Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 (19 page)

“Such enthusiasm,” cooed Eshe. “I’ve been experimenting more with astral travel. It’s nowhere near as difficult as you make it out to be.”

“Oh yeah? And yet I don’t see you lining up to take this trip.”

Her eyes flashed, and I’ll admit it, I was smug. Council members might be creatures of amazing power, but they were also constrained by their position. They couldn’t go where I went, couldn’t do what I did.

I returned Eshe’s gaze steadily, perversely pleased by her annoyance. “If we’re done chattering here, then let’s move.”

“Eshe and I will both be performing the opening ritual,” Armaeus said, his voice preternaturally calm. “Your familiarity with me will help bring you back, if anything should go wrong.”

“And what might that ‘anything’ entail?” I watched with growing unease as he and Eshe moved to flank me. My seat was tucked tight against the conference table. I knew from experience that this would help when I eventually collapsed. Way closer to land on a table than a floor, even if the surface was hard. “What’s waiting for me in Atlantis that I should be aware of?”

“Nothing that should pose an obstacle.” This was Eshe again, and her voice too had taken on a different character, almost an edge. “But you will not go in unassisted.”

She leaned forward and placed a small box on the table—the ornate blue-and-green case that held the Atlantean deck. I stiffened as she opened it. “No. I don’t know those cards.”

“The Atlantean deck makes sense here. More sense than the newer decks,” Armaeus observed. I felt his gaze boring into my temple, but he didn’t speak in my mind. Apparently he was content for everyone to hear his thoughts. “They can help provide direction. Atlantis’s capital city is an enormous structure.”

“But these cards are different.” Mesmerized by the idea of touching the cards, I scooped them out of the box, feeling the weight of the deck in my hand. “They’re too heavy for regular cards. You can’t shuffle them.”

“Try.” Armaeus’s words swirled through my mind like smoke, and I focused on the cards. Hefting them awkwardly, I sorted them in my hands, one over top of the other, all facedown. There were only about a dozen cards, and I hadn’t looked at any of the faces except the eyeball card. Would I know what any of them meant?

Without thinking further, I spread the cards in a wide arc on the table, only vaguely aware that no one in the room was speaking. Everyone’s gaze was fixed on the arc of cards, with the backs gleaming up at us, their strange interlocking design at once evoking Celtic, Norse, and Greek inspiration. The cards seemed to glow with an internal fire, and I stared down at them for another long moment. Then I picked three at random and pulled them out, all facedown.

Unlike many of the Tarot decks in current usage, the backs of these decks were not symmetrical at both the top and bottom. It was clear which side was upright, which was reversed. Fine by me. When it came to finding artifacts or even people, I always read the cards in the upright position. I didn’t have time to split hairs over what a reversed card might mean. Not if I was being tracked or if someone’s life was on the line. But here, assured of the cards’ positioning, I turned them over in quick succession.

And blanched.

These cards were nothing like what I was used to seeing. The markings at the bottom, signifying the name, meant nothing to me. The symbols at the top, intended to be numbers, I assumed, were strange slashes. I didn’t know this script, I didn’t know these symbols. There was a full constellation in the first card—not only the Star but moons and planets as well, all crowded together. The second card wasn’t merely the Tower, it was chaos. Multiple structures crumbled inside a thickly rimmed Wheel, while demonic creatures danced in one corner and angels raged in the other. The third card was the most disturbing of all, though it really shouldn’t have been since I’d seen it before: A single eye staring out, unblinking, all knowing. Arcing over and below it were the rays of what could be the sun, or could be the onset of a killer migraine.

I had no idea what any of it meant.

Even as I stared, I felt moved to draw another card—beyond moved. Held in the all-seeing clutch of the sacred eye, my hand reached out and secured a final card, but though I could pull it forward from the deck, I couldn’t turn it over. It was as if it slowly dissolved, as if everything was dissolving around me. I turned to see Armaeus and Eshe speaking to each other, their mouths moving, their eyes intent, me all but forgotten between them. Nikki stood behind them, but she was too far back—too far. I couldn’t reach her, I couldn’t speak, and beneath me, on the table, the cards began to shimmer, bursts of light breaking free from them and bathing me in a golden radiance.

