Getting Wilde (29 page)

In the meantime, Armaeus had provided me with access to his computer. I’d declined his offer of a new phone. The entire point of a burner device was that it wouldn’t be LoJacked by the council, after all. Kind of defeated the purpose for them to make a gift of one to me.
 

Granted, what I’d seen on his computer
had
satisfied me. It wasn’t my account, but his, with the transaction of $20,000 going out to my digits. I could find a whole lot of kids for twenty grand.
 

“Each time you agree to serve as Eshe’s oracle, to provide her the answers she seeks, that
amount will be transferred, Armaeus said. “You can make your arrangements with your own bank from this terminal as well—”
 

“I’ll do it tonight.” I shook my head. “On my own.”
 

He didn’t roll his eyes, but he might as well have. “There is very little about you I couldn’t find out if I didn’t want to, Sara. You really think I don’t have an intimate understanding of how much money you have and where you spend it? How do you think I found you in the first place?”
 

“Boundaries, Armaeus.” I waved a hand at him. “You want me to work with your little freak-show harem, you at least give me the illusion that you respect my limits. Otherwise, I’ll walk.”
 

“You won’t walk.” His smug smile couldn’t have been curved more perfectly to piss me off. “You have the girls in Las Vegas Medical to protect. The phone calls have already been placed to their family, so you have them to protect as well. And as you pointed out yourself, the city is potentially about to be overrun by curious agents of SANCTUS, wondering how, exactly, Jerry Fitz managed to explode himself while wearing a cuff that bore their symbols. A cuff which, miraculously, survived the blast and made it into police custody.”
 

I scowled at him. “There weren’t two pieces left of that thing larger than a dime,” I said. “I saw it, Armaeus. I half thought SANCTUS had detonated it.”
 

“You’re correct. But you weren’t the only one to see it. And your compatriot, Miss Dawes, is not so careful with shielding her mind. We were able to create a reasonable facsimile and leave it at the bomb site. Queries are being made through the highest channels at the Vatican, and we’ve started slight ripples at Interpol. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to serve as some well-placed thorns. It won’t take them long to come investigating.”
 

I stared at him. “You
want
them to come here. I thought you were all about
noninterference.”
 

“You mistake the role of the council in the affairs of magic.” Armaeus shook his head. “You’ll have the opportunity to correct that error during your extended stay with us.”
 

“Not with you.” How many times did I have to make this point? “I’m not floating around in hyperspace while I’m here. I don’t care where you stick me. Put me up at a casino, buy me a house, I don’t care. But I’m not staying here.” He looked ready to argue, and I held up a hand. “I’m more useful to you out there than I am here, other than when Eshe wants to play Psychic Scavenger Hunt.”
 

“It’s not safe.”
 

“You can’t keep me here against my will.” This too was something else I had figured out in the intervening hours between our little standoff in the hospital room and now. I may not know all the ins and outs of the council, but I wasn’t a complete idiot. That had been a carefully orchestrated scene by Armaeus. Down to the last impossible choice. “You had to get me to
agree
to stay on as your little windows on the world of my own free will. The girls had already agreed to it, and apparently even hallucinating yesses count as yesses in your book. But I hadn’t. Why the hangup? What happens if someone says no?”
 

“We’ve not had to deal with that for so long, I wouldn’t know.”
 

 The light, clear sound of a gong interrupted us, and the doors swung open. Without saying another word, Armaeus gestured me inside.
 

I went.
 

The great hall of the council looked a lot like…a conference room. Fancier, of course, with a long center slab of marble instead of particleboard with cherry veneer, and throne-like seats in place of rollaway chairs. But the general effect was the same. Darkness hung heavy on either side of the table, which was illuminated by a bright central light, cast in such a way that
everything seemed limned with gold.
 

“You guys are the best. Someday you’re really going to have to tell me who does your decorating.”
 

