Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 (13 page)

Another few steps and the reason didn’t matter. Two rooms opened on either side of me, entryways with no doors. They appeared identical, and the amulet burned with equal violence at both. So we were at an impasse.

Or…not quite.

Holding the amulet carefully, trying not to burn myself, I fumbled open the pouch around my neck. Loosening the top, I reached into the bag with two fingers, snagging the first chip I could grab. It was about the size of a thumbnail and made of something that could have been plastic or ultrathin glass. I pulled the chip out and squinted at it by the light of one of the sconces. Emblazoned in perfect clarity on its surface was the Queen of Pentacles, showing a seated woman surrounded by riches, staring to her right.

“Right it is.” I dropped the chip back in the bag and tightened the opening, almost feeling grateful for Kreios. He might not be willing to interfere with others’ futures in this war on magic, but he cared enough to interfere with mine, which was all right by me.

I entered the chamber to my right, only to find it wasn’t a chamber at all, but yet another long corridor filled with mirrors on either side. As I walked by them, the images on the mirrors shifted. So not mirrors but windows, or screens of some sort, wobbling with shadows. I reached out, and my fingers connected with a solid surface.

The moment I touched the window however, the scene changed, the lights coming up on a suburban park. I stopped short as I saw myself, but it was a much younger version of me, simpler. I was maybe sixteen—no, seventeen years old, and the park evolved subtly too as I watched, until it became the neighborhood green space near my house in Memphis. The house I’d shared with my mother until I was seventeen.

One hand on the glass, the other holding the amulet by its laces, I stared at the scene before me.

I was sitting on one of the picnic tables, my books balanced on my knees, my head bent. I couldn’t remember what I… No, no, I did remember, I realized with a smile. I was studying French that day. French! I’d forgotten I’d tried to learn that language. It was the end of my junior year, and I’d nearly made it through two whole semesters under Mrs. Tisch, who insisted we all go by a made-up French name.

My hand spasmed against the window. How long had it been since I’d remembered that? This was April, I could tell by the trees blossoming around the park, before any of the events that had happened a few short weeks later. A few days after my birthday, actually, when everything had seemed full of promise and sunshine and—

“Sariah! I hoped I would find you here.”

The man’s voice came through the glass as clearly as if he was standing next to me, and I stared as my younger self on the other side of the glass looked up, eyes alight. My heart took a hard thump to the right as Officer Brody Rooks strode up, his uniform dark blue in the bright sunlight, his hair blonded from too many days outside, his skin tanned. I tracked the blush climbing up my younger self’s cheeks as she fumbled with her books, barely able to get them closed before Officer Brody reached her.

“Hi—do you need anything?” the seventeen-year-old Sariah blurted, trying so hard to sound adult that I winced. “Is everything okay?”

“Of course it is.” Officer Brody grinned and held out a small package wrapped in brown paper. On this side of the glass, my chest had gone hollow with remembered pain. “Your mom yelled at me for not getting you anything for your birthday. She was right, I should have realized it.”

“You didn’t have to get me a birthday present,” the girl who I’d been mumbled, but she reached out and plucked the gift from Brody’s fingers so he wouldn’t feel awkward. With her head bowed, Brody couldn’t see her face. But I could. Plus, I’d been there. I’d been her. All the pent-up teenage hunger for someone to care for me, someone to appreciate me, to
respect
me, had been centered on the clueless police officer, and I watched my younger self struggling with the enormity of it all.

A present! He’d gotten me a present!

I didn’t want to open it then. I could tell that, and remembered it as well. But Brody shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, clearly unsure, and I’d made him unsure. I’d made him unsure because of my stupid, adolescent, moony-eyed crush.

“Open the package already,” I groaned on this side of the glass, knowing how this movie ended. “It’s not an engagement ring. It’s a book. It’s only a book. Come on.”

But the Sariah on the picnic table took an inordinately long time about it. I didn’t remember taking that long. She flipped the package over, weighing it with what probably passed as an arch smile for her, and laughed at Brody’s exasperated hand flapping.

