by Stark, Jenn
I nodded and resumed staring out the window. The rain was letting up enough for me to survey the street around the hotel, though there were only a few souls out, most of them hunched over against the rain or carrying enormous umbrellas. Every once in a while, a few people would meet briefly, then spin apart, often with the flare of two lit cigarettes serving as the filament of connection between them. Shadowed by the rain and late hour, it was almost mesmerizing the way the pedestrians moved, like choreography in a silent movie.
“What’s their end game?” I murmured. “Why haven’t they come after us?”
“Well, they did. The hotel.”
“That wasn’t subtle enough. It was the opposite of subtle, actually. They were out in the open, stalking us where anyone could see. They had to know we’d disappear before they got there.”
Nikki hummed as she typed. “We could have engaged them.”
“We wouldn’t have, though. There’s no precedent for us to do that. So it was a push, but a push toward what? And who tipped them off that we were there? I’m not completely buying it was just our electrical signature. There has to be more to it than that.”
Across the room, Nikki leaned back in her chair. She knew what I was asking. “Mercault let slip that you were in Paris, and thirty minutes later, they were all over you with a team of what, twenty operatives? And not slug operatives either.”
“They were definitely not slugs,” I said. “I mean, I was able to handle them, but not without working at it, and I’m supposed to be the great and powerful Oz. So these guys were good.”
“And fast.”
“Very fast. But the attack at the hotel had a different feel to it. I didn’t sense that they were coming after us to take us down, while I did in the park. That felt more personal.”
“We still don’t have anything on the woman who attacked you or the guy on the bike. Simon didn’t find either one of them in any database anywhere in the world as operatives. There weren’t any arrests assigned to them. Or official papers, for that matter, which means they’re off the grid. If they are, the rest of them are too.”
“Yeah.” I leaned against the window frame, my gaze skipping over the hustling and shuffling crowd below, thinning even as the rain grew less intense, the storm finally showing some signs of breaking.
Then I saw him.
A lone man stood just outside the café that had been bustling all night. Unlike everyone around him, he stood absolutely still in the rain, his hands in his pockets, his face tilted up and away from me so that the reflected light from the café played across his pale skin. He wore a dark fedora and rain slicker over dark pants and shoes, but otherwise seemed to be completely unbothered by the downpour.
Completely unbothered, I realized. In fact, the rain was parting around him, his own personal umbrella force field keeping him dry.
“What is it?” Nikki murmured from her position on the couch.
“We’ve got a watcher, but he’s not watching the right place, and I feel like that’s on purpose. How’d you check us into the Hotel Savoy?”
“Straight-up check-in. Same as here. Same as the other three places. They knew you there, though. You’d stayed before.”
I glanced at her. “No, I haven’t. I’ve never stayed longer in Hamburg than a few hours. Why do you think so?”
“I checked the room out, and there was Glenmorangie sitting on top of the minibar. That struck me as odd, but the card said compliments of the house. I figured they recognized your name and had it sent up before I got there.”
“Negative. I would have remembered any of these hotels. So—”
My voice trailed off as the man on the corner turned to face me. His eyes were the same cold blue that I remembered from the Luxembourg Gardens, his face startlingly clear in the rain. He knew where I’d been this whole time, had only turned as I’d made the realization that I’d been had.
I didn’t flinch away from his gaze. I wanted to know who this man was, and I wanted to know how such a powerful Connected could exist without the Council’s knowledge. For his part, he stared back at me, cool and confident. “What’s his game?” I muttered, settling my feet more firmly.
“Sara…” Nikki warned. “This wouldn’t be the time to do anything stupid.”
“He knew I’d be here,” I countered. “He knew, or they knew, exactly when we arrived in London, and they had a team in place to hit the hotel within a matter of minutes of us showing up. Meanwhile, you guys had been there for two days without issue. How did they know? Who’s filling them in? And who is the target, me or Armaeus?”
