Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (16 page)

The air smelled of prime rib and faint
cigarette smoke. It took me only a second before I realized we were
on the second floor, the mezzanine level, of the Eldorado Hotel and
Casino in downtown Reno, Nevada.

To my left along the interior mall-like area
was the Silver Legacy Hotel and Casino and beyond that the Circus
Circus Hotel and Casino.

This interior mall area stretched for a very
long three blocks and must have a couple dozen restaurants, shops
and gift stores along its wide corridor. It was a nice place
considering Reno’s weather in the winter, allowing people to move
between the three casinos without ever going outside.

I had always liked this interior mall and the
feel of it. Some people said it reminded them of a huge cruise
ship, only without ocean views and people getting seasick.

I glanced around. No one had noticed our
arrival so I figured Stan had jumped us into a blind camera
area.

“Back with your girlfriend in a moment,” Stan
said and vanished, leaving me alone.

I had no idea what the problem was, or why we
were in Reno, but if he was going for Patty when she was still at
work, I knew it couldn’t be good.

I stepped away from the stone pillar and let
my poker senses take in everything around me. A few people upset at
losing, and one couple went past not happy, headed for the Silver
Legacy. I caught part of a conversation about how the guy was angry
with his wife flirting with another man. He was telling her so in
no uncertain terms. It wasn’t hard to miss, even without extra
poker senses.

But I could sense nothing that would cause
Stan to jump us to Reno and into the Eldorado.

Across from me was a brewpub full of younger
patrons laughing and drinking. I’m not sure exactly when I started
thinking of adults around age thirty as younger, but I did. Since I
have been told that as a superhero, I have basically stopped aging
at thirty even though I am over forty, I have no idea how jaded I
was going to get by the time I reached one hundred.

Or two-hundred-plus like Patty. She still
hadn’t told me her real age. She just shook her head and said it
didn’t matter every time I asked. She didn’t look a day over thirty
either, but knowing there might be a few hundred years in age
difference sometimes actually bothered me.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and the calming
sense of Patty’s touch. That was one of her super powers and I
loved it.

And her. More than I wanted to admit to
myself at times. We just fit together in seemingly every sense.

I turned around to look into her beautiful
brown and very worried eyes. She was still dressed in the uniform
of the MGM Grand Hotel front desk. A black skirt, white blouse and
MGM dark vest with their hotel emblem on the right side.

Her long brown hair was pulled back tight as
she kept it while working.

“Any idea what’s going on?”

I shook my head, keeping my poker senses on
full. I didn’t quite have a “Spider-Sense” like Spider-Man did in
the comics, but I had a pretty good ability to know when danger was
approaching and right now I could feel nothing.

“Where is Stan?” I asked.

“He went to get Screamer,” she said.

“This can’t be good,” I said.

She nodded.

A moment later Stan appeared next to the
stone column in the dead camera area. Screamer was with him looking
just as puzzled.

Screamer had the ability to touch someone and
get into their mind and their thoughts. He didn’t have a
distinctive look, more like Stan with the ability to blend into
just about anywhere. He usually wore old jeans and a sweatshirt
with the UNLV logo on it and tonight was no exception.

Screamer had gotten his name from his ability
to put images into other people’s heads. He often worked for the
police and could put images so bad and so real into a suspect’s
mind that he could make the most hardened criminal scream. What he
did could never stand up in a court, but he had solved a lot of
crimes over the years.

And he had helped this team save the world a
few times as well.

“All right,” Stan said. “Let’s go.”

He turned toward the short staircase leading
down around an ornate fountain and into another section of the
Eldorado Hotel and Casino mezzanine level.

“What are we doing here?” Screamer asked a
moment before I could.

“Going for a drink,” Stan said, his voice
almost lost in the sounds of the multiple fountains.

Patty just shook her head and I followed
them, keeping every sense I had on full alert. And that was a lot
of senses, so many in fact I hadn’t named them all. But the one
right now I was trusting the most was my danger awareness
sense.

