The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  Nikki turned and squinted at me. “Got a sec, dollface?”

  * * *

  “I—sure,” I said, frowning. “Carole, if you’ll hang on—”

  “Wait a minute, I know you,” Brody interrupted, coming up on our other side. “I’ve met you before, for sure, back in Memphis. You were poking around the burn site about, what, three weeks after the fire? If I recall correctly, you were supposed to come in to answer some questions. You never did.”

  Carole turned to him, her grin never wavering, though Brody’s words stopped me in my tracks, even as Nikki tugged at my arm. Carole had gone back to Memphis? When? So much of that first month had been a blur for me. But…she’d gone back to Memphis at one point? And I hadn’t realized it?

  “You’re right, Officer Rooks, though that was a long time ago. It seems like everything turned out the way it should have, though, wouldn’t you say?”

  “No,” Brody returned, scowling. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, that’s a conversation for another day. Right now, I think it would be a better use of our time to go see those RVs you were talking about,” Nikki said a little too brightly, her hand still firmly on my bicep. “Rhonda’s not here anyway, so we should keep moving. Agreed, everyone? Agreed. Let’s go.”

  She wheeled me around, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath as two unassailable facts converged together in my mind. One, Carole Reavers, the RV driver and head of sorts of the Rambling Rovers, the RV club that had scooped me up as a seventeen-year-old runaway outside Memphis, Tennessee all those years ago, had returned to the scene of my crime not three weeks after whisking me away from it. The other thing that I realized, which I never had before, not as a freaked-out kid whose world had been turned upside down, not even as a twenty-two-year-old woman ready to strike out on my own as a freelance psychic artifact finder…Carole Reavers was Connected. Powerfully so. I couldn’t take the time to understand specifically what that meant as Nikki hustled us deeper into the crowd, however, the four of us melting into the crowd of Simon’s admirers as he continued passing out his magic bands.

  “She’s the one who sent the tickets,” Nikki hissed at me as we ducked past a large group of beer-guzzling thirtysomethings dressed for the beach. There was a new tone to her voice, this one decidedly harsh. “The parking tickets.”

  “What? Oh,” I said, my brows going up. “That makes sense.”

  “It would, ordinarily, except just as soon as she touched on that memory, she killed it. Like—it was gone. And the rest of her mind was a blank, too, other than the memories of you and she playing kumbaya in the RV gang. There’s other stuff I almost saw—and then boom, it was gone. That’s some serious Connected ability, to hide your memories like that. Why’d she do it? How’d she do it? I didn’t get the immediate sense she was psychic, but we’re talking major mojo here, dollface. I wanted you to know. Something’s not right.”

  “Hmmm…” I glanced over to Carole and frowned. I’d never once picked up on any psychic ability in her when we’d ridden together in her big RV, but I’d been kind of a mess at the time. I easily could have missed it. Or maybe…

  “Maybe she’s just an old lady losing her memory?” I asked the question aloud, but quietly, and Nikki huffed a startled cough.

  “Sweet Christmas, you think?” she muttered. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  At that moment the crowd cleared, and Brody and Carole drew even with us. “It’s a long way from Memphis, all the way out here,” Brody was saying. “I assume RV life still suits you?”

  “It surely does.” Carole practically guffawed. “It’s the only life for me.”

  The sound of her laughter was unexpectedly jarring to me. She’d laughed like that all the time. It was one of my favorite memories of my five-year stint with Rambling Rovers. I didn’t recognize the other white-haired people who walked along with us, laughing and joking but not paying particular attention to us. That made sense, I supposed. Carole had been relatively young when she’d picked me up eleven years ago, maybe somewhere in her sixties? Seventies? I never really knew. Some of the other drivers had been far older. There would’ve been attrition, people eventually losing their ability to drive the giant vehicles, or getting someplace like Phoenix and finding a retirement community that suited them better than the open road. Even I had eventually stopped wanting the constant view of the highway, eager to strike out on my own. Carole had understood, had let me go, but now… Here she was. It was almost surreal.

