Janine pointed to the side of the crumpled bag. “Is that blood?”
“Back inside her knife,” Nessa told Hedy, shooting a glare across the room at Tony. “Someone was being very rude. Anyway, she’s resting up for the ritual.”
“I think that’s blood,” Janine said.
“Explain what the coins are for?” Daniel asked. “I wasn’t clear on that part of the plan.”
Nessa picked up a gold coin. She turned it in her hand and gave it an appraising eye.
“We have no idea where Marie landed, but we know she’s still alive, which suggests—hopefully—she’s somewhere civilized. But unless we’re beyond lucky, our paper money will be worthless there.”
“No guarantee that these will be worth anything either,” Hedy said, “but silver and gold are valuable both here and on my world, so it’s a reasonable bet. I always say it’s better to have and not need than to need and not have.”
“Wait.” Janine stared at her. “Your world? Are…are you an alien?”
“Janine, Hedy. Hedy, Janine.” Nessa tossed the coin onto the pile and scooped up another one. “Hedy is my daughter, and yes, she’s an alien.”
Janine pointed at Hedy, then at Nessa’s face, then back again.
“Your daughter? She’s older than you.”
“I was dead for a little while,” Nessa told her. “It didn’t stick.”
“I am so done with this,” Tony grumbled, standing in the corner with his good arm crossed tight over his sling.
Gazelle scurried to answer another knock at the door. The new arrival was cut from rawhide, junkie-thin and grizzled, draped in bikers’ leathers. His thin hair was plastered to his scalp, and his rough whiskers glistened as he walked in, hauling a fat canvas rucksack over each shoulder.
“Hey, Winslow,” Daniel said. “Just drop ’em here on the bed. Thanks for coming out on short notice.”
“Startin’ to rain like a mother out there,” Winslow said.
Nessa shoved the coin pile aside, making room. The army-green rucksacks rattled as they landed side by side on the edge of the mattress. Without even looking, Winslow jerked a thumb back over his shoulder at Tony.
“What’s with the cop?”
“Who says I’m a cop?” Tony replied.
“I do, ’cause you’re a cop. I ain’t offended, some of my best customers are cops. Still…”
Winslow looked to Daniel. “He’s cool,” Daniel said.
“The guy has spoken,” Winslow muttered.
He unzipped each bag and folded the canvas back to unveil a cornucopia of firearms. Nylon straps held pistols snug against taped magazines, alongside a scattering of shotguns and hunting rifles. Tony moved closer, eyes going wide as Winslow hoisted a sawed-off shotgun and sighted its twin barrels toward the rain-slick window.
“Brought the usual goody bags. Just what you wanted, reliable and easy to transport, nothing too fancy. Take your pick and we’ll talk pricing.”
“Wait,” Tony said as Daniel took the shotgun, weighing it in his hands. “What is this?”
“An arms deal,” Daniel said. “See, he gives us guns, and we give him money. That’s how arms deals work.”
Gazelle stepped up behind him and stared over his shoulder, eyes wide.
“Hand cannons. Marie told me about these. Can I have one?”
“Winslow, set the lady up with a pistol, please?” Daniel put a hand on Gazelle’s shoulder and ushered her up to the edge of the bed. “She’s from a parallel Earth where they haven’t invented firearms yet, so give her something a beginner can handle.”
Winslow rolled his eyes as he reached into the bag, tugging at the nylon straps. “Supposed to warn me before you get me involved in weird shit, Dan. You know I don’t like the weird shit.”
“What? She’s an alien who wants a hand cannon. That’s not weird.”
“As much as I agree with this guy,” Tony said, pointing at Winslow, “can we get back to…this? The thing that’s happening right now? What the hell, man? I’m an NYPD detective. You can’t do this shit right in front of me.”
“I commit crimes in front of cops all the time,” Daniel told him.
“Ones with actual jurisdiction,” Winslow added.
“Why. Do we need. Guns?” Tony said, forcing the words out.
Daniel set the shotgun down and turned to face him.
