Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 (30 page)

She strode up to the bed and hooked her foot around a rolling stool, drawing it close. Jimmy joined us, and she glanced at him.

“He’s ready.” Jimmy grinned, clearly enjoying himself a little too much. “He wants an image of Death.”

“Death?” Blue blinked at the young boy, who nodded, his eyes wide. He looked between her and Jimmy, his broad smile undimmed as he chattered.

“Death. The whole deal. Swooping cape, scythe, the more skulls the better.” Jimmy paused as the child spoke rapidly. “Happy skulls, like the Day of the Dead. Men and women who lived good lives and died good deaths.”

Blue laughed, and the sound made all the techs in the room pause, their heads coming up and swiveling toward her as if there’d been some disturbance in the Force. She waved them back to their work, then considered the boy.

“Death,” she said again, but the smile remained on her face. “I think we