by Jenn Stark
As Dixie stammered a blend of indignation and awe, Roxie set down her drink and pulled off the Venetian mask. She shook out her hair, and I blinked, momentarily transfixed by her blond, boozy beauty. She was like the original good-time girl, preserved for all eternity.
She tossed the mask to the table. “I don’t know why I care so much. One of the Council’s tricks grants us the ability to hide in plain sight—or did it never occur to you that no one ever questions that the stunning Eshe never ages, that Kreios looks the same now as he did the day he took his seat on the Council?” She threaded her hand through her curls. “I should have learned about them maybe three years earlier than I did, but still. You have to take your opportunities when they come.”
She turned to me, picking up the glass of bourbon and taking a long, appreciative sip while she studied me. I studied her back. She was worth studying.
“Sara Wilde,” she said at length. “I’ve heard so much about you.” She gestured to the couch behind me. “You should lie down. You are…so tired.”
“I’m good in the chair, thanks.”
“As you wish.”
Roxie drifted toward her chair and sat, and I could feel the energy swell up and around her, the very air giving way. She regarded me with an almost palpable pleasure, a cat surrounded with bowls of cream.
“Let me guess. The Magician doesn’t know you’re here. Eshe sent you, and she’s keeping it from him. Eshe, I always did like. Kreios too. But then, what’s not to enjoy about Kreios?”
“No one sent us.” I shifted in my chair. “But while we’re on the topic, why aren’t you on the Strip? There’s that castle—”
“Lovely, isn’t it? Makes me happy that it’s there, off in the distance.” She leaned back. “And I’m not hiding, sweetie. I remain in the city to spite Armaeus, not to cower from him. I stick in his craw like a piece of gristle he can’t spit out, and Lord, if that doesn’t make me sleep easier at night.” She winked at me. “Still, you can tell him I have no interest in joining his crusade. The Council has proven quite beneficial to me, and I thank them for it. But I’m quite fine with my limited involvement.” She waved the glass, grinning at me. “I can tell you what you want to know, though. The newcomers to Vegas. Why they’re here. I’m right, aren’t I, about your question? I’m always right.”
She took a long drink as I nodded. “And your payment?” I asked.
“Oh, we can dispense with that.” She leaned forward, her face suddenly intent. “Despite the fools who’ve flocked to the city, there are some legitimate players of interest here too. Perhaps fifty who are dangerous, but maybe three of real concern. There had been four, but Monsieur Mercault has quite unaccountably gone missing. He will not be in play for the scroll cases Armaeus covets so deeply.”
“He’s…” I tried not to gape at the flood of information. “Do you know what happened to Mercault?”
She smiled. “That is another question, Sara, with a different price.” She lifted her glass in a toast. “For your purposes, you most want to pay attention to Grigori Mantorov, Russian and quite proud of it. Appears to be a gentleman, and of course, there’s that divine accent, but make no mistake, he’s as dirty as it gets. You want to know who is behind the Connected trafficking, particularly the trafficking of the youngest of souls, you need merely to go to his door.”
The youngest of souls? “How do you know him?”
She shrugged. “It’s a shared knowledge. I don’t have to sit on the Council to know what they know. Another advantage of living in the city. They tend to think very…loudly.”
Anger riffled through me. If Roxie knew this guy, that meant the Magician knew him too. Knew him and hadn’t told me about him. “Grigori Mantorov.”
“Yes, but he’s not the only one who will be here. Annika Soo will be too, and she ‘s not to be ignored. Chinese, also proud of it. Powerful, deadly, and constantly furious. Her, I would watch out for.”
“Agreed.” I did know Annika Soo. I’d never been hired by her, but I’d narrowly escaped her minions twice. I tried to tamp down my mad to get the information I needed. If Annika Soo was actually here, that was out of character. “She usually prefers to poach artifacts from finders after the fact, instead of hiring out the wetwork herself. Why is she getting involved personally?”