“It’s really not much,” he insisted, but the expression that my younger self wore arrowed through me. It was so…happy. So carefree and full of possibilities, and before I realized it, my other hand was up against the glass as well, feeling that moment, those emotions, my whole life before it was broken up and wrecked and—

Sariah opened the package and held up the book to the light, struggling to hide her disappointment. Because of course she had the book already. She’d read it when she was twelve. And she was seventeen now,
seventeen
! Didn’t Brody know that? Did he think she was a little girl?

“Oh, thanks,” she said, and it was her turn to be awkward. She didn’t get many gifts. She certainly wasn’t going to reject this one. And yet it burned some small, pathetic corner of her soul for him to think that
this
was a book she hadn’t heard of,
this
was a book she didn’t already practically have memorized.

“It was my favorite book,” Brody said, and I could see his embarrassment through the glass, even if my younger self couldn’t. “I-I thought you might enjoy it, but you’ve read it already, haven’t you?”

“No—I mean, yes—I have. A while…it doesn’t matter. I appreciate it, really I do.” My younger self opened it up and flipped to the front page, and I could see the tide of hope grow again, only to be dashed when she realized he hadn’t signed it to her either. It was a book, like any other book. “Oh, come on! You didn’t sign it?”

“What?” Brody asked, his eyes wide. Clearly he was thinking he should have gotten Sariah a Starbucks card. How could a cop know how to navigate the murky waters of giving a book to a teenage girl! I groaned on his behalf as my own younger, stupider self shoved the book back at him. “Sign it,” she ordered imperiously. “And say something nice.”

Brody wordlessly took the book back, his mouth twisting into a grimace as my younger self handed him a pen. I watched him, a witness to an impending train wreck. He couldn’t sign anything personal, I knew that. My younger self knew it too, yet she was not at all hiding the fact that she wanted that personal touch, wanted something that she could hold close and remember him by.

Poor Officer Brody clearly realized the danger of what she was asking, maybe for the very first time. I winced at the sudden dismay in his eyes, so embarrassed for my younger self that my stomach churned. Brody’s pen jerked in his hand, and he glanced hard at Sariah as she bent to shove her books in her bag, giving him the illusion of privacy. Then he finished what he was writing and handed the book back to her.

“Sorry,” he said gruffly. “I don’t have much experience with signatures.”

“Then I won’t read it in front of you.” The glance Sariah sent him was so full of adoration that he stepped back, clearly nonplussed.

“Give your mom my best,” he said.

“Is there anything new on the Degnan case? I could come to the station—”

“No, there’s not,” Brody shook his head hard, but it was no use at this point. With his signature, all had clearly been forgiven. My younger self was in full-on crush mode, and even the dumbest adult could have figured that out. I could practically see the terror in Brody’s eyes, but he tried to tough it out, tried to be chill, resting his hands on his belt to avoid giving Sariah Pelter the hex sign to keep her back. “I’ll call if anything comes up.”

“Sounds good!”

Though my younger self was clearly about to ask him for a ride home—never mind that it was two blocks—Brody stepped back quickly and nodded again. “Gotta bolt. Happy birthday,” he said, before pivoting and walking swiftly toward his car.

A different girl would have been chastised. Not me. Not then. I surreptitiously watched Officer Brody until he got into his cruiser and peeled off, the whole time busying myself with my pack as well so he wouldn’t see me staring moony-eyed after him. And then I ran, breathless, all the way home.

The scene seemed to collapse on itself then, to blur, as my own mind took over, serving up images I’d thought I’d completely forgotten, images I’d certainly never thought about again. Not later. Not after.

Because I’d never looked at Officer Brody’s signature. I couldn’t. It was too much fun imagining what he would say, conjuring up different words, phrases, veiled promises, possible pledges. The possibilities were endless, and there was no way I would break that spell, no way I would cut off all that hope, all that thrilling potential.

So I’d put the paperback up on my highest shelf in my bedroom and promised myself that I’d wait exactly one month and then I’d open it up.

Three weeks later, I’d been running for my life.

I jerked myself back to awareness. The window was back to being a mirror, and the other glasses were shifting now, images coming into focus. I didn’t feel up to playing musical memories anymore, so I pushed back from the wall and strode quickly down the corridor until I reached the far door. With a relieved breath, I stepped out of the hallway of yesterdays and into the next job.

