Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5 (28 page)

“Dark power.” Carefully, I stretched out my fingers, turning over my hands and scrutinizing them. No scars, no burns. “I don’t feel different.”

“You won’t—you shouldn’t, until the need is great. The magic is perfectly warded and sealed within you until you call upon it. And then you will feel…” He blew out a breath, and I felt that breath move through me, as if all my cells were expanding to fill yet further with power. “Very different indeed,” he said. His jaw was set in granite. “But you will be safe, I swear it. Now and evermore, you will be
safe
.”

The intensity of his words made my vision go white for a moment, and when my eyes cleared, I was staring into thin air.

Armaeus was gone.

Chapter Twenty-Five

I staggered to my feet and looked around. “Armaeus?”

There was no reply.

I padded over to the wall of windows, only partially surprised to see I was still wearing clothes. But the Magician had not touched me, in the end. As usual, he’d done everything with his magic, all of it illusion.

Still… I lifted a sleeve of my shirt, and grimaced as I traced the curve of my arm down to my elbow, seeing what I expected to see. My arms were no longer damaged. I suspected my legs and torso had been healed as well. The slicing and dicing I’d received at the hands of Soo’s generals had been burned away in the conflagration of my time with Armaeus. It wasn’t the only thing.

The gold ring of the Council no longer remained around my finger.

I stared down at my hand with a mix of confusion and—weirdly—despair. Armaeus had untethered me, sent me spinning off to manage my own battle with only a weird magic bullet inside me. Still, I felt stronger than ever before. Was this yet another trick of the Magician’s?

How could it not be?

“Yo, dollface.” Nikki appeared in the doorway of the penthouse, and I turned to look at her. Another indication of time’s passage was her outfit. Instead of the gorgeous dress Jiao had given her to face the Council, she was back in a similar flat gray ensemble to the one she’d worn earlier in the day, a technical top and cargo pants. However, her boots were a magenta pink, and so were her nails. And her hair, for that matter.

Just how long had she been with Kreios?

Nikki lifted a glass holding a suspicious-looking green liquid. “You’ve been out for hours. Armaeus said to come get you, that you’d be hungry. Then again, Kreios said you’d be throwing up for days if you ate food-food, and the two of them got into a heated discussion in…Atlantean, I think. He recommended this.” She shook the concoction. “I tried it. It’s questionable at best, but if it keeps your stomach happy….”

I turned toward her and caught sight of the sword, lying in a position of prominence on the desk. “What time is it?” I asked, my voice little more than a croak.

“Half-past three. All’s quiet on the Western Front. Brody’s back on the streets again, bitching about not being able to find you, so if that doesn’t bring everything back to normal, I don’t know what does.”

I grabbed my sword and we headed for the elevator. I dutifully took the shake from Nikki. “Do you have any idea what’s in it?”

“I don’t. According to Kreios, though, you drink that, and you won’t harf up your intestines the first time you eat.” She eyed me expectantly as I hesitated. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. All’s quiet on the Western Front, but there
is
a front. A front with sharp, pointy swords that bad people want to stick into you.”

“Gamon and the usurpers,” I grumbled. “Sounds like a rock group.”

“Yeah, it sounds like a big problem, is what it sounds like. You go out there with the twenty-four-hour flu, it’s questionable as to whether you’ll get to hour twenty-five, you savvy?”

I stared at her a long moment as the elevator doors swished open. Then I started drinking.

The elevator ride seemed to take longer than usual, and I found myself bracing my legs wide, my left hand on the sword as I downed the shake. It tasted of cinnamon and chocolate and a whole lot of something herbal that could have been weed but was probably wheatgrass. Still, by the time we hit the first floor, even Nikki was glancing around nervously.

“Bad enough that we take an actual elevator to a different plane,” she said. “But this thing was moving decidedly slow. I don’t like it.”

I stared at the empty glass as we waited for the elevator doors to open. “How much of this did you drink?”

She shrugged. “Kreios gave me my own sippy cup. I drank maybe half of what you had.” She turned to me, her eyes wide. “Dollface, no. That was not supernatural spinach.”

“Well then, how do you explain…” The doors shushed open, and Nikki and I remained trapped in the elevator bay for a minute, drawing closer to each other out of sheer self-preservation.

Everything in the lobby of the Luxor Casino…had changed.

