by DD Barant
We make it down to Las Vegas Boulevard, the Strip. The skyline looks the same, but the streets are full of empty vehicles, wild animals, and confused zombies. It looks like some sort of apocalyptic movie being filmed where the director suddenly had a nervous breakdown and none of the actors knows what to do next.
Including us. “Why are we even here?” I ask Azura as we watch a half girl, half gazelle clear an SUV in a single leap. “We’re not architecture.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “But both of us jumped from our respective worlds to the one we just left via magic. We may have been ejected the same way.”
Makes sense—as much as anything does, at the moment. Ahaseurus is the one who brought me across the dimensional divide in the first place, so I guess he might be able to kick me out as well.
Azura doesn’t seem bothered by the zombies at all, brushing past them like they’re not even there; me, I’m a little more worried about being turned into cerebellum sushi.
“Hey,” I say. “These underdead—what exactly do they eat?”
She looks at me like I’ve just asked her why chocolate is a good thing. “They’re not alive, Jace. They don’t eat anything.” She pauses. “Well, that’s not strictly true. They do transfer entropy from themselves to organic sources—plant matter, mostly. In essence, the organic matter decays instead of their own body. It’s sometimes called feeding, though in truth the process is actually one of excretion.”
“They make other things rot,” I say. “That’s not really an improvement over eating brains.”
“Not as such, no. But don’t worry—they don’t attack people.”
We discover the buildings that had been turned into spell sites have been returned to normal, which Azura seems to think is a bad thing. “The spell is complete,” she mutters, watching a large hawk swoop through the shattered glass doors of the Paris casino.
“This is where we sent Tair and Cassius,” I say. “If the myth is no longer running, then where is he?”
She doesn’t answer, but the look on her face tells me more than enough. Spells, like any mechanism, require energy to power them—and that energy all too often comes from the souls of living beings.
“You think he was—what, eaten by the spell?”
“It’s possible.”
“But he’s a pire! He’s not even alive!”
“There were no doubt many pires caught in the spell, as well as thropes and the underdead. You don’t need to draw breath to have a soul, Jace.”
Cassius, dead? I don’t believe it. He’s too damn slippery to let himself be caught and killed that easily. If Tair could escape from the myth, so could he.
It’s much more likely that Tair sold him out, which means he’s probably in Silver Blue’s hands. But if the whole city’s been sucked into another dimension, where would the arms dealer have wound up?
We haven’t seen any trues, which means they were probably all transported to Nevada along with the city of Night’s Shining Jewel. Silver Blue’s human, so he’s probably in NSJ as well. In fact, I might be the only person in Vegas right now—besides Azura—who even knows what a slot machine is, unless Tair managed to somehow come along for the ride. I’m still unclear on how exactly thropes and pires fit into all this—I haven’t seen either one on the street, which could mean that both inhabitants and buildings have been swapped. Presumably, there are a bunch of dazed tourists wandering around the mossy streets of NSJ and wondering where all the neon went.
“We’ve been sidelined,” I say. “No offense to your place of birth, Azura, but I think all the action’s happening in the place we just got kicked out of.”
“Which means there’s a good chance your boss is here, as well,” she points out. “Asher will want to keep any potential trouble as far away as possible.”
“We’ve got to get back.”
“Agreed. But I can’t do that on my own—which means paying a visit to my employers. The Lyrastoi.”
I glance up at the nightgliders still circling far overhead; it’s dark enough now that I can barely make out the tiny triangles. “Think we can get a lift?”
“No. I’ll have to make my way overland, to the Royal Keep—if I can get a ride on a were stag or something similar, I should be back within a day.”
“Wait a minute. You’re not taking me?”
She shakes her head. “Sorry, but you’d just slow me down. Best if I find you a safe haven here and have you wait.”
“But—”
“You’ll be fine. Trues are treated well here, and if you have any trouble you can contact one of the were-hawks for assistance; they’re members of the City Guard, charged with keeping the peace. Fellow lawmen, in other words.”
Sure, if a renegade zombie decides he’d like to broaden his diet and turn me into a rotting corpse, I’ll just wave to the friendly cops flying overhead and they’ll swoop down and save me. I’m sure they’ll take the side of a complete stranger who doesn’t understand the language, the culture, or any of the rules.
“Here,” Azura says, fishing what looks like a large seed from her pocket. “Swallow this. It’ll let you speak the local language—each of the were tribes has its own dialect, but there’s a common tongue that’s used in the city.”
I take it hesitantly. “It’s not going to sprout roots in my lower intestine, is it?”
“No, that would cause it to be digested much too quickly.” She doesn’t elaborate, and I decide I’m better off not knowing. I stick it in my pocket and hope I won’t need it.
Then we go looking for a safe hidey-hole for Jace Valchek, intrepid criminal profiler and special agent in charge of twiddling her thumbs, to sit around and do nothing.
Yeah, like that’s going to happen.
* * *
We eventually decide on a casino for me to hole up in, because they’re reasonably familiar territory to me and largely being avoided by the locals. That’ll change, I’m sure.
