by Jenn Stark
“We good?” Nikki asked. Shed of her uniform and cap, her perfect brown mane of hair was pulled into an all-business ponytail, and her statuesque figure made the most of shiny black tights above her black stilettos. Her silky fuchsia halter top had a death grip on her chest, but her tiny bolero jacket was not exactly functional. When I nodded, she looked down at herself in sudden concern. “How in the hell am I going to pack a gun in this?”
“You’re not,” I said, reaching into my boot and tossing her the switchblade I kept there for special occasions. Because I’m festive like that.
She grimaced as she slid the blade out of sight between her breasts. “I’m better with a gun.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
We headed off. Vegas being Vegas, we didn’t draw much attention as we strode down Fremont Street. We reached the old casino in a few minutes. The stench of the place—cigarette smoke embedded into the very walls—greeted us almost before we entered the door, but it didn’t take long to get used to the gloom inside.
Binion’s was an old-style casino, and by old-style, I meant broke down and wheezing, with the barest glimmer of its old glory days shimmering beneath the worn façade. We pushed our way toward the cigar purveyor at the back of the building, and I slid my hand in my jacket, fanning through the cards. I pulled another one from the center of the deck.
“I love it when you do that,” Nikki murmured beside me. “What’s tricks?”
“Miss Wilde, what is it you think you’re doing?”
“Wheel,” I said, ignoring Armaeus. Apparently, our detour to Dixie’s had given him the time he needed to get his bearings again. He’d figured out that we were no longer on our way to his fortress with the Devil in tow, and I somehow suspected Kreios wasn’t breaking any land-speed records to get back to HQ. Why couldn’t Vegas have been built on a lake? “That’s not especially helpful, though. It’s not like we haven’t already passed a half-dozen roulette tables in this place.”
“True. Then again, none of those were hanging at eye level, pretty much like a big red X marks the spot.” Nikki smirked. The dark, stained-paneled corridor led down toward ominous-looking restrooms at the far end, but what Nikki was eyeing was an old clipping pasted to the paneled wall with a roulette wheel prominently featured. She scanned down the panel for a doorknob, but there wasn’t any in evidence. Still, the place had the feel of a door. “You think—” Nikki began.
“You ladies lost?” A gruff voice at my side drew me up short, and Nikki stiffened as well.
Her voice, when it sounded next, was a study in tremulous fear.
“We…we have questions that no one can answer. Not right, not the way we need them to be,” Nikki said, her words barely a mumble, as if she’d mixed the wrong pills and downed the combination with a tumbler of vodka. “We were sent here for help. Please, honey—we have money. Lots of money.”
I kept my head down, doing my level best to scuff my boots on the ground. I never could pull off feminine, so I did better with desperate and ragtag.
“You’re looking for answers?” The man leered, sticking his face into Nikki’s chest. “You come back up front when you’re done, and I’ll give you all the answers you need.” He laughed at his own joke, then banged on the wall. The panel behind the roulette wheel image pulled back, clearly a one-way door, and red light poured out of the opening. “That way.” The bouncer jerked his thumb toward the ominous hallway.
“No, do not—”
The Magician’s warning was cut short as the bouncer shoved us forward, apparently either not expecting us to be armed or not caring. Stupid, but not surprising in the community of dark practitioners. It was as if the things of this earth somehow took a backseat to true mystical powers. We walked down the shadowy hallway, peering through the murky red light. The place stank so badly, it was a miracle anyone ever came back here on purpose.
Then we were dumped into a much larger room with pounding music and the acrid smell of burning flesh heavy in the air. When my eyes finally adjusted, I revised my opinion. Based on what I was seeing, it was a miracle anyone made it out alive.
The place was a demon hole.
