by D. N. Hoxa
When Lucas left, we stayed for another beer. It was nice to hang out with them—when they weren’t being nosy and when Carter didn’t look at me like he was trying to read my damn mind.
“It’s ten p.m.,” Kyle said, rubbing his hands together. “Fortune Fire awaits, my friends. This is where I leave you to go make more money than I already made tonight.”
“The casino?” I asked, surprised. I knew about Fortune Fire only from what Jamie had told me. It was a casino for supernaturals and a lot of people died in it regularly. The Guild claimed all their games were legal, and they never admitted that people died, but rumors spread. There had to be something behind them.
Just like there was something behind the rumors about Damian.
“Yep. It’s Friday—the best night of the week,” Kyle said.
“But isn’t it dangerous?”
“He’s just got a thing for that dealer, that’s all,” Carter said with a grin.
“You’ve been there, too?”
“Oh, yeah. Plenty of times. But don’t let Kyle fool you—the house always wins.”
“And the danger just adds to it, but I love the magic in the air. There’s so much of it,” Kyle said, taking in a deep breath with his eyes closed as if he could actually smell magic. “Right, then. I’m off!” And he stood up.
I narrowed my brows for a second, hushing Kit who couldn’t wait to get me out of the Shade so he could be on his way. I tried to think about what more I knew about Fortune Fire. It had been here, in New York, for at least a couple decades. That’s what Jamie said. And there were magical games in there, too, not just normal casino stuff.
“What are you thinking?” Carter asked, and I realized, we were alone. Kyle had already gone.
“Where exactly is Fortune Fire?”
“In Yonkers, about forty minutes away,” Carter said. “Why?”
“No reason, but just to make sure: Yonkers is right on the Hudson, right?” Because if there was water close by and there had been heavy use of magic for decades, wouldn’t that make it the ideal place for Helen and her friends to plant the Treasure of Saraph?
“It is, yes, but the casino isn’t close to it. It’s in the southeast,” Carter said.
Damn it. “So the river isn’t even in sight?”
“Nope,” he said.
Disappointment flooded me. I’d been trying to think of a place that matched the description Damian gave me, but I had nothing. He hadn’t called at all, so that meant he hadn’t figured it out, either—and the full moon was tomorrow night.
“But a reservoir is right next to it. It’s not a river, but it has plenty of water,” Carter said after a second, making my heart skip a beat. “Why are you asking me this, Sin?”
Reservoir. That’s a big source of water, wasn’t it? More than enough to grow a freaking plant.
I stood up and Kit almost fell from my lap, but he managed to hold onto my jacket before jumping to the ground.
“You wouldn’t happen to be on your way there, too, would you?” It was in times like these that I really wished I had a car. One of these days, maybe I’d bite the bullet and buy one. It was obviously necessary lately.
“I wasn’t,” Carter said, a strange smile on his face. “But I could take you if you’d like.”
Oh, I’d like very much. “No, that’s okay. Maybe I can catch Kyle before he leaves the Shade.” But that wasn’t probable. I turned around and looked at the street, but I couldn’t see him. I could still call him, though.
“I’ll give him a call and tell him to wait for us,” Carter said and followed me outside the bar.
“It’s fine, Carter. Really, you don’t have to come.”
“It’s Friday night and it’s either the Fortune Fire or the Bronx. I’ll take the casino,” he said, taking his phone out of his pocket. “This is gonna be fun.”
Fifty minutes later, I was standing in front of the Fortune Fire.
The parking lot in front of the casino was huge, almost twice the size of the building itself. We got out of Carter’s car and the strong lights almost blinded me. Music blasted from inside the building, and you could tell that it was already crowded in there by the number of cars in the lot.
I turned around to scan the area, and the first thing I saw was the reservoir Carter had talked about. It was bigger than I expected and right across the street from the parking lot. Easily half a mile wide, and I couldn’t see the sides of it at all. That would be plenty of water to plant seeds.
