Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 (31 page)

“Here they are alone.” I said the words, and my heart seemed to grow too large for my chest. “No one should die without knowing those who love them.”

“But no one does, don’t you see? Not anymore. They love what these children
were
, what they might have become. Not what they are.”

Forcing Viktor’s thoughts away, I moved into the center of the six children. Not children anymore—these were teenagers in body, if not mind. They would learn, though. And they would be loved. Viktor was wrong.

Taking a deep breath, I set down my weapons and reached for the first child’s hand. Mary Degnan. The girl who’d really started it all for me, without knowing it. My hand penetrated the beam of light easily, and I grasped her wrist, feeling the heartbeat thump against my fingers. Pulling her hand free of the beam, I reached for the second child, Sharon Graham. Though they could easily reach each other, their hands fell limply back to their sides when I tried to link their fingers.

Worse, there was now something wrong with the hands that I’d freed. They’d…aged. The veins larger, the skin thinner. I frowned at the beams, wondering what they were made of. If I took the children out of the light, would Viktor’s prediction come true? Was that what he meant by them aging too fast, getting bent and broken by the world they were reentering?

“You’re going to have to make a choice, Sara Wilde. An important choice.”

Viktor again. I tried to ignore him, but his voice sounded all around me like a tolling bell. “If you damage the portal as you leave it, the demons will not…cannot return here. Their prison will be in ruins.”

“Yeah? Why would I want that?”

“Because I am proposing a trade. Permanent protection for the children, if you destroy this plane.”

Another voice cut across my thoughts. “Something’s happening, dollface. You need to hurry.”

I jerked my head up. Nikki’s voice had come through far more clearly than it had the last time I’d made the jump. Another modification of Blue’s? Either way, the concern in her voice was clear. Viktor had been distracting me. He could be on his way to the chapel to stop me, keep me from delivering the children—or worse, his demons could take them as they finally reached earth.

That couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen.

As if reading my thoughts, Viktor’s voice pounded down again. “The demons must have hosts on earth, you know this. Who better than children groomed to the task?”

“You’re lying,” I snapped. “The djinn don’t want them. They’re not strong enough.”

Racing forward, I pushed through the light beam into Mary’s body, sending her toppling over onto Sharon Graham. I watched with horror as their skin darkened outside of the brilliant light, but I didn’t take the time to dwell on it. I couldn’t. I turned and yanked Jimmy Green and Harrison Banks out of their light, and then I noticed it. Someone was screaming.

Viktor continued as if nothing was happening. “Physically, no. They would not be permanent solutions. But temporary? Of course. Until the jump to some other human—the biggest and strongest of humans—was possible. By then, granted, the children would be…quite broken. But now there is another solution. Another choice. If you would only give it to them.”

The walls of the room were starting to blacken and curl. I pulled Hayley Adams and Corey Kuznof, and they tumbled to the ground, dropping like corpses in a boneyard.
This is dignity? This is what I brought for them?
The moment the last child was out of the light, the beams winked out and the screaming grew louder. I howled for Nikki, but I couldn’t hear her voice anymore. Couldn’t hear anything.

“Why wouldn’t you choose to save them forever?”

I was a fool to believe Viktor, a fool to believe his lies. But he didn’t give me the chance to deny him. “Destroy this realm as you leave, Sara Wilde. Without the portal, the demons can remain in their own form on the earthly plane. They are not invincible there, anymore, though they do not know that yet. They will merely be strong, new blood to feed the heart of magic. Tools to be shaped as they must be for the good of all.”

“Are you insane?” Everything in me rebelled at the thought of the demons remaining on earth. It was against the Council, it was against reason.

“It’s the only way you’ll know—for sure—that these children will be saved. A pity to bring them all the way back home, only to lose them again. To lose them
all
. Their minds already so fragile, their bodies so—”

“No!” I dropped protectively over the children as the wind picked up and roared through the room, shattering the walls beyond me and bursting them wide.

“Do it, and I will be in your debt. I acknowledge that freely.”

I pulled the children’s arms and hands together, clutching them close. “I’ll kill you if you hurt them!”

