Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 (12 page)

I chewed on my lower lip, still rocked from my own close encounter with the artifacts at McCarran Airport. Was that what was drawing the Connecteds to Vegas? Couldn’t be. They’d only just shown up. I hadn’t felt any pull to the city in recent days, other than the call of money, so that didn’t make sense either. Did Brody know something he wasn’t sharing?

Don’t think about him.
I had an aura to keep chilled.

I focused on Dixie’s question. “The artifacts for the Rarity could be doing it, especially since the show hasn’t been hosted here in recent memory. But it seems kind of a stretch. Most of these people won’t even go to the public viewing, right? And besides that, from what I understand, the majority of the artifacts on display won’t have magical properties.

The tenor of the crowd inside the chapel leapt a notch, and Dixie pursed her lips. “What am I going to tell them?”

“You’re not,” Nikki said, her voice surprisingly calm and resolute. Whether she was relieved that Dixie hadn’t planned a party without her or simply relieved to be in charge, I wasn’t sure, but she wore her confidence like a blinged feather boa. “You’re going to ask, and you’re going to listen. This part I’m good at. Let’s go.”

She moved into the main chapel, Dixie right on her heels. I let them get ahead of me, then slipped into the farthest-back row I could find, surveying the room.

It was a…surprisingly tame bunch. Men and women dressed both in street clothes and business attire, some looking like Midwestern tourists, others like rejects from a Marilyn Manson concert, and still others like slightly harried research librarians. As I’d suspected, they
didn’t
look like they had the kind of money to be shopping the Rarity. They definitely were jumpy, though. A few of them maybe scared. I settled back in a pew for the second time that day, and tried to open my third eye…

Nothing. Not even a twitch.

Nikki reached the stage, then turned around and surveyed the crowd. She seemed suddenly in her element. Like she was giving a press conference.

“A lot of you have come into the city on short notice and are getting your bearings. That’s what we’re here for,” she said, her voice clipped and sure. “What brings you to Vegas?”

Silence. The room shifted and squirmed under her gaze, but she held her ground. Finally, one of them said, “Well, starting last week, the visions said to come here, and here we are. Everything said, ‘Go to Vegas.’ This chapel wasn’t part of it—but it sure is nice.”

“Visions,” Nikki confirmed. I shot a startled glance toward Dixie, but she merely smiled with a desperate
I have no idea what they’re talking about
grin plastered on her face.

“I don’t know about visions. I got a notice from my New Age shop—an e-mail alerting us to the solstice celebration.” This from a man sitting two rows away from the first woman. “Then we got here, and there’s no information anywhere.”

“Well, of course we’re having a celebration, sugar,” Dixie interjected. “We simply weren’t expecting out-of-town guests is all.”

“Well, who sent the flyers, then?” asked a girl in the back. “Or made the website? They said if we were believers, to come. And I talked to my friends, and they got the same thing. The store has a policy that they post anything that’s related to the metaphysical, and they checked the website, same as us. We didn’t think to call first. Vegas isn’t that far.”

I pulled out my cell phone to the sound of agreeing voices all around. “What’s the website?” Nikki asked.

“Don’t bother, it’s not there anymore.” A twenty-something goth from the third row held up his phone. “It crashed this morning, no explanation. You ask me, it makes being here even cooler. I mean, no one’s asked us for money or anything, right? So it can’t be some kind of scam. It’s like a rave, but one filled with the power of solstice.”

“And we’re happy to help you make the most of your solstice experience,” Dixie said warmly, immediately easing the tension in the room. I focused again, and my third eye finally blinked open, casting everyone in shades of pinks and yellows and greens and blues. But none of them were anywhere close to the Magician’s level of brightness. Nikki and Dixie shone more vividly, but as to the rest… These were normal people. The kind of people who read their horoscopes online for fun or visited psychics to work out their love lives.

Nikki seemed to be thinking the same thing. “How many of you work in the psychic trade? Even if you merely dabble in it?” About a third of the room responded with a show of hands. “And the rest of you?”

“My sister lives in Dallas—she asked me to come. Said she couldn’t come up but wanted me to bring back any info that sounded cool.”

