Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 (26 page)

“Um, they don’t stand anywhere, Officer Brody—Detective Brooks,” I amended quickly. “We worked together ten years ago in a purely professional capacity.”

He nodded, his face not betraying any reaction to the blush chasing over my face. “We did. But we’re not working together professionally now, are we?”

Wait, what?

Somehow he’d gotten closer to me. “I specifically don’t want to work ‘professionally’ with you, Sara. I want you to share information with me as a concerned citizen, yes. But you are nowhere near being a subject in this or any other case at this point, nor are you acting in any official police capacity. You can leave the city at any time. You probably should leave the city, in fact. The woman I met two weeks ago was planning on it, I know that for sure. The question is…will you or won’t you?” His eyes were the color of a winter day, clear and unworried, and despite the intensity of his glance, he didn’t seem jacked up, didn’t seem invested in the answer, didn’t seem—

“Miss Wilde.”

So not the time.

“Why do you think I should leave the city?” I blurted the words before I could stop them, and it was Brody’s turn to smile, the little half smirk that he’d used so many times with so many people while I’d watched him, starry eyed with teen idol lust.

“Doesn’t matter what I think. Will you or won’t you?”

“No. I mean, yes. Yes.”

“Sounds like you haven’t made up your mind on that.”

“This isn’t a good time.”

He shrugged. “I can wait.”

The double meaning of his words dropped me into another rolling wave of confusion. He could wait. He had waited, sort of. Or at least he’d remembered me, from all those years ago. Remembered the girl I’d been or tried to be. I didn’t know if that was a good or a bad thing. A bad thing, I was pretty sure.

“There’s been an intriguing development, Miss Wilde.”

Not. Now.

“I said I could wait.”

I blinked at Brody, my brain trying to balance the conversation in my mind with the one in front of me. Despite my sense that the Magician wasn’t pulling my chain, I shoved Armaeus out of my consciousness. Brody was a different story, though. He wasn’t using magic. Not any sort of magic I could ward against, anyway. And he was definitely pulling my chain. But I wasn’t going to react like a kid anymore to that. I was grown-up. Grown-ups did things differently than teenagers, I was almost sure of it.

“It’s none of your business whether I stay or go,” I huffed, very adultlike.

“Nope.”

“So why do you want to know?”

“Other than I might possibly lose a good CI?” He shrugged, his flinty blue eyes betraying nothing. “Call it professional curiosity. The kind of work you do, the kind of people you know—we’re going to run into each other, Sara. I like to know what to expect.”

My inner teen stared at him, gape-mouthed. I tried not to follow suit. He really…didn’t give a crap. “But you…” I blinked, my mind rushing through all the years, all the daydreams, all of the completely ridiculous fantasies I’d made up in my head about this man, this stupid cop who really had just been working with the snot-nosed kid from down the street, her value all in her cards and her visions and nothing…

Well, not completely nothing. “You
kissed
me.” He had too. When he’d first seen me two weeks ago, seen me and known it was me, back in his life after ten years in the wind, he’d pulled me into his arms, and—

Had that simply been an
interrogation technique
?

Outrage blasted through me as a loud rap sounded at the door, which immediately opened. A uniformed cop stuck her head in. “Sorry to interrupt, Detective, I didn’t want to forward it to your voice mail.” She glanced down at her clipboard. “An Armaeus Bertrand is on the line for you.”

“For him?” I blurted, and Brody’s head swiveled around to me in surprise, once again all cop.

The woman nodded. “Says there’s been a development in the Rarity theft he wanted discuss with you. He was…” She straightened a little, blushing. “He was, ah, most insistent.”

I stared at her. The woman had to be pushing sixty, and she was as pink and wide-eyed as a kid. Then again, Armaeus was pushing nine hundred. So to him she
was
a kid.

“Thanks, Nancy,” Brody said, and the woman straightened further. Maybe surprised that Brody knew her name, maybe surprised that she had a name at this point. The Magician could do that. “Patch it through to my cell phone?”

“Will do.” She left the room, and Brody turned more fully to face me.

“What is your relationship with Armaeus Bertrand, exactly? Does he know you’re here? What’s his involvement?”