“But you cannot.” Viktor’s words beat at me, inexorably. “Think about it, Sara Wilde. You have the weapons this time. Many weapons. Who gave them to you—more than you could possibly need? Ask yourself who. Then ask yourself why.”

There was no longer any time to argue. Bright white light blasted beyond those walls, infernally hot. Reshouldering my pack and gripping the knife once more, I pressed myself against the children as a wave of heat roared over us. With their bodies so close together, I could wrap my own arms around theirs, like the Ten of Wands with the worker bent over his clutch of staffs.

And still the portal held. A prison that had held creatures from a time before time. Creatures like the Watchers I had seen on Atlantis. Creatures like the children now huddled beneath me. Who was to say Viktor wouldn’t try this again? Who was to say that the demons wouldn’t attack the Connecteds or bring them back to study, to possess, to grow even stronger while they waited?

And another voice spoke, not Viktor’s, deep in my own mind. Who was to say
I
shouldn’t do everything I could to protect these children once and for all? To do what I couldn’t all those years ago?

The wind screamed over and around me, and I tucked my head down, glaring back at the room where the children had been imprisoned. It was dwindling now, peeling away. But it wasn’t broken. It was holding. A prison waiting for prisoners from a dozen worlds away.

Not anymore, I thought. Not anymore.

Flipping the knife in my hand, I flung it back toward the illusion.

The portal burst outward like a supernova.

We hurtled through space, completely off course from the force of the explosion, and I whipped my head around. Nothing looked right, nothing looked familiar. There was no Möbius strip to follow along to bring me home.

Yes, I’d destroyed the portal—but I’d destroyed my own path as well! If so, I’d never be able to get the children back. Not alone. Not at all.

As we shot forward with dizzying speed, I tried to drop myself back into the trance—but I couldn’t concentrate. The wind was too strong, my own panic too great. Casting my mind out, I struggled for anything to catch hold of, anything to draw us back across the twisting path, anything—

A woman’s face flashed into my mind, so fiery bright that everything else paled beyond it. Mary’s mother. No, not only Mary’s, but the faces of all those people in the main chapel at Dixie’s, those parents, men and women, young and old, their faces turning toward me as if they’d heard a far-off cry.

“Please! Please help me!” I gasped, and Mary’s mother’s eyes widened with a flare of power so strong, I would have sworn she was a Connected herself. She reached out all the same, toward the huddled mass of bodies beneath me, my face up, eyes squinted against the wind, my arms tight around the limp, lost souls I carried, souls that could not fight this battle on their own, souls that needed champions to fight it for them.

Their champions raced toward us now. Arms outstretched, hands grasping, and in my mind’s eye, I felt a sudden surge of parental love, the desperate, rabid force of pain and guilt and loss and terror and endless waves of grief all bursting forth, becoming a beacon in the night. A beacon that not only guided me but pulled, gripping-grasping-straining, loving not what had been or could be but what still was, what truly was, and wanting it more than life itself. The force of that light ripped through the foundation of this far dimension that held the children, shattering its edges, wrenching it wide.

There would be nothing left of this place. I built that image in my mind, powering us through. Nothing left—nothing left. Never would it hold these children again, never would it hold anything. So twelve, not six souls would be freed this night; twelve, not six souls never would return.

The way home became clear despite the thunderous wind and roaring fire, and I drove my heels into the nothingness and pushed one last time—

And we were soaring then, racing again down the path that Blue had etched so clearly in my skin and mind. All the while, the beacon in the darkness far beyond was growing brighter and stronger and true. As we neared it, something else was shifting.

The burden in my arms started moving, shuddering to life, the papery-thin skin shucking off the children’s bodies like waxed paper, the skin beneath bright and warm, pink and healthy. Eyes and mouths were open now, startled and frightened and panicked and alive, so alive that I reached out again and found new tethers to hold. Nikki and Mercault, Dixie and Brody, four pillars driven into the ground to catch and bring us home.

I burst back into awareness with a rush of agony excruciatingly present and real. I surged upward, fists flying, my back seared with pain.

