by Jenn Stark
The next and the next and the next place whirred by like a sickening storm. More violations. More experiments. A lab in the middle of a frozen landscape. A sacrificial ceremony in a swamp. A high-rise bristling with computers where maps of the star systems were overlaid with mathematical equations and ancient texts, while men and women hunched over their screens with a frenzied hope.
Then finally, a familiar face in an unfamiliar place. A face that turned to me, that smiled into the nothingness that was my presence, as if he could almost see me back.
I rushed by, not stopping, not speaking. I hadn’t been sent to find Max; he wasn’t supposed to be here. Instead I climbed the stairs of the palatial building with its austere, clean lines and moved quickly past guards and tourists, drifting down quieter and quieter corridors until I entered a room that was markedly different from all the others I had seen this day.
It was clean, it was orderly, and it was occupied by a group of businessmen who were wielding pens, not scalpels. There was something off about this group, though, something that breathed as much danger as any of the foul places I’d been before.
Then the doors opened, and I caught my breath. Darkness roiled into the room with an air of authority I had never before experienced, but the man it attended was familiar to me. He’d been the leader of SANCTUS, the figure I’d glimpsed in Binion’s lair. But here, in this place, his presence was much stronger, much clearer. It was also not quite human.
In that moment, he looked up, and I felt myself yanked out of the room, out of the building, the same soul-crushing pain grinding me up like a cheese grater until I came all the way back to myself in the chamber, the blessedly dark chamber, with walls and ceiling and floor and table and chairs and—
I slumped, almost hitting the ground before I was caught in a cool, steadying embrace. I smelled like fire and blood.
“That,” came the droll voice of the Devil, “was most unexpected.”
My eyes flickered open as I was hoisted up again. To my surprise, Armaeus didn’t carry me out of the room, which I heartily deserved, in my opinion. Instead, he poured me into one of the enormous chairs around the table. Eshe was seated as well, looking credibly shaken.
“Who are you?” she asked.
I stiffened. “Rich, or I’d better be.” I scowled at Armaeus, who regarded me with that maddeningly contemplative stare. “What? What did I do?”
“What you said you would,” he said. “You saw, and you shared what you saw.”
“She did more than that.” I blinked at the High Priestess’s tone. For all of her animosity toward me, there was something else new lining her words. “Where are you from? Who are your parents?”
“Okeedoke, I think the bonding moment is done, thanks. You guys going to tell me the import of anything I just saw?” At Eshe’s new layer of surprise, I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I remember what I see. If that’s not usual, let’s give the dearly departed Fitz some props. He’s improved on the original toxic fumes your little oracles inhaled. Though I gotta tell you, that hurt like a bitch.”
“Molecular displacement,” Armaeus said. “You literally came apart at the seams to travel the way you did, but retained sentience to report.”
“Yeah, well, it stung.”
“What you saw was the Connected community eating its own tail, if it matters.” Kreios reclined back in his chair, his fingers steepled together. “The experiments have been going on for a long time, but the electronica angle is new. New and dangerous. And possibly exactly what’s needed.”
“What I saw was not needed, I can pretty much guarantee that.”
He conceded that point with a nod. “But the idea was on track. Even doctors had a reason for leeching their patients, back in the day.”
“Look…” I sighed. “I need some air. You guys keep talking. I’ll be back when I’ve accounted for all my missing molecules.”
“You can’t leave.” Eshe leaned toward Armaeus, but her tone wasn’t petulant anymore. It was worried. “She can’t leave.”
“Watch me,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Getting out of the Magician’s lair was less exciting than I’d anticipated. Outside of the Conference Room of Doom, an elevator bay lay dead ahead, and when I pressed the button, it opened right up, mercifully empty. I rode it down to a bright antechamber clearly announcing itself as the Luxor’s front lobby, and wandered over to the bell desk, reviewing my options. I hesitated, keenly aware that I was being watched by two sets of staff members—from the Luxor and from Prime Luxe—both of which appeared to be clued into my appearance. It was like standing in the hotel lobby of The Shining.
