Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 (3 page)

The woman’s smile was wintry. “Death finds all, eventually, whether they seek it or not.” She tilted her head. “We know you.”

Given the mythological Valkyries’ penchant for identifying who would live and die, this wasn’t particularly good news, but her gaze next fell to the box I held clutched in my hand, her white-blonde brows lifting in surprise. She nodded. “Gather your weapons, then, mortal. Your battle is upon you.” She stared at me for a long moment, her lips curving into a ghost of a smile. “Tell Armaeus he owes us.”

She disappeared. A moment later, so did the other five silent women. I peered into the darkness, trying to process what I’d seen…

As the sound of baying wolfhounds cut through the brittle night sky.

Crap!

I turned down the mountain and ran.

Chapter Two

I spent the flight back to Vegas alternating between catnaps and attempts to pry open the ornate blue-and-green inlaid box I’d snagged on the way out of the Mad King’s castle. Neither proved very effective. A quick check of my accounts showed that the Council had wired me the cash, and I forwarded it to Father Jerome’s account.

Jerome, the French priest I’d met more than five years ago when I’d started my work in the arcane black market, wasn’t your average holy father. His vocation might have been the Church, but his crusade was the Connected children of the world—children now at deadly risk as the war on magic took progressively more sinister turns. I helped as I could, usually with cash. And though I was quickly coming to realize that money wouldn’t solve all my problems, it sure did solve a pile of them. Especially with the reports Father Jerome was feeding me from France: More psychic children were being targeted by the dark practitioners of the Connected community, which meant more money was needed to house and protect them.

The transfer done, I waited for Armaeus to contact me. He didn’t. Not via phone nor via his annoying habit of crawling around in my head until I noticed him. It was weird to have my brain all to myself, even though most of the time I was trying to shut him out of it. I should have been happy he was leaving me alone.

Oddly, I wasn’t.

To distract myself, I shuffled the Tarot cards yet again, though I knew just by touching them there’d be no answers from that quarter. I’d been casting cards on Viktor Dal off and on the whole trip, to try to figure out who he was, and why he’d picked Nigel for the job against me. Nigel, who I’d not particularly counted as an enemy, though if you were on the outside looking in, you might think he was. We’d been set at odds on enough jobs, after all.

Then again, Nigel hadn’t delivered me to the bad guys exactly. He’d located me, but he hadn’t incapacitated me, and he easily could have. So what game was he truly playing?

As they had all day, the cards once again came up Sixes and Sevens, Moons and Swords and I put the deck away in disgust. Sometimes, it really did hurt to ask.

Google was no help either. There was no way Viktor Dal could be the same Viktor from Memphis, but there was nothing on the Internet or the Darkweb about the guy, and nothing about his line of work. Had Nigel given me a false name? And if so, why? I wasn’t in the mood to play “guess the allegiance,” but something about Nigel’s involvement in tracking me down for Viktor was unsettling. It felt too…intimate. Too personal.

I thought about the Seven of Swords again. Something was going on I didn’t know about. That was a good way to end up dead.

I landed at McCarran International Airport as night draped Sin City. The box remained resolutely shut. The drinking horn remained about as generic as a horn could be. I remained surly and on edge. As we taxied toward the terminal, I swung my gaze out at the Vegas night and rubbed my face with my hands. Sleep hadn’t come easily, not even on Armaeus’s private jet. I needed to sleep in a real bed.

When we were finally cleared, I disembarked, leaving Mim’s horn and the blue-and-green inlaid case aboard the plane. Armaeus would know where to find them.

He’d know where to find me too. Whenever he got around to looking.

“Passport?” The bored woman at the immigration kiosk flicked me a dead-eyed glance as I reached her, and I obligingly handed over my documents. Las Vegas’s primary airport looked the same way it always did in the middle of the night—filled with tourists and wired for sound. The new rush of Vegas hopefuls spilled out of terminals and converged on the baggage claim area like ants swarming a honeypot.

I shouldered my own carry-on and glanced up at the TV screens as I pushed toward the exit. Stark missing persons announcements cycled across the screens in between flight listings, a blur of grainy images and clinical details. My mood soured further. How many of those notices had I seen over the years, long after I’d stopped officially assisting the police in the search for missing children?

