by Jenn Stark
A jolt of electricity strong enough to set my hair on fire burst through my consciousness. I gasped and realized I’d been speared through the belly with—something. A long, glowing lance that pulsed and shivered, cold as death. I reached to pull it out, and my hands went right through it. Illusion, but a damned painful one.
“Not exactly illusion.” The smug voice shivered along my nerves. “What did you think of the work here? Immortality from an elixir, Sara Wilde, not from the hands of a god. Far better, don’t you think?”
I hung in place, still pinned by the imaginary spear, but no one appeared in front of me to match the voice, and I couldn’t focus on anything but the piercing pain in my gut. Pain that intensified when I didn’t answer right away.
“This isn’t your work,” I gritted out. “You’re just an eavesdropper, on the outside looking in. Legit drug companies are the real boots on the ground here, the real heroes. Not turn-of-the-century nutters who don’t know…” I winced at the new surge of pain. Where the hell were Armaeus and Eshe? “When to die.”
“I’m many things, Sara Wilde. Insane is not one of them. You of all people should know that.”
With another zap of electricity, the electrical spear unskewered me, throwing me to the ground despite the fact that I still had no true form—there shouldn’t have been anything for that lance to impale. Except now I was corporeal, somehow. I’d been electrified into a denser form.
More importantly, I wasn’t alone.
Standing before me was my equal and opposite, another figure who shifted out of the electrical streams and took definite form, a man with his left hand raised holding what looked like an umbrella of spitting electrical streams that arced out around us.
It was, unmistakably, Nikola Tesla. A young version of him anyway, before he’d lost all his teeth. I marked his appearance as that of a man no more than thirty years old. Tall, slender, with perfectly brushed-back hair and a tailored suit looking straight out of the 1940s, he had crazy dark eyes, pale skin, and an aristocratic smile that seemed both urbane and condescending at once. His fingers were long—almost oddly so, and he gestured with his right hand gracefully as he executed a deep bow.
“Look long and well, Sara Wilde, then run back to your Council and tell them the opportunities of the world are beginning to be realized. Tell them there has never been a better time to be a human—or a worse time to be a Council member. They’ll not dare silence me now, not with all I know.”
Taking advantage of my pseudo-physical form, I managed to roll my eyes. Tesla’s speech was way too Evil Overlord. Then again, the man had been digitized during the Second World War and probably hadn’t had an actual conversation with anyone since.
“Why don’t you tell them yourself?” I asked. “They need you.”
“No.” Tesla sneered. “The Council’s needs no longer supplant those of the people. It’s time your precious Magician learned that for himself.”
“Come on, he’s not that bad.”
Something in my voice seemed to trigger Tesla. He focused on me with an almost physical touch, the breath coming through his teeth in a sharp hiss. “You care for him. You’re not a Council member, you know you’re being used, manipulated, and yet you still care for him.”
Beyond Tesla, the glowing dome of this electrical cage spit and flickered, but the jagged streaks of electricity looked decidedly weaker. Progress.
“Maybe,” I egged him on, studiously not staring at the dome but at his outraged face. “He’s taught me quite a lot.”
“But don’t you understand? Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s hemming you in, exactly as he tried to do with me. Boxing you up to take you out only when he needs you. I can give you more, Sara Wilde. I can give you everything—everything he’s hidden from you, everything you most need to achieve your potential.”
“That…sounds pretty good,” I said, half listening. Okay, maybe more than half listening, but my number one priority here was to get away from the crazy man, not create a business plan with him. “Of course, we’ve already discovered quite a lot on our own. Like some breakthroughs even you haven’t made.”
Tesla’s focus on me intensified, and the dome around us grew that much weaker.
“Turns out Soo was sneakier than any of us realized,” I said.
“Her facility,” Tesla said sharply. “It’s warded.”
“Even against you. Imagine that.” I lifted my hand as if to wave off his outrage. “Turns out, she’s hit the Connected amplifier jackpot.”
