by Jenn Stark
Torsten looked around, seeming to notice for the first time that the room had been set to rights. “We destroyed that entire wall,” he growled. “I enjoyed that.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you should be a little bit more discerning about the shit you decide to break,” Nikki advised. She straightened her sequined gown, somehow managing to look even more beautiful with a split lip and charred shoulders. “I know you guys have been stuck under a rock for a while, but even in Atlantis, they should have taught you better manners.”
Torsten stared at her in momentary confusion that only deepened as Nikki wiped her jaw and shook the blood from her fingers.
“You’re not afraid of us,” he said, then eyed the bombshell brigade now downing shots at the far bar. “None of your people are.”
“Child, my people could eat your people for lunch and still be hungry by happy hour,” Nikki informed him, and he blinked again.
A new sound rang out, making me jump. It was shrill beeping, and Nikki cursed, plunging her hand into her bodice and pulling out her phone as Torsten’s eyes goggled.
“That’s Dixie,” she said, worry instantly crossing her face. “And it’s late. I’m not thinking there are any newlyweds lining up at the Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars at this hour.”
She swiped through what had to be other messages, her eyes shooting wide.
“She’s got company for sure.” Nikki scowled at Torsten, then me. “A woman with white hair, pale skin, big eyes, and not a stitch of clothing strolled into her chapel twenty minutes ago, she says, and now the place is surrounded by demons. She says it looks like they’re pals.”
The Syx disappeared in a rumble of colorful cursing.
“No, no, no, that can’t be right,” Torsten insisted, even as the Syx vanished. “Demons don’t attend the Moon. We had plenty of them in Atlantis. They’re like oil and water. They never cross paths with us if they can avoid it. Celestine cannot abide it. She would no sooner draw demons to her than she’d slit her own throat.”
He spoke with such sincerity it was impossible not to believe him. “Do we know anything about this Moon?” I demanded of Armaeus. “Is Dixie in danger?”
“I can tell you that the wards around Dixie’s chapel have been strengthened, easily ten times over,” the Magician said, sounding bemused. “Not by Simon either. Interesting…”
“Well, Death is right next door,” Nikki offered. “Maybe she gave Dixie an upgrade?”
“Perhaps,” the Magician allowed. “Either way, we should go. Now.”
And without another word, smoke billowed through the room, catching us all up in it.
31
Nikki, Nigel, the weres, and I landed inside Dixie’s chapel, in one of the small, sweetly decorated, vaguely official-looking rooms dedicated to launching the union of those hardy or foolhardy enough to begin their married life in Las Vegas. This particular antechamber was empty, but we could hear the demons howling outside the building. More alarmingly, bright light filled the space, as if the parking area between Dixie’s chapel and the tattoo parlor across the way bristled with floodlights.
“Is that Celestine?” Nikki asked.
Torsten looked around with some confusion. “Probably. She can’t abide being indoors.” He strode up the slightly angled center aisle, clearly looking for a way out.
“She’s got a lot of things she can’t abide, seems like,” Nikki observed drolly, but she headed out after him.
I noticed that, though the Magician had deposited us all inside, he wasn’t with us. Neither was Kreios. I didn’t wait around to think about what the implications of that might be, but hoped that they would jump into the fray sooner rather than later. I followed at the back of the pack, feeling weirdly like I shouldn’t leave anyone behind. Who would I leave behind? Nikki was out, Nigel right beside her, Torsten’s boy band on their heels. But as I cleared the doorway of the chapel, the feeling got even stronger.
Despite the urgency of getting outside, I slowed, letting the others pull ahead. I could hear the demons roar again, and Dixie’s sharp cry of relief, probably as she saw Nikki and the others emerge. The demons’ howls immediately stopped, and I wondered if the Syx had been brought to bear as well on the problem. They’d left before we did, after all, and their mode of transportation was every bit as efficient as Armaeus’s.
I strode past the closed door of Dixie’s office, when a force of anger punched out at me, so strong it rattled my teeth and knocked me up against the wall.
