The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  We blew through a short corridor past locker rooms that smelled heavily of lavender and mint, then into the fitness room. Like most hotels, it was equipped with slightly dated heavy-duty machines, crammed into too small a space. No matter how earnest their flyers were, the MGM Grand didn’t really want its guests spending their time getting in shape, it wanted them back at the casino spending their money.

  At the far end of the room was a rubberized multipurpose area with a scattering of mats, exercise balls, and free weights…and in its center, pinned to the floor with a half dozen swords sticking out his back—was Bill Compton. The Ten of Swords up close and personal.

  I lurched forward automatically even as Nikki shouted, “Watch it, it’s a fake. An Illusion.”

  At her cry, all the swords over Bill disappeared except one, a vicious knife buried in his upper shoulder. But that was the least of my troubles.

  A flurry of tights-clad ninjas appeared as if out of nowhere, leaping between the exercise machines and flying toward us. They were definitely human, not illusions, but small, fit, and incredibly strong humans, which made their assault feel like we were getting attacked by a preteen Olympics gymnastics team. More importantly, their hands were lit up with magic, transforming them into battering rams of white-hot power.

  “Son of a—hey!”

  Nikki’s shout was cut off midstream as she went down in a whirl of near-silent kicking and pummeling, while I had my own mini brigade to handle. I didn’t recognize these sleek, well-muscled, and extremely young Asian powerhouses. But they were wielding fists of fiery power…power I didn’t think they’d come by naturally.

  “Who are you?” I demanded, ducking and feinting side to side, barely fending off their flurry of strikes. Thank Christmas there hadn’t been a karate team available in the hotel, or I would’ve been in serious trouble. As it was, the gymnastics team more than held their own. One young girl cartwheeled into me and sent me crashing into one of the machines. Nikki flattened another of the kids, barking “Sorry!” as she picked up his small, dazed form and hurled it into three other teammates.

  And they kept coming. Their eyes were white and glowing, their luminescent hands lashing out in all directions, a miniature firestick brigade. One of them flailed at me from the right, and I automatically lifted my hand to parry the blow, capturing the child’s fist in my palm. For the first time, one of our attackers made a noise—a scream, actually—the girl’s eyes instantly clearing as she yanked her hand back, gaping at me in stunned surprise.

  Then she burst into tears.

  Her outburst set off a chain reaction in the others, with shouts and yelps and startled exclamations, the gymnasts coming back to themselves. They sent up a wailing cry as I broke away and stared furiously all around. Bill was gone. I didn’t even know if he’d been there to begin with. I raced forward to the mats, and sure enough, there was blood there—but Bill had disappeared. This had been a trap of some sort, or at the very least, a show of power. But why—how?

  And then I heard it. A soft, strangled moan, back up the corridor, where the locker rooms had been. I took off, shouting as I passed Nikki.

  “Find out everything they know.”

  “On it.” Nikki already had her hands on the shoulders of two of the kids, her head bent. I raced into the bathroom.

  In my line of business, I pride myself on being willing to expect anything. That still didn’t prepare me for the scene in the men’s locker room of the MGM’s fitness center.

  Her tawny curls still perfect, her whiskey eyes steady, and her creamy silk sheath marred by only the slightest spatter of blood, Melanie Lester held the much-taller Bill Compton by the neck in one slender but surprisingly strong arm. Bill’s legs were now bent and useless, his head thrown back against hers, while the knife blade at his neck was steadily drawing blood. More blood stained the front of his shirt through his open suit jacket. So he had been on that floor at least for a moment. How had Melanie dragged him all the way back here? How had she done any of this?

  “What are you doing?” I asked, striding forward.

  Melanie hissed and stepped back, digging the knife deeper into the neck of the nearly unconscious Bill.

  “Don’t come any closer,” she snapped. “I have to do this. It’s my time.”

  I stared at her with stunned confusion. “Your time for what? Bill hasn’t done anything to you. He wouldn’t do anything to anyone. I didn’t even think you had a problem with Bill.”