I pick Wonderland, a casino and hotel based on Alice’s adventures—I guess pires have a certain fascination with mirrors that don’t behave like they’re supposed to, and thropes do love their rabbit. According to a sign next to the blackjack tables, their buffet features over twenty bunny dishes—from hasenpfeffer to March Hare Macaroni.
I’m not interested in food at the moment, though. What I need to do is find a counting room or security office that I can get into and then lock behind me. That shouldn’t be too difficult, right?
Wrong. Maybe on my world—the one with guns, nuclear bombs, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns—but this particular version of Vegas was built by shamans as well as gangsters. Every door I might want to hide behind seems to be already locked, with magic as well as steel.
“I thought you were good at this,” I say as Azura fiddles with another door.
“I am. But there’s a big difference between a jailhouse lock and something protecting a big stack of cash. I can break this, but it’ll take me an hour—and it won’t be much good afterward.”
I sigh. “Maybe I should just grab a cardkey from the front desk and use a room. At least then I’ll have hot water.”
“Until everything in the storage tanks cools off.”
“I’m not planning on being here that long.”
In the end, that’s what we decide on doing. I’m tempted to go for one of the high-roller suites, but I don’t want to be that high up in case the power dies. I choose a room on the third floor—high enough that random looters won’t stumble across me right away, and close enough to the ground to be able to leave in a hurry.
We raid the kitchen for supplies—there’s food in pots and ovens that’s still hot, which is more than a little unnerving. Azura loads up on fried chicken, bread, and a jug of water, while I stick to fresh fruits and vegetables and a tray of sushi I find on a counter. It’s only half made, so it must be fresh.
“Stay inside,” Azura says. “Once the shock wears off, there’ll be looters aplenty. They won’t care about m
oney, but something like this—” She holds up a long, gleaming butcher knife. “—is worth a king’s ransom. We’ve no fire and thus no steel—every blade we have is either imported, obsidian, or hardened with underdead magic.” I’ve noticed her speech seems more formal since we’ve gotten here; it’s like her native accent is returning because she’s home.
“I’ll be careful.”
“See that you do. Your gun won’t work, and the criminal element here is just as dangerous as any large city.”
“Yes, Mom.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
And with that, she’s gone. I grab my supplies and head upstairs.
* * *
Ah, Las Vegas. City of endless possibility, decadent hedonism, seductive abandon. What to do, what to do …
I eat crackers in bed.
They’re good crackers, don’t get me wrong. But I eat them alone, with only the TV remote for entertainment. Not the TV itself; it’s showing nothing but blue movies, and by that I mean a screen of solid blue. The only channel I can find that still seems to be functioning is the one you use to check out of your room automatically. I watch that for a while, but the plot’s kind of predictable. I wash down the translation seed with some water for desert—might as well be prepared.
I find myself thinking about Charlie.
And that’s just not something I’m ready to deal with yet, so I think about raiding the minibar. But I’m far too vulnerable—in more ways than one—to get drunk by myself, so that’s not an option. Besides, the little binge Azura and I indulged in has left me feeling less than eager for any more booze.
I peek out the window through a crack in the drapes at the street below. There’s a pack of what look like spider monkeys wearing bandoliers exploring a Winnebago in the parking lot; it’s a little unsettling when one of them morphs into a full-size naked man, apparently to better pry open the sunroof.
But there’s more than just spider monkeys out there.
Thropes get bigger when they transform, so I’ve seen large and hairy plenty of times before. But I never thought about what that would mean for something like, say, a lion …
The pride strolls down the center of the boulevard in half-were form like a street gang daring someone to stop them. There are seven in all, five females and two males, and I notice three things right away: first, that the females are clearly in charge; second, that any of these were-lions could bite a thrope’s head off in one chomp; and third, that the males have obviously spent a lot of time fussing over their manes. Little braids dangling beneath the ears, streaks of red or blue dyed in, highly polished bones artfully woven into carefully brushed fur at jaunty angles; some cultural traits just seem universal.
The females are highly alert, their bodies in a semi-crouch as they pad along on two feet. The males are more or less in the center, much more relaxed, their long pink tongues lolling out of their mouths like dogs on a hot day—
Suddenly I don’t feel so good.
I lurch back from the window and sit down heavily on the bed. My head’s spinning and my stomach’s trying to copy it. Maybe that sushi was sitting out longer than I thought—
No. This feels familiar, and I know why.
When I first got here—here being the world Cassius and Ahaseurus yanked me into, not the one I’m currently trapped in—I came down with a syndrome called RDT: Reality Dislocation Trauma. Symptoms included nausea, headache, hallucinations, and fainting spells; basically, I was allergic to being in an unfamiliar universe and my body was trying to reject it.
Dr. Pete gave me an herbal remedy called Urthbone, and after a few months the symptoms disappeared and he pronounced me acclimated enough to stop taking it.
Now it seems my symptoms are back. I shouldn’t really be surprised; this is a different reality, after all, and apparently I don’t travel too well. If Azura were here she might be able to help—it seems like the type of problem she’d know something about—but I’m on my own.
Did I mention that the condition can be fatal?
