by Jenn Stark
Instantly, I was on my guard. He didn’t answer the question, and Father Jerome, like most Parisians, was a master at the nuances of communication. “Tell me he’s not dead, Father.”
The priest’s long sigh made my gut twist. “He’s not dead, Sara. He is a strong little boy. But he is in significant pain.” A pause. “He misses you. I don’t know why you are where you are, but you should come back. Perhaps sooner rather than later.”
I forced myself to keep my voice steady. “The morphine isn’t helping?”
“It is, when he allows us to use it. But he doesn’t want to lose his sight, he says. He’s afraid if he goes to sleep, he will wake up blind.”
My heart shriveled a little in my chest. Michel was a Parisian boy I’d met the first time I’d visited Father Jerome. I’d gone to the priest because he was an acknowledged expert in antiquities, familiar with the object I was being asked to “reclaim” at the time. But the good father hadn’t been alone that day. He’d been shepherding a ward of young Connected children to a social outing at the zoo, and he’d commandeered me to help as chaperone. Over the course of the day, he’d told me each of their stories—stories I’d never thought possible. Stories I certainly couldn’t forget.
Back then, Michel hadn’t truly understood his abilities. Nor had he learned to use them. Back then, he hadn’t yet seen what hunters would do to the Connected—especially to kids. The fact that he’d ever seen such an atrocity, that he’d been taken himself for several harrowing hours before we’d run his captors to ground, was something I didn’t think Father Jerome would ever forgive himself for.
Now, Michel should be recovering, but his nightmares and the pain racking his body stymied the most gifted of normal doctors and frightened those docs who were Connected. No one wanted to draw the attention of the dark practitioners who’d done these terrible things.
Which meant that all we could do was wait to see if the little boy would come back on his own.
Either way, it had become clear that Father Jerome couldn’t watch the children every day. There were too many—and he was only one man. Another facility, outside of Paris, was being identified. But facilities took money to run. So did morphine drips.
“I’ll be home soon,” I said firmly. “With enough seed money to start the home in Bencançon. You’ll see.”
“It is more important that you come back safely, Sara. Promise me that you will.”
I smiled into the phone. The old man had become the father I never had, a fact I suspected he knew, since he was so skillful at manipulating guilt. “I will, Father. Give Michel my love. Tell him I will teach him how to samba when I see him next, but he must be well enough to stand.”
“I will do that.” We talked for a few minutes more, going over the plans for the halfway house, the latest gossip he’d heard about the antiquities black market. I told him in the briefest of terms about the jade amulet that had brought me to Rio. He listened without speaking, and when I was finished, he startled me with his response.
“This amulet you have found, have you touched it? Worn it?”
I frowned into the phone. “Well, yes. But it’s not like it was under glass. It was being, um, worn by someone else when I first saw it.”
“And how long did you wear it?”
I blew out a long breath. “For about ten minutes the first time, sadly. Then maybe four hours the second? Something like that. Why?”
Father Jerome’s voice grew animated. “How did you feel when wearing it? Did it become unusually cold or hot, or create any sort of reaction?”
I thought about the sparking flames shooting from my headdress. “Ummm… Why would you think that?”
“Oh, a journal article I recall. Given its relation to the Icamiabas, there’s a superstition about the amulet’s reaction to strong women. They’re a female warrior tribe, you know that, right?”
“Hence the name ‘Amazon,’ yeah.” Fatigue was beginning to scratch at my eyelids, and I fought back a yawn. “Is this reaction anything like hives? Because I don’t have time for hives.”
He chuckled. “Not exactly. It merely leaves its mark, it’s said. For use in time of need.”
I glanced down at the frog-shaped welt on my chest, one of easily a dozen injuries I needed to address. “I’ll let you know if something like that turns up.” My yawn cracked my jaw. “Okay, I’m crashing for the night. Tomorrow I’ll get the amulet again and finish my transaction with the client. I’ll be back before either you or Michel know it.”
“Good night, Sara. And be careful. The Icamiabas are also known for taking the hands and feet of those who cross them.”
