by Jenn Stark
I flinched. “What?”
“Two,” he continued, still contemplative. “You both coexist but live in terrible pain, each recognizing the loss that you have endured because of the existence of the other. Three, she does act like a shard and reassimilates with you, body and soul, leaving you to sort out whatever collateral damage that requires.”
“You know, this is all sounding like a really bad idea…”
“Four, you exist separately in whole and easy unison, as Nikki suggests, like two long-lost sisters.”
“Sisters.” I grimaced.
“Cousins,” he offered.
“Twice removed,” Nikki chimed in from the front. “And it would certainly solve the need to have a doppelgänger. We could sic Sariah on Interpol, and the entire agency would burn.”
I shot Nikki a glare in the front seat. “You almost sound like you want me to do this,” I accused. “Even though there’s that whole ‘and you could both die or be mentally damaged’ part.”
“You forget, dollface, I was there with you—briefly—when you were in Hell. I touched you, and you were not all that far removed from seeing your…Sariah. There were other parts of your trip you didn’t want me to see, but not that. I saw her. She wasn’t a nice person, but…” She shrugged. “She was you. Or a part of you. And, well, I love you.”
“But she’s not me—not anymore. She was who I was when I was seventeen, calcified with ten more years in Hell.”
“Still…” Nikki said.
“You know this sounds like the beginning of a really bad horror movie, right?” I protested. “She’s going to show up, and you and she are going to become best friends, and I’m going to end up dead in a bus stop bathroom, the word ‘Whyyyy’ written in blood on the wall.”
Kreios chuckled and leaned back in his seat. “Perhaps you could discuss it directly with her.”
“But I can’t,” I said mulishly. “You haven’t told me how to—”
The switch happened so quickly, my eyes refused to fully acknowledge the change in Kreios’s demeanor, let alone his physical form. One moment, he was his long, lean sun-burnished self, the next, he was crowded into the corner of the vehicle, almost hunched over, long dark hair stuck to his skull. He wasn’t Kreios either.
“Sariah?” I gasped.
The figure squeaked in terror as Nikki swerved, almost running us off the road. Her arms flailing, she grappled for the handle with one hand and flung the other back to brace herself against the seat cushion.
“What is happening?” Sariah demanded, her voice high and shrill. Not my voice, I realized with a start. In fact, there was a lot about Sariah that wasn’t quite me. Her hair was lighter, almost a deep cherry red, she was thinner, and her eyes were wide with terror. She was so different from even when I’d seen her in Hell that I couldn’t speak for a moment.
Then again, she’d just been ripped out of her world and thrust bodily into mine, so she could be excused from being surprised.
“You’re all right—you’re all right,” I began, but Sariah’s eyes stopped rolling long enough to fix on me, and the twisted snarl I remembered so well suddenly returned. That didn’t take long.
“You don’t know that, you don’t know that at all,” she retorted. “Whose body is this anyway, this form that I’m sort of in? It’s old and it’s creepy.”
I could almost hear Kreios’s choked laugh, and the car lurched again, Nikki trying to balance her need to see what was going on in the back of the SUV with her need to not have us end up in a ditch.
“The Devil of the Arcana Council,” I said, holding Sariah’s gaze as she swung her face back toward me. “I can’t reenter Hell right now. I’ve become… I can’t get back there right now. But I wanted to see you. Talk to you.”
“Why?” she demanded. “I was doing just fine. I did what you asked. I helped you with the Magician. I showed you things you would never have known otherwise.” To her credit, she didn’t even smirk, though what she’d shown me had nearly devastated me. With Sariah as puppet master when I’d bumbled my way into Hell the first time, I’d experienced what I’d thought was real love with Armaeus—real and lasting love, a lifetime’s worth—that was then ripped away from me, leaving me crippled with heartbreak and loss as I’d realized it was all an illusion.
What about now? I wondered suddenly. Was what I shared with Armaeus real? Or was it still that illusion, a constantly moving picture show that never reached its ending, winding over and over again in my mind?
