Getting Wilde (24 page)

Whether they had killed Fitz or the Devil had, I was no longer sure, but their darkness was stretching toward Vegas—was already
in
Vegas, I suspected. No way was Fitz the only dark practitioner on their payroll. I thought of Barnabus back in Italy. Were the Knights Templar aligning themselves against the council as well?
 

And if so, it all came back to why. Clearing out the Connected communities made sense if you were an ultraconservative religious group. But the Knights Templar were as underground as the Connecteds, and their relationship with the Church had been anything but open. The mere fact they still existed, if they truly still existed, opened up an entirely new level of crazy, in fact.
 

Someone needed to bring the council up to speed, assuming that Kreios hadn’t already. Beyond that, Nikki’s and Dixie’s people needed to be warned. Prepared. How long had Fitz been operating at Binion’s, on SANCTUS’s payroll or at least in their good graces? How much had SANCTUS already penetrated the city? If SANCTUS was going to wage war in Las Vegas, the
off-Strip carnies would be the first to fall.   
 

And then there were the girls from Kavala. They were in no shape to be moved out of the city. It wasn’t reasonable to ask Father Jerome to come here to oversee their recovery. He had children of his own to find, in addition to his work in the cathedral. He’d want me to stay, get them on their feet, protect them for as long as it took to arrange for their safe transport back to their home village.
How long had they been in Fitz’s lair? And what had they endured before they’d gotten here?
 

I sighed, the familiar urge to run gnawing at me, matched by the equally oppressive obligation to stay. Those were my options: I could leave, disappear. Hole up somewhere  until I could inhale without hearing green slime rattle around in my lungs.
 

Or I could call Armaeus right now.
 

The first decision at least made some level of sense. The second involved actually facing the nightmares that had pierced the mists of Fitz’s Oracle room. The soldiers of SANCTUS preparing their plans, and then that—that creature behind them, hovering in the darkness. Lying in wait. In my mind’s eye, I felt its gaze flicker over me again—and suddenly I knew.
 

I couldn’t leave. Not yet. I had to warn Armaeus that SANCTUS was coming, and fast.
 

I reached into my jacket for my cell phone, the movement feeling more momentous than it should, as if a ripple was shooting out across the universe, ringing some far-off bell.
 

Then I remembered my phone was back in Fitz’s demon hole, blown to bits.
 

Oh well. Leaving was probably the smarter idea anyway.
 

I wiped my hand over my face and, limping, headed in the opposite direction of Nikki and her gaggle of exhausted, half-broken psychics. I’d find some place to hide for a few days, catch some sleep, and heal. Then I’d figure out how to meet my obligations without—
 

I fell back from the curb as a car shot by me too quickly. Vertigo clouded my vision, and I
staggered a little to the side, smoke and gorge rising up once more in my throat. The car braked and backed up, and panic shattered through me. With the visionary clarity of the Oracle, I saw myself stumbling to the pavement as the door opened, sickness overtaking me, never even feeling the hands beneath my shoulders, around my waist, barely able to discern the words sliding through my head.
 

“A decision, once made, cannot be unmade, Miss Wilde.”
 

“No!” I stood sharply back from the curb, shaking my head hard as the limo stopped beside me. The door didn’t open, though, and I didn’t fall down.
 

Forget that. If Armaeus swept me away now, I’d be just as trapped as those girls behind glass. I knew the Magician, and I knew how he worked. If I didn’t go to him on my own terms, or at least healthy, I’d be overwhelmed. It’d happened before.
 

“Miss?”
 

I turned and squinted into the sunlight. A man was walking up the street to me, his gait so familiar, so self-assured, that for a moment I simply stood there frozen, unsure of where—or who—I even was. I took a step back, more out of self-preservation than anything else, and something changed in the man’s body as well. Recognition swept through me in a visceral wave, so electric that the air practically exploded around me, circuits popping in my brain, my heart, my joints, my bloodstream.
 