It all felt perfect and good—until the rays arced across the tattoo Death had burned into my right wrist.

Agony swept through me. The table seemed to blow up, the cards flying and wind howling around me in a furious maelstrom. I stayed centered and sure for another moment more, then I blew up too, blinded by the bursting star.

I dropped swiftly—no, not dropping,
rocketing
down into a clear azure ocean, far down. Too far down. I shouldn’t be able to breathe, but I was falling so fast and the water was so warm and I didn’t need to fill my lungs, didn’t need to breathe, didn’t need to—

The skies opened up beneath me, and I hurtled to earth again, smashing onto a patch of dirt beside a crumbling paved road.

Oof.

Every bone on my body should have been pulverized with that crash, and I lay on the ground for a long moment, afraid to move. “Hello?” I managed, without shifting position.

There was no response. At length, I moved my fingers, then my toes. My arms responded, my knees as well. I wiggled on the ground like a bug, and my spine obligingly wiggled back. So far, so good.

I shakily got to my feet and looked around, drawing in a questioning breath before realizing the import of that.

Apparently, Atlantis had oxygen. Good to know.

I heard a whirring in my ear, and I turned, then turned again. If that whirring was Armaeus, it wasn’t going to do me any good. Which was unfortunate, based on what I was seeing.

I stood in the middle of a war zone.

It wasn’t difficult figuring out the imagery before me. Buildings lay in ruin, shattered, their roofs caved in and their walls blown out. Not a single stone stood on top of another one from what I could see. The dirt strip I stood on looked like it had once supported grass, maybe trees—but those had been scorched to the ground. Nothing remained but dried-out wisps of something undefined sticking out of the ground. The sky was blue, but that was the only bit of cheer afforded this place.

Despite the carnage, it was clear it’d once been beautiful.

It appeared that I was in some sort of courtyard, in front of a large central building. There were stone walls—those had not been shattered, at least—which ran the circumference of the courtyard in silent testimony to what lay within. Another broken set of walls was only a few feet away, and I walked toward them. More empty space lay beyond. There wasn’t dirt beneath my feet this time, only stone. I scuffed aside some of the sand, and dull, white marble peeked through. Apparently, I was inside the central building. Or at least closer to it.

I tried to report. “This place is totally destroyed.” Nothing but whirs and clicks sounded in response, and I sighed. Atlantis had lousy cell reception. I was on my own.

At least I was alone in here.

I’d no sooner thought that than I recalled the cards I had drawn. The destruction card had been surrounded by the wheel, and on the outside of the wheel, angels and demons awaited. I squinted at the high walls surrounding me in a perfect arc, and shuddered. There was no sound, barely a rustle of wind. But I had no interest in finding out what lay beyond those walls.

Besides, what I needed was straight ahead.

As I walked forward, I thought of the other two cards I’d drawn. A constellation of stars, sun, moon, and supernovas, and the all-seeing eye.

I figured I’d know that last one when I saw it, but the constellation was confusing me. I’d already moved through space and time to get here, but I hadn’t seen any of that imagery—nothing but mist and water. Since I’d arrived, however, nothing remotely resembled a constellation.

There was nothing here at all, in fact. No sound, no animals or birds, hardly any breeze. Then again, I’d moved through time. What was before me was now behind me, if Armaeus was to be believed. I was standing in a country lost not only to the world, but also to its timetable. Did that have something to do with what I was or wasn’t seeing, and its order?

My head began to hurt.

Armaeus had told me the artifacts he sought would be at the very core of the central building, and that was where I was walking toward, or what was left of it. The place was enormous. With the wreckage, I couldn’t get a true sense of the scale, but I felt like I was crossing a football field, with the central building at the far end. I picked my way through the rubble, trying to keep my footing. As I walked, I noticed something peculiar about the stone floor through the tumbled rock.