No. I couldn’t—wouldn’t believe that. I wouldn’t let that be possible.
Sariah had turned to me, staring out with haunted eyes. “Why are you doing this to me now?” she pleaded.
I blinked at her, my brain scrambling to catch up. “You don’t—want to be back, um, on earth? In the mortal plane or whatever?” I asked. Mostly I was just glad that Sariah hadn’t gone up in flames or hadn’t forcibly reintegrated with me, though that might still be because she was borrowing Kreios’s body, or at least using it as a tether.
“What?” she looked around wildly. “Whoa. Is that where this is?” She fumbled with the door handle, and I heard the distinctive snick of the locks engaging from the front, even as the window rolled down.
“Oh!” Sariah leaned her head out the window, the breeze catching at her hair and lifting it off her face as the sun shone down on her. Her entire demeanor changed in that moment, her body going limp. Her hands no longer grasped the handle of the door, nor clutched the back of the seat. Instead, they fell half-open as she experienced the elements on her skin for the first time in, what…ten years? Ever? Could she even remember who we’d been before that fateful day in Memphis a decade ago?
“I…it’s wind,” she said, marveling. “There’s no wind in Hell, not really. Not once you get used to it and understand how the illusion works.”
“Do you…like it?” I didn’t know what to say to her, I realized. I felt like an idiot for calling her here.
She slid her glance to me, seemed to register the rest of the world around her. She stiffened, straightening quickly against the seat, and easing back from the window.
“You caught me off guard,” she said. “I knew you became immortal the moment the Magician turned you. I knew you weren’t coming back.” She waved off my immediate protest. “Couldn’t come back, yeah, yeah, I get it. But—what, so you decided to bring me here? Why?” she narrowed her eyes. “What do you need?”
“A second chance.” That response came out before I really meant it to. But once the phrase hung between us, I realized it was what I wanted. “I didn’t know what I did all those years ago to you, creating you, when I saw the blast of smoke and fire. I had no idea that I could do something like…this.” I flapped my hand at her.
To my surprise, she gave me a lopsided grin. “You never were willing to acknowledge your strength, you know. It was one of your biggest flaws. Still your biggest one, I’m thinking. That’s…probably on me, though. I took what little spine you had and kept it with me.”
“Hey,” I protested. “I’ve done just fine without you.”
“Fine enough.” She shrugged. “But you never wanted to believe what you could be, not really. It’s your most glaring hang-up.”
She glanced forward to Nikki. “You were in Hell, briefly. I felt you there. You’re her best friend now.” Sariah smiled a little, and that smile cut me to the core. Once again, I was smote with regret, dismay, even embarrassment. How could I have left Sariah in the pit of Hell once I realized she was there?
Even as I thought the words, however, I rejected the idea. I hadn’t thought of her as a real person, merely an illusion placed in Hell to guide me, test me, and show me what I needed to know. It hadn’t occurred to me that Sariah was her own being. And now…
“Do you want out of Hell?” I asked again abruptly. Sariah turned to me, startled. For a moment, I thought she was going to respond with a snarky retort, then she hesitated.
“I don’t know,” she
said, with what sounded like honesty. “It’s all I really know anymore. There was life, then there was the fire, then you wouldn’t come back to the fire. You were running away—running away!” Her expression now flashed with derision. “You always wanted to run away. But I didn’t. I heard my name, and I saw what was in the fire. And I wanted it, wanted it with an urge that I had no interest in denying. At first, it was incredibly hard to turn back, but then…but then you kept running. And it got a whole lot easier after that. But instead of reaching the lair of the epically cool dragon, I ended up in Hell. And, well, that became home to me.”