“Because there’s a bounty on Vanessa and Marie’s heads, and a small army of psychopaths looking to cash in. In about forty minutes, we’re all going to march out of the relative safety of this hotel, out onto the Las Vegas Strip, and make our way about a block south of here. We’ll be exposed, surrounded by crowds and heavy traffic every step of the way. Then we have to keep these ladies covered while they do a very complicated ritual, which could be the last and only chance we’ve got to save your partner’s life.”
Daniel swept his open hand toward the rucksacks.
“So do you want a gun or not? I’m buying.”
Tony stared at him. Then he sighed and pushed himself away from the wall, walking up to the bed.
“Yes,” he grumbled, “I want a gun.”
“There you go. Was that so hard?”
“Got a Glock Nineteen with your name on it,” Winslow told Tony, nodding at his sling as he reached into the rucksack on the left. “Has a trigger safety, easier to handle with that busted wing you got there.”
Gazelle had a million questions about the matte-black handgun, and as they spilled from her lips, Daniel’s phone buzzed against his hip. He took it out and tapped the screen.
“Carolyn, you’d better be able to walk by the time we—” He paused, listening. “Shit. Okay. Stay exactly where you are and keep your head down. I’m coming to get you.”
He hung up and shoved the phone into his pocket.
“We’re leaving. Now.”
* * *
At first, Carolyn had been annoyed that she’d been assigned an obvious minder. Badger—his real name was Lazzaro, apparently, but he was fine being called by either—trailed her down to the bar overlooking the casino floor and hung on her every word. At first it gave her flashbacks to some of the fantasy conventions she’d been to, picking up overeager fans like barnacles when she just wanted to get a good buzz on.
Of course, Badger had never read any of her books, though he’d lived on the fringes of a couple of them. She was halfway into her whiskey highball when she realized why he was sitting so close to her. His knuckles were white against the edge of the lacquered bar top, squeezing it like he was a passenger on a plane with a blown-out engine and all he could do was ride and pray.
“Is it the crowds?” she asked.
The open bar perched on the edge of the casino floor, overlooking the sweep of flashing, trilling slots. The table games were heating up, every seat filled and shouting gamblers packed shoulder to shoulder as dice tumbled across the green felt. A fresh wave of tourists shambled in through the smoked-glass lobby doors, looking like drowned rats, and Carolyn caught a flash of lightning at their backs before the doors whisked shut.
“The noise,” Badger said. “It’s quiet at night, back home.”
Carolyn sipped her drink. “Yeah, this town doesn’t do quiet. I live in a farmhouse. Edge of nowhere is the only place I can hear myself think. How about we go back upstairs? I can hit up the minibar.”
“This is all right,” he told her, the tone of his voice saying anything but. “The Dire Mother says we’re going to be here for a while. Maybe…a long while. I need to get used to it.”
“At least order a drink. It’ll loosen you up a little. Just charge it to the room.”
“That was one of the things Daniel said not to do.”
“He says a lot of things,” Carolyn replied. “Trust me, doing Vegas on somebody else’s credit card is a rare and wonderful treat. Take full advantage. I am.”
Badger gave the bartender an uncertain glance and slowly raised one hand—the one that wasn’t clinging to the bar—to get
her attention.
“Do you think they have honey mead?” he asked.
“I guarantee they do not. Ask for a rum and Coke, that’s a good ‘welcome to Earth’ starter drink.”
Carolyn’s gaze drifted across the lobby as the doors slid open again, a curtain of rain beyond the glass. More new arrivals. Not tourists.
Water trailed down Nyx’s serpentine blond braid, droplets clinging to her leathers and glistening like her body was sheathed in black eel skin. She had four men with her. They fanned out and moved in military cadence on their way to the check-in desk. Each one had an identical black duffel bag slung at his side, drooping low like they were carrying heavy cargo.
“Cancel that,” Carolyn muttered as she dug her phone out.
She slid a little lower on the barstool. Nyx was showing a picture to the check-in clerk. Carolyn’s restless fingertips drummed against the bar as she waited for Daniel to pick up.
“Hope you’re all packed and ready to go,” she said, “because your least-favorite demonic bounty hunter just showed up. I don’t suppose there’s a back way out of here?”