“I vote for option A, since dude’s here now. We don’t know where Armaeus is. Presumably, neither do they.”
“Unless they took him.”
“There’s no way that’s possible.”
But despite Nikki’s unshakable faith in the Magician, I wasn’t so sure. There’d been absolutely no contact from Armaeus since he’d taken off with Simon, and he’d been physically shaky before that attempt. He wasn’t operating with a full bag of magic tricks, and the assimilation of the lost chapter of the Book of Radiance had taken a toll on him in a way I’d never seen before. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how possible it was that Armaeus was in serious danger, danger I couldn’t even understand, much less counter. He hadn’t wanted to get me involved. He hadn’t wanted to risk me.
And that…was a problem. Even if he didn’t know who I was, how could he not know who I am?
“Sara,” Nikki said again. “You’re not all that good at transpo when you haven’t been somewhere.”
“I’ve been staring at this damned corner the last three hours. I know it better than I know my own bedroom.”
“I still think—”
I crackled out of the suite and onto the sidewalk in front of the café, where the man had been standing. I didn’t expect him to still be there when I arrived, of course. He’d done a good job of anticipating my every move up to this point. The most likely next step would be for him to move just far enough away that he could watch me without getting tangled up.
I was wrong.
The moment I appeared on the sidewalk, the man wrapped his arms around me and slung me into the street, bouncing me off a passing car with such force, I ricocheted right back into his body. Moving too fast for me to wink out of existence before it landed, his gloved fist came around and caught my jaw, whipping my head back as pain galvanized me into action. When he swung around from the other direction, I ducked, using my own not insignificant speed and piling into his body, the suddenness of my movement catching him by surprise enough to make him sprawl back. That reaction lasted only a moment, however, as he regained his feet and launched at me again. By then, I’d already turned as if I was going to run. I didn’t mind taking on this guy, but not with so many people around. Like it or not, the skills I had at my disposal didn’t work so well for any hand-to-hand combat that involved an audience.
That said, I had to get close enough to hurt the man discreetly, so I had to get creative. At the last second, as he gathered himself to launch after me, I spun back toward him, angling a little. I was able to wrap my arms around his legs, using the flurry of my movement to mask the twin bolts of fire that I shot into his back. He grunted with pain. A second later, I felt the crack of something low against my skull, which earned a much more robust scream from me. At this point, we had attracted a crowd, but no one was stepping in to break us up. Or maybe everything was simply happening too fast.
I couldn’t risk another fire bolt, so I lurched to my feet and made to run in earnest this time. The guy immediately took off after me. I shot across the street and passed the open doors of my hotel just as Nikki crested the doorway in time to collide with my pursuer. There, her years on the force came in handy as she cold-cocked the guy, knocking him flat before she whipped out her phone and took several photos. He came to just as quickly and launched up, one hand slicing at Nikki just below her chin. Blood immediately geysered fr
om her neck and I leapt forward, but the man raced away as Nikki toppled into my arms. I clapped a hand firmly over her neck and probed the tracery of the wound with my fingers, my hands crackling with heat as I cauterized the gash with furious magic.
“Go—go!” Nikki gasped, waving the phone at me, but I wasn’t about to leave her. I flashed us both back to our room, where Kreios was now waiting.
“I’ll take her,” Kreios said, pulling Nikki from me almost protectively as she still waved the phone, less convincingly this time.
“Bugged,” she said as her head rolled.
Kreios pulled the device from her and swiped it, then nodded sharply. “She got photos. I’ll run these through Simon’s system to get an identity. But it looks like the same man you saw in Paris.”
“How’d he know we were here?” I demanded as he tapped on the phone, sending the photos off.
Kreios shrugged, then handed the phone back to me. “There’s no bug in the room, so if he heard you, it wasn’t through electronic means. The phone wasn’t bugged, either.”
“So, what, he’s just got really good hearing?” I snapped, but Kreios’s attention was already back on Nikki.