“Ahhh…good to know.”
I waited while the priest said a benediction in Latin, feeling better for it. I might not agree with all aspects of Father Jerome’s faith, but I had faith in him. It was all I needed.
Well, almost all, anyway.
Chapter Eight
After I hung up the phone, I sagged for a moment in my chair. I needed to do some personal recon before I passed out, but passing out sounded like the far better option. Gritting my teeth, I hauled myself up and trudged to the bathroom, then flipped on a light so bright, it made my eyes water. What did they plan to do in here, surgery?
Wincing with effort, I pulled my shirt over my head, then stripped off my jeans in one long movement. That done, I stared at what was left of my once healthy, unmarked body.
I was a mass of bruises and burns.
The bruises, now starting to swell, were the easiest to write off. They chronicled the long day’s worth of abuse I’d suffered, first squeezing my way through the orgy enthusiasts, then at the hands of Fernanda’s flailing. After that, I’d done pretty well until Nigel had nicked my neck with his blade, and things had gone downhill from there. My feet were a disgusting, scraped mess from my impromptu run through the streets of Rio. My side still seeped blood.
The deepest damage had come at the hands of the Russian, though. She’d made the most of her small frame and had beaten the crap out of me with swift kicks, grabs, and punches that ended up making my skin look like a patchwork quilt of jagged, uneven welts. I checked my teeth for good measure, relieved they remained in my head.
“Shower,” I muttered to myself, knowing that when I woke up, I wouldn’t be in any mood to deal with it. Still, it took another five minutes of me staring at myself with hollow-eyed confusion before I could move again. The water in this hotel was blistering hot, and I hugged the tiled wall and whimpered as it pounded my muscles into jelly. By the time I stumbled out of the shower, I was lousy with fatigue.
Wrapped in a towel, I made it back across the room to recover my clothes. I swiped for my go bag, too groggy to focus, and merely managed to push the bag off its perch. Contents spilled across the floor, and I frowned down, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Cards. Several of my Tarot cards had literally jumped out of the bag, landing face-up on the carpet like abandoned toys. Great.
That tumble of cards might not matter to most people, but I wasn’t most people.
For the past several years, I’d made my living as a finder of lost things. My compass of preference was a Tarot deck—seventy-eight cards, each with their own unique images, which arranged themselves into spreads I could decipher with remarkable success. Whether the cards aligned properly out of luck, coincidence, or because secret fairies made it so, I never much cared. I simply knew they worked.
My skill wasn’t unique, but my mastery of it was, and word had gradually gotten out that I could find some of the treasures the world held secret, particularly those treasures with a psychic or magical energy. Those kinds of trinkets went for big money on the arcane black market, and finding them had been just the ticket I’d needed to get back onto the grid four years back. Everyone who’d chased me off said grid was dead, after all, no thanks to me. Being a Connected was not for the faint of heart.
Now I knew I should pick up the cards, but that would involve getting do
wn on the floor. If I did that, I’d likely stay there.
Nevertheless, habit and a sense of self-preservation forced me to at least review them where they lay, to note their image, position, and placement…
I blinked.
They were all the same card. The Magician.
Six Magicians littered the floor, like soldiers marching off to battle. “What the…”
In most Tarot decks, there was one Magician card. That’s it. One. Even the Thoth deck only had two, for reasons I’d never quite figured out. But six… Six wasn’t possible.
Bracing myself on the chair, I leaned down for a closer look, then—
The cards had changed.
They weren’t all Magicians after all. One of them was, certainly, the card farthest out of the bag. But the others were a mash-up of majors and minors, exactly what you’d expect to see on the floor. I knew they meant something, and probably something important. They’d literally point the way, in fact, for those with eyes to see.
“Tomorrow,” I muttered. Now that they were behaving, the cards weren’t going anywhere, and neither was I for a few hours. Instead, I turned and swiveled toward the suite’s separate sleeping chamber, the enormous bed almost embarrassingly plush to my exhausted eyes. As I staggered to it, dropping my towel to the floor, I thought about what Father Jerome had said about the amulet and its potential to have a strange effect on its bearers.
