by Tricia Owens
As I was finishing up, I felt a curious buzz in the air. While I walked back through the darkness to my friends, I tried to decide if I was being paranoid or if I had really just felt someone using magick. The sensation grew, pulling me to an incredulous stop.
"Who in the world would risk showing off in front of ordinary humans?" I asked aloud.
While Las Vegas was packed with magickal beings ranging from pixies to shapeshifters to sorceresses like me, ordinary people were completely oblivious of this magickal underbelly. That was because the Oddsmakers ran the city and they prohibited any use of magick where ordinary humans could see it. You absolutely did not want to cross the magickal bosses, not if you wanted to continue using magick or, you know, breathing.
My first thought was Vagasso. Any dark spirit willing to summon a dangerous demon in an attempt to take over the city would have the balls to do what I was feeling now. No one knew exactly who or what Vagasso was except that he was powerful. And yet my friends and I had managed to ruin his plans.
It was safe to say he wasn’t a member of my fan club. The demon he'd summoned? I'd banished it back to Hell. Summoning demons was no easy thing, and now he'd have to start all over. If I were him I would've been pissed at me, too. And I would have chosen this night, with me alone in the middle of the desert, to retaliate.
Granted, I wasn't completely alone. I called up my magickal familiar, which was a golden Chinese dragon I called Lucky. Lucky could be a wisp of air or a worthy opponent of Godzilla, depending on how much of my life energy I fed to him. There was also the trick that if I gave him too much power, I sort of lost myself to my ancient dragon blood and I became a dragon. That was the worst possible thing that could happen to me. Previous dragons in history had destroyed villages and caused terrible loss of life. If I gave in to my nature, too, I would be hunted and killed by the Oddsmakers.
That wouldn't happen tonight, though. Fingers crossed it happened never.
I called forth Lucky only his weakest form, so that he presented as a gust of circling cold air. Not much of a threat, but I'd drawn enough bad attention to myself when Lucky and I had fought off Vagasso the first time. It was a miracle I hadn't yet been called before the Oddsmakers to answer for how much sorcery I'd used.
A hundred yards away, above the desert, something red and gold streaked through the sky. I gaped. That hadn't been a Roman candle.
I stared at that patch of sky, feeling my eyes beginning to burn from the dry desert air and the gunpowder that hung heavy like storm clouds.
This time it was unmistakable: what moved through the sky wasn't a form of firework. It coiled and reared up like a cobra, but it had wings that spread out into fans of fire. I guessed from the distance that it must be at least fifty feet long. Its body was mostly a blood red color, but was gold on the wings and where plates flared along its spine like fins.
It was a magickal European dragon.
My eyes rounded as the dragon blasted fire in a streamer worthy of a Mad Max flamethrower. On the ground beneath it, people cheered. Car horns honked. They all thought it was some kind of advanced pyrotechnic. I hoped they continued to believe that, because if any one of them guessed that the dragon was created by sorcery...a lot of bad things were going to happen.
"Anne! Anne!" Melanie sprinted to me and grabbed my arm once she'd skidded to my side. "It's a dragon!"
"I know." Sweat slid down my spine as the red dragon lazily circled overhead, really putting on a show and attracting the attention of the hundreds of people gathered here.
"I didn't know there were other dragon familiars in Vegas," Melanie said.
"Me, neither."
"It's like they're showing off," my friend went on, watching the display with horrified fascination. The light from the dragon turned her blue hair purple. "Or, like, they're thumbing their noses at the Oddsmakers! Anne, this is crazy!"
It was more than crazy. The longer the dragon performed, the more I realized this was catastrophic.
"You don't think the Oddsmakers would blame me for this, do you?"
But as soon as I asked the question I knew the answer: of course they would. That was the point of this seemingly pointless and risky magickal display: someone was setting me up.
~~~~~
To say I was paranoid during the drive home was an understatement. I kept craning my body around in the front seat so I could monitor the sky from every angle through the front windshield and side windows.
