by Jenn Stark
I passed a hand over my eyes. “You’ve been drinking tequila.”
“Not me. I haven’t had a single drop. Other than taking a pitcher of beer to the face, I’ve been as boring as I can possibly be so that we’d blend.” She winked. “I know that’s important to you. Though frankly, I think the world could use a little more Sariah.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sure you managed to blend just fine.”
“Be glad I did, because the good women of Farraday High are drinking like it’s their job. Simon contacted me about this little get-together, then let drop that something hinky might be going on with the ol’ gang, so I thought I’d pump whoever showed up for information. But that was a nonstarter. All everyone wanted to do was bitch about their jobs and their parents and when they should get pregnant. You’re lucky that half of them couldn’t even hang long enough to get to the fourth round—”
“Fourth?”
“Anyway, Mary and this other chick, Patricia—I don’t even know who she is—”
“Oh, come on.” I gestured impatiently. “Her dad ran McGee Funeral Home. Sleepover in third grade? Georgianne got trapped in the casket showroom?”
Sariah slapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes going wide. “Oh my God,” she breathed through her fingers. “You’re right.”
“Who else is in there?”
She flicked more beer froth out of her hair and shrugged. “I have no idea. There’s way too many to track. Anyway, they decided it’s Karaoke afternoon and they’ve got half the bar happy to go along for the ride. Apparently, you’re somewhat known here, so we’re getting a pass, but it’s only a matter of time before things go south. You should probably do something about that. I’ve had about all the reunioning I can stand.”
A mighty crash sounded from the bar, even louder than the music, followed by a chorus of hooting laughter. “Fantastic,” I muttered.
I turned away from Sariah, not missing the fact that she kept on going, making a beeline for the elevators. We were dressed roughly the same, more my fault than hers since I rarely deviated from some combination of tank top, hoodie, and jeans—surly attitude optional but highly encouraged. I could pass as her, no problem. I darted forward through the crowd, surprised that the music hadn’t fully stopped, and came face-to-face with a big guy dressed in a suit, all hatchet jaw and hard eyes, looking like he ran the place. Had to be the manager.
“You wanna explain what’s going on here?” he demanded, then he eyed me more closely. “Wait a minute, why is your hair dry? You took a full pitcher of beer to your face not three minutes ago.”
“Hold that thought.” I pushed by him and broke the final knot of revelers, now chanting in excited delight. And there was Mary Clemson Strand, or at least I thought it was Mary Clemson Strand, in the center of the ring of people. It was a little hard to tell since she was doing a handstand while an intrepid volunteer was about to place a full martini glass on one of her Keds-clad feet. Said feet were wobbling precariously in the air, but Mary’s arms were braced taut, her lips clamped tight with focus. I stopped short as I stared at her one-woman display. Seriously, it was kind of impressive.
Then everything shifted.
I felt more than saw the change in the atmosphere, the extra set of eyes trained on me, and not in an admiring way. I’d felt this before not all that long ago, while walking through the streets of Paris. I was being watched in this room. Worse, I was being tracked, and unless I missed my guess, I’d been lured here on purpose. Someone had their eyes on me.
“Oh my God, Sariah, you’re back! Let’s do this—Farraday Forever!”
I gaped as Tiffany Sacksteder burst out of the crowd, her bright eyes and wide smile shocking me to my toes. She looked like she hadn’t aged at all since I’d last seen her, when we’d both been seventeen and she’d been one of the most popular kids in class. She’d never been mean to me—hell, I think she’d invited me to one of her birthday parties—but it wasn’t like we were besties. What the hell had Sariah done before I’d gotten here?
The crackle of magic shot across the floor so quickly, I could do nothing but react. I knocked Tiffany to the ground and dove for Mary, cutting off the burst of magic before it reached her. Instead, it hit me square in the back.
And it hurt. A lot. I screamed, having missed the section in my Arcana Council user’s manual on how to be a tough guy, and internalized the racketing energy as best I could as another blaze of crackling energy shot across the room. I curled up in a ball as the delighted shouts around the bar turned to real concern.