Tesla started sputtering—literally sputtering, asking me a series of rapid-fire questions. As casually as I could manage, I stretched out my own fingers, willing the electrons in the surrounding field, his own electrons, to draw toward me, to become one with the perfect symmetry of my hand, my body, my—
“What are you—no!” Tesla’s sudden shout broke through my concentration.
Whatever I did, it worked, but God’s teeth, was there a price.
The blast of electrical pain was so intense, it seared my nerve endings to numbness, and I found myself tumbling through the air, unable to orient, unable to fixate. A cry burst forth, a shattered scream, and then there was nothing but light, endless crackling light, filling the whole sky and setting it on fire. I shivered and rolled and eventually collided into a different kind of strength, an unfamiliar one, not Armaeus at all, but—
“Steady. Steady now.”
A new voice sounded in my ear—no, not new, familiar but too close, too sure, too attached to the arms that now closed around me, stopping my free-spinning roll into outer space and bringing me back down to earth, to Vegas…to home.
I woke up on the carpet of Armaeus’s penthouse office, covered in a blanket and my own sticky sweat. I also suspected strongly I was going to be sick.
Eshe crouched beside me.
“You always have to do things the hard way, don’t you?” she murmured.
“That…sucked.” I flinched away from her hands and shoved the blanket off me. She followed me with the cloth she held, drawing it over my forehead. It felt good, I had to admit, but this was Eshe we were talking about here. She was about as nurturing as a crocodile.
“How’d you get stuck on cleanup duty?” I grumbled. Pulling myself up to a seated position, I leaned against the wing-back chair, clutching my stomach to keep all my insides inside.
“Your reconnaissance mission was an unprecedented success,” she said drily, settling back on her heels. “Simon and Armaeus gathered enough detail from your rambling to hit on a solution—apparently, you lifted some sort of digital fingerprint from Tesla, and that fingerprint can be tracked.”
“Great,” I said, grimacing as she intercepted my lurch upward and helped me get settled in the chair. “Are they coming back? Or can I go?”
Her brows lifted. “I assumed you would wait for Armaeus to return to, ah…assist you with your recovery.” She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t do healings.”
“One of the reasons I always liked you.”
I sucked in a deep breath and stood without Eshe’s assistance, pleased to discover that I only wobbled a little. “Tell me something,” I said, studying the High Priestess as she also stood. “Who’s side are you on with Tesla rejoining the Council? Do you think it’s a good thing, or a bad thing?”
To my surprise, Eshe seemed to consider the question legitimately. Her gaze was direct, and her lips quirked into a hard smile. “It’s a good thing. Armaeus is right to reassemble the Council, to allow us to be at our strongest for the coming trials…whether those trials originate among the mortals or greater powers. Despite that, it’s a foolish move for him personally. Tesla never did accept the Magician’s absolute adherence to the Council’s mission of noninterference.”
“He wanted magic for all.”
“Exactly,” she said. “From my perspective, however, Tesla is a romantic, a scientist too in love with his creation to fully understand the ramifications of it. And that’s a person who will
prove to be a thorny distraction for Armaeus. Where there’s a distraction…” She lifted one elegant shoulder. “There’s opportunity.”
I knew she was waiting for me to say, “Opportunity for what?” but I couldn’t do it. Everything inside me was sliding around dangerously, and all I wanted was fresh air and sunshine.
“Right,” I said, and I turned toward the elevator. Eshe waited until I had almost reached the elevator bank before delivering her final salvo.
“You’re a distraction too, you know,” she said as the doors opened. I limped inside, turning back to glare at her. Her smile was calculating.
“Maybe. But a distraction for who, I wonder?” I asked, rewarded by the change in her expression even as the doors snicked shut.
My victory proved fleeting as I sagged against the cool metal of the elevator, whimpering as it plunged back to earth. I barely made it out of the Luxor’s lobby before another wave of nausea struck me, and I flagged down a cab, giving the instructions in a feeble voice as I folded myself into the car. I didn’t bother being accurate. Dixie’s chapel was far more of a landmark than the tattoo parlor where Death worked, and the cabbie wisely refrained from commenting on my decision to go to a wedding chapel as I struggled not to die.
