Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 (17 page)

Dixie strode ahead, her pink purse clutched in her grasp, pressed against her dress. It was the only sign she was nervous. Nikki, beside me, was up on her toes. I wasn’t certain where she’d hidden a gun on her body, but I was pretty sure she had one.

For my part, I simply stared.

The trio regarded us with hollow eyes, tracking Dixie’s march across the diner. “It’s been a long time, Danae,” Dixie finally said.

I did my best not to applaud.
Danae and the Deathwalkers?
Best. Band name. Ever.

“I’d hoped it would be longer.” The woman who stood to greet Dixie was as dark as Dixie was fair, her long ebony hair falling from a sleek part in the center of her head. She wore flawless makeup, and a black tank dress that bared chiseled arms and long, muscular legs in platform stilettos. She nodded regally to Nikki and me, and I managed to rehinge my jaw. “We have foreseen great damage to the city. We have interests to protect.”

“Great damage how?” I asked.

The witch’s eyes flicked to me, a glance that shifted her from traditionally beautiful into the realm of the seriously eerie. Her eyes were smoke gray, far too light against her dark skin.

“You pledge yourself to turn back the tide of evil, yet you light candles when you could cast the sun,” she said, regarding me somberly. “You could wield the sword of justice, yet instead allow harm to befall those you would protect.”

Something hard snapped within me. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what she was doing. She was a sorceress, and psychic manipulation was a skill. Identify the weakest points of your opponent and magnify them. People were always much more willing to believe the bad about themselves than the good. Hang-up of being human.

Still, I didn’t need a Windy City witch judging me. Especially when what she said hit so close to home.

“No one will be harmed,” I said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to weather the storm that’s coming.”

“You will fail.” She peered at me, her gaze raking over my battered body, my scruffy clothes. “I know you.”

“I’m pretty sure I would have remembered someone who goes by the name ‘Deathwalker.’”

She creased her lips into a shape that could almost be called a smile. “We haven’t had occasion to be known by that name for many years. Even here”—she waved her hand—“we were quite domesticated. The old ways were better suited for the old times. There are many who’ve fallen away from that path.”

“But not you?”

“And not you. Not yet anyway.” She turned to the woman beside her, but the woman shook her head.

“The newcomers are not enhanced.” The woman pointed at me. “She wears a Tyet, but primarily for—”

“Hey, hey, hey.” I held up my hands. “I didn’t agree to a strip search.”

Danae lifted her own hand to quell my outburst. “Our magic remains pure because of our commitment to holistic practices. Not all of our kind agree. The pull toward enhancement is strong, particularly when we must fight the dark practitioners—which the city reeks of at present. We do not have much time.”

I stifled a groan. “Who
isn’t
coming to Vegas, exactly? We’re kind of a little full up right now.”

Danae ignored me. “Who in the city is enhanced?” she asked Dixie. For her part, the Welcome Wagon of Vegas looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Besides you,” Danae added dryly.

Wait, what?
Dixie’s face was a mask of Southern hospitality. The kind shown by rebel housewives right before they gutted carpetbaggers. “We don’t judge
enhancements
, merely actions,” Dixie said smoothly. “A person shouldn’t be judged by anything but that.”

“Power, sister,” Nikki put in. She had leaned forward ever so slightly, in full mother-bear mode. For once, it wasn’t me she was protecting. “You got something you need to say, Danae, go ahead and put it on the table.”

The Deathwalker turned to Nikki for a moment, studying her. “We were so named because wherever we passed, naught but death remained. Yet we never took a life, seer. Consider that.”

“Very spooky.” Nikki’s voice was harder now, sharper. “You want to get a little more clear, or are we all wasting our time? Why do you care about ‘enhanced’ Connecteds? And what do you mean by that, specifically?”

“It is the left-handed path. Once you embark upon it, the way to darkness is but a few steps.” Danae’s mouth twisted. “Why do you think so many have fallen to the way of the dark practitioners? There was never so much evil in the world, waiting to spring. It has been helped along.”

“By whom?” I prompted. If she said the Council, I was totally picking up my Nerf ball and going home.