And it was flat coming up blank.

We went past a gift shop, down another short
flight of stairs, and toward what looked to be a combination bakery
counter, restaurant on the right, and bar in the back on the left,
tucked against the wall.

Suddenly Patty said, “Sherri.”

Her uniform morphed into a black dress, her
hair flowed into a perfect shape around her head, and black high
heels replaced her tennis shoes she wore while working.

All in the space of one step.

I had no idea she could do that.

None at all.

And we’d been together now for a few years.
If we survived whatever we were facing, we were going to need to
have a talk about her powers.

“Oh, no,” Screamer said as Stan headed toward
the bar past the huge counter full of very tasty-looking pies and
cakes and cinnamon rolls coated an inch deep in white frosting. The
entire area smelled of fresh bread, making my stomach rumble and me
wish I had taken a few more bites of that cold chicken.

“Come on, Stan, why?” Screamer asked.

Stan said nothing. Just kept walking.

Stan reached the bar and pulled up a
barstool. Screamer sat on his left, Patty took the spot on his
right, and I took the spot next to Patty.

I could still sense absolutely nothing wrong,
but from Patty’s sudden change and Screamer’s comment, they were
clearly sensing something I wasn’t.

And that scared me more than I wanted to
admit.

We sat there in silence with the sounds of
the distant casino echoing faintly in the background. It must have
only been a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity.

The bar was a normal wood bar, pretty wide,
and even though it looked rustic, it was polished as smooth as
glass. We were the only customers sitting at it. There were three
empty stools to my right. It felt really, really strange to be
sitting at a bar. I just never did this.

Bottles of varied booze lined the ornate back
bar, blocking most of a mirror that made the area seem bigger. The
top of the back bar was also a rustic ornate wood as were all the
decorations on both sides of it.

This kind of bar could have been in any one
of a thousand places. It actually seemed a little out of place with
all the desserts in a huge counter ten paces behind us. It felt
like it belonged more in an Old West saloon in a movie. A long ways
from the smell of baking bread and ringing modern slot
machines.

I was about to say something when a door into
a back room swung open and a stunning woman emerged carrying a few
bottles of vodka. She wore tan slacks, a white short-sleeve blouse,
and an apron with the Eldorado Hotel logo on it. Her pitch-black
hair was pulled back tight and I caught a glimpse of a dark tattoo
on her shoulder and upper arm.

And she might have been one of the most
beautiful women I had ever seen.

“Hey, Stan,” she said, smiling in a way that
could knock down just about anyone with its radiance.

Now my warning senses were going off and
going off strong. If she was sitting across from me in a poker
tournament, I would be very, very careful even being in a hand with
her. She had power. More than likely she was a superhero or maybe a
god.

But I caught no threat at all of danger from
her. Just warnings about her power.

Stan nodded and didn’t return the smile.
“Sherri,” was all he said.

She put down the bottles, wiped her hands on
a white bar towel and slipped a bar napkin in front of Stan.

“Great seeing you,” she said. “I suppose Mom
sent you and your team here.”

“She did,” Stan said, again nodding.

“Well, I appreciate you coming,” she said,
smiling. “Thanks.”

I wanted to shout out
“Mom?”
but then
realized the only woman who could order Stan, the God of Poker
around, was Laverne, Lady Luck herself. I now had a hunch suddenly
who I was facing. I hadn’t known going into a previous mission that
Lady Luck had a daughter, so I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me
that she had two.

Or more for all I knew.

When this was over, I really needed to ask
some very pointed questions about the family trees of some of my
bosses.

Sherri put a bar napkin in front of Screamer,
the smile turning a little sad on her face.

“I miss you,” she said.

He only nodded just slightly, his gaze
holding hers.

She missed him?

What in the world was going on? If this
Sherri was Lady Luck’s daughter, having both Stan and Screamer have
strange reactions to her didn’t seem like much of a good start to
whatever we were facing here.