  “I don’t have a problem with Bill. It could’ve been anyone tonight. But he pissed me off. Going up and talking to everyone like that was the most normal thing in the world, and then I heard that you’d talked to him one-on-one at the bar like he mattered, like he was somebody. That’s just—it’s disgusting.”

  “What?” I normally tried hard not to be so dense, but this was throwing me for a loop. “Of course he’s somebody. He even has a gift, like you and me.”

  I’d been hoping to appeal to a sense of commonality, but it seemed to be exactly the wrong thing to say.

  “He’s nothing like you and me,” Melanie snarled. “He can’t do this.”

  Wrenching her knife away from Bill’s throat for a moment, Melanie sent a geyser of fire toward me, blue-white and brilliant, the magic so much stronger than I expected, even at this late moment, it rocked me back on my heels. My hands came up and my own fire coalesced her thrown energy into a shield between us. She returned the knife to Bill’s neck, this time digging deep. Blood welled up from the wound, and Bill groaned, some innate survival instinct overcoming whatever magic or drug she’d used to incapacitate him.

  “Stop that,” I growled, real anger bubbling up. “He didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “He didn’t do anything right either. He’s nothing, a nobody. And if I’m to gain entry into the ranks of the True Connecteds, I have to prove that I’m willing to take out the trash.”

  Now nausea rose up within me, making my own hands spark. Melanie Lester was Connected, a moderately powerful Connected, I was willing to grant her that. How she got there wasn’t really all that important, though I could tell by the metallic tang to her bared energy that she’d augmented her abilities with technoceuticals. Despite all that, she was also batshit crazy…and human. I couldn’t simply kill her outright, but in this moment, I absolutely wanted to.

  “You are about to experience deep and abiding regret, Melanie, and I mean that most sincerely,” I informed her with enough menace that she eased up ever so slightly on the pressure of the knife on Bill’s throat. “I don’t know who told you that this was the best approach to get into your new little Mouseketeer Club, but you picked the wrong damned way to do it.”

  “You don’t understand,” she practically wailed. “You always knew what you were, who you were. If I had known back then, if I’d done the work early enough, I would’ve been the one to get Officer Brody’s attention. I would’ve been the one who worked with him, side by side. But no, all he wanted to do was work with you.”

  Brody? He was mixed up in this too? “That was his job. He had no use for a punk-ass kid, but he had no choice.”

  As I spoke, I flexed my fingers. I could break Melanie’s hold on the magic wall easily enough, but I didn’t want to risk her driving her very real knife into Bill’s very real neck again. I could fix an injury, I couldn’t fix a dead man. And Bill had a wife, children. A life.

  He was happy.

  Another roll of fury erupted inside me again. “You’re seriously doing all this because you were jealous of me twelve years ago?”

  “No, you stupid bitch, I’m doing it because I am a True Connected. And True Connecteds are willing to do anything for the cause.”

  I felt more than saw her gaining the strength to push the knife in one final time, severing arteries that weren’t made to hold up to this abuse. I was Justice of the Arcana Council, dedicated to protecting Connecteds from themselves. Melanie had summoned me to watch her attack on Bill as part of her entry video t
o the Shadow Court, and I didn’t take well to being used.

  I brought my hands forward and roared. “Enough.”

  The wall of magic between us disappeared first, setting free a wave of my own fire that raced toward Melanie and swept her up in an electrical storm. She jerked back, the knife slicing wildly, and screamed as she was encircled in a bale of electrified wire, the only magical construct I could think of as I raced forward to catch a toppling Bill.

  He sank to the ground in my arms. There was blood all over him, so much blood. Far too much blood for anybody to survive. Even as I held him, I could sense his heart was giving out, his body going into shock. I wasn’t strong enough to bring back someone from the dead, I could only heal—but I had to have something alive to heal.

  No, I ordered silently, hugging him close to me, my own heart pounding strong enough to make up for his failing pulse. No. I poured all the magic I had ever learned, every healing ability I’d ever drawn from the Magician into Bill’s body.

  “Armaeus,” I begged, the word almost a whimper. But the Magician didn’t respond as I flung open my mind to him. Could he not hear me? Couldn’t anyone hear me?

