Call of the Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  We kept moving until we reached the main conference room. Ma-Singh ushered me in, and I swept the space. It was empty, but the screens lining the chamber were all on, each showing a different general standing at attention. Representatives of the French, Nigerian, Chinese, Argentinian, Russian, and Hungarian military stations were watching me with fierce attention, and I drew to a stop.

  Ma-Singh began speaking in his heaviest, formal voice. “Your reports, generals. You have the order. Proceed.”

  I blinked at him as the first general spoke. I’d trusted Ma-Singh to run the military of this House; I didn’t need to hear these updates. He turned to me and nodded gravely, respectfully, then returned his attention to the first general. It was a woman from the Russian site, her features harsh and pointed, as if her skin was drawn too tight. Her voice held iron. She spoke in her native tongue, and I watched the caption beneath her screen. Even with the English, I didn’t understand half of what she was saying, but when she finished, I bowed to her in the manner Ma-Singh had taught me. “You honor this House,” I said.

  When I lifted my head, her expression had changed. There was pride in it now. Satisfaction.

  What was going on here?

  And so it went around the table. The men and women Ma-Singh trusted to protect our House gave their reports, and I accepted them willingly, honoring each in turn. Then Ma-Singh spoke again, thanking them in an elaborate ceremony I also couldn’t follow, and one by one, their screens went dark. We stood in silence then for a long moment.

  “You want to explain that?” I asked.

  “When you first accepted Madame Soo’s charge, the generals did not accept you.”

  “Yes, I recall,” I said wryly. They’d actively tried to end me, in point of fact, but Ma-Singh conveniently didn’t reference that.

  “They have watched your path most carefully, and I have kept them informed whenever possible. They are aware of your…recent actions. Your sacrifices.”

  I tugged at one sleeve, where I’d been hooked up to Sells’s bloodsucking machines long enough that I still twitched at so much as a bendy straw. It’d taken my own vital fluids to counteract the most recent drug cocktail Gamon had created for the rabid technoceutical trade. Nothing like giving a little blood, sweat, and tears for your job. “And that’s a good thing?”

  “These six are the first to request a specific audience with you. They will continue to request it. And there will be more.”

  “You know I have no clue about half of what they’re saying. That’s why you’re here.”

  He nodded. “They know you trust them. And that you trust me.” He waved to the monitors. “But you are their leader, not me.”

  I got the feeling there was a lot going on under the surface here, but I simply nodded. “Where are we on Gamon?” I asked. None of the generals had mentioned her, not even the Argentinian one. “Sells hasn’t checked in at all?”

  He turned to me. “We have a feed, but—”

  “Show me.”

  He strode to the side of the room and flipped a switch, and one of the screens flared to life. He punched open a file, and a video clip came up—it showed what was presumably a human, lost in white swathing. As I watched, the eyes clicked open, the pain-crazed orbs beneath staring at the camera but clearly not seeing anything.

  My hand flew to my mouth. “Gamon.” There was no question.

  He nodded. “She has not been able to speak clearly since she was found, but though she’s been accepting care, she’s not improving yet.” He shrugged. “It will take time.”

  “Not good enough.” Sudden urgency took hold of me. We needed all the Houses up and functional, now more than ever. I knew it in my bones.

  With the ease of long practice, I opened my mental barriers. It didn’t take long for the bait to be taken.

  “How can I be of service, Miss Wilde?”

  Chapter Eight

  I blew out a long, steadying breath, aware that Ma-Singh was staring at me. Gamon.

  The word really didn’t need to be spoken aloud. Armaeus knew me better than that. Still, he reached deeper in my mind, pulling the image from my memory, turning it around. “Yes, it is. Barely.”

  Can you heal her?

  “I can. So can you.”

  So can… I frowned, thinking about that. Weighing it. Someone this damaged?

  Armaeus’s chuckle was low and condescending, yet oddly sensual too, rolling down my spine. I steeled myself against it, knowing that he was doing it on purpose, triggering a deep response in me the way he wielded his own magic. I didn’t need sex to fuel my abilities, but…I didn’t so much care right now.