“She’ll be fine. You healed her clean. There’s blood loss, though. I’ll help her with that.” He lifted Nikki into his arms. Meanwhile, the map that she’d been staring at on her tablet now stretched in front of me on the phone, with an unmistakable red dot moving up the street. I didn’t know Hamburg well enough to know the guy’s direct location, so I’d have to do this the hard way. An instant later, I was back on the sidewalk where we’d first tussled, and I started running.
It took me a good mile to catch up with the asshat, and that was me going full tilt. Right around the three-quarter-mile mark, however, I realized he had to be running me toward a trap. He would’ve circled back by now or ambushed me if he was interested in taking me out. There were plenty of opportunities for that in the rabbit warren of streets that made up downtown Hamburg. As it was, our footrace was leading me into an area heavily under construction, with tarps and plywood covering over buildings in dire need of renovation. I needed to stop, think, and be strategic, but every time I made the attempt, I saw the geyser of blood spurting from Nikki’s throat. This jackwit was going to pay for that if it was the last thing—
The boarded-up wall beside me exploded out in a fury of movement and violent force. I pivoted to the side, but not quickly enough to avoid the crush of Connected humanity that burst out toward me, easily a dozen leather-clad assailants, all of them with fists flying. I reacted instinctively, my hands balling into fists as they instantly lit into fire—
And were extinguished just as quickly.
What the…
The crowd of my attackers seemed to realize this fact as soon as I did, and, with a roar of delight, they lurched toward me. I crackled into nothingness—only that didn’t work either. I could still work up a modest electrical zing of psychic ability, but it wasn’t enough to do any of the things I had come to depend on it for. I’d been shorted out.
“Crap!”
I raced across the street to the line of motorcycles and picked one at random. I might not have enough psychic power to transport myself bodily out of this mess, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around to become the base layer of a bad-guy wedding cake. With a last furious burst of electricity, I lit the bike up, and it roared to life. I blasted off down the street and was gone.
Chapter Twenty
Another feature of my sudden lapse of psychic ability made itself immediately obvious as my Connected pursuers didn’t give chase on foot with supersonic speed, but instead relied on a barrage of straight-up ordinary bullets that didn’t quite reach me. Apparently, they were equally afflicted by the psychic dead zone. Silver lining.
But what the hell was that about? I sucked in a breath, my adrenaline spiking, and yanked Nikki’s phone out of my jacket. The red dot was still ahead of me, picking up pace. I leaned into the handlebars of my motorcycle, mostly to avoid getting blinded by the rainwater whipping over the top of the low windscreen and lashing into my face. Manhandling a phone while driving an unfamiliar motorbike at high speeds during a rainstorm wasn’t going to earn me any discounts on my insurance, but this dickhead had slashed Nikki. He wasn’t long for this world, one way or the other.
I followed him all the way to the Hamburg pier, pulling up sharply as he entered a private shipyard that appeared to have no security. Not being a complete idiot, I recognized a trap when I saw it, and I sat back on the bike. The red dot on the phone stopped in the center of the shipyard, and then, of course, winked out.
Asshat.
“Lovely night in Hamburg, wouldn’t you say?”
The voice that broke over me was cultured and older and decidedly Western European. I wasn’t willing to get more specific than that, but it was the same voice I’d heard from the ghost kidnapper of the family at Gare du Nord, and I was sure—almost sure—I’d heard it before that. Not in any major way, though, which was interesting. This guy hadn’t been a direct client of mine in the past, or an enemy. I was sure of it.
But he certainly had my number now, and this was a call I was going to take.
“Does it usually storm on your best nights in Hamburg, or did I get particularly lucky?”
“Particularly lucky. But then, you’ve been a very lucky girl in your life, Miss Wilde, haven’t you?”
There didn’t seem to be any need to respond to this, as the guy clearly had a prepared script. He stood slightly behind me and to the right, and I wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of turning toward him to see him more clearly. Why start with the whole maturity thing now?