A favorite construct of the practitioners of the dark arts, demon holes were half-club, half-rave, all illegal. Bodies were packed into the tight space, writhing and churning, partiers of every shape and size, all of them clearly transported by any of a dozen synthetic cocktails mixing drugs, hallucinogenics, and magical stimulants. Music blasted from every direction, so loud the bass practically jumped the floor. How had we not heard this outside? Then screams of delight went up, and we saw the central attraction as we passed along its outskirts.
Six young women, undoubtedly the young women who’d gone missing from Dixie’s care, were tied together on a long rope, blindfolded and standing in the middle of the room. The first in their line was a tall, willowy girl with white hair that might have once been long, but was now blunt cut and spiked, serving as a goth-like crown atop her head.
Snaking around the women was a sort of small labyrinth of flame made by ropes soaked in something toxic, sending up short, flickering curtains of blue-white fire. The game was immediately obvious and chilling in its cruelty: the girls were expected to work their way out of the maze without getting scorched, calling upon their apparent “psychic abilities” and intense intuition about the movements, thoughts, and experiences of each other to get the job done. From the looks of their worn, emaciated forms crisscrossed with burns, however, their Sight was weakening along with their bodies.
“Sweet mother of Jesus,” Nikki hissed beside me.
“We’ll get them,” I promised her. “There are only six?”
“Six is enough.” Nikki peered around the dark room. “And I wasn’t lying to Dix back there. If Binion’s has these girls out on display, who the hell else do they have? This place is a shithole, but it’s got a reputation for high-grade black magic.”
“Then keep a lookout. But we have to keep moving.” Because Dixie’s girls weren’t the only lost souls in this den, and perhaps more importantly, they weren’t the ones who would give us the answers we were supposedly seeking. The guy at our back pushed us toward another door, this one flanked by two enormous bodyguards, their muscled bodies like something out of a comic book. Thick plugs stretched the guards’ earlobes and heavy metal horseshoes hung from their wide noses, and their soulless eyes watched us levelly as we approached.
Their heavily pierced and modded bodies were also completely naked, a fact that was not lost on Nikki. “I do admire their personnel standards here, I’ll give you that,” she said. The men didn’t respond, but I could feel their gazes focus on Nikki. Scowling in stereo, they stood aside at the sharp command of the man behind us.
The door swung wide to welcome us into the room of Oracles.
The thick stump of a man at the center of the room was not the most interesting thing in the place, but he was the most important. Even better, I knew him. Sort of.
Son of a bitch.
Jerry Fitz had been one of the few buyers of magical artifacts I’d been told to steer away from by many of my earliest mentors in this business. I hadn’t realized he’d set up shop in Vegas. I wouldn’t have pictured him at Binion’s either. The guy had money, and a whole lot of it. What was he doing in the back room of a two-bit demon hole on Fremont Street?
I struggled to remember what I knew of Jerry Fitz. He’d started out life as an oracle of sorts, then had quickly figured out that the big money was in pimping the talent, not putting himself out there on the line day after day, particularly as the Connected community got darker and more dangerous. He picked up a mini-harem of psychics drawn to his charisma and money, and when the first one had tried to leave, he’d made such a vivid example of her that no one else had attempted it. After that, it was merely a matter of luring in new talent with money and drugs and protection, keeping them locked down and performing at the rate he needed them to perform, and then going where the money was.
And the money had apparently led him here.
Once again, this was quite a few rungs down on the evolution scale. What was I missing? It was dark, it stank, and the crowd outside had seemed decidedly low-rent. True, he had total dominion, but I hadn’t heard a word breathed about Fitz in the past few years. For a megalomaniac like him, that was tantamount to forever.
More intriguing, it looked like he was going to be our personal moderator on today’s Q&A session. For someone who had a rep for turning over the dirty work to his minions, that was unusual. Was he seeking a particular question to test his process or tip him off to danger? Had he become more OCD over the years? Was he trying to branch out, learn new skills?
Why was he here in Vegas, and why was he here in this room, now, with two down-on-their-luck Strip rejects with money to burn but not a whole lot of it? It didn’t make sense.