"Anne, I don't think they're going to swoop down out of the sky and smash my car," Melanie said with a nervous little laugh. "I mean, they'd better not. I still have a year's worth of payments on this thing!"
"I guess not," I muttered, but I honestly wasn't sure. I turned around in my seat to look back at Christian. Though he was relatively new to Las Vegas, his mother was a witch and his father, before he died, had been a water fey. Those were old school beings with deep connections in the magical community.
"Have you ever heard anything about anyone being summoned by the Oddsmakers?" I asked him, hoping his witchy mother might have been a bit of a gossip hound. "Do they receive a certified letter in the mail or are they snatched up by a giant eagle, or what?"
He smirked, because it looked good on him and Christian was the sort of guy to know exactly how he looked at all times. It didn't make him a bad guy. In fact, he'd saved Vale and me by helping to run off Vagasso.
"No one actually knows someone who's faced the Oddsmakers," he told me, "because those people conveniently disappear." The wind from our open windows stirred his red hair around his eyes as though he were a model in a wind tunnel. "But everyone has heard stories of people who've been summoned by them."
"So what stories have you heard?"
"You know about the warlock who used a Cambodian luck spell at the Tropicana to win a couple of million dollars?"
I nodded. "Rumor says he's buried somewhere in the desert."
"I don't know if that's true or not, but I heard that the Oddsmakers grabbed him by shrinking him down to the size of a cellphone and then pocketing him and walking out of the casino."
I laughed, though if the story were true, it wasn't funny. "Then they could have just flushed him down a toilet, not gone to the effort of burying him out in the desert."
He grinned at the suggestion. "It's just what I heard. No one knows much about the Oddsmakers except to steer clear of them."
Celestina, sitting beside him, gave a snort of derision. Stretched across her lap with his head out the window was Lev, now in his wolf form.
"Oddsmakers are like the Mafia for magick," she said. "They don't operate for the good of anyone but themselves. Threaten their bottom line and they'll erase you."
I found that an interesting analogy. "So what's their bottom line? Surely they're not motivated by money?"
"They're motivated by a hunger for power. No one can do anything of major magickal significance without their permission."
"Well, I guess someone has to take some kind of control," I said. "Otherwise we'd have sorcerers and shifters running free all over the place and the government would be snatching up the rest of us for testing and military experiments." I shuddered. "Better to have rules than be poked and prodded, right?"
"You assume the Oddsmakers exist to protect us." Even in the dark interior of the car, I could read Celestina's skepticism. "It's all about power. Always."
I didn't doubt she was right, which set my mental gears turning. "How did they come about? Did they take control on their own or were they elected?"
"Ooh! Ooh! I know this!" Melanie took one hand off the wheel to wave it above her head. "My dad told me the Oddsmakers showed up in Vegas in the late 1950s because huge amounts of chance magick were building up here. A lot of the vintage places like the Sands, the Sahara, and the Horseshoe were doing well by that time and bringing in a lot of business. God, Anne, most of them have been imploded, how sad is that?!"
"It is sad, but keep going," I urged, trying to keep
her on target. I loved her, but as a monkey shifter Melanie could have an attention span shorter than a six year-old's.
"Okay, so the valley is like a big bowl, right? The mountains surround us in a ring. And there's nothing nearby to soak up all the chance magick that grows every time someone makes a bet. I mean, you flip a coin and a tiny bit is generated even from that. So imagine thousands of people betting on everything, twenty-four hours a day. It just kept building and building and the Oddsmakers realized someone nasty was going to come along and try to take advantage of it all. So they decided to begin monitoring the place to make sure no one was tapping into it for the wrong reasons or being sloppy and revealing magick to ordinary people."
It was interesting, and I wanted to know more, but history needed to take a backseat to my current nervousness. "But who are they?" I pressed. "Some of the original Oddsmakers must be dead by now. Were they replaced?"
