly proved himself to be as well. They moved more quickly than my eye could follow, and I was distracted with the problem of having bullets fired at me, as soon as the soldiers realized that not all their opponents were stealth warriors wielding plates and dinner forks.

  I leveled shots and picked off outliers, hoping like hell the artwork I was striking wasn’t as old and authentic as it appeared, while Soo and Gamon took pieces out of each other. Something seemed off about Gamon. I couldn’t fix on exactly what, though. He was strong—but he didn’t overpower Soo as quickly as I would have with his no doubt greater strength. He was fast—too fast, and he worked the whole of his body, not solely his torso and arms. He fought at Soo’s level, combating her tricks but not coming up with any of his own. Something was strange about that, something important—

  “Hey!” I spun around with the force of the bullet that pierced my left arm, and glared down at the blood welling up at the graze wound, then up at the men rushing toward me. Fury swamped me, and I roared as I came up swinging. A shadow darted behind the man, and I forced myself to focus, swinging hard with my rifle as I clocked my assailant across the chin. He sprawled in the other direction but another man was right behind him, three of them actually, all of them crowding close—too close for me to get a shot off.

  I shot anyway, toward their feet, dancing them back until I could crack another round at their bodies. By then a new attacker flew at me from the side, and I was pummeling back, battering him as his fist came down hard above me—once, twice, banging into my temple and forcing me into a crouch.

  “Back off!” I snarled and heaved myself up again. The man stepped back easily, noting my lunge and the fact that I was losing my footing in my pain and rage. As I swung up again and missed, he grinned at me fiercely—

  Right up until the point of an elegantly slender blade poked through his sternum.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Kekai!” The geisha cried the word like it was an absolution. Then her blade slid out just as quickly, and I gaped as a whirl of brightly embroidered silk flew past me, and a half-dozen new entrants to the battle took up their stations and laid into Gamon’s warriors with their vicious blades.

  I grabbed my upper arm, surprised at how dizzy I was, and lunged for another weapon. Blades and guns littered the floor now, but I wanted no part of the blades. The nearest gun was empty, but the second one, a Glock still clutched in its owner’s grasp, proved a better fit. I spun around, looking for Soo and Gamon—and they were nowhere to be found.

  I crab-walked through the battling ninjas and darted into the next room, then drew up short.

  “Stand back, Gamon,” I shouted, leveling my gun.

  Gamon was crouched over Soo, apparently strangling her. He was doing a good job from the looks of it. I shot him in the back, and he convulsed forward but didn’t drop. Kevlar vest, the bastard. The next shot missed his head only because he ducked. He fell to the side, his hood flopping down, and my eyes had trouble focusing for a second. Something was wrong about Gamon’s face, his mask. Something was terribly wrong.

  “She doesn’t have long. Say your good-byes.” The voice was sharp, cutting, but no longer a gritty rasp. And it matched up with the face in a way I hadn’t expected, a way that seemed patently impossible, given all that I knew about Gamon, all that had happened, all the destruction, the slaves, the children—

  Gamon was a woman.

  A woman had orchestrated genocide on the youngest and most vulnerable of her own kind. A woman who now stared at me in fury, pride, and vindication, knowing what I saw, knowing the judgment I passed against her with one glance.

  She spat her words at me. “You are weak and broken, like Soo,” she snarled. “She failed.”

  “She’s not finished.” I squeezed off another bullet, and it caught Gamon in the arm, but I was already running forward as she bit out a curse in a language I didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

  I braced myself for Gamon’s return shot, a magic exploding ball of doom, something, but at that moment, a voice loud enough to only be the result of a bullhorn bellowed from the room beyond. “Police! Drop your weapons!”

  I skidded to my knees in front of Soo. I could already tell I was too late, though. Blood bubbled at her mouth, and her eyes were clouding over. Worse, she bled from the gut and the leg and the shoulder—killing slashes gushing too fast to stop.

  “Annika!” I cried out, and I didn’t care where Gamon had gone, didn’t care if I was about to get knifed between the shoulder blades. “Annika, hang in there, hang in there. I can get help. I can get—”

  “No.” Soo’s eyes refocused, and she blinked, registering my presence. “I knew you would come,” she whispered. “I knew you would come here to rescue or avenge.” Her smile was weak. “I’d hoped it would be the former.”

  Armaeus! I screamed in my head, but the Magician remained silent, content to leave me to my own battles when I needed him most. I crouched over Annika, smoothing her hair back, and I was reminded, forcibly, of the girl Rutya doing the same to me. The rhythmic, lulling cadence of comfort, of help, when no help or comfort would be good enough.