Without even hesitating, I turned to her door to yank it open. It was locked, but I didn’t have time to screw around. The urgency I’d felt was, well, urgent. My hands lit with fire, I blasted the doorknob open. The smoke cleared, and there was nothing different. No change.
What the… Armaeus said Dixie had upgraded her wards after a series of break-ins and mishaps, but I was Justice of the Arcana Council, not your average lockpicker. I channeled my energy and felt a current of awareness from outside the chapel. A shifting of focus, like the Eye of Sauron turning toward me. Panic flared through me, and I pushed every bit of power I could into the freaking door, this time blowing it off its hinges.
And nearly choked on my own scream.
Inside the office, Sariah lay stretched out, suspended from the ceiling by four thick cords she’d wound her hands and feet into, her body flayed opened with a million cuts. She hung faceup over a bed of spiked nails, their tips crackling with fire. Sariah’s back was a mass of scorch marks, her body healing new layers as fast as the fire could blast them off her. And she wasn’t alone. A flat, thin pallet lay on top of her, and sprawled upon that were at least two adult-sized bodies and at least two smaller ones I could see. Corpses or knocked-out people, I couldn’t tell. What was clear, though, was that they were only being kept out of the fire by Sariah’s stubbornness to not let herself fall—or be burned to the point where her body disintegrated.
The innocents, I thought instantly, remembering Sariah’s words at the pizzeria only a few days ago. Not their battle to fight. Not their day to die. But how—why—?
Sariah jerked her face toward me, her eyes boiling with fury, and I didn’t need any further explanation. I rushed forward with my hands blazing, my arms stretching out—and more too. I screamed as flaming wings broke free from my back, triggered by me drawing on my deepest magic. I swept the lot of them up, even as I knew this had to be a trap—a trap that’d been laid for me, not Sariah—or not only for her. The bed of nails exploded as I crashed through it, and though I transported all of us to the parking lot between Dixie’s chapel and Death’s tattoo parlor, I could feel my power being sucked away, ripped bodily from me.
Then we were in the parking lot. Sariah and what I suspected were a newlywed couple and their three small children, one little more than a baby, slammed against the front door of DarkWorks Ink—all of them except Sariah knocked out cold. The door opened instantly, and a shadowy figure yanked the family inside—Sariah too, I saw blearily. Good. I needed her safe. She had…she had done enough.
But I wasn’t fully present in the parking lot. I was held in a position of stasis. I could see but not act. And what I was being shown made my blood run cold.
Dixie might have screamed when Nikki and the others had come out, but I understood now her cry hadn’t been one of alarm or even dismay. She stood on a makeshift stage in the middle of the parking lot as if she was born to it, her petite, hourglass body wrapped in a white cowgirl dress that ended midthigh, paired with a petal pink cowboy hat, pink boots, and a jaunty pink scarf. Her broad smile lit up her face with pure, unadulterated joy, her blue eyes dancing, her blonde curls flowing gorgeously over her shoulder. She preened beside the cowering Moon, who blazed with frantic white light, and in her hand, she held the Moon’s ring.
“Well then. If I had known that all it would take to lure you out of your little shell was a pretty trinket, I would have solved this problem a thousand years ago, darlin’,” Dixie drawled, jolting me. She spoke wi
th her habitual confidence, but there was something harder, even defiant gilding her tone now. “It would have saved us all a whole lot of trouble.”
Desperately, I peered through the smoke. Where was Armaeus or Kreios? Clearly, this was a bad situation—and in their own backyard! Why weren’t they stepping in?
The Syx also stood outside the ring of demons, their faces stoic and resolute, but they didn’t move. What the hell was everyone waiting for?
I scanned the crowd again and blinked. There weren’t any humans here, other than Dixie, Nikki, and Nigel. Otherwise, it was demons and shapeshifters, and those weren’t the kind of victims the Syx were called to protect.