“This is gonna be awesome!” Kyle said, grinning ear to ear as we made our way toward the casino. Most people entering it were human, but there were a few supernaturals, too. “The last time I’ve been here with someone was when Merlin was still in town. Lucas won’t even hear about it,” Kyle continued. “You guys are planning on playing, right? I swear it’s much easier than it sounds. There’s a game for everyone.”
“I think I’ll just watch this time around.” Watch and try to find Helen and her friends, if they were even here.
“We’ll see,” Carter said. “Let’s get through security first.”
The ground floor of the casino was for humans only. We entered through the rotating door, and it was like we’d stepped into a different world altogether. The music was loud, the sound of the people talking, laughing, even screaming, coming from the gigantic area, all the lights and the sound of machines beeping—it made me dizzy for a second. I’d never been to a casino before, and my first impression was intense.
Carter and Kyle, who seemed to know exactly where they were going, were not nearly as affected by the casino as me—or Kit. For once, he didn’t have anything to say. He just held on to the back of my neck and watched, sniffing the air curiously. The guys led us toward a set of doors made of glass in the hallway with two toilets at the end. The dark red carpet looked better than what I had at home. Small lights on the walls burned red, too, and when we were halfway through the corridor, I felt the ward. We slipped right through it because it wasn’t intended to keep us out. Possibly designed to keep humans away only. The music began to change, too, turning into a different melody, a different beat that seemed to be coming from behind the black curtains at the end. I looked back to see two women and three men who had been in the parking lot, coming right behind us. That’s when I noticed that I was not dressed for this. I had a black shirt on, a pair of jeans and my leather jacket. Also, sneakers. And weapons.
The women behind me wore sparkly dresses and really high stilettos, and their hair was perfect, their makeup impeccable. Holy shit.
“Are they even gonna let me in?” I asked the guys in a whisper.
“Why wouldn’t they?” Carter asked.
He was right. Just because those two women were dressed so perfectly didn’t mean everybody else in the casino would be the same.
Kyle pulled the black curtain to the side and let us through. I almost slipped and fell on my face because they hadn’t warned me that there would be stairs right behind the curtain. The music was growing louder with every step we took, and the feel of magic was, too. Down the very steep stairs, we turned to the left, and there, we finally saw the doors to the real Fortune Fire.
The corridor continued for another couple feet, before it opened into a rectangular area. At the end of it were the doors, and on the sides were boxes made of metal mounted on the walls with two small reception desks and two hosts in front of them.
But they weren’t as intimidating as the two bouncers standing by the doors, one of them open. Inside, all I saw was bright lights and people. A lot of people.
“Jacob, my man!” said Kyle, going for the bouncer on the left, his hand raised. The bouncer was possibly my height, but he was twice as wide as Kyle. He and his friend wore black suits and they had earpieces on. They were both werewolves—and I didn’t know it just because of the way they looked at Carter, but because I’d already seen their essence.
“Hey, Kyle. You brought friends,” the bouncer said. He only looked at me for
a second before focusing on Carter, who smiled innocently, like he couldn’t possibly know why they were staring at him like that.
“It’s a special night,” Kyle said and proceeded to take the swords off his back, sheaths and all.
I looked at Carter. “We have to leave the weapons?”
“You do. I’m not carrying anything,” he said with a shrug. Kyle put his swords on the small desk of the reception on the right.
“What’s up, Mike?” Kyle said to the host.
“The usual,” Mike said. “Who’re your friends?” He nodded his head toward Carter and me.
“Coworkers. I’m just here to show them a good time,” Kyle said with a grin, as Mike took his swords, put them inside one of the metal boxes and brought a key to Kyle.
While he did, I took advantage of the fact that the bouncers couldn’t look away from Carter—and he couldn’t care less—and slipped one of my daggers, the stolen one, behind me under the waistband of my jeans. So when Kyle stepped aside, I undid the belt of my sheaths, and offered it to Mike with only one of my daggers in it.
