The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

“I will have to get something new to wear,” Eshe said thoughtfully, while Viktor remained quiet. Too quiet. “I have not interacted with the common folk for far too long.”

  “Way ahead of you, girl,” Nikki said. “Both you and Lainie need a total makeover, and I have just the spot in mind. It rocks. You’re going to feel better then you have in three thousand years, I kid you not, and she’s finally going to lose that nerd scientist look.”

  Eshe seemed intrigued, but I slanted Nikki a disgusted glance. “Lainie too? Are you serious?”

  “You don’t think having two oracles on hand while your classmates get sloppy drunk isn’t a good idea? Imagine what they might know that you don’t realize.” She eyed me meaningfully, and a pang of awareness curled through me. I hadn’t seen these kids—men and women now—since the day I’d run away from Memphis after my foster mother had been killed. A mystery that still hadn’t been fully solved. Was it possible they knew something that they didn’t realize?

  The room erupted in chatter—for everyone except Brody and Viktor Dal, I realized. Brody, who’d been a police officer on the hunt for missing kids and Viktor, who had been the school counselor for the same school district as my high school, and had maybe interacted with some of the students of Farraday High. Maybe even the student who was seeking me out now. If I could trust Viktor ever to give me a straight answer about anything, I’d ask him directly about it. But I didn’t want to tip my hand. Not with an entire busload of my former classmates coming into town. There was a lot of leftover business from my days in Memphis, it appeared.

  Bottom line, this was going to be one hell of a class reunion. And one I absolutely had to attend.

  I met Nikki’s gaze. “I hate you.”

  “I love you too, dollface.” She winked.

  9

  Brody’s phone rang, barely audible amid the firestorm of chatter, and he leapt to his feet. It could’ve been an alert from Uber Eats, but he wasn’t missing his chance to get away. He said something to Nikki, and she immediately stood with him. Eshe and Viktor stood as well. The High Priestess remained a little unstable, but Viktor was right by her side, holding her elbow with a fair approximation of actual intimacy as they exited the room. Within seconds, only the Devil, the Magician, the Fool, and I remained in the room.

  “Whoa,” Simon finally said, his voice hushed.

  “An apt summary,” the Devil drawled.

  He gestured with his right hand, and the room around us shifted. No longer were we in one of Armaeus’s conference rooms, no matter how remodeled; we were most definitely in the Devil’s domain. An oasis of tropical plants, babbling water, and real sand encased in a glass solarium at the heart of his residence high above the Flamingo hotel. It was a testament to how completely accepting I was of the illusions the Arcana Council created for their own amusement and distraction that my brain didn’t balk at our sudden transition. Instead, I turned to Kreios.

  “You mind explaining to me what just happened? And use really small words, because you pretty much lost me the second Eshe said hello.”

  He grinned, but behind his usual indolence, there was an edge I didn’t normally see with the Devil. Ever since I’d met him, Aleksander Kreios had impressed me with his suave, relaxed, and, well, devil-may-care attitude. But this was more intense, an underlying steel that gave form and strength to his easy manner.

  “I confess, I had no idea that the High Priestess had such a delicious skill of manipulation. I always knew there were depths to her we had not fully explored, but in this, she surpassed my every expectation. She truly became the oracle of the ancients in all her twisted and confounding ways.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You missed the part about small words.”

  The Magician interjected. “When ancient supplicants approached the oracle, they had a question in mind, a burning desire they had to satisfy. Though there is very little written record of what the oracle’s answers were, hers or any of her priestesses, the oral tradition is clear. The oracle gave answers that were effectively nonanswers. So confusing that it left it up to the querent to interpret her true intent. Ultimately, supplicants made their own determinations, answers that were uppermost in their hearts or perhaps, more accurately, the hearts of those who had sent them. But the truth of Eshe’s ability is subtler than that.”

  “So Viktor was going to kill me?” Simon asked, cutting to the heart of the matter. He sounded remarkably sanguine about the idea.

