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

“Max said you were getting too many to count,” I said, taking in the worn faces, the gaunt cheekbones, the pale skin despite the bright and cheerful sun beaming down through the trees. “There has to be a hundred kids here.”

Father Jerome nodded. “There is also the house in Toulouse, and another one outside Paris.”

“And how many from these places did you pick out as specials?” I asked. “Max told me you had some children whose abilities far outshone the rest.”

The look Jerome turned on me was bemused, then he transferred his gaze to Max as he bounded up the stairs to join us.

“I figured you should tell her,” Max said, returning Jerome’s surprised glance with a shrug.

Father Jerome sighed, then gestured to the children gathering in front of us. “All of these here are specials, as you call them,” he said quietly.

I blinked at him. “They can’t be,” I said automatically. “There are too many.”

He held up a hand, forestalling any further commentary. “But the fact remains. These are the children who’ve been identified with abilities or characteristics that would result in the arcane black market sale of their bodies, living or dead, in some cases for tens of thousands of dollars. They are visionaries, psychics, psychometrists like Max here, state changers, healers…and, in some cases, actual weapons, if aimed appropriately.”

“But…how?” I stared around at the children and noticed many of them were looking back at me now, their eyes soulful and heavy with purpose even from a distance. “How did you find so many?”

“As I’m sure Max has told you—we didn’t have to. Many have come looking for us. And before you ask—no. None bear the mark you sent me, of this Gamon. We have started receiving those children, but none of them are so talented as these.”

My lips twisted. “I guess that makes sense. Gamon would have to give up too much power to bait us with a marked child. And she may or may not know we can undo her tracking device.”

Jerome nodded. “The tattoo artist you spoke of. The Council Member. She has contacted me—well, your Magician has, on her behalf.”

I bristled at his gentle words. “He’s not
my
Magician.”

“Ha! If you won’t claim him, I will,” said Max. “And Jerome’s right. She said she’d send people to remove the tracking devices from the tattoos of the kids who have them, and she did. We haven’t gotten a lot of marked Connecteds, though. And no high-functioning ones. Not that Jerome’s let me near the marked kids.”

“Too dangerous,” Jerome said. “One of them could be as talented as you at reading abilities, and in communication with this Gamon as well. I cannot risk anyone knowing of your skills.”

Max shook his head genially. “Father Jerome is taken in by my youthful smile,” he said. “He doesn’t realize I can defend myself.”

“Not against everything,” Jerome said firmly. Then he turned. “Come—you should meet some of the children.”

He took me down into the throng of hyper-skilled Connecteds. Their energy swept over me in rolling tides the longer I was in their midst. Max was everywhere, introducing the children, goading the quiet ones into bright smiles and quick laughter, urging the more outgoing ones to share their stories. I’d heard many of those stories through Jerome already, but hearing them again from the children themselves tore a new set of holes in my heart.

“C’est bien, Giselle,” Jerome murmured now. “She is here. She is safe.”

I blinked as I looked down at the young girl Jerome was kneeling next to. But she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at me.

“Vous êtes ici,” she said, and her eyes stopped me cold. They shone with a bright intensity I’d last seen in Las Vegas only a few weeks earlier, on an entirely different young woman’s face. I seemed to have a knack for stressing out gifted girls. “You left this plane for darkness but you are back now,” she said. “You can continue the fight.”

Jerome smiled indulgently, and the child kept going. “And now you must become a fire that burns everything, defeating the usurper. Or all of us will die.”

I flinched back, but the girl next to her turned and nodded at me too, her face set with tension. When she spoke, she used the same haunting cadence of the first child. “It’s the only way,” she said. “They’ll strip away all that is left of us if you do not strike first. If your hand becomes a scythe that destroys the usurper, all will bow before you.”

“Now stop that, Kaitlyn,” Jerome began, but I lifted a hand even as Max reached out to me, his reassuring touch on my other hand holding me fast, grounding me.

“It’s okay,” I said and crouched down to meet the first little girl’s eyes. “What usurper, sweetheart? What are you talking about?”

