Getting Wilde (23 page)

“You lie!” Fitz roared back at me, and I felt the tears pool in my eyes, the warm rush of them falling down my cheeks as another burst of gas streamed from the vents. “I have delivered them their Devil and they have paid me for my work. I am one of
them
. I have done all that they
asked, an initiate to their cause. I am ready to serve!”
 

“They
despise
you,” I cried, gagging on the gas that filled the space. “You are the filth they must get rid of before what is to come. You will die—you must.”
 

“I have met my obligations!” Fitz strode toward the glass, shoving his finger at me. “No! You are not ready. I sensed the Sight in you, but it’s too wild, too broken. You’re a shattered toy that no longer serves its master, and I have not put you back together yet. I will, though.” His face swelled up with meanness, and he leaned toward the glass, bug-eyed and cruel. You cannot partake of the Pythene mists if you’re not pure of heart,
and you are not prepared
!”
 

The laughter welled up inside me as I reached some new level of hysteria, something snapping within me like a too-frayed string. “And you have been
betrayed
,” I hissed, my words silken with threat. I crawled along the glass wall, my fingers grasping at its smooth surface. “You have been betrayed, and you will
suffer
, Gerard Fitz, undone by fear and treachery.”
 

“Shut up!” Fitz snapped, but he stumbled back from the glass at whatever he saw in my eyes, grabbing for his console.
 

“Did you think you could deceive the prince of lies?” I continued, slithering against the glass, tracking his path. “That there would be no price to pay? That pain would not rain down upon you in a storm of fire, engulfing your very soul?”
 

Fitz’s fingers twisted knobs on his console, and a new mixture flooded into the room. Even in my hallucinating state, I recognized a change in the gasses, my body sagging forward as Fitz grinned in unholy triumph. Foggily, blearily, I realized his leering mug would be the last thing I would ever see on this earth.
 

That was a little depressing.
 

Right up until the moment that his head blew apart.
 

The glass shattered with the force of the blast, and oxygen rushed into the space as the
noxious fumes spilled out, creating a deadly cocktail of gas and fire. The guards, realizing too late the carnage that was about to ensue, still managed to almost reach the door before being blasted through it, and I could hear the screams of the dancing throng in the world beyond.
 

And then, for a long and horrifying breath…there was nothing but smoke and darkness, and a distant, shimmering blue figure, trapped on a field of red.
 

Watching me.
 

“Sara!”
 

Nikki was at my side, hauling me up as my eyes blinked open again, one of the body-modded guards at her side. Somewhere, he’d found trousers, I noted through my delirium, and he gathered up the two girls on the floor, one under each arm, then pounded for the door.
 

I tried to make my feet move, but my legs wouldn’t cooperate, slipping and sliding on the scorched carpet. Nikki used her not inconsiderable strength to throw me over her shoulder in an impressive fireman carry, giving me a unique upside-down view of the room. I blinked and stared, trying to make sense of everything, while trying equally hard not to vomit. Girl had paid way too much for those stilettos.
 

Fitz’s chamber wasn’t burning nearly as much as it should have been, given the destruction that immediately surrounded the bomb. Unfortunately, the only thing left of Fitz was a few of his hardier modifications—and the smoking wreckage of his exploded wrist cuff. Lying next to it was an equally pulverized…Magic 8 Ball.
 

I grinned, drunk on vertigo. Let the police figure out what to do with
that
.
 

The outer room of the demon hole was impressively empty by the time Nikki dragged me through it, her mouth going a mile a minute. “Hans and Franz—whoever they are, I appreciate muscle like that, you know? And no inhibitions about putting it on display? I mean did you see those guys’ asses, I’m telling you,” she began, stilettos clumping over the now-doused labyrinth
of fire, smoke heavy in the air. It seemed like we were going in the wrong direction, and I suddenly felt…not so good. Not so good at all.
 

“Fortunately, they agreed Dixie’s psychics weren’t going to be good to
anyone
dead, after I practically promised I’d have their babies. They’re going to be so disappointed when they figure out the plumbing doesn’t quite connect that way. Such nice shoulders.” She sighed. “By the time I got back to you, all hell had literally blown up, and half the planet had fled like rats on fire.”
 

A door opened and closed, and we were in some sort of hallway, lit by dim blue light. Nikki picked up speed as we moved, and I focused on keeping all my insides from becoming my outsides. “But kudos to Fitz’s interior decorator, right? The back of Binion’s opens up into a maze of underground tunnels that extend out into points all over old Vegas. You can get
anywhere
from
anywhere
down here, I’m thinking. And most importantly,
we
can get out.”
 

“Mmph,” I muttered as Nikki finally clattered to a stop. She slipped me off her shoulder, steadying me as I swayed.
 

“You look like shit, sweet cakes, but the moment we step outside these walls, the council is gonna be on you like rubber on a duck.” She snapped her fingers in front of my eyes until I pushed her hand away.
 

“Why?” I managed, then squinted as she waved at the high-tech fixtures blinking down at us over the large door.
 

“Fitz may have been a bastard, but he wasn’t cheap. That unit’s from Techzilla.” She grinned. “Psychic jamming device, top of the line. I suspect the council will want to get their hands on it, since it clearly blocks their asses too.” She waggled her brows at me. “Unless Hans and Franz strip it out of here first, which I sincerely hope they do. You ready for your close-up?”
 

I nodded, and she opened the door. We were in an alley that ran behind the Binion’s
building, crowded with delivery trucks and a dozen or so half-clad clubbers. Smoke puffed out of some of the doors as they banged open, smelling of sulfur and too-sweet gas. There’d been so much
gas
—
 

“Up you go, babe.” Nikki had a strong arm around me, keeping me steady when I would have slumped to the ground. “I got a feeling we’re not out of this yet.”
 