It went beyond the simple overlay of Prime Luxe. That was there and bolder than ever, but wasn’t the main issue. Instead, it was the
people
who had shifted. Colorful blobs of light extended from each tourist and worker as if they were being hugged by a technicolor gummy bear. We stepped carefully into the lobby, turning around, and the flow of color from the clanging slot machines in the next room almost blinded us.

“Sweet Baby Jesus on a Tricycle,” Nikki whispered. “Are you doing this?”

I could feel the dark twist of magic curl within me. “Let’s get to the SUV.”

We walked forward, trying not to hold our arms out, to keep everyone at a distance, but it was a near thing. Two cops eyed us suspiciously, their gummy bear auras turning a muddy gray, and we picked up the pace ever so slightly. By the time we’d reached the sliders, another pair of cops was standing at the SUV doors.

“That’s ours, officers,” Nikki said brightly, blinking quickly. Too quickly. “We’ll be on our way now.”

I expected them to ask her if she was safe to drive, but instead, their attention slid to me, as if Nikki was part of my identifying cover. Then their gaze dropped to the sword.

“Oh! Oh yeah,” I said, lifting my hand away from the blade. “Sorry, I just won the darn thing down at Circus Circus, and I couldn’t resist wearing it. It’s plastic, they said, nothing scary.” I frowned down at the blade, the epitome of the confused tourist. “I mean, I think it’s plastic.”

“You’re Sara Wilde.” The question came out more of a statement, but with the second set of cops coming out of the Luxor, it didn’t seem worthwhile to deny it. The backup officers stationed themselves at the Luxor’s front doors, keeping the gawking tourists away.

“Well, yes—” Then apprehension struck. “Why?”

“We have a few questions we’d like to ask. If you’ll step over here?”

“Dollface…”

I didn’t need Nikki’s warning to realize something was terribly wrong. The men’s aura wasn’t gray anymore—it was black, and it was uniform. The same dark stain of power I’d seen in the bottom of Armaeus’s power pit. Though these men were dressed like Las Vegas’s finest, no way were they local cops.

“Ma’am, if you’d step over to the side, please…”

Nikki spotted the movement first, the telltale moment of the angled elbow and downward surging hand.

“Gun!” she yelled, so loud that a car across the carport screeched its wheels, its driver cutting the wheel hard. Nikki body-blocked the first cop into the second, sending both of them sprawling in a bone-crunching pavement skid. She yanked open the passenger door to the SUV, scrambling over the seat to get to the driver’s seat.

I pulled the quick release sash of my sword, and both the blade and scabbard came loose from the belt, landing solidly in my hand. Wielding the Honjo Masamune like a bat, I turned hard into the cop nearest me and caught him under the chin. He dropped, gargling, but the second cop wasn’t so easily fooled. He brought his gun up and shouted harshly, never mind the bunched-up vehicles and screaming tourists.

“Stop! Police! I will shoot!”

I didn’t have time to think, and what happened next showed it. I slid the Honjo Masamune out of its scabbard and leapt forward, attacking the cop head-on. His gun flinched upward, and he fired, the bullet ricocheting harmlessly off the ramparts of the carport, sending the tourists into another round of panic. He leveled the gun again but by then, I was arcing fast, my blade slashing down across his chest—not closely enough to cut him, but I did shred his shirt, slicing through what looked like a Kevlar vest. I whipped the sword up and spun it around, until its butt faced him. I punched the man’s forehead with enough force to drop a rhino. Then Nikki revved the engine and swerved onto the sidewalk, bumping into me as I clutched the Honjo and its scabbard against my chest with one hand and scrabbled for the door with the other.

I got the door open just as a real cop car bounced into the Luxor’s driveway.

“Get in!” Nikki hollered, and I surged into the backseat as she roared over the median, banking hard and shooting out the front of the Luxor even as the cop car’s lights flashed and sirens started wailing.

I screamed unnecessary exhortations to go, to get, to
move
as Nikki peeled around the car park and headed out again, bouncing onto the Strip and speeding toward Mandalay Bay.

“A little direction would probably be a good idea, dollface,” she snapped, laying on the horn as she blew through a red light, sending cross traffic skittering into each other. Sirens erupted behind us, a Strip-based symphony that was closing fast.

