Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5 (23 page)

“Haven’t a clue,” Nigel said. “They have a tendency to die before that becomes an issue.” He laughed as my mouth turned down at the corners. “Relax. These men and women are not stupid. They will put forth as their champion the best of their number, and as we have proven here, you’ll face that champion honorably. After that, the fate of the Honjo and the House will be in the hands of the best candidate. It is all you can do.”

I nodded as the twin pendants of jade fired along my collarbone, one cold, one hot. I didn’t know what Soo would think of any of this, but Soo wasn’t here. She’d never told me of her plans for the House, or even that she’d led the House of Swords, until her dying breath. Had her reticence been purposeful?

I turned my gaze out the window, staring into the darkness beyond the airplane’s wings. What truly had been Soo’s thinking, to assign her House to me when there were so many better choices in her ranks? In doing so, she’d painted a target on my back—mine and those closest to me. Granted, she’d also stopped an immediate crisis among her generals, making them stop and assess her choice of their leader before discounting it out of hand, forcing them into the established protocol of succession. She had further denied Gamon a win of the highest order by not allowing her House to die with her.

So where was Soo now? Hopefully not roaming through Hell, with nothing but the shadows of her mother’s bedchamber and my own lost spirit to guide her. Hopefully she was somewhere far beyond that desolate plane.

Hopefully.

We landed at McCarran International Airport before dawn, the lights of Sin City still shining despite the hour. I gazed at the bright towers of the Council, somehow feeling a million times older than I’d been when I’d left the city days earlier. My gaze roamed farther afield, toward Lake Las Vegas and the home Soo had built on its banks, safe within its surrounding trees and fountains, hidden from the harsh realities of the desert.

But there was no hiding for me anymore, I knew.

“You’ll be safe?” Nigel asked, scowling as I helped Nikki into the back of a limo—one I would be driving for a change. The empty car had been waiting at the Jetway when we’d landed, and I’d felt strangely comforted by its presence.

“We’ll be safe. We’re getting Nikki some clothes—”

“And a shower. Trust me, this is a good thing,” Nikki piped up, but I could hear the strain in her voice.

“Clothes and a shower. Then I’ll be out to Soo’s house. If you’ve got generals coming out your ears, cool them down. Try to figure out where else we’ve been hit, if we have, and where we might be hit next.”

Nigel eyed me oddly, and I waved him off. “Go. And let me know if I should lie low. I could put off the Battle of the Bros for at least another decade, and happily.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “You’ll comport yourself honorably,” he said. “You can count on the Honjo for that.”

The Honjo was currently in the backseat with Nikki, keeping her as honorable as she was ever going to get. “Noted.”

We watched him head off to wrangle with customs, but no one stopped us as we left the tarmac and headed into the city. “I always wondered what it’d feel like to sit alone in the backseat,” Nikki said. “I’m not so much a fan.”

I shifted my gaze to the rearview mirror. “Would it help if I wore a hat?”

She snorted. The trip to her condo was short, and as we turned into the development, I realized that in all the past several months of living in Vegas, I’d never once been here. Nikki had told me only briefly about her place—about a picture I should ask about, if I ever visited. But we hadn’t had time. Nikki had been staying at the Palazzo, and I’d been traveling to Israel. But now, as I made tight turns down residential streets, it was almost surreal to imagine her living a life among these pink-and-white stucco tract houses, each more faceless than the last.

“Brody didn’t say one of Soo’s Vegas houses had been leveled, did he?” I asked out of the blue, stirring Nikki in the backseat.

She blinked at me beneath her Chicago PD ball cap, then shook her head. “Nah. It was the warehouse—the occupied one. Caused a bit of a stir, because apparently Soo was stockpiling guns there, always what you want to find out when you report up through Homeland Security. But he was mostly still pissed he hit the building thirty seconds before the bombs went off. Had he been a minute earlier, he’d have missed the blast site. A minute later, and he at least wouldn’t have been knocked into the opposite wall.”

I winced. “What does Dixie have to say?”

Nikki’s laugh was wry. “She’s about to fall apart with joy at having someone to fuss over. Brody better hope he stays injured on a regular basis, because that girl has found her calling.”