The detective—and it was a detective; it had to be, from the cheap brown suit to the badge on his belt to the worn, tanned face, messy hair and squinting eyes—froze another moment as well. I felt rather than heard his next question, the word so quiet I could almost believe I’d imagined it. “
Sariah?
”
 

Oh. Hell. No.
 

I reached out for the door to the limo and wrenched it open, piling myself inside. “Go,
go!” I gasped as the door slammed shut behind me, the pounding steps of a man fading into the background. The driver complied, bending forward to jump out into traffic, revving the engine hard to leave the detective in the dust.
 

Holy shit. Brody Rooks. Had he really truly seen me? His voice had been uncertain, his eyes disbelieving whatever his brain was trying to convince him had just happened. He had to have known it was really me, though, right?
Right?
 

No sirens erupted behind us as we zipped along the boulevard, however. And the driver didn’t ask for my destination. Instead, Armaeus studied me in the rearview mirror . “You want to tell me what that was all about?”
 

“Can’t you figure it out yourself?”
 

“No, Miss Wilde, I can’t. Which, please let me assure you, I find more tedious than you can possibly imagine.”
 

His unexpected candor threw me for a second, and I hunkered down in the backseat, alternating between attempting to breathe without pain and trying to unscramble my brains. Neither was working out too well.
 

“Where are we going?” I asked instead, sounding like a thousand-year-old smoker.
 

“To Prime Luxe.”
 

I frowned at him. “You live in a steakhouse?”
 

Armaeus didn’t honor that with a response, which was fine by me. I was hunched so low in the limo seat that I felt like I was five years old, seeing Vegas for the first time. Only I wasn’t seeing the Vegas that everyone else saw, I knew. We approached the Strip from the north end, and as we passed the Stratosphere, I squinted hard. “Who lives here?”
 

“No one,” Armaeus said curtly. “You should rest. There will be plenty of time for you to explore your new home once you have recovered.”
 

“I’m not staying here.” Every time I spoke, I expected the words to come out of my mouth on a puff of smoke, like a cartoon dragon. “There’s too many people in this city.”
 

The silence from the front of the car was noncommittal, but I knew Armaeus was anything but. Which irritated me as well. He didn’t know me, not really. He’d used me for a half-dozen jobs, and I was a reliable finder to him, nothing more. He had no right to ask me to stay anywhere I didn’t want to stay, and if he threw the whole SANCTUS war at me, I’d call bullshit.
 

Oh God. SANCTUS.
 

I struggled upright, the movement hurting more than it had any right to. “You need to know this.”
 

“If it isn’t about the man who was following you, it can wait.”
 

“It can’t wait.” I clenched my hands into fists and pressed them against my belly. Why wasn’t I feeling any better? “Jerry Fitz was working with SANCTUS. He had a cuff on his wrist that was imprinted with the same glyph that I saw tatted on that Swiss Guard lookalike. Pope hat and tails, the whole bit. His also had a dagger at the bottom, for what that’s worth. He was transmitting to them the whole time I was there. I have no idea what, but when I was…in that room…”
 

“Rest is the best way you could serve right now, Miss Wilde. Do not make me force you to do so. As you requested, I am asking you nicely first.” Armaeus’s haughty golden glare pinned me to the rich leather seats. “But I’m only going to
ask
you once.”  
 

“Fine.” I flopped back in my seat, my bones jarring with pain. “I shouldn’t hurt this much, by the way. Just sayin’.”
 

“Do you know why you do?”
 

“Because Jerry Fitz is—was—an asshole? That about covers it, I think.”
 

“There is more to it than that, I suspect.” Armaeus cruised past the Wynn Casino. I blinked down the Strip and saw the negative reflections of the half-hidden homes of the council. The white tower soaring above Treasure Island, the black tower that dominated Caesar’s Palace. Scandal, the only arcane casino that chose to advertise, flickered above the Flamingo. An elegant castle of fairyland proportions glittered in the harsh sunlight above Bellagio, with its masculine twin across the street surmounting Paris.
 