  “That is one of his possible truths, yes, a path he appeared to have considered most sincerely. The second path is one he shared with us under a lesser compulsion.”

  “Because you weren’t giving him your Devil face, were you?” I gestured at Kreios. “When Eshe first sat down, Viktor was more under your influence or whatever. And her aura was out of control.”

  The Magician turned to me. “You could see that? How does it appear, specifically, to you?”

  “Deep purple when she entered the room. When Viktor invaded her personal space, it flared out to an almost harsh blueish white, and after his first little bombshell, it diminished to a soft lavender before sort of fading away altogether. Do those colors matter?”

  “To us, perhaps not. To a dime-store fortune-teller, perhaps a slight bit more, but to Eshe, the answer is unequivocally yes. We will need to determine what they mean to her. To your point, however, the initial truth that Viktor spoke was more deeply buried. If it was deeply buried because he was horrified, but he would consider it, that is concerning.”

  “Yeah, right,” I muttered. “That man hasn’t been horrified in his life. That’s not how he’s built.”

  “Every sorcerer has his breaking point,” the Magician observed mildly, a little too mildly. “But the fact remains…”

  The Devil took up the conversation. “The fact remains that we have an unparalleled opportunity here, an access point into an organization that heretofore did not exist. We can be assured that Viktor was approached by members of the Shadow Court. We can also be assured that he turned them away unsatisfied at this time. I do not believe, and he did not explicitly say, that they had given up on their request for his involvement in their affairs.”

  “So he still plans to shoot me,” Simon pressed. Again, he didn’t seem particularly upset about it, more indignant. “I’ve got people too, you know. And mad skillz. I’m not without my defenses.”

  The simple truth of that statement struck a chord in me, and I slanted a glance to Simon. The youngest of the Arcana members, in temperament if not actual length of time on the planet, he was also the Council’s tech expert, and he lived for his work, quite literally. He definitely had mad skillz.

  “You have eyes on him?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. I’ve got eyes on all you guys—just kidding.” He grinned in a way that made me think he wasn’t kidding at all. I didn’t mind so much. Simon hadn’t always had an easy go of it. He’d earned his paranoia. “But I don’t have record of Viktor meeting with these two yahoos from the Shadow Court, I can tell you that much. Which means he either got them into his little Emperor hidey hole above Paris casino or—”

  “Or they met in a dead zone, someplace where magic doesn’t work and you don’t have surveillance,” Armaeus said. I hadn’t known dead zones existed until a few weeks earlier. I wasn’t a fan.

  Simon nodded. “Or, as Kreios pointed out, someplace where they control the surveillance. The business with the ghosts was interesting. There’s got to be a way for me to unscramble the code so that we can actually see faces. If I do that…”

  His words trailed off as he started setting up the pile of laptops and devices he’d hauled in for the meeting but never used. As he busied himself with his electronics, the Devil spoke.

  “There’s also the question of the summoning fires. Detective Brody was informed of a third fire just now.”

  “Really?” I asked. No wonder Nikki had wanted to go with him. “What about Eshe?”

  “Insulated as she is by Viktor, she will li
kely not be drawn out. Lainie, on the other hand, is already at the scene.”

  “Then I should go,” I said, getting to my feet. “That girl has been through enough.”

  The Magician raised a restraining hand. “We will both go, but there is value in allowing this third discovery to proceed for a short while without our interference.”

  I sat back down. “Why? Do you want whoever is setting these fires to know that we have a posse? Non-Council members committed to the cause?”

  “It’s not an unreasonable strategy,” the Magician returned. “For a Council who has prided itself on not meddling in the affairs of humans, to our own detriment, it would now appear, putting forth the understanding that there is a very human-support component to Council activities adds a different flavor to the proceedings.”

  I considered that. “Fair enough. The Houses wouldn’t qualify because they don’t really support us. They’re technically at odds with us, or they’re supposed to be.”

  “Whereas human organizations not exclusively known as magical who assist us—or individual Connecteds not affiliated with a larger group—add a measure of credibility to our efforts. The Shadow Court has its own inroads into similar organizations, you can be sure.”

