by Jenn Stark
“And the one in India?”
“A small outpost. We are still gathering data on it, but it’s unclear how extensive their operation is or what specific strain of technoceutical they’re producing,” he said. “Then there is the one in Greece, another odd location and one we suspect is defunct. Then the one in Belize.”
“Belize.” I frowned, trying to remember anything I knew about the tiny Central American country. “Unique local materials there? Indigenous magic?” I’d been to Rio, which technically wasn’t that far from Belize, yet I couldn’t imagine what the draw would be to the southern hemisphere.
“Unknown, but we’re doing the research now. The final location is here.” Ma-Singh pulled his fingers along the device, and the screen’s perspective scooted up. I widened my eyes. When I’d seen the tiny dot on the global map, I’d thought it was higher up…like Canada. But this…
“If I’m not mistaken, that’s my home state of Tennessee,” I drawled.
“It is,” he confirmed. “A small production facility that appears to be outside Nashville.”
I stared at him. “Nashville.” That was the second time the city had come up this week. I’d grown up in Memphis, so of course I knew the town. Just not why it suddenly had turned into Crime Central. Which was insane. I passed a hand over my eyes. Man, I was tired.
“Once again, we don’t have a lot of information.” Ma-Singh shook his head. “Madame Soo kept her interest in technoceutical production and marketing very close to the vest and refused to accept any House resources for protection of her interests there. She hired locally and did not intervene in the event of a skirmish. Each of the holdings could take care of themselves.”
I still couldn’t get over what I was seeing on the screen. “Seriously?” I protested. “You’re telling me that Nashville is a hotbed of technoceutical production. With a straight face.”
“It’s one of the nascent medical technology growth centers as well,” Nikki piped up, tossing her banana peel across the tented space, where it sailed into a waste can. “So if they need industry or tech to make technoceuticals, I could see it.”
“But…really?” The city was so close to Memphis, it simply seemed wrong. I frowned at the surge of emotion that billowed up within me. It felt almost like homesickness, and I shoved the thought of my childhood home away. Hard. Staring at the map, though, realizing how long it’d been since I’d been to the place where I’d grown up, I felt oddly displaced.
Still, this wasn’t Memphis but Nashville. If we had to go to Nashville, we could, and not have any reason to stop in my hometown. No reason to walk those streets, see those buildings, gaze out over that river—
Stop it. I firmed my smile and shrugged as if answering my own question, but Nigel didn’t seem to notice my distraction and Nikki was now focused on a croissant.
“Why there?” I prompted Ma-Singh.
“From what we can tell, she’d invested heavily in a startup company in the city, but only through surrogates. She’d never appeared there herself.” Ma-Singh shrugged. “We didn’t know about the operation until we began pulling these financials at your request. Whatever investments she had there, she did not make them known, even to her closest staff.”
“Jiao Peng?”
“Family,” Ma-Singh said, shaking his head. “Madame Soo never involved Jiao Peng in any activity she considered dangerous.”
I lifted my brows. “But she oversaw the security and mining operations of the House of Swords.”
“Neither was dangerous. Not in the way of technoceuticals.” Ma-Singh spread his hands. “You must understand. Madame Soo had some measure of Connected ability, augmented through the jade pendant she wore constantly and the one she sought her whole life to retrieve, which you eventually did. Within the House of Swords, such ability was unusual. Our strength was not built on psychic ability but on the adherence to the way of the warrior, the practice of swordplay. That is our honor and our guild.”
“Then why work with technoceutical developers at all?” I pointed to the map. “Even though she was cutting back on locations, she clearly wasn’t cutting back on investment.”
“No,” Ma-Singh conceded. “Her financial investment in these locations tripled in the last five years.”
“So she was on to something—something specific. It’s a matter of finding what—beyond the general category of technoceutical that allows man to compete with Magician.” I frowned. “And we need to discover who else is ponying up that kind of cash to these places or others like them.”
Ma-Singh considered that. “You’re looking for the heads of the other Houses.”
“Wasn’t Soo?”
“Madame Soo didn’t count the Houses as her competition, not in the end. For that, we need to look no further than Gamon. The feud between them grew personal and consumed all of Madame Soo’s attention.”
I let that pass, because I’d known Soo in those final days. She had been fixated on Gamon, fixated and oddly reckless, as if willing her time to be at an end.
The conversation moved on from there, facts and data points and positions on the map eventually blurring together. I called a stop to the meeting, and Nikki groaned in relief.
“If you seriously thought I was going to survive on this spread, we clearly have not been spending enough time together,” Nikki pouted. “There’s usually a food truck down at the lake club around this time. Let’s motor.”
We slipped away while Nigel and Ma-Singh decided to take another look at the maps, and Nikki strode quickly enough to leave all conversation to the side until we exited the palatial house into the mirror-bright sunshine again. If anything, she seemed to pick up speed at this point, her long legs eating up the asphalt until we reached her Jeep.
We slid inside, and I stared at her. “So, what’s your glitch? Who died? Who got married?”
“Girl, what is going on with you and the Magician?” she asked instead.
I blinked.