I held my breath. Had they seen me take out the other?
“Anything else to declare?” the bouncer asked, but he still wasn’t looking at me.
“Nope. That’s all,” Kyle said. “See you later, fellas.” And he stepped inside the casino.
I wasn’t expecting to find trouble here, but I didn’t feel very comfortable going into an unknown place, full of supernaturals, without at least one of my daggers. And when the bouncers let us through without any more words, I felt a thousand pounds lighter.
Once inside the casino, I took out the dagger from my waistband and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, where I wouldn’t risk cutting myself.
Then, I looked ahead.
Holy hell, the place was huge. It was bigger than the human casino upstairs, twice as bright, and twice as loud. I was wrong, apparently. There were a lot of women in front of me, but I couldn’t see a single one with jeans and sneakers on. They were all dressed up, and I stood out like a sore thumb.
“Like it?” Carter said, putting his hand on my back to remind me that I needed to move.
“It’s…so much.” The smell of tobacco and alcohol was worse than in the human clubs I’d been to. If it wasn’t for the really high ceiling, people would have suffocated in here.
But Kyle had been right. Magic hung in the air, making it thicker. There was so much of it everywhere I turned.
“You’ll get used to it eventually,” Carter said. “Come on.”
We went deeper into the oval-shaped room. I couldn’t get enough of everything around me, soaking it all up.
The far left wall was lined with slot machines, possibly over fifty of them, except they didn’t exactly look like normal slots. They were bigger, and they looked strange, but they were too far away to tell for sure.
“The easiest games in here. Also a money pit,” Carter said when he saw where I was looking. “But people don’t play them for the money as much as for the spells. If you win, you can choose your prize—money or a spell. And if you hit the jackpot, you get to take home three spells.”
“Wow.” Only a witch or wizard could trap a spell in something—like Malin had in the Moon Chalice—and those were very expensive.
“See these?” Carter said, taking my attention to the boards that took up almost all the space in front of the slots. “Roulette wheels. You can only make money off them, but you don’t play it quite like humans do.”
I could see that for myself. On the wheel, instead of numbers, there were letters. Latin symbols that we used for spells. The people standing around the big boards all seemed anxious, a few of them shouting out every few seconds, but most so focused on the spinning wheels, you’d think their whole life depended on it.
“Blackjack,” said Carter, pointing to the right side of the room, where more, smaller boards were placed in two rows, at least five feet away from one another. The board was red, and the cards the dealer was putting in front of the people were black, with silver and golden symbols. Two sets of them were floating in the air, in front of two players around the first board, and when I tried to look at the symbols, I found them completely blank. Must have been a spell.
“Poker and baccarat,” Carter continued, showing me the boards. I didn’t know how any of those games were played, but it was fascinating to watch the people. So many of them, I lost count after the first fifty, and only a small number of them looked like they were actually having a good time.
And that included Kyle. I hadn’t noticed him disappearing from our side at all, but I found him sitting around one of the boards that Carter had called baccarat. He was hunched over the board, holding his cards right in front of his face, watching the dealer—a gorgeous young girl with short blonde hair dyed pink at the ends and huge blue eyes.
“Good luck, Kyle,” Carter said, patting him on the back as we passed, but I didn’t think Kyle even noticed. He didn’t even look back at us.
“And now, the fun games.”
The fun games were games adapted and designed for supernaturals. The second half of the oval room was full of them, but that wasn’t all. There were three more rooms, separate from the rest, on the far right. They had their own black curtains and their own bouncers in front of them. According to Carter, the first room was for fae games. They were played exactly like in Gaena, and nobody here understood shit about them. Probably because non-fae weren’t allowed in there at all.