Melanie could only shrug. "I don't think my dad knows anything about who they are. I'm not sure that anyone does."
"When you find out, Anne," Christian said, "let the rest of us know."
"Ha ha," I muttered at his unsubtle suggestion that I would be picked up soon and brought in for questioning.
He laughed at my sour expression. He was of zero interest to the Oddsmakers, so this discussion probably meant little to him. Unless he planned on putting on a SeaWorld show in the lake in front of Bellagio, no ordinary human was ever going to learn that Christian was a water fey.
"I'm teasing, but the fact of the matter is you can't stop it if it happens," he went on more seriously, "so why worry about it? If they want you, there's nothing you can do to avoid them."
"Do they have an email address? I'd love to write and tell them that the dragon that was out there tonight was not my doing." With a sigh, I settled back in my seat. "I'm going to get the blame for this. I know it. But you're right. All I can do is sit back and wait. I don't like that."
"It'll be okay," Melanie assured me with a smile. "Even if they question you, you're innocent. We'll all testify as character witnesses!"
"Are you trying to get me hanged?"
She giggled. The sound relaxed me. I checked how much money I had. "Hey, are you guys hungry? If we go to the Peppermill I'll buy."
Melanie opened her mouth to cheer—
—except I never heard it.
The Toyota Prius flipped. That was how it felt, like my seatbelt cut into my hips and all the blood in my body rushed into my head. Screaming filled my ears, mine or my friends'. I couldn't tell which because the sound was swiftly drowned out by a blast of ferocious sound like a jet plane taking off or a monster roaring—
~~~~~
I was no longer in Melanie's car.
I blinked. Above me was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, stretching so far in every direction that I couldn't see the edges from where I lay.
But was it really the Sistine Chapel? The longer I stared at the frescos above me the more wrong they appeared. The painted figures within the scenes of Genesis were all subtly but definitively unnatural: a fang here, a claw and tail there, a cruel twist of the mouth that I was sure Michelangelo had not intended. It was ancient Italian bizarro world.
Compelled by curiosity, I eventually located the iconic depiction of God extending his finger to create Adam. Just like everything else, it was warped. This version of Adam held a wand, the tip of which glowed with magick where God touched it. And God...well, he looked like someone you didn't want to turn your back on. He reminded me a bit of a werewolf.
I said, "Is this...is this someone's fanart?"
The sound of my voice startled me. I spread my hands flat beneath me on what felt like cold, hard concrete. Breathing through my mouth, I did my best not to freak out. Where had the car gone? Where were my friends?
Where the hell was I?
"A better reaction than most, Anne Moody. A point in your favor."
The voice was a young woman's, but that only made the hairs stand up on my arm because there was no way someone my age could be responsible for what had just happened to me.
Inwardly cringing, I stood up. The thought crossed my mind that I could call Lucky, but I paid no attention to it. Using my sorcery against the Oddsmakers sounded like the worst thing I could do. I had to face this as plain old Anne Moody.
Talk about terrible odds.
Chapter 2
Wherever we were wasn't the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, not that I had seriously considered that for longer than a few seconds. Though the ceiling, towering far above me, was painted with Michelangelo's finest as interpreted by a twisted fan of Harry Potter or Buffy, this wasn't a chapel. In fact, if I hadn't seen the ceiling I wouldn't have believed there were walls. Maybe there weren't. Magick made anything possible.
Case in point, surrounding me on all sides were what looked like curtains of black silk that seemed to disappear into nothingness where they neared the ceiling. I knew they weren't curtains, however, because despite the lack of a breeze, they occasionally shivered and billowed and emitted puffs of a smoke-like material as though the curtains themselves were living tissue releasing spores.
The room, or lair, was cold, which was another neon sign telling me that I was now in the world of the supernatural. I rubbed my bare arms and wished I'd worn jeans even if it was ninety degrees outside. I was dressed for the Fourth, not grandma's spooky basement.
