Never had I met such a spirit. Never had Arne or any of the elves warned me, either.
But I was pretty sure I knew what kind of spirit Portia Elizabeth was—and why I wasn’t surprised she’d chosen Sin City as her base of operations.
Stars and clouds drifted by outside. Under us, dots glimmered like islands in the pitch black. Not many cities filled the plains between Minneapolis and Las Vegas.
“Remy,” I said.
He looked up as he pulled out a blanket from the pocket next to his seat.
“We’re going to Vegas to look for a succubus, aren’t we?”
He tucked a pillow against the side of his seat and leaned back. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”
Chapter 8
A lot of primal spirits were demonized in the early Christian days of the Roman Empire. Lots of the world’s magical ecology was wiped away by the howling onslaught that was hurricanes Constantine and Justinian. Such is the way of fearful, powerful men.
Not a lot has changed.
So I suspected that the spirit who called herself Portia Elizabeth wasn’t the man-eater the label “succubus” suggested. I just didn’t know what else to call her.
But that didn’t diminish the danger she presented to those who did not understand who and what she embodied. Not that I understood, but at least I knew what I was getting myself into, and knowing what you are walking into is half the battle.
The plane taxied to the charter terminal and our pilots increased the lights enough that we could disembark. They thanked us both, and we stepped off the little Cessna into the nighttime, desert air.
Too much dry, dusty heat hit me full in the face.
Night in the desert carried a different kind of predatory ambiance than in northern climates. Here, no trees hid monsters. No lakes or rivers or streams blocked a frontal attack.
Here, only the shadows stood between you and the stalking beasts.
We were deep enough into autumn that the night temperatures had dropped to brisk, but the air still desiccated my lungs as if someone had stuffed me full of silica packets.
Remy, though, didn’t seem to mind. Remy seemed right at home.
He stretched and yawned, and sniffed at the cool night air. “Jet fuel.” He leaned his head to the side and sniffed again. “Insomnia.” He leaned the other way. “And the Placebo Effect.”
I shook my head.
Remy threw wide his arms and walked backward toward the bright lights of the terminal. “Happiness is a drug, my friend, and Vegas is the biggest medicinal lie there is.”
I laughed. So under it all, Remy didn’t like Vegas any more than I did.
He touched his nose before turning around. “The desert is the true drug,” he called over his shoulder.
We checked through the terminal and made our way to our waiting rental. I wanted to settle into our hotel on The Strip and sleep. Remy had other plans.
None of his online searches had pulled up anything or anyone who might be our target, but he still had leads. “Mark didn’t remember the address specifics of the apartments,” he said.
Mark Ellis, the wolf molested by the vampires, had spent about a year or so as a transient before Gerard and Remy found him. Most of that time had been in the Southwest.
Somewhere in the city, magicals lived in an apartment complex. Mark remembered talk while there of a “woman in red” who could have been a succubus.
Mark figured the apartments had some sort of low-level concealment enchantment that made remembering specifics difficult.
Remy figured I’d see the magic around the building even with a low-level enchantment.
We find the apartments. We ask questions. And hopefully, we find Portia Elizabeth.
“We have four days,” he said as he tossed his bag into the back of the rental SUV. “We start now.”
Four days to find one spirit in a city of two million people. “What’s the magical population here?” I asked.
The SUV dinged as he inserted the key. “There’s no permanent enclave of elves or kami, if that’s what you’re asking. This place is too transient for any of the magicals to take root.” Remy smoothed the front of his dress shirt.
The kami had North American enclaves in San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and New York City. Their largest and most powerful New World enclave operated in Peru, and tended toward “unseemly behavior,” according to the elves. I never asked for specifics. But the kami were generally better at the complexities—seemly and unseemly alike—than any of the other magicals, except the wolves and elves of Alfheim.
So a small kami enclave in Las Vegas seemed possible. But without permanent magical residents, we would most likely be talking to mundanes. And at this time of the night, mundanes liked to talk, and any little help we could muster to find our target, the better.
Night magic, Rose used to call it, and it was utterly of the mundanes. At night, they were prey, and nothing makes prey huddle more than the threat of unseen predators.
Remy was both predator and protector. He confused the magic and opened up the souls of the afraid.
We slid past the rental yard’s gates and into the Las Vegas night.
The Strip never shut down. The hotels and casinos never closed. The lights stayed on and the money rolled, but the desert always nipped at the shores of the mundanes’ island of fantasy.
The desert magic, though, felt less hospitable than Alfheim, as if it understood that Las Vegas wasn’t a simple buoy. Vegas was a drilling platform in the middle of pristine waters and the ocean here was not happy about its presence.
Remy understood. He might be more protector than predator, but his hackles were up, and his concentration keen on the dark streets flowing by outside the SUV.
Remy’s nose wrinkled. “Don’t you smell it?” he asked. “The transience?”
The last time I set foot in Vegas, you needed to go outside to travel The Strip. Now, the hotels were all intertwined inside a net of shopping-mall-like hallways and restaurant-lined tunnels. Once you entered, you literally did not need to step outside into the heat unless you wanted to visit “old Vegas” or take a daytrip into the desert.
