Call of the Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  “Where we heading?” Nikki asked as finally we broke out onto the sidewalk, the cool desert night air a welcome respite from the overheated cacophony inside the club. “Because if it’s farther than twenty feet, we so need a cab. These boots were definitely not made for walking.”

  “Cab,” I said. “Paris.”

  “Excellent.” She grinned. “You take me to all the nicest places.”

  Nikki hailed a taxi with a speed that could have been a Connected-level ability all on its own in this city. We slid in, and the vehicle shot back out onto the access road as soon as Nikki had given him the destination. I wasn’t surprised, the Strip wasn’t long, but even a block off the main thoroughfare was easier travel if you had to go any distance along the crawl of casinos. Too many lights and way too many tourists, especially the ones who defied walkways and even fences to wander into the middle of the road.

  As we swung into traffic, Nikki sung her gaze to the driver, then back to me. “Not the high rollers,” she said succinctly, shaking her head at my surprise. “I know that’s what you were thinking, but it wasn’t guys who dealt these drugs, it was women—friends of theirs, fellow carnies. They’ve all set up shop in a New Age kiosk in the Grand Canal galleria over at the Venetian, peddling essential oils and readings while you wait, that sort of thing. Their friends were getting all the clients—and the tips—and finally let Lori and Cindy in on their secret stash of Charisma.”

  I frowned at her. “Charisma?”

  “That’s all I got, the one word that Lori thought when she fixed on the memory of the handoff. I assume it’s the street name for the drugs, but I’ve never heard of it. Gotta be technoceuticals.”

  “Yeah…” I sank back in my seat, strangely deflated. I’d wanted there to be a connection between the collapse of the women and the Trident guy, not merely another example of the drug trade hitting the city. Probably because I wanted there to be an easy solution to whatever had harmed the two foolish girls. Having it simply be another drug handoff from low-level Connecteds wasn’t a solution, merely a whole new set of problems.

  “You can let us out here, sugar lips.” Nikki leaned forward, addressing the cabbie. “With that conga line, ain’t no way you’re getting any closer, and I don’t want you to get stuck.”

  I peered out the windshield, and Nikki was right. A parade of brightly colored tourists were dancing in the driveway of Planet Hollywood, and cabs, busses, and cars were all backing up in a hurry. Nikki paid the driver and we slid out of the car, weaving our way through pedestrian traffic until we reached Paris Casino. I gazed up, and up still farther, taking in the Emperor’s Black Tower soaring high above the hotel’s natural roof. The onyx monolith now reverberated with an electric-blue shimmer, giving it the effect of seeming to be constantly in motion. “Creepy,” I muttered.

  “That it is. What’re we walking into here?”

  I shook myself back, startled I hadn’t already explained. One of the problems with hanging out with a mind reader, you assume she’s reading your mind too. Only Nikki worked very hard not to put her hand in where it wasn’t invited—unlike Armaeus.

  Armaeus. Where had he disappeared to, anyway? We’d worked well as a team back at XS, for all of thirty seconds anyway. It was something that I could get used to, despite how infuriatingly unpredictable he could be. Like right now, for instance.

  Nikki eyed me expectantly, and I filled her in. “Brody called, said he’s tailing Dixie and she entered here, thinks there’s something up with her. She’s not acting normal.”

  Nikki snorted. “I don’t know that Loverboy would necessarily know what normal was when it comes to Dixie.”

  “He’d be the first to agree with you, apparently. He wanted us to scout her out before he became truly concerned.”

  “Concerned as in, I used to do the horizontal mambo with you, I care, concerned? Or concerned as in I’m about to put the drop on you, crazy mama, concerned?” she asked, and I considered Brody’s tone when he called me. He’d been all business—and confused too.

  “I don’t think he expected her to come here tonight, which is saying something if he’s been tracking missing Connecteds. She’s made it abundantly clear that’s her turf.”

  “So he wants her out of the way.”

  “Maybe. But more importantly, he wants to know what’s up with her.”

  “Don’t we all,” muttered Nikki, and I grimaced. She and Dixie had been virtually inseparable when I’d arrived in Vegas earlier in the year. Now they barely spoke, while Nikki and I had gone on to become fast friends. Had there been more to their estrangement than I realized?