“But do you want to stay there anymore, if you could live…out here?” I repeated the question quietly, trying to imagine myself as a seventeen-year-old girl not running toward escape, but instead confronting the fire that had destroyed everything I knew. I heard the excitement, even passion in Sariah’s voice, and I could even hear the echo of it in my own mind, the echo of all the bad ideas, foolish plans, stupid chances I had taken as a kid. I’d become a lot more cautious after the explosion, but I’d always assumed that it was because I’d learned the lesson of being careful, being wary. It’d never occurred to me that my foolhardiness had been stripped away from me forcibly.
Did I want it back?
I was still puzzling through that, trying to decide what to do, how to do it, and if it was doable, when the question became one of when, not if. Sariah turned her face toward the window again, her eyes on a distant horizon that only she could see.
“Is…is Officer Brody still around?” she asked quietly.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
After Kreios had body-switched with Sariah again, returning her at least temporarily to Hell, we’d spent the entire way to Bharatpur arguing about how she could legitimately leave that plane and come to Las Vegas. Nikki had primarily been insistent that she be the one to introduce Sariah to Brody, but Kreios was more concerned with ensuring that she made the transition in one piece, and that she stayed in one piece. I hadn’t felt even the slightest tug that would indicate any sort of weird reassimilation between us, fortunately. As to the rest, it would have to sort itself out.
When we reached the airport, Kreios took his leave—presumably to find a way to bounce Sariah out of Hell without anyone realizing what he was doing. And by anyone, I was pretty sure he meant the Magician.
It took the entire flight back to Vegas for Nikki and me to wrap our heads around the idea of Sariah living in the real world, and I still wasn’t sure we’d managed it by the time the plane taxied to a stop on the tarmac. Foremost on my mind, oddly enough, was the small detail that Sariah had distracted Armaeus enough to allow me to ice-pick the guy with a tree branch, in order to jump-start his return to immortality. I wondered how he’d feel about seeing her again…
The slightest whisper of a laugh skated through my mind. “As long as I see you again, Miss Wilde, that is all that matters.”
“We got the all clear, dollface,” Nikki barked, startling me and fortunately missing the flaring heat in my cheeks as she trotted down the jet stairs in front of me. We deplaned from our nondescript charter flight onto the tarmac of the private airstrip we’d secured…one of four rented out in case the airport was being watched. Nikki swept the horizon with her gaze and returned her attention to her headset, relaying orders with a cool, officious command.
No admirers were waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs, however, and the limo sitting at the edge of the runway was empty, as per our instructions. Nikki jogged ahead of me, her long legs eating up asphalt in her vintage aviator gear complete with bomber jacket, slim khakis, and heavy boots. I dashed along behind her, carrying nothing but the tools of ultimate destruction and enlightenment in a pack on my back. I slid into the opened door Nikki held as she again swept the airstrip, her face intent behind her mirrored sunglasses.
Apparently satisfied, she entered the vehicle herself and flipped her long golden-brown hair out of her face, tucking a strand behind one ear as she transferred her communication device to the console of the vehicle.
“We’re all clear here, Nigel. Where’d the gamers go?”
“Primary group is at drop point B. We’re processing them now.” Nigel’s voice sounded tired. He’d been here a full thirty-six hours before we’d eventually wound our way to Vegas, and it sounded like he’d been awake for every one of them.
Nikki put the car into gear and pointed it toward the city. “Any idea how they got word we’d be coming in now?”
Nigel sighed. “They didn’t. They’ve simply been waiting here, hoping that Sara would eventually show up. We explained to them about the video game, and about the information waiting for them there. They’ve already seen it. But they knew that you are coming in, and they didn’t want to miss the chance of seeing you.”
I groaned, and Nikki cracked a smile. “This is starting to break my heart.”
“How many are we talking, Nigel?” I asked from the back of the car.
“Today, with this group all in, about thirty people. Since we let drop you were heading back, more like three hundred.”
“Three hundred!”
“Yep. And that’s only the small portion who either have the means or the proximity to Vegas to get here easily. Ma-Singh has been flooded with inquiries into the email address that we embedded into the game code. Those numbers are looking more around several thousand, when you count everyone worldwide.”
