by Jenn Stark
Startled, I blew out a sharp gust of breath, then inhaled before I could resist the primal urge. Only, the gas from the hookah hose now stuck in my mouth was nothing like actual air. I instantly convulsed, going rigid in the guard’s hands as Fitz did something with the device shot that more gas into my lungs. My head filled with images and noise, my stomach roiled, and when he finally yanked the hose out of my mouth, I lurched forward, ready to throw up everything I’d eaten for the last six weeks.
Instead, only words spewed out of my mouth, thick and hot.
“Death comes for you,” I wheezed and took some satisfaction from how Fitz’s face suddenly went from cackling enjoyment to confusion. “Destruction. Loss. Your kingdom— vanquished.” I said this last on a gasp, and the effort it took to push the word out grated along my windpipe, as if the word itself had claws.
I swung my gaze to the women behind the glass. Was this what they felt every time they were compelled to speak their prophecy? The pain was raw and fiery, and it didn’t dim with the passage of words. Not when more of them kept bubbling up insistently. “Lost. Failed,” I wheezed. “Destroyed. Forgotten.”
“You haven’t been properly prepared,” Fitz growled, thrusting the tube at my mouth again despite my efforts to squirm away.
The gas poured into me once more, and my eyes practically rolled back in my head, the images shattering through me those of destruction and pain, fire and noise. Once again, with startling clarity, black papal seal seared across my memory. I flailed forward, grasping Fitz’s wrist to where an identical seal was etched into his cuff. “You are betrayed!” I gasped.
“Get off me!” Fitz threw up his arm, and clearly his mods included some sort of steroidal component, because for a small man he really could pack a punch. I staggered back against the guards, barely coherent as they hauled my body up once more, Fitz beside me the whole time, blasting my face, my eyes with the gas. As I mumbled words that made no sense, I was dragged across the carpet, dead weight in the arms of the two guards. A door opened, and they tossed me to the floor. “Full dose,” I heard Fitz call out as the door slammed behind me, and I blearily turned to peer through the glass.
What I saw was a nightmare.
There was no longer just the sleazily posh room of Jerry Fitz and his thugs on the other side of the smeared glass, but the throng of dancing humanity beyond it as well, then the worn-down Binion’s casino beyond that, people hunched over faded baize-topped tables, acrid smoke heavy in the air.
And I could see farther, to where the Devil reclined in some glassed-in penthouse, sipping from a golden chalice—then off again through streets and deserts and cities and oceans, until I soared far into the East, to the seat of Fitz’s master, amid a glorious palace.
Beyond that, as if lying in wait, something alien stirred in the darkness—a blue figure wrapped in a field of red. And in the midst of all this, in the center of a great, arched room hung with gilded paintings and glittering treasure, I could see soldiers standing at attention around a black-robed man whose slight stature belied his strength. They all bent over a gleaming black console—as sleek and dark as Fitz’s wrist cuff, emblazoned with the same grim seal, minus the dagger that also adorned Fitz’s. While gas filled the small chamber and the young women beside me sent up a keening wail, I lurched toward the glass. They’re coming!
“Speak!” The voice crackled over me, so loud it could be God himself demanding me to share my desperate vision.
“SANCTUS!” I cried, and I could sense Fitz stiffen, though his guards didn’t flinch, apparently unaware of the meaning of the name, unaware of anything except the commands of their leader. I pounded against the glass, my words frantic now, panicked. “Death! Destruction! Your kingdom turned to fire!” I shook my head, frustrated at my own confusion. I need to be more clear!
“You lie!” Fitz roared back at me, and I felt the tears pool in my eyes, the warm rush of them falling down my cheeks as another burst of gas streamed from the vents. “I have delivered them their Devil and they have paid me for my work. I am one of them. I have done all that they asked, an initiate to their cause. I am ready to serve!”
“They despise you,” I cried, gagging on the gas that filled the space. “You are the filth they must get rid of before what is to come. You will die—you must.”
