Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 (3 page)

No. I couldn’t get that blasted blue dragon off my mind, the one embroidered into the ex-corpse’s robes. I’d seen something like it ten years ago. More importantly, I’d seen something like it two
weeks
ago—an almost identical design on one of Armaeus’s planes. And I was almost sure I’d seen a similarly shaped dragon sitting on one of his shelves, too. In this room.

“Where is it,” I growled, peering around. “You’ve got it here, don’t you?”

“You forget, I don’t have the luxury of knowing your innermost thoughts, Miss Wilde.” Armaeus’s clipped voice pulled my attention back to the present with a hard thump.

I’d been in business long enough to recognize the sound of pissed-off client. And though I liked to push Armaeus’s buttons, I liked getting paid more. “You should not have left Las Vegas,” he continued.

“Couldn’t be helped.”

“I see. Then shall we discuss your experience in Siberia? Or shall I rely on my contacts to give me the full report?”

I regarded my broken-off nails. “Nothing much to discuss.”

“I beg to differ. You could have been injured—or, worse, arrested. A minor Mongolian crown wasn’t worth the risk.”

He gestured to a case, and I frowned at him. “What?”

“I assume that’s what you wanted to find?”

I followed the direction of his long, elegant finger. And all other thoughts flew out of my head. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I groaned. “They put these things in Cracker Jack boxes or something?”

“So that
wasn’t
what you sought?” Amusement laced his words.

I stalked over to the case. On the third shelf, gleaming with polished stones and burnished bronze inlays, sat a near replica of the Mongolian helmet I’d wrenched off some hapless not-quite-a-corpse’s head before plunging into the iciest waters this side of Hell. “Does this do the same thing—the long-life business?” I quirked a glance back at him. “Do
not
tell me that’s what’s kept you kicking around for so long.”

Armaeus lifted a contemptuous brow. He could do that better than anyone I knew. “I do not keep the crown for personal use. I have it here for study.” His golden eyes tracked me, cataloging my every move. “Who was your client?”

“Some guy with a lot of money jonesing to dig up his family tree.” I shrugged. “No one you need to care about.”

“It isn’t that difficult to learn what I wish to know.”

“So why bother asking?”

The rustle of silks was my only warning, then a fresh wave of panic seized me as the High Priestess spoke from another of the room’s four entrances.

“Oh, good. The prodigal daughter returns.”

Terror blanked my thoughts for the barest moment, but it was apparently long enough for the High Priestess to see my expression. She smiled with satisfaction, and her wide, intelligent eyes mocked me. Today Eshe was rocking the whole Greco-Roman goddess motif, from the tips of her dangle earrings to the toes of her gilded sandals. Her hair fell long and lustrous around her shoulders, framing her perfectly proportioned olive-toned face, and her body practically shimmered in a deep purple robe. “Don’t worry, Sara,” she cooed. “This won’t hurt much. And it’s for such a good cause.”

I glared at Armaeus. “You didn’t tell me she was going to be here.”

“You didn’t ask.” The Magician’s voice had also hardened another notch or six, and I fought to keep my stance easy, my shoulders square. I had to play this carefully. A pissed-off Armaeus was a good day’s work. A furious Armaeus was dangerous. “If I cannot see your thoughts, I cannot gauge your pain.”

“My
pain
?” An unexpected surge of outrage welled up, bolstering and fierce. I stalked forward, jabbing my finger at Armaeus to punctuate my words. “You don’t get the
right
to discuss my pain. I’ve already played that game with you, remember? That
was
you, wasn’t it? In my hotel room two weeks ago? Telling me that it ‘didn’t have to be like this’? Or am I getting my Council members confused?”

“Tsk, tsk, Sara, so much anger.” Eshe was enjoying this. Then again, she probably enjoyed pulling the wings off dragonflies too. ”It was your choice to protect the twins from Kavala. They are the natural oracles, not you. Serving me is what they were born to do.”

“No, they were born to be
gifted,
Eshe. No obligation required.”

“Yet you feel obligated to them?”

My own anger flared hotter, treating my brain vultures to a barbeque. “Gee, I don’t know. Fifteen years old, kidnapped, and sold to that scum-sucking Jerry Fitz, who pumped their lungs full of gas so they could see visions more clearly? Forgive me if I thought I should cut them a break.”