I narrowed my eyes. It was a reasonable question. Armaeus had not been at the Rarity, and Brody wouldn’t know that he was connected to Kreios, necessarily. But at the moment I wasn’t inclined to do Brody any favors. “He’s a client. I work for him.” Brody’s mouth turned down, and I pushed it a little more. He wanted us to be all business? Fine. This was my business. “I find items of interest for him.”

“Items like the gold scroll cases?”

“On occasion, sure. But those weren’t his scroll cases. They’re Fuggeren’s. So Fuggeren was my client on that job.” Granted, Armaeus was my original client and Fuggeren the tagalong after the fact, but details.

“That’s pretty—” Whatever comment he was about to make was cut off by the racket of his phone. He pulled the device out of his pocket and thumbed it on. “Detective Rooks.”

I turned to leave, but he held up a finger. I offered him one of my own and was out the door.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“He’s on to you, you know.”

I sat with Nikki at the SLS outdoor bar, scanning the pool area. By the time I’d hooked up with her, she and the rest of the visiting Connecteds had decamped from the chapel in search of cooler territory in the face of the scorching afternoon. The SLS pool was packed, but the crowd wasn’t your typical college or twenty-something crush. It was like the entire Midwest had emptied out of their RVs and into the SLS, and everyone was waiting for the church fair to begin. “Brody. He suspects you’re a lot more than what you seem.” I decided not to mention the word “natterclack.”

“Yeah, well, that’d be the detective part of Detective Dishy.” Nikki took a long pull on her bourbon and soda, squinting into the sun. Today she wore a white miniskirt paired with red canvas platform high-tops, white knee socks banded at the top with red stripes, and a faded Converse all-star tank top artfully cut to show off her industrial-strength bright red sports bra. Her auburn hair was in pigtails, and her star-shaped sunglasses took up the top half of her face. “He say anything specific, or did he just get really low and growl, ‘I’m on to her, you know’?”

I smiled, relaxing for the first time all day. “I think he knows you’re not just another pretty face is all. He hasn’t taken the time to dig.”

“Tell him I’m an open book. Anytime he wants to riffle my pages, he knows where to find me. Dixie’s had her chance at him, and you aren’t grabbing that low-hanging fruit, so to speak. Somebody’s gotta.”

“I’ll let him know.” Armaeus’s call had been to inform Brody that more of the Rarity gold had been recovered at the Luxor, hiding among the kitsch. I knew this not because Brody had told me, but because Armaeus had mentally mute-conferenced me into the phone call as I’d stalked out of the station house. Way better than Skype.

That was no more an “intriguing development” than a Tinder breakup, though. So either Armaeus wanted me out of Brody’s mitts for his own reasons, or he had some other development to inform me about, and he needed me in the clear to do it. Either way, he hadn’t uttered another peep, so I’d decided to check in on the crowd at SLS.

The solstice celebration had technically started earlier today, but there remained way too many of them. “What are they all still doing here? I thought the Rarity was winding down.”

“It’s in its final day, with the triumphant return of Fuggeren’s scroll cases, though the savviest connoisseurs are convinced the ones on display now are fakes. No point tempting the gods by putting them out there a second time to grab. But remember, these people aren’t here for that. They’re still waiting for some kind of Psychic Rapture, which they’re convinced will be at sundown, tonight. We’ve got a whole parade planned down to the Bellagio fountains, where their visions told them they’d have the best view. We tried to talk them down from it, but nothing doing. It’s nuts.” She eyeballed me. “They think you’re someone special, by the way.”

I frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“Their visions.” Nikki waved a hand. “Some of them have seen you, seen you do great things. Bathed in light, shining through a storm, the whole nine yards.”

“Armaeus is behind those visions, Nikki. Roxie wasn’t lying about that.”

“Some of them, sure. But not all of them, babe. You got skillz, I’m telling you. Sooner or later you’ve got to own that.”

“I’ve overreached myself before.” I shook my head, shoving the old memories away. “I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

“Child, you—”

“Where are the witches in all this?” I interrupted her. “I haven’t heard anything from them since they crashed the diner. Do
they
still think all hell’s going to break loose?”

“I don’t think so. Danae and the gang have been nose to the bedrock for the past three days. I’m not much on my ley line configurations, but they’re pretty sure that the city’s grid will hold. Hold what, they’re not saying, but hold.”