Sure enough, he continued. “There are those who believe that we choose the lives we lead before we take our first breath upon this planet. That we are here to learn something specific, and that we choose both the graces and the obstacles we face. But your life—well… It’s hard to believe that someone would have chosen the challenges you’ve endured, Miss Wilde. May I call you Miss Wilde? I know that’s the title of choice of your Council’s leader, and I’d hate to overstep.”
Irritation poked at me, but I knew better than to give in to it. Of course this guy would know about me. I wasn’t all that anonymous. I mean, no, I didn’t have an Instagram account, but people knew who I was.
I didn’t speak, but he obligingly continued. “So let’s explore your life, shall we? I’ve studied it so closely, it would be a pleasure to share it with someone else.”
“I’ll take a pass. Who are you?”
“Ah! Names. Names are perhaps the best place to start. Your name, or so you believed, was Sariah Pelter. Not a very prepossessing appellation, but then you weren’t destined to have it for very long. Your parents had far bigger plans for you, each in their own way. Willem of Galt, the current Hermit of the Arcana Council, and the Atlantean goddess Vigilance, though she’s gone by many names since then. An impressive and unusual pairing.”
“Yeah, they were a big hit at parent-teacher night.” I couldn’t stand it anymore, though, and I turned to my right to see the man. I wasn’t expecting it to be the dark-haired, dark-eyed assassin, but this guy…I’d seen this guy before. Somewhere.
I narrowed my eyes. “I know you.”
“I’m flattered,” he acknowledged, nodding as I racked my brain for where I would have run into him. It had to have been on a job. But he hadn’t been a client. A competitor I’d been told to watch out for? A tail looking to get the drop on me and steal whatever artifact I’d just light-fingered myself? Something…like that. But not quite that. Tall and slender, the man was expensively dressed in a buttoned-up trench coat, dark trousers and shoes. He wore no hat, and his light blond hair and cool blue eyes assessed me with the slightest bit of amusement that did a passable job hiding the brutality that lurked beneath. He looked like the quintessential Aryan, in very human proportions—strong, or at least giving the appearance of being strong, but not heavily built.<
br />
And rich. It was a characteristic I’d learned to pick up on early in my career as an artifact hunter, and it was always men who projected it most. This guy was absolutely rolling in money and power, and had been for so long, he didn’t even notice it anymore. Which meant he hadn’t made his money himself, or at least he hadn’t made it all himself. He was simply the latest in a long line of moneyed asshats not afraid to throw their power around.
A new layer of annoyance riffled through me as he resumed his monologue. “But you weren’t raised by your parents, of course. That wouldn’t have done when no one knew you existed and the two were on opposite sides of a millennia-old war. Instead, you were raised by a cocktail waitress in a squalid little trailer park in Memphis, Tennessee. She also fancied herself psychic. Once she realized what you could do, she whored you out to her friends at the salon, the bar, even the local police department to build up her own sense of self-worth, and told anyone who would listen that she was every bit as gifted as you were. Until her big mouth got her killed.”
So, we’d officially moved to insults. I tried to keep my anger in check, because there was something truly intriguing about the eagerness with which the man spoke. He wanted to get a rise out of me, sure, but he wanted something more than that. He wanted me to ask questions.
Fair enough. “Is there a point to this?”
“Ah, Ms. Wilde, you disappoint me,” he said, though his lips quirked into the barest approximation of a pout. “It’s such a fascinating story. The same day your foster mother died, your house was blown up by an ancient dragon god of Atlantis, nearly with you inside it, and you ran away. Not to the police officer who had been your champion and virtual guardian, but away. As far away as you could get, yes?”
“Look—”
“And then you were found at a rest area by a kindhearted woman and taken in by her, no questions asked, her and her RV community of retirees. Such a good-natured group, and what a stroke of luck when so many other options would have led you down far darker paths.”