I struggled against the miasma of smoke surrounding me. The Magician might not want to act, but I wasn’t the Magician. I didn’t know what game Dixie was playing, but it felt deeply wrong. Was she somehow channeling the deep energy of the Star? Was that what was happening here? Or was she…
No. Even as the idea slammed into me, I rejected it. Dixie couldn’t be the actual Star. There was no way. But the alternative wasn’t much better. Had she deceived us all and used our affection for her to deliver us on a platter to the most hidden Arcana Council member? Was that even possible?
“You can’t win.” The soft, plaintive cry came from a completely unexpected source. Beside the posturing Dixie, the Moon straightened, and I instantly saw what so enthralled her honor guard, despite her frailty. She was beautiful, of course, but that wasn’t it, exactly. The Moon seemed draped in a gossamer shimmer of wonder, radiant with the energy of pure potential, of planting and growing, flowering and transforming, the cycle continuing over and over again, time without time. When she looked at Dixie with deep and profound acceptance, a chill ran through me.
The Moon was psychic. She knew what was coming with some part of her fractured mind. Knew it and both welcomed and dreaded it at once, the sign of a Connected who had survived more lifetimes than anyone could count.
“Of course I’m going to win, sweetie,” Dixie cooed, and I searched her voice for the core essence of the being that was channeling itself through her. Was the Star, in truth, male or female? Or something else entirely? “You yourself beheld it, the glorious rise of the Star while all the Council tried so desperately to return the world to order after the fall of Atlantis. The Sun saw our chance to rule, but he told me to wait, to grow my strength. He didn’t tell me you would run away from the battle altogether. That surprised us all.”
Dixie lifted a lazy finger, curling it in a come-here gesture, and the nearest demons howled with salivating delight. One of them cracked a switch I hadn’t seen it was holding, and a mark appeared on the Moon’s forearm, her blood blue and shiny in the supernatural light surrounding her.
I jerked forward in anger, but I couldn’t move. Furious, I pushed out with my mind as hard as I could.
Armaeus!
This time, the Magician responded.
“This is a fight between members of the original Council, Miss Wilde,” he said heavily.
The Devil unexpectedly chimed in. “Between members of the original Council who have specifically excluded themselves from our protection. We have no power here.”
What? How is that possible? I stared furiously around the place. Nikki and Nigel were caught in some sort of a weird thrall with Torsten’s crew, the silent shifters in service to the Moon held fast by the Moon’s own magic, while the demons writhed and chanted, in service to the Star.
Where the hell is Michael, then? I demanded. Shouldn’t he be involved?
Only silence greeted me. I turned around, a wave of fury burning more deeply within me. What was the point of the Council if they refused to help in times of need?
“A question worth considering,” Armaeus agreed, though I hadn’t thought that last protest out loud. It’d been loud enough, apparently. No matter what happened here tonight, the Council was heading for a serious identity crisis after this.
Is Dixie possessed? I pressed Armaeus, glancing back to her as she admired her shiny ring.
He didn’t respond, but Nikki pushed forward as if she could hear my thoughts, shoving against a wall of energy.
“What has gotten into you?” she demanded of Dixie, equal parts of anger and genuine concern.
Dixie turned to her one-time best friend with an indulgent smile that turned harder along with her knife-edged words. “Oh, you’re a fine one to talk,” she said. “Since the moment you turned up on my doorstep, I’ve had the distinct displeasure of watching you slowly build your grub-like abilities to something approaching skills. How often did I long to dispose of you, but I couldn’t draw the anger or the attention of the mighty Council, a mighty Council that treated me like a second-class citizen when I was far more powerful than you are. More powerful than any of you.”
The subtle shift in Dixie’s speech made me narrow my eyes. This wasn’t the declaration of a Possessed. This was the rage of a woman truly spurned.
Nikki seemed to pick up on it as well. And, being Nikki, she doubled down on the insult.
“Oh, please. You didn’t have enough ability in you to pull together a proper bake sale,” she sneered, her bold defiance drawing the cool, ethereal gaze of the Moon. Her expression softened as she took in Nikki’s fierceness, her lips curving into a smile that made my heart shiver. For all that her mind was fractured, she was truly a wondrous creature—a goddess, through and through.