  We stepped into the club, and before I could ask, Nikki touched my hand. “Don’t look right away, but…I know where Armaeus went.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Paris Casino’s main nightclub was a two-story paean to decadence known as Chateau, a gorgeous fifteen-thousand-square-foot space infused with dark shades of blue, fiery red accents, and a truly insane amount of brass and mirrors. They’d also gone way over the top with light fixtures, the oversized, glittering lot of them doing their best to illuminate the recessed dance floor and extravagantly appointed VIP banquettes.

  But tonight, the gorgeous fixtures weren’t the main attraction of the club—and neither was the Magician, though by all rights, he should have been. No. The club, which was admittedly far more subdued than XS, seemed to be showcasing its dancers…female dancers in particular. And just off to the right of the dance floor, standing in a pool of her own light, resplendent in head-to-toe silver—silver that included face and body paint, of all the crackpot effects—was Hera.

  And Armaeus had his arm around her. So that’s where he’d disappeared to.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Josephine,” Nikki murmured as we edged our way around the club. “What’s he doing here with that?” She shot me a look. “I gotta assume that’s the newest Council member.”

  “You’d assume correctly.” I watched the two with interest, once again wondering what Armaeus’s specific angle was in wooing the goddess. Hera had information that the Council needed. She also hopefully had an intense tolerance for cold cream, because she’d need it once she tired of tonight’s getup. “I don’t know if she came out here herself, unasked, or if he brought her here.” I shook my attention away. “That’s not what we’re here for, though. You see Dixie?”

  “That would be…wait. I see Brody, does that count?”

  “It’s a start.” I looked over to where Nikki gestured, and the detective was there—and not alone. Another guy that could only be a plainclothes detective—you couldn’t find ugly suits like that unless you were paid to do so—was bellying up to the bar alongside him, both of them staring convincingly into their glasses of bourbon. As I watched, Brody flipped around and took in the room again, just another off-duty cop surveying the scene. He caught sight of me and Nikki immediately, his gaze momentarily blanking with surprise, then moved on.

  Beside me, Nikki cackled. “You’re totally going to have to dress like this all the time. It’s just too fun to see everyone’s reactions. Ma-Singh’s going to have a coronary.”

  “Brody wasn’t looking at me,” I murmured, but my gaze was tracking what I presumed was Brody’s trajectory, pausing as he paused. I turned to peer in that direction, and I saw her.

  “Yo, girl. What?” Nikki, taking note of my flinch, turned as well. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh.”

  In a city like Las Vegas, outrageous outfits and larger-than-life personalities would never get you a second glance, at least not from the locals. Advertising interns dressed as showgirls routinely patrolled the Strip, hawking everything from the nighttime club shows to discount phone cards, and escorts drifted in and out of the casino hotels like expensive perfume everywhere you looked, if you knew what to look for—which was generally a bikini, bolero jacket, and high heels. So it wasn’t Dixie’s outfit that gave me pause, though that was certainly a showstopper. It
was how she moved in it.

  “Can you tell what she’s on?” Nikki muttered.

  “Not exactly, but it’s pretty intense. No wonder Brody picked up on it.”

  “My ninety-year-old aunt would’ve picked up on it.” Nikki’s disgust was heavy as I flicked open my third eye and focused on Dixie. She wore a pink cowboy hat perched on her yards of curly blonde hair, and her petite, curvaceous form was poured into a skintight pink sequined dress, thigh-high white go-go boots, and a white silk scarf jauntily tied around her neck. She also was vibrating at an entirely different level from those around her, there was no question. But it wasn’t the typical electrical splatter-spit of early-in-the-night alcohol, or the sluggish crawl of sedatives or late-in-the-night boozing. It also wasn’t the frenetic current of the typical organic compounds found in most street drugs.

  This was definitely technoceuticals, and they were definitely premium grade.