Eshe stood at the front of the table, but to my surprise, Kreios sat next to her. Sat, or more like sprawled, in one of the opulent chairs. He stared at me as I approached, clearly not a fan of my outfit. He wasn’t the only one. Armaeus had been angling for the toga as well. Not going to happen.
 

Eshe pursed her lips as I approached. “You should be kneeling.”
 

“A lot tougher to walk that way.”
 

“You should—”
 

“The oracles that Fitz used were cooped up in a glass chamber, and they were able to respond, Eshe.” Armaeus’s voice was firm. “Miss Wilde can sit or stand. Whatever is her preference.”
 

“I’ll stay on my feet.” From Eshe’s little half smirk, I got the feeling I wouldn’t be upright for long, but I was feeling lucky.
 

“Then we will begin.”
 

Her words made me tense up, and I fixed my eyes on her, suddenly uneasy. With that short sentence, her voice had dropped several octaves, far past bass into something so elemental it seemed like the very murmuring of the rocks and earth. The lights dimmed over the table, and I vaguely had a sense of Armaeus seating himself beside Kreios. The High Priestess’s gaze was locked on her hands. Despite myself, I glanced there as well.
 

And was caught.
 

A ball of fire had erupted between Eshe’s palms, but not like any fire I’d ever seen. It crackled with blue and purple veins, green and gold and red, and it seemed to expand to fill my
whole world.
 

“Are you ready to see and share all that may be seen?” Eshe’s words were so quiet, they were almost subvocalized, but I felt myself nodding. Though whatever she asked me next, I couldn’t have said.
 

Because there was the tiny problem of my brain exploding.
 

Without warning, pain radiated through my system, my body jolting into a tight arch of pain, breath crystallizing in my lungs. I wanted to vomit, but my bile was fire in my throat, burning through my esophagus. My blood vessels swelled to six times their normal size, my pulse racing like traffic fleeing a storm after the roadblocks failed. I twisted away, desperate to escape, to find Armaeus, Kreios, anyone who could help.
 

Something sounded in my ears again, demanding my attention, and I realized my eyes weren’t seeing. I reached up to tear away the obstruction, and pain lacerated my face.
 

Before me sat a group of men at a table, leaning close. Not just men—women too, all of them robed for surgery. The room didn’t look like a surgical suite, though. More like a room in a cheap hotel. Not abandoned, not some sort of crack house, but a tired, beat-down room with cheap polyester comforters and old, faded carpet and tan walls that maybe once had been white.
 

They had a body stretched out on the table—not a bed, a table, like a portable gurney. A drip was attached to a pole, and the body was white, too white, too small, the legs and ankles protruding to the edge of the table but not quite reaching. A child? A teen? There was no way to tell until a knife slashed and the feet convulsed, and I realized this child was awake! Awake!
 

Another impossible pressure weighed on my brain, and I moved closer, closer when all I wanted to do was leave. I placed my hand against the shoulder of a man, and he shrugged me off, shivering, but the movement shuffled him to the side, and I saw the small form on the table. Not a child, but not quite a man yet either, judging by the sharp planes of his collarbone. His chin
jutted up in a paroxysm of pain. Without thinking, I placed my hand on the boy’s leg, and his pain became mine, suffusing me with a new wave of sharp horror that buckled me at the knees.
 

The boy on the table relaxed, and the men around me spoke in words I didn’t understand, couldn’t understand, but they passed into me and through me as I focused on the boy, sending him all my strength and taking all the pain that I could, watching with dead eyes as I saw the implantation of the device into his chest cavity, low and deep, up against his solar plexus, the center of his energy, I knew. I could feel the boy’s power stirring, waking, an eye fluttering open that saw too much. It would see me!
 

Instantly, I was pulled almost physically from the scene, twisting away, and then I was in another place, another hellhole. There was only one person here. A woman, bound to a wall. I was forced toward her by unseen hands, though I could smell the rankness of her death. She was gone, but recently, her life spirit still heavy in the air. I lifted her head, brushing her lank hair out from her face, and my stomach turned over again. Her eyes were gouged out, her tongue cut away. The sweat was not yet dry on her face, though. Her captors were close—close.
 