Well, other than Fernanda, I’d arguably had it next to my skin the longest. Was it a good thing or a bad thing that the amulet had reacted to me? Had it found me weak or strong?
And how had it reacted when it’d come into contact with Nigel’s unmentionables?
The sound of my own laughter echoed through the room as I crawled beneath the covers. Even my eyelids ached. Still, sleep wouldn’t come. I lay there for several long minutes, eyes closed, willing myself to sleep.
No dice.
I tried meditation. Deep breathing. Even planned a grocery list for an imaginary future when I’d learn how to cook… nada.
“Please, God, make me stop hurting,” I finally moaned.
A long, slow chuckle seemed to shimmer through the air. “Close enough.”
My eyes snapped open. The room had gone completely dark. Had I turned the lights off? I tried to recall, but my mind remained in a fog, my muscles as heavy as concrete. Every punch and jab from the Russian shot-putter was making itself known on my body, and not in a good way.
The bed creaked. Alarm jolted through me, though I still couldn’t move. It took all my energy just to stifle a whimper. I did not have the stamina for hand-to-hand combat right now. I barely had the stamina to shiver. Which would be a problem if I had to fight.
Was that someone breathing? No—no. There was definitely no one breathing except for me, and I was an exceptionally quiet breather. But if no one else was breathing…
“You did ask for help, Miss Wilde.”
“I—what?” My nerves prickled as a long-fingered hand drifted over my shoulder, my reaction reminding me all too much of the amulet sending sparks along my skin.
“Am I dreaming?” I didn’t think this was a dream, though. If it was a dream, there’d be sunshine and unicorns. And ideally scotch.
“Would you prefer to dream?”
The wall of blessed heat spooning up against my backside blew something against my ears, and I felt myself sucked beneath conscious awareness. Whether I liked it or not, I was going down.
“You’ll like it.”
Words to live by, I always say.
Chapter Nine
There was no sound, no breeze. I floated on a soothing ocean, somehow not at all concerned with drowning, though my usual water wings were conspicuously not in evidence. Instead, I was buoyed up by waves that eased my battered body into unclenching its muscles and unkinking its knots.
It took me a moment to realize I wasn’t alone, but the touch of lips against my neck seemed an almost disembodied experience, not something I needed to react to or necessarily understand. I groaned as the trail of kisses drew a line of fire down my back, curving in a graceful arc along my waist, until I somehow, through no effort of my own, managed to flip over onto my back, and those lips burned a brand against my hip bone. Energy sparked somewhere deep inside me, healing me with equal parts fire and brimstone.
“I do not understand you,” the murmured voice came again. “I can only go so far into your mind. Why?”
“Hummm?” I turned again into the water, reveling in the sensation of hands kneading my legs, my hips, my lower back. Everything that had been abused in the past twenty-four hours was devolving into blissed-out euphoria. When the touch moved around my belly and up to my breasts, however, I hissed with pain.
The fingers froze, retreated. “There is no pain in this place.”
“Well, there damn well is in that place.” I attempted to shift away, but the Magician held me fast, and—
My eyes popped open. “What?”
I scrambled off the bed, taking half the sheets with me, shaking my head like a stoner flushed out from beneath the stadium bleachers. I frantically scanned the bed, the floor…then the walls and ceiling for good measure. No one was there. Had I just been spooning with the Magician? As in the Magician Magician, the Divine Trickster, Trump One of the Tarot? Did such a being truly exist?
I hobbled into the living room, flailing for the light, but the sudden flood of illumination made me sag against the wall. “Make it stop,” I whimpered.
The room went dark. Well, not completely dark. The same lamps flared, but at about a quarter of what I suspected their usual brightness was. “Do you also do windows?”
“You need to trust more.”