  Dixie glowed and shimmied at once, like a pink lava lamp on high speed, not quite seeming to keep her form as I stared at her with the benefit of my heightened sensitivities. Always strikingly beautiful, she was stunning tonight, her lips parted on a laugh, her eyes dancing, her obvious enthusiasm capturing the attention of the small knot of admirers she’d pulled around her.

  I turned my attention to that group. Young, female, Connected. “Did we miss a Ladies’ Night flyer or something?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing. The place is packed with them.” She tilted her head. “Is that what brought Hera? Or did Hera bring the girls?”

  Unwillingly, I shot a glance back to the Empress in training. Hera stood a little apart from Armaeus, no longer clinging to him, and she swayed a little, her eyes remaining fixed on the writhing mass of femininity on the dance floor. When I returned my attention to Dixie, however, I lifted my brows. The normally self-possessed owner of the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars was completely fixated on Hera. As she stared, Dixie’s aura seemed to grow, billow out, as if she was the kid in the back of the schoolroom, desperate to get the teacher’s attention.

  My phone buzzed against my chest again, and I practically ripped it free, scowling at Nikki. “I never should have agreed to let you talk me into stowing my phone there. That’s gotta be radiation poisoning waiting to happen.”

  “Oh, right, the woman who creates fireballs between her fingertips is worried about getting fried from her cell phone. That makes sense.”

  Ignoring her, I glared down at the phone. It was Brody, of course.

  What the hell are you wearing?

  I snorted and showed the phone to Nikki, who gave me a wink. “Leave it to Detective Delish to spot what’s different. Always detecting, he is.”

  I see her, I texted back. Want me to get closer, figure out what she’s on?

  Knew something was off, was all he texted at first. Then, simply, Yes.

  “Lookie there.” Nikki nodded to another section of the room, and another pair of girls was entering Chateau, looking decidedly worse for wear to my third eye, though they presented themselves attractively enough. But their auras were dirty, ragged, hungry, and they visibly started when they saw Dixie holding court. From the corner of my eye, I saw Brody straighten at the counter.

  “He’s seen them too,” I said, and Nikki let out a low whistle.

  “Some of the missing carnies he was searching for?”

  “Gotta be, maybe, I don’t know,” I said. “But he’s going to make a move if we don’t stop him, and I don’t think he should.”

  To my surprise, though, it was Brody’s partner who laid a restraining arm on him, looking for all the world like a randy midlife crisis in a brown suit as he then pointed to one of the showgirl-dressed waitresses working the room. The two of them put their heads together. The girls kept coming across the room until Dixie finally noticed them.

  Her aura shifted in a flash.

  The jittering energy of the amplifying drugs—what I suspected was amplifying drugs anyway—remained. But gone was the pleasant pink and happy, cheerful blues and yellows that had overlaid that energy, making Dixie seem like a breath of early spring. In its place was a slag of browns, blacks, and grays, cold and jagged and focused like a laser beam on the two young women.

  They may have been low-level Connecteds, but they weren’t completely clueless. They halted at Dixie’s glare and wheeled back.

  “Which do you want, the kids or Annie Oakley?” I asked, and Nikki sighed.

  “Better give me the kids. Dixie hasn’t had much use for me since I left her and the chapel high and dry, and besides, she knows my skills. It’s been a while since she’s run up against you, and ain’t nobody sure anymore what you’re capable of.”

  “Right.” With no better place to stow it, I returned the phone to its bra holster, and brushed past Nikki. As I did, her low words followed me.

  “Remember, this is her turf.”

  Her turf, I thought as I stalked across the room. It was true enough. Dixie had been a part of the Vegas scene since well before I’d gotten here and even before Nikki had hit the city. She’d been the den mother of some of these carnies for the past decade and more. They trusted her, and, by all accounts, she’d done her level best to earn that trust.

  So what if she was amped on technoceuticals? As Dixie herself had pointed out, there was little difference between that and cosmetic surgery, as long as the users were of consenting age and, of course, consenting. Who was I to judge? I’d benefited from similar power boosts from Armaeus. I didn’t need the fact that Dixie had always rubbed me the wrong way to cloud my judgment. Even if she had broken things off with Brody, which clearly made her an idiot.