  Annika seemed to know what I was doing as well, and the lines in her forehead diminished. Her voice, when it came, was stronger as well.

  “We learned the bastard’s secret, didn’t we?” she said, her words rich with triumph. “Gamon, hiding behind that mask, that infernal hood. Now we know why. Now she will pay.”

  I swallowed. “She will pay, Annika. I’ll find her and make her pay for everything she did. Every last child, every last life. Your people will be safe.” I gritted my teeth against the bile that rose in my throat. I’d seen children strapped to tables in the wake of the dark practitioners’ rapid escape. I’d seen hollowed-out corpses of men and women harvested for the spark of light they held within, the Connected abilities that made them special and unique…and then made them hunted, tortured, and killed. And not merely by one of their own, but by one who should have been ensuring the survival of the race she was systematically destroying. I gagged on the thought of it, unable to find words.

  “You will find and you will kill her,” Soo said, her voice steady as her skin blanched and the blood at her mouth ran faster. The only thing keeping her alive was her own grit, I knew. The grit of her people, her family, her mother.

  I winced. Her mother. Surely Soo wouldn’t roam Hell as her mother had for so long, waiting and hoping for the end of a chapter she’d not been able to finish herself. I wouldn’t let that happen, I couldn’t.

  “I will destroy Gamon,” I gritted out. “The honor of your family will be kept. Your people will remain strong, and any that she has captured will be found and set free. I promise you that, Annika,” I said. “I won’t rest until it’s done.”

  She swung her gaze to me, holding me tight in her thrall. There were people running around us, sounds, shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything but Soo’s voice. Her mother’s pendant still gleamed at her neck. And the marks of near strangulation were evident on her throat, but too high—as if Gamon had tried to remove the necklace but it had refused to be pulled over Soo’s head.

  Now Soo reached up a shaking hand to her throat and pulled the necklace free with a gentle tug. It dropped easily in her hand, and she pressed it toward me. “Take this,” she said. “Take them both.”

  I forced myself not to jerk back, my mind scrambling for other alternatives when I knew what she was asking. Knew but couldn’t accept it. “I’ll find your general, Soo. I’ll work with him as if he were you.”

  “No.” Her smile acknowledged my feint and discarded it as quickly. “No general, no surrogate. You.”

  Before I could protest, she continued. “You will take over for me, Sara Wilde. You will govern the House of
Swords.”

  “The what?” I didn’t know what she called her syndicate, but I’d never heard of the term House of Swords applied to it. House of Swords was Tarot, and Tarot was the province of the Council—and of ancient magic that dated back to the start of the world. Not a Chinese syndicate better known for bashing heads and making money than for the mystical practices of the arcane.

  “The amulets are the key,” she murmured now, her voice growing threadier, less distinct. “Guard them,” she said. “Take them.”

  She pressed the jade amulet into my hand, and its twin seemed to thump against my neck.

  “Annika, no. You can’t leave me here. You have to explain, to stay, to heal, to do this yourself. I’m not you. I could never be you.”

  I was babbling, but my words did little to stay the fluttering of Soo’s lashes as her gaze grew more distant, fixing on a far shore I could not see.

  “You are not me,” she whispered. “You are meant for more, as I am meant to die here, victim and victor.” Her smile was triumphant, and then she convulsed, her entire body going tense. I felt the Connected ability surge within her as she gripped my hands, the amulet in our shared grasp growing impossibly warm.

  My eyes flashed wide. “No!” I leaned forward as hands grabbed at my shoulders, prying me away from Soo. I shoved her amulet into my jeans pocket, then hunched into a ball.

  “Sara, Sara!” Brody snapped, right in my ear. “These are EMTs, they can help. Let them help, Sara, let them—shit. We need another kit over here!” He shouted over my shoulder. “Sara, are you hurt?” His voice grew louder and firmer with each word. “There’s a lot of blood on you, honey. Are you hurt? Are you injured?”

  I blinked up at him, holding on to his steady voice. Brody. Brody was here in this bloodbath, pulling me off Soo’s body, talking to me in his “I’m not frantic, I’m calm” patter as men with grim faces and quick hands bent over Soo to revive her, the blood on the floor testament to anyone that she would not be revived, could not be revived. She was lost to Gamon’s hand as her mother had been lost before her, to a woman who would stop at nothing to increase her power—even sacrificing the best and brightest of her own kind to further her aims. Soo had been lost—lost! In a war she had barely begun to fight.