“A strategic move to show she’s still very much in the game. It’s no secret that the balance of power is shifting in the arcane black market. Her interests are at stake, and her position, and her pride. She won’t allow anyone to take what she believes should be hers.”
“So Annika, Grigori—are they Connecteds? Or just rich?”
Roxie lifted a silk-clad shoulder. “Power is a matter of nuance. You know that. One man’s intuition is another man’s psychic gift. One woman’s ability to shift is another woman’s hallucination brought on by mental illness. It’s all in what we can accept into our lives, or what we choose to use.”
I stared at her. “Are. They. Connecteds?”
“I think for your purposes, it is best to assume so.” Not exactly an answer, but Roxie kept going. “The third party is your primary concern, however. He has money and intelligence and charisma. And, unless I miss my guess, he’s a Connected too: Jarvis Fuggeren.”
“Wait.” I sat back. “I thought Fuggeren was the one selling the gold.”
Roxie smiled. “Jarvis Fuggeren, as was all his family before him, is a master of playing both ends against the middle. You want to know the real reason why he is conducting this sale at the Rarity and not in the privacy of his own home?”
“Showboating?”
“Information gathering. He knows about SANCTUS but not who is behind them. Who the power players are. And he knows better than to invite them to meet in secrecy. His caution is for naught, though. Wherever he goes, the arcane black market follows. They trail after him like dogs, ready to feast on whatever spoils he leaves behind.”
“Yeah, well, what about the low-level psychics who’re here in the city? They don’t know Fuggeren, or about his gold. They frankly shouldn’t know about SANCTUS. What’s set them off?”
Roxie lifted her brows. “There are some questions even I don’t deign to answer. Not yet. But I will tell you this. SANCTUS is an organization that thrives on its secrecy. They prefer to pick off the Connected community in a death by a thousand cuts.”
Yeah, I’d witnessed a good dozen of those “cuts” littering Mercault’s estate.
“But the collection of Connected currently assembling in Las Vegas is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a rarity,” Roxie continued. “It will prove to be a temptation that SANCTUS cannot ignore. Here they can kill a community of psychics and believers in significant numbers, without any repercussions. Here, more importantly, they can warn off the next wave of the curious, those low-level Connecteds who aren’t yet fully aware they have abilities.”
I thought about the people I’d seen in Dixie’s chapel. “Those people aren’t SANCTUS’s targets.”
“Of course they are.” Her smile was hard, jaded. “Curiosity must be punished as much as action, in a war like the one SANCTUS is fighting.”
“But why, specifically, are they here, anyway? Who lured them? There were flyers, Roxie. Some of these people had visions. All of them were being instructed to come here, to Vegas, for solstice, and it’s all come together in the past several days. There’s no way SANCTUS has that kind of infrastructure on American soil.”
Her gaze didn’t waver from mine, but neither did she speak for a long moment. Long enough for me to play connect the dots with my fried cerebral cortex. “No. No way.”
Roxie sighed, then sat down her drink and reached out to touch my hands. I let her do it, too. The flow of her energy was light and full, but it couldn’t reach the hard center of me, a core that was quickly turning to ice and stone. “The Council drove them here?” I demanded. “All these innocent people? They herded them here like sheep to draw the wolves down on them?” Not the Council, I knew. Armaeus. Arma
eus had done this.
Roxie’s mouth tightened, but her eyes remained steady. “The role of the Council is to assure the balance of magic.”
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I yanked my hands away. “These people have no idea they’re about to be dropped into the middle of a war, Roxie. You and your precious Council know that.”
“Not mine.” She drew herself up as well. “I have not allied myself with the Council for decades.”
“Well, maybe it’s time you reconsidered that. These people can’t stand up to SANCTUS—they’re not prepared for it.”
“Armaeus believes—”
“Armaeus is wrong, Empress.” I spit out her honorific like a curse and stood. “You’re all wrong. And a whole lot of people are going to die if you freak shows don’t get that through your heads.”
Dixie’s phone buzzed, and she jumped, clearly not expecting it. “I swear I shut it off…” She frowned down at her screen. “Sweet Mother Mary and the angels.” She looked up at us, eyes wide. “The Deathwalkers are here.”
