The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  “That’s fantastic. I’m not going. What else did Simon find?”

  “You’re totally going, and Simon’s original plan was to be pretty straight up about his inquiries. He didn’t care if anyone knew we were in the market for magical McGuffins. In fact, he wanted people to know that something was up and that the Arcana Council was on the move, that we weren’t sitting on our asses any longer.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, grabbing the next canister and sliding it open. Another healing totem had been recommended for its great and magical powers, this one at the base of Niagara Falls. I didn’t think I wanted any part of that. “Has that changed?”

  “Immediately and definitively,” she confirmed. “Mainly because we started getting requests that we shut our piehole.”

  That caught me up short. “We did?”

  “Ayup. The first one came in from the Iron Sea coven up in Chicago, more of a cautionary note than anything, that we needed to be careful with the questions we were asking. Things got more aggressive from there. Apparently, any sort of chatter on the arcane web or in the arcane black market for magical artifacts of protection has an immediate and curious effect on trade. The people at the top who are making all the money aren’t big fans, in other words. They’re going all big swinging wands about it, scaring the crap out of everyone, so even as Simon’s outreach slowed down…”

  She gestured at the piles of canisters around me. I grimaced.

  “My incoming mail increased,” I ended her sentence for her. “People want to help, but they can’t do it in the open. Sort of like the Connected community has played things since the dawn of time. Except now they want us to do something. That’s different.”

  “They’re worried about somebody who’s Connected, too, not an outsider. That’s also different.”

  “It is. But sadly, not surprising.” I rubbed my jaw, oddly tired. And not simply because I’d been sleeping on glass pillows. “The Shadow Court strikes again.”

  Following our altercation in Hamburg several weeks ago, the Shadow Court had gone underground. Now we were heading quickly toward autumn, though in Las Vegas, the change of season hadn’t been terribly apparent. The days remained crackling hot, and the nights, though dry, didn’t seem to be getting as cool as they should be for the desert. The city had taken on a shifty-eyed glower under the oppressive heat, everywhere except the Strip, where, with enough alcohol and air-conditioning, people didn’t have to think about global warming or climate change so much.

  In addition to trying to score magical artifacts, we’d used the time off from the Shadow Court to our advantage, throwing ourselves into a full-scale survey of all the Connected organizations and communities worldwide and how they intersected with each other. For the Shadow Court to have gone under the radar so completely implied more than simply a bunch of people good at keeping a secret—it implied a false front. There was some other organization out there doing the Shadow Court’s public work for them, someone beyond Jarvis Fuggeren’s rich, entitled sneer.

  We didn’t know what that organization was, but we were inching closer to it. In the meantime, every day was Christmas with all the new toys and trinkets I was receiving at Justice Hall. I should’ve done this months ago.

  “Simon only started putting out the requests, what, a week ago?” I asked. The Fool had been hurt pretty bad while helping us fight against the Shadow Court and was only now recovering, under the careful watch of the Arcana Council’s medical expert. “He’s only a few days off injured reserve.”

  “Yup. Dr. Sells took her sweet time before proclaiming him well enough to sit in front of a laptop for longer than twenty minutes. He didn’t want to start the search when he couldn’t finish it, which was good thinking since it exploded almost immediately. The first two days, he was putting out feelers. The remaining five, he spent doing damage control and capping off live wires. All the while gathering more information, more intersections. What people are saying, how they’re saying it, what issues keep bubbling up. There are patterns developing, trends. That’s not necessarily good.”

  I nodded. Absently, I pulled another canister and swiveled the lid open, shaking out the slip of paper within. Something about it seemed almost familiar to me, and I frowned as Nikki continued talking.

  “Best anyone can tell, about eighty percent of the Connected community is worried about the other twenty percent, and of that twenty percent, eighteen percent is worried about the remaining two.”

  “That sounds about right,” I said. “I can assume none of those two percenters are among the Arcana Council.”