After the shower of sparks petered out, I rolled to the side to see one of the most enigmatic members of the Council watching me with curiosity, his face alight in the electrical show. Nikola Tesla, the Hanged Man and arguably the planetary go-to guy for electricity. I should’ve known he would come down for all the excitement, since the Stratosphere was his domain. But who was shooting the fireballs?
Another burst of electricity skidded across the floor, but this time, Nikola stepped forward, gesturing with one elegant hand. I realized he had a wand of some sort in that hand, a wand that seemed to suck up all the exploding energy and redirect it upward, turning the ceiling into a constellation of stars. One of those stars literally burst in a shower of multicolor lights, but now everyone believed this was part of the show. They erupted into spontaneous applause as I scrambled over to Mary, who now huddled on the ground, her curly hair decidedly singed.
“Sariah?” she squeaked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, reaching toward her, then realized my fingers were still spitting sparks. I focused a little harder and willed my hands to return to normal. Around us, the crowd had swung back into full-tilt party time, but I recognized the fastidious pants legs of Nikola Tesla sharply creased above his polished wingtip shoes as they strolled up to us. The guy made absolutely no attempt to hide his identity, and unlike many of the members of the Arcana Council, he had a quite well-known face. This being Vegas, of course, everyone just assumed he was an impersonator, but he didn’t seem to mind that either. Nikola Tesla was happiest when he was pulling something over on a gullible crowd. Some things never changed.
Now he helped me up, extending an aristocratic hand to Mary as well, and she rolled to her feet, her eyes going wide.
“Wow, you look amazing,” she gasped. I didn’t know if Mary had any idea who Nikola Tesla had been, but her enthusiasm was as warm and infectious as it had been when we were fifteen. Even the Hanged Man was not immune to her charms.
“You’re unharmed?” he asked. She nodded enthusiastically, giving him a broad smile.
“Nothing hurt but my ego. It’s been a few years since I’ve tried a handstand.”
“Mary,” cried Tiffany, bursting back on the scene with two full glasses of a vaguely tropical-smelling concoction. “You’ve got to try this.”
“Ha! Farraday forever!” Mary laughed delightedly, the two of them turning from me and tipping their heads together in a gesture that reminded me so forcibly of high school that I blinked. I suspected these two women had gone on to different lives, certainly different colleges and cities after they graduated, and yet they’d come together again as if no time at all had passed. Once more it was as if I was standing on the outside looking in. Not excluded intentionally, but excluded nevertheless.
I’d forgotten I had an audience of my own.
“Surely, you’ve gotten used to it by now,” Nikola observed beside me, the comment oddly human from a guy who’d been little more than ether when I’d met him, hiding in electrical fields to avoid his work on the Council. “Though I suppose you are still quite young.”
“Nice wand,” I countered. “Something else you put a patent on?”
He spread his hands, and the wand reappeared in his palm for just a moment before vanishing again. “A Tesla grounding rod, actually. The latest technology. I’m honored you’ve been keeping up with my research.”
Nikola Tesla had not been idle these past severa
l months since he’d returned to the Arcana Council. Though he took some pains to keep his work under the radar, his patent processes had caught the attention of Simon, particularly since Tesla insisted on submitting them under his own name. To a one, they’d been rejected with strongly worded reprimands about identity appropriation.
“You’re going to have to come up with a pseudonym,” I informed him.
He waved me off with an imperious gesture. “There is no patent on an individual’s name. If a Mary Smith from 1932 submitted a patent, and a Mary Smith from 2019 submitted a patent, is the latter Mary Smith to be denied simply because she had the audacity to be named the same as a previous patent owner? Surely not. I will persevere.”
“Was that what all this was here, then? Some kind of magic show? I felt someone watching me right before the energy jolt. Did you do all that?”
“I did not,” Tesla informed me, his own excitement sharpening. “I recognized the gathering of extreme electricity in my domain, of course, and checked the video monitors. I saw that abomination of your alter ego carrying on with the tourists as if she had no sense of pride, but that in and of itself was not alarming. She is an effusive volcano of chaos.”