The trip took less time than I expected, or I passed out. Either way, by the time I stumbled into Darkworks Ink, I could barely see three feet in front of me.
I was used to feeling like crap after astral travel, but this…was different. Very different. And I had a feeling Death could tell me why.
Jimmy Shadow, the manager at Darkworks Ink, moved out from behind the counter as I lurched through the door. Despite the fact that I outweighed him by a fair margin, he caught me in a strong grip as my feet seemed to move in opposite directions.
“You know, just for once I’d like her to be wrong,” he muttered.
“Huz-muzzah?” I managed as he muscled me back through the doorway that led to the parlor’s main corridor. I was completely blind now, my eyes dazzled by a cascade of streaking lights that couldn’t seem to decide which direction they wanted to swirl. By the time Jimmy got me to the third room to the right, and the open chair that sat in the middle of the room, I’d begun shaking. Hard.
“You didn’t take the pills.”
Death’s voice cut through my spasms but didn’t make me feel any better. My tongue was now too big in my mouth, and breathing took all my focus. I dimly heard her stride across the room to me, the thud of her heavy boots ringing in my ears. Without saying anything more, she knocked my head to the side, exposing my neck. The next thing I felt was a sharp prick to my neck. I surged up, but Jimmy had a viselike grip on me, his sawdust-raspy voice rattling off soothing nonsense until finally Death spoke again.
“You want to tell me why?” she asked, though her voice was more amused than irritated. Good to know I was still worth a laugh.
Gingerly, I scooted up in the heavy leather chair, lifting a hand to my neck. The lights were diminishing now, though I felt like my retinas had been permanently burned. The nausea was also subsiding.
“Did you just inject me with silver?” I half gagged. “For reals?”
“Among other things,” she said. “What’d you do with the pills I gave you?”
“Planted them to grow silver trees,” I grunted. I blinked at her, saw she was pulling up her rolling ink station, settling herself on her stool. “What’re you doing?”
“Figure I’d work on you while we talked. You haven’t finished this design. You wanted to be able to find Nikki and get her out of any trouble, if she ever got into any, which is likely if she’s going to become an Ace.” She pointed to my arm. “That won’t do you any good if you don’t have a way to get her back.”
For the second time in five minutes, I endured a needle piercing my skin, but at least this time, I could watch it happen.
“Why’d you want me to eat the silver?” I asked. “And why would it have helped now? I thought the whole ‘silver cure’ thing was bullshit.”
Death snorted. “It is, the way it’s commonly used. But, as with most homeopathic cures, there is a seed of truth amid all the mysticism. What I gave you was pure silver, as pure as those seals we pulled out of the Granite mine. That makes it different.” She didn’t wait for me to ask the next logical question, but pressed on. “You’ve figured out that the foundation for most of Arcana magic is electrical. Silver—particularly pure silver—is a conductive agent for that electricity. In the formulation I gave you, it helps you manage the changes to your DNA—so your body has to work less, and the transition isn’t as exhausting.”
“Ah.” In other words, I wouldn’t be so tired, I suspected.
“It also helps any new influxes of electricity ride along your skin versus sink into your body. That’s important if you’re going to continue to hold onto live wires the way you have.”
I lifted my brows. “You knew that was going to happen?”
Death looked up at me, her eyes cold and stark. “Of course.”
“Did you know you’d have to eat souls?” She didn’t bother to answer that, but I persisted. “You know how all this ends, don’t you.”
She shrugged at that. “I know all its possible endings, yes. Some are more likely than others. Some ebb, others flow. Life is constantly in flux. It’s best not to get attached to any one outcome.”
“That’s super helpful,” I sighed. I let my eyes flutter closed, listening to the whirr of Death’s ink machine. Without question, I felt better. No more streaking lights, no more nausea. All because of a shot of silver?
I frowned, remembering other events of that first night with Death.