“I have met my obligations!” Fitz strode toward the glass, shoving his finger at me. “No! You are not ready. I sensed the Sight in you, but it’s too wild, too broken. You’re a shattered toy that no longer serves its master, and I have not put you back together yet. I will, though.” His face swelled up with meanness, and he leaned toward the glass, bug-eyed and cruel. You cannot partake of the Pythene mists if you’re not pure of heart, and you are not prepared!”
The laughter welled up inside me as I reached some new level of hysteria, something snapping within me like a too-frayed string. “And you have been betrayed,” I hissed, my words silken with threat. I crawled along the glass wall, my fingers grasping at its smooth surface. “You have been betrayed, and you will suffer, Gerard Fitz, undone by fear and treachery.”
“Shut up!” Fitz snapped, but he stumbled back from the glass at whatever he saw in my eyes, grabbing for his console.
“Did you think you could deceive the prince of lies?” I continued, slithering against the glass, tracking his path. “That there would be no price to pay? That pain would not rain down upon you in a storm of fire, engulfing your very soul?”
Fitz’s fingers twisted knobs on his console, and a new mixture flooded into the room. Even in my hallucinating state, I recognized a change in the gasses, my body sagging forward as Fitz grinned in unholy triumph. Foggily, blearily, I realized his leering mug would be the last thing I would ever see on this earth.
That was a little depressing.
Right up until the moment that his head blew apart.
The glass shattered with the force of the blast, and oxygen rushed into the space as the noxious fumes spilled out, creating a deadly cocktail of gas and fire. The guards, realizing too late the carnage that was about to ensue, still managed to almost reach the door before being blasted through it, and I could hear the screams of the dancing throng in the world beyond.
And then, for a long and horrifying breath…there was nothing but smoke and darkness, and a distant, shimmering blue figure, trapped on a field of red.
Watching me.
“Sara!”
Nikki was at my side, hauling me up as my eyes blinked open again, one of the body-modded guards at her side. Somewhere, he’d found trousers, I noted through my delirium, and he gathered up the two girls on the floor, one under each arm, then pounded for the door.
I tried to make my feet move, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate, slipping and sliding on the scorched carpet. Nikki used her not inconsiderable strength to throw me over her shoulder in an impressive fireman carry, giving me a unique upside-down view of the room. I blinked and stared, trying to make sense of everything, while trying equally hard not to vomit. Girl had paid way too much for those stilettos.
Fitz’s chamber wasn’t burning nearly as much as it should have been, given the destruction that immediately surrounded the bomb. Unfortunately, the only thing left of Fitz was a few of his hardier modifications—and the smoking wreckage of his exploded wrist cuff. Lying next to it was an equally pulverized…Magic 8 Ball.
I grinned, drunk on vertigo. Let the police figure out what to do with that.
The outer room of the demon hole was impressively empty by the time Nikki dragged me through it, her mouth going a mile a minute. “Hans and Franz—whoever they are, I appreciate muscle like that, you know? And no inhibitions about putting it on display? I mean did you see those guys’ asses, I’m telling you,” she began, stilettos clumping over the now-doused labyrinth of fire, smoke heavy in the air. It seemed like we were going in the wrong direction, and I suddenly felt…not so good. Not so good at all.
“Fortunately, they agreed Dixie’s psychics we
ren’t going to be good to anyone dead, after I practically promised I’d have their babies. They’re going to be so disappointed when they figure out the plumbing doesn’t quite connect that way. Such nice shoulders.” She sighed. “By the time I got back to you, all hell had literally blown up, and half the planet had fled like rats on fire.”
A door opened and closed, and we were in some sort of hallway, lit by dim blue light. Nikki picked up speed as we moved, and I focused on keeping all my insides from becoming my outsides. “But kudos to Fitz’s interior decorator, right? The back of Binion’s opens up into a maze of underground tunnels that extend out into points all over old Vegas. You can get anywhere from anywhere down here, I’m thinking. And most importantly, we can get out.”
“Mmph,” I muttered as Nikki finally clattered to a stop. She slipped me off her shoulder, steadying me as I swayed.
“You look like shit, sweet cakes, but the moment we step outside these walls, the council is gonna be on you like rubber on a duck.” She snapped her fingers in front of my eyes until I pushed her hand away.