“How is that even possible?” I demanded. “How could all those people know about Simon’s game?”
Nikki snorted. “Dollface, the number seems big to you now, but think about it. There are Connecteds in every corner of the globe. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, and only a tiny fraction of them have stumbled onto this game, and a fraction of that with the means to get here. It sounds like a lot because they’re all focused on you, but it’s really not.”
“Several thousand Connecteds, with some of them flying to Las Vegas because of a video game, is a lot no matter how you slice it,” I said. “Any one of those people could get picked up by Interpol, at least if they’re old enough, and interrogated. You don’t think they’ll give up the game pretty quickly? Once they do…”
“Well, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news…” Nigel’s voice was full of chagrin, and I sank back in my seat, more exhausted than I could remember being in a long time.
“How bad?” I asked.
“Not great, not terrible,” Nigel said. “Interpol has updated your Red Notice to include child endangerment and cult-based recruitment methods.”
I winced. “How is that not terrible?”
“Nobody is indicating that you’re creating an army yet. I’m not sure why that is, though. It would be my absolute first thought.”
“Have we spoken to anybody they’ve interviewed? Maybe it’s something in the way they present the information?”
“We have, and it’s possible. The kids we’ve picked up have been adamant that you don’t know anything about their actions. That they are operating because they want to, not because they’ve been summoned. However, we’ve looked at more of the mods buried in the game, and there are some definite clues to lead people out of Mongol Horde and into Arcania, Champions of Atlantis.”
I closed my eyes. “Please…don’t call it that.”
“Do I have an action figure?” Nikki asked. “Tell me that Simon made action figures.”
“Bottom line, beyond the mod we added, the Sara Wilde character in the game is issuing warnings right and left, telling players to be careful. She shows up in bars and cantinas, in churches, walking down the street. Most of the time she’s in disguise, and her actions always follow the same pattern. Interestingly, the pattern that played out in Kathmandu. Players gather, she shows up, they get attacked, she saves the day, issues a warning, then leaves.”
I frowned. “But that just happened. He’s uploading information that quickly and it’s getting coded into the game?”
“Ah, no,” Nigel said. “It appears that this sort of behavior has been seen from Sara Wilde since the embedded game’s first inception, six months ago.”
“You’re just that predictable, dollface.” Nikki grinned.
“Where is Simon now? Does he have any idea that we’re on to him? He has to. And where is Hale? Has she been traced yet?”
“Hayley has checked in with her parents, advising them that she’s in Las Vegas, safe and working, but she wouldn’t give up her location. Ginny is in Vegas now, scouring casinos. We’ve given her a cadre of House guards to help with her search, but we don’t hold out much hope. Hayley is Connected, and she’s smart.”
“And Vegas is a very easy city to hide in, if hiding is what you want to do.”
“Agreed.” Nigel hesitated a beat, then continued. “Simon is at his digs above the Bellagio, according to Kreios. Who came back well in advance of either one of you, by the way.”
“He had a more direct flight,” I evaded. Kreios could appear—or appear to appear—anywhere that suited his whims. “He said Simon is there now? How long ago?”
“He, uh, called, as you were landing.”
Nikki lifted her brows and stared at me in the rearview mirror. “Called?” I prompted.
“More like sent a pigeon with a note tied to its toe,” Nigel groused. “For the record, it’s not easy to catch a pigeon. But that was within the past hour, so I’m thinking Simon’s still there.”
“Fair enough. We’ll be there ASAP.” Nikki ended the call as I considered Nigel’s report. “I’ve never called on Simon at the Bellagio before.”
“Always a first time,” Nikki said cheerfully, and she stepped on the gas.
As we turned onto the Strip, however, Nikki’s phone lit up again—along with the dashboard where it was still paired. I could tell who the caller was in an instant: Brody Rooks.
“How does that man know the moment we’ve popped back into town?” Nikki marveled. “He’s going to have a coronary once he realizes there’re two of you.”