Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 (30 page)

“He was only barely human before he ascended the Council.” She shrugged. “His time as Emperor has not improved his restraint. Hide the ink. And this time, focus on taking weapons
with
you. They will help you when you decide to do what you will do.”

“I…okay.” I decided not to ask Blue for clarification. I didn’t think I’d like the answer. And having a weapon on hand really did seem like a good idea, if I was going back to rescue the children.

Blue waited until I stood, then watched with keen eyes as Jimmy helped me resettle my hoodie, carefully drawing it down over the tattoo. As it had the last time, the spot had stopped hurting the moment she’d taken away the needle gun, but I remained a little woozy. Jimmy stuck by my side as we moved to the front chamber, and I blew out a long breath, gathering my energy to face what was coming next.

I squinted through the window and frowned. “Why are all the cars here?”

Blue folded her arms and leaned up against the counter. “The Council is about balance, but balance takes many forms. To some, it is negating either side’s advantage, putting all players at the same base level. To others, the level is not important, as long as the sides are roughly equivalent. I tend to favor the latter.”

“Which means…”

“Consider it a matter of evening the odds.” She nodded to the cars outside. “They’re waiting for you in the chapel. If you move quickly, Viktor won’t know you’ve made the jump until after you get back. The weapons are waiting there too.”

“Weapons?”

“Armaeus sent the rest along. He wants you to take anything you can this time.”

I blew out a breath, but before I could speak, Blue continued.

“You’re wrong, you know,” she said. “You don’t need to compartmentalize everything away to focus solely on the crisis at hand. You need to use all that’s going on in your world to contribute to what you must achieve. Any pain, sorrow, joy, excitement—emotion of any kind helps your cause. Become more honest, discard your masks, and you become infinitely more powerful. Remember that.”

I nodded, unsure how to respond to a pregame pep talk from Death. An infinite number of nervous quips sprang to mind and I stuffed them down. Instead, I turned and walked outside in the lit-up parking lot.

The cars lined up in front of Dixie’s bore a hodgepodge of license plates. Some showed the dust of a long road trip, some were obviously rentals. One was Brody’s. I crossed the wide strip of asphalt, feeling its latent heat radiate upward. I frowned that I even noticed the detail. Had Blue reset my internal thermometer as well? Probably a good thing, unless I was going to get cooked again. Being oblivious to becoming a self-contained fire pit was the only thing this next jump had going for it, and now that too seemed lost.

I walked into the cool chapel and was struck by…the silence. I might as well have been at a funeral home, and I strode up the hallway with increasing concern. There were people here, definitely people. I could hear their hushed voices in the main chapel. But why were they here, and what did Blue mean by evening the odds?

I wheeled around the corner, and stopped.

“What are they doing here?” I asked, or tried to ask. My voice dried up in my throat as I saw the faces in the bright chapel lights—older now, so much older, as if not ten years had passed but twenty-five. These were the parents of the children, and three sets of them I knew. Three sets I didn’t. They didn’t see me across the crowded room. They were talking to Dixie, who was holding court with Brody, both of them serious and achingly considerate. I blinked, trying to make sense of it, when one of the women looked over at me. Her careworn face was ineffably older, yet I would remember those eyes for the rest of my life.

She blinked, and I could see the flash of confusion and half recognition across her face. Mary’s mother, so young and yet so old, her eyes rich with a pain that made my heart quail. She reached for Brody’s arm, and I wheeled back, ducking my head and turning. She didn’t recognize me; she couldn’t recognize me. We’d seen each other once, a long time ago. And I’d been only a kid.

Then someone else moved, and I stiffened further, hesitating as a familiar figure approached me with a wide smile.

“Mademoiselle Wilde. It is such a pleasure to see you again.”

I took an instinctive step back. “What are you doing here, Mercault?”

He stopped several feet short of me and executed a short bow. “You increase in value to me with each passing moment. What sort of business partner would I be if I did not help you in your time of need?”

I frowned at him. “Help? Since when do you help for free?”

His eyes danced. “Who says I do not gain? I have redeployed my agents in the city to serve as protectors for the Connected, as I understand we have a bit of a demon problem.” He tilted his head. “I must say, working with you has already proven more invigorating than I would have expected. When this business is complete, we shall have much to discuss.”