  “Those videos at Castle Odermatt.”

  “Totally tracked those down,” Simon jumped in, his fingers racing over the keyboard. “Solidarity Pharmaceuticals is freaking huge, basically a delivery system for about eight hundred pharma labs worldwide. They’re totally pushing technoceuticals along with legit drugs—and they’re underwriting that Nobel science guy’s worldwide rainbow tour, supplying him with his vaccination drugs for disaster victims. The drug they’re pushing for that is a new one to me, Novadrine, and they’ve also got a secondary additive for local drinking supplies, some kind of catchall water purifier. They’re supplying him strictly for PR reasons, I think, and believe me, the PR is good, but I’m still digging into the background there. The time-share is a nonstarter. Standard monster villa in the middle of paradise, but their terms totally suck.”

  “Bottom line, the Shadow Court could be trying to align itself with Solidarity Pharma and its philanthropic activities, in addition to hitting up the rich and Connected,” I said. “Mixing with the public, maybe trying to curry favor. So if we show up only after Brody and Nikki survey the scene, also looking like we’re mixing with the public, then whoever is watching will take note.”

  “I’ll have said scene for you in thirty seconds,” Simon said excitedly. “Whoever these firebugs are, they’ve got a sense of humor. They set the fire in the middle of the lagoon of Treasure Island. That little island thing is barely more than a stage prop. No one gets hurt that way, and there’s plenty of water to put out the flames, but still.”

  “So you saw who’s at the fire?”

  “Oh yeah. That area is definitely under ordinary surveillance, and…here we go.”

  The screens situated around the expansive teak table flickered to life, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the lagoon of Treasure Island. Given the scorching desert heat, there were not a lot of tourists out, but those who were would’ve been noticeable anywhere other than Vegas.

  I leaned forward. “Um…what are they wearing?”

  “Feathers, it would appear,” the Devil answered, and sure enough, three slender swaying individuals wandered down Las Vegas Boulevard, clad head to toe in robes stitched with brightly colored feathers. One of them carried a shallow metal salver at his side. As Simon zoomed in, it became clear that the feathers were actually made of silk and twine, but the effect remained the same. The shimmering firebirds danced their way around the lagoon of Treasure Island and out of immediate sight of the street, then jumped into the water of the shallow pool, holding their salver high. They clambered across the water in a remarkably short amount of time before pulling themselves up onto the makeshift island in the center of the pool.

  It was a testament to the security at Treasure Island that the reaction to their trespassing was immediate and loud. But the three firebirds paid no attention to the shouts coming at them from the casino security guard who immediately ran out the hotel’s front doors. If anything, they seemed to take pleasure in it, laughing delightedly as they positioned their holy bucket and threw something inside it that they pulled out of their voluminous robes. A second later, the fire went up, and the three fire sprites disappeared.

  “Hold on there, Sparky,” I said. “That’s some pretty heavy-duty transfer right there. Who are these guys?”

  Armaeus chuckled. “We are in Las Vegas, Miss Wilde. This illusion could easily be explained as any one of the many distractions up and down the Strip.”

  I looked at him sharply. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

  “I do not, but I am not the audience for this little demonstration. That said, it would seem we are dealing with Connecteds of at least some moderate skill, which we already expected given their ability to summon the High Priestess with their call. Which is fascinating.”

  “Fast-forwarding here until we get to Brody and Nikki on the scene… Boom. There’s Lainie,” Simon said.

  We watched with fascination as the woman who, for all intents and purposes, had become the High Priestess’s intern, stepped out of the crowd and surveyed the chaos. She moved confidently, slowly, and paid absolutely no attention to the first responders who were doing their level best to keep the growing crowd back. Intriguingly, though she was approached by them, they shied away as if they had no jurisdiction over her. And of course, they didn’t. This was a summons of the ancient oracle, and nobody had more right to be there than she did.

  She stopped short of the lagoon, her head tilted up, as if she could actually see the smoke billowing up into the sky, the remnants of the fiery conflagration that had already been put out by the first responders. Her lips moved, and Simon leaned forward.