It was growing darker. Specifically, it was growing a darker blue. As I crept through the wreckage toward what I assumed had been the center of the building, I began to pick out a pattern on the floor—stars. I thought about the stars lining the ceiling in the Bavarian castle. How many centuries and lifetimes had been linked by a fascination with the heavens? How many dimensions as well?

I squeezed between two extremely large rocks and blinked, trying to process what I was looking at. Then I turned around. Instead of going up, as I’d subconsciously been expecting as I’d entered the ruins, I had been moving slightly downhill the whole time. I’d not seen the center of the building at all, but the very tip of a mound of rubble that had fallen together to make a large room. An enormous dome the size of a cathedral lay half-balanced on a shattered rock wall, creating a slitted opening. If I was correct in what I was seeing, the dome was sheltering the very center of the main building. Or, more succinctly, my destination.

I lifted a hand to wipe my hair out of my eyes, and something strange caught my attention. The palm of my right hand was deeply imprinted with marks—not burns, but deep ink stains that ended right above the symbol that Death had tattooed into my skin. I touched my fingers to the marks and felt no pain, then my mind flashed back to my actions right before I traveled.

I’d drawn a card. Drawn it, flipped it, and blanked out.

Squinting into the light, I tried to make sense of the images cresting over the palm of my hand. This image looked similar to one of the Major Arcana cards of the traditional Tarot system.

Justice.

A figure stood with a scale in front of her, the balance of the two objects held on the scale weighing out as carefully even. Unlike Justice, however, this figure was not blind. Also unlike Justice, this figure did not have a passive sense to her, cool and detached. She held the weighted scales in one hand, and with the other she brandished a sword—or brandished something. The image ran off the edge of my palm at that point, and it was impossible to tell what she was carrying. It felt very swordlike, though.

It also felt kind of useless.

Disgusted, I stood back and looked around. Common sense indicated I should stay away from the dome, but I’d been running the artifacts hunting game for a long time. I had a feeling it was the right place to be.

Nevertheless, it didn’t hurt to understand exactly how big that dome was—and how sturdy—before I crawled under it. I took a running jump toward the wall…only to come up on it so much more quickly than I expected that I almost face-planted into the side of the dome. Scrambling to the side, I caught an outcropping a good three feet above where I thought I’d land and hung there, confused, my feet dangling for a moment as I tried to get my bearings.

I was easily fifteen feet up. And I’d gotten here in two quick jumps. What was going on? Scrabbling for purchase again, I spied the next ledge up and lurched toward it…

And missed it entirely.

Instead, I plowed into a different ledge, my head cracking against the stone, my hands flailing until I could pull myself up and onto the next ridge. Not a ridge at all, I realized. A shelf. And as I turned to peer down at the dome again, burnished gold and silver, brilliant in the harsh sunlight, I saw what I’d been both dreading and hoping for.

The all-seeing eye.

Chapter Fifteen

“Ohhhkay.”

The entire surface of the dome had been etched with a large, Egyptian-looking eye, heavily lined as if with kohl, its center refracting the sunlight back to me. I teetered a little and took a step back, hugging the rock wall.

I was dizzy, I realized with a start.
Very
dizzy.

What had Armaeus said about the results of the Great Flood? It had changed the atmosphere of Earth in some way, rendering the demigods of old less fleet of foot, weaker, more susceptible to the vagaries of age?

By extension, if Atlantis had gotten blasted to never-never land, that would mean its atmosphere was different, wouldn’t it? Not different enough that I couldn’t breathe, but different enough that the quality of that breathing was dramatically impacted.

Of course, so was the quality of my speed and ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. So there were potentially trade-offs.

Either way, I was much more concerned about breathing than I was about running and jumping. I couldn’t afford to stay here too long.

I half slid, half jumped back to the ground level, approaching the crack between the rock and the dome. It didn’t seem completely dark on the inside, which made no sense either. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes to prepare for the gloom within and ducked inside.

My eyes popped open, and the breath went out of me completely.

“Sweet Christmas,” I managed, more in my mind than in words.

Light filtered down from an enormous oculus in the center of the dome, the iris of the all-seeing eye. It illuminated a floor that was absolutely stunning in its beauty, preserved unexpectedly due to the falling dome.