Wilde Fire: Immortal Vegas, Book 10

by Jenn Stark

  I scowled, remembering how much it’d hurt the last time I’d forcibly repelled a god. And the time before that. “Yeah. Not ideal.”

  “But the demons, the energy we’re dealing with—that’s already past the point of no return. It’s the new normal.” Simon said this without particular inflection, as if he wasn’t all that perturbed. There was something about being immortal that really screwed with your perspective, I decided. “It’s not going to be easy being a Connected, I will say that.”

  “Oh, good, because it’s been a barrel of laughs up to now.”

  He flashed me an unrepentant grin. “Upside, though, it’s a whole new ball game now. And you’re in an excellent position to make up new rules. Think about that.”

  Then he dove back into his monitors and keyboards and deeply twisted circuitry, leaving me to find my way out.

  I found Jimmy where I’d last seen him, hunkered down next to another stucco house, snoozing as his AC blasted full tilt. I slid into the front seat beside him. “Take me to the House of Swords,” I said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The House of Swords’ official headquarters was an oasis in the desert. Buried inside the heavily guarded compound, the war room looked like a hackers’ lounge at a gaming convention. As in Simon’s little tract house, every wall was lined with screens tuned to feeds and military schematics from around the world. Half the table was given over to more touch screens that showed continuous scrolls of information about key outposts of the House of Swords. At the head of the table, Ma-Singh relayed orders and took reports from a dozen generals and lieutenants of various nationalities. Additional men and women stood at attention at both entryways into the room, by the wet bar, and atop the trapdoor that presumably led to some underground tunnel into the desert. I eyed the guard stationed by the bar and nodded with approval. That’s what I’d stake out too.

  I returned my gaze to Ma-Singh, who was speaking to our southernmost general in Africa, stationed in Mozambique. The general was delivering sharply-worded details about fire falling from the sky during a recent torrential storm. It was the start of their summer season, and rain was expected—but not the electrical storm that followed, violent enough to catch the hills ablaze to the north and west of the capital city of Maputo. The locals were apparently blaming someone named Tilo.

  “Who’s Tilo?” I asked, interrupting their conversation like I owned the place. Which, you know.

  Ma-Singh turned to me, surprise writ large on his face, and the reason why occurred to me a second later. I’d understood the language he and General Okafor had been speaking as if it were English, but it hadn’t been. It was Portuguese, a language I certainly had never realized I knew. I hadn’t tried to translate, it simply was right there, as accessible as English. The dark magic of the Magician at work? Or Sensei Chichiro’s prediction coming to fruition that languages were only a problem for me as long as I wanted them to be? Probably a mixture of both.

  Ma-Singh recovered quickly. “Tilo is a local god of creation, known to be very particular, but more or less benevolent. Also, he is not a god worshipped in any organized way. The predominant religions of the country are currently Christianity and Islam. No one seriously believes Tilo has returned to walk the earth, but…”

  “But we’re forced to play guess-the-god every time we flip on the Weather Channel, got it,” I said, rubbing my forehead. “Have we had any other evidence of an actual incursion other than weather-related fires?”

  Ma-Singh was now staring at me, but General Okafor answered me directly. I’d been speaking in flawless Portuguese.

  “Not here, no. However, the members of the House of Swords have been reporting violent nightmares for the past two nights, images of fire, the hillsides ablaze, so this is seen as playing into those fears. And those are only the members of the Swords who are Connected and who report up through us. We anticipate there are a lot of Connecteds not affiliated with a House of Magic who are also having these nightmares and drawing their own conclusions, or even non-Connecteds who are especially sensitive.”

  “That’s already been confirmed.” Nigel peered at a screen set into the table. “We’ve been tracking website activity on both the standard internet and the arcane web. Mentions of night terrors are streaming in, as well as nightmares, sleepwalking, acute anxiety, along with exceptionally detailed visions by seers. A very defined wave of panic is building.”

  “Generalized or are there hotspots?” I asked.