  “I got it, I got it,” he murmured, his fingers darting over the keys. She’s saying… ‘Bright and burning star, we follow you. Powers of the ancients, we call you. It is time.’ Sweet.”

  I made a face. That was the second reference to a star these firestarters had rocked. “Bright and burning star?” I sighed. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Armaeus merely turned to me and held out his hand, his eyes sharp with interest.

  “Let’s find out.”

  10

  We arrived at the fireside crime scene at Treasure Island a moment later, whispering into existence with far less crackling, since Armaeus was the one doing the whisking.

  Lainie stood off to the side, but now Nikki was with her, one hand on her shoulder. Nikki turned and made eye contact with me as soon as I appeared, and I nodded. Our bombshell barrister femme fatale was far more than just a pretty face and a pair of incredible legs. A former cop, she had used her natural-born intuition to excellent effect, but her psychic skills transcended even that. With just a touch directly against their skin, she could read anyone’s memories. Not their minds, not exactly, but the way they recalled certain pivotal events in their lives, particularly events of the recent past. It had proven invaluable to her work in homicide, where witnesses were reliably unreliable. Everyone had their memories, which she could see as their own filtered view of the world. Now she’d used that same ability to see what Lainie had seen.

  I was simply glad that the young woman seemed not too terribly worse for wear. To my surprise, she turned to the Magician, and when she spoke, it was the High Priestess’s voice that emerged, not Lainie’s clear alto.

  “The ashes,” she said.

  The Magician nodded and disappeared from my side, winking back a second later. In his hands he held a gelatinous mess of soot and water in a clear bowl, which he offered to Lainie. She took it from him and dumped it out, letting the muck stream through her fingers as both Nikki and I shuddered. She didn’t seem to notice the mess she was making. Perhaps to her, it wasn’t a mess.

  This time when she spoke, it was in her own voice. �
�Purple and blue,” she murmured. “The summons comes from royalty, and to royalty it is given. Fire and truth and freedom. The call is made.”

  She fell silent again as I stared at her, but when I would’ve pushed her for more information, Armaeus touched my shoulder and drew my attention away to the far side of the lagoon. Three figures stood there, dressed in long linen shifts of pale neutral colors, cream and tan and taupe, watching the proceedings. I knew without a doubt they were the same three who had set the fire, back to see the results of their handiwork, this time sans feathers. To my surprise, they were not focused on Lainie but on Detective Brody as he argued with the first responders, about what, I didn’t know. He gestured wildly, passionately, in a distinctive Brody-like way, and the three figures radiated approval. If anything, this confused me even more.

  Brody was Connected, after a fashion, but he was probably the closest our group was ever going to get to an ordinary human. Yet he was helping us, and we were helping him. The rightness of that resonated with me…and it seemed like it resonated with our erstwhile feathered firestarters as well. Interesting.

  “Miss Wilde,” Armaeus said as the trio turned up the boulevard, away from the Strip. We followed.

  We started after them, moving slowly down the street as they strolled their way past the Wynne Casino and on toward the Sahara Casino. At the far end of the Strip, the Stratosphere loomed high, and soaring above it was the home of Nikola Tesla, the Hanged Man. He had not been considered necessary for this morning’s meeting, and I wondered at that. Given Tesla’s obvious affinity with the Emperor, it would seem like the Emperor would have wanted to have as many of his homeboys present as possible.

  “Is Viktor even aware of what he revealed today?” I asked. “If he revealed anything?”

  Armaeus didn’t respond, but gestured me across the street, glancing both ways as if expecting trouble. Nothing came, and he inclined his head. “Viktor wanted to share what he did…at least part of it. He came to me a week ago, eager to talk, and welcomed the engagement of the High Priestess to help exonerate him from what he considered to be Kreios’s unwarranted focus. Not that he had a problem with the focus itself, just the intensity of it. He wanted the chance to share his story and would not do it without the High Priestess present.”