“Yeah, and you need to get out of my head.” I made it to the table and took a seat, putting said head in my hands for a long minute. I wasn’t sure what was happening to me here, but this was not the time for me to have a psychic meltdown. And more to the point…
I scowled down at my body, swaddled in the hotel sheets. Leaning back, I peeled away the top layer to expose my chest. I’d surveyed this area when I’d hit the shower, but I hadn’t registered more than “ouch.” Now, based on my body’s reaction when the Magician or whoever he was had hit the area with his magic fingers, something was seriously wrong with my…
I frowned. The skin was unmarked. There was the hint of pink, as if an old burn was fading, but unless you peered closely, there was no scar at all, barely a shadowy outline of a frog against my left breast, like I’d ghosted it in with makeup. I touched the skin, tensing up for the shot of agony…and nothing. I pushed a bit more firmly, right on top of the burn mark, and—nothing.
“Well, that’s weird.” I dragged my fingertip over what was left of the frog’s head, and—
Pain ricocheted through me so hard, I burst out of the chair, stumbling back several feet until I connected with the couch. My entire body hissed with electricity, the burst of energy complete and absolute and gone just that fast, leaving me lying in a heap on brightly colored cushions, breathing shallowly. My hands gripped the couch’s edge as if that hold was all that kept me tethered to this plane.
“Um… Any idea what that was?” I asked the air around me.
Silence.
Apparently, the Magician was out for a smoke break.
Nevertheless, I noticed something else as I lay naked and panting on the hotel room couch. Besides the fact that the ceilings were exceptionally clean in this establishment.
I didn’t hurt.
I stretched out my toes to double-check, as it seemed a safe place to start. Nope. I flexed my battered legs. Not a problem. I remained absolutely covered with bruises, scrapes, welts, and swelling, but the pain itself was gone. It was as if my nerves had been fried, no sensation at all passing their receptors.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. I drew my fingers along my arms, hugging them to me. I could feel that. I pinched the skin ever so gently, and could definitely tell the moment my nails dug into my
skin. So pain wasn’t off the table, at least not new pain. But all the pain of battles past…
Slowly, gingerly, I sat up, trying to reconcile how I looked with how I felt. My eyes refused to ignore the fact that I was a Neosporin “Before” ad waiting to happen, and the bruises snaking along my skin did not inspire confidence. But as I lifted my arms up and extended them to their full length, nothing made me twinge.
Even when my shoulder made an interesting crunchy noise, and then a wet pop, I could feel the blood drain out of my face, but not the pain that was surely causing that reaction. Bracing myself on the edge of the couch, I launched upright, then took an exploratory step. My swollen feet complied. I drew in a deep breath—my lungs obligingly expanded. I was moving normally. I was breathing normally. This was definite progress.
My gaze swept the room, taking in the TV and its bright digital display. The clock read 4:16. By my reckoning, though I hadn’t realized it, I must’ve slept for more than three hours. That was plenty. And apparently, whether thanks to the Magician or Kermit the Frog, my pain receptors had shorted out, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Still, I wasn’t complaining. Give me a quart of coffee and a doughnut, and I’d be ready to go.
Warmth fizzed along my nerve endings as I crossed to the table, picking up my discarded sheet along the way and wrapping it around me, more for the sensation of something on my skin than modesty. Plus, the A/C had dropped to subarctic, and my gooseflesh was starting to hatch goslings.
I stopped at the edge of my impromptu card reading, staring down. The six cards still lay on the carpet, topped by the Magician, whose meaning I’d already figured out. The rest of them presaged a raft of crazy heading my way. The Page and Seven of Swords indicated that electronic communication and stealth would be the order of the day. The Chariot generally meant an overland journey, which made sense given that I didn’t think the amulet was lurking somewhere in my hotel.
Unfortunately, after that, the cards took a turn. Lying side by side were the Five of Pents and the Tower. The Five of Pents could mean poverty, but its literal imagery depicted a church. So maybe a holy place of some sort? Either way, the Tower was generally no fun at all. It indicated that yet another surprise lay in store for me… or possibly a bomb. Toss-up.