  “Some of the drivers are still with us. You remember Betty and Joe—they’re still going strong, raising hell,” she said now, drawing my attention back to her. “Jerry the barber, of course, still manages to keep us in pin money everywhere we go. We lost Nancy last year to the cancer, that wasn’t so good.”

  She rattled on, and I noticed vaguely when our path diverged from Simon’s trail, felt the attention of the Fool as he turned toward us, then started following us at a distance. That in and of itself shouldn’t have surprised me as he was here in part to shadow me and his attention was welcome, but some corner of my mind picked up the shift in his energy. He was excited, getting jacked.

  In all the Arcana Council, Simon was arguably one of the smartest members when it came to technology, but he never really seemed to have his own special superpower. Instead, his particular skills seemed more focused on connecting and augmenting the powers of those around him. He was a natural Pied Piper, imbuing others with a sense of cheerful optimism that I suspected could one day lead us all off a cliff much like his titular card. And, much like that card, I somehow knew it would all work out in the end, that there would be a ledge right beneath the cliff or, more likely, a giant bouncy house. Appearing just in time to keep the party going. That was the sense I got from him now, excitement and even fun. I’d been on more than a few adventures with the Fool, however: his idea of fun was not always good for my short-term health.

  “Our camp is right up there. We try to get to Burning Man every year, have for the last couple. It’s just a crazy time, such great energy,” Carole said.

  I considered that. “You’ve been out to Vegas as well, I assume? Seems like a good place to go for an RV club.” We’d never visited when I’d been with them, but there had been those in the group who’d pushed for it year after year. I’d never wanted to come anywhere near the Southwest, though. The very idea had given me nightmares. Once I realized the Arcana Council was based in Vegas, I at least understood why I’d been afraid, but I hadn’t known anything about the Council back then. There was a lot I hadn’t known back then.

  Carole waved off the idea with a generous hand. “There’s a group that goes up every year when we’re in town or nearby,” she admitted. “I’m a Reno girl myself, much less flash and sizzle, same games, same opportunity to lose all your money to the house.”

  I nodded once again, struggling with the surreal recognition of her Connectedness. Granted, I’d only been a kid, but how had I not picked up on that? I’d been freaked out about anything to do with psychics and magic and things that went bump in the night. I hadn’t even read cards for a full year after I’d run away, convinced that I’d somehow brought that tragedy on myself. But I hadn’t stayed curled up in a ball forever.

  It was Carole herself who had encouraged me to break out the cards again, at first just for myself and then to do readings for other people in the club. Eventually I had become a mild camp attraction when we pulled into one of the larger RV festivals, and I’d make a little money on the side. It all had gone to groceries, wine, and gas, but I hadn’t minded. I felt safe and certain again, and that had meant more than anything to me. I’d sworn I’d do anything to keep Carole and her people safe, had promised her that even when I’d left when I could no longer hide behind the windshield of her RV. But she’d always assured me that they’d be fine with or without me—that I needed to follow my dreams.

  It suddenly occurred to me what all this could mean. I practically stopped in my tracks as we cros
sed an open space heading toward an encampment that evoked a collection of Old West Conestoga wagons circled against the Indians, only this camp had streamers stretching from Airstream to monster RV, and clotheslines with thirty years of rock concert T-shirts flapping in the breeze.

  “Are you the one who summoned me to come out to Burning Man, asking for help? Talking about…”

  I meant to say more, I truly did, but some delayed sixth sense held me back as Carole turned to me, her eyes bright and panicked even as she pressed forward eagerly. It was as if there were two emotions battling to take the fore—and I didn’t understand the conflict beneath either of them. What was going on? Had she sent messages telling me she was sorry, and then forgotten them? Or been forced to forget them? Was she hiding something from me deliberately?

  “Well, that sounds exciting, but it wasn’t the Ramblers,” she said, her grin a little too forced. “How’d you get the message? And how did someone want you to help? You still reading cards?”

