Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5 (3 page)

His steps slowed to a trudge, like a kid brother I couldn’t shake. “Yeah, but—when?”

“A few days, Simon. A week. Nothing’s going to blow up in the next week that I can’t handle when I get back.”

“Hey.” He brightened. “I’ve already packed the shield onto the jet. Maybe it can fly back on its own, and I could come with you. I haven’t been to Paris in a while. I could kick back, take in a few museums—”

I halted in my tracks. “What’s your deal? You got your field trip to test out your new tech, and you got Eshe’s shield. You did everything Armaeus asked you to do.” My own words echoed back to me, and I narrowed my eyes at him. “Unless I’m missing something?”

He shrugged. “He’s the head of the Council, and you’re the most powerful mortal we know right now. He wants to keep an eye on you.”

“Keep an eye?” I held up my left hand, bandaged edge to edge. “Not even that blasted altar of doom could pry that stupid ring off my hand. That’s plenty of tracking for one person. You can tell Armaeus to go spin in small circles, and I’ll get home when I get home.”

If anything, the Fool looked even more morose. “
What
?” I demanded. “I can’t read your mind, Simon. No matter what you people think of me.”

“It’s just… There’re too many changes in the Connected community.” He rocked back on his heels. “Too quick. Too many people coming out of the woodwork and throwing shade, when it’s been excessively boring for decades.”

“Forgive me if I think you have a skewed perspective on boring.”

“You don’t understand.” He shook his head. “I’ve been doing this for three decades. Thirty years of bumping along without anything much more interesting than watching the stock markets go big then go bust then go big again. When Armaeus found you, things started to move faster. We were collecting artifacts again. Not like we needed more of those, but still. Stuff was happening. The Council actually convened meetings. It was cool. Then the veil between the worlds started to wobble.”

I lifted my brows. “It can do that?”

“Fray, split, whatever.” He waved a hand. “And now there’s this talk of Houses. Like, real live Houses of the Minor Arcana—giving mortals actual standing right alongside the Council. No one even
told
me about Houses, and I’ve been kicking around for thirty years. The orientation manual absolutely sucks for this job.”

I tried to process everything Simon was saying, but he was talking way too fast. I glanced at the monitors. My flight wasn’t for another hour, and his was whenever his bony ass got on the Council’s private jet.

We had time. And I wanted answers.

I steered Simon into a bar, never mind that it was ten in the morning. He’d done worse to me. “So what’s the real story with the Houses?” I asked, casual as all hell. It was a reasonable question. Annika Soo, head of one of the most powerful syndicates on the Connected black market, had also, it turned out, fronted one of these mythical Houses. Right up until she’d conferred that leadership position to me not two weeks earlier. So it’d be handy for me to know some details.

Simon lifted his hands in defeat as he slumped further on his stool. “That’s the problem. I don’t know anything more than you do. I don’t even think Armaeus does anymore.”

The bartender cruised over. I pointed at the bottle of vodka on the middle shelf. “Neat,” I said.

“That’s why Armaeus is all freaked,” Simon continued as the bartender busied himself with our drinks. “The four Houses of the Minor Arcana haven’t been in play since the Middle Ages. There’s no history, no hint of them—other than Soo’s House of Swords—and we didn’t know about that until these past several months. As to the rest…” He shrugged. “The Council stopped looking a long time ago for evidence of House activity. We couldn’t poke our noses too far into what wasn’t our business.”

I’d heard this song before. “Because you didn’t want to interfere.”

“Bingo.” He smiled wearily. “The number one rule of Arcana Council: there is no Arcana Council. We don’t mess with mortal magic, other than making sure it stays balanced. Since the Houses are for mortals, when we lost track of them, we simply had to accept that.”

Simon picked up his glass. “Except, we couldn’t believe they’d simply disappeared. Armaeus was convinced they’d gone underground, and was furious he couldn’t do more, learn more. And there weren’t any mortals who could get him deep enough into the Connected community to draw out the truth.”

Slow understanding dawned. “Until me.”

“Yep.” Simon squinted at me. “You were the first mercenary we’d hired who didn’t…well, die. In a hurry. The others didn’t last.”