  “You would be correct. We’re the Pollyanna of the Connected world. Nobody thinks we’re a threat. In fact, though they would love us to actually do something…nobody thinks we will.”

  Don’t engage. I grimaced, feeling the tug toward action again. It wasn’t my place, as a member of the Arcana Council. Nevertheless…

  “What about the attendees of the Odermatts’ party?” I asked. “Where do they fall?”

  “Definitely more in the threat zone. Estelle LeGrieux is positively loaded, and her family has been the money launderer of the rich and powerful since the Middle Ages. If she’s throwing in with Fuggeren, she’s bringing both cash and political influence to the table. We tracked down the audiovisual clips too. The time-share location was on a private island near Indonesia, known for its elevation—which means it probably won’t get flooded by rising tides, but when that happens, it will be even more exclusive. Exclusivity is apparently its biggest draw. That and the infinity pool, anyway. Simon thinks it was being offered as a property of the future for the rich and special—sort of a guarantee of awesome digs when everyone else is under water, literally.”

  “Nice. And the drug company?”

  “Solidarity Pharmaceuticals. Definitely a front. We’re tracking that down, trying to see who’s behind the shell companies that own it, but there’s no question we’ll eventually find technoceuticals. The humanitarian dude is more of a question mark—Dr. Sebastian Rindon, Nobel-Prize-winning scientist, dedicating his life to helping catastrophe survivors recover without getting poisoned by all the toxins in the post-disaster sludge. Rising seawater, mudslides, flooding, sewage spillover, you name it. He’s got some kind of vaccination to keep people from getting sick as well as purifiers to dump into the water, and it seems to be working. He’s a hero, so far as we can tell.”

  I made a face. “That doesn’t track. Why would he be on the screen at the Odermatts’? Is he Connected?”

  “Not really. Tough to tell until we get right up on him, but he’s apparently rubbed up against some Connecteds in the process of his humanitarian work. They all deny Rindon has any major woo. Some of them don’t like him, but they don’t know him that well either. He sort of burst on the scene a few months ago with his antitoxin vaccination, and he’s mainly getting the hero treatment.”

  “Is he rich?”

  “As Croesus,” Nikki confirmed. “Family’s South American, based in São Paulo. Absolutely flush—donates a lot of that scratch, but he’s got it to donate.”

  “Well, that would get him in with the Odermatts. Maybe they’re hoping to bring him on as a personal doc to the stars.”

  “Could be. He could also be a sign that the Shadow Court and their cronies are taking more interest in current events. We need to change the conversation so that it includes the Arcana Council. I’ve found out that the Devil’s going to be calling a meeting of the Council later today, and that will give you a fantastic opportunity to tell them that.”

  “I don’t have time for a meeting,” I said automatically.

  “You’ll have time for this one.”

  I grimaced. It wasn’t that I thought Nikki was wrong, but this was an argument we couldn’t win. For millennia, the Arcana Council had done a pretty good job keeping the gods on their side of the veil and keeping magic balanced, but it had done so on the down-low rather than becoming the face of the Connected community. I was arguably the only
member of the Council who had a direct connection point with mortals who felt harmed in some way by another Connected, and the Council liked it that way.

  Granted, I wasn’t the only Council member who Connecteds petitioned for aid, not by a long shot. But I was the most honor bound to answer that call. Judging from the number of cases stacked behind the library doors of Justice Hall, I’d have enough calls to answer to last several lifetimes. More than enough to get me out of a meeting and an endless-loop argument about who should be doing what.

  “Yeah, well, I feel a sudden and urgent need coming on to explore some of these artifact trails,” I said, gesturing to the canisters. “So you can plan on me being out of town.”

  “Not so fast, dollface,” Nikki said. She waved the invitation at me, the movement seeming to spark a responding tremor in the newest slip of paper on my desk. I frowned at it, then picked up the sheet, unrolling it. A sudden flash of pigtails, braces, and moon pies assaulted my senses, an echo from the past so forceful, it made me jump.