Pushing against the compulsion to leave this place entirely, I turned and raced through the corridors, slipping in and between the bars that kept this woman trapped underground. It didn’t take me long. The men were hunched over their spoils, like pirates with looted treasure, and they didn’t see me come upon them until I was already past. I whirled to face them, my eyes peeling open wide, and they blanched as they walked through me. But I saw their faces. Saw and remembered. Saw and reported.
 

The next and the next and the next place whirred by like a sickening storm. More violations. More experiments. A lab in the middle of a frozen landscape. A sacrificial ceremony in a swamp. A high-rise bristling with computers where maps of the star systems were overlaid with mathematical equations and ancient texts, while men and women hunched over their screens
with a frenzied hope.
 

Then finally, a familiar face in an unfamiliar place. A face that turned to me, that smiled into the nothingness that was my presence, as if he could almost see me back.
 

I rushed by, not stopping, not speaking. I hadn’t been sent to find Max; he wasn’t supposed to be here. Instead I climbed the stairs of the palatial building with its austere, clean lines and moved quickly past guards and tourists, drifting down quieter and quieter corridors until I entered a room that was markedly different from all the others I had seen this day.
 

It was clean, it was orderly, and it was occupied by a group of businessmen who were wielding pens, not scalpels. There was something off about this group, though, something that breathed as much danger as any of the foul places I’d been before.
 

Then the doors opened, and I caught my breath. Darkness roiled into the room with an air of authority I had never before experienced, but the man it attended was familiar to me. He’d been the leader of SANCTUS, the figure I’d glimpsed in Binion’s lair. But here, in this place, his presence was much stronger, much clearer. It was also not quite human.
 

In that moment, he looked up, and I felt myself yanked out of the room, out of the building, the same soul-crushing pain grinding me up like a cheese grater until I came all the way back to myself in the chamber, the blessedly dark chamber, with walls and ceiling and floor and table and chairs and—
 

I slumped, almost hitting the ground before I was caught in a cool, steadying embrace. I smelled like fire and blood.
 

“That,” came the droll voice of the Devil, “was most unexpected.”
 

My eyes flickered open as I was hoisted up again. To my surprise, Armaeus didn’t carry me out of the room, which I heartily deserved, in my opinion. Instead, he poured me into one of the enormous chairs around the table. Eshe was seated as well, looking credibly shaken.
 

“Who are you?” she asked.
 

I stiffened. “Rich, or I’d better be.” I scowled at Armaeus, who regarded me with that maddeningly contemplative stare. “What? What did I do?”
 

“What you said you would,” he said. “You saw, and you shared what you saw.”
 

“She did more than that.” I blinked at the High Priestess’s tone. For all of her animosity toward me, there was something else new lining her words. “Where are you from? Who are your parents?”
 

“Okeedoke, I think the bonding moment is done, thanks. You guys going to tell me the import of anything I just saw?” At Eshe’s new layer of surprise, I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I remember what I see. If that’s not usual, let’s give the dearly departed Fitz some props. He’s improved on the original toxic fumes your little oracles inhaled. Though I gotta tell you, that hurt like a bitch.”
 

“Molecular displacement,” Armaeus said. “You literally came apart at the seams to travel the way you did, but retained sentience to report.”
 

“Yeah, well, it stung.”
 

“What you saw was the Connected community eating its own tail, if it matters.” Kreios reclined back in his chair, his fingers steepled together. “The experiments have been going on for a long time, but the electronica angle is new. New and dangerous. And possibly exactly what’s needed.”
 

“What I saw was not needed, I can pretty much guarantee that.”
 

He conceded that point with a nod. “But the idea was on track. Even doctors had a reason for leeching their patients, back in the day.”