Nothing about the setup felt cozy. Or transient. It felt like an inescapable trap.
“Not so much smell as see,” I said.
Remy stopped for a light. The stoplights hung on their poles and the desert crept in on the heat wafting off the still-hot pavement. Up ahead, the unending glow of The Strip still could not fight back the blackness of the night sky.
“You see magic here?” Remy asked.
I hadn’t really looked. Every location had a natural magic. Plants, animals, mundanes and magicals—they produced currents. And currents meant energy, but cities had a technological energy that swamped any- and everything natural.
We were a few blocks off The Strip. The houses here were “vintage.” The concrete, old and cracked by decades of desert sun. This part of Las Vegas had a griminess—but not dirt. Dust blew in—some parts of nature would not be deterred—and the constant blasting stripped paint and patina alike.
Or perhaps the mundanes here had been stripped of their faces and facades.
Maybe, perhaps, places like this were where the mundanes rubbed up against magic. Maybe people made wishes in these forgotten corners of humanity. Perhaps here was where magicals were born.
I shook my head and frowned. I must have been more exhausted than I thought.
“Maybe,” I said. Was I looking at magic?
Most of the ambient magic floating between the walled yards and deserted convenience stores mimicked the golds and greens of the glitz and glimmer rising over The Strip. It carried right angles. It stopped and started. But it also pulled and coiled in ways that suggested that whatever they’d paved over to build the hotels had been powerful indeed.
My gut said that deep underground, there was a primordial importance here. There were also people. The waves of magic around me supported my instincts. But honestly, I knew n
othing of this place beyond my own distaste.
“I’m not sure what I’m looking at,” I said.
Remy sniffed again. “And that, I believe, is the core of Las Vegas.” He straightened his cuffs as he looked up at my face. “This place is a glamour.”
Perhaps. Though my gut said glamour wasn’t quite the correct descriptor.
“Watch for magicals and mundanes who understand what we are.” He turned left onto one of the major streets leading to The Strip. “Someone might know something.”
Every road in Las Vegas led to The Strip. Every corner, every path. Everything led to the pillar of light cutting through the terror of the night.
Beyond the horizon, out on the edge of the world, the cherry-red glow of the approaching dawn ever-so-slightly backlit the mountains.
We were about to lose the night magic. I peered at the smaller, older hotels and casinos rising up along the edges of Las Vegas’s wonderland.
There had to be someone here, somewhere.
“There.” I pointed at a boardwalk overhang of one of the smaller, older casinos. The lights blared, but the gates were still closed even though the sign proudly advertised “24 hours of gaming.”
A trail of craggy magic drifted through the casino’s one open entrance.
Whoever this magical was, he or she wasn’t particularly good at full glamours.
Remy pulled up front and rolled down the windows. He sniffed. “Hmmm…” he said. The wolves could scent out just about anything. “I do believe you are correct.”
We parked. As we walked toward the entrance, Remy adjusted the cufflinks he’d put in before we exited the plane. He’d decided to play “rich, magical high roller” for the evening and that the cufflinks would be enough to transform his travel white shirt and black slacks into a persona that garnered respect. I, in my jeans and t-shirt, was to be his de facto bodyguard.
Ornate, intricate chandeliers hung from the ceiling and added a hint of deadly nature to the casino floor. Lights behind the glass oscillated and the entire structure rotated through a brittle rainbow of dangerous stalactites.
A hint of lovely danger never hurt to get the blood pumping and the money flowing.
Slot machines dinged. Dealers called out cards. The roulette table jangled and jingled, and the three drunken old men pushed chips toward their chosen color.
The shadows between the banks of slots thickened into coarse points of darkness that, to my magic-seeing eyes, looked as if they had a prickly texture.
A bored, dark-haired woman with no obvious magic wiped at a glass behind the bar and watched us walk across the casino floor. She didn’t give us any more attention than she gave the drunk at the end of the bar.
One older lady with her cup of fake gold casino coins looked up at us. Her eyes narrowed—and the magic around her puckered.
Troll, I thought. A real troll. The dangerous kind who stayed away from humans. They tended to fixate on specific locations—mountains, hills, boulders, and bridges—and never left unless driven out.
Remy grinned. “Well, well,” he said, and walked toward her slot machine. “Look what we have here.”
Her glamour reflected the disparity between her visible size and what the air currents around her suggested. She was hunched, and condensed, but gave off a clear air of appearing smaller than she truly was.
Her gray hair gave off a granite-purple cast even in the golden casino light, as if, as a troll, she had already made her peace with her eventual turning to stone. The wrinkles of her face lacked a true three-dimensionality, as if she didn’t quite understand how to glamour properly.
The screen on her slot machine screamed through images and colors, and cast a sulfur-fire glow onto her loose old-lady polyester and her gaudy, gold jewelry.
She curled her hand over her big cup of coins and hissed at Remy. “Wolf,” she spat out.
Remy extended his hand. “Remy Geroux,” he said. “Alfheim Pack Alpha.”
