The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  “They’re pretty,” I acknowledged, and she beamed.

  “They’re pretty, they’re small, and we are all in. Farraday forever,” Patty said, laughing as she and Amy held up their hands as well. Amy’s tattoo of stars, oddly enough, seemed to gleam a bit stronger, but Patty’s face caught my attention. It changed expression as she focused on the front door of the bar.

  “Oh, of course,” Patty groaned, as the others looked over. “I totally knew she would come.”

  “She’s not getting any stars,” decided Mary. She tucked her hand around the sheaf protectively. “My tattoos, my rules.”

  I swiveled and saw who’d caught her eye, my stomach immediately cramping. I might not be great with names, but there wasn’t much likelihood that I would forget Melanie Lester.

  “Wow,” I offered. “She looks…good.” Melanie swept in with the same full-on entourage of besties I remembered from high school, as if it’d all been yesterday. She did look good, though her proportions were not exactly the way I remembered them.

  Amy immediately leaned forward to confirm, “So she totally married right out of college and got the entire workup done as a twenty-two-year-old! New boobs, new nose, and a preemptive face lift. The work was well done, I mean you would still recognize her, obviously, but it had to have cost like $30,000 all in, and her husband was just all, no problem, babe. I couldn’t believe it.”

  I steeled myself as Melanie surveyed the scene, knowing she would find me almost immediately. I’d never really attracted the attention of my fellow students, but there was something about Melanie that had always rubbed me the wrong way. She’d also come from a family that was loaded, and I suspected she hadn’t needed her new husband’s money to get the cosmetic surgery done. If she wanted it done, it would’ve happened. That was true ten years ago, and it seemed doubly true now. As soon as her gaze settled on me, though, she started forward.

  Mary visibly recoiled. “You have got to be kidding me. She is totally not coming over here right now—oh my God, she is. I’m not giving her stars.” As if to emphasize the point, she slipped the temporary tattoos back into her bag.

  “Geez, she’s even doing that same thing with her hair. Do you remember that?” Patty asked. I nearly spit out my drink as, right on cue, Melanie handed her phone to one of her girls, then twirled one of her big, fulsome tawny-blonde curls. It was such a trademark Melanie Lester move that I felt a pang of nostalgia mixed in with the visceral need to flee.

  “Maybe I should find the ladies’ room or something—”

  But it was too late. Melanie sailed up to me with a brittle smile, her elegant pale-cream shift moving in a swirl of expensive silk around her. “Sariah Pelter—or I guess you’re calling yourself Sara Wilde now. Is that your stage name?”

  “Melanie,” I acknowledged. I scanned my emotions for a reaction, but I mostly felt curious. Really and truly, Melanie had been a bit of a mean girl, but she hadn’t been mean to me, exactly. She hadn’t bothered me, and I’d known enough to stay away from her, evoking the sixth sense of self-preservation most loner kids had. Now I studied her more curiously, and my third eye winked open.

  Hello. “What are you doing these days?” I asked a little abruptly, trying to mask my shock at the geyser of energy that seemed barely repressed beneath Melanie’s frosty hauteur. A moment later, though, the power winked out. Had I imagined it? Or had Melanie merely managed to weaponize her disdain for everything around her into a superpower?

  Either way, my question seemed to please her. “Exactly what I should be,” she informed me coolly, as her besties tittered around her, Chanel-scented pigeons at the fountain. She waved her hand, and the rock on her finger caught my eye. It had to be at least three carats. “I can’t believe this is where they chose for us to have our party. Was it your idea, as a local?”

  I gaped at her, hearing the insult but not understanding it, while Mary broke in, her voice overly cheerful. “Wow, Melanie, you look fabulous! How are you—”

  “Dollface.”

  The familiar call of Nikki Dawes broke out across the room, carrying over the music and gaming noises and causing everyone to turn, even—especially—Melanie Lester and her crowd of frenemies.

  “Who is that?” Amy asked, her voice a little awed, while Melanie visibly recoiled.

  “What is that, you mean,” she groused.

  I couldn’t fault Amy her reaction, whereas Melanie’s didn’t surprise me at all. Some people had never stood that close to the sun.