“Um, thanks?”

If by not compartmentalizing Blue intended me to be thrown into a morass of confusion, she’d accomplished that. I was relieved beyond measure to see Nikki striding across the room to me, carefully avoiding both Mercault’s thugs and Brody’s parent trap.

“Hey, girl,” she said, taking my arm. “We thought we’d start in the same chapel. Kreios gave me the high sign that there’d be no Council onsite until the kids came through, so it’s just us chickens for this.”

“They decided to back Viktor?”

“Not exactly.” She slanted me a look. “They decided to back you. Apparently, the house is betting on you to bring home the job on your own. They stay out of the process, balance is maintained, and Armaeus gets to see you level up. You pull this off, I think they’ll throw you a friggin’ parade.”

“Yeah, well. Remember what happened last time.” We stepped into the second chapel, and Nikki shut the door behind me. The sudden solace was a mini miracle, all the energy of the main chapel held apart. I blew out a sharp breath, eyeing the gleaming Atlantean weapons piled neatly on the small platform at the front of the room. “Viktor doesn’t know about this place?”

“If he does, tough tits for him,” Nikki said. Her smile was hard. “Mercault showed up tonight like the Easter bunny, with the entire French Foreign Legion behind him. Viktor isn’t getting anywhere close to here, demons or no demons. Though the longer I think about it, I gotta admit…those guys were smokin’ hot, if you’ll pardon the pun.”

I stared at her, a new layer of crazy embroidered onto the insanity quilt I was pulling around myself. “You seriously
liked
them? Even though they wanted to possess you?”

“Well, not all of them—okay, all of them. Hey,” she said, laying a hand against her chest. “I more than most know what it’s like to be an outsized Dorothy in a world of Oompa Loompas. The fact that I made their cut did not escape me.”

“You made their cut for
possession
, Nikki. Not for the prom.”

“Till you walk in size-thirteen stilettos, honey, don’t judge.” Nikki’s words were more teasing than chastising, but I remained thrown off my axis yet again. I didn’t know her that well, but she seemed so strong and certain in everything she did. It hadn’t occurred to me that the idea of being chosen—even chosen by a demon who wanted to dominate her, body and soul—would give her a rush. The very idea made my head spin.

I turned toward the front of the room. Once again, the carpeted stairs made the most sense for the attempt, but I had to stuff down a twinge of apprehension as I climbed the short flight. Turning, I sat down on the edge and rested my elbows on my knees. My ink didn’t hurt, and it was only Nikki here, so I pulled up my hoodie sleeve and peeled away the bandage covering my forearm. Nikki was sitting in the front pew, but the room was so small that that meant she was essentially in my lap. With a slight forward lean, she inspected my arm, letting out a low whistle.

“That…somehow looks really deep.” She looked up at me. “And like it hurt. A lot.”

“I noticed it.” I smiled ruefully, looking at my arm. With the initial flare of reaction dying down, I could see the design a little more clearly. Blue had certainly upgraded my Celtic-looking symbol to something that looked, as Nikki had said, etched into my skin. The three-dimensional effect was breathtaking, but it was the clear pathing of the symbol that truly struck me. This artwork had a definite beginning, middle, and end. It was a walkway into and out of a place that seemed beyond this world.

Unaccountably, my heart began beating hard in my chest. She’d done this for me, Blue. There would be a price. There was always a price. But for the moment, I could focus solely on how much potentially easier she’d made this next jump.

I turned to Nikki, who now was spreading out the weapons I’d pulled from Atlantis. “Wow,” I muttered, and she grimaced.

“Yeah, wow. These things keep getting more beautiful every time I look at them.”

She was right. The arrows seemed more refined, the knife more elegant. The calligraphed symbols stood out in high relief on the blades, looking ancient and powerful at once. “You ready?”

“I’ve got the easy part of this assignment, babe. You’re the one who goes deep undercover.” She leaned forward. “But I’m here for you. You say the word, I’ll do it. Whatever you need.”

I gave her a smile that didn’t really hold its shape, and breathed out a long sigh.