Chapter Fifteen
Nikki fled the room first, moving faster than I’d ever seen her rock a pair of stilettos. Dixie was on her heels. I stayed put, staring at Roxie as color flooded her face.
“Deathwalkers?” I asked. Clearly I needed to keep better tabs on my Connecteds, but I’d been busy. “What’s a Deathwalker?”
“A coven of witches from the Old Country.”
“Like, what, Germany?”
She flapped a hand at me. “Chicago. They were prominent during the mob rule in Vegas but lost interest in the seventies and the mob tried to carry on without them. That went well. Since then, the Deathwalkers entered into international finance and trade, went clean, you could say. But if they’re here…”
My head was spinning. “You’re telling me that Armaeus sent them an e-mail too? To sweeten the pot further for SANCTUS?”
“No. That wouldn’t have maintained the—”
I turned away, unwilling and unable to hear the word “balance” anytime in the next century. Nikki and Dixie were already screaming at each other when I joined them in the car, and we raced back to the Strip in a blur. The coven had decided we would meet in a diner, and we roared up to the Blue Moon at three p.m.—typically a downtime, according to Nikki, unless a bunch of Deathwalkers had recently shown up. Instead, the parking lot was packed with vehicles.
Inside, however, there was only one table taken, by three people. Whether the diner had been full before and everyone had taken a convenient walk, or the cars in the parking lot were an illusion, I wasn’t sure. But a line of servers stood frozen behind the counter, not making a move toward the trio—two women and one man.
I couldn’t blame them. The group was preternaturally pretty, in a high-cheekboned, perfectly chiseled sort of way. The woman in the center, clearly their leader, stared at us with stony disapproval. The other two focused their attention on their hands, which they held in a loose cuplike formation on the white paper place mats on the table in front of them. Their lips moved in a silent concert, but I couldn’t see any power sparking from them. Nikki was too tense for there not to be something going on, however. And then there were the servers. You didn’t work long in Vegas without becoming jaded, but these people were seriously spooked.
Dixie strode ahead, her pink purse clutched in her grasp, pressed against her dress. It was the only sign she was nervous. Nikki, beside me, was up on her toes. I wasn’t certain where she’d hidden a gun on her body, but I was pretty sure she had one.
For my part, I simply stared.
The trio regarded us with hollow eyes, tracking Dixie’s march across the diner. “It’s been a long time, Danae,” Dixie finally said.
I did my best not to applaud. Danae and the Deathwalkers? Best. Band name. Ever.
“I’d hoped it would be longer.” The woman who stood to greet Dixie was as dark as Dixie was fair, her long ebony hair falling from a sleek part in the center of her head. She wore flawless makeup, and a black tank dress that bared chiseled arms and long, muscular legs in platform stilettos. She nodded regally to Nikki and me, and I managed to rehinge my jaw. “We have foreseen great damage to the city. We have interests to protect.”
“Great damage how?” I asked.
The witch’s eyes flicked to me, a glance that shifted her from traditionally beautiful into the realm of the seriously eerie. Her eyes were smoke gray, far too light against her dark skin.
“You pledge yourself to turn back the tide of evil, yet you light candles when you could cast the sun,” she said, regarding me somberly. “You could wield the sword of justice, yet instead allow harm to befall those you would protect.”
Something hard snapped within me. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand what she was doing. She was a sorceress, and psychic manipulation was a skill. Identify the weakest points of your opponent and magnify them. People were always much more willing to believe the bad about themselves than the good. Hang-up of being human.
Still, I didn’t need a Windy City witch judging me. Especially when what she said hit so close to home.
“No one will be harmed,” I said. “We’ll do whatever it takes to weather the storm that’s coming.”
“You will fail.” She peered at me, her gaze raking over my battered body, my scruffy clothes. “I know you.”
“I’m pretty sure I would have remembered someone who goes by the name ‘Deathwalker.’”