A break. I guess you could call it that. Because after I’d freed the girls from Fitz’s hellhole, after I’d also been exposed to his freak show Pythene gas, I’d pledged myself to the High Priestess in place of the girls. Her abilities were specific and needed a prism. She could interpret and even direct present and future events, but she needed someone to
see
those events first. For the moment, that someone was me.

So now, whenever Eshe called, I reported for duty, ready to exercise my gas-enhanced skills of astral travel. Wherever she directed, I went. Whatever she needed to see, I saw. Saw and reported…then slunk off with my handy metaphysical barf bag, a parting gift for flying the not so friendly skies.

Just thinking about it made me wobble a little on my feet.

“Sit down, Miss Wilde.”

Armaeus’s voice seemed to be coming from too far away, but I couldn’t deny that his idea was a good one. I shambled toward the nearest chair, which had somehow gotten…nearer to me than it had been.

I scowled down, testing it with my foot. One thing about the Arcanans, you never could tell what was real with them and what was simply powerful illusion.

Still, the chair felt real enough. Throwing caution to the wind, I sank down into it. The plush leather gave easily beneath my weight, surrounding me with comfort.

To his credit, Armaeus let my relaxation last for another full thirty seconds before ruining it with his voice again. “She’s ready.”

I stiffened. “No, I’m—”

I didn’t have time to complete my sentence. Eshe spoke the ancient words and the thrall of her control held me fast. By the time she stood beside me, I was already fading from this plane, could barely feel her touch on my forehead.

“SANCTUS,” she murmured.

I shot out eastward, muscle and sinew shattering apart so that my mind might stretch before me, the visual effect like a hundred satellites all orienting on the same stretch of geography, offering up a multifaceted view. But at least this was a search I wanted to make. SANCTUS was a big reason all the money was so necessary for Father Jerome. A quasi-religious, quasi-military society dedicated to destroying all things magic, SANCTUS had erupted like a napalm strafe across the Connected community…and they were targeting the children first. Children had always been at risk from dark practitioners. Now they were an endangered species. Under the careful direction of Cardinal Rene Ventre, bestie of the pope and closeted zealot against all things magical, SANCTUS had become Connected Enemy Number One, and Ventre the embodiment of everything wrong in the world.

With Eshe’s request, I expected to head straight to Vatican City, Rome, to find the group. Instead, my searching mind angled farther east, to Istanbul, where the enormous spires of the Hagia Sophia beckoned me to enter its hallowed dome.

Without consideration for stone or glass or steel, I hurtled into the building, each barrier an unnerving shock to my system. Crashing through physical structures didn’t immediately hurt though, not really. The pain always came later.

Down, down, down, I went. Until I finally found my quarry, holed up in a room deep within the bowels of the onetime Church of Holy Wisdom.

Nothing holy was going on here now.

A young woman barely more than a child lay stretched out on a metal table, surrounded by monitors all registering electrical activity that was completely off the charts. I stared, horrified, as men and women in surgical gowns moved industriously around the girl. Finally, through a break in the gowns, I could see more: the young woman’s blank eyes, her slack expression.

She was dead. But death offered no repose for her.

Chatter erupted in the room as energy readings jumped and jangled, the Connected’s brain waves still responding to God only knew what stimulants they’d pumped into her. The words of the doctors were Italian, Greek, Arabic—a flood of excited babble, while monitors glittered and fingers pounded on keyboards.

Through all of it, I knew I was speaking, reporting what I saw to Eshe and Armaeus, every detail, every nuance. But my attention could not stay focused on the machines, the doctors. Not with a child in the room. A perfect, precious Connected child, who had done nothing to deserve this treatment other than to be born special. Unique.

Gifted.

I heard new voices, arguing voices, but I could not spare them my focus. I drifted closer, down toward the dead girl. No breath would ever pass her lips again; no smile would light her face. No impossible fancy would ever make her hug herself with delight and possibility.

She was gone. I was too late.

Always too little, too late.

I reached out, and another explosion of activity on the monitors penetrated my consciousness. On the table, a ripple shuddered across the girl’s face, and I heard—felt —
knew
her last moments: the screams, the cries, the prick of the needle in her neck, and the long spiraling crash toward—

“No!”