I took in his stumpy form. The picture I’d been given of him five years ago when I’d gone after my first artifact had clearly been pre-body mods. Now Fitz had more metal and plastic implanted under his skin than the Terminator, with not terribly attractive results. But he did look scary enough, I supposed. And those mods… Something about those mods made me nervous. The tech on this job was becoming a little intense, like the bright shiny map of the planet in the Magician’s French stronghold, and the electronic death helmet that had encased Kreios beneath the abbey.
Magic had always been about low-tech mastery, you and the force of nature, the ephemeral connection between and around all living things. Magic, psychic skills combined with electronics was…an unknown quantity. It went beyond the technoceuticals and into places like the Stargate experiment of the 1970s by the US Department of Defense and Russia’s Cold War push for dominance. Back then, those experiments had failed.
I got the feeling they wouldn’t be failing now.
Fitz finally seemed ready to give us his full attention. “Welcome, welcome,” he oozed, turning from his high-tech command center, with its knobs and screens and levers. “What is your question? How can I help you achieve the peace you so deserve?” He glanced at Nikki, smiling indulgently at her garish outfit, then switched his gaze to me.
And froze.
Freezing is never good.
“You…” he said wonderingly. In that moment, I made a half-dozen quick realizations. First, Fitz was either batshit crazy or high on technoceuticals. His eyes had that glittering frenzy of someone stretched to the breaking point, and everything on him twitched. Second, he didn’t look nearly as bad as he should have for someone hopped up on drugs. He was positively spoiled with health, in fact—skin tone rich and flush with blood, hair still on his head, teeth intact. Third, his breath smelled of burnt acid, which may or may not mean anything more than a really bad burrito for lunch.
But it was the last set of insights that were the most troubling. One, he wasn’t wearing a weapon. That meant he didn’t need one, which didn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Two, he was solidly built beneath all the body mods, so he wasn’t going to go down easy.
Third, he clearly recognized me. Or thought he did.
I took a step back as Fitz barked out a command in some language that—once again—I couldn’t recognize. Clearly, I needed to brush up on my ancient tongues.
But it was too late to consult the Rosetta Stone now. In the space of a breath, two guards were at either side of me, bracing my arms so hard they lifted me off my feet. Another two guards held Nikki—the bouncers from the front door, as it happened, which I didn’t know was a good thing or a bad thing. Without being told to do so, they pulled her from the room and back into the chaos of the club, so I decided: good thing.
Meanwhile, my personal set of guards had liberated the gun from my holster as well as my deck of cards, dumping both on the table in front of me, along with my box of Tic Tacs, cell phone, some stray euros, my tourist map of Rome…and a key-fob-sized Magic 8 Ball. I frowned at the last item. Granted, it was a really cute tchotchke to have on hand as a backup to my cards, but it wasn’t mine. In fact, I’d never seen the thing before. Where the hell had it come from?
That thought, of course, led me straight to Kreios. Had the Devil planted the toy on me when I wasn’t looking? And if so, why?
Ignoring both me and my perplexing pocket toy for another moment, Jerry Fitz leaned over the console in front of him. Suddenly, the panels lining the wall slid apart, revealing two stunning young women collapsed on the floor behind a sheet of glass. I surged forward, but the guards held me tight. The two sprawled girls were nearly naked, their hair fanning out around them, but there was no question that they were the twins from Father Jerome’s list—and from Dixie’s wall of wonders. Both of them sported matching black hair, pale skin, delicate features, long limbs. Both of them appeared dead to the world. Both of them were Greek goddesses in the flesh who moved only when a gong-like chime sounded at a flip of Fitz’s fingers.
With an almost ghostly languor, the girls stretched upright, stirring toward wakefulness. Eventually, they pulled themselves to their knees, and then their vacant gazes swung toward the glass. Resolve knifed through me. These faces would not haunt me, dammit—they would not join the ranks of the missing whose lives I could not save.
“Lost.” The whisper slowly built. “All is lost.”