I couldn’t help but smile too as we made the final turn to her street, and I parked in front of the third house down and to the left. I stared at it. “You live in a duplex?”

“Hey, a little respect,” Nikki protested. “We refer to it as a Gemini. Much classier that way.”

“A twin.” I got out of the car as Nikki unbent herself from the backseat, handing me the Honjo sword. “Yeah, I can see that.”

The duplex—and it was a duplex—was small and nondescript, the exact opposite of anything that seemed appropriate for Nikki Dawes. But I kept my silence as she strode up the front walk, clearly still a little ginger as the stitches tugged in her thigh and hip. In deference to her injury, her heels were only three inches tall, but her freshly painted toes stuck out proudly from her gladiator sandals. French manicured, of course.

“In we go,” Nikki said, and if she was self-conscious about opening her home to me, she didn’t show it.

Inside, I swept the room with a quick gaze, again struck by the ordinariness of it all. The main living area was done over in IKEA and knockoff Pottery Barn, cool and neutral to combat the infernal heat outside. The carpet was springy beneath my feet, and the walls were painted a buttery taupe.

“You don’t have a cat or anything I need to guard against, right?” I asked, and Nikki chortled, throwing her bag on the couch and checking the stack of mail on the end table.

“That would be negative. Dottie next door brings in my mail and makes sure my plants are watered. I don’t have the heart to tell her they’re plastic.” She grinned at me and pointed to a picture of her with a septuagenarian wearing huge cat-eye sunglasses and grinning ear to ear. “She reminds me of my grandma who pretty much raised me, south side of Chicago. They both would do anything for a laugh.”

Nikki entered the kitchen, and I followed helplessly behind, amazed at the number of photographs on her walls. Most of them were from Vegas—Nikki posing with burlesque dancers and sequin-covered singers, magicians, and fortune tellers, all of them looking happy to be alive. There were a few pictures from her childhood, her family apparently a big fan of the 90s plaid revolution and boot-cut jeans, but none of her parents. On the refrigerator was a picture of a woman with on-purpose blue hair, a grinning childhood Nikki beside her staring with wide eyes.

“Gram Betty,” Nikki said, tapping the photo. “She dyed her hair that color the summer I moved in with her for good, my parents having long since given up on me.”

“The summer you…” I squinted at the picture. “You look all of twelve.”

She shrugged, an ocean full of water sliding under a bridge somewhere. “I was a trying child. But Gram Betty never minded. She called it the way it was, at a time when being different wasn’t always a good place to be. And she protected me until her dying breath.”

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “How long ago was that?”

“Long time.” Nikki’s smile was far away. “The year I got married.” She shook my head as I gaped at her. “I know, right? All that drama.”

She turned and headed out of the kitchen again, her voice floating back to me as I stepped into the narrow hallway. “I need stuff for—what, a couple of days?”

“Maybe longer,” I managed, trailing behind her. The longer I stayed in this home, the more I realized it actually did fit Nikki, or at least a part of her I’d never glimpsed before. More pictures lined the wall to her bedroom/office, and I blinked at the narrow bed and enormous desk, crammed with enough electronics to make Brody blush.

“You like keeping up with the news, I see.”

She grinned at the collection of monitors and scanners, reaching over to turn one of the dials. “White noise. Keeps me company. I’ll just be a jiff.”

My gaze raked the desktop as she busied herself in her closet—which was actually the entire second bedroom. But what I wanted to see was in plain sight on the edge of her desk. A picture of a tall, proud Nikki, not a curve to her frame—dressed in a police officer’s uniform. The face was more angular, the hair nowhere near fabulous, but the eyes were hers. The smile was hers.

And so were the three children with her, two of them grabbing her legs, and one, the smallest, hanging from her neck. She’d told me about this picture, told me to ask about it, but I couldn’t think of anything but how beautiful and alive these small souls seemed to be, even in a fading picture.

“They’re perfect, aren’t they?” I didn’t put the frame down as Nikki came up behind me, and it was her hand on my shoulder, comforting me, when it should have been the other way around. “Three beautiful babies that I’d do anything for. I told you, remember? To ask me about them.”

She glanced at me and I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Eventually, I couldn’t be what they needed me to be. So I became what I had to be for myself. When they’re ready, if they’re ever ready, they’ll find me again. And I’ll be waiting for them when they do.”

