Vegas Knights (33 page)

  "Flatter me all you want," I said, "I'm still not letting you sacrifice me."

  Houdini shrugged. "Perhaps I could start with young Miss Strega then?"

  I'd had enough of this game. I stepped up, swapped my pistol into my off hand, and socked Houdini in the jaw.

  "Jackson, no!" said Dad. I ignored him. At that point, I wasn't sure if he wanted to protect Houdini or me more, and I didn't much care.

  I'd always considered myself more of a lover – alright, a geek – than a fighter. I'm not built like a linebacker, and I'm not especially tall or fast. The only thing I really have going for me in a fight is raw determination coupled with the ability to take a beating.

  Growing up in New Orleans, I'd had plenty of opportunities to get into fights. The first year after Mom died, I accepted most of those.

  Eventually, my grandmother drilled it into my head that fighting was the last resort of someone too damned stupid to come up with another solution. If you offended someone, you apologized. If someone offended you, you took control over your anger and never gave into it.

  In this case, though, I think Grandma would have cheered me on. This wasn't just my pride at stake, but the fate of the world. Not that her encouragement would have done me any good.

  I gave Houdini my best punch – probably the best punch of my life. I felt the papery skin on his jaw give as my fist slammed into it and shoved his head hard and fast enough back on his neck to snap it. Had I hit a living person that hard, I think it might have killed him.

  Houdini's head flopped back on his broken neck, and he staggered backward several steps before coming to a halt. Then he reached up with his hands and put his skull back where it was supposed to be. He rubbed his neck with his hands and ran his fingers over the flap of skin I'd torn loose from his jaw, smoothing it over as if it were a bit of piecrust that could be pressed back into place.

  When he removed his hands, Houdini was intact. He looked as good as if I had never touched him. My hand hurt like hell.

  "Now, Jackson," he said. "There's no profit in being like that."

  I leveled my pistol at him. Powi did the same with hers.

  Houdini cracked a smile. "Do you really think that you could hurt me with something like that? That I would fear something as trivial as bullets?"

  "Everyone makes mistakes," I said. "Just ask Bugsy – or go pick the bullets out of his corpse."

  He rolled his eyes at me. "You know, you have the solution to your problem in your hands." He nodded at my gun. "To foil me, all you have to do is shoot your father and then yourself. To be sure, you might want to kill Miss Strega first for good measure."

  "Harry!" Dad said. "That's enough!"

  "And that would leave you without the power you need to finish your ritual?"

  "Possibly." Houdini shrugged. "Until someone else powerful enough to try to stop me gives it a shot. Taking that chance is up to you."

  "I think I'll stick with the odds that still breathing gives me," I said.

  "However you want to play it," he said. "Why don't the two of you come with me?"

  Houdini walked out onto the wide balcony that ran around the perimeter of his penthouse.

  "Jackson, don't," Dad said. "Let him take me."

  I goggled at him. "Are you insane, Dad? You'd let him kill you so he could bring Mom back to life?"

  "If it works, I'd come back to life too. I'm willing to take that risk if it means I might be able to have your mother back here with us."

  I couldn't look at him. I couldn't bear to be in the same room with him. I stalked after Houdini, and Powi followed, keeping half an eye on my father for me.

  "What's your angle?" I asked Houdini.

  He pointed south down the strip. "I thought the view from here might help you to put this all in perspective. Do you see the light spearing out of the Luxor? It's the one manmade artifact that's actually visible from orbit. Imagine that kind of power."

  He turned back to talk to me. "Do you see how every casino on the Strip can harness enough of that power that it could do the same? Doesn't that give you a sense of just how insignificant each of us – every human being – is compared to that? Our lives are nothing more than twinkles in the sky of history."

  I shook my head. "It tells me that our achievements mean something. What we do matters. We affect each other. We can even alter the view from space."

  "I'm about to do something monumental," Houdini said to both Powi and me. "You don't want to be on the wrong side of history with this. It's going to happen with or without you."