  My lizard brain hiccupped long enough for me to remember my other piece of news. There are three men in the casinos that Brody can’t trace. Not on any system. Loaded and setting off his cop radar. Could you…

  I tried to conjure up the picture that Brody had sent to me, but I must have done something wrong, because Armaeus went quiet for a long moment. Then a strange, murmured hum whispered through me, amping up another power cell. He really was good at this. “Perhaps we should go to them.”

  I frowned, my brain fighting back toward reality. Go to them? Like at the casinos?

  “It would be good to put in an appearance. Ten p.m., at Club XS. And heal Gamon first. The flush of power will be upon you.”

  Then he was gone.

  I drew in a long, shuddering breath just as Nikki walked in. Her gaze went from Ma-Singh to me, and her plaintive cry made me blink.

  “Why do I miss everything!” she moaned.

  I turned and focused on her. Whether she’d been damaged from her recent stay in a hospital or knew where we were heading next, Nikki had made the most of her time since her discharge. Her usual blonde coif was replaced with a no-nonsense brunette flip, above which was perched a nurse’s cap in vintage Florence Nightingale style. The ensemble continued with a navy-blue short cape that stopped just short of the hem of her starched white nurse’s outfit. Foregoing the white hosiery—this was Vegas, after all—Nikki further deviated from the standard with a pair of decidedly nonregulation white patent leather platform heels, which made her six-foot-four frame tower over even Ma-Singh, who stared at her in something approaching awe.

  “Well?” Nikki demanded. “What just happened?”

  “How did you get your leg healed?” I countered. “I thought you were more beat-up than that.”

  “Armaeus stopped by.” She frowned. “I would’ve thought he’d told you.”

  “That would be negative.” Not that I minded—Armaeus healing Nikki only brought her back to me faster, but… “Were you, um, awake for that?”

  “Not even remotely,” she said, her voice laden with disgust. “Which was a crying shame. I only knew he was there because of the roses and card I saw when I regained consciousness, bastard. So what else happened that I totally missed?”

  “Nothing—yet,” I said, as my own stint with Armaeus’s touch eased away. I knew exactly what he’d done here, could feel the power practically sizzling off my skin, but it still was unnerving at how good he was at pushing all my buttons in exactly the right sequence. “Where’s Gamon, exactly?”

  “I stopped over there before I came here. Sells has her in three layers of cocoon. I’m telling you, she’s been fried all the way through. I think the only thing still keeping her alive is spite.”

  I grimaced. “When can I see her?”

  Ma-Singh stirred restlessly. He didn’t want me anywhere near the woman, and I couldn’t really blame him. But this…

  “In person?” Nikki asked. “You can’t. Sells won’t let anyone in the incubator who hasn’t been sterilized, and for Connecteds, that means a level of self-care you do not want to be a part of. But she said Armaeus contacted her and told her what you wanted.”

  “He did? I only just had the conversation with him.”

  Nikki shrugged. “What can I say, he must be psychic. Anyway, she gav
e me this, said you can check in anytime.”

  Nikki handed over a tablet of some sort, and I took it curiously, tilting it.

  “Swipe it on. It’s set up to a viewer directly above Gamon,” Nikki explained. “She’ll know you’re there—light comes on. She won’t be able to hear you well with all the gauze over her ears, but she still has hearing. Which is a God’s honest miracle, you ask me. Girl’s pretty much a Funyun right now. If she wasn’t such a stone-cold bitch, it’d break my heart.”

  I nodded, then set the tablet on the conference room table. “Is Sells clear?”

  “Will be in another hour. We can get comfortable. Oh—and there’s this too.”

  She held up a small pouch that looked like a gris-gris bag from New Orleans, and I peered at it in surprise. “What’s that?”

  “Exactly what you’re thinking,” Nikki said, putting the bag back in the pocket of her nurse’s outfit. “Contains one of Gamon’s teeth, her hair, her blood, I think some charred skin too.”