I grinned, but didn’t disagree with him.
“Importantly, my security cameras also picked up on three individuals in the crowd I could not identify. A man and two women. While their bodies were in relative view, their faces were blurred, almost masked, which, of course, should not be possible. Not with the Arcana Council’s technology. At that point, I came down to investigate in person, and by then you’d arrived.”
Instantly, I thought of Simon’s admission from earlier today. “So you mean the Shadow Court has upgraded, somehow? There’s now someone out there with masking tech that’s defeating even our best surveillance?”
Nikola lifted one elegant shoulder. “So it would seem.”
“Well, great. Now that they’re aware we’re trying to find them, it appears they’re taking particular interest in reminding us of our failings. Were you able to figure out who they were even without facial recognition?”
He hesitated. “The man left with the arrival of Sariah, the women only departed after I redirected their electrical display. Those two were young, perhaps in their mid-twenties, dressed casually. They kept to the back, deliberately avoiding the fracas at the bar.”
“As if they thought they might be recognized.” Was one of these women the person who sent me the antagonizing note? Did I have more than one enemy at Farraday High? And who could have possibly held a grudge that long, anyway? I’d been a virtual nobody in high school, even after I’d started working with Brody. Whoever had penned that note had said I wasn’t worthy, and back then—she’d been right. I definitely hadn’t thought of myself as worthy. So how had I pissed someone off all those years ago?
“It seems likely that they wanted to avoid detection, yes,” Nikola said, refocusing me.
“But why attack their own classmates in public?” I argued. “If they wanted to keep a low profile, that wasn’t the way to do it.”
Nikola arched a brow. “They weren’t targeting their own classmates—well, I suppose they were, after a fashion. You were the target. They wanted to know what you’d do, how fast you’d do it, and whether they could hurt you. I think it’s safe to say they gathered all the relevant data they needed.”
I opened my mouth to retort, then shut it. “Oh. Well that…sort of sucks,” I muttered. “And we have no idea who they were? Or who the guy was?”
Nikola pursed his lips together, studying me for a long moment. And then he waited yet longer, until his eyes finally narrowed and an expression of annoyance flit across his elegant face.
“What?” I prompted. “You do know him?”
The inventor appeared to make up his mind. “I share this only because I take exception to my goodwill being abused,” he said tersely. “There was no reason for him to choose my domain for his meeting, not when he has his own. And if there was a reason, he could simply have asked.”
I frowned. “He, who?”
Nikola waved his hand with a curt, dismissive gesture. “There was a time, many years ago, when I espoused the view of many scientists of my time, a view that argued for the improvement of society through the selective removal of undesirable elements in the population.”
I blinked at him, taken aback. I’d known, vaguely, that Nikola had been an early proponent of eugenics, but this hardly seemed the time to discuss his failings. “And that matters, how, exactly?”
Nikola pushed on. “I have since amended my thoughts on the subject, but as a younger man, I shared my views to willing ears. Secrets were shared. I learned hidden truths as well, valuable truths. Times change, minds change, but not every mind, in the end. And some minds are further crowded by hubris and entitlement, such that foolish mistakes are made.”
By this point, my own mind was swimming. “Cut to the chase, Nikola,” I implored. “Who was the guy?”
“He’s not a guy,” Nikola snapped. “He’s a powerful mage whose secrets run very deep, and whose prejudices should not be discounted. The face of the man speaking with the young women presumably from your high school graduating class was completely obscured to my cameras, but his clothes were not. And his signet ring bears the number eighty-eight. He’s worn it so long, I’m sure he doesn’t notice it, but I am a man of science. I notice things.”
“I’m sorry, but—” Finally, understanding dawned. My eyes widened. “You are kidding me,” I gasped.
“I have told you only what I saw, nothing else,” Nikola said crisply. “What you do with it is your concern. You understand this? I have no desire for conflict when I have my own studies to pursue.”