“What?” I struggled to remember what had happened since the last time Armaeus and I had spoken, which had been before I’d gone to Paris. “I haven’t seen him since after the fight with Chanda Som. He healed me, same as always.” Not quite the same as always, of course. There was the small part about him making me immortal. But details.
As if picking up on this deception, Nikki snorted, shoving the vehicle into gear. She backed out with a roar, then spun the wheel, sending the Jeep bouncing down the driveway.
“I can’t believe you’re not going to come clean on this,” she said. “I’m your friend! Your confidante! Your soul mate. And here you leave me high and dry.”
I stared at her. “What are you talking about? You can see into my brain if you want to, what I see and what I think I see. If there was something all that exciting going on, don’t you think you’d know it?”
“Who knows with you—every time I turn around, you’re leveling up.” Nikki flapped a hand at me. “And I don’t look without permission. All I’m saying is Armaeus has been acting not at all normally over the past several days. Whatever healing you guys did together clearly rubbed him the right way.” She eyed me. “Though you kind of still look like roadkill, now that I see you up close.”
I rolled my eyes. “And why do you think Armaeus has changed, exactly?”
“Flamingo bar, three nights this week, he and Kreios have been seen—and I mean seen, seen, like by actual Unconnecteds. Like they’re the New Age Rat Pack or something, fancy suits, lots of money, yukking it up. They’ve brought in so many millennial players to the Flamingo that the old people at the penny slots are starting to complain.”
I full-on gaped at her now. “Armaeus and Kreios. At the Flamingo.” While the Magician and the Devil occasionally walked the Strip in a guise that mortals could process, they didn’t make a habit of it. And they never cared about the riffraff paying attention to them. “What’s their game?”
“I figured you were.”
I shook my head quickly. “We—no
thing happened, Nikki. Not like that. He healed me, yes, sort of.” Of course, he’d also been the one to injure me this time around, so that was only fair. “And we did a test drive of magic, but it’s not like we had sex or anything.”
She threw me another look, searching my face earnestly. “Because yeah, you would tell me that, right, doll? I’m your friend. Your confidante.”
“Soul mate, got it,” I said, laughing. “Yes, I would tell you.”
“Good. Because there're some other things I should tell you, too,” she said, blowing out a breath. I picked up on a level of nerves that went far beyond Kreios and Armaeus going all money on the city for no reason. “Soul mate to soul mate. But I think it’ll be easier to show you.” She looked in her rearview mirror at the rapidly dwindling mansion. “You gotta be back at any particular time?”
I hesitated, and even in that hesitation realized how much had changed. Up until a few weeks ago, I’d spent most of my time trying to get out of being tracked or followed or roped into meetings. Now those things revolved around me. I flashed Nikki my phone with a grimace. “Lemme text Nigel that you and I are going shopping. And that I’m going to spend the night at the Palazzo. He’ll believe it, and if you’re with me, he won’t worry.”
Nikki grinned. “I so like that in a man. Brains, brawn, and the good sense not to get in my way.” She continued on blithely. “Dixie asked me to stop by the chapel to give me an update.”
I lifted my brows. “Update on what?”
“God knows,” Nikki said, sounding less evasive than stressed. What was her deal? She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as she drove, her manner almost manic. “But you were gone for days, girl, and no matter that I could crawl around in your head, I’d rather get it from you straight. What else happened in France? Did you run into trouble?”
The question proved appropriately distracting, and I launched into the tale, enjoying the catch-up time more than I expected to. I paid no attention to where Nikki was driving, and it seemed like she didn’t either, winding us around and through all the standard haunts of the city, up and down the Strip and around again.
By the time we cruised up to the familiar white stucco building of the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars, I realized that I’d relaxed enough to laugh. The worries that had erupted in Paris with the children and the Interpol agents and the still sickly Chantal and her even more frail baby and Father Jerome and his safe house seemed very far away when confronted with a long line of geese dressed in wedding tuxes and bright pink bridesmaids’ gowns, waddling under a white stucco tower that ended in a garish neon starburst.
“Man, it feels like forever since I’ve been to Dixie’s,” I said. Beside me, Nikki snorted, but she didn’t get out of the car right away.
I glanced over to the other shop of importance in this strip mall, Darkworks Ink. It seemed it’d been a long time since I’d been there too. Yet we were simply sitting here, baking in the sun, not moving…
Suddenly, I got it.
I turned around to stare at Nikki. Whether or not she’d been legitimately summoned, she’d driven me here to show me something. I was going to learn something inside Dixie’s drive-through wedding chapel that, from the way she was acting, was going to bother me. A lot.
“What?” I asked, exasperated. “Are Brody and Dixie married? Getting married? Pregnant? In jail?” With each question, Nikki’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, which only made me feel worse, not better. What could be worse than Brody arrested?
“Seriously, Nikki, I can take it. Unless he’s in jail. Because that would be bad.”
“He’s not in jail.”
“Okay, well, fine, then.” I took my attitudinal temperature and was surprised to find it well within the normal range. “Because if Brody’s happy with Dixie—well, I’m happy. The crush I had on him died a long time ago, and I am good with it dying. If he’s ready to move on, I’m ready to move on.”