"Where are my friends?" I asked. My voice was instantly swallowed by the black curtains. I tried again, louder this time. "I want to know where my friends are."
I heard the whisper of movement, a rustle of cloth over cloth. The curtains around me were mostly still, so I followed the sounds up, above my head. The figures I'd thought were painted were moving slowly, changing positions, interacting with other figures. I watched fanged creatures biting into the necks of winged angels, bringing looks of horror to their beautiful faces. Child-like cherubs tore the limbs off figures that howled in soundless agony. Snakes slithered through the spaces between the bodies. Malicious-eyed eagles dived at fallen figures and ripped their flesh off in stringy bits. The scene was vaguely reminiscent of a sadistic Greek myth, except that I knew that most myths were based on a magickal reality.
Was I still in Vegas? Reluctant to pull my eyes away from the ceiling, half-afraid that some of the figures would come to life and fall on me, I tried to make sense of the rest of the room. I couldn't tell if it was rectangular or round, if the illumination that allowed me to see came from behind the curtains or emanated from the floor.
"Why am I here?" I tried again, impatience leaking into my voice. Still nothing. "Why ignore me? Are you trying to bore me to death?"
"Impatient to meet your death, Anne Moody?"
Immediately I wished I'd kept my mouth shut. The voice was a woman's, soft and sweet and yet somehow bringing to mind the dripping, black-haired girl from The Ring. It was the kind of voice I expected to hear if I were trapped in a haunted house. Maybe I was.
"I think I'm here to be yelled at and then released," I said hopefully. "And I'll have learned my lesson, believe me."
I startled as a form materialized behind the curtains to my right. It stepped forward just enough for the gauzy material, if that was what it was, to settle into the nooks and crannies of the person's face and over its head and shoulders. It appeared to be an average-sized man, but everything else about the figure was far from average.
"Who are you?" I whispered, because my throat had constricted and a whisper was all that would come out of me.
The face behind that curtain made my knees tremble. There were hollows in that face which should not exist and angles in disconcerting places. Things moved beneath the cloth where there shouldn't have been any movement, as if the figure's face crawled with insects or tiny, alien appendages.
The figure breathed, making the cloth go concave and convex over the hole that I assumed was its mouth. But that hole was far too large and that motion...it was somehow horrible. Signs of li
fe, in this instance, were the last things I wanted to see.
"Do you believe the Oddsmakers are one or are many?" asked the saccharine voice. It didn't appear to come from the figure since the cloth over its mouth didn't react as she spoke. "Will you believe that we are...legion?"
"That's what demons say," I said cautiously.
Abruptly I reassessed where I might be. Had Vagasso grabbed me? Was this revenge for banishing the demon that he'd needed?
"There is much power in this region. Chance magick is generated by hopes and dreams and fears. So many fears... It's far too much for one, or for many, to manage without...corruption."
"So you are the Oddsmakers." My voice held a plea. Lie to me, lady. I want to believe.
"Today, we are. Tomorrow...others are."
I gasped when seven more figures stepped forward, pushing against the black curtains. They all stood motionless, only the cloth moving against their mouths and in tiny, terrible places over their faces. All could have been men, but all were subtly wrong, subtly horrific.
"What do you want with me?" My lips were chapped but I didn't have any saliva in my mouth to moisten them. I was on the verge of calling up Lucky because I was scared down to my toenails. But pulling forth my sorcery here might be the last thing I ever did.
"The entity calling itself Vagasso is not your battle."
As she spoke, more figures stepped against the black curtains, until I was surrounded by dozens of them. Maybe there were more, standing behind their shoulders, just out of sight. It was a flash mob of horror. The middle of the room wasn't far enough for me to stand for my comfort. I wanted to dig my way out of there, even if I had to do so with my bare hands.
"You will not engage Vagasso."
"He—it, whatever Vagasso is—summoned a demon." I kept my gaze darting around the circle of shrouded figures, watching for movement, for a sneaky step forward. "He wants to overthrow you."