I didn’t have any preset plans. I just had to get out of there. Besides, something about the council’s coldness up in their hallowed heavenly halls had me thinking about Nikki and Dixie again, and the city’s Connected community. And the girls from Kavala.
More to the point, if I was going to be stuck in Vegas for a few days, I needed to learn my way around. And where else should I start but the friendly neighborhood Welcome Wagon?
“Hello,” I said to the small, faintly European-looking concierge standing there. “I’m trying to get the lay of the land, and I was hoping you could direct me to the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars?”
“Love in the Stars? But of course, mademoiselle. You are a bride-to-be?”
The man’s accent seemed legitimately French, and I blinked at him. “No—well, I mean, I need to go to the chapel, but I’m not—”
“It is the most romantic chapel in Las Vegas, you will see! But it is a bit of a distance. You would like a taxi, yes?”
“Yes.” I smiled at him. Then I remembered: I had no purse. I had no plastic. I had no phone. I sighed. “Never mind. How far is it away from here?”
As the man peered at the screen, I heard the unmistakable hard stride of a six-foot-four woman in four-inch stiletto heels. I turned around in time to see Nikki doing a double take as she scanned me from head to foot. She was back in a chauffeur costume, but, given the hour, she’d upgraded to the fully sequined version.
“Whoa, girl. What the hell are you wearing?” She frowned at my art-gallery outfit, her scowl lightening briefly as I pulled off the shirt to reveal my tank underneath. “Well, now you’re not just pitiful, you don’t match at all.”
“Says the woman wearing a sequined chauffeur’s outfit.”
“Says the woman rocking a sequined chauffeur’s outfit.” She grinned. “C’mon. I’ve been camped out here in this kitsch palace waiting for you for the last three nights. Sooner or later I knew you’d showed up.”
Something about her words struck me as wrong, but my brain became wholly occupied with the effort of movement. As we walked the short distance to the car, I could sense the vertigo sneaking up on me. We stopped at a potted plant in the shape of an enormous scarab beetle just as I was feeling the need for something to steady me. I held on to it as Nikki leaned against the valet station and made eyes at the young man standing there. “Please tell me you didn’t park my car in the Nairobi desert,” she said. “I gotta bounce.”
Whether the valet was blinded by her sequins or her smile, he blinked rapidly, then took her ticket and dashed off. Nikki glanced back at me and frowned. “You feeling okay?”
I shrugged. “How are the girls? Are they safe?”
“Most of them didn’t need to be admitted.” Nikki pulled out her phone, scanning her messages as she talked. “The ones who did were admitted more for dehydration than for their wounds. It seems that Fitz kept his entertainment well-nourished enough to function, but ten hours a day in that smoke-filled hole-in-the-wall eventually wears a body down.” She scowled, looking up at me again. “Their burns will heal, but some of them will be scarred for life. Shitty way to go for people who already had the cards stacked against them, pardon the pun.”
“And their minds?”
One corner of her mouth kicked up in a wry grin. “At least there they’ve got a bit of
an edge. Being an acknowledged Connected as a kid tends to toughen you up mentally, prepare you for the road ahead. It’s us poor sons-a-bitches who don’t figure it out until later in life that have the harder road. Fortunately, what the psychic network didn’t prepare me for, the police academy did.”
I blinked, not sure if I heard her correctly. Police academy? True, Nikki could handle a weapon with the best of them, and she had a certain no-nonsense style beneath her flash. But though I didn’t know her well, I wouldn’t have pegged her for a cop. Especially not as—
She laughed at my confusion. “Oh, I didn’t look like this then, dollface. That was before the change. That was before a lot of things. Still, you don’t really ever forget, you know?”
Her tone was a little wistful, but before I could respond, her sleek town car cruised up the ramp and slowed to a stop. The starstruck young man leapt out of it as Nikki rounded the front of the vehicle. He handed over the keys—and his card. The latter Nikki tucked into her bra, and I wondered if she still had the Devil’s card in there as well, or if her foundation garments were permanently lined with mementos from the streets of Vegas. “I love this town,” she sighed happily as she slung herself into the car. She looked at me in the review mirror. “Dixie’s, I heard you say?”