Too many.

Made sense, though, to advertise at an airport, especially in a city that billed itself as the crossroads of corruption. I’d only recently started thinking of Vegas as home, but even that was a bit of a stretch. There were many faces to this city, and I truly knew only a few of them: the Strip, a few blocks off Strip, and the old casino district downtown. Who knew what other secrets the city held?

I moved with increasing fatigue past baggage claim, toward the constantly churning taxi line beyond the plate-glass doors of the airport. Flying the Arcana Council skies meant I could avoid the luggage carousels that I could see were already clogged with bags despite the fact it was two in the morning. A few more steps and I’d make a clean getaway from the airport. No muss, no fuss.

So why wasn’t I feeling better about the world?

“Yo, dollface! Sorry I’m late.”

I jerked to a stop as I focused on Nikki Dawes coming toward me fast. She was wearing a perfectly crisp chauffeur’s outfit despite the hour—smart cap set atop her lush auburn curls, a black tuxedo and bright white blouse open at the collar to display the barest hint of her impressive assets. The only concession she’d made to the cool desert night were the long, sleek leggings that stretched down her mile-long legs instead of her typical skin-tight miniskirt, and her platform heels had been replaced by knee-high stiletto boots. As usual, she turned heads in a long line of appreciative admirers, men and women alike.

She grinned as she reached me, eyeing me with approval. “Glad to find you in one piece. But Armaeus needs to learn the difference between ‘cell phone lot’ and ‘my apartment’ next time he thinks it only takes me three minutes to show up at the airport.”

“He contacted you?” I frowned. “He’s been radio silent for me. I was beginning to think I’d pissed him off somehow.”

“Pretty sure you’d know if that was the case. He’s not exactly the shy and retiring type.” Nikki cocked her head. “And, to be fair, maybe it wasn’t Armaeus with the wake-up call. Maybe it was just me shooting bolt upright in bed with an urgent freak-out that you were at the airport.”

I snorted. “Well, I appreciate it, no matter what.” Nikki wasn’t the most powerful Connected I’d ever encountered, but her abilities as a member of the psychic community were impressive and very focused. She could see what others saw either with their eyes or their minds, whether those people were in front of her or halfway across the world, as long as she was keyed into that person. The more she got to know you, the sharper her visions. It’d made her previous career as a cop a successful one, and her current career as a Strip-based psychic and occasional Council gopher lucrative as well.

“I gotta say, I assumed the Council had made plans for your safe return.” She grinned. “Then again, I’m here, and you’re here. So maybe I
was
the plan all along.”

“Maybe.” However it had come to pass, I was glad. Nikki had attached herself to me over the past several months that I’d been working in Vegas, and I’d grown used to having her by my side when I was in the city. Especially given how crazy the city had gotten of late.

I breathed more easily as the doors spit us out into the cool Vegas night. Rubbing the worst of the grit out of my eyes, I fell into step with Nikki as we picked our way across the lanes of traffic, heading for the short-term parking garage.

Minutes later we angled alongside an ungainly construction site that jutted out from the wall of the main parking ramp, skirting tarp-draped plywood. The temporary walls were already showing signs of wear, yellow caution tape and orange hard hat stickers warring with graffiti and random flyers. We’d almost reached the main opening when a line of blue-and-white signs caught my eye. The same blue-and-white missing persons posters I’d seen on the airport’s interior screens, only here the images marched down the plywood barrier in lockstep, each more heartbreaking than the last. It was always the kids that were the worst.

Gritting my teeth, I forced myself to look at the first face, because—you never knew. Especially in a city like Vegas.

My focus wavered as I considered the reality of the city I was walking back into. A city I’d helped change recently, and not necessarily for the better. “How are the other Connecteds on the Strip?” I asked. “They recovering?”