Nikki winced. “Moving on isn’t really the problem, dollface.”
Before she could explain further, however, a car pulled in beside us. I looked over, instantly recognizing the beat-up sedan. “You know, for a detective who’s supposed to be stealthy on occasion, he sure should consider changing up his ride sometimes.”
Despite Nikki’s muttered curse, I popped out of the vehicle with a smile, once again checking my attitude gauge. Brody engaged? Didn’t care. Brody and Dixie pregnant? Made me exhausted to think about, but ultimately, didn’t care. Brody wasn’t in jail, he clearly was still on the job for the LVMPD, and he regarded me with easy affection, even camaraderie as I came around the back of Nikki’s Jeep.
“The prodigal daughter returns. Again,” he said, with only a slight edge to his tone. I found myself glad to see him, even if he didn’t make my heart go pitty-pat anymore. He still looked much like the young Officer Brody who’d starred in a thousand daydreams of my youth, when my mom had offered up my card-reading services to the Memphis police. A rookie cop at the time, Brody had been stuck with the community service job of being nice to the weird kid—not expecting me to actually prove to be helpful at finding lost kids. Medium height, medium build, he had scruffy brown hair and soft blue-gray eyes, his sun-tanned face creased with equal parts worry and laugh lines. He was steady and reliable, and that counted for a lot these days.
Now he leaned against the trunk of his car and swung his gaze to Nikki as she exited the jeep.
“Good God, Nikki,” he blurted. “What are you wearing?”
Not even Nikki could resist Brody’s openmouthed stare. She cocked out a hip to show off her bodysuit. “Only the latest in mixed martial arts fight gear—except the boots.” She peered at her feet. “Those would totally not fly in combat, but I couldn’t resist.”
“Since when do MMA fighters get into the ring wearing skin suits?”
“Since they don’t want to bleed and sweat all over everything.” She held out her arms with a flourish. “Moisture-wicking, cooldown material specifically engineered to handle multiple types of perspiration, whether caused by adrenaline or exertion. They’re different, you know.”
“They are?” I was willing to let myself be carried along in this game. Nikki was still acting weird, but Brody wasn’t. So whatever it was she was worried about, he clearly didn’t think I’d care. Brody was a guy, so he couldn’t be fully trusted on this score, but he also wasn’t an idiot.
If he had popped the question to Dixie, he’d be more nervous than he was, worried about telling me.
Wouldn’t he?
“Hey, I haven’t been over to Darkworks Ink for a while,” Nikki said, swinging her gaze to the tattoo parlor opposite the chapel. “We should check that out, doll.”
“Actually, if you wanted to see Dixie, she’s only free for a little while,” Brody said. “We’ve got to head out shortly.”
There it was, again, I realized as I watched Nikki react to Brody’s words. That frisson of nerves. I nodded enthusiastically as Nikki turned back to me, her face losing some of its determined cheer.
“That sounds great!” I said, gesturing to Brody. “I haven’t seen her in forever. How’s she doing?”
“Why, as I live and breathe, Sara! Nikki didn’t tell me you were back.”
The breathy voice sounded a little more Marilyn Monroe than usual, and Nikki froze as Dixie Quinn appeared in the shaded overhang to the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars. Today she was wearing a pink fluttery tank top over acid-washed jeans, her wrists jangling with about fifty-seven charm bracelets and her flowing golden hair covered with her trademark pink cowboy hat. Her boots were also pink, but her pants weren’t tucked into them but hanging straight—a move that constituted formal wear for Dixie.
“How are you?” she asked, beaming at me as she held out both her hands. Dixie was a hugger. I instinctively mistrusted huggers. But with Nikki guarding my back, I stepped forward and returned her embrace. She turned to Nikki next, and they did the pretty, then she grinned as she envel
oped Brody in a cloud of knockoff Chanel No. 5. I had my attitude thermometer ready to jam down someone’s throat if things got too intimate right there in front of God, the world, and all those geese, but Dixie just hugged Brody and gave him an almost chaste kiss—the two of them eminently comfortable in their couplehood.
I checked myself. Cool as a clam. No worries here.
“You about ready?” Brody asked, a little gruffly to my ears, but Dixie smiled and linked her arm in his.
“I am. I’ve been at work all morning on it. And Sara! I wanted to update Nikki but you should get up to speed too. Brody’s got me running up one street and down the other, but I swear, I’ve never been happier in my life.”
“Happier…?” I frowned, as Nikki grimaced beside me. “Why happier?”
“Oh my stars. You’ve been out of the country. Of course you didn’t know.” Dixie beamed. “I’m all official now. Brody’s brought me on board to work missing persons cases with the police!”
Chapter Fourteen
That little announcement pretty much cracked the crap out of my attitude thermometer, but I gave Dixie a bright smile in return. “Hey, that’s great!”
Fortunately, Dixie whirled toward the door before my face fell off, eager to show off how efficient a helper she was. “I never thought I’d be working for the police, but it’s been so rewarding. So many more people to save, and not all of them are even Connected! But of course, some of them are.” She dimpled back at us as Nikki and I followed her bouncy blonde curls inside the chapel. “We do tend to get into an awful lot of trouble.”