The next job, I could handle. Yesterdays needed to stay where they were.

Shaking off the weird ache in my chest, I focused on the room around me.

It was a woman’s bedroom, which made sense given that I’d drawn the Queen of Pents. And similar to what that card depicted, the room was filled with treasure. Gold, jewels, and fine wood carvings spilled out of chests along the floor, and the carpet was a deep sumptuous cream. There was a cheerful fire burning in the far grate with some bundles of cloth beside it, and rich textiles spilled out of chests to either side of the flames. The bed was piled high with pillows—too high for anyone to clamber over, all of it purely for show.

“A chamber fit for a Queen of Pents,” I muttered.

And then one of the huddled lumps in the corner shifted. It stretched, elongating and all I could do was watch—unable to move, unable to breathe, unable to do anything but stare.

The figure stood, facing away from me.

“You came,” she said.

Chapter Eleven

I finally was able to step back as the woman sighed deeply, staring into the fire. When she turned, though, it was all I could do not to run from the room.

Her hair was a mass of blood, her skull caved in by a devastating wound. Her shift was simple and dirty, the shift of a slave or a prisoner. It hung off her emaciated frame, and her hands were clasped in front of her. Her entire body trembled, and she appeared to be held together by grit and hope alone, her eyes enormous as they fixed on me. “You have come, finally. After all these years.”

Her accent sounded Asian, and I swallowed. Soo had never told me her mother’s name. She also hadn’t told me her mother was still kicking around in Hell. But this had to be her—had to be. The amulet in my hand was practically on the verge of nuclear meltdown.

“Your…daughter, Annika Soo sent me,” I finally managed. “To see you. To find your—”

“My daughter.” The woman said the words in a strange, singsong cadence, and I tried not to shiver at the insanity lacing her voice. Or to fixate too much on her face. Instead, I attempted math. If Soo had been five when her mother had died, that had been, what—thirty or forty years ago? There was no way to tell the Chinese syndicate owner’s age, but she wasn’t in her twenties, no way. Had her mother been here all this time? Watching? Waiting?

Her mother’s voice disrupted my mental calculator. “My daughter is careful and wise,” she said, and her words were stronger now. “She will not come here. It is good she sent you instead.”

I grimaced, thinking the same thing. If Annika had seen her mother this way, all the pent-up rage she held against Gamon would explode within her, shattering her control. She couldn’t come here. Ever. I edged forward. “Why do you think that?”

“She would not have found me.” Her mother refocused on the fire, so she missed the surprise on my face. “She believes in what she can see with her eyes, touch with her hands. That is where she draws her strength. Not the ancient pain that brought me here. She is strong, though she is but a child.” She crouched down and began scrabbling in the pile of clothing. “Such a beautiful child. Her fifth birthday was a day of sunshine and rain, both in one day. So like Annika, my precious girl.”

I hesitated, completely out of my depth with how to speak to this woman. I could sense from the tug on my amulet that I needed to advance toward the fire. But unless I blew bodily through Annika’s mother, I didn’t see how that would be possible. “She’s no longer a child,” I said. “She’s become the leader of your mother’s syndicate. She rules many people now. She is feared.”

The woman swung her head around to me again. It was difficult to look her in the face, but now…somehow less so. Either I’d gotten used to the crushed indentation in her skull, or it was less pronounced. The blood on her face had been wiped away as well, leaving unbroken skin in view. She seemed almost…normal. Almost the lovely woman she must once have been. “She is grown?” she asked in a quavery voice.

I nodded, taking another step forward while scanning the room beyond the woman. Though the chamber was built for a female’s rest and healing, Annika’s mother apparently hadn’t slept anywhere but the hearth for the past thirty years. She was hunched and frail, a mass of trembling nerves. As she lifted a listless hand to her face, I could see the long ragged mark on her arm. It gleamed as if it had been inked yesterday.

“Grown,” she muttered, shuffling against the piled clothes. One delicate foot edged out to touch a small mound at the edge of the fire. “Grown and safe. Safe and grown. My precious Annika.”