“I bought some books at the store, but I haven’t started yet. Still, I live close and figured…what the heck.”

Something about their naïveté sparked warning bells, but Nikki and Dixie had what they needed.

“Well, since you’re here, let’s get things organized,” Nikki said. “What’ll help us is if we know how to reach you once we get some of our last-minute plans in place. I’m going to send around a sheet for you to give us your contact information if you want—or at least your e-mail. Meanwhile, Dixie, why don’t you let them know about the special astrological configuration this week?”

Dixie blinked at her. “The what?” Then she recalled herself, sliding smoothly into a patter about the unique significance of solstice
this
year, of all years, a significance that was undoubtedly being felt the world over, given their presence here.

Nikki gestured to a girl with a notebook in the front of the room. The book went around the room for signatures, and I rocked back into my seat, my sense of dread building. These people weren’t high-level psychics. They weren’t even working practitioners. They were cannon fodder. They were rats flooding in before an oncoming storm. A storm that was scheduled to hit…on solstice.

Exactly when SANCTUS was scheduled to come to town.

Just that fast, the pain hit me right between the eyeballs, fast and hard, closing around my brain like a vise.

I knew that pain, and I knew where it led.

The High Priestess demanded her due.

Chapter Eleven

I stumbled out of the chapel amid the general bustle of information gathering, and barely made it to the sidewalk. A limo was there, of course. Not Armaeus’s personal town car, but a long, sleek model that screamed Arcana Council all the way.

Eshe had learned quickly that if she trusted me to get to her on my own once she started playing “twist the nerve endings,” she’d just as likely find me in a gutter as in the Luxor lobby. She was getting better at playing fetch.

And what was her deal, anyway, freeloading at Council headquarters instead of having her own digs? I mean, the Fool didn’t really have a home either, and I’d never met the Emperor or Empress, so I had no idea if they actually lived in their castles in the air. But presumably they’d lived there at some point instead of couch-surfing it, Arcana style. Not Eshe.

The pain jabbed me again, blinding my third eye with white-hot agony, and I curled into a ball in the back of the limo. “I’m coming, I’m coming.”

As usual, there was no response. The High Priestess didn’t go in much for mind chatter. Beyond being able to interpret oracular visions, she was skilled at afflicting the nerves and emotions of others, to bring about the futures she most wanted to see happen, and to forestall the futures that didn’t fit with her shopping schedule. With me, she used that skill like an invisible leash. If I was anywhere within a hundred-mile radius, she could bring me to my knees.

Once the oracle twins were out of the city, I’d technically no longer be beholden to her. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t keep trying. Because my newfound skills at astral travel should have faded already—and they hadn’t.

I struggled to an upright position, my head against the cool glass of the window, and considered my options. Maybe if Eshe
thought
I was weakening in my skills, my vision dimmer, cloudier, she would leave me alone. It’d only been a few weeks, but I couldn’t seem to remember a time when the itch of the gas hadn’t squirmed through my skull. Or when I hadn’t been on the edge of falling down into an abyss of darkness and vertigo.

This needed to stop. And it wouldn’t stop unless I made it.

Maybe…

Another blast of pain exploded against my eyeballs, and darkness swept over me.

I awoke in a familiar setting: a conference room table fronted by large, comfortable chairs, lights gleaming from fixtures in the table’s surface. Surrounding the enormous, sleek table, shadows encroached from all directions. I was alone today, the other chairs empty, which was not how this normally went. Usually, either the Magician or the Devil was on hand to witness my attempt at oracular gymnastics. Either to record my responses or to scrape me off the floor when I was done, I was never sure. But given that I was currently collapsed on the Arcana Council’s conference table, my head in my hands, my mouth dry with panic, their absence seemed…notable. And ominous. Slowly, I lifted my gaze, blinking into the shadows.

“Are you prepared?” Eshe’s disembodied voice floated over me as I sank back in my chair. I felt like three-day-old sushi, so it wasn’t too hard to look sullen. I didn’t favor her with a response, just a quick, brusque nod.

“Do you swear to see all—”

I waved her off. “Give it a rest, Eshe. We’ve done this often enough to skip the theatrics.”