“Why?” I managed, then squinted as she waved at the high-tech fixtures blinking down at us over the large door.
“Fitz may have been a bastard, but he wasn’t cheap. That unit’s from Techzilla.” She grinned. “Psychic jamming device, top of the line. I suspect the council will want to get their hands on it, since it clearly blocks their asses too.” She waggled her brows at me. “Unless Hans and Franz strip it out of here first, which I sincerely hope they do. You ready for your close-up?”
I nodded, and she opened the door. We were in an alley that ran behind the Binion’s building, crowded with delivery trucks and a dozen or so half-clad clubbers. Smoke puffed out of some of the doors as they banged open, smelling of sulfur and too-sweet gas. There’d been so much gas—
“Up you go, babe.” Nikki had a strong arm around me, keeping me steady when I would have slumped to the ground. “I got a feeling we’re not out of this yet.”
She was right. We hadn’t moved ten feet when my vision was obscured by two perfect feet shod in luxury leather sandals. Laughter floated down around my head.
“I have so missed this city.” I squinted up into sunlight as the Devil stared down, his gaze full of warm admiration. “And all its many charms.”
Chapter Twenty
Nikki let me drop to the ground with admirable speed as she stood up, balancing on her high heels. My head swam, and my lungs felt…fouled. Every new breath didn’t improve the situation either. It was like I was adding to the contamination by inhaling the hot, dusty air. I shook my head, trying to clear it. No dice.
Nikki blew out a sharp breath. “You’d better not have been kidding about that invite to your club, yo,” she said, taking Kreios’s proffered handkerchief to wipe the worst of the grit off her face. “I’ve earned a serious VIP suite.”
“I will personally see to all your needs.” His considered me again as Nikki’s wheezed response devolved into a stuttering cough. “You were hurt worse than I expected,” he said, sounding surprised. “But you killed him, I assume?”
“Fitz? He is definitely dead.” Nikki wasn’t quite willing to give up the floor, and I was more than happy to let her carry on. “Unless he got modded to regenerate himself from bite-size pieces, anyway.”
“We didn’t kill anyone,” I half coughed. “You’re the one who planted that bomb.”
He frowned at me, genuinely confused. “Me?” he asked. “The council doesn’t kill mortals, Sara. Mortals kill mortals.” He looked down at his perfectly manicured fingers, apparently admiring the job of his nail tech. “The fire that was set outside of the necropolis exit was not deadly. Painful, perhaps. Not deadly. The men in the abbey—at no time did I lift a hand against any of them. I had you and your associate to thank for that. And here…” He waved around the bombed-out building. “This is an unfortunate accident emanating from the lair of an avowed meth cooker. We are merely lucky that the police and all their earnest young detectives are on their way. Thank heavens more innocent bystanders were not harmed.”
“Right.” I had no patience for the council’s loopholes right now, or its effed-up code of honor. And, truth to tell, SANCTUS could have been behind that bomb instead of the Devil. Fitz’s wrist cuff had been as destroyed as my Magic 8 Ball. Had Kreios planted a bomb or a harmless toy? And did it matter in the end? I was out. The girls were out.
Either way, there was something in Kreios’s words that nagged me, something whispering of warning. What was it he’d said? How had he said it, exactly? My vision blurred again as I bent forward, my hands on my knees, overcome with a sudden hacking fit that teetered on the edge of something far worse.
“How much did she ingest?” Kreios asked over my wheezing. I missed Nikki’s answer as I spit into the street, pretty sure I should be concerned at the vivid green hue of my bile.
“What was that shit?” I muttered. Kreios stepped closer, apparently unmoved by the Technicolor display.