  I felt it then, the tug to share, the same tug I felt all those years riding late into the night next to Carole, the woman who had miraculously appeared out of nowhere to rescue me that day outside of Memphis, to give me a safe place to lay my head. The one who protected me as I healed from the trauma of my entire world going up in flames. I wanted to tell her, I needed to tell her, like I’d wanted and needed to tell her all my stories, all my history, since almost the first moment I met her. She’d known everything there was to know about me…and she wasn’t the only one anymore.

  Because she’d told her tales, or sold her tales, to Jarvis Fuggeren and the Shadow Court.

  An icy, snaking dread slithered through me.

  Oh…no.

  It was only because my third eye was open and my unexpected outrage so sharp that I even saw it, the faintest whisper of white in her eyes, the scrambling of her features so quick, so indistinct, that I wouldn’t necessarily have recognized it, if it hadn’t been happening with alarming regularity around me of late.

  “Sara.” I heard Simon’s voice from a far distance, knowing he saw what I saw and he understood it for what it was.

  “Holy crap,” I managed, horror and surprise and bone-chilling fear crashing over me, wave upon wave. “You work for the Shadow Court, don’t you? You’ve always worked for the Shadow Court.”

  For a long, fraught moment, all the frantic enthusiasm slipped from Carole’s face. She looked at me with the haggard eyes of a woman condemned. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she whispered, echoing easily a dozen of the messages scrawled on traffic tickets throughout the South. “I had to.”

  Then her body seized and her face cleared of any emotion except hard focus. “Time to go, Sara,” she snapped.

  The entire RV encampment burst into action.

  “Back off!” Nikki bellowed as she whirled, the fur-and-hide strips of her bikini flying as a quartet of octogenarians barreled toward her with the strength and speed of someone easily thirty years their junior—hell, fifty years their junior.

  Carole, for her part, turned toward me and made a cutting motion with her hands that had fireball written all over it. I’d never seen the woman use magic once in all the years we’d ridden together, but now I barely got my hands up in time to ward off a credible surge of power that nearly singed my eyebrows off.

  Beside me, Brody barked, “Stand down! Stand down!” But he didn’t pull his gun and was taken down by three women in kitten-patterned nursing scrubs, their sensible shoes kicking and flailing, his muffled shout of surprise confirming that here again, these old people were not at all what they seemed.

  Then Simon was beside me. “Sara,” he shouted, and I saw him fling his hands at me, the gesture so inviting, so welcoming almost, that I could do nothing else but stretch my hands wide as well, conflicting with my natural desire to shove a bolt of fire at Carole and burn her to a crisp.

  Instead, the energy from my fingertips arced wide, soaring over the top of the RV encampment, racing along the clotheslines and setting the Grateful Dead, Limp Bizkit, Green Day, and Volbeat shirts alight. A sudden roar rose up all around us, and in my peripheral vision, I realized that we had, of course, drawn a crowd, the four of us in the center of a white-haired coalition of crazies, but the fight was no longer restricted to only us. Easily a hundred bracelet-wearing festival goers, all of them with perfectly regulated body temperatures, raced forward and threw themselves into the RV encampment mosh pit, fists flailing, legs striking out, bare feet stomping, furry slippers flying, capes twirling, and bikinis suddenly liberated and soaring through the air. The arc of magic that Simon and I had thrown up over the group kept the magic powers to a minimum inside, instantly warding the attackers but not completely knocking them out. Just evening the score a little bit, since erupting fireball magic was probably not on the schedule for Burning Man until at least nine o’clock at night.

  I rushed forward, wrapping my arms around Carole, but she slipped away almost wraithlike, part of her body seeming to dissolve in my grasp only to slither out and reform a foot apart from me. She wasn’t disappearing and reanimating, but her speed was unlike anything I’d seen—except for a group of phantom-like attackers that’d targeted us in a hotel in London. Those asshats had also been minions of the Shadow Court, and had possessed similar speed. What were these people eating?