  “I…wait a minute,” I muttered, squinting at the slip of paper. “I recognize this handwriting.”

  But Nikki was going ahead full steam. “You can’t leave. You have to do this,” she crowed, flapping the invitation with more force. “It’s High School Reunion: Vegas, baby, and you have been invited.”

  Reunion? She’d said that before, only this time it finally registered. “What are you talking about—”

  My question was cut off sharply as the phone rang beside me, the screen lighting up with the name of Brody Rooks, Detective of the LVMPD.

  If anyone could save me from Nikki’s histrionics, he could. I grabbed the phone with an almost feral sense of desperation. “Brody. Please give me good news.”

  There was a brief pause, then Brody’s permanently graveled voice came over the line. “I need you at Caesars Palace right now, Sara. We’ve got a problem.”

  4

  Technically, Brody wasn’t at Caesars Palace so much as he was in front of it, namely at the ornate formal gardens that sprawled out in front of the casino, expanding its prime real estate footprint on the Strip. The gardens were broken up into small squares of flowers and seating areas with fake Roman columns scattered around, and in the center of one of those monuments was the remnants of a trash fire.

  Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be something I’d get too concerned about, except for the woman standing at the far end of the grotto in full Roman toga, golden sandals, and beaded crown. Eshe, High Priestess of the Arcana Council.

  “I love my job,” Nikki breathed. She clutched her five-hundred-dollar leather tote to her chest, the cream-colored envelope sticking out just enough that I could see it.

  “Why did you bring that?” I asked pointedly, mainly so I wouldn’t have to point.

  “Reasons,” she informed me. “But they can wait till we figure out who our fire bomber is. And why the High Priestess decided to make an appearance, because that toga is everything.”

  At that moment, Brody stood back from a knot of techs who were working the scene. He saw us immediately and ambled over, his hands shoved into his pockets. As usual, his sandy-brown hair was disheveled, his suit wrinkled. He looked like he hadn’t slept in three days, though I suspected it was probably longer. He was only ten years older than I was, but today, he might as easily have been pushing fifty. When it came to Brody, it wasn’t the years, it was the mileage. And he had seen some long, hard road.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Why do you have the full court press for a trash fire?”

  “Not your typical trash.” He crooked his finger for us to follow him into the crime scene, where Eshe had drawn near as well. For the first time, I noticed she wasn’t alone. An attractive young black woman stood next to her, her face serene, her eyes unfocused. She moved as Eshe moved, like they were held together with a string. If you didn’t know when you first saw her, you wouldn’t realize she was blind.

  But I did know. Lainie Grant had been a promising young astronomy student until the fateful night several months ago when she had gazed into the skies at the exact moment I’d dropped a pendant of pure, brilliant magic into that same, star-filled sky. The light show she’d seen with the benefit of extreme magnification had taken her sight, at least her regular sight. At the same time, it had augmented a very different kind of sight.

  Brody ignored both Eshe and Lainie for the moment as he jabbed his finger at the remains of a squat metal container, the contents of which were still smoking. Nikki and I both reacted as we approached. “Sweet oleander and chives, that stinks,” Nikki muttered.

  “You got that right,” Brody said. He turned to me. “You recognize it?”

  I made a face. It smelled like a combination of rotten eggs and scorched metal. It was also nothing I’d ever encountered before. I would’ve remembered it. “Am I supposed to?”

  “Worth a shot. According to Eshe over there, this isn’t your ordinary dumpster fire. It included psychotropic ingredients from a very old recipe that hasn’t been in use for, oh, I don’t know, about two thousand years.”

  I stiffened. “Hallucinogens? Was anyone affected?”

  Suddenly, Brody’s involvement in this case became a lot easier to understand. I’d worked with the man when I was a kid in Memphis and he was the low man on the police totem pole, assigned to oversee my attempts at finding missing children using psychic means. We’d been successful, but the stigma of paranormal investigations had never left him, and here in Vegas, it had turned into his full-time job.