The Oracle of Delphi was ready for her close-up.
Chapter Nineteen
Beside me, staring at the plate glass, Fitz fairly bounced with excitement.
“Do you have any idea how long it is between visits from a truly gifted Connected?” he asked, though who he was asking, I wasn’t really sure. The two creatures holding me in place weren’t talking, and I wasn’t much in the mood for twenty questions. “I seek so little in this world. The chance to explore. To learn. To put my creations to the test, refining and improving them until they could take their place with angels. But I must always wait. Be patient. It is…tedious.”
“What are you doing here, Fitz?” Did he truly know who I was, specifically? Somehow, I didn’t think so. I didn’t think he’d truly looked at my face. He’d just sensed something about me at twenty paces, the same way I could sense the level of magical ability in a person by touch. Either way, whatever he sensed in me now had him chortling to himself.
I wasn’t a fan of Fitz chortling.
“It has taken many years to perfect the formula.” He fiddled with more controls as I assessed my situation. I couldn’t overpower the guards without my gun, and the room wasn’t offering much in the way of other great ideas. Fitz had decorated the place in vintage Hugh Hefner, all silk pillows and shag rugs, rosy light and artful porn. Whoever he entertained here on a regular basis was either male or extremely open-minded. Shelves filled with artifacts lined the walls, some of the pieces worth quite a bit to my trained eye, but none of them close enough to matter.
An unearthly moan sounded over the speakers, and my gaze snapped back to the glass wall. The young women in the chamber were now swaying, colorful gas filling the room around them. Fitz turned another dial, smiling as their faces creased in pain. “I call it Pythene: methane, ethylene, benzene, and a few other nice additions to make the oracles more animated,” he said, watching the girls as if they were his prized pets. “Admittedly, the combination is quite lethal after prolonged exposure. But my newest subjects have proven to be delightfully durable. And, in the end, there are always more voices to add to the song.”
His oily glance slid over to me. “Like yours, my dear. I have a knack for sensing talent, I should tell you. Yours is exquisite.” His hand shook with his own pleasure, and I squinted at his wrist. A large black metal cuff adorned it, etched with a glyph that looked almost like—
“Speak!” Fitz commanded, watching me, and I jerked my gaze back toward the girls. They now stood pressed up against the glass. Despite myself, I shrank back. Their eyes were dead, their mouths agape. And they were staring at me.
“Chosen,” they intoned, and Fitz leered at me.
“Finder!” the woman on the right cried out, her hands lifting to her ears.
“Chosen!” the other moaned before lapsing into unintelligible babble.
They both rocked on unsteady feet, their loose shifts slipping off their shoulders, revealing the bodies of girls who were barely teenagers. They pressed their hands against the glass as if straining to get out, their faces tight with pain. “Darkness,” they all but sobbed in near tandem, one echoing the other in some sort of twisted overdub. “Death and war and darkness.” Revulsion coiled in my stomach at their words, their panicked faces. What must these women be seeing?
Fitz almost giggled. “And so you have come into my place of darkness, on the brink of death and war, to achieve your potential.” With another sharp crack of his command, the guards shoved me down to my knees. I was now eye level with my scattered cards.
“Sorry, guys,” I muttered, knowing that no matter what happened in this room, I probably wouldn’t be keeping hold of them. Half the cards were on the floor, but the one topmost on the tabletop pile was faceup. And I really wasn’t happy to see it again.
The Tower.
In a Tarot reading, being dealt the image of an exploding building was very rarely a good thing. Especially when you were currently trapped inside a building, with no discernible way out.
“Speak to me.” Fitz stood right in front of me now, his bug eyes bulging as he held up something that looked distressingly like a hookah. He pushed the nozzle of the contraption into my mouth as one of the thugs clamped down on my jaw and pinched my nose shut.
Then—with a sharp brutality I wouldn’t have thought he had in him—Fitz shoved his fist into my stomach.