  Beside us, Ma-Singh muttered something in Mongolian. I couldn’t speak the language, but the normally stoic general looked a little green. I could relate.

  “Why?”

  “Gamon insisted, once Sells explained your offer. Said what you wanted to do wouldn’t work otherwise. I smell bullshit, but Sells was the one who harvested the material. Gamon’s magic is—very old, she said. Old and dark. If this is the way to her heart, it’s the way you should take.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “So we have an hour?”

  “We do, dollface. I can give you the full rundown, if you want.” She gestured to the conference room table, and Ma-Singh bowed. He still looked a little ill.

  “With your permission, Madame Wilde, I shall return to my work. I already have all the updates I need on the patient, and we’ve made no headway on identifying your attackers in the desert.”

  I nodded, then pulled my phone free, scrolling through the texts Brody had sent. When I found the pictures of the trio of nameless men, I forwarded them to Ma-Singh.

  “Start here,” I said. “These guys just hit town and have Brody in a twist. He thinks there’s a link to our shooters.”

  Ma-Singh had removed his own phone, which looked impossibly small in his giant paw of a hand, and scowled down at it. “I do not know these men.”

  “Nobody does.” Even as I said the words, they struck me wrong, and I recalled Armaeus’s brief hesitation when I’d presented him with the same images. “See what you can dig up, and let me know. I’ll be with Nikki—not here the whole time, but in the house.”

  “Of course.” Ma-Singh nodded, then bowed as Nikki eyeballed me. He turned and left.

  “Not here?” she asked, looking around the conference room. “I mean, it is a little sterile, but—”

  “Do you have any clothes that would fit me?”

  Even as I asked the question, I felt my cheeks burn—a condition not helped by Nikki going stock-still. “Say that again?”

  “Clothes. An outfit,” I said, thinking about Armaeus’s invitation to go find the high rollers ourselves. “Something—I don’t know, glam.”

  “Glam.” Again, Nikki’s confusion made my discomfort flare. “You want to be glam. Why?”

  Now irritation and embarrassment spiked through me. “You know, never mind—”

  “Oh, no, no, no, you don’t,” Nikki barked, grabbing my arm and practically hauling me from the conference room. “Jiao Peng!” she brayed, pitching her head up toward the nearest camera. “My room. Bring the trunks.”

  “Bring the—what are you talking about?” I hadn’t known that Annika Soo’s aunt had returned to Las Vegas from the House’s former headquarters in Shanghai, but why would she have trunks?

  But Nikki didn’t respond to that, and she didn’t slow down. Instead, she frog-marched me down one corridor and along another, until we reached the former solarium of the Soo mansion, which Nikki had claimed as her own bedroom suite. It was a spectacular chamber, the glass eye open to the sky but covered with a translucent filter, reducing the sun’s glare to a soft, dappled glow. Nikki’s bed, hidden behind a large screen, took up the far section of the solarium, but the entire rest of the space had multiple chairs set up in conversational seating sets, a desk and computer setup patched directly into the LVMPD, and a bubbling fountain that gave the room a surreal sense of calm.

  Nikki had transformed a storage room off the solarium floor into her clothes closet, and that was where she took me now. I hadn’t seen it since she’d commandeered the room, but from the looks of things, she’d been busy.

  She hit the lights, and I gasped. “What on earth?”

  “The best that money could buy.” She grinned. “How could I resist?”

  “No wonder you never go home.”

  I turned in wonder at the built-ins that lined the walls, the free-standing racks of clothing that allowed ultimate access to Nikki’s collection—a collection she’d been building for easily the last decade and a half, from the looks of this room. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of it was her shoes, and I stared at the wall of boots, stilettos, pumps, peep-toes, and bunny slippers like it might disappear. “This is unreal.”

  The sound of wheels on the tiled floor outside made us both turn. “That’ll be Jiao Peng. Don’t you dare move. Actually. Do move. Go sit. Now.”