I stopped in the process of lifting my own vodka, then put the glass down again. “There were other artifact hunters?” Of course there would have been others. The Council’s need for toys hadn’t simply erupted out of nowhere a little over a year ago. But I’d never questioned Armaeus needing me for such work. I’d simply done it. “They died?”

The last question was more rhetorical, but Simon answered it anyway. “Not so much died as burned out. Literally, zzzzzt.” He made a gesture with his fingers as if pulling a string taut. “They couldn’t function after a few jobs.” He rolled his empty vodka glass. “You’re different.”

I was different, yeah. I’d run more than thirty jobs for the Council in the past year and change, and so far, no zzzzzt. But Armaeus couldn’t have known I’d be so hardy at the outset. He’d simply kept pushing me. And apparently, I hadn’t been the first mercenary he’d ever pushed.

The wreckage to my body was one thing. He’d done a good job healing that so far. But what about the wreckage to my mind?

I scowled. “Where are they now? The others?”

“No clue,” Simon shrugged. “Maybe they’re dead now. Armaeus stopped hiring for a while, maybe ten years before he found you. But in all the time he’d been working with hunters, the Houses never came up. When he realized Annika Soo was more than the head of a criminal syndicate, that was the first I’d heard about the possibility of the Houses still existing. I don’t think he knew she ruled Swords, though.”

“Oh, right.” I quirked him a glance. “Reading minds is kind of his thing.”

“I know. But it’s like there’s some sort of shield between the House leaders and the Council. He’s not used to being shielded…except from you, of course, and you surprised him from the start. Which means maybe there’s more out there like you, and that’s kind of a problem.”

I signaled to the bartender to pour us another round of drinks, and pushed my glass toward Simon. I hadn’t had a chance to drink from it yet, but this information was enough of a high.

“A problem for who?” I asked. “If the Houses stay hidden, how does that hurt anyone?”

“No one can stay hidden anymore,” Simon said, lifting my glass. “It’s all hands on deck. Magic hasn’t been moving this fast in hundreds of years. The Council thinks maybe we’ll have an arcane renaissance that hasn’t happened since the Dark Ages. Why do you think the Magician went all the way to Hell to find the Hierophant? This war that’s coming, it’s mortal on mortal and mortal on magic, yeah. But there’s something else stirring, some deeper shift, and we don’t know if it’s good or bad. We have to be ready.” He grinned wryly. “Which means we have to keep tabs on you.”

“Uh-huh.” I narrowed my eyes at him as he drained his drink. “Well, you’re not coming with me to Paris. I’m not on the Council, no matter how much work I do for you guys. I’m a free agent.”

He tipped his glass my way, looking more relaxed than I’d seen him in ages. “You
were
a free agent. When I met you, anyway. You were getting us, what, some bowl from Crete? I think that was what Armaeus had sent you for. You got it too, and all you wanted was money and to get the hell out of Vegas as fast as you could.”

“Yeah, well. I wasn’t a fan.”

“But now you’re in it up to your neck, aren’t you? So important that Armaeus needed to put a ring on it.” Simon snickered, setting down his drink. His smile got a little looser—too loose, and he pointed a wobbly finger at me. “You keep surprising him every time he turns around, blowing things up and—”

“Use your inside voice, buddy.” I reached out to stabilize Simon as he lurched toward me, his arms windmilling. When I caught him, heavily, his face was right at my ear.

“Poison, Sara,” the Fool said succinctly. “High grade. Fast acting. Didn’t track it at first but it’s going to incapacitate me pretty quickly, starting with my extremities. Not going to be worth shit to you here, but I can ah, make myself scarce.”

I blinked at him. I knew Simon had some teleporting capabilities—something about bending electrons—but… “You can teleport while poisoned?”

He pulled back and met my gaze. “I’m sure going to try. This is seriously high-grade dope, and I don’t want any part of someone who knows this particular blend. Sorry to bail on you.” He stared hard into my eyes, and I felt the hum of his desperation. “You got about eight seconds till you’re on. Lead guy is short and he’s coming up fast.”

“Right.” I opened my mind and with Simon in my arms like this, my vision expanded broadly. I saw not only Simon in front of me, not only the bar, but the bar, the building, the rushing workers outside, the tarmac, the hangar, the plane—Armaeus’s plane.