Farther down, the ancient and somehow techno-modern steel-and-glass monstrosity of what was apparently called Prime Luxe, the Magician’s home. It didn’t have its name flickering in neon along its towering spires, but with a name like Prime Luxe, I couldn’t blame it.
 

Still, the palace towered over the Luxor Hotel with its gleaming pyramid and golden sphinxes, and I had to smile at the nod to a lifetime that could never be restored. Armaeus had been Egyptian before he had become Arcanan. Some memories were worth keeping alive,
apparently.
 

Up in the front seat, Armaeus was waiting for me to continue. Loudly.
 

I sighed. “Yeah, well, forgive me for stripping it down for you. Fitz stuffed his Pythene gas tube into my mouth and turned the jets on full. That much hot air did a number on my lungs, not to mention my nervous system.”
 

“Certainly, but that’s not the only reason.”
 

“Enlighten me.”
 

“We’re here.” I looked up and, as always, Armaeus was a master of the understatement. He cut the wheel and sped into the drive of the Luxor like he owned the place. Which he did, after a fashion. The valet-service boys jogged up to us, their Luxor uniforms flickering between the garish gold of the beloved casino and the deep navy of Luxe. Armaeus stopped and glanced back at me. “Can you walk? I can assist—”
 

“I can walk.” The door swung open, and a masculine hand reached out, which I grabbed with perhaps a bit more force than expected. Still, I was half lifted out of the vehicle with admirable grace, and I didn’t have the mental strength to figure out how Armaeus had managed to move from the front seat to my car door in a split second, replacing the valet boy. He folded my hand over his arm, snugging me to his body. The contact with him short-circuited my system from the tip of my head to my toes, and, too late, I realized I no longer wore the Tyet around my neck.
 

Armaeus’s chuckle was soft. “I’m not going to accost you when you can barely stand, Miss Wilde.”
 

“Mmph.” If anything, my vertigo grew worse, not better, here in the Magician’s lair. I squinted and shook my head, trying to reconcile the tone-on-tone overlay between the very real Luxor and the not-quite-as-real Prime Luxe. I hung on to Armaeus shamelessly, and he provided
a solidity I hadn’t experienced in far too long.
 

Don’t get used to this
, I warned myself, but any attempt at intelligence was not really tops on my list right now. Not after what I’d been through over the last few days. Not after what I’d been through over the last ten years. Not after what had happened to me a decade ago, on a sun-blasted day in Memphis, when everything I’d thought I was and everything I thought I’d be had blown up in a surge of smoke and fire.
 

Bake my biscuits, Brody Rooks. Of course he’d be called in to investigate the one place in Vegas I most needed him not to be, before I could escape cleanly.
Of all the gin joints in all the world…
 

But it wasn’t
that
surprising, I supposed, that he would get the freakshow detail for Vegas. Back in the day, he was the cop who’d made his name working with the kooks in Memphis. Back in the day, he’d been willing to give the time of day to people who didn’t merit much more than a snickering reference on cable news.
 

Back in the day…
 

I shoved those thoughts away as Armaeus shouldered me closer to him. He punched the button to a bank of elevators that shimmered slightly out of alignment with the other elevators in the Luxor lobby. I peered around, trying to get my bearings, which was impossible with the cases of kitschy Egyptian trinkets all around me and the wildly colored carpet that assaulted the eyes along with all the gold.  
 

The doors swooshed open, and he ushered me inside.
 

I really did mean to stop leaning on the Magician then, to support myself on one of the four very capable walls surrounding me. But that seemed like an awful lot of work.
 

“I can help you heal, Miss Wilde, but you must allow me to do that.”
 

“So what are you waiting for,” I muttered against his chest. It was a very nice chest. “You
got insurance paperwork for me to sign or something?”
 

“Not exactly. But your mind is closed to me.”
 

“That’s kind of the point, isn’t it? It being my mind and all.”