She stopped and took the picture frame out of my trembling hands, her voice gentle with concern. “Aww, it’s okay, sweetie,” she murmured, turning me toward her. “It’s okay.”

I buried myself in her embrace and cried tears I didn’t know I had in me.

Chapter Twenty-One

By the time we reached Soo’s house in the brushy foothills of the Lake Las Vegas area, it was clear the cavalry had been summoned. A dozen rental SUVs lined the expansive parking deck, each bigger and burlier than the last.

“I’d make a joke about overcompensating, but it’s too easy,” Nikki drawled. She was back in her customary seat in the front of the vehicle. I sat beside her, my nerves too jacked for playing our usual roles. She apparently felt something of my nerves too. Rather than her usual eye-popping ensemble, Nikki’s hair was once more tucked beneath her CPD ball cap, her uniform positively staid—a gray technical T-shirt and deep charcoal cargo pants, with reinforced gray Chucks beneath. She looked like she was ready to rumble.

“Nigel hopefully has filled them in. I don’t want this to be a big deal,” I said. My hand rested protectively on the sword across my lap. I’d switched out my hoodie and jeans for the thick tights I employed on night raids, and a technical T-shirt that allowed movement, also in black. So much easier to hide the blood that way. Otherwise, it was me, my sneakers, and the Honjo Masamune, against the arrayed ranks of Soo’s best warriors.

I gave myself about even odds.

“You’re going to be great,” Nikki said, parking the vehicle. Instead of exiting immediately, though, she put her long, Miss Kitty-manicured fingers on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead at the mansion for a long moment before turning to me.

“And when you are great, and you find yourself wondering if you could ever do this thing, be this person, I want you to know this. You can. You may not have all the answers yet. You may not understand fully the ramifications of the job. You may be years away from being able to handle it well—but you can handle it. And no matter what you choose to do, whether it’s running your sword down the center of Soo’s generals or using it to draw a line in the sand between you and the Council, I’m here for you. I’ll fight in front of you as long as you need me to, beside you as long as we can, and behind you until I can no longer stand.”

My trembling hand reached out and closed over one of her great big ones, and I let it sit there for a few moments before I squeezed. Once more I couldn’t speak, my throat too tight around the lump wedged in it.

“There. That about covers it.” Nikki slapped the wheel, her eyes bright. Then she got out of the car.

It took me a moment longer to compose myself, but by the time my feet hit the sizzling-hot pavement of Soo’s luxurious desert mansion, calm draped over me like a ceremonial cloak. I followed Nikki, fixing my gaze on her broad back until she reached the door. There she stood aside and opened it, grinning at me.

“Go get ’em, cowgirl,” she whispered, and I managed a smile back.

My triumphal entry was marred by a workman exiting the building, followed by Jiao.

“Apologies, Madam Wilde,” Jiao said, bowing to me. Her serene manner shifted slightly to a scowl at the worker. “He should have been completed hours ago.”

“He…” I frowned at the man, then stiffened as he turned his capped head toward me. Beneath the crisp tan uniform with a patch of an HVAC business whose name I forgot even as I saw it, stood Simon the Fool, grinning like a twelve-year-old. I stared at him. “You had work here?”

“Checking the systems, ma’am. We had reports of damage to the coils in your main AC unit, and as hot as it gets out here, you don’t want to mess with that. The company wanted to make sure we checked everything was safe before things got out of hand. They worry.”

I blinked at him, hearing the layered message in his words. What was going on? “And what did you find?”

“Monitors were acting up, but we’ve got the right eyes in place now. You should stay cool for the duration.”

He tipped his cap again and Jiao shooed him outside, leaving Nikki and me frowning after him.

“He bugged the place?” Nikki asked under her breath.

“Who knows what he did,” I muttered. “But no hanging your bra on the camera unless you want to get called on it later. I have a feeling we’re going to have a live studio audience for whatever is happening in here.”

“Roger that.” We moved inside the foyer and waited for Jiao.

Jiao returned seconds later, her heels clicking on the gleaming blue tile. “The generals are assembled in the fight center. I’ll brief you as we go,” she said.