“I…Sure. Of course.” I cleared my throat, then nodded, my thoughts galloping forward. The number eighty-eight was a Nazi symbol, and the first and only Nazi-sympathizer who was also a high level mage that sprang to mind was…good ol’ Viktor Dal.
Apparently, the Emperor had taken it upon himself to meet in the Stratosphere bar with two people who were probably my old classmates, not ten minutes before they lit me up like a Roman candle. What had they talked about? What had he shared? If I confronted him, would he spin this as some sort of weird double-agent crap? Had he thought he’d not be noticed?
He and Nikola were friends and colleagues, but he’d apparently not told Nikola of his little meetup on his turf. And if there was one thing I knew about Nikola Tesla…the man craved respect. Viktor, of all people, should have understood that.
“Right,” I finally managed, giving Nikola a shaky smile as I cast around for a new topic. I stared at the crowd of people around us, drinking and talking. “All that, ah, aside, you’re lucky that someone didn’t notice this wasn’t your average light show.”
Nikola inclined his head, acknowledging the subject change. “Luck has very little to do with it. People see what they want to see and only what they want to see. It has ever been that way, from those who choose to believe to those who do not. I must say I wasn’t surprised to be attracting attention this evening, though it was not the attention I expected.”
“What do you mean?” I vaguely had a sense of Mary and Tiffany singing again near the bar, as music from a decade ago played over the speakers. They’d been joined by Amy too. The three women seemed to be content, though, and as long as Sariah didn’t return, I suspected the afternoon’s disruption was over.
“Surely you’ve been paying attention to the electrical storms over São Paulo?” Tesla continued.
I stared at him blankly. “Ahh…no?”
Tesla rolled his eyes. “A major series of squalls have hit the area, the last one producing an extreme amount of lightning. Rainfall caused torrential flooding, which was bad enough. But the unusual amount of electrical disturbance has complicated rescue measures on the ground exponentially. I have been awaiting a request to assist from my colleagues who are responding, but one has not been forthcoming yet.”
He sounded outright miffed. I squinted at him. “You can’t have any living colleagues outside the Council. You died in 1943.”
He flapped a hand. “Only my most tedious of incarnations. My presence on the arcane web as an electromagnetic scientist continues apace. I have offered up my opinions for stabilizing the area with electrical grounding techniques, but the head of the rescue operation, Dr. Rindon, has not deigned to reply. Since he received the Nobel Prize, he hasn’t generally taken suggestions well, but he would be foolish not to take this one.
“Dr. Rindon?” I frowned. “That guy is everywhere these days. Simon doesn’t like him, you should know.”
He tilted his head, considering that. “Simon is an astute judge of character, but there is no denying Rindon’s genius. And he is doing good work—work I could easily do in his place, were it not for my exalted duties as Hanged Man.”
I glanced around the beer-soaked bar, but wisely kept quiet as Tesla continued.
“São Paulo is Rindon’s home, so of course he’s most concerned about the storm and flood damage there. The electrical danger is far greater at this juncture than the threat of toxic runoff, however. He would do well to use my Tesla grounding rods.”
“Why do I think you’ve sent him footage of what just happened here?” I asked drily.
“He deserves to know what he should be using. Alas, he has been far more concerned about waterborne pathogens of late, as opposed to our shared interest in the efficacy of simply electrifying water to purify it.”
I looked at Tesla in horror. “Ahh… If you electrify the water, everything dies.”
He flapped his hand again. “For now, yes. There is no experimentation without some loss of life. Rindon understands that, as well do I.”
I grimaced. Nikola Tesla may have amended his most obnoxious beliefs on eugenics, but he still wasn’t quite right in the head. “What is wrong with you?” I muttered, but Tesla was already turning away, done with our conversation.
I made my way through the crowd, keeping a sharp eye out for anyone I recognized from Farraday High. Fortunately, the party had moved on without me. I wasn’t surprised to see Brody loitering near the front of the bar, however, swilling his own drink and clearly waiting for me.