With a jaunty grin, Simon dissolved in my arms, leaving me with an armful of cotton shirt, cargo shorts, and a skullcap.

A sudden rush of steps closing in was my only warning. Without rising, I thrust my elbow back as the first assailant reached the bar, up and to the right at about throat level for a size-challenged assailant. I was rewarded with a gargling sound as some tourist across the bar shouted in alarm.

I spun off my stool, grabbed my empty vodka tumbler, then swung it wide. It connected with another face, but that didn’t stop assailant number two. Something bright flashed toward me and I dropped, boneless. A syringe missed my neck and impaled itself in the chairback. I scrabbled away on my backside as a pair of flashy loafers and impeccably tailored trousers leaped over me, clearing my head…

Then it was my turn to stare.

A well-muscled, highly trained blond in a fantastic suit cracked one of the assailant’s heads on the counter and shoved him back toward the guy now wielding a second needle, then flipped the man’s hand around to bury the syringe in the assailant’s own neck. A fourth attacker raced in and whipped out a gun. This was the Tel Aviv airport we were in, however, and by this time, the crowd had dispersed and security with guns were coming fast, booming orders in multiple tongues as my protector whipped around and located me on the floor.

If I had any doubts before, the impossibly perfect shaving job would have clued me in.

“You can run?” asked Nigel Friedman in his crisp British accent.

Without waiting for me to respond, he scattered a few metallic spheres on the ground, then helped me up.

“Move out,” he ordered, even as the first officer noticed me staggering to my feet and shouted for us to stop.

Then the bombs went off.

They were flashbangs, not meant for anything but the most superficial of damage, but the effect was impressive. Travelers and workers screamed, bolting away in all directions. Nigel gripped my arm hard enough to bruise as he hustled me out of the bar area and into the main line of scrambling tourists. Rather than heading for the exit off the main concourse, he banked hard to the right, following signs that led to the smaller terminal set up alongside the large commercial carrier gates.

“What—how—” I managed, but not much else, as Nigel’s long strides took up two to three of mine.

“You never choose to do things the easy way.” Nigel scanned the monitors as he walked, but every new step brought more modulation to his voice and pace, both of them tempering the farther we got away from the disturbance at the main gate. A flood of airport security warnings blared over the loudspeaker in what I supposed was Hebrew and Arabic, then in English, advising of the apprehension of assailants and for everyone not to be alarmed. I didn’t know if I was included in that.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, now that we were walking normally, though still with purpose. Nigel and I had a long history of hunting for the same artifacts for different employers, which made us competitive on our best days and frenemies the rest of the time. “For the record, I’m not in the mood to get handed off to your newest employer.”

His lips quirked. “That would be entertaining. But I was in the area, merely called in to clean up the mess you were about to make. You should be more careful, Sara.”

“Is that so?”

“Considering the trail of bodies you’ve left in your wake recently, yes,” Nigel said. His gaze was cold as it raked over me. “Soo was a friend of mine.”

“I didn’t think you had those,” I retorted, unreasonably stung. Annika Soo had died on my watch, but she’d walked into that danger on her own.

Nigel ignored my gibe. “You should know that Gamon has put out a bounty on your head to all his operatives—”

“
Her
operatives,” I interrupted, which at least got the officious prick to shut up. Life was a balance. “Gamon is a her. That’s why she always wears a mask. And so what if she wants me dead? She wouldn’t be the first one.”

“No, but
she
would be your biggest enemy to date. Her black market operations span the globe, her pockets are deep, and she’s got agents everywhere. There’s a reason she and Soo hated each other and it went beyond the war on magic.” He glanced at me. “From all accounts, Gamon is willing to throw a lot of money into the search for you. Capture only, for now. Execution appears to be off the table, which doesn’t bode well for your body parts. You should avoid public transportation until you two sort out your differences.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Suddenly, all the fatigue of the past few weeks caught up with me. Even though I’d drunk none of the spiked vodka, bone-deep weariness made my legs too loose, my gait unsteady.

Nigel didn’t seem to notice. “Good,” he said, his voice clipped. He put his fingers to a spot behind his ear, and I realized he was carrying a wire.

“Um, who exactly phoned you in on this, again?”