She was right. We hadn’t moved ten feet when my vision was obscured by two perfect feet shod in luxury leather sandals. Laughter floated down around my head.
 

“I have
so
missed this city.” I squinted up into sunlight as the Devil stared down, his gaze full of warm admiration. “And all its many charms.”
 

Nikki let me drop to the ground with admirable speed as she stood up, balancing on her high heels. My head swam, and my lungs felt…fouled. Every new breath didn’t improve the situation either. It was like I was adding to the contamination by inhaling the hot, dusty air. I shook my head, trying to clear it. No dice.
 

Nikki blew out a sharp breath. “You’d better not have been kidding about that invite to your club, yo,” she said, taking Kreios’s proffered handkerchief to wipe the worst of the grit off her face. “I’ve earned a serious VIP suite.”
 

“I will personally see to all your needs.” His considered me again as Nikki’s wheezed response devolved into a stuttering cough. “You were hurt worse than I expected,” he said, sounding surprised. “But you killed him, I assume?”
 

“Fitz? He is definitely dead.” Nikki wasn’t quite willing to give up the floor, and I was more than happy to let her carry on. “Unless he got modded to regenerate himself from bite-size pieces, anyway.”
 

“
We
didn’t kill anyone,” I half coughed. “You’re the one who planted that bomb.”
 

He frowned at me, genuinely confused. “Me?” he asked. “The council doesn’t kill mortals, Sara. Mortals kill mortals.” He looked down at his perfectly manicured fingers,
apparently admiring the job of his nail tech. “The fire that was set outside of the necropolis exit was not deadly. Painful, perhaps. Not deadly. The men in the abbey—at no time did I lift a hand against any of them. I had you and your associate to thank for that. And here…” He waved around the bombed-out building. “This is an unfortunate accident emanating from the lair of an avowed meth cooker. We are merely lucky that the police and all their earnest young detectives are on their way. Thank heavens more innocent bystanders were not harmed.”
 

“Right.” I had no patience for the council’s loopholes right now, or its effed-up code of honor. And, truth to tell, SANCTUS could have been behind that bomb instead of the Devil. Fitz’s wrist cuff had been as destroyed as my Magic 8 Ball. Had Kreios planted a bomb or a harmless toy? And did it matter in the end? I was out. The girls were out.
 

Either way, there was something in Kreios’s words that nagged me, something whispering of warning. What was it he’d said? How had he said it, exactly? My vision blurred again as I bent forward, my hands on my knees, overcome with a sudden hacking fit that teetered on the edge of something far worse.  
 

“How much did she ingest?” Kreios asked over my wheezing. I missed Nikki’s answer as I spit into the street, pretty sure I should be concerned at the vivid green hue of my bile.
 

“What
was
that shit?” I muttered. Kreios stepped closer, apparently unmoved by the Technicolor display.
 

“In addition to the gasses Mr. Fitz no doubt mentioned to you, as he was ever a fan of explaining his experiments in vivid detail, the mixture contains a cocktail of high-end designer hallucinogenics with electromagnetic properties,” he supplied. “Technoceuticals, I believe is the street term. The very latest coming out of southern Asia, where they’ve somewhat cornered the market on the trade. According to our resources, your host was engaged in some highly lucrative test applications intended to enhance the ability of known high-functioning Connecteds. With the
proper combination, and once he managed to hurdle the unfortunately terminal side effects which seemed to accompany all such combinations to date, he could easily go out and turn mid-range Connecteds into high-functioning ones, and high-functioning ones into demigods. Or that was the theory.”
 

“Psychopath.” Nikki sniffed. But there was a note in her voice that I didn’t miss, and I thought of Dixie back at her chapel. She and Dixie were two mid-range Connecteds fighting on the side of good. If anyone would benefit from a technoceutical charge-up, why not them?
 

“Quite,” Kreios said, scattering my thoughts again. “Now that the wards are down on his lair, we will send in our analysts, at least once the police have—”
 

“Police!” I jerked my head up, panic finally cutting through my nausea. That couldn’t happen. His words from before suddenly trickled into my mind.
The police and all their earnest young detectives
… No. No, and no, and no.
 

“Okay, I’m out. Give Armaeus my love.” I straightened up painfully, willing my head to stop spinning. “He knows where to reach me.”
 

“So it is the
police
that centers your fear, Sara Wilde,” Kreios mused, eyeing me with renewed interest. “Except your fear is far greater than I find useful, as it shrouds your mind from me.”
 

“Hang on a tick,” Nikki interrupted the Devil’s complaint, peering down the alley. “That’s the ride for my girls. I
also
have no interest in dealing with the boys in blue, scrumptious though they may be. So let me get them out of here. We picked up a few stragglers along the way, and I need Dixie to triage.” She strode off to where the narrow avenue intersected with a main street, where a bright pink bus emblazoned with “Chapel of Everlasting Love in the Stars” idled. The two highly pierced guards stood watch over a clutch of young women, along with some adult males and a white-haired couple huddled together on the pavement, and the still-
unconscious twins as well. I should go to the girls, I knew, make sure they were all right. I should report in to Father Jerome. I should close the loop and finish the job.
 

But the sound of sirens pounded through me, igniting me with a wholly unreasonable fear.
Right now, I have to get out of here.
The rest I’d figure out later.
  
 

I turned back to Kreios, but he’d already slipped away—no doubt to explore the building for himself before the police poured through it. The alley was finally clearing of smoke, and dizzying heat beat down on me.
 

I
hated
this city, I decided. Hated everything to do with it. And everything it held. I wanted nothing more than to leave it behind for good.
 

But as nausea crashed over me again, pinning me in place for another moment, I also couldn’t deny what I’d seen while under the influence of Fitz’s Pythene gas.
 

SANCTUS was coming.