Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 (3 page)

I didn’t have time to question, though. Squinting hard against the rain, I raced forward and threw myself off the side of the boat, wrapping my arms around the nearest tentacle as it flopped off the deck and back toward the ocean.

For one endless second, the creature’s bellow of rage, confusion, and
longing
superseded the fiery blast of agony that raced along my nerves.

Then my entire body was electrified with soul-shattering pain.

This was so going to leave a mark.

Chapter Two

“Miss Wilde.”

I jerked awake, which made everything in my body howl in muted agony. The muting appeared to be courtesy of industrial-strength painkillers and the fact that I was wrapped in enough cool fabrics to constitute a sensory deprivation tank.

On the upside, this meant someone was taking care of me. I wasn’t merely a burn mark on a sky kraken’s elbow. On the downside, I was apparently in pretty bad shape.

But the voice that spoke in my head was as insistent as it was familiar.

“Miss Wilde.”

“I’m asleep,” I mumbled. I didn’t want the Magician in my head. I didn’t want him near me, not now, when everything on my body ached and I suspected that he wouldn’t merely try to heal me but give me a lecture as well.

Laughter scored across my nerve endings, and the traitorous bastards felt better for it.
“I’m here to help you. Let me.”

“Go to Hell.” This wasn’t an unreasonable request. The Magician of the Arcana Council should already have left for Dante’s playground in search of the Hierophant, a Council member who’d been hanging out down under for going on six thousand years or so. For Armaeus to be lollygagging around so he could jump in to save me was both prescient and insulting at once. “You should have been there and back by now.”

“Tomorrow.”
He waited a beat.
“You should not have done what you did.”

I groaned, trying to shore up my mental barriers, to no avail. I was too weak and in too much pain to ignore the comfort that the Magician’s touch would give me. “Don’t I at least get healed first before the speech?”

The Magician’s laughter expanded, and my mind broke like cheap glass. I lowered my mental barriers entirely to allow him to flow past my defenses, to flood my senses with a deep, soothing balm. It was an ebullient, effervescent, life-altering bliss that broke the charts, marred solely by the fact that he kept talking.

“Allow me to restate. You should not have been able to do what you did. With the…”
His voice drifted off or I did, and I dropped into decadent slumber. It wasn’t always this easy to let the Magician work his, well, magic. For the entire duration of our relationship, up until a few short weeks ago, his touch had incited as much panic as pleasure in me. I wanted his touch, craved it even, but I was terrified of it all the same. But recently, that had changed. The Magician had traded in his Immortal ID tags for a walk on the mortal side, and the result had been—

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I blinked back to awareness as the healing balm to my nerves drifted decidedly south. “I’m not burned there.”

“You resist what you most want,”
the Magician murmured.
“I’ll never understand that.”

“Work on it. Bad enough someone’s eventually going to come in here and find me healed. Let’s not have them find me happy as…ohh.” I sank briefly into subverbal instant gratification, before clawing my way back out again. “I said stop.”

“You aren’t healed, exactly.”
Armaeus said.
“I can only do so much without touching you. But you will heal. And when I see you again, we’ll need to talk about setting boundaries.”

I snorted. “That’s a first.”

“Until then…”
I noted the departure of the soothing mist immediately, but I sensed Armaeus hadn’t left yet, and my instincts were rewarded a moment later as I felt a soft, insistent pressure on my lips.

My heart rate jacked, but I kissed him back anyway, reveling in the miracle that was his mouth, his skin, the essence of him around, above, and through me. I didn’t understand the Magician; I didn’t want to understand him. For now, it was enough that he existed and, for whatever reason, had the urge to put me back together whenever I broke myself.

Considering how often that happened, I’d take it.

“I won’t sense you once I leave this plane,”
he murmured, his mouth moving hungrily along my jaw until it reached the sensitive skin below my ear.
“Outreach is not that exact.”

“Try,” I said, before I could stop myself.

Armaeus paused, clearly startled, then pressed his mouth over mine again.
“As you wish,”
he murmured, making the last word drift across sixteen time zones as he dissolved.