  Nikki Dawes always knew how to make an entrance, and this time she’d done so with the two most powerful magicians in the world on her arms. She’d dressed to slay in a head-to-toe green sequined dress with a slit all the way up to her hip bone, bright red thigh-high boots, and matching long red gloves. Her hair was a luxurious fall of sleek black waves, and her bright green eyes were lined with kohl and thickly lashed, her lips painted the exact shade of her gloves and boots. Armaeus stood to her left and the Devil to her right, both men in expensive, bespoke suits with jewel-toned shirts open at the neck. They could’ve been Hollywood moguls or Wall Street sharks or Nikki’s highly paid gigolos, but she completely ignored their masculine splendor. Instead, she threw her arms out and squealed, rushing toward me with a confident grace that belied any pain she was feeling from her towering heels.

  “Darling, you are gorgeous,” she gushed—right before she yanked me away, hard.

  I barely got some clearance between myself and my classmates before Nikki wrapped me up in her arms and held me close. Her voice, when it came, was sharp and cutting.

  “According to Simon’s sensors, this place is crawling with bad mojo, dollface. Ghosts everywhere, Shadow Court minions. You haven’t been approached?”

  She asked this question even though she knew the answer, being able to read my memories without even needing to touch me since we knew each other so well, but there was no question she was keyed up, on edge. She pulled back from me, smiling wide, and I shook my head the barest fraction. Then she turned and handed me off to the Magician, who gazed down at me with his gold-and-black eyes and smiled as if he planned to eat me for dinner. I heard Mary gasp as he drew me close.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him, startled.

  “Exactly what it seems like I’m doing,” he assured me. And then he kissed me.

  A kiss from the Magician was never something to be taken lightly, but in this case, the magic that poured through me electrified me enough to fry my very last nerve ending. He pulled back as smoothly, and I was surprised I didn’t glow in the dark.

  “You need to be careful,” he murmured. “There’s a hunter here. We’ve got a half dozen operatives with faces that don’t register on our surveillance equipment.”

  “Nikki told me already. How is you kissing me going to help protect me more?”

  “It’s not.” His eyes glittered. “I just wanted to kiss you.”

  I blinked at him. “Ahhh…what exactly happened to you when you got back your memories? You’re kind of starting to scare me.”

  His gaze, if anything, grew more intense, pinning me in place. “Truly?”

  For the barest moment, my heart fluttered like a bird trapped inside a too-small cage, then I wrenched my gaze away, my cheeks blazing with warmth.

  “Where are Simon and Eshe? And is Lainie here?”

  Nikki chose that moment to link arms with me again, drawing me away from Armaeus. “Oh, you’ll see Eshe and Viktor here for sure. They wanted to play it a little cooler. Lainie is wherever it’s darkest in the room, gives her a break on her eyes. Simon, of course, is over at the video arcade. Armaeus, go terrorize the Muggles with him. Give Sara her space.”

  Armaeus obligingly moved off as Nikki took me more deeply into the room, pulling me into the crowd. It wasn’t only Farraday High students filling the space—this wasn’t a private party—but the students I met stood out easily to me. I saw Melanie talking it up with a dark-haired man in an expensive suit, someone who seemed
vaguely familiar but only insofar as any twenty-something person seemed vaguely familiar tonight. Melanie appeared to be very pleased with the attention she was getting, but my glance went beyond her as I saw a woman step into the light, her features timeless and serene, energy fairly crackling around her as she surveyed the room. Her eyes lit on Melanie with an almost feral interest.

  “Hmmm…” I murmured, and Nikki glanced over as well.

  “Apparently, Eshe has been doing her homework,” Nikki confided. “It looks like your old friend Melanie Lester has been talking some smack about you online.”

  “She has?” I eyed Nikki with surprise. “We’ve never had a single conversation since I left Farraday High.”

  “Yeah well, you could say that she heard about you, and she took some pains to remind everyone how weird you were in high school. Eshe took offense.”

  I watched the High Priestess move across the floor, not so much walking as slinking, but it wasn’t Eshe who held Melanie’s attention—at least not for long. Instead Melanie looked past the High Priestess, focusing on the entry to the bar.