  Carole stood tall, raking her gaze around the area, then turned and abruptly fled. I surged after her, but another figure tackled me from the side, and once again I went down in a flurry of fists and kicking, only this time, there was laughter as well, the full-throated, drug-addled laughter of partiers with too much energy to burn in the middle of the desert. By the time I broke free of the mob, Carole was gone.

  It took another twenty minutes for the spill-off “fighting” to end, though. Security had arrived in due course, and most of the flailing had turned into people throwing their arms around each other and declaring ultimate solidarity, as Brody, Nikki, and I dragged ourselves off to the side and Simon found his way toward us through his ever-expanding crowd of admirers.

  “You okay?” Nikki asked me, and I shook my head.

  “No, I’m not okay. Not at all.” I crossed my arms. “I was with that woman for five years. Five years! I ate with her, I trusted her, and she legitimately cared for me. I had nightmares, so many nightmares, and I would wake up and she’d be right there, talking to me, singing to me. Clearly, we’d been having a conversation, but I no longer remembered what it was, but that was okay, right? It was okay because she was my friend. She was there to take care of me. She was there to help me get better. And all the while, all the while, she was working for the Shadow Court?”

  I sucked in a deep breath, trying to process it all. “That’s how that fucking bastard knew so much about me. That’s how I got on his radar screen. Hell, I could’ve somehow gotten on his radar screen long before then, because there she was, ready to scoop me up the moment I ran out of Memphis with my throat filled with smoke and my eyes streaming with tears. Stupid!”

  I turned to Brody. “You said you saw her? You knew her?”

  He grimaced. “I met her once, yes. She came to Memphis and visited the burn site, talked to one of our teams. Said she’d seen your picture on the news. Back then, we were still searching for you using conventional means, and she came in saying she wanted to help, but it was all bullshit. She didn’t know anything. She was just somebody trying to scrounge information. Information she didn’t need, since she already had you.” He shook his head angrily. “Now I suspect she simply wanted to see how much we knew about you. If we had any idea of how powerful you really were, or how powerful you could become.”

  “It explains why the Arcana Council didn’t know about you either,” Simon said thoughtfully. “Armaeus always said he should’ve known you were out there earlier. I mean, holy crow, you were the offspring of an Arcana Council member and a goddess. You should’ve shown up on his radar well before you did. He stumbled on you because of your art
ifact hunting, but there should’ve been signs before.”

  “Not if somebody was trying to keep those signs from popping up,” Nikki put in. “But then why let you leave at all? Why not keep you in the fold?”

  I thought about that, my stomach tightening with a sick feeling. “I can think of one good reason,” I muttered. “The Shadow Court wasn’t ready yet. They still had more work to do. Now they must think they’ve got all their ducks in a row—and they’ve got no problem letting me know how far ahead of me they are and always have been, every step of the way.”

  “And they sent her back, why? To taunt you?” Brody asked.

  “‘I’m sorry…’” I muttered, grimacing. Maybe Carole Reavers regretted what she’d done to me back when I was seventeen, what she’d been set up to do here. She’d certainly looked genuinely horror-struck, but that didn’t change the truth. I’d been her assignment then, and she was still on the job now—even though she was once more in the wind. Gone, but definitely not forgotten this time. How many other chance encounters in my life had been orchestrated by the Shadow Court—and why?

  “They sent her back to me because they’ve stopped playing games,” I said. “They want me to know exactly how many cards they have. They’re ready to make their move.”

  “That works out,” Nikki drawled. “Because we’re ready to take them down.”

  15

  By the time we’d gotten back across a quarter mile of Black Rock City to our own private tent encampment, I felt like I had been in the desert for well over half my life. Despite the fact that evening was falling fast, it was hot, dirty, dusty, windy, and did I mention, hot? Nikki, striding beside me in her Raquel Welch prehistoric costume, seemed to be completely unaffected by the heat .

  “How are you not melting?” I demanded, and she winked at me.