  Nigel bent over his computer and refocused. “It appeared at first to be generalized, because it’s spread over such a large section of the world. But there are hot spots. Southern Africa is one of them, not just Mozambique, but Angola and Namibia as well. After that, it gets industrialized, and in a hurry. London, Cairo, Istanbul, New Delhi, Tokyo, Chicago, New Orleans—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, holding up a hand. “That’s more than seven places.”

  Nigel squinted at me. “That’s right. There’s probably about twenty here that represent clusters of internet activity. Why?”

  “There shouldn’t be that many.” Through my own recent artifact-recovery efforts, we’d gotten the 4-1-1 about the end of the world: a message captured in an ancient Buddhist scroll that pinpointed an attack of seven suns as the harbinger of Armageddon. Seven…not twenty. I placed my hands to my temples and pressed hard, as if by sheer force of will I could keep my brains from falling out. “I can’t spread our resources across twenty or thirty different potential hotspots. We don’t have enough people. And we don’t even know which of the gods are going to come through specifically. Or when.”

  The Council, my mind whispered to me. I had to get them together, had to force them to share. There was simply no other option anymore if we wanted to be prepared.

  Ma-Singh turned to scan the monitors as if they might provide the answers we were so glaringly missing. “And what is our plan when we confront these monsters and gods?” he asked. “If the veil is truly failing in so many places, where do we put them after we’ve ensnared them on our plane? We can’t simply block them back. Won’t they go to another weakness in the field and slip back through?”

  The general was right, of course. I’d already tried unraveling that particular problem on my own, only to promptly avoid it again. What might have worked at the dawn of man and the age of Atlantis simply wouldn’t work now. It wasn’t a question of harnessing enough magic to push the gods out, because we no longer had that level of magic on this earth. Certainly not in any way that we could readily access. We had some great sorcerers, we had maybe a dozen powerful Connecteds outside the Council, and then the Council itself, not all of whom we could trust to stand and fight. We had the four Houses of Magic, none of them truly up to speed other than the House of Wands, and even they were woefully undermanned for this task.

  What was it we truly planned to do?

  I thought back over the times during this past year, when Armaeus and I, or I by myself, had confronted a god. There was Llyr, of course, bursting angrily through the fountains at the Bellagio. There were the angels and demons, or whatever the hell they were, trapped in the broken ruins of Atlantis. I’d caught the briefest glimpse of the Valkyrie when I was at Castle Neuschwanstein, and I’d encountered demons and Revenants and witches, who all walked this earth. There was the mighty sea creature called up from the depths of the oceans off the coast of Japan, and even Zeus and Hera, the big guns of the Greek pantheon, who were currently ripping each other’s hair out. And then, of course, there was my own mother, a goddess who’d taken on many faces and many names over the course of ages, from the ancient goddess Lilith to Tezcatlipoca, god of smoke. Some of these beings were mighty, some almost mundane. But what was the common denominator among them? If I had to put myself in that position of removing them from Earth entirely, both the powerful and the weak, how would I do it?

  No. Freaking. Clue.

  Frustrated, I knocked on the door of Armaeus’s mind—and once more got the dist
inct impression that no one was home. Whether the Magician of the Arcana Council was deep in meditative thought or whether he was on the other side of the planet, putting out fires that I could only guess at, I didn’t know, and I suddenly realized I no longer cared.

  I was tired of living my life according to other people’s schedules. My House needed me to be able to make decisions, plans. The entire Connected community needed me as well. And depending on what I learned when I did finally assemble the Council all in one place, the world at large might have a vested need in me too. It wasn’t my job to save everyone, but it was beginning to look like saving my own little corner of humanity might have some serious ripple effect, and that would have to do.

  But I still needed the Council’s help. And if Armaeus wouldn’t respond to me…

  I’d have to go to them.

  “Find Nikki and Brody, and get them to the Luxor tomorrow morning, say ten o’clock,” I said to Nigel, then shifted my glance to Ma-Singh. “I’m going to need you and a half-dozen guards with me in Prime Luxe as well. To manage that, each of your non-Connected team members will have to be partnered with a Connected or will have to have some Connected ability themselves. Otherwise, their brains will fry when they realize we’re not actually standing on solid ground.”