She creased her lips into a shape that could almost be called a smile. “We haven’t had occasion to be known by that name for many years. Even here”—she waved her hand—“we were quite domesticated. The old ways were better suited for the old times. There are many who’ve fallen away from that path.”
“But not you?”
“And not you. Not yet anyway.” She turned to the woman beside her, but the woman shook her head.
“The newcomers are not enhanced.” The woman pointed at me. “She wears a Tyet, but primarily for—”
“Hey, hey, hey.” I held up my hands. “I didn’t agree to a strip search.”
Danae lifted her own hand to quell my outburst. “Our magic remains pure because of our commitment to holistic practices. Not all of our kind agree. The pull toward enhancement is strong, particularly when we must fight the dark practitioners—which the city reeks of at present. We do not have much time.”
I stifled a groan. “Who isn’t coming to Vegas, exactly? We’re kind of a little full up right now.”
Danae ignored me. “Who in the city is enhanced?” she asked Dixie. For her part, the Welcome Wagon of Vegas looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Besides you,” Danae added dryly.
Wait, what? Dixie’s face was a mask of Southern hospitality. The kind shown by rebel housewives right before they gutted carpetbaggers. “We don’t judge enhancements, merely actions,” Dixie said smoothly. “A person shouldn’t be judged by anything but that.”
“Power, sister,” Nikki put in. She had leaned forward ever so slightly, in full mother-bear mode. For once, it wasn’t me she was protecting. “You got something you need to say, Danae, go ahead and put it on the table.”
The Deathwalker turned to Nikki for a moment, studying her. “We were so named because wherever we passed, naught but death remained. Yet we never took a life, seer. Consider that.”
“Very spooky.” Nikki’s voice was harder now, sharper. “You want to get a little more clear, or are we all wasting our time? Why do you care about ‘enhanced’ Connecteds? And what do you mean by that, specifically?”
“It is the left-handed path. Once you embark upon it, the way to darkness is but a few steps.” Danae’s mouth twisted. “Why do you think so many have fallen to the way of the dark practitioners? There was never so much evil in the world, waiting to spring. It has been helped along.”
“By whom?” I prompted. If she said the Council, I was totally picking up my Nerf ball and going home.
“The dark practitioners themselves, in part,”
Danae said, returning her attention to me. “The technoceuticals that have flooded the arcane black market. However, they are not simply ending up in the hands of unConnected patrons and clients to provide a temporary magical high. They’re afflicting Connecteds too. Changing them. Poisoning them. That is not balance. That is not purity. That is defilement.”
Coming from a group of tree huggers, this wasn’t a surprising attitude. But I was mostly glad that I didn’t have yet another crime to lay at Armaeus’s feet.
Nevertheless, something about this didn’t add up. “Technoceuticals aren’t addictive.”
“Aren’t they?” Her glance was withering. “Power is the most seductive drug of all. You should know that more than anyone. And if you don’t, you should learn it. Not everyone you count as friend is worthy of your trust. Not everyone you count as foe deserves the title.”
It was her second jab, and I was full up on my quota of being used as a punching bag.
“You trying to get me to call your psychic hotline?” I asked. “Because you’re really, really good at saying nothing in a very impressive way.”
“Then let me say this clearly.” She shifted her gaze to Dixie. “The lines of energy have shifted. The old maps no longer hold. You will help us reconfigure them before the storm hits the city.”
“There are no ley lines that run through Vegas,” I snapped.
“They do when the Council is seated here. As they have throughout time, in city by city, country by country. Wherever the magic is strongest in the world, eventually the very energy of the Earth’s core gets drawn up through the crust and bowed out, amplified. That is what is happening here. A great force has stressed the lines too much, compromising the underlying power that binds the world together. But once we map the new configuration, we can manage any new influx of magic.”
“But that’s—”
“I’ll help you.” Dixie’s voice was resolute. She turned to me. “There are too many Connecteds here, Sara, and more coming every day. You tackle the job from your angle. I’ll do it from mine.”