  She pointed to one of the overstuffed chairs in the makeshift closet, and I made my way to it, still numb that any one person could have this many clothes—and I’d seen Nikki’s closet before, in her condo near the Strip. But there…everything had been jammed together. Here…

  “Here we go.” Nikki pushed a large cloth-sided armoire into the room, and I was surprised to see the diminutive form of Jiao Peng pushing a second similar carrier behind her. I stood instantly, but both women shooed me back to my seat.

  “What’s in the bags?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at their grinning faces with a growing level of suspicion.

  “It was Jiao Peng’s idea,” Nikki said. “I’ll let her do the honors.”

  The small woman bowed. Since I’d taken over as Soo’s replacement, I’d rarely seen Annika’s aunt, one of the few remaining loyalists to Annika’s cause after Annika’s mother had been slain years ago. Jiao Peng had survived the regime of Annika’s uncle and had survived the slaughter that had occurred when Annika had returned to claim her rightful position. She was now the administrative head of the House of Swords, and, like Ma-Singh, I usually left her to her own devices.

  Now she turned and gestured elegantly to the cloth-covered armoires.

  “Madame Soo took great pride in her wardrobe and appearance, believing it was part of her impact on everyone she met. When you became the head of the House of Swords, I believed you would understand this eventually, though in truth, I had begun to despair you would not.”

  I twitched a hand at the cuff of my hoodie. “Yeah, well, I don’t have time to dress like Soo did.”

  I didn’t either. The former head of the House of Swords had an appropriate outfit for every occasion, whether it was a killer cocktail dress with deep, concealing pockets for the knives she’d so favored, or long white ceremonial robes for the complex rituals she performed as part of her sword training. There was a reason I favored my usual casual attire. It was easy. That and the blood came out quickly.

  “Nevertheless, against the day that you would change your mind, and with Miss Dawes’s help, we prepared.”

  My gaze shot from her to the armoires, as Nikki practically pounced on the first, pulling the zippers down until the cloth covers fell completely away.

  There, in the center of the room, were two completely full racks of clothing.

  Instantly, my stomach cramped. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Don’t move! I said don’t move,” Nikki said, her words coming fast enough that I knew she’d brushed against my mind, this time without the benefit of touching me but apparently, desperate times requi
red desperate measures. She whipped through the racks. “What’s the occasion, specifically? You said glam, but what kind of glam?”

  “I don’t know,” I grumbled, already deeply regretting this. “The XS bar at Encore, I think. Armaeus wants me to meet him there.”

  “He what?” Nikki spun to stare at me, then rehung the dress she’d already half pulled off the rack. Instead, she pulled two more, while Jiao Peng removed two entirely different outfits, both of them with pants and long tunic-style jackets.

  “What are those?” I asked, pointedly ignoring Nikki as she giggled and yanked down more dresses.

  “You, more than Madame Soo, are a creature of movement, constantly in flight,” Jiao Peng said. She held up the ensemble. “This moves with you, not against you. Conservative but not heavy.”

  “Not enough skin,” Nikki called from the center of the rack.

  Jiao Peng continued. “I have also altered many of Madame Soo’s more traditional garments, should you ever have need.”

  I widened my eyes. “Jiao Peng, I couldn’t—”

  “She would be honored, were she here to grant them herself,” the older woman said simply. Her face was alight with happiness at whatever she saw in my face, but I couldn’t help myself. She’d gone to all this trouble—for me. To help me fit in.

  “This!” Nikki’s triumphant shout drew my attention, and I looked over at her almost despite myself, then blinked.

  “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “Girl! You’ve spent most of the last five years scrambling out of deep, dark holes, and your legs are to die for. You need to strut it.”

  “I don’t need to strut it that badly,” I said, scowling at the micromini. “Try again.”

  In the end, there were three dresses that could work for a night club, and two pairs of shoes to try on. But as the clock wound toward the end of the hour, I couldn’t bring myself to try any of them on a second time. “Pick one,” I said, stepping out of the last. “I need to get ready for Gamon.”