Getting Wilde (28 page)

“Kind of overdressed, don’t you think?”
 

 “I suppose I should thank you. If these women recover, they’ll be the finest oracles to serve for over five hundred years.”
 

“They weren’t on the delivery order.” I slanted a look at Armaeus. He didn’t seem impressed. “They’re not staying.”
 

“Don’t be absurd.” Eshe turned around and scowled at Armaeus. “We need these women. I need them.”
 

“For what? I thought you didn’t interfere with the actions of the mortal realm. What could the visions of two seers possibly tell you that would be of any use to you?”
 

She kept her gaze on Armaeus. “Is there a reason why she’s still talking?”
 

“Look, duckface—”
 

“Wake.” Armaeus’s voice echoed out through the room. Beyond the glass, the women
stirred, rousing to wakefulness. Eshe caught the movement and whipped back around. “How are their numbers?” she demanded.
 

“Thready,” Dr. Sells said severely. “They should not be here. They should be in a fully functioning facility. With medical specialists.” She scowled at her monitors, never glancing in our direction. I didn’t know if I liked the woman, but I liked her attitude at the moment, anyway.
 

“I don’t trust those facilities. Too many walls.” Eshe’s tone had turned petulant. “You should have everything you need here.”
 

“I do, for life support.” Dr. Sells flicked her hand across the screen, and the picture changed. “And congratulations, these two young women are going to survive. But I can’t even determine the true impact of this Pythene gas on Sara right now, and she only inhaled it for about an hour. These women have been sucking down that concoction for the past several weeks. There’s no telling the long-term neurological damage it’s inflicted, let alone the state of their pulmonary systems. They should be under observation for weeks to be safe.”
 

“Weeks?” It was my turn to be petulant. “I need to get them back to their families.”
 

“Broken and incapacitated?” Dr. Sells looked at me through the glass. “If you truly feel that their systems in their home countries can outstrip what the council’s money and connections can provide them here, then I suppose that’s a wise choice.”
 

Son of a bitch.
My opinion of Dr. Sells took a nosedive, but I couldn’t fault the woman’s logic. I felt Armaeus’s smug glance at me. He was behind this, somehow. I couldn’t quite believe that he’d orchestrated these women coming here
—
even I wasn’t that paranoid
—
but he sure as hell would benefit from me being stuck in the city for a while.
 

“Fine,” I muttered. “Then they get out of this hole in the sky and onto the actual earth, so if their parents want to come here, they can. I want them protected, but I don’t want them hidden. There’s too much of that as it is in the Connected community.”
 

“What—again, why is the courier allowed to speak? The oracles go nowhere but here. If we need these specialists”
—
she said the word with a flick of her fingers
—
“then we bring the specialists here. We’ve done it before.”
 

“Not negotiable.”
 

“And I told you to be silent.” Eshe moved with such a languorous grace that a lesser person wouldn’t have seen her attack coming. But I’d been working the back alleys of the black market for going on five years now. I knew the difference between someone working the grift and a sorcerer with real talent. Eshe, for all her bad manners, was the latter.
 

I dropped to the floor.
 

The wave of power surged over me, lighting up my nerve endings that were still in full-twitch from the Magician’s electroshock therapy. The blast slammed into the back wall, getting absorbed harmlessly into whatever substance made up this structure. Somehow I didn’t think it drywall.   
 

I rolled to my feet and danced to the side of another blast, not missing the fact that Armaeus stood aside, watching us both with keen interest but no apparent concern. Screw. That.
 

I didn’t have magical powers, but I had something Eshe didn’t, I was willing to bet.
 

A good right hook.
 

She rushed me, and I pivoted left, readying my body and tightening my core as she screamed in frustration, her hand coming up to throw some reinforced spell at me point-blank. I brought my fist up—
 

And punched through air.
 

