Getting Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  So now here I was, trudging through the Palazzo, the key card and a box of deep-fried love in my hands the only things keeping me going. A beefy security guy waved me through to the special bank of guest elevators, and, I’m not going to lie, I appreciated his extra muscles, though my problems weren’t going to be solved by brawn. I rode up to my floor alone, then shambled down the long, luxurious hallway past several double doors whose numbers I barely registered. My entire world had diminished to four very important digits. 2-0-1-5. I’d get there eventually.

  After what seemed like an inordinately long time, the rooms dwindled to single-door dwellings, with doors spaced farther apart. Then, suddenly, Suite 2015 loomed in front of me. I slid my passkey home, somehow absurdly pleased with the green light that flicked on. I shoved the far too heavy door open, walked inside—and stopped short. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Suite 2015 glowed in the warm, ambient shimmer of several discreetly placed lamps in the foyer, the light glinting off a white marble-inlaid floor that spilled out in pristine beauty across the foyer, down a short set of steps, and into a sunken living room area. The room was stuffed with every conceivable luxury: a giant flat-screen TV, unreasonably large overstuffed couches, a prissy work desk bristling both with electronics and a huge bottle of champagne in a bucket, and…a floor-to-ceiling view of the most extraordinary world I’d ever seen.

  Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas.

  Mesmerized, I dropped the donuts on a table and walked toward the window. My eyes filled with the city’s bright lights—and its enormous phantom casinos: The pristine white-and-black towers, the fairy-tale castle and its neighboring hulking keep. Above the Flamingo Hotel, Scandal’s glass-fronted lightshow had changed to a pulsing neon burst of purple flames.

  I leaned against the window frame, my gaze inexorably drawn yet farther south. Because there, of course, was the final casino, crouched like a predator at the edge of the city. Prime Luxe. It was larger than all the rest, more elegant and more barbaric by turns, its glowing metal spires thrusting up in a primitive and powerful cry to the heavens. I wondered if Armaeus was in there somewhere, watching for me, waiting.

  Well, he can go screw himself. I was wrung out, feeling worse, not better, with each passing hour since I’d tripped the light fantastic in the council’s conference room and had my Brody showdown. God, that had all sucked. Even the parts that still sent my heart racing. Because I knew what I had to do.

  I was staying as long as it took to get the girls out of danger, then I was out of here. Permanently.

  Even as I thought the words, the white spires of the Prime Luxe turned red—pulsed—then went dark.

  I wheeled back from the window as if I’d been slapped. Jerking the curtains closed, I blanked the view of the city.

  “You bring the donuts?”

  I looked up, and Nikki stood in the doorway to the second bedroom of the suite, her hair in a garish turban and her body ensconced in an enormous kimono.

  “Kitchen table.” I pointed.

  “You’re the best. She padded over, and I realized that she was wearing giant poodle slippers. “I left you a change of clothes on your bed from my go-bag. We gotta do something about your wardrobe, but not tonight. Tonight is for donuts and champagne. The latter is on the Magician. I’m sure he won’t mind.”

  I smiled as I trudged my way into the bedroom. The thing on the bed looked like one long piece of cloth, but I didn’t care. I unbuckled my boots, then skimmed out of my shirt and leggings. Eventually I found a neck hole in the garment and pulled it on. It was some sort of weird caftan, and it smelled like bubblegum lip gloss.

  Nikki hadn’t wanted me to be left alone tonight, and I hadn’t wanted to either. Nevertheless, I was a little out of my depth. It’d been a long time since I’d had anything approaching a girlfriend. Other than Father Jerome, it’d been a long time since I’d had anything approaching a friend at all.

  She barked out a laugh when I went back into the main area. I’d knotted the garment to the side, and it almost cleared the ground. “Dollface, I swear, if I posted that on Facebook, you’d have to fight the boys off with sticks. C’mere. The donuts are top-drawer . The champagne sucks, but what’re you gonna do.”