Too exhausted to come up with a
Princess Bride
comeback, I faded to black as well, my chart pinging like a Vegas slot machine. A phalanx of nurses burst into my room, but I truly didn’t care anymore.

The next time I opened my eyes, however, I cared a little more. I did.

I especially cared about the gloved hand smashed against my mouth.

“Don’t scream.” The voice was low, guttural, and definitely not Japanese. “You can see?”

I nodded once as the man waved a gun in front of my face, the silencer evident on its tip. I could smell too. The gloved man’s pistol had been fired recently. That was never good.

“You can walk. We go.”

This wasn’t a question, and I winced as the man ripped the luxurious bedcovers off my body with no further warning. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing a standard-issue hospital gown but a tunic and scrub-like pants, the skin beneath still damp with what appeared to be heavy-duty cold cream. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, and the intruder hauled me to a seated position. He was small framed but strong, his face covered by a thin black mask. Another man appeared next to the bed and shoved my boots at me, but I fumbled the catch. Wasn’t this room guarded? Shouldn’t someone be noticing the fact that I was about to be abducted wearing nothing but scrubs and Noxzema?

With a snapped order that sounded suspiciously German, the first man braced me as the second dropped to his knees and laced the boots on my feet, never mind socks. I decided this wasn’t the best time to bring up the subject of blisters.

Hoisting me upright, Thug One let me walk a few steps. “Good.” He nodded. “We go silent. There is a garden, then a back entrance and car. You scream, you die. I get paid either way.”

Not waiting for my response, he turned, the other man filing in behind me.

Who would want me badly enough to send kidnappers here? I frowned, trying to force my brain past the residual morphine haze. The Japanese dark practitioners weren’t that organized, I was almost certain. Then again, the emperor’s yacht
had
been nearly surrounded by national security forces prior to the electrical storm. Had the military been there solely to protect the dignitaries, or were they after more?

The Imperial Palace was eerily silent, and I blinked down the first darkened hallway we entered. There wasn’t a soul in sight. These two men were either the guards assigned to my room, or they’d killed the guards. Either way, they knew their way around the palace, which was another tick mark in favor of a military-backed operation.

Still, why were they after me? I considered the unfairness of it all as we slipped down two more long hallways before the night opened above us and we stepped into a moonlit courtyard. I recognized the spot from the first time I’d visited the emperor—a narrow strip of green space between the palace and the outer walls, like a landscaped moat. Shadows hung heavily along the walls, and that was where we headed, skirting the garden and its cheerful fountains and shimmering pools.

I ripped through my options as we trudged along. If these guys were being paid by the Japanese military, I needed out of the palace no matter what. Once on the street, I had maybe one chance. The goons hadn’t bound my hands yet, which meant I could potentially disable one of them with a punch to the eye or throat, enough to get his weapon. Then I’d have to shoot blind and run.

It wasn’t a great strategy, but if I got into whatever car was waiting at the curb, I’d end up fish kibble after a potentially long and painful interlude with Ginsu knives. Any plan was better than that.

We exited the garden through a side door that led to the wide paved apron of concrete abutting the side of the palace. I’d decided on Thug Two as my target, then Thug One abruptly stopped and I plowed into him. The curse he hissed in German was way too strong a reaction to me treading on the backs of his ankles.

“No car. We—”

One of the shadows moved suddenly to my left. I ducked and shoved myself into Thug Two’s stomach as I heard the slice of a sword through the air, then Thug One’s gurgling death rattle. Not trusting my access to Thug Two’s eyes, I knuckle-jabbed his throat instead and went for his gun as two more shadows materialized beside me. A knife flashed through the moonlight into Thug Two’s side, his gasp abruptly cut short by another slash to his neck.

I swung around, my grip on the gun steady. “Back off,” I growled.

“There is no time.” The voice was musical and precise, and a woman stepped forward. “We are here to help you.”

I recognized her from the face paint. “Not you again,” I muttered, but I held up the gun.

The geisha before me bowed, her serene face beautiful in the moonlight. “There will be more military here in two minutes,” she said. “I can take you to safety, but we must leave now.”

A whispered hiss sounded from another shadow, and the woman stepped closer. “Now, Miss Wilde. We must go.”