  “Mr. Dal?” she squeaked, and her hands clapped to her face, her arched brows lifting high. “Oh my god!”

  Nikki and I stared, dumbfounded, as Melanie practically skipped forward past Eshe to throw her arms around the Emperor. Viktor accepted her hug in the way professionals do, holding her slightly away, the soul of discretion. Then he turned to Eshe. “My beautiful Eshe,” he declared, his face rapt with adoration. “Allow me to introduce you to a student I knew when I worked in Memphis. Melanie, this is exactly the kind of woman you might one day become.”

  I nearly choked on my tongue, and Nikki hissed. “Burnnnnnn,” she muttered, as we watched Melanie’s face mottle with conflicting emotions. Suffice to say, that particular ex-mean girl would be busy for awhile, and Nikki tugged me deeper into the room just as Simon came bouncing out of the crowd, channeling a hipster Where’s Waldo—his various T-shirts, jeans, Chucks, and skullcap all in shades of gray, his grin a mile wide.

  “Sara,” he practically shouted. “Reunions are the best, aren’t they?”

  “Um, not really—”

  “I’ve got one of the ghosts.”

  I snapped my mouth shut, opened it again. “Are you serious? Who?”

  “Sandra Lawson, according to her name tag, but—”

  “Stop right there, amigo,” I said, lifting a hand. “That’s a nonstarter. Sandy’s been Melanie’s bestie since God was a child. Your psychic surveillance may be picking up on her face being blurred in the face of Melanie’s reflected glory, but she’s no ghost. She’s a lackey, desperate for validation from the one girl who’s destined never to give it to her. And Melanie’s got some Connected ability, so that likely exacerbates the problem.”

  “Oh, geez.” Simon frowned. “I didn’t calibrate for teenage neuroses.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “Well, now you know. Maybe we don’t have the Shadow Court here so much as millennials with identity issues. Go back to Virtual Reality land and kill some people, okay? Bond with the boys.”

  He didn’t have to be asked twice, and Nikki immediately pulled me into the crowd again. “So introduce me to your friends already! I can ditch the gloves whenever you need me to do a deep psychic memory dive, you savvy?”

  We spent the next forty-five minutes moving in and around the room, reconnecting with people I barely remembered, introducing myself to people who stared at me like I was an idiot, and then explained that we had spent four classes together in high school and of course, they remembered me. Even once the gloves came off, Nikki didn’t pick up on any issues of merit, other than a few high school crushes I quickly discounted. Their stories began to blend together, and none of them stood out to me as needing any particular help. Even Rhonda showed up about twenty minutes into the party, her eyes wide with excitement, looking like a million bucks. I saw Nikki watching her approvingly, and I raised a brow at her.

  “What are you now, the go-to stylist for high school reunions?”

  She laid a hand on her tastefully exposed cleavage. “I have a gift, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

  Rhonda saw me and hurried up, opening her arms as if to give me a hug, then stopping awkwardly. When she hesitated, I made up the distance between her, grasping her close for a quick moment. Just as with Bill, I could feel the spark of Connectedness buried deep within her, and it made me smile as I stepped back.

  “Did you see my newest decoration?” Rhonda asked, wagging her hand at me. I caught sight of the temporary tattoos as Nikki whistled.

  “Way cooler than henna art. I approve,” she said, and I laughed as Rhonda explained how she’d gotten the tattoo strip from Mary. With Nikki by my side, I finally began to unwind. The ghosts that Simon warned us about seemed to be keeping to themselves, and until they moved, I couldn’t do anything but wait. At the far end of the room, I saw Bill Compton again, chatting with the woman at the front desk, whose name I’d already forgotten. He peeled off his name tag, and I chuckled. It appeared he was making good his escape.

  As Nikki prattled on to another of my classmates transfixed by her awesome, I watched Bill amble out the door. Then the blonde at the desk caught my eye again. As if in slow motion, she turned her head, her gaze fixed on someone out of my range of vision. She gave a short, determined nod. A second later, a shadow-like wraith—barely a blur, really—pushed through the door on Bill’s heels.