I jolted awake, sprawled out on Armaeus’s chair. Scrabbling like a crab, I crouched back into the cushions, my gaze swinging around. “What?” I said, too loudly. “What happened! Why am I here? Why did you—”

“I brought you out of the session early.”

Armaeus’s voice was a rock in the middle of a stormy sea, and I floundered toward it, shaking my head, trying to see. Gradually, too gradually, my eyes cleared and the vertigo edged down long enough for me to breathe.

“Where… what…”

“Eshe has departed. She received the information she needed. You did well, as you always do.” He studied me with his inscrutable gaze, and every one of my nerve endings flared with warning. “Perhaps too well.”

“I—oh. Good.” I realized I was clutching a pillow, and I forced myself to unlock my hands from it, ordered myself to breathe. Carefully, deliberately, I set the pillow on the chair’s armrest. Patted it. “We’re good, then.” I drew in a long, stabilizing breath, and willed myself to pull it together. “We’re good.”

“You didn’t need to flee the city to avoid Eshe.”

Irritation crackled through my system, healing me faster than any positive affirmations ever could. I flicked my gaze to Armaeus, glad to note that my eyes were focusing again. “I didn’t ‘flee.’ I got bored.”

“Bored.” Armaeus twisted his lips around the word. “How intriguing that your ennui coincided with the call Father Jerome placed to you, advising you of the new flood of Connected children on his doorstep. Children who, through his intercession, had barely avoided getting kidnapped, killed, and dismembered for the use of their body parts, whether by dark practitioners, SANCTUS, or both.”

I winced, seeing their faces. So many kids, their expressions tight with confusion, their eyes hollow with fear. How many had Jerome already hidden away? How many more would he need to hide as the war on Connecteds continued to heat up?

And why hadn’t we known about the pale, fragile blonde, dead on some table in Istanbul because we hadn’t reached her in time?

Armaeus continued, oblivious to my distress. “I presume you are far less bored now, given that Father Jerome’s bank accounts have been increased by more than a hundred thousand dollars?”

I scowled. “Nothing in my contract says I can’t take on additional work.”

“If you needed additional work, I could have supplied it. My assignments will always take precedence over Eshe’s, as does my protection. Had I known you were avoiding her, I would already have intervened.”

I closed my eyes to avoid having to respond to that one. Armaeus’s “assignments” came at the price of me being around Armaeus. And that had its own set of challenges. He wasn’t merely sex on a stick. He was dangerous at a primal level, gigging my lizard brain even when I wasn’t in the throes of a viselike headache.

Man,
my head hurt.

“Miss Wilde.”

“Just resting my eyes. Carry on.”

He sighed with irritation. “Your instability is becoming a problem.”

Oh?
I opened up my right eye, the one that hurt less. “Not to me.”

Armaeus scowled at me in monovision. “You’re on retainer to the Council.”

“Not true.” I opened the other eye, then squinted. “You talk a good game, but right now, Eshe is the only one of you guys paying me. Trust me. I keep track of that stuff.”

“And I would suggest that to take advantage of additional work opportunities, you must actually be
here
.”

Finally we were getting somewhere. I scooted upward on the chair, which was so soft it threatened to swallow me whole. “If you have an actual job for me, why didn’t you tell Nikki? She’s my people.”

“Nikki Dawes is not your ‘people.’ She’s barely her own people.” He scowled at me. “I’m not sure you’re sufficiently prepared for this new assignment.”

“Does it pay?”

“Of course. Further, it involves a direct response to SANCTUS. ”

I sat up abruptly, Cardinal Rene Ventre’s image giving a face to my pain, all spectacles, squinty eyes and tight lipped grimace. “Then consider me prepared.” I worked out a kink in my neck. “What’s the gig?”

Armaeus regarded me a long moment more. He did that, sometimes when he thought I wouldn’t notice, sometimes blatantly, like now. Eyeing me as if I was some sort of bug in a specimen jar, batting against the lid to escape.

Despite my bravado, I knew what the Magician was seeing: I looked like crap. Skin white and pasty, enough coffee in my system that I practically vibrated, my eyes hung with fatigue, my hands twitchy. I was cold too. Constantly, ridiculously cold, the ache of some deep chill starting in my gut and rising up to put a choke hold on my lungs, my throat.