“Maybe SANCTUS knows that Armaeus got a hold of the scroll cases and they’ve called everything off.” I blew out a breath, taking in the crowd. “There are just so many Connecteds here.”

“More than we imagined possible. More than Dixie can handle, you want to know the truth. She’s beginning to sound like a camp counselor off her meds.” Nikki shook her head. “Those who don’t know better are all abuzz with excitement. The ones who do know better don’t know whether to get the hell out of Vegas or stay. If it
is
the Rapture, no one wants to be left behind, you know? Not when the deep end of the ocean is hella more dark than it’s ever been. And Roxie has returned to the fold with a vengeance, dispensing her little gems of wisdom to the masses pretty much every hour, on the hour. At least up until this morning. Then solstice hit and she had everyone rapt with attention—except then she warned them all that the real celebration wouldn’t be ‘til, you guessed it, sundown.”

I looked at the sky. Sundown wasn’t all that far off. “She say anything useful?”

“Nothing we can hold her to.” Nikki shrugged. “She’s keeping them here, which I’m against, but she’s keeping them happy, which I’m all for. Still, for someone incarnated as recently as the seventies, something’s…wrong with her.”

I quirked her a glance. “Not like you to judge.”

“I’m not talking her plastic surgery. She just—bugs me. I don’t know if she’s scared or got something up her sleeve, but she feels off to me.”

I considered that. What I’d been able to find on Roxie Meadows hadn’t been super conclusive. While she’d been huge in the sixties and seventies, the party stop for musicians and celebrities from all over the world, her flamboyance had simmered down markedly with her accession to the Council. Part of that was because of her discretion, what with the whole anti-aging thing she had going on, but I agreed with Nikki. There was something more there. “Anything more from the Devil?”

“Not a peep. He’s not anywhere, Eshe isn’t anywhere. It’s like a storm is rolling in, but we don’t know from what direction, or whether to bring our umbrellas or snow shovels.”

I slanted my gaze to the east, at the far horizon. I couldn’t see it beyond the towering Arcana Casinos. In the waning day, the trans-dimensional homes of the Council were almost indiscernible, the bare shift of a shadow or refraction of light. They were there, but they served merely to make me feel more insulated, not less. Not insulated, exactly. Trapped.

Nikki wasn’t a mind reader, but her next words nailed it anyway. “It’s like we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, and it’s going to be square on our heads.”

I nodded. “The Rarity’s big closing bash and auction happens this evening, and it’s solstice, and everyone here seems wired for sound. Part of me wants to lock them all down, but part me thinks they’ll be safer in the open, mingling with un-Connecteds. Safety in numbers and all.”

She nodded to the floatie-and-fairy-wand crowd in the pool. “We couldn’t lock down this crowd without the National Guard. The alcohol started flowing at six a.m., and really hit once the official solstice mark was passed. It’s giving a whole new meaning to the last man standing. I don’t know if they’re scared or excited or simply that desperate to drink the Kool-Aid.”

“Technoceuticals?”

“Not that we can tell. But that shit has so many variants, who would know?”

“Where’s Roxie now?”

“Turtled up. Dixie was supposed to meet with her after her big speech, but the old girl split. Her assistant called instead, said Madame was indisposed and not feeling well, and needed to recover. Put off Dixie until next week.”

“By next week, it could be too late.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“So we should go to her house and get her, right? See what’s really going on?”

She grinned. “My thoughts exactly.”

Before we could move, the waiflike blonde that Dixie had befriended, Naeve, came rushing around the corner. “Aura reader, heads up,” Nikki breathed.

I wasn’t too worried, but then the woman stopped in front of us, panting with excitement. “Have either of you seen Dixie?” she gasped. “I—her cop friend, the cute one? He’s been—”

Her gaze swung to me almost before the words were out. Nikki’s hand nudged mine, and a wave of pure ease and detachment washed through me, a total instant Zen massage. The woman finished, and I blinked at her, trying to hear her voice over the rush of birdsong and ocean breezes.

“Injured?” I frowned. “Really?”

“Well—that’s what I heard.” Naeve stumbled back a step, tilting her head. “You know him too, right?”