The momentum carried me forward into the arms of a man I swear hadn’t been there two seconds before, a man whose arms I’d already experienced once this day, the lingering effects of which were not completely forgotten. “I’ve so missed you already, Sara Wilde.”
 

He turned me neatly in his arms, caging me so that I faced out.
 

The Magician stood close to me, too close, his hand on Eshe’s shoulder, handling her far less roughly but with the same restraint. “Look at her,” he said.
 

“I will not be—”
 

“Look at her, Eshe. She has agreed to substitute herself for the oracles. Look at her and tell me she cannot do what you need her to do.”
 

“She can barely be trusted to speak in complete sentences.” Eshe flicked a glance at me, then stilled. As usual, I caught on a second too late. By the time I decided to avert my eyes, I couldn’t.
 

“What is this you have brought?”
 

Her words were almost exactly what I recalled Kreios saying to Armaeus over the phone when we were flying back from Rome, and the odd phrasing caught at me as I held Eshe’s dark-eyed stare. I felt her trying to peer into me, through me, but the twist of her pouty lips told me of her lack of success, before she shrugged off Armaeus. “I can’t reach her mind. She’s useless to me.”
 

Armaeus let Eshe go willingly. Kreios did not seem to have the same agenda. His arms remained locked around me, pinning me to his muscular form. His chuckle was low, almost intimate, and it caused Eshe to look sharply at him. “I suppose you have something to add? Since you invariably do?”
 

“You don’t need to wrench the visions out of her, Eshe. She will give them to you freely enough.”
 

“I will?”
I will?
The idea of me giving Eshe anything except a hard time was difficult for me to imagine.
 

“She will.” It was Armaeus who spoke now, and his lip curled with annoyance, as if he’d
finally noticed Kreios’s stranglehold on me. “She won’t allow you to touch the women from Kavala. She knows they would go to you willingly, have already gone with you once before. You would not coerce them. You would not need to.”
 

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Eshe sniffed.
 

“Accordingly, if she doesn’t want the girls to get anywhere near you, she has to offer something in return. Something only she can do.” He shrugged, eyeing me dispassionately. “And so she will.”
 

I struggled against Kreios’s hold a moment more before he let me go, though I could feel the energy of his touch even after he’d released me. I rubbed my arms, sensing his smirk, and irritation lashed through me. I should be more upset, I knew. I should be outraged. But Armaeus was right, and Dr. Sells was right, and Father Jerome, who probably didn’t even know he was going down for this, was right.
 

“Fine,” I said, staring daggers at Eshe as she boldly met my gaze. “You want me to look something up from your global Rolodex, I can do that. Until the girls are strong enough to leave the city. And that’s not going to take months.” I scowled at Dr. Sells. “That’s going to take weeks. But if my newfound ability suddenly goes poof, there’s no bothering the girls. I want your word on that.” I wasn’t glaring at Eshe when I made this announcement, but Armaeus. He inclined his head gracefully. “Not your nod, your word.”
 

“I give you my word as my bond. You will serve as Eshe’s oracle until such time as the women leave Vegas to continue their recovery.”
 

“I’ll need her longer than that.”
 

“Oh, bullshit,” I snapped. “By that point, you’ll have broken down the gas you’ve collected from Fitz’s stash into its component parts. You can make your own little hallucinogenic cocktail. You won’t need to crawl around in anyone else’s brain at that point. You can suck down
the gas yourself.” I grinned at her horrified expression. “C’mon. Rub elbows with the little people, why don’tcha? Could be fun.”
 

“You’re revolting.” She scowled at Armaeus. “How do we even know she can do what you say she can?”
 

“Oh for God’s sake.” I waved down her theatrics. “What do you want me to see for you? What past or future do you want to view?”
 

“Tell me what really happened when Kreios was stuck in that abbey.”
 

Behind me, Kreios stiffened. “That’s hardly relevant.”
 

“It’s eminently relevant,” Eshe shot back. “You certainly haven’t been forthcoming, and this is information the council needs to know.”
 