  Now he shook his head. “Not as much as they should’ve been, according to Eshe. Which makes things even weirder.”

  At that moment, the High Priestess stepped into our circle. Given that we were on the grounds of Caesars Palace, her toga could initially pass her off as one of the extras on staff, but that illusion only lasted until you looked her in the eyes. Eshe was every ounce the renowned Greek oracle she’d been prior to ascending to the Council at the height of her powers. Tall and slender, with richly bronzed skin, it was her face that was the most surprising. She was gorgeous, of course, with exquisite high cheekbones, green eyes, and a fall of dark glossy black hair that spilled over her shoulders. But there was something about her expression that transcended beauty and toggled right on over into terrifying.

  “There is no way this should be possible,” she informed us, and her tone more than anything made me stiffen with concern. Eshe was haughty, condescending, and outright obnoxious as a matter of course. But she was none of those things right now. She legitimately sounded scared.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. “What’s in the trash can?”

  She sent me a withering glance, which, frankly, made me feel better. “It’s not a trash can, it’s an ancient salver that, if you actually carbon dated it, may well have been manufactured in the early two hundreds BCE. When the needs of our supplicants demanded it, we used these containers with initiates to help them walk the bridge to the other side.”

  I swung my gaze from her to the, uh, salver. “The other side of what? I thought the deal was that you guys got high, got visions, then shared them with any and all who asked, the crazier the better.”

  For once, Eshe didn’t take exception to this jab, but merely nodded. “You would be correct regarding the primary function of the oracle. We listened to anyone who came our way, and offered the advice they so desperately desired. But there was another sect of seers that could only be found deeper in the caverns. Very few were admitted to that sacred space. Those who gained access were willing to pay whatever price to get the answers they sought. To give them the level of information they needed, we had to do more than, as you would say, get high.”

  “Which means…?”

  “Which means that with the proper application of mind-altering substances, additional abilities would manifest, such as astral travel. Not just astral travel to other parts of this world, but to other realms entirely.”

  I stared at her. “Other r
ealms? Like what other realms, specifically?”

  She regarded me steadily. “You should know. You’ve been there.”

  I didn’t rise to that bait. Granted, the name Atlantis could be spoken aloud in Vegas without anyone paying much attention, but it still was a level of crazy to which I didn’t aspire before coffee. “And where else?”

  She shrugged one elegant shoulder. “There are many lenses into the world of humans, many doors that can be opened and stepped through, from which you can see the pageantry of humanity with far greater clarity then you can while living among its people. The herbs used in this salver are a demand for such higher-level clarity. Someone wishes to see the future in a very specific way, using the heights of the oracle’s power. This request hasn’t been made, to my knowledge, in hundreds of years. And I would know. As the oracle, when such a fire is set, I am bound to come and answer the questions put forth.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You’re telling me in all the time since you’ve ascended to the Council, this has never happened before?”

  “Oh, it’s happened, but not in probably fifteen hundred years. The old ways died very quickly when the end came, and the esoteric learnings of our sect were lost and scattered by design. There are some things mortals were not meant to know.”

  “Right.” This whole keeping-the-dangerous-magic-from-the-stupid-humans trick was another favorite of the Arcana Council’s. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand it, but it often proved to be more trouble than it was worth. “So what’s the ramification of this fire being set here, then? Is this some history buff gone out of control? Showing off?”

  “I don’t think so,” Eshe said. “The setting of this fire is quite deliberate. The question that it asks succinct.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Brody said. “This is news to me. There was nobody on scene when the brush fire started, or at least nobody that the cameras picked up. The place was empty, then a second later, we have this weird bucket thing and flames. Then we got about thirty flattened tourists and the firefighter crews showing up with gas masks to put the thing out. There was no question being asked, and there was nobody standing around to ask the question.”