“Nope. Still jacked and loving it.” Nikki grinned as I stopped and turned toward her. Several days earlier, Vegas had served as the latest site for the war on magic, and Magic hadn’t taken it lying down. The resulting energy spike—which I had helped channel—had left everyone riding a psychic high that had nowhere to go but down. Only that high was lasting a lot longer than I would have thought it could. “Fortune-tellers are raking it in,” Nikki continued. “Card readings have been off the charts, and there’s rumors of excluding psychics from the casino VIP suites for fear they can predict the outcomes of hands. Everyone’s walking around with a chip on their shoulders. If this wears off,
when
this wears off, there are going to be some disappointed Connecteds out there. Dixie’s already bracing for the technoceutical market to jump when that happens. If the Connected can’t get amped by natural means, she figures they’ll do it by artificial.”

“Oh, geez.” Dixie Quinn, the horoscope-reading director of Vegas’s Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars, had her finger on the pulse of all the city’s psychics. And if that pulse was currently hammering… “That’d be bad.”

“Real bad,” Nikki agreed.

We started walking again, my gaze hitting image after image of the depressing posters. “Have you seen me?” each of them asked. The pictured kids had that eerily familiar look that all kids on missing persons flyers had, the kid you might have seen anywhere, around the corner or in the grocery or playing on a subdivision sidewalk. Their hair and smiles school-picture perfect, and their age-progressed pictures achingly innocent, cheerful gazes reflecting nothing of what must have happened to them…

Suddenly, I stopped short. It took Nikki a few steps to realize I wasn’t right behind her.

“What is it, dollface?” she asked, coming back to stand by me as I stared at the fourth flyer in the series of posters.

The
fourth
.

“I know that girl,” I said, lifting a hand to the child’s face. The curly hair, the bright smile, the laughing eyes. “I know that girl. I—she was one of the…” I shook my head. The age-progressed image showed the same girl, the same smile, the same eyes. Her face was fuller yet more heartbreakingly beautiful, and her hair was long, only a hint of the riot of curls from her childhood hairstyle remaining.

“What’s this
doing
here?” I muttered as I glared at the copy beneath the pictures, but I couldn’t make out the words at first. “She disappeared nowhere near here.”

“Says here she’s from Memphis,” Nikki supplied. She looked at the picture to the right. “This one too.”

“What?” I glanced at the flyers to the left and the right of the girl I’d recognized. The one to the left was a stranger to me. The one to the right, however…

“No.” I scanned the copy rapidly, but it had only bare-bones information. Date of disappearance, age at the time of disappearance and present age, number to call in case of sighting. Not a Memphis area code number either, but a number I already knew all too well. Brody Rooks. The LVMPD detective I’d first worked with ten years ago in Memphis, with me as a fledgling psychic and him as a rookie cop. And what we’d done…was search for kids.

“What’s Brody doing digging this up?” I snapped. “What angle is he working?” I glared at Nikki. “Did you know about this?”

“Nope.” She shook her head, confused. “All these kids—these were the ones you guys were searching for when you were a teenager?”

“
No
,” I said decisively. “Not all of them. That’s what makes this even weirder.”

I went back to the first poster, racking my brain. I’d never seen that child. I couldn’t have forgotten him. When I’d worked with Brody, there’d been only three kids we’d been tracking. Two from inner-city Memphis, one from the burbs. Three had been enough. These other three… I didn’t know. I pulled the flyer from the wall, staring at it. “I don’t know this boy, this Jimmy Green. I swear he wasn’t one of ours. And these age-progressed images… There’s something off about this.”

Nikki pulled another poster free. “They look like photographs, you ask me. Not computer renderings.”

I nodded sharply. That was exactly what was off about them. “And there are three new ones. If Brody somehow has linked more kids to the same crime…I can’t imagine it.” Outrage rippled through me as Nikki moved along the line of posters to the end. “What is Brody
doing
? And why are these
here
?”

“Sara.” Nikki’s voice was a whip crack, and I looked up. She was standing at the end of the line of posters, her diamond-hard nails already peeling away the flyer from the wall. I moved toward her as I pulled more posters down, memorizing the names, the photographs, especially when I once again got to the ones I knew. Hayley Adams. Corey Kuznof. Mary Degnan. Children whose faces I’d seen in my sleep years after I’d left Memphis. Children whose faces I could never forget if I’d wanted to. And there’d been many times when I’d wanted to.