But the child simply stared at me, unblinking. I tried a different approach. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I murmured, until she blinked again, rapidly. “Have you seen—specifically—what it is that I must do?”

“Yes.” And now the child did nod, with the solemnity only a little girl could muster. “You must take up your sword.”

Chapter Four

It was another hour before Father Jerome, Max, and I left the château, only to repeat a similar scene at another house a few hours away. There the children were not the highest-skilled Connecteds—at least not anymore. But they were more traumatized to be sure. These were the children who had not escaped the demands of the dark practitioners unscathed. Some were missing limbs or were recovering from facial reconstruction surgery. Some were orphaned, their parents considered more important than the children for a particular ritual.

And some had been enslaved by Gamon.

“We followed your instructions,” Jerome said as we walked down one hallway and peered through plateglass windows into hospital suites. “Even the local tattoo artists that we called in as reinforcements knew what was required once we gave them the name of Blue.” He glanced at me. “That name opens a lot of doors.”

“It should,” I said. The incarnation of Death currently sitting on the Arcana Council was a shock blonde with a tattoo gun and a flare for painting hot rods. Known as Blue in the world of auto airbrushing, she ran a tattoo parlor in Vegas and had an international clientele of trainees. Trainees who apparently made house calls under the right circumstances. “She performed a similar job last week for maybe a hundred victims of Gamon. They can’t be tracked now—and these kids you have here, hopefully they weren’t tracked before you had their ink worked on.”

“If they were, we’re ready,” Jerome said. “This house is not unknown. Our children have never been harmed once we’ve brought them in. Their value to the dark practitioners has already dropped by the time they reach us.”

“Because they’re tainted with awareness.” I hesitated even as I said the word, a new idea occurring to me. “You know, maybe we should round up all the Connected children, both the ones who’ve been harmed and those that haven’t yet, and let them mingle, so they know the evil waiting for them in the outside world. Once they know that, their magic might be altered enough to make them less appealing to the dark practitioners.”

“Perhaps,” Father Jerome agreed. “Though it would rob them of their childhood.”

I grimaced. “Better that than their lives.”

“As you say.”

He directed us to an oak-paneled library that had been made over as a conference room, with a long central table and deep-cushioned chairs. Unlike the Arcana Council’s meeting rooms, no electronics bristled from the corners of this chamber. Instead, a large map of Europe hung prominently along one wall, marked with pins in clusters. The white pins were the birthplaces of the Connected children; the black ones were known locations of dark practitioners. But another color had sprouted like wildflowers across the map.

I moved forward with a frown. “What’s with the purple?”

“The highest skilled of the children are denoted by that color,” Father Jerome said, and I could feel his gaze on me. “We thought we could identify hotspots of particular concern once we had enough markers.” He chuckled wryly. “We didn’t realize we would soon have far more data than beds. But you see the pattern.” He waved at the map.

“Ley lines.” I nodded. “The ancient arbiter of sacred grounds, tied to the earth’s energy patterns. Makes sense.” I turned to him. “But ley lines circle the globe, Jerome. That’s like saying you’re likely to find grass in a field.”

“Our thoughts exactly. There is an uptick in the birth of highly skilled Connecteds at the intersection points, but most of the intersection points have been accounted for, at least in Europe. And there remain outliers.”

“So it’s a dead end.”

“That line of inquiry, yes,” he said. “We cannot predict where the next strong children will emerge. Of course, if we can’t, our enemies can’t as well.” Without giving me a chance to comment on that, he moved to the map and picked up a ball of twine. “What we did notice, however, was perhaps more disturbing.”

He began unraveling the twine from its bobbin, then hooked it on the tops of each cluster of dark pins, moving down and to the right, then up and to the left, back and forth. In no time, an image appeared in the center of the map, etched out in twine. I’d seen a deliberate incarnation of the image before, in Las Vegas. Gamon had used it to mark a grisly diagram of body dumps throughout the city, but we didn’t know why, precisely. There was no indication that Gamon was Jewish—but none that she wasn’t either.

“Star of David,” I said.

Jerome nodded. “The alpha and omega joined together. You’ll note there’s no population of practitioners in the center…that we’re aware of.”