She shrugged and moved to a spot in front of
Patty. She slid a napkin in front of her and smiled, the smile
actually reaching her eyes. “Patty Ledgerwood I presume. I’ve heard
so many good things about you and your work. You look
stunning.”

Patty smiled, blushed, and said nothing.

Sherri slid a napkin in front of me, her
smile turning to something I couldn’t read.

“So this is the famous Poker Boy I’ve been
hearing so much about.”

I kept my poker face and only nodded
slightly.

She laughed. “You people sure aren’t much for
idle conversation, are you?”

“We’re here,” Stan said, his voice very
controlled. “I don’t understand why you are here, or what you need
from us.”

“I work here,” she said, smiling. “I have now
for about four years. Moved here from the Atlantis Casino. I worked
there for ten years. Remember?”

She looked at Screamer and he just
nodded.

She went on. “The management here keep
offering to make me a bar manager, but I like keeping my hand in
the drinks and talking with the customers.”

Even though Stan had the best poker face that
existed, I could tell he was surprised by that. If this was Lady
Luck’s daughter, I was surprised as well.

“And I didn’t ask you to come here,” Sherri
said. “That was Mom’s idea. She said you four might be able to help
me with my lost riddle.”

Stan said nothing, Screamer just shook his
head, and Patty just smiled softly and stared at her.

Wow, was there a lot of history between these
four. Clearly it had all happened long before I was born. And since
Stan had been married to one of Lady Luck’s daughters, more than
likely he wasn’t pleased to see this one either. So it looked like
this was going to be up to me to figure out what she was talking
about.

“So what’s the riddle that your mom thought
we could help you solve?” I asked. “And I assume I am talking with
a daughter of Lady Luck. Correct?”

“Sherri,” she said, giving me that beaming
smile that I had no doubt melted some of the icing off a cinnamon
role in the case behind me.

“The Queen of Clubs,” Screamer said, his
voice soft.

“Dear husband,” Sherri said, a slight touch
of hurt going to her eyes, even though she kept smiling. “You used
to not like anyone calling me that name.”

I was trying to deal with the fact that
Screamer had been married to Lady Luck’s second daughter at one
point. Now all I had to do was figure out why Patty had a problem
with her and I might have a clue what was happening.

“So the riddle?” I asked, pulling her
attention back to me. “What’s so important about it?”

“It’s lost,” Sherri said over her shoulder to
me as she moved fluidly down the bar to pour some drinks for a
waitress that had come up to the waitress station in front of a bar
well.

Sherri seemed to move faster than anyone I
had ever seen, yet the waitress never once looked up. After only a
moment, which I guessed had something to do with her slipping
slightly out of time to do the drinks, she came back toward us
wiping her hands on a bar towel. “Can I get any of you a
drink?”

My three teammates sat silently, so I said,
“Sure. Bloody Mary mix with no vodka.”

“Celery?” she asked as she moved to the well
again.

“Nope,” I said.

As she finished my virgin drink, I studied
her. Not one sense of danger, nothing from her, and she wasn’t
blocking me in any way. In fact, I wasn’t getting that much sense
that she actually had many powers at all, even though I assumed she
was a god. Could it be that Lady Luck’s daughter was only a
superhero like I was? That didn’t seem possible.

As she put the drink on my bar napkin and
again wiped off her hands, I asked her a simple question. “What’s
so important about finding or solving the riddle?”

“It will lead me to a second key holding the
Four Faces of Janus.”

“Oh,” was all I said.

Stan just shook his head.

Screamer sort of snorted in disgust and Patty
again didn’t move.

We had already gone into Elysium, the capital
of the ancient race of the Titans, to rescue Sherri’s sister, Helen
the Queen of Hearts, who had gone there to get one of the keys that
held the Four Faces of Janus.

Supposedly, legend says that when the four
keys are combined, they will open the time lock and allow the
Titans to return to their rightful place in time and space. Or
something like that. Mythology and facts were sometimes hard to
tell apart for me these days. I really, really needed to ask more
questions about all this.