  Either way, he didn’t come. There was only me and poor, dying Bill, whose only crime had been talking to me. I hugged him even closer, and then, I saw Bill’s very bones, expanded in front of me in a masterpiece of creation. Saw the future arthritis that was forming even now in his hands, the fragile vertebrae of his upper spine that would tweak and send him to the chiropractor before he was thirty. I saw his rich blood spilling out over the floor, pumping with life, whispering of the advances he would make in his job that would earn him accolades and send him back to school, back to academia where he would eventually become a professor and teach others to share their gifts. I saw this even as his life drained from him and I refused to let him go.

  “Death,” I hissed in desperation, but she didn’t come either. Instead, I commandeered all the magic I could muster and dumped it into this man who was not even fully Connected, praying to any gods who cared to listen that it would be enough.

  When I looked up next, it wasn’t Death or the Magician who stood in the breach with me, it was another member of the Arcana Council altogether. Tall, weathered, and grim faced, her hair pulled back into a long braid over her military gear, her eyes eerily flat, Gamon stared at me huddled on the floor with Bill’s bloody form in my arms, then shifted her gaze to Melanie, still writhing in agony beside us.

  “I assume, of the two, she’s my assignment?”

  I shot the woman a glare. “Oh yeah.”

  You can’t stop us,” Melanie crowed, twisting around to stare at us. “We are more powerful than you think we are.”

  “I’m so glad to hear it.” Gamon turned to her, a ghost of a smile on her face. “Okay, idiot female, we’re going to take a ride. And then you’re going to tell me so much more than you ever thought possible. It’s going to be fun.”

  The two of them disappeared in a crackle of electricity, and then there was only silence. I leaned back against the concrete wall for a long moment, trying to catch my breath, when Bill moved in my arms.

  “Sariah?” he asked weakly. I blinked down at him, trying to see past my blurred vision. His shirt was soaked with blood, but his neck and shoulder showed nothing but pink, light healthy skin, his eyes large and wondering, and more than a little frightened.

  “I was jumped, I think,” he moaned. “In the hallway. Muggers. I think they may have also jumped Melanie Lester. Do you remember—”

  “Yeah,” I said, sighing. “I remember Melanie.”

  “Is she going to be okay?” he asked, still apparently missing the fact that he was covered in blood. Because that was Bill. That had always been Bill.

  I gave him my best smile, pulling him a little more upright in my arms and thinking about Melanie Lester being interrogated by Judgment of the Arcana Council.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  22

  Since Bill’s injuries were now all but healed and I no longer had a knife-wielding lunatic onsite to explain the blood on his shirt, it didn’t make sense for me to hand Bill over to your average, everyday first responders. Instead, I tapped Nikki to take him for a quick visit to Dr. Sells’s clinic, to get all the necessary assessments and a bonus memory massage. I didn’t want him to have any negative side effects from Melanie’s opportunistic attack.

  I was pretty sure her assault hadn’t been about Bill so much as finding a convenient lever to get to me. I was getting tired of this particular trick of the Shadow Court’s, but I found it interesting too. Why were they so obsessed with me…an obsession that apparently had lasted since I’d been a young girl?

  I had no answer to that, and reluctantly made my way back to the party, if only to make sure the Council hadn’t gotten out of hand in my absence and started doing the Electric Slide. But as I strode through the MGM Grand’s wide hallways, I turned the conundrum of the Shadow Court’s interest in me round and round in my mind.

  I arguably was an important member of the Arcana Council, and perhaps even one of its strongest members, but the Shadow Court had been snooping around even when I’d been a kid at Farraday High. Viktor’s involvement in the school had always seemed a little weird, especially once I’d learned he was such a high-ranking member of the Council, and we’d eventually have to come to terms about that. But now it had taken on an even darker edge. Had he been at Farraday working as a school counselor at the behest of the Shadow Court? And why? My activities as a finder of lost children had been laudable, but not flashy. There would’ve been no reason…

  I sensed the shift in energy as I rounded the corner and instinctively slowed. The music coming from the bar was vintage Katy Perry, and the idea of anyone kissing a girl and liking it while the Devil looked on spurred my steps again. But there was more than mere manic Saturday-night-at-the-bar revelry going on here. I could feel the tension tighten as I stepped inside Level Up and immediately saw the blonde who’d given Melanie the nod to follow Bill deeper into the MGM Grand. Out of nowhere, irritation spiked.