She clutched the cup to her chest and sunk into the padding of her chair. “You live with elves,” she spat out in a clipped, Danish accent. She looked me up and down. “What are you?”
“I’m a jotunn,” I said.
She slapped her leg. A loud, chortling cackle followed, and she pointed a finger at my chest. “Do not let real jotnar hear you say that, boy!”
I glanced at Remy. He shrugged. “Real jotnar” were not likely to show up any time soon. Or at least that was what Arne claimed.
The troll continued to cackle. “So many of you in my space,” she coughed out.
“I thought trolls stayed away from mundanes,” Remy said.
She sniffed and held out her hand. “Vacation for the arthritis.” She shook her head as if Remy was the dumbest wolf she’d ever encountered. “Too many tourists visit my rocks, now. The warm is better.”
“Casinos aren’t exactly natural,” I said.
She pointed at the floor. “Still land.” She pointed upward. “Still mountain.” Then swirled her finger at the chandelier-encrusted ceiling. “Still cave.”
“Still gold.” Remy pointed at her cup.
Trolls had the same variety of attributes among their kind that the wolves, vampires, and all magicals other than the elves did—if there was a story, that particular type of troll walked the Earth somewhere.
This one liked gold more than she detested humans.
She rubbed at her cheek. “You still wolf.” She forced the final ‘f’ sound out between her lips as if she was a deflating tire.
Remy leaned over so they were eye-to-eye. “There’s a place here. An apartment complex. One of my wolves stayed there not too long ago. We need to find it,” he said.
The troll’s lips thinned. She clearly knew of the place. “Why would I care where the locals live?” she said.
“We’re looking for someone,” Remy said.
The troll frowned. “Of course you are. You be the big bad wolf.” She deflated the ‘f’ again. “Your kind gets fixated.”
“Fixated? This from a troll,” Remy said.
She sniffed at him again. “You an old wolf. Old wolves not trustworthy.”
Remy rolled his eyes. “A woman. A spirit. Affects men.” Remy’s cheek twitched.
“Oh! You stalking, wolfie? Woof woof.” She swirled her finger again. “The mundanes have laws now, you know.”
Remy simply stared at her. No blinking. No pinching the bridge of his nose. Only a silent, still, pointed glare directly at her eyes.
She looked away. “Lots of women here affect men.”
“How many?” I asked. Were succubi common? I had no idea.
The troll pointed at Remy’s platinum cufflinks. “Want.”
Most of the wolves had an issue with silver. For some, contact led to hives and a lot of itching. For some, it caused a full-on allergic reaction including closed-up airways and heart palpitations. Platinum wasn’t an issue, though.
Remy growled.
The troll tisked.
He sighed and removed his links. She held out her hand but he shook his head and closed his fingers over the jewelry. “Information first.”
The troll frowned. “The place you seek. It’s near.”
Remy withdrew his hand and dropped his links into his pocket. “You know more. I smell it on you.” Remy angled his shoulders as if he was about to walk away.
“Hey!” she screeched—and swung at Remy.
In one blink of the eye, she was the small, craggy old lady holding a cup of coins, and in the next, she was as big as me.
Bigger than me. She pulled back her arm to swipe at Remy again and her knuckles raked across the chandeliers.
The tinkling of cut crystal added the casino equivalent of white noise to the room and for a split-second, it filled all the corners and crevices. The shadows winked. Remy rolled out from under her grasp. She howled and swiped with her now-huge hand to snag him around his waist.
She backhanded me with her other fist—and glued my shoulder to her hand
with some sort of extruded tar. I stumbled into a bank of slots, but dug in my heels and braced against her push.
Her attention shifted from Remy to me. Her eyes narrowed, but at least she didn’t howl again. She simply released whatever had stuck me to her.
It clung to my skin and my shirt. Decay halfway between compost and sulfurous rock wafted off whatever it was.
She opened her hand as if calling it back to herself.
The pull knocked me off balance. The entire bolted-together structure of slots rocked. Alarms blared. Someone near the bar yelled.
I looked up. The bartender had vanished and left her cloth and glass on the bar. The drunk sitting on the stool ignored everything. And a security guard off to the left bounced on the balls of his feet as if utterly confused.
Remy threw the troll’s cup of casino coins at her face.
She danced to the side but yowled at her falling gold. A wave of the sticky stuff sprayed over Remy.
He swore. A guard yelled. The troll looked over her shoulder and pulled her tar back.
In yet another blink of the eye she returned to her little old lady glamour.
She stuck out her tongue and sprinted toward the exit.
I had no idea trolls could move so quickly. She made the glass doors before Remy made it halfway across the floor.
She looked over her shoulder, then at the dawn outside, then at us again, and I swear her face changed. What had been anger and dumb indignation switched over to the realization that she hadn’t thought through her escape. That, perhaps, she’d made the wrong move.
But it was too late. She stepped onto the wide rubber mat meant to capture sand and raised her arms as if to shield her face. She was about to run outside even though she obviously knew doing so was a bad idea.
“Hey!” Remy yelled. “Don’t go out into—”
Elf Raised (Northern Creatures Book 3) Page 6