  He frowned at me. “We don’t have a lot people who fit that description here in Las Vegas.”

  “We have more than we did,” I said grimly, gesturing to the monitor that was primed on our own backyard—where members of my unofficial army were still camped out. “Pick the least volatile of those gamers who have Connected ability. Make them display it, or we’re wasting our time.”

  “Very well,” Ma-Singh said, moving to the monitor. “But we don’t have time to vet them. You can tell by looking at them. So, look.”

  I glanced up to the monitor where he was pointing, and squinted at the screen. I never would have thought that my third eye could have range through a television monitor, but it was a day for many discoveries. “That one,” I said, pointing. “The kid with the glasses. And the girl next to him, as long as all that camo is for show and not because she’s some sort of wannabe Rambo. And that one, and him too.” In short order, I’d picked out six Connecteds from the encampment on our lawn. Ma-Singh gave the order, then turned back to me.

  “What next?” he asked.

  I drew in a deep breath. “Next, I’m going to face plant. Then, at about 10:05 a.m. tomorrow, I’m going to summon the Council.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Nigel was visibly twitchy as we arrived in the lobby of the Luxor the next morning, the reassuring flash of gold and glitz and the distant clatter of casino slot machines doing little to calm his nerves.

  “You okay there, cowboy?” I asked, surveying the lobby. I could, of course, catch the gleam of the elevator bays that would take us to Prime Luxe, but I knew he couldn’t. Nigel had accomplished his feats of stealth and artifact recovery based on his wits and special ops skills alone, not due to any significant Connected ability. And he’d been one of the best in the business.

  “I’m fantastic,” he said in his typical clipped British accent. “Couldn’t be better.”

  I kept looking at him, though, a sudden burst of nostalgia opening inside me like a daisy in a snowstorm.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked, studying him. My third eye fluttered open.

  He shot me a glance briefly, then returned to his recon of the lobby. There wasn’t much to see except for nervous receptionists eyeing us. You’d think they’d get used to me strolling through their front doors, but they seemed to have selective amnesia when it came to the parade of Connecteds that used this entry point at the base of Prime Luxe.

  “Miss what?” Nigel asked at last.

  “Your old job. My old job. When we were nothing but artifact hunters. Getting an assignment from the highest bidder, going out and finding whatever MacGuffin you were tasked to find, and delivering it. No muss, no fuss. No real questions about the ethics of what you were doing, the reasons why somebody needed a fertility artifact from Madagascar or a power amulet from Peru, no worries about what might happen to any of them after the job was done.”

  He shrugged, but his smile was rueful. “That wasn’t all that long ago. When I was working with Soo, I still had time to take those jobs. Up until about a year ago, really.”

  “A year.” Once again, it seemed impossible. Had it really been such a short time since my work with the Council had begun escalating? And for that work to take me so far from the realm of where I’d always thought I really wanted to be, which was going into places where angels feared to tread and extracting the rarest treasures? Was I truly doing what I should be now?

  Okay, fine. Probably not a great time for me to be having an existential crisis.

  “Yo, dollface.” Nikki and Brody strode into the front lobby of the Luxor, and I blinked, while Nigel chuckled softly under his breath.

  “She never does disappoint, I’ll give her that.”

  She didn’t either. Nikki Dawes scanned the Luxor lobby with a practiced eye, but she was drawing more intense scrutiny than she was giving, that much was for sure. Using the overnight break to maximum effect, Nikki had taken the opportunity to change into what could only be described as Wonder Woman street wear. She wore a tight metallic bronze mini dress that ended in a flirty black skirt. The skirt skated along her muscular thighs a good two inches above thigh-high black leather platform boots with articulated knees. Her wrists were encased in gold-toned leather bands, and a gold leather lasso hung at her waist. A shiny gold headband secured a long mane of dark brown waves. She’d skipped the cape, but that was probably a good thing, given all the revolving doors.