“It’s no good for another reason,” I said, carefully pitching my tone to be nonchalant. Nevertheless, if Kreios wanted his secret kept, it was easy enough for me to do it. And if ever there was someone I wanted to owe me a favor, it was the Devil. “I was there, Eshe. I showed up about ten minutes after Kreios went underground, so I was privy to just about everything that happened to him. Not exactly useful as an oracular test. You’re going to have to ask me something else.”
 

“Fine,” she snapped “Tell me something about myself that no one in this room could possibly know but me. That will serve.”
 

I stared at her, but only partially in disgust. The other part rushed up too quickly, filling my mouth with words and thoughts and plans and expectations. I shook my head, but the pressure to speak grew almost unbearable. Finally I breathed out a long, ragged sigh. I swung my gaze back around to Eshe, and I could tell by her expression that she was surprised. Maybe a little worried?
 

Worked for me. “You killed to take your—”
 

“Stop—that’s enough!” Eshe snapped, shock suffusing her face.
 

“Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure,” the Devil drawled. “There are so many ways that sentence could end, and all of them completely entertaining. Do go on, Sara.”
 

“And I said no. What she’s said is sufficient. I can use her for my research.” She folded her hands demurely. “You’ll remain with me in my domain until I have need of you.”
 

I bristled. “I’m not your chew toy, Eshe. I’ll work for you the same way I work for Armaeus. On my own hours, and not until you’ve paid me a retainer fee.”
 

“Unacceptable. Do you have any idea how long I’ve been without—”
 

“And do you really want to push me? You’ve already agreed to leave me alone the moment my senses return to normal. That could happen in the next thirty minutes if you’re not careful. And thirty minutes is about all the patience I have for this science experiment right now. So you want a piece of me, then let’s go. But I’m out of here after that.”
 

“Out of here.” She smirked. “You reek of Armaeus’s touch. I don’t think he’s going to be letting you go anytime soon.”
 

“Not your problem.” I didn’t miss Armaeus’s cold stare at my profile. I couldn’t figure him out. He’d just put me back together like Humpty Dumpty after the fall, then extorted me to work in this city for God only knew how long. Not for the first time, I began to suspect he had an end game that I wasn’t going to like. Also, not for the first time, the itch to flee became overwhelming.
 

Flee this man, flee this city, flee this life.
 

Then my gaze flicked past Eshe’s sneer and into the room next door. Once again, I was seeing the oracles of Kavala behind glass, like they were circus animals on display. That would have been their future with Jerry Fitz without question, and my heart twisted into a hard little knot. The girls were fully awake, their faces luminous with youth and frailty. Away from the
smoke and filmy costumes, they looked like ordinary girls. Girls with a future. Girls with hope.
 

Like the little girls and boys whose pictures still haunted me. The ones I wasn’t able to save when I’d been barely more a kid myself.
 

And they were staring out into the observation room, their eyes filled with wonder, as if they were viewing an actual goddess in their midst. Or a savior. Or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
 

But they weren’t looking at Eshe. They were looking at me.
 

I sighed, then glared again at the High Priestess. “Let’s get this done.”
 

“Of course,” she purred, putting out her hand to draw me toward her. “This will only hurt a little.”
 

I had to handle it to the council. When they wanted to put on a show, they put it on with style.
 

We stood in an antechamber, waiting to be ushered into the council’s grand meeting hall. I was edgy, ready to go, since Armaeus had spent the last few hours annoying the crap out of me with delays. First I had to shower, then eat, then sit in a quiet room to “meditate.” Read: “fall asleep.” He’d finally shown up again, with a new set of clothes that apparently had been ordered up by Sister Fashionista. I was now wearing designer trousers over my boots, and my tank was covered by a shimmery white shirt with long sleeves. I looked like a receptionist at a high-end art gallery. Eshe had wanted me in a toga, but even I had my limits.