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

“Weapons up!” On the heels of Zee’s bark, two sturdily built men burst into the room, dressed like desert ninjas in long tunics and trousers, their faces covered with enormous Mongolian death masks—one a dragon, the other a wolf. Zee shouted for them to stand down. Instead, they immediately drew their bows, notching them with arrows. Arrows that looked eerily familiar.

“Fire!” The crack of semiautomatics shattered the silence, but the death-masked men didn’t fall. They simply staggered back like they’d been hit with a feisty paintball round, then lifted their bows again. Another crack of gunfire, and more bullets punched through them. This time, though, one of their masks half exploded. That had more effect, and the creature howled, dropping to his knees as he blindly sought to recover his bow.

Zee let fly a third round, then holstered his weapon. “Keep ’em busy. We’ll get this done.” He turned to me, clamping his hand on my arm. “I don’t want to wait for these guys to call up reinforcements.”

He pushed me toward the Crazy 8 in the floor while his men provided covering gunfire. I launched myself onto the rock pile, Zee right behind me, the two of us landing hard. The roar of scraping stone was barely discernible as the floor dipped slowly. Too slowly. We jumped up and down again. The slab wobbled, slipped, then suddenly gained momentum and shot completely vertical, dust and rocks sailing down on us. We dropped down into sheer blackness.

About three point five seconds later, we slammed into a flat surface. The gravel and dust continued falling around us, but not all of it, not completely. My hand connected with a strip of metal even as my knees and feet broke through the floor.

“Iron mesh,” Zee barked. “Also old as shit. Get off this thing.” We scrambled to the side like startled spiders, then whipped around after we reached solid rock floor. Zee swung his flashlight, the arc of its light barely cutting through the dust. In front of us, a thick mesh of bars crisscrossed the floor, rendering the surface makeshift human net.

I pounded Zee’s arm. “
Undead,
Zee
?
Really? nowhere in my contract did it mention undead.”

“We didn’t know either.” He flicked his flashlight around and up. The room emptied into a downward sloping corridor. Above us, the ceiling was easily twelve feet up, once again perfectly sealed. The Magician’s infinity symbol glowed in the center of an elaborate scrollwork etched into the stone.

Okey-dokey
. That kind of Magician I could handle.

“After the others get clear, they’ll assess whether they come down here or bug out. Let’s make that choice easy on them.” Zee squinted, leaning forward to tap the wall. “Crypt’s gotta be on this level, though. That’s hammered gold.”

As we pulled ourselves to our feet, the sound of an enormous gong reverberated through the room. Gonging was never good.

Zee apparently agreed. “Move out.” We turned and raced down the corridor. The walls were plated with every precious metal of the ancient world—bronze, gold, silver, iron. Then we reached a large center room, with fully a dozen corridors snaking off it. Darkening shadows and various stages of stink indicated that each passageway held its share of crypts.

Zee stopped long enough to fish his Techzilla reader out, pointing it at the open doors. At the third one, it bleated. “Pay dirt.”

“Yup.” I wasn’t perfect at reading energy—that was what I had the cards for. But even I could sense the zing of this last room. The zing…and something else.

“Wait,” I said as Zee traded his reader for his gun. “You hear that?” A faint whooshing sound shivered in the distance, almost inaudible, marred briefly by another burst of gunfire far above. “Is that water?”

He shrugged. “We’re on a lake, princess. There’s water goddamned everywhere.”

“King of Cups.” I shook my head. “Last card I drew. It was the King of Cups. Cups are water. That’s important.”

“And Khan was a king. Also important. And my guys will run out of ammo soon. Most important of all. Let’s hit this.” Without another word, Zee ducked into the low entrance, leaving me to follow behind.

Bodies lined the deep cavern, lying in perfect symmetry and draped in exceptionally well-preserved furs, their heads covered in yet more ritual death masks. Unlike their brothers upstairs, these guys really did look dead.

We didn’t stop to make sure.

The shrine in the center of the room was some sort of fancy stone coffin perched on a thick pedestal. With Zee ahead of me, taut as a bowstring, we crept up the small staircase to get a closer peek.

I let out a soft breath when we saw what lay inside the open coffin. “Hey there, old guy.”