  “Holy crap,” I muttered.

  I took off running.

  21

  No sooner had I cleared the reception desk than I ran smack into a tangle of arms, legs, and platform-heeled awkwardness. I went down in a flurry alongside Mean Girl Melanie’s chief lieutenant Sandra Lawson, all deep-cherry-red hair and MAC cosmetics, and she scrambled to her feet with impressive speed, her swing dress, well, swinging. She was clearly on her way back from the bathroom, as her makeup had received a fresh new veneer of glitter. I thought briefly of Simon’s warning, but Sandra had not even an ounce of Connectedness to her that I could tell.

  “Watch where you’re going!” she announced with a pout. “You totally could’ve killed me!”

  I managed to step away from her without hip-checking her into next week, but the damage had been done. Bill was nowhere in sight. I raced out into the hallway and turned right, then left, with no idea where to go. The MGM casino loomed deep inside the building straight ahead, more bars and restaurants were off to the right, and somewhere past the casino were multiple banks of elevators leading to the floors of hotel rooms. I didn’t even know if Bill was staying in this hotel. “Dammit!”

  I wrenched my bag open as Nikki barreled out after me. “Dollface! What’s going on?”

  “I think I’ve figured out who’s at risk this weekend, but it makes no sense.” As I talked, I riffled through the cards, yanking three out. The Four of Swords, Ten of Swords, and Queen of Swords.

  “That’s an awful lot of sharp pointy things going on right there,” Nikki observed as we took off deeper into the hotel.

  “Yeah, and that’s not good. Chances are they’re up in the sleeping areas, but I’ve no clue where. We’re dealing with a sense of betrayal, and hopefully not Bill lying face down in his own blood, and it’s probably a woman who is attacking him. The queen…” I shook my head. “There was nobody in that room that had that level of power, I would’ve picked up on it. Melanie had some, yes, but it wasn’t all that much.”

  “Unless it was being deliberately banked,” Nikki said.

  “Maybe. But I think the target is Bill Compton, a really nice guy, wouldn’t hurt anyone—it literally makes no sense. I don’t even know if he’s staying here.”

  The two of us were hustling through the casino with its rattling chimes and canned hilarity, and Nikki started to laugh.

  “Well, at least I can help you there. Your friend Bill made the rounds like it was his job, came right up and looked me square in the eye and told me I wasn’t a student from Farrada
y High but he’d seen us together and wanted to say hello. We shook hands and, well—he’s staying in the north tower, twelfth floor. But he’s got clothes stashed in a locker back in the fitness center. It was on his mind, so…”

  I glanced at her, startled. “You memorized everyone’s room assignment when you met them?”

  “Only the ones who reached out and shook my hand. Which, I gotta tell you, not really the first thing that most of the guys from Farraday High were comfortable doing with a woman possessing my unique attributes. Bill’s a good egg.”

  “He is a good egg,” I said, getting angry all over again. I paused briefly as I saw the corridor that led toward the hotel rooms, then shifted my gaze forward again. “Fitness center? Four of Swords could mean a spa too…”

  “Agreed,” Nikki said. “I’m telling you, he wanted to get his stuff.”

  We took off again, my mind still working furiously. “Bill’s got some small measure of Connected ability, but not enough to bend a spoon or anything. There’s no reason for him to be attacked or for anyone to take issue with him. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  We jogged past a Mexican restaurant and a wedding chapel, then the grand spa of the MGM gleamed in front of us, a small walkway off to the side beckoning us on.

  “This place is open twenty-four hours?” I asked dubiously. “We really think he’s back there?”

  All doubt was shredded a second later when we heard a loud crash coming from deep inside the fitness center.

  Nikki and I burst forward. I was surprised to find that the interior doors to the spa had been wrenched open, the lock mechanism little more than a melted husk. Bill might have had an access card, but whoever had followed him did not.

  “That’s some serious magic lockpicking right there,” Nikki commented tightly. “We’re dealing with somebody who’s got both a fair amount of power and some questionable impulse control.”

  “The ghost, the wraith I saw near the front desk,” I muttered. “That had to be someone from the Shadow Court. But again, why would they go after Bill?”