“What’s the significance of the seals?” I asked. “What’s Armaeus going to use them for?” I blinked my eyes open. “They were inscribed with geometrical patterns. Including the Flower of Life. Did…”
“Tesla made those seals, yes. He didn’t realize why at the time. He might still not. The Granite mine wasn’t his focus in 1893, but Armaeus understood that it could be, if things went a certain way. So he commissioned Tesla to build the seals, and the man never realized they would be used against him.”
“Because you warned him,” I said, suddenly getting it. “You warned Armaeus of all the possibilities, and he took action to keep Tesla hemmed in.”
Death sat back on her stool, admiring her handiwork. I glanced down at the elaborate design she’d etched into my skin, a combination of spikes, smoke, and interlocking throwing stars. Nikki would approve.
When I looked up again, Death’s cold gaze was on me. “Tesla figured out some of it, not all, but enough. And he never could understand why Armaeus had betrayed him—had successfully limited his power. His outrage fueled his creative genius, giving mankind some of its greatest gifts…but it also exacted a toll on him.”
“Like his sanity?”
Death wheeled back her stool, giving me room to stand. “Be careful of Nikola Tesla, Sara,” she said. “The power he wields has not yet reached its greatest heights. When it does, he’ll seek to apply it to whomever he thinks he can break first. Someone whose abilities are peaking but who hasn’t quite had the humanity stripped from her.”
Faces of the Connected children raced through my mind, souring my stomach.
“Yes.” Death pointed at me, her finger a smoking gun. “That would be you.”
Chapter Twenty
Nikki was waiting for me in the lobby of Darkworks Ink, flipping through one of Jimmy’s giant books of flash tattoo designs. “I’m thinking the Cheshire Cat,” she mused as I stepped out from the back. “Maybe on my ankle.”
Jimmy shook his head as Nikki’s gaze swung to me.
“Cavalry called,” she said, fluffing her once-again auburn hair. She’d switched out of the bodysuit into loose cargo pants, a tight black tank top, and army boots, a pair of reflective Ray-Bans slung from the neckline of her tank. All she needed was an AK-47 and she could be a video game avatar. “Well, part of the cavalry. Dixie.�
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“Dixie?” I asked, frowning. “Not Brody?”
“Predictably, Detective Delish has shut her out now that they’ve apparently found something hinky at the medical lab. There’s gonna be some sort of raid, she thinks, and she wants to make sure any innocent Connecteds get out of there before it happens. They’ll never talk to her again if she doesn’t warn them, since she was just at the joint.”
“Trials of being an informant,” I shrugged. “Why doesn’t she go herd them out herself?”
“Because she doesn’t want to tip off lab management that she knows more than she said she does. She’s afraid if she shows up again too quickly, they’ll figure out she’s thrown in with the cops.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, twitching my hoodie sleeve over my newly inked arm. I didn’t think I’d be needing to test out Death’s handiwork in a strip mall in Vegas; Nikki wouldn’t be in any danger. It could heal a bit more. “What’s in there that they’re going to raid?”
“Kids, mostly.”
I stopped. “What? What do you mean kids? Connected kids?” Not that that would be any better—or worse. Children always seemed to be caught in the line of fire, no matter who was doing the shooting.
“Nope.” Nikki shook her head. “Or at least, Dixie doesn’t think so. Just run-of-the-mill asshole parents selling their kids as research animals.”
“Reason enough for a visit. And we think this is where Connecteds have been getting disappeared?”
“We don’t think anything, sweet buns, except that Dixie’s rattled all the way down to her bedazzled toenails.” Nikki grimaced. “If she’s juicing, I don’t know whether that means we should trust her more or not. But she’s definitely freaked. She’s not faking that.”
“Then let’s go.” I thought briefly about calling Nigel or Ma-Singh, but decided against it. This needed to be low profile if Brody wasn’t going to find out about it. Besides, I’d had the might of the House of Swords at my disposal for less than a month. The whole rest of my life had been much more of a shoestring operation. I was more comfortable with shoestrings.