“You think you’ve got what it takes to best the Moon?” Nikki continued. “You think you’ve got even one ounce of her badassery? You can’t get people to stay married longer than thirty hours after they leave your door. What power do you have?”
“Enough!” Dixie shouted. She flapped her hands again, and a dozen demons cracked their fiery whips, making the Moon cry out in pain as she staggered back. “I’ve been drawing down this pitiful wretch’s power long enough. I’ve gotten everything I need.”
She pulled something out of a hidden pocket, bright and steely, and I could feel Nikki rush forward before I could shout a warning.
“No!”
The knife came down, but it struck Nikki, not the Moon, the blade sinking deep in her gut.
I exploded.
32
I had no power left within me, so I drew on pure rage. I punched through the force field hemming me in and broke out, not into the field of battle on the parking lot, but into a crowd of gray figures, faces slack, arms out in supplication. All moaning and groaning in utter despair, rage, or mindless confusion.
“Justice,” they groaned, whispered, even shouted, but faintly, weakly, as if from a far-off distance. “Justice.”
I whipped around, seeking any way out, but the figures converged on me from all sides. The first one reached me without me realizing it, coming up from behind, but I felt the cold weight of him as he passed through me, and I knew his story. A man killed by a local witch for threatening to take over her tiny farm. He’d been beset by dark shadows while traveling. The shadows had spooked his horse, and the horse ended up throwing him into the ditch. In death, he knew his killer, however, and he’d cried out for Justice. Justice had never responded. All this had happened centuries before I’d been born, and by then, jobs had already been piling up in Justice Hall.
“Justice.” Another wraith walked through me, this one female, a young woman killed for her eyes in a barbaric ritual that had echoes in the arcane black market even today. She was sighted in the way of the Connecteds, and then blinded and killed out of fear and covetousness. I couldn’t save her either. There were so many like her I hadn’t saved, despite the handful that I had, and I felt the weight of her passing slow me down ever so slightly.
By the time the third wraith reached me, pushing, shoving, straining close, I understood what was happening here. I’d fallen into a trap within a trap, one only an ancient, malevolent member of the Arcana Council would know how to engineer in their spare time, when she or he wasn’t possessing Dixie. What did we know about the Star? What did
anyone?
I twisted this way and that, trying to avoid the weight of humanity seeking to drape itself upon me. Stars were remote and shiny, hanging bright in the far sky. Everyone who looked upon them was filled with desire and longing. They were too distant to truly care, too remote to understand, a perpetual guide that no one could reach. They also saw everything, bearing constant witness, especially everything that happened in the shadowed night. Where the Moon was brighter, they dimmed, and beneath the Sun, they vanished altogether.
These thoughts ran together in my head as the fourth and fifth wraiths slammed into me, lending their outrage to the albatross these creatures were seeking to hang on me.
“Justice,” they hissed, but these were no saints, no victims without recourse. These were members of the arcane black market, from maybe only a hundred years earlier. Running prostitution and smuggling operations and blasted out of business by Connecteds who were more powerful and more ruthless than they were. But even they felt righteous enough to call for help. Everyone had their limit, after all. Everyone thought their way was the right way.
Each new body flowing through me weighed me down, and there was always another to take its place, but I could see the far-off sheen of the Moon on the horizon. And so, rather than trying to fend off the moaning supplicants from all sides, I bent my shoulder and pushed through. Taking on their problems, their complaints, their miseries willingly.
Never mind that I couldn’t solve them, never mind that I could never right the wrongs that had befallen them during their lives. They were dead. They were human. They had left this plane of existence to reenter at some other point, and they carried their outrage with them to their new incarnations. I couldn’t help that. I could only acknowledge the outrage they felt, agree it wasn’t just. And move on, as there was nothing more I could do.
Strangely, that seemed to be enough. As I proactively took on the draining force of each new victim, acknowledged it, pushed through it, and moved forward, no new weight was added to me. If anything, the tiniest sense of relief and release peeled away a layer of my misery. I didn’t have time to think on it too much as I continued through, faster now, harder. The trap the Star had set for me became another gateway, another path of understanding.