I shook my head. “Hospital first. Armaeus said that they’d moved the Kavala twins to a private room at Las Vegas Medical. I want to double check that for myself, before their parents arrive tomorrow.” I drew in a shaky breath that I was sure contained some oxygen in it. “So, that was one heck of a distress call you piped into my brain earlier today. I didn’t know you could do that. I got out of there as soon as I could.”
Nikki’s gaze, momentarily occupied by getting out into traffic on the boulevard, slanted back to me. “Um…’k. But the girls’ parents have been here for over a day, sugar.”
”What?” I frowned. I’d seen those girls not five hours ago. Something wasn’t tracking. Then something else clicked in: Nikki’s words, about waiting for me for the last three nights… “Ah, how many days has it been since I saw you in Binion’s then?”
“That would be three. You went poof into the Cat in the Hat’s limo, and I didn’t hear another word out of you. No sooner did I turn around from that, but the oracle girls disappeared. Like, now you see them, now you don’t disappeared. Jez, that would be bodyguard number two, was beside himself. And he’s big enough on his own.”
“That was all the first day?” My mind balked at trying to parse such simple information.
“Tuesday, yep.” Another whiskey-eyed glance. “Any of this ringing a bell?”
“Not so you’d notice.”
She shook her head. “I tried to contact you but got no reply. Good to know it worked, though.” She grinned. “Then I got a message from one of the council’s couriers that you were safe and healing, that the Kavala twins were fine, and I should focus on getting anything I could out of the young psychics we liberated from Binion’s. Their medical care was covered by the council, by the way. Dixie let that slip.” She blew out a long breath. “Then yesterday, I get another call from the hospital, since somehow I’ve been assigned as their ward, and they were back in the hospital, and oh, yes, could I please come down and sign a bunch of paperwork. Which of course I did. The girls woke up midday, but while I’m given to understand they can speak English, they seem to need to be in a trance to do it. So we basically smiled at each other a lot. Their parents arrived today, and they don’t speak much English either, but I got them to the hospital in one piece. The Magician is putting them up at the Palazzo. Nice digs, but not cheap.” She paused. “There are also guards assigned. At the hotel and at the hospital. Someone cares about these girls, it seems.”
I thought about what the High Priestess had planned for the sisters—what I’d taken on instead. My body felt like it was held together with Krazy Glue and chicken wire. “They’re recovering?”
“The hospital is expecting a specialist in tomorrow to start doing a full tox study. They found enough trace remains of the gas to perform a chemical analysis, but not enough, apparently, to reproduce it for further study. I’m pretty sure there were more than enough canisters of that shit stored around Binion’s that didn’t go boom, though. And I’m not the only one.”
That sounded ominous. “Who else—oh.” It hit me with the punch of a medicine ball dropping on my stomach. “The police.”
“The very same.” She paused as we turned the corner, heading off the Strip. I didn’t know the lay of the land yet, but it felt like we were heading to Dixie’s chapel. “After your little disappearing act, the detective on assignment came looking for me. And while I always appreciate his pretty blue eyes and fine ass, I had to go full-on diva meltdown over the remaining girls to keep him off his balance until Dixie took over and I could split.” She eyed me again. “He asked if there’d been a woman in the club, maybe someone who’d found the psychics. He called her Sariah Pelter.”
Sariah Pelter. I shifted in my seat. I hadn’t heard that name for a long time. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, that there were two hundred people in that place, and it was dark, it stank, and I wasn’t doing a census. Then he pulled out a picture.”
That did make me sit up straight. Something hard panged in my chest. “A picture? What sort of picture?”