  I continued trying to school myself to go at this evenhandedly, but then Dixie abruptly shifted her gaze from her quarry as I crossed her field of vision. If I hadn’t already seen her with my third eye, I would never have believed what I was seeing now. Her aura didn’t just shift, it transformed, back to bunnies and rainbows and without even a trace of the jittery amplification tell. She was simply Dixie, with the same buoyant good cheer I’d experienced from her since the very first time I’d met her at her wedding chapel. She’d been wearing a cowboy hat that day too.

  “Sara! Why, as I live and breathe, I never thought I’d see the day when you dressed as beautifully as you should. You look spectacular!”

  I blinked at her enthusiasm, having forgotten my outfit. “Uh…” I looked down, still a little startled myself at all the sequins. “Thanks.”

  “Actually, I’m so glad you’re here, I—” She looked past my shoulder to where the girls had been, and her mouth turned into a perfect pout. “Well, shoot! We missed them! C’mon, let’s try to catch—”

  As she spoke, she twirled me around and tucked her arm into mine, then strode forward quickly. Her words kept pace with her go-go boots. “There were two women here just now, girls really, did you see them? Well, what am I saying, of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t have known where to look.”

  “There are a lot of girls here tonight,” I said gamely, trying to figure out where she was going with this.

  “It’s Ladies’ Night. That’s why they come—free drinks and dancing, great promotion, but—well, shoot.” She stopped in the exact location the girls had been, but they were gone. She pivoted around, clearly trying to locate them. “I figured they might come because I’d been putting the word out about some designer technoceuticals as bait, and they—”

  “Bait?” I stopped her, my brain instantly cramping. “Putting the word out?”

  “Well, of course— Oh!” Her watermelon-glossed lips made a perfect O to match the sound. “Bless my stars, you don’t know. How could you know? We never get a chance to catch up anymore, what with all your business with the House of Swords.”

  She said the words completely without censure, but I still felt the sting. All well and good that I was out making the world a safer place for Connected kids internationally, but I had been
ignoring the Connecteds in my own backyard. Dixie, clearly, had not.

  Her next words confirmed it. “I haven’t rested a day since this latest round of disappearances began—they’re coming in waves, and it took me most of the summer to figure out the pattern. But there is definitely a pattern, and I’m this close to getting to the root of it, I surely am.”

  “A pattern?” I asked weakly. I’d all but forgotten the ugly aura Dixie had projected when I’d first seen her. Now she was radiating the conviction of a crusader, so earnest that I wouldn’t be surprised to see a halo atop her pink cowboy hat.

  “My, yes. Every time a new shipment of technoceuticals hits the streets, we lose Connecteds. And not to drug overdoses. These are healthy, nonusing psychics in the main, young, old, everywhere in between. And they simply—vanish.” She snapped her brightly tipped fingers right in front of my face, the sound jolting me.

  “Why?”

  “Not a clue,” she said, the pout returning. “But things are moving now. I’ve set myself up as a drug dealer.”

  My head started throbbing in earnest. “A what?” I exclaimed, so loudly that Dixie blinked hastily, her hand shooting out to capture my arm again and wheel me around, heading toward one of the bars. The bar Brody had been standing at, I realized, though the detective now was nowhere in evidence.

  “Really, Sara, my heavenly days. You’re supposed to draw attention because of your fabulous dress, not by shouting at me,” Dixie chided, but her voice remained light, and she leaned toward me with conspiratorial glee. “But you heard me right. I am posing as a technoceutical dealer to lull the competition into talking to me, reaching out to me to join their networks.”

  “Are you crazy?” I asked, my words still little more than a sputter. “What if they don’t want you to join them, they simply want to remove you from the picture?”

  “But they won’t, you see? Alive, I add instant credibility to their operation. If they kill me or harm me in any way, that’ll attract a lot more notice than a few missing Connecteds. Especially now that I’ve sown the seeds of my drug sideline. Any official investigation by the police will turn that up in five seconds, and then the whole city’s worth of traffickers will be under a microscope. No one wants that.” She gave me a sad smile. “You do know I ended things with Brody, yes? Broke my heart, I’m not going to lie. But it had to be done. I simply was too close to learning something important.”