The corpse was not, as I expected, Mongolian. Granted, he’d probably been dead a long time, and death could really take the stuffing out of a guy. But the cadaver appeared far more Russian than anything else—maybe even European, with pale, papery skin, sunken cheeks and wide-set eyes. He’d not died in a moment of violence either: his features were untroubled, the visible skin of his face and neck unmarked.

But while the dude was a total white guy, the crown was all Mongolia, all the way.

Unlike the spiky-pointed version of its Western European cousins, this headpiece looked more like a helmet, with long metal flaps that came down over the ears and a hardy construction that gave the impression you could wear it into battle. The entire surface of the crown was studded with orange, blue, and green stones, glinting in Zee’s flashlight beam. It was pretty enough, but if it followed the pattern of most magical artifacts, the embedded jewels didn’t mark its true value.

As I leaned forward to grab it, my glance dropped to the robes pulled tight over Dead Guy’s body. They were made of richly patterned silks, vivid greens flowing into an intricately worked chest patch of red and blue. Zee’s flashlight angled, and I froze, mesmerized by the image.

How was that possible?
Staring out at me in full embroidered splendor was a blue dragon, its wings outstretched across a field of red. I knew that design. It’d been imprinted on my brain ten years ago on the worst day of my life. But what was it doing on a dead guy’s bathrobe?

More concerning, why did it seem so familiar? Like I’d seen it somewhere else, somewhere
recent
, somewhere…

“Princess,” Zee hissed.

Reflexively, my fingers closed on the crown, and I jerked it free from the corpse’s head.

Its eyes flicked open.

“
Dammit!
” Zee’s curse was drowned in the sound of a second massive gong strike, so loud it vibrated the walls. I jammed the helmet into my jacket while Zee thunked his flashlight into the now ex-corpse’s skull, which earned him a squawk of outrage. The creature started beating his frail arms against Zee, screaming in a language that sounded shockingly like French. Another slam of Zee’s light, and the guy fell back into his coffin, out cold.

Before we could clear the pedestal, however, the skies opened up—or the ceiling, more accurately—and a torrent of water crashed over us. Zee staggered under the deluge. “Son of a—”

“No!” I reached for Zee’s arm and yanked him back as he prepared to plunge into the already calf-deep water. “King of Cups—he rules from a platform on water. We need to stay here!”

“Well, it’s a popular destination.” Zee dashed water from his eyes and pointed, growling in disgust. “Fucking undead.”

I followed the direction of his hand. The corpses lining the walls were on the move. They’d sat up straight and were swinging their legs over their pallets. A few of them were already in the water, which was rising fast, cresting the short flight of stairs at the base of our pedestal. More splashes, and Zee cursed again. The walking undead were all heading toward us.

Water cascaded in from all sides, and the platform beneath our feet wobbled, lifting away. I squinted down, surprised at the fact that we were floating, then up again toward the ceiling. Zee squeezed off a few rounds, shooting into the cascade. “Some ideas, here, princess!”

“Working on it—” Then I saw it. “There! Hole!”

“Not going to—fuck!” Zee fired a round point-blank into a death mask that surged out of the water, and the creature spun away, going down beneath the surface. By now the flood was chest-deep, and the platform had broken away, spinning, turning—

“Get into the coffin!” I shouted. “The King rules over the water from his throne. No throne, so hit the coffin.”

Zee turned and stared at me, balancing on the shifting platform like a surfer. “What are you
talking
about?”

“Get in!” I threw myself into the coffin, right on top of the spindly former corpse, and Zee gave up trying to understand and clambered in on top of me. Icky White Guy
stunk
. As I shoved him deeper into the coffin, he woke up and hissed at me.

“Whoa! Check your privilege!” I tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go and the old guy started beating at me. Zee’s roared curse overrode everything as our stone boat lifted farther, then banged with a gut-wrenching thump against the ceiling. The sound of rushing water pounded our eardrums, and we shifted and bounced along with the current, the rim of the coffin scraping against the ceiling until finally we hung—suspended.

For a long, queasy moment.

Even the ex-corpse shut up, his rheumy eyes going wide in the reflected beam from Zee’s flashlight, his mouth with its rotted teeth forming a startled O.

Then we tipped forward, careening out of the room and down what felt like a massive waterfall. Zee braced me while both of us battered the once-again screeching, screaming Skeletor, who grabbed at our arms, our faces, my jacket. One of his finger bones snapped like a twig in his desperate attempt to recapture the crown. He didn’t seem to notice.