“The dark practitioners themselves, in part,” Danae said, returning her attention to me. “The technoceuticals that have flooded the arcane black market. However, they are not simply ending up in the hands of unConnected patrons and clients to provide a temporary magical high. They’re afflicting Connecteds too. Changing them. Poisoning them. That is not balance. That is not purity. That is defilement.”

Coming from a group of tree huggers, this wasn’t a surprising attitude. But I was mostly glad that I didn’t have yet another crime to lay at Armaeus’s feet.

Nevertheless, something about this didn’t add up. “Technoceuticals aren’t addictive.”

“Aren’t they?” Her glance was withering. “Power is the most seductive drug of all. You should know that more than anyone. And if you don’t, you should learn it. Not everyone you count as friend is worthy of your trust. Not everyone you count as foe deserves the title.”

It was her second jab, and I was full up on my quota of being used as a punching bag.

“You trying to get me to call your psychic hotline?” I asked. “Because you’re really,
really
good at saying nothing in a very impressive way.”

“Then let me say this clearly.” She shifted her gaze to Dixie. “The lines of energy have shifted. The old maps no longer hold. You will help us reconfigure them before the storm hits the city.”

“There are no ley lines that run through Vegas,” I snapped.

“They do when the Council is seated here. As they have throughout time, in city by city, country by country. Wherever the magic is strongest in the world, eventually the very energy of the Earth’s core gets drawn up through the crust and bowed out, amplified. That is what is happening here. A great force has stressed the lines too much, compromising the underlying power that binds the world together. But once we map the new configuration, we can manage any new influx of magic.”

“But that’s—”

“I’ll help you.” Dixie’s voice was resolute. She turned to me. “There are too many Connecteds here, Sara, and more coming every day. You tackle the job from your angle. I’ll do it from mine.”

“Speaking of which, tick tock.” Nikki held up her arm. Her knockoff Rolex was completely at home on her large wrist, and she flashed the brightly polished face of it at me. “You still look like split-pea soup on toast, and you’ve got a party to crash.”

I blinked at her, then remembered. The Rarity pregame gala was tonight. That was not going to happen. “I don’t care about—”

“You may not, but that’s where the action is, sugar pie. Maybe if you get those thingamajigs for the Magician, whatever’s coming down on us will veer off in another direction…or stop in its tracks. C’mon.” She started to stand, but I waved her off.

“You stay here. I can make it back to the Palazzo on my own.”

Her lips turned down. “This saving-the-world shit requires the hardest of choices. I definitely don’t trust you to do your own shopping.”

I glanced down at my scrubby clothes. Shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.”

Of course, I didn’t have to.

Chapter Sixteen

Rich people don’t walk anywhere.

The limo that the Arcana Council sent to collect me was their standard sleek town car, but for a change, it wasn’t idling at a curb. Instead, I’d been instructed to take an elevator down to a parking level I didn’t know the Palazzo had.

The elevator doors swished open, and a young man in a tailored suit stood at the edge of the tiled entryway. “Miss Wilde,” he said deferentially.

I peered into the back of the car while he opened the door. No Kreios. I didn’t know if that made me feel more or less self-conscious. I half fell, half slid into the car, struggling not to flash the unflappable driver, who said nothing about my lack of coordination and merely shut the door with a decided thunk.

I straightened in the seat, shimmying down my dress. Which, of course, wasn’t much on shimmying.

Dragging in an experimental breath, I tried once again to decide whose choice this outfit was. The micro leather sheath that had been waiting for me in my room at the Palazzo was meant for a woman about six sizes smaller than I was, who’d apparently just had surgery to remove all her internal organs. It came down far enough on my thighs to render walking problematic, but not enough for anything remotely approaching propriety. If it had been any shorter, it would have passed as a halter top.

The dress had no back to speak of, and its neckline dropped from a severe choker collar to reveal a slender teardrop of skin from neck to cleavage, though I supposed I should be grateful the slit didn’t extend to my navel. Either way, with so little in the way of material, Spanx had been out of the question. Which was too bad, since I hadn’t had time to break a rib.