Her disapproval radiated through my fog of pain, which made me feel better. Something shifted at the side of the table, and I realized Kreios
had
joined our little séance. Armaeus remained absent, probably shining his astrolabe. “Hey,” I managed.

Kreios inclined his head politely enough, but his gaze drifted over my face with sensual intensity, his blatant carnal interest apparently undimmed by my appearance. Then again, this was Kreios. He had resting sex face.

“Focus.”
Eshe’s command pulled at me, a primal calling. I fell back into the chair, my face tilted up, my own breath gagging in my throat. Instantly, a spill of images assaulted me, one after the other, as they always did.

In a burst of pure energy, I moved out of Armaeus’s conference room, out of Vegas. Eshe burbled and muttered in my ear, sneered and poked, and I angled down toward a familiar location with its soaring domes and cathedrals, its crowds of people in the street. I plunged once more into Vatican City, a broken falling star.

And found…nothing.

The last time I’d been here, the rooms beneath the Vatican had held men hunched over a table, blinking schematics flush against the wall, carts bristling with tech. This was SANCTUS’s main stronghold, the cadre of men and presumably women who were dedicated to erasing magic and its wielders from the face of the Earth. They’d already made quite a dent in the Connected population, particularly in parts of Eastern Europe. Everywhere they went, they left behind scattered remnants of the community, mourning their dead.

Now the place was empty. Not merely of robed figures leaning over screens, but of all their tech too. The room could have been any subbasement stone chamber, its walls craggy, its floor swept clean but already showing signs of encroaching dust.

I must have spoken, because I was pulled out of the Vatican and thrust farther east, a rag doll shoved into other rooms of a dollhouse, looking for someone to play with. But I saw no one in the places I was sent—not the fancy homes of Roman officials, not the outlying abbeys dotting the countryside. Not farther south or east. Had SANCTUS disbanded? That seemed…unlikely.

Armaeus’s voice sounded near me, his words sharp. Apparently, he’d decided to show up.

“They know we’ve been spying on them.”

“Impossible,” Eshe hissed. “They are not that strong.”

“They could have moved operations to ensure their safety.” This was the Devil, but no concern marred his voice. Simply speculation. Curiosity. “The Vatican has come under fire.”

Their voices faded. Another pressure urged me forward then, farther to the west. The hills of Tuscany gave way to the Alps of the French borderlands, and then the sprawling beauty of château country. I thought I’d rush by, but something drew me down into the bosom of the French countryside. I’d been here before. Some of the most entrenched of my clients lived here. I hovered, an oracle without anything to see as the Council argued around me. While I hung in the odd embrace of space and time, my third eye fluttered open.

Instantly, the world changed beneath me, becoming a kaleidoscope of color. And I saw everything more clearly, more sharply.

I knew this place.

Able to move without being pushed, I angled down.

The château of the Mercault family was as ostentatious within as it was outwardly classy, a huge stone monument to generations of wealth and privilege. That privilege had not merely survived the French Revolution, it had thrived during it, staying far away from the barricades of Paris and keeping its own ruthless vigil on the family’s private holdings. Monsieur Mercault preferred to operate his business from afar, never wanting to see the help, but he’d asked me to deliver an artifact directly to him once: a jewel-encrusted drinking glass. It was small, fragile, and impossibly old. I’d found the thing in a bazaar in Mumbai, though not exactly on the shelves of some open-air market stall. It had taken a bit to secure it for Mercault, but he’d been very generous in his thanks.

Now as I approached his home like a ravening wraith, the place seemed…strangely still. The usual swarm of gardeners wasn’t bustling over the grounds and when I entered the walls, the psychic pain that jolted me had nothing to do with my own molecules being rearranged.

“Death,” I whispered.

If the Council took note, they didn’t stop me. The bodies started in the foyer—a dozen of them piled on the floor. The servants and grounds people. They had been killed recently—the air hung with the cloying sweetness of drying blood. More bodies were in the kitchens and the bedrooms. Mercault’s wife had been struck down before she could exit their bed. At least one set of adults, Mercault’s children or guests, had also been killed. The murders weren’t clean, but they didn’t appear to have been motivated by torture, either.