Nineteen
“Once,” Nadia said, “I thought a perfect plan was all I needed. Then I learned how plans fracture and break when they come into contact with reality. I was betrayed not long after my reign began, by someone I thought I could trust. He slipped a bomb into my first throne room.”
She paused, silent, studying her mechanical gauntlet. The mercury-covered plates rippled as she turned her hand. Motes of sapphire light, hologram static, trailed behind her fingertips.
“You died shielding me from the blast. You died, cradled in the one arm the bomb left me. And that taught me the value of trust.”
At Marie’s side, Tricia scowled at the memory. “It was Ezra. The Overlord gave him everything—security, a fortune, a way to escape his fate, and he still stabbed her in the back. He was afraid she was going to turn on him, so he turned traitor first.”
Marie looked between the two women. She shook her head.
“But…he still works for you.”
Nadia offered Marie a tiny smile.
“No. His image works for me. And the world-class think tank he recruited. You see, I learned early on that some people would never follow me, not eagerly, so I gave them a more palatable alternative. The loyal and tireless genius, and a great man who they can look up to. The wizard behind the curtain.”
“Obviously,” Tricia said, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “the Overlord is nothing but a figurehead. It’s really Ezra Talon who’s leading New America to glory. Everybody knows that.”
Marie thought back to her cab ride that morning. He’s gonna save us all, the cabbie had said, before reflexively praising the Overlord and offering a gesture of nervous prayer.
“One of the many little games we play, to keep the populace docile and obedient. As for Ezra,” Nadia said, “he still has an office at the TAG building. More of a cell, really, with mirrored walls and lights that never turn off, so he has to stare at himself every waking moment of every single day. Well. What’s left of him, anyway.”
She raised her hand. Her gauntlet’s fingers wriggled.
“Sometimes I walk by his window and give him a little wave, like this. He can’t wave back, of course. It’s the little pleasures in life that matter, don’t you think?”
“And you went to all this trouble,” Marie said, “hunting across the universe, poisoning Nessa, all of it, for…what? To find a replacement version of Martika?”
“Think bigger, love. Much bigger. For one thing, if you were all I was after, I would have just sent Tricia to grab you the day we found your world.”
“Which I suggested,” Tricia added.
“For another,” Nadia said, “do you really think I’d murder one of my own incarnations, for something so petty as taking her Knight? Ridiculous. If my plans didn’t absolutely require Nessa’s death, I would have collected her right along with you. Two incarnations of the Witch, working together in the same timeline, on the same world? We’d be unstoppable. As for you, I’m certain I could convince her to share you with me. And let’s be honest, the threesomes would be amazing.”
Marie folded her arms tight across her chest. The scarlet banners lining the room, spaced between tall Ionic columns, dangled motionless in the frigid air. Lines of soldiers in black still flanked the red carpet down the heart of the chamber, staring straight ahead in stoic silence. The stillness of the hall bore a weight that pressed down on her shoulders. A sense of absolute inevitability, blossoming from the gears of Nadia’s machinations.
“Why, then?” she asked.
“I did start out looking for another Knight,” Nadia explained. “This world, this version of us, had a unique glitch in the system. You understand our story, yes? Our curse?”
“We die together,” Marie replied.
“Or I die, and you follow shortly after. Usually by your own hand.” Nadia wagged a mercury finger in mock reproach. “You kill yourself a lot. But in this world, I was mortally injured and survived, medical technology and cybernetics to the rescue. So I theorized…if I could find a Knight who had lost her Witch and brought her here to live with me, would the curse of the first story still take hold? Technically, you aren’t my Knight, and I’ve already survived the incident that was supposed to end me.”
“The story would…break,” Marie said. “The universe would stop trying to kill us.”
“It’s just a theory. But the more worlds I explored, hunting for one where another version of the Witch and her Knight existed at the same time as me, disturbing patterns began to emerge. Signs of a precursor civilization, with language and iconography that spread across multiple parallel worlds.”
“You mean like the cathedral under Deep Six?”