At least the boots made up for the dress. I stretched out my legs in the wide space and admired the knee-high stilettoed wonders, the leather as scrunchy as the dress above it was tight. I’d passed on the leather cuffs that had been helpfully sent along—again, not knowing if it was Kreios or Armaeus with a bondage fantasy, and not super interested in fanning that particular fire. But the secondary option, a string of stones that I hoped were crystals but had the weight and flash of diamonds, now glittered from one wrist. I felt like a star on Oscar night, only with half the clothes.

The driver angled the car through the subterranean garage, lights flashing against the walls, and I checked the palm-sized clutch the Council had sent along, complete with a handy phone. I was fresh out of burners, so it was just as well, but it’d been the other items in the purse that had intrigued me. An ID card issued to my real name, and a slender clip of fifties and twenties. For tips, I assumed.

The ID card bothered me, though it shouldn’t. Kreios was using his name, and surely some of the attendees at this little shin of diggery knew he was the Devil. Then again, until I’d begun working with the Council, I hadn’t known the group existed. I also hadn’t known that a former Council member was hanging out in the burbs, or that there were more in the wind, holding out on their contracts.

What was it Roxie had said about Armaeus and the cloak of normalcy that he cast over the Council? No one questioned the Arcanans’ lack of aging, sure, but maybe it went beyond that. Maybe his skills extended to ensuring people saw nothing more than they expected to see. A fancy hotelier instead of the Magician; an international art collector instead of the Devil. Lord knew that no one ever took note of their real estate ventures on the Strip.

Grudgingly, I had to give Armaeus some props. He might be the most megalomaniac micromanager I’d ever met, but he was covering a lot of bases.

Still, that didn’t excuse him from luring Connecteds to Vegas as bait for SANCTUS. If he’d truly done that...

“Miss.” We’d moved out into Las Vegas Boulevard traffic, and the driver was watching me through the rearview mirror. “Mr. Kreios will meet you at the door of the Grand. He regrets that he was unable to accompany you—” The man stopped, shook his head a little, then glanced back into the mirror, his eyes shaded subtly darker. “He regrets nothing.”

My attention sharpened as the driver’s voice dripped with the smooth intonations of Kreios’s rich Greek accent. He scanned what he could see of me. “You wore your hair down.”

I frowned, lifting my hand to my head. I’d spent way too long in the shower, pounding the ache from my body. But I was clean, which had to count for something. “I wasn’t aware there was another option.”

The driver’s smile was miles different from the deferential expression he’d worn at the door, and his eyes glittered with an otherworldly sheen. “It suits you,” he murmured.

Then he blinked, hard, and returned his attention to the street. When he spoke next, his voice was once again blankly professional. “We’ll be there in a few minutes, miss. Las Vegas traffic at this hour can be challenging, but at least it’s a nice evening.”

“That’s certainly true.”

The limo came equipped with a tinted sky roof, opaque to outside viewers but which afforded me an unrestricted view of the Vegas Strip skyline. With night falling on the city, I couldn’t help but look up. Soaring above me was the white tower over Treasure Island. To the right, atop Caesars Palace, was an equally impressive monolith, a gray stone castle keep I’d begun to suspect was the Emperor’s domain, for all that it appeared dormant. Opposite Caesars was the Devil’s home, Scandal, which glinted and writhed in full neon splendor above the Flamingo. Beyond that, over Paris Casino soared another tower, black as pitch. Opposite Paris was the Bellagio, sprouting its fairy-tale castle.

And finally, near the very tip of the Strip, was the Magician’s domain, Prime Luxe. It was an enormous holding, with spires of steel and glass reaching up to the heavens, proclaiming its dominance. How could any of the Connecteds who were here and who possessed any amount of ability not see it? Was Armaeus’s power that intense? It simply didn’t make sense.

“Once again, you are asking the wrong questions, Miss Wilde.”

“Hey!” I turned in my seat, but Armaeus’s touch on my mind slipped away. Instead, the limo slowed.

“Here we are, miss.” We turned into the drive of the MGM Grand, which was lit up like a Christmas tree. A crowd milled in front of the entrance, but no one was dressed as painfully as I was.

I frowned. “Are you sure this is the right place? Maybe they want us in the back or something?”

“You’ll be escorted directly up. The ownership of the Grand preferred the entry to be public.” His smile was reassuring. “You’ll find that most people won’t notice you.”