My brows leapt. “But there’s got to be something there.” I moved closer, peering at the map. “Are we reading too much into this? Do we know anything about the distribution of the dark practitioners in Asia or the Americas? Africa?”

“They are active to be sure, but their concentration is not as large. The Old World, or what was known as such, seems to have held the highest concentration of practitioners for generations. And now this appears to be the center of those practitioners.”

“What is that, Hungary?” I asked, leaning close. “The Ukraine, maybe. Okay, so—that’s where Gamon is, you think? In the center of that star?” I frowned. “Why not Israel, if she’s fixated on Hebrew symbology?”

I could feel Jerome’s gaze on me. “I think perhaps there is a better question for you to ask yourself,” he said quietly. When I turned to him, his hands were clasped in front of his stomach, and he looked worn—more tired than I had ever seen him.

“Jerome, what is it?” I took a few steps forward, but he waved me off.

“I’m not the one you should worry about,” he said. “You’re asking questions about Gamon, and in fact, they are good questions to ask. She has become the figurehead of evil—but”—he paused, lifting a hand—“only the figurehead. You cut the head off a hydra, and it will grow a new head.”

“That’ll take time, though,” I said. “In the meantime, this is one creature who deserves to be headless, even for the short term.” I gestured to take in the grounds outside this room. “What if she’s the usurper that little girl spoke of, the one I need to strike down?”

“What if she is?” Jerome threw my words back at me. “Help me understand why you should be the one to
wield
the blade, Sara, versus merely guiding this sword to the right hand.” The priest’s words were kind, but they struck to the heart of my own insecurity. “I’ve pleaded with you for months—years—to work more with the children. To not only provide for their safety, which you have done amply—but to help them recover. To bend your skills to their future, not simply their present. You have rebuffed me at every turn, and that is your right to do so.”

When I would have spoken, he kept going. “Yet now, I find that not only have you taken up a call to arms in the fight to protect these children, you’ve gone further. You’ve been named the head of a Chinese death syndicate. You seek the blood of Gamon.”

I stiffened. “Gamon is the reason why these children suffer.”

“And you have pledged yourself already to their protection,” Jerome said, his words as stern as I’d ever heard them. “The children talk of swords and death and retribution. Yet when I see you, I don’t see swords and death. I see someone who finds the lost and shepherds them home. Why isn’t
that
Sara enough in this war? How did you come to decide that the Sara you were is not the woman you can be and still serve the needs of the many?”

He pointed at the map. “There are many who would take up arms to fight this beast that wraps around our most vulnerable children. There are many swords to fill that army. Why must this blood be on you, when there is so much other work to be done?”

I took a step back, my mouth working, but in truth, I couldn’t answer him. Not directly. “You don’t think I can fight Gamon?”

Father Jerome’s smile was the saddest thing I had ever seen. “I think most assuredly you
can
fight Gamon. I think you could fight her, and, in divine righteousness, you could strike her down. But this is a fight that does not end with Gamon. This is a fight that ends with the root of all that is fear and evil in this world. And that is a fight no one can win with only a sharp blade and a stout heart.”

His words rang with a truth and a finality I couldn’t disavow, but I still found myself shaking my head. “You don’t know that, Father.”

He stepped close to me. “I do not know,” he said, taking my hands, the gesture so calm, so comforting that I inexplicably wanted to cry. “But I can hear, Sara. I can listen to what the children say about a warrior who is sworn unto death to save them. And I can hear them whispering about the pain and suffering this warrior will endure, the betrayals and loss. And I can think to myself—all these things, they do not have to fall to Sara Wilde. There are many roles in a war so big as this. There are many battles to fight.”

He squeezed my hands. “Especially when you don’t even know how to handle a sword.”

I let out a choked laugh, but Jerome was right. Not half a year ago, I was secure in my position. I would make a mercenary’s profit on a war fought by others, save the children in my path, and put the money toward the greater good. Rather than get caught up in the politics and perfidies of the opposing sides, I’d focus on the one thing I could do, and do well…finding and selling the artifacts to finance Jerome’s work.