  "I thought you said you needed us as your sacrifices," Powi said.

  "You, or someone just as powerful," he said. "Fortunately, someone else who qualifies has just arrived."

  I heard it before I saw it. The sound of the helicopter's spinning rotors drowned out his last words as the machine rose from below us and appeared off to our left. It trained its spotlight on us, almost blinding me, but I recognized its markings just before that. It had come from the Thunderbird.

 
 

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
 

The helicopter turned to the side, pointing itself south down the Strip. The side door of the rear compartment had been removed, and a man – I recognized him as Walter – stood there in the gaping hole with a rocket launcher braced over his shoulder.

  I sprinted in the other direction, toward the far corner of the balcony. Houdini stepped forward and held out his arms toward the helicopter as if he was greeting some long-lost friends. "Welcome, Mamaci!" he shouted over the roar of the helicopter's thrumming rotors. "I've been waiting for you!"

  Walter fired the rocket.

  Houdini waved his arms upward, and the rocket veered straight up into the sky. It zoomed up toward the stars – barely visible against the light the Strip threw up into the stratosphere – and kept going, hunting for a target it would never find.

  A man with a machine-gun – one of Mamaci's other thugs – appeared next to Walter and opened fire while Walter reloaded the rocket launcher. The bullets traced a line of chipped stone across the balcony's floor,

reaching for Houdini.

  Rather than make the bullets disappear, Houdini charged the balcony's railing at top speed. He leaped atop the railing without breaking stride, spread his arms wide, and kicked off like a cliff diver hanging high over some distant ocean. He hung there framed in the spotlight for a picture-perfect instant, and then gravity reasserted its grip on him and hauled him out of sight.

  The machine-gun fire continued straight ahead and then angled toward me. Concentrating, I visualized a sort of force field in front of me. As the bullets struck it, they disappeared, replaced with nothing but air.

  The bullet-sized bits of high-velocity air hammered at me, threatening to ruin my focus. The moment I let my guard down, though, I knew my shield would disappear, and the real bullets would tear through me. I glared at the space before me and kept my attention sharp on the task at hand, refusing to let the battering air-storm distract me.

  I hoped that I could keep this up until the man with the machine-gun ran out of bullets. When he stopped to reload, I planned to dash inside the penthouse and make my escape.

  Before that happened, though, Walter fired another rocket.

  If only I could have phased through the floor. I would have appeared in whatever Houdini kept housed right underneath his home, lost and cut off from Powi, but that would have been easy enough to fix, I think. Of course, in the time it took me to switch my mojo from one task to another the machine-gun might have put an end to me.

  Instead, I focused harder on the field in front of me, so much so that sweat ran down my face and I bellowed with the effort. The rocket slammed right into the field and disappeared.

  I would have crowed in triumph had the force of the rocket-sized blast of air that hit me not knocked me backward off the balcony.

  The thing that surprised me most about falling out into space, sixty-six stories up, was the silence. The racket from the machine-gun and the helicopter faded away fast, and I was too terrified to draw the breath to scream. The air rushing past me – or, actually, that I was rushing through – drowned out the sounds floating up from the Strip below.

  As I hurtled down toward the wide expanse of concrete that served as the casino's entryway far below, I wondered how much this was going to hurt. The blazing lights scattered about the entrance gave me a sharp glaring view of where I would land. I'd miss the artdeco fountain out front by about fifty feet, I guessed. For an instant, I regretted that the air-rocket's blast hadn't hit me harder, but I realized that at this height the fountain could have been as deep as an ocean and the landing would still kill me.

  I wondered what would happen if I tried phasing through the ground. How far down would my momentum take me? Would I ever stop, and if I did how would I get back to the surface? Would I suffocate before that happened?

  I heard sirens in the distance. I saw people streaming out of the casino, some of them screaming, and I remembered Prospero and the zombies. I hoped I wouldn't land on any innocents.

  I knew that my only chance at survival would be figuring out how to fly. I would have preferred for my first flight to be under better – read: nonlethal – circumstances, but at the moment I'd run out of options for deferring it.