“The sort you got from newspapers back when they still had newspapers. It was beat to shit too, even in the little laminated pocket thing he had it in. And it was you, dollface, circa age sixteen, not counting your eyes. Those put your birthdate more at the creation of the world.” We pulled into the parking garage at LVM, and I shuddered as we entered the concrete structure in an actual car vs. via the psychic highway. Traveling by limo hurt way less than traveling by brainwaves. Or whatever it was I’d done. Nikki parked and half turned in her seat. “You wanna tell me that little story before I up and say the wrong thing at the wrong time?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but her phone beeped. She glanced down. “Hold that thought, honey,” she said. “The girls just flat-lined.”
We piled out of the limo, Nikki bolting for the elevator for several long steps before she realized I was keeping up. With a curse, she strode back to me, pulling one of my arms over her neck to carry some of my weight. “I thought you were supposed to be healing.”
“This is me healing.”
I couldn’t fully hear Nikki’s expletive as we made it to the elevator bay. She practically threw me up against the wall, bracing me as she punched in a button for the fourth floor. Then she scowled at me and also punched one for the fifth.
“They separated the girls?”
“They did not,” she said. “Just hedging my bets given your awesome athletic prowess right now. I can’t manage everyone collapsing around me at the same time.”
“Great,” I muttered. I couldn’t seem to fill my lungs. I’d started out fine at the car, but within three steps, I’d needed a deep breath of air, and—it wasn’t there. Whatever was pumping through my veins was high-test something or other, but it certainly wasn’t oxygen.
The elevator pinged open, and Nikki punched it closed again, not moving until we’d hit the fifth floor. “Here we go.” She hauled me out of the elevator and down the hallway. Room doors stood open, some with patients, some not. She stepped inside one and deposited me on a chair, then squatted until she was eye-level.
That, apparently, was the wrong thing to do. “What are you on?” She scowled at me, then pulled a phone out of her cleavage. “Burner. No passcode set. Do me a favor and don’t set one now, not until you stabilize. Which ain’t going to be anytime soon, sweetcakes.”
She held out the phone, and I took it, wincing against another chest spasm. “I’ve got the number, and I’ll text you if it’s clear. When you feel better, if you feel better, it’s room 425. If you don’t feel better, crawl into this nice bed here and tell the nurse I’m one floor down. It’s
not like they don’t already know me in this joint.”
I nodded, and Nikki gripped my shoulder, then stood. I heard her heels clicking down the long corridor. Twenty steps, then a pause, a door slam, and silence.
Stairs, I thought. I could get to the stairs.
I couldn’t stay where I was, no matter what Nikki said.
What did the High Priestess do to me?
I closed my eyes. The lights still flickered, and I thought back. I remembered the girls, the fight. The afternoon of preparation, a meal. Being left alone and nodding off.
Nodding off.
The meal.
I frowned. I’d been tired, yes. But I hadn’t been ready to drop into a coma. Had Armaeus drugged me? Worse, was one of the side effects of the drug an enhanced visual acuity for astral travel or whatever the hell it was that I’d done?
Just whose side was that bastard on, anyway?
I struggled to straighten in my chair—which was a good first step, I thought. At some point, my phone pinged, and I glanced down at it. My eyes blurred with pain almost immediately, so I tucked my phone away. Nikki was supposed to text me when she had the all clear. Well, she’d texted. What she said didn’t matter, I just needed to get to her.
I pushed out of the room and sighed, swaying closer to the wall. What was my deal? Fortunately, the unit was all but empty tonight, and I made my way down the interminably long corridor mostly by breathing through my nose. The place smelled like antiseptic and citrus, which, surprisingly, helped stabilize me. Then again, I’d been in and out of a lot of hospitals, back in the day.
As Sariah Pelter. “C’mon, c’mon,” I gritted out. “Not the time.”
I made it to the door marked EXIT and pushed it, almost crying with relief as I staggered into the cool white stairwell. I pressed up against the wall and realized from the shock of contact that my skin was fiery hot. “Goddammit, Armaeus,” I muttered. “What did you do to me?”
Only silence greeted me. I tried to remember whether or not the Magician had spoken inside my head since I’d entered Binion’s. He had, hadn’t he? But not since he’d “healed” me. And certainly not once I’d been prepared for the High Priestess’s visioning work.