“Okay, then,” I said, picking up a knife and extending my hand to grasp another blade. “Let’s get me gone.”

And as Nikki spoke the words, I fell into the deep trance the jump required. In the space of a single breath, I left the tiny, quiet chapel and descended…

Into madness.

Chapter Twenty-five

The cosmos rushed around me in a blinding blur, and I found myself once more in the plane of the Syx, but everything was different now. The oxygen seemed far too thin, for one, the very fabric of the illusion fraying away and making it impossible for me to get my bearings. I was back in the courtyard of the New England-style university, but the sky was a bright red, the grass was yellow, and the brick buildings wavered in the background, unable to hold their shape.

Another critical difference: I carried weapons with me this time—a pack of stars on my back, a large knife in my hand. I ran forward toward the nearest building, and the illusion fractured further, as it had the last time. I was once again in a cold, utilitarian room, but instead of it being lined with gurneys bearing children, there were six full-grown figures who stood bathed in light beams pouring from the ceiling.

I stumbled to a stop and took a moment to simply stare.

They were beautiful.

Tall, straight, and glowing with health, the six children had turned into the kind of people that parents proudly posted on Facebook and photographed for Christmas letters. Just as in their missing persons posters, there was no indication that they’d been stolen from their parents, their friends, their homes, their planet. They were perfect and whole. Their faces untroubled, their smiles easy in their stasis.

“Amazing, aren’t they?”

I whirled, but there was no one there. Still, the voice persisted in my head. I knew that voice. Viktor Dal. I didn’t know how he had found me, but it didn’t really surprise me. Even if he couldn’t come here himself, he had to stay in communication with the demon realm.

“Had you stopped to take more stock of the artistic record of Atlantis, you would have seen this place as well, seen the Syx, immortalized on the painted dome.” The voice pounded through my head, refusing to be ignored. “They are truly remarkable creatures, born of a time when magic bowed to no rules. When all that mattered was creation and growth, learning and being. You saw them, no? The creatures they were before? Surely they remain still in the bowers of Atlantis, waiting for the hand to bring them home.”

I shook my head. Viktor was talking in circles. I hadn’t seen the Syx in Atlantis, I’d seen the Watchers. Angels and demons who’d rushed me like the mad creatures they were, crazed with loneliness and—

I stiffened.
Loneliness
. The Watchers hadn’t truly recognized me, not in any real sense. They’d raced toward me because they’d been
alone
. Abandoned for how many centuries, how many thousands of years?

And the Syx. If these were the most powerful of the Watchers, they too had suffered long for their transgressions. Suffered more, some would say, locked in this alternate dimension, waiting an eternity for someone to notice them, someone to remember.

“And for what were they punished?” breathed Viktor, his voice twisting in my heart like a sickness. But I couldn’t deny the power of his words. “For being what they innately were? For being true to their selves? There is always a price to pay for that, isn’t there? You learned that price early. So early. These children would have learned it too, eventually. They would have been considered outsiders. Strangers in their own families. As you were. As you always were. Is this the life you would give to them, the life you were forced to live?”

Viktor’s words riveted me to the spot. In some distant point of my mind, I realized that the veil was tearing here, the pocket of safety unraveling. In another part, I felt more than saw Nikki’s strong presence, and Mercault’s mischievous grin and larcenous eyes. In a farther part, I saw Brody and Dixie, and farther, the shadowy presence of the Council, safe in their immortal ivory towers.

Except not all of them were immortal. Not anymore.

Focus
.

I turned back to the six figures held immobilized by the streaming light. Three girls, three boys. Featureless in the way that young people were, their lives waiting to be written on their faces in deep furrows and hard angles. Their eyes were closed, their mouths slightly open, their hands outstretched and down at their sides. They looked like nothing more than yogis in the midst of meditation.

Well, it was time to give them a whole new meaning to transcendence.

“Is it worth that much to you, to see them age and be broken over and over again by life’s disappointments?” Viktor persisted. “To see them bend beneath the weight of expectations the world cannot hope to fulfill? Here they have known happiness, acceptance. Here they are not considered aberrations. They could die without pain, without heartache.”