  I tried to focus, but the rushing wind, the screams coming from below, and the sheer terror racing through my head made it hard. I had to do it. I had to.

  Facing the ground, I put out my arms like a bird, and I brought my feet together like a diver. I closed my eyes and let the wind push back my head. I felt the pressure from the air and how it pushed me up, how it wanted to keep me away from the ground. I reached out with my mind, and I gave in to the air. I let it push me up harder and harder, and I felt myself falling slower and slower until I came to a complete stop.

  The rushing stopped. The pressure stopped. The air and I had become one.

  The screams, though, got louder.

  I opened my eyes and saw that I was only thirty feet from the ground, lower than the casino's marquee. A crowd of people stood in Bootleggers' driveway, craning their necks back and pointing up at me. A small circle had opened up in my most likely landing place, and I looked down and laughed at it.

  Then I pointed my head toward the penthouse and raced back up into the sky.

  I picked up speed as I went, willing myself to move faster and faster. By the time I reached the penthouse, I shot right past it into the open night sky. The spotlights that illuminated the sides of the building seemed to follow me right up, catching me like a firefly in a flashlight's beam.

  I hollered in wordless triumph as I reached the apex of my rise. I just couldn't help it. I felt like I'd been released from a lifetime in prison and now had the whole world before me.

  I looked down at the casino and saw the helicopter hovering right over Houdini's balcony. Walter leaped out of it first, carrying a shotgun rather than a rocket launcher. A moment later, he turned back and helped Mamaci down from the aircraft.

  As the pair walked across the balcony toward the main entrance to the penthouse, I heard something coming up behind me. I spun around and spotted Houdini heading my way, silhouetted against the Strip. The rocket he'd diverted earlier zipped right after him on a column of flame.

  Houdini flew straight at the helicopter. At the last instant, just when I feared he might get pureed by the helicopter's blades, he turned ninety degrees straight up. The rocket continued on the same path as if he'd put it on rails.

  The helicopter exploded in a fiery blast. Even from where I hung in the air, the explosion hurt my ears, and the shockwave tried to shake me out of the sky.

  Pieces of the helicopter rained downwards, but the bulk of the craft's structure crashed right into the penthouse's balcony and smashed through the tall windows that separated the living space from the night. It sat there and burned, consuming itself and blackening the building's stone facade.

  I stared in shock at the destruction, unsure of what to do next. I decided to fly down to the balcony to check on Powi and my dad, but before I could move, Houdini appeared beside me in the air.

  "Nice work," he said. "You're like a baby bird that got tossed from its nest."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Having a conversation some seven hundred feet in the air gave me just a bit of vertigo.

  "You already had the wings," he said. "You just needed the right inspiration to figure out how to use them. I applaud your performance."

  "You're insane!" I said. "You killed everyone in the helicopter."

  "Don't forget about all the gawkers on the street below," he said. "I'm sure a few of them were hurt too, maybe even killed."

  "And that doesn't bother you at all?"

  He shrugged. "Dead? Alive? Very soon it won't make a difference."

  Then he fell out of the sky. As if riding down a slide, he slipped right onto his balcony and landed well away from the burning wreck. He stared into the room, adjusted his tie, and disappeared inside.

  I followed right after him, taking a bit more care with my landing. I came in slow and tiptoed in right from the very edge of the balcony. Once I hit the ground, I sprinted for the penthouse, but I hauled up short at the sound of gunfire. I realized then that I'd dropped my pistol when I'd been knocked off the balcony.

  Mentally readying my shield before me, I crept into Houdini's place. I saw Powi kneeling beside my father, using the stone altar as protection, her pistol in her hand. She popped up over the edge of the altar and fired her three last shots at Houdini, but he waved them away into puffs of air. She fired at him again, but her gun's hammer clicked down onto an empty chamber. Without any more bullets at hand, she tossed the weapon aside and hunkered down behind the altar again.