  Beside her, Brody looked perfectly at ease, growling into his cell phone until he caught sight of me. Abruptly, he pocketed the device and headed our way, Nikki at his side.

  “Funny, you don’t look like you’re in the center of a disturbance,” he said, eyeing me before turning to Nigel. “Neither do you.”

  “Give it time,” I said. A second later, Ma-Singh and the cavalry arrived, the latter looking a little too wide-eyed for my taste, but there was nothing for it. The half-dozen gamers that I’d swept up from the lawn were trying to appear cool next to their stony-faced Sword guards, but there was no question that it was beginning to dawn on them that things were about to take a turn for the crazy. Hopefully, they didn’t freak too much at what happened next.

  “I wondered if we’d get the red carpet rolled out,” Nikki said, her gaze going over my shoulder.

  I turned to see what she was looking at and nodded. I’d wondered too. Though Armaeus had refused to respond to my attempts to mentally connect, I hadn’t stopped pinging him. I’d laid it all out—what I was going to do, how I was going to do it. How he reacted was on him, and how he handled the Council was on him too. Didn’t change what I needed to do.

  But it looked like he was onboard with the game plan. As we watched the wall of elevators, a new bank of doors glimmered into view, none of them the weird dark blue he’d rocked the last time we were here. Now they were all onyx and stainless steel. Nikki and I headed toward them, the others following, and the doors whooshed open.

  “You think he’s got the whole gang up there already?”

  “I don’t think so.” And I didn’t. In fact, I was getting the distinct impression that Armaeus was still testing me. For what reason, I wasn’t entirely sure. And until I figured that out, I also wasn’t entirely sure if I was intrigued or merely irritated about it. So many questions, so little time.

  I turned back and grabbed Nigel by the hand, while Nikki reached for Ma-Singh. The big Mongolian was looking decidedly unhappy as I watched everyone step into the elevators, but his people knew what to do. They locked hands or clasped the shoulders of their young charges, the latter’s eyes going wider as the doors whispered shut.

  “What I wouldn’t give to see their faces,” Nikki muttered, and we entered our own elevator cage.<
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  We didn’t have long to imagine it. The elevators up to the Magician’s private residence were nothing if not efficient. Within a matter of seconds, the doors slid open again and a swath of pale platinum-gold carpet met us, a sea of luxury lapping at the doors of the elevator bays. Nikki recognized where we were at once and nodded, while a tiny knot of apprehension unraveled within me. The Arcana Council conference room. Armaeus was taking my request seriously.

  Silently, our entire group entered the space, which was empty save for a single figure at the far end of the room. Not the Magician, but, judging from the gasps that Aleksander Kreios received as he turned toward us, I suspected that was by design. Armaeus was never one for the adulation of mortals, whereas to Kreios…

  “My dear Sara Wilde,” he said, his white teeth flashing against his tanned skin. For today’s meet and greet with the rank and file, he’d upscaled his typical Mediterranean-surfer look to something approaching casual sheik. His skin was so sun-bronzed, it fairly glowed, and his thick, surf-perfect hair tumbled to his shoulders. He was wearing a cream-colored linen suit, the white shirt beneath it opened several buttons past propriety, and gold glinted at his neck, wrists, and fingers. He looked the epitome of spoiled-beach-god luxury.

  “Kreios.” I nodded to him, then gestured for my people to move. The gamers were ushered as gently as possible into seats, but their eyes remained trained on Kreios. The guards stood at their back. Nikki, Brody, Ma-Singh, Nigel, and I remained standing. “Where’s the Magician?”

  “Awaiting your summons.” Kreios nodded, something glinting in his eye. “If that summons is sufficient, he will arrive.”

  My irritation meter pinged hot. So that’s what was going on here? A pissing contest?

  Kreios seemed to read my thoughts, and his smile deepened as he savored my annoyance. Kreios, even in his best moments, was one deeply twisted guy. “In his defense, what you will be asking of us is not sanctioned Council business. So a show of your strength is perhaps necessary.”