“…Drop point!” howled Zee in my ear, delivering another punishing blow to the wish-you-were-dead-guy’s face.

“What?” I jolted to the side as we raced around another turn in the cavern, then my stomach bottomed out again. Above our coffin, the tunnel’s ceiling appeared to lift up and everything was brighter—shockingly so. “Oh—an exit! This must be the exit!”

“Here we go!” bellowed Zee, locking me in an iron grip.

The propulsion force of the water shot us out into blessed open sky. A blur of gray and green streaked past, too fast to identify. The crypt tipped and dropped away, carrying away the ex-corpse as Zee kicked him down again. Brutally cold air ripped through my sodden clothes in stark contrast to the warm body holding me close.

For a breath, all of time stood still, the world too bright and full, the sky too blue and stark, and there was nothing but light and air and the unnervingly close sound of someone screaming bloody murder…

Right before we plunged into the frigid waters of Lake Baikal.

Chapter Two

The trans-dimensional elevator ride up to the Magician’s magical lair was shorter than the plane trip to Vegas, but the jet lag sucked just as much.

“You’re late.”
Armaeus Bertrand’s voice pushed against my brain.

My brain pushed back.
And you have a stunted appreciation for sleep.

As my primary client, the Arcana Council had a lot to offer: they paid me well for finding them the magical artifacts they craved. Plus, they were immortal, which had seriously improved my long term cash-flow projections since I’d begun working with them a little over a year ago.

But my work detail with the Council had taken a decidedly nasty turn of late. My most recent assignments hadn’t been to find stuff via my traditional Tarot card reads, it’d been to find them via astral travel, a particularly gut-churning, nerve-shredding, head-exploding form of mental projection, for which I’d recently developed an unfortunate proficiency. And while it wasn’t this way for everyone I suspected, for me, astral travel
hurt
. It hurt a lot.

It hurt so much, in fact, that getting within two miles of Council headquarters liquefied my guts and made my heart seize up.

Yet here I was, crawling into the belly of the beast. Again.

Like I said, they paid well.

And after my stopover at Father Jerome’s makeshift Connected orphanage in Paris yesterday, I was ready to score more cash. The old priest was doing everything he could to protect the children on the front lines. The least I could do was my job.

With as much swagger as I could manage given that a thousand razor-beaked vultures were taking biggie-sized chomps out of my brain, I strode into the Magician’s palatial office. We were at the southern tip of the Strip, soaring above the Vegas skyline, and despite the harsh midmorning light, you could sense the magic in the air of the city, the whirling wheels and snapping cards and the metallic whoosh of slot machines.

It was the sound of madness, but strangely comforting too.

Inside the Magician’s office, though, the crazy was kicked up several notches, which was not doing me any favors. Every surface gleamed, glinted, or invited, from the plush couches to the oversized command desk Armaeus favored. Worse,
everything
vibrated with power, be it trinket, tech—or thaumaturge.

“Miss Wilde,” Armaeus greeted me, his voice low and resonant, demanding that I look at him. Bracing myself, I did.

Dark, enigmatic, and sinfully sensual, Armaeus Bertrand wrung the most out of his half-French, half-Egyptian birth, never mind that he’d been walking this Earth since the thirteenth century. His face, with its perfect angles and smooth lines, might as well have been a Renaissance masterpiece carved out of bronze. His blue-black hair drifted luxuriously to his shoulders, and his mouth curved in a soft, indulgent smile while his golden eyes swept over me, from my plane-tousled hair to my dusty boots.

He was dressed impeccably, of course, cool and unflappable in a linen suit with a jewel-blue shirt beneath, open at the neck. I, on the other hand, looked like I hadn’t showered in days. I was fine with that, though. I believed in truth in advertising.

I shook my head, trying to refocus. I’d had a lot of time to go over the Lake Baikal job as I’d gradually worked my way back to Vegas, after nearly beating Zee to death with the crown once we’d made it to shore and negotiating a postjob undead bonus with my satisfied client. The one piece I couldn’t quit thinking about
wasn’t
the Mongolian crown, however, nor the near-bout of hypothermia I’d contracted before we’d been scooped out of the ice bucket of Lake Baikal. It wasn’t even the relief on Father Jerome’s face when I’d given him the money from the job, cash he so desperately needed and deserved.