  “Any port in a storm.” Instead of going with conventional flutes, Nikki served the bubbly in giant glass tumblers. I picked up the bottle and read the label. “I assume this was the most expensive bottle?”

  “I figured you needed it more than the sultan of Dubai.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that, but Nikki grinned at me as I gingerly slid onto the couch. My mental inventory insisted that everything that was supposed to be inside my body remained inside. Even if it all remained a little scrambled.

  “So.” Nikki leaned back in her chair, her feet stacked one over the other at the ankle, the white fuzzy poodles waging their pink tongues at me. She hoisted her tumbler, but her eyes were direct. Cop direct. And her manner was no-nonsense. “You want to tell me what’s going on between you and Detective Sexy Pants?”

  “Why—is he dating Dixie?” The words were out before I could stop them.

  “Nope, but not for her lack of trying. That’s a complication for another day, though, because he pretty much looked ready to eat you alive at the hospital, and pretty much all in a good way, once he gets over his pout. What’d you do to him?”

  I grimaced. “Let him believe I was dead for the last ten years.”

  “Well, that would put a guy off, I guess.”

  I picked up my own glass and took a long swig. Nikki had opened up the curtains again while I’d been changing, and the entire swath of the Vegas Strip lay spread out in front of us like a sorcerer’s playground. I sensed all the questions coming from Nikki, but I beat her to it. Now, this night, I wanted somebody to know.

  “Back in the day, I wasn’t Sara Wilde. I was Sariah Pelter, or Psychic Teen Sariah.” I rolled the glass in my hand. There was no judgment coming from Nikki. I suspected she’d been a pretty good cop at some point. “Your comment about knowing your gifts as a kid making it easier? It does and it doesn’t. My mom knew what I could do, and she told her friends, who told their friends. I’d read cards for them when they came over to play poker. They all got a great laugh out of it. Eventually, I was maybe about twelve at this point, someone asked me if I could find her lost dog. God love her, she loved that dog.” I shook my head, remembering it. “Little Jack Russell terrier, most annoying thing you ever could imagine. She was beside herself with worry.” I let my words trail off, remembering the woman’s lined face, her florid bottle-red hair, her heavy makeup. And her eyes. Her eyes had been the worst. She’d known from the start.

  “Let me guess,” Nikki interrupted my thoughts. “You found the dog in a neighbor’s backyard.”

  “Put out in the trash. I didn’t predict that part. She guessed when she went home that night and saw the trash cans all lined up along the street. She attacked everyone’s garbage like some sort of crazed maniac and found Kiki within twenty minutes. My mom told me that later.” I shuddered. Of all the terrible things I’d seen since then, it was that story that gave me the willies. Maybe because that was when everything had started. “It didn’t take long after that.”

  “And how long did it take for puppies to become kids?”

  I glanced at her sharply, and once again, despite the kimono and turban and the thin film of facial cream, the eyes that stared out at me were dead-on cop.

  “You said ten years ago was when you were tangled up with Brody. For him to give a shit, he had to be working with you. Not a huge leap to have the community psychic brought in on an investigation, even if she’s a kid. Especially if she’s a kid.” Her eyes narrowed. “Schoolmate, I bet.”

  I worked my hands around the glass. “Maryann Williams. She’d been gone three days. I didn’t know her, not really. She wasn’t in any of my classes. But her mom told someone else’s mom, who told my mom and also the police th
at I probably knew something because I could find anything, and my mom, of course, was more than happy to march me down to the station to prove their stories true.”

  “She sounds like a prize.” Nikki’s words were slightly more judgmental now. “But you did your thing, I’m thinking. You found the kid.”

  “Yeah.” I swallowed. “I was too late, though.”

  Nikki took another drink and considered that. “Bet you weren’t after that.”

  “Not usually.” My words were barely a whisper now. “I became sort of obsessed. I would pore over the missing persons reports, amber alerts. My mom kept bringing me to the station. I’d give information to anyone who would listen. They even investigated me as being an accessory once.”