No reason to panic, I tell myself. RDT takes a while to progress—when I went off my meds in a misguided attempt to eliminate certain side effects, I lasted at least a week before I started to hallucinate. I’ve only been here for a few hours.
I lie down and close my eyes. Slowly, the feeling subsides. When I’m sure it’s gone, I open my eyes again. There. Perfectly normal, nothing to worry about.
For some reason, though, I can’t get the image of that male were-lion out of my head. It bothers me, in a way that goes beyond simple fear of a large carnivore. It reminds me of—
Jace.
I hear the voice quite clearly. It’s coming from between my ears, and it’s not mine; I’m intimately familiar with how I sound inside my own head, and that’s not my overly verbose brain that just spoke up.
It’s Cassius.
“Uh … speaking?” I say. I have a sudden conviction he’s going to ask me if I’m satisfied with my current long-distance provider.
Jace. Stop thinking about phone companies.
Sure, thanks a lot. Now that’s all I can think about—
JACE.
Ow. Okay, okay. That really you, Caligula?
Yes, it’s me. I’m using a telepathy charm. It won’t last long, so pay attention.
I’m all ears. Brains. Whatever.
I’m sorry I didn’t make it back to the meeting place. I wasn’t able to escape the myth on the first go-round, though I sensed that Tair did. Did he come back?
Well, what do you know—tall, dark, and shaggy was telling the truth. Yeah, he did. We didn’t have long to chat, though—Stoker’s mercenaries showed up with their tails between their legs, wanting to buddy up so they could make it out of Vegas in one piece. Good plan, bad execution—Charlie was right behind them. He made kind of a mess when he crashed the party.
Anyone survive?
I wonder how much of my grief is leaking into my thoughts. Azura, Tair, and me. Charlie … didn’t.
We need to meet, Jace. Right away.
I don’t know what stuns me more, the coldness of his reply or the forcefulness that comes after. He sounds almost desperate.
Where? I ask.
High ground. I’m at the top of the Eiffel. Come NOW.
The last word isn’t so much a shout as a command, as if he could somehow yank me there through sheer willpower. I’ve never heard Cassius sound like that before—but then again, I’ve never been in the man’s head before. Or was he in mine?
Either way, the whole experience is over as suddenly as it started—I can’t hear him, and I assume he can’t hear me. I mean, I hope he can’t hear me; a telepathic boss is one of my worst nightmares. He did say the effect wouldn’t last long, but with Cassius you never know just how much of the truth he’s telling.
Doesn’t matter. I wanted to find him, and now he’s found.
All I have to do now is figure out a way to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower …
* * *
The real Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, is just over eighty stories tall and made out of eleven thousand tons of steel. The one in Vegas is five-eighths scale, around 450 feet tall, and right next door to the Wonderland. The enormous steel girders of its base begin inside the casino itself, curving up and through the ceiling; to me it looks like the aftermath of an absinthe binge by a French architect with an industrial teleporter.
The real tower has a swimming pool between its giant legs. This one has a restaurant on the eleventh floor and an elevator that goes all the way up to a viewing platform on the top—except that the elevator is currently locked down and I don’t have the security codes to bypass it.
Which means I take the stairs.
For a thrope or a pire, loping up forty-five or so floors is no big deal. For a merely human NSA agent—who keeps in shape, thank you very much—it’s more of a deal. Not big, exactly, certainly not humongous, but edging from medium-size into the somewhat larger-than-normal variety.<
br />
I have plenty of time on the way up to think about why he chose this particular place to rendezvous. “High ground” was the way he put it, and that makes a certain amount of sense. It’s probably fairly easy to defend from any attack but one from above, which limits potential hostiles to were birds and Lyrastoi—unless there’s some other flying species I’m not aware of.
I slow down and take a breather when I’m five floors away, so I’m not out of breath when I show up. Vanity, I know, but Cassius always looks like he just spent an hour in front of a mirror with a team of personal stylists and I don’t want to show up wheezing like an old car—
“Hello, Jace,” a voice whispers from the stairs above me.
I freeze. It takes me a second to realize that the voice belongs to Cassius, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard him whisper before. Or if he has, it didn’t sound like that.
“Came down to meet me, huh?” I say. “Thanks, but I don’t think the last few flights would have killed me—”
“Wanted to make sure you were alone,” he says. I can’t see him clearly; he’s standing above me and behind a beam. “I’ll see you up there.”
I don’t hear him leave—no footsteps echoing through the stairwell, no sound at all but the wind blowing through the open beams of the structure—but when I round the corner, he’s not there. I keep going.
I don’t see him when I get to the top, not at first. I look around the deserted platform, see nothing but a closed tourist kiosk and the central column the elevator rides up in. The platform’s glassed to shut out the wind, but I can still hear it battering against the structure, trying to get in.
“Cassius?” I say. “Where are you?”
“Over here.” His voice comes from beside the elevator column. I start walking toward it.
“Stop,” he snaps. Uh-oh.
“What’s wrong? You don’t trust me?”
“That’s not it.”
“Oh, I get it. You think maybe I’m Azura, playing one of her shapeshifter games. Well, let me clear that up right now … the very first time we met, I shot you. Okay?”