  “You,” I snapped. “Get up.”

  Her eyes flared as I flipped open my purse and yanked out a set of bracelets. I didn’t usually have much cause to use the toys that had come with my position of Justice of the Arcana Council, but much like everyone else was tricking themselves out with articles of power, maybe it was time for me to level up my game as well.

  The woman at the desk didn’t move, but planted her hands on the table, her face going hard. When she spoke, her voice had lowered two octaves, and her eyes flashed white.

  “You’re too late, Justice Wilde,” she informed me in a deep, throaty tone. “It’s already happening. We’ve found a way to take the Connected power away from those who have no right even to develop it, and—”

  Without waiting for her to say another word, I slung bracelets at her, giving her a return hard smile as they wrapped around her wrists and tightened.

  “Yeah, well, this is happening too. Enjoy your flight, honey.”

  “What?” The blonde’s eyes flashed back to normal. She tried to wrench her hands apart, her question cycling up into a wail as the familiar figure of Gamon materialized beside me.

  “I think I preferred it better when you delivered people,” Gamon said. “Since when did I become your designated driver?”

  Dressed in her military leathers, one long braid over a shoulder, her weapons belt slung over her hips, Gamon looked way more badass than I ever could, and the woman at the table quailed.

  “You…you’re not on the guest list,” she stuttered.

  “True. Sorry about that.” Gamon grinned, all teeth.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” The shrill panic cut through the noise of the music, and I turned to see Mary Clemson Strand tugging at the hand of a man who’d closed his fist around her slender wrist.

  “Stop that,” she cried again. I’d never seen the man before, but as Mary instinctively turned tow
ard the door, I realized one very important fact. His eyes were sheet white.

  “Nice,” Gamon said. “Looks like I got here just in time.”

  Suddenly, a good twenty people in the room seemed to light up like Roman candles, their energy spiking off the charts, their eyes going as white as snow. They lunged for the screaming Farraday students, who seemed to all get the clue at the same time that something had gone terribly wrong with their reunion. Around the room, members of the Council turned, the Devil and the Magician on opposite ends of the floor, the High Priestess and Simon by the video arcade area, and Viktor—where the hell was Viktor?

  It didn’t matter. With this much firepower, the Arcana Council would make child’s play of—

  The floor began to tremble, as if Vegas was suddenly ground zero for the mother of all earthquakes, and I turned quickly, noticing for the first time that the pile of white glitter on the floor wasn’t just glitter. It was salt.

  Salt was bad. Very bad. There was only one bit of magic I knew of that truly relied on a barrier of salt to make it work…and this was one distraction by the Shadow Court I completely hadn’t expected.

  From the middle of the room, the floor erupted into a roiling mass of demons, easily forty strong, the combined mass of their screaming rage suddenly redirecting the focus of the Council away from the Shadow Court’s minions and onto a very real and immediate supernatural threat. Armaeus’s, Kreios’s, and Eshe’s hands all burst into flaming torches of power, but not even the members of the Council could kill a demon outright. They could contain them and redirect them back to wherever they were summoned from, but to kill a demon, unfortunately, you needed another demon. Which meant I’d just walked into an endless loop of chaos.

  “Sariah!” I whirled at the new cry, this one from Tiffany, who was fighting her way across a throng of struggling classmates to get to where Mary was still battling her captor. “Help her!”

  I could practically feel the energy draining away from the students around me as the demons pounced, raking claws and fangs across both Shadow Court minions and Farraday graduates alike. My hands burst into flames too. From the corner of my eye, I had a vague sense of Brody running into the bar and screaming his head off, but I couldn’t focus on him.