  “Gotta love the system. They assigned you to Brody after that?”

  “He was new on homicide, and they tossed him into Crimes against Kids or something like that. He got saddled with me before he could say no.” I shrugged. “After a while, it just seemed natural, working together.”

  “And how long before it blew up?”

  I looked out the window again. Scandal was lit up in pulsing purple and red. As I watched, it slid to blue, then green. Like a skyscraping lava lamp. “Three years. Then I just—I had to leave the city. For good. And I couldn’t leave a trail. I was off the grid for a long time after that. But eventually, I sort of drifted back, I guess.”

  “We all do.” Nikki rolled the champagne around in her glass. “And then, eventually, Brody transferred here, and you never came clean on the fact that you’d been alive all this time.” She looked at me somberly. “Cops take that kind of thing personally. We lose too many as it is.”

  I winced, remembering the almost crazed look in Brody’s eyes as he’d searched my face, unwilling to believe at first that I wasn’t some hallucination. “I know.”

  “But that definitely explains you’ve always been hell-bent on leaving this place almost before you touch down.” She stopped moving her glass. “Until this time. Because of those girls.”

  “I made a deal with the council.” I sensed the slightest touch of Armaeus in my mind, but I ruthlessly shut him out. “Fitz pumped a lot of that Pythene gas into me, and it did something to me. For the time being, I have the same visioning skills that Jos and Prayim do. So they don’t have to play Eye of God for the council. I can.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  “About as well as it looks.”

  Nikki pursed her lips, her glass almost empty as she leaned down to scoop up another donut. “There’s more to it, isn’t there? The girls—before they disappeared, the first time, they said something’s come for us. Hunting us down. And that they were coming here next.”

  I saw no reason to deny it. “Yeah.”

  She shook her head. “Well, it’s a great place to party.”

  I laughed again despite myself, and Nikki eased the conversation away from all the dark corners and sharp edges that were forming in my mind. At some point, she helped me to my feet, but the pain in my body had dulled from the alcohol and sugar. I stumbled into bed, telling myself that tomorrow, everything would work out. Tomorrow, I’d find out when the girls would be able to return home. Tomorrow, I was one day closer to getting my own freedom back.

  Sleep didn’t creep up on me like a whisper in the night—it hit me like a baseball bat. I’d no sooner closed my eyes than my mind unhinged, and I found myself sifting and drifting through a flood of random, unconnected thoughts, sinking deeply into a profoundly subverbal bliss. Gradually, the mind-static firmed and a soft, familiar murmur slid over me, as intimate as a lover’s touch.

  Exactly that intimate, in fact.

  Sweet Christmas, yes. I needed a really good dream right about now. I let the smile curve my lips, pleasure prickling along my skin, warming it, as I arched in response to the pressure on my body. I sighed with completely unfettered appreciation as the mattress beneath me shifted to accommodate the body of a large, delicious-smelling man, knocking my Sleep Number to an absolute 10. Not any delicious-smelling man either, but a beautiful, dangerous, lust-magnet muffin of stud who I wasn’t entirely sure was trustworthy, but at this moment, I pretty much didn’t care, because I was dreaming. And if a girl couldn’t throw caution to the wind while she was sacked out for the night, when could she?

  Except…except there was decidedly something non-dreamlike about the hand sliding up my thigh, about the soft murmur of breath along skin, the feeling of lips pressing to my hipbone, my rib cage, my shoulder. And the Magician’s voice when he’d spoken was close—too close. Like, right-next-to-me close. Despite my brain insisting that waking up was seriously not in my best interests, even if all of this was a dream, I pried my eyes open a slit.

  Just in time to get body-checked into the mattress by a full-frontal bronzed demigod.

  “Miss Wilde,” the Magician purred. I felt myself sliding back down a rabbit hole of unconsciousness, unable to escape. Then his next words sent me spinning in an entirely different direction. “It’s time for our work to begin.”