“Crap!” I hauled myself upright, grabbing the pull bar as I threw the sword and scabbard across the backseat. Nikki hit a corner hard and I thrust my hand into my hoodie, swiping for my deck. She corrected, and the few cards I’d manage to yank out went flying, even as I lurched across the backseat.

“Easy!” I sputtered, pawing for the cards.

“Click it or ticket. We’ve gotta motor. Half the freaking LVMPD is gonna be on our tail if we don’t move it like now. And I’m thinking our little death-by-cop greeting party was just an opening salvo sent by Gamon to let us know she’s ready to party, whether or not Usurper Joe gets his act together. We’ve gotta finish this.” She gunned the SUV. “Where’m I headed?”

“I’m working on it!” I spit back. The cards had landed in a scatter, and I scooped them up, knowing there was no way I’d be able to replicate their original order. Still, a lot of times I could figure out which came first or last just by the images, and I fanned the cards out, gripping them so hard, the plastic warped in my hand.

“Okay! Okay—we got two majors and two minors, majors are prolly bookends but hard to say.”

“Not helpful,” Nikki said. She blew through another light, barely slowing on the side street.

“Chariot—that could be the car or it could also be Luxor. Gotta be Luxor; that’s first. That’s past.”

“Definitely past. What else, what are the other cards?”

“Two wands. A trip of two hours, two days, or a long trip, choices, trip, journey. Two, something,” I rattled out. “Then there’s also Death and the Five Swords, Death is transformation, change—”

“Or, you know, Death—”

“And Five Swords is a fight, a fight you lose but should’ve won, or win but maybe don’t like the outcome for having done so. I can’t think—Death!”

“I got that one already.”

“No, the Two of Wands is facing left, toward the setting sun, that’s west. Two hours west on a journey to Death.”

“Sweet Jesus and an armadillo, Death Valley!” Nikki crowed, and she roared around the next corner, running alongside the highway. As luck and the cards would have it, the interstate was I-95, a quick shot out of Vegas and up through the desolate landscape west of the city, until it jackknifed south onto Nevada-373 and eventually crossed the California border into Death Valley National Park.

She jumped onto the highway, and we started speeding away, and it was only then that I realized there were no more sirens after us. “All’s quiet from the city,” I said, shoving my cards back into my interior hoodie pocket. “What’s that about?”

“You focus on regaining your Zen place of happy fighting,” Nikki said, eyeing me from the front seat. “And put your sword back together while you’re at it. It looks like a messed-up stack of TinkerToys that way.”

I shook my head, pulling the sword toward me and sliding its blade into the scabbard. “I think my Zen happy place is under construction. And if these cards are lining up the way I think they are, it’s not opening back up for business anytime soon.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not the attitude of a warrior—hey!”

The display in front of Nikki as well as a monitor mounted into the ceiling of the vehicle crackled to life, and though Nikki tried to smack the electronics into submission, a second later, Simon’s face took up the entire screen, like he was peering down a dark hole.

“This should—excellent, we got ’em,” he said to someone off camera. His eyes flickered to the right and back directly above the camera, and a grin split his face.

“Sara, my man! You guys have gone viral!”

“What—” Despite myself, I leaned forward, but Simon was distracted again, his fingers apparently flashing over a keyboard. His face was replaced by a camera-shot YouTube video, steadier than usual because of the selfie stick that allowed the angle to pike high above the cars. For a moment, there was nothing visible but Nikki and my head—confronted by the two guys in tan. Then Nikki suddenly heaved herself at the cops and vaulted into the SUV, and screams erupted all around.

“Oh my God, those cops! Those cops have a gun on that—” Pause. “Holy shit! Holy shit did you see that? Look at her go!”

The camera swooped, and then we did get a more direct shot on the action in front of the Luxor’s main doors, grainy and indistinct though it was. I saw my arms flash out as I disconnected the Honjo from my belt, then the person on the screen started moving so fast, it was impossible for me to believe it was me performing those moves. I watched myself knock the first cop back and slice the second, but I totally didn’t recall me leaping up to rebound off the side of the SUV, nor my spiraling flip in the air. I would have thought I’d have noticed that.

The sound of sirens picked up then, and the camera swung dizzily away, the awed viewer’s reaction echoed by another voice. “Oh my God, there’s more cops, there’s more—hey! She made it into the car! The girl with the sword is in the SUV!”