She tugged me into a run, and if I had any doubts before, the startled male shout from inside the palace garden silenced them. We darted up the access drive and into the main street, where a sleek limo waited, a woman at the door.

“Here,” the geisha said, somehow managing to look elegant even as she slid into the car. I piled in after her, decidedly less graceful, my gun still in my hand.

I took the opposite seat from the geisha as the limo pulled away from the curb.

“What’s going on here?” I snapped. “How’d I piss off the military?”

“They sought to question you privately. When it became clear that General Asaki was not going to grant them access, they arranged to take you.”

Question me. Right. “Those guys weren’t Japanese.”

“No.” She shook her head. “A precaution in case they failed. There will be no ties between those men and anyone inside this country, by careful design.” She inclined her head. “My name is Yori,” she said. “We are in your debt.”

I scowled at her. “You people tried to kill me.”

“Merely to stop you. We didn’t know what you were.”

“I get that a lot.”

“I am sure you do.” Yori remained perched on the edge of her limo seat. Unlike the women on the emperor’s yacht, she was not heavily made up or dressed in traditional garb, but her everyday kimono screamed inviolable traditions and ancient rules. Before I could speak she nodded again. “You spoke with the kara’pei.”

My fingers spasmed on the gun in my lap. I didn’t remember much of my dance with the sky kraken. After Ren’s people had fished me out of the water, burned to a crisp, I’d remained helpfully delirious as the Imperial Guard had pulled anchor and raced the traumatized guests to shore. It was only later that I’d gotten the story from the good general, in between bursts of morphine.

According to Ren, the thunderous gale had stopped within sixty seconds of me throwing myself off the boat and into what he kept referring to as “a thicket of tentacles,” which never failed to make me giggle. In that one minute where I’d clutched my own private limb of death, he’d seen me light up with the same yellow miasma that had coated the screens in the monitoring room, and he’d heard me scream in a language he didn’t know. Then the tentacles had shot up into the sky, I’d fallen into the ocean, and the storm had abruptly abated.

But I knew the name kara’pei, now that Yori said it. It’d been one of the words burned into my brain as I’d try to shoo the sky kraken away, pleading with it that we didn’t come to steal but to restore, we didn’t seek to destroy but to understand.

My impassioned speech had made little impact: Yes, the thing had uprooted its tentacle farm, but it’d left behind a disaster under the calm surface of the sea. The Yonaguni monument had imploded. The twin slabs we’d targeted were presently buried under a pile of crumbled rock nearly two meters thick.

“That’s its name? Kara’pei?” I tried the word on for size. I wasn’t impressed. “He was kind of quick on the trigger.”

“No one else had ever come close to finding the sunken artifacts buried at Yonaguni,” Yori said. “The Imperial Guard had long shown interest in the arcane, but discreetly, almost as an afterthought, or so we believed. Then we learned of this boat, the closing of the monument to outside crafts, and we tracked the ebb and flow of power between the emperor’s and prime minister’s bases. When we realized there was a credible threat to the monument, we acted.” She lifted one delicate shoulder, as if summoning a sky kraken had been a reasonable call to action for a summer afternoon. “The dance of swords was part of the ritual but would have come to nothing if you had not truly found the location of the artifact.”

“So you’re saying that thing was
my
fault?”

“Not your fault. Your strength. We have not had contact from the kara’pei since the twelfth century, when it manifested as a great wind to defeat the Mongols’ fleets.”

“Then you’re welcome. I’m not eager to see it again.” I winced, reliving the electrical shocks from the creature. “The artifact the emperor was searching for has lain dormant for three thousand years. Why did it suddenly flip its switch?”

Yori folded her hands in her lap. “The Dākumeiji.”

The Japanese word meant nothing to me, and my blank stare was clearly a tip-off. “Dark mages,” she said quietly. “You call them the dark practitioners. They have been amplifying their efforts for the past several months. This was the first of the artifacts they have activated with their spells, but it will not be the last. The emperor’s dreams were triggered by those same spells, but the artifact was not made for modern hands. None of them are. Their power is too strong.”