“Sara! Sara, relax, relax—breathe!” Nikki’s voice was strident, and I heard the panic in it, her fear fueling mine.

Something seriously wrong welled up inside me, my pain too heavy and whole for this to be right. I blinked my eyes open and didn’t hear the clicking noise that had accompanied the movement the last time, but my vision swam with red. I kept swinging and sensed her shift away, and my fists and face and hands were wet with a hot, steaming rain.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, can you never do anything the easy way?”

Suddenly, strong arms were around me, clamping my arms to my side, rendering my punches useless. Despite the agony of the pressure on my back, I smiled, feeling the strength and certainty of it. Brody. Officer Brody Rooks ten years ago, Detective Brody Rooks now. Here to save the children. Here to win the day.

I opened my mouth to thank him, to speak, but it filled with a dark and strange fluid. Not tears, I thought. Not rain either. Something…different. I sputtered and tried to swing away, but Brody held me close.

“The parents. They cannot see her.” It wasn’t Brody’s voice but the Magician’s. His tone was clipped, hard, and a moment later, his hands were over my eyes, my face, cool through the wetness, calming my thundering heart. My brain split in confusion—Brody and the Magician, both of them here, both of them…how?

Kreios’s voice sounded next. “I need but a moment.”

Then I heard the sound of excited shouts, questions, pounding feet, and felt my body being turned, sheltered, barricaded away from the barrage of humanity that seemed to be racing toward this room.

The children! I started, my eyes clearing as something rough and warm was wiped over my face, my neck.

“You’re all right, Sara, you’ll be all right.”

I couldn’t understand the importance, but something seemed different. Important. Strange. Armaeus’s lips brushed over my eyes, first the left, then the right.

“When this is done, find me,” he whispered, and even his voice sounded wrong, thick with emotion. “It will be all right.”

Then he was gone. I blinked my eyes open, and neither Kreios nor Armaeus were there. Only Nikki, Brody, and Dixie…and the children.

Nikki was at my side. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, girl, keep that towel on your eyes, EMTs will be here shortly.”

I struggled to a sitting position, held firmly by Nikki as she braced me against the chapel steps. My gaze went from the blood-soaked towel in Nikki’s hands to the scene in front of me, and I shrank away from the chaos for another long moment. She turned at the look on my face and cursed.

“Hang tight, cookie, it’s starting again. I’ll be right back.”

The children half sat, half lay in the center of the room, piled against each other, their heads covered with heavy hoods. Huge blankets were wrapped around them, a deadening weight. Was that how they had been transported to the Syx’s dimension? Total sensory deprivation to ensure their minds didn’t shatter?

It didn’t matter. Dixie and Brody were carefully stripping off hoods as EMTs rushed through the door. They took one look at me, and I waved them toward the children, dragging myself farther back in on the platform, away from the chaos of rebirth below.

As the children emerged from their hoods and blankets, they looked exactly as they had in the beams of light—in the images Viktor had shown me. Long, glossy hair, healthy skin. They seemed drugged, dazed, but they were responding to the EMTs with semicoherent sentences, blinking around owlishly. Already I could imagine Brody’s cop mind swinging into action. He’d want to protect the kids, get them evaluated, but he must know that wasn’t going to be possible.

My mind seemed stretched beyond its limits as I sensed the minds of the parents, all of them huddled in the main chapel. I had no need to trance to feel their power, drawing close to their bright light. Without them, their children wouldn’t be here. Without them, I wouldn’t have made it either. Without them, I wouldn’t have seen the miracle of a parent’s love in action, to know that, at its peak, it was stronger than even the most powerful of Connected magic.

My eyes filled again with a salty mix of blood and tears, but I couldn’t blank my thoughts in time. In the main chapel, Mary Degnan’s mother looked up, turning away from the other parents, her eyes seeing without seeing. Perhaps there was some Connected ability in her after all?

Either way, she stood, turned. And said something to the others that had them turning as well. Their shouted voices seemed to come through the very walls of the chapel, and the teenagers’ reaction was swift and profound.