“In addition to the gasses Mr. Fitz no doubt mentioned to you, as he was ever a fan of explaining his experiments in vivid detail, the mixture contains a cocktail of high-end designer hallucinogenics with electromagnetic properties,” he supplied. “Technoceuticals, I believe is the street term. The very latest coming out of southern Asia, where they’ve somewhat cornered the market on the trade. According to our resources, your host was engaged in some highly lucrative test applications intended to enhance the ability of known high-functioning Connecteds. With the proper combination, and once he managed to hurdle the unfortunately terminal side effects which seemed to accompany all such combinations to date, he could easily go out and turn mid-range Connecteds into high-functioning ones, and high-functioning ones into demigods. Or that was the theory.”
“Psychopath.” Nikki sniffed. But there was a note in her voice that I didn’t miss, and I thought of Dixie back at her chapel. She and Dixie were two mid-range Connecteds fighting on the side of good. If anyone would benefit from a technoceutical charge-up, why not them?
“Quite,” Kreios said, scattering my thoughts again. “Now that the wards are down on his lair, we will send in our analysts, at least once the police have—”
“Police!” I jerked my head up, panic finally cutting through my nausea. That couldn’t happen. His words from before suddenly trickled into my mind. The police and all their earnest young detectives… No. No, and no, and no.
“Okay, I’m out. Give Armaeus my love.” I straightened up painfully, willing my head to stop spinning. “He knows where to reach me.”
“So it is the police that centers your fear, Sara Wilde,” Kreios mused, eyeing me with renewed interest. “Except your fear is far greater than I find useful, as it shrouds your mind from me.”
“Hang on a tick,” Nikki interrupted the Devil’s complaint, peering down the alley. “That’s the ride for my girls. I also have no interest in dealing with the boys in blue, scrumptious though they may be. So let me get them out of here. We picked up a few stragglers along the way, and I need Dixie to triage.” She strode off to where the narrow avenue intersected with a main street, where a bright pink bus emblazoned with “Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars” idled. The two highly pierced guards stood watch over a clutch of young women, along with some adult males and a white-haired couple huddled together on the pavement, and the still-unconscious twins as well. I should go to the girls, I knew, make sure they were all right. I should report in to Father Jerome. I should close the loop and finish the job.
But the sound of sirens pounded through me, igniting me with a wholly unreasonable fear. Right now, I have to get out of here. The rest I’d figure out later.
I turned back to Kreios, but he’d already slipped away—no doubt to explore the building for himself before the police poured through it. The alley was finally clearing of smoke, and dizzying heat beat down on me.
I hated this city, I decided. Hated everything to do with it. And everything it h
eld. I wanted nothing more than to leave it behind for good.
But as nausea crashed over me again, pinning me in place for another moment, I also couldn’t deny what I’d seen while under the influence of Fitz’s Pythene gas.
SANCTUS was coming.
Whether they had killed Fitz or the Devil had, I was no longer sure, but their darkness was stretching toward Vegas—was already in Vegas, I suspected. No way was Fitz the only dark practitioner on their payroll. I thought of Barnabus back in Italy. Were the Knights Templar aligning themselves against the council as well?
And if so, it all came back to why. Clearing out the Connected communities made sense if you were an ultraconservative religious group. But the Knights Templar were as underground as the Connecteds, and their relationship with the Church had been anything but open. The mere fact they still existed, if they truly still existed, opened up an entirely new level of crazy, in fact.
Someone needed to bring the council up to speed, assuming that Kreios hadn’t already. Beyond that, Nikki’s and Dixie’s people needed to be warned. Prepared. How long had Fitz been operating at Binion’s, on SANCTUS’s payroll or at least in their good graces? How much had SANCTUS already penetrated the city? If SANCTUS was going to wage war in Las Vegas, the off-Strip carnies would be the first to fall.
And then there were the girls from Kavala. They were in no shape to be moved out of the city. It wasn’t reasonable to ask Father Jerome to come here to oversee their recovery. He had children of his own to find, in addition to his work in the cathedral. He’d want me to stay, get them on their feet, protect them for as long as it took to arrange for their safe transport back to their home village. How long had they been in Fitz’s lair? And what had they endured before they’d gotten here?
I sighed, the familiar urge to run gnawing at me, matched by the equally oppressive obligation to stay. Those were my options: I could leave, disappear. Hole up somewhere until I could inhale without hearing green slime rattle around in my lungs.