“Precisely. And while I’ve always been happy with the idea of a random, chaotic, and entirely rudderless universe, one devoid of purpose save the purpose we choose to give it…I was forced to face evidence of an architect.”
Marie thought back to the cathedral, concealed at the bottom of an alien sea. The mammoth pews of green stone, the carvings of faceless judges standing over cowering, kneeling figures, the condemned burning in a pit of fire.
“God,” Marie said. “You’re talking about God.”
“Not an omnipotent one. Not omniscient, either. We found signs of a civil war. Apparently some of his first children thought a change in management was in order. I don’t disagree. Point being, we came across strongholds, temples, caches from both sides of the fight. And many of those caches had locks.”
“Like the one at the cathedral. We had to bleed, to open it. It was made for us.”
“Ah,” Nadia said. “You made the same mistake I did, at first. It wasn’t, as I discovered after studying a couple and piecing together more of the precursors’ language. They were built to keep the talking apes out. You know, stop primitive humans from getting their hands on any dangerous magic. The locks can only be opened by the direct, original creations of God himself. Beings personally crafted by his own divine hands.”
The throne-room lights seemed to dim like a storm cloud passing over the sun, as the implication set in. And with it, horror.
“Wait,” Marie said. “You’re telling me—”
“We thought the first story was created by random chance, an outburst of spontaneous magic in the wake of humanity’s discovery of the power of words. A cosmic fluke. We thought the storyteller was some dead, ancient shaman, who likely went to their grave with no understanding of the curse they’d inflicted upon us.”
Nadia shook her head.
“God did this to us,” she said. “He did it to us on purpose. He created us to suffer and die, again and again, for all eternity.”
“But why?” Marie asked.
“I’d love to ask him.”
Nadia turned her gauntleted palm to the heavens. Golden light spilled from her hand, a new hologram tracing itself in the air. A map of spheres, t
ied together by luminous and gilded vines.
“The war went badly. God fled and sealed himself up inside one of the first worlds he created.” Her opposite hand tapped a golden world at the top of the hologram. It glitched, flooding with static, as her plum-painted fingernail poked through the image. “Elysium. Heaven itself.”
“As far as we can tell,” Tricia chimed in, “the rebels were confident they could kill him, and he was clearly confident he could be killed. They just couldn’t get to him.”
“But every lock has a key.”
New images blossomed around the vine-tangled spheres. A copper bell, engraved with spidery runes. A slim black book. A slender candle, electronic distortion shivering around its tall and steady flame.
Marie knew that bell. It was snug against her side, hidden in Nessa’s mirror bag. The realization ignited a spark of hope: not even Nadia had noticed the bag, thanks to the invisibility enchantment. Nadia had mastered witchcraft and the arts of power, and she’d woven a seemingly inescapable trap for them both…but Nessa was stronger than she realized.
“Long story short,” Nadia said, “three ritual tools, imbued with the magic of creation and designed to crack open the gates of Elysium. Before they could be used, God’s loyalists stole them away. They couldn’t destroy the relics, so they settled for the next best thing. They hid them, scattered far and wide across the backwaters of the universe.”
“We found that bell in the cathedral,” Marie said. “And I don’t know if it’s the same one, but Hedy almost lost her entire coven over a magic candle she stole.”
“Another moment where the master plan went sideways,” Tricia grumbled.
“Quite,” Nadia said. “My teams recovered the candle, and I sent it to Mirenze, where Hedy was supposed to stumble across it. The Sisters of the Noose found it first. None of Hedy’s people were supposed to be harmed. I regret that. Meanwhile, we steered your world’s version of Ezra toward Deep Six.”
“With the bookmarks inside the suit Carlo stole,” Marie said, putting it together.
“Exactly. Carlo ‘steals’ the prototype armor—he never realized we let him do it—then Ezra ‘finds’ the suit. Tricia had to make some last-minute changes to the plan, thanks to Carlo getting himself killed, but it all worked out. End result: two of the three relics end up in Nessa’s hands, while I stay concealed in the shadows.”
Bring the Fire (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 3) Page 15