The second room was for vampires and ghouls. The games in there required vampire and ghoul skills, from physical strength to their sense of hearing, and there was some blood tasting involved in there, too. The third room was for werewolves, Carter said, but werewolves preferred the games in the main room. That’s why it was empty, though the bouncers were by the entrance.
“There’s only one game in there that I enjoy playing—because it’s hard as hell,” Carter said. “It’s called Sniff’n’Pick, and the House presents the players with animals—sometimes objects—and the blindfolded players have to pick up exactly what kind of scents they’ve put on the animals. Picking up scents is never an issue, but put it on a fur, where it mixes up with the animal’s natural scent, you get hell.”
“What about games for magic wielders?” There wasn’t any other room that I could see. Across from us was the bar—the biggest I’d ever seen, with seven bartenders behind it, and more bottles of alcohol than I could count.
But on its other side, where Carter pointed, there were more games. Half the wall was covered in Wheels of Fortune, and in front of each were five people and the dealer. When he spun the wheel, it didn’t stop by itself.
In fact, it did stop, then turned the other way, and then forward again, then back…holy shit, the players were trying to stop it on the symbols they betted on with their magic.
“Whoever can hold the wheel with the pointer to their symbol for three seconds wins,” Carter informed me. “And check that out.” He pointed at the machines in front of the wheels, separated from the card boards only by a couple feet. “The Reader Beams.”
They were seven-foot-tall machines, with a metal piece that extended outward. On it hung some sort of a glass sphere—and people were putting their heads in there. The machines were full of lights and numbers, and as I watched, one of the spheres filled up with green lights, and the sorcerer slipped out of it, raising his fists to the ceiling, screaming in excitement.
“People don’t usually make big money on them, but I bet you could beat them all,” Carter said, grinning. “Each player places a bet in the machine. The smallest is one grand. The machine then chooses a spell that they have to speak inside the reading sphere, and whoever has the fastest and strongest magic wins eighty-five percent of the entry money.” That sounded a lot like big money to me, but what did I know? “Are you thinking about giving it a try?”
God, no. “Let’s just go to the bar. I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Suit you
rself,” Carter said, and we made our way to the bar. There weren’t many people sitting there—most took their orders to whatever game they were playing—so it wasn’t hard to find a spot. As soon as we settled and ordered our drinks, Kit jumped on my lap and squeaked.
“Don’t take long,” I told him. He wanted to go search the place himself, see what kind of food he could find to steal, but I didn’t know if I’d find something in this place. He needed to be close by in case we had to leave in a hurry.
With another squeak, he jumped from my lap and onto the floor, and ran ahead.
“How did you manage to train him like that?” Carter said, taking me by surprise. Train him? “He’s just an animal, right?”
I looked at him. He didn’t flinch, didn’t grin. Holy shit, he didn’t know.
But Kit had shifted into his true self during the fight at the castle in Estird. What were the odds that Carter hadn’t seen him? Or maybe he had, but he had no idea it was Kit?
“Yeah, something like that,” I said, just to see what he’d say.
Nothing. He said nothing.
“Are you going to tell me what you’re really doing here, Sin?” he asked, his amber eyes sparkling.
“I was just curious to see the casino, that’s all,” I lied and scanned the crowd as best as I could. If I caught a glimpse of Helen and her friends here, there would be no doubt about it: this would be the place where they’d try to plant the Treasure of Saraph. It was perfect. It ticked all the boxes: heavy magic used over a long period of time, a big source of water nearby—and it was far away from the Shade, too.
“Your skills are admirable,” he said and clinked his bottle of beer to my glass of whiskey. “Cheers to many more lies to come.”
I grinned. “Takes one to know one, right?” I said and took a sip.
He laughed for a bit. “You know, my brother just might be obsessed with you.”
I raised a brow. “He is?”
“Oh, yeah. Wants me to tell you that he can make you very rich, Sin Montero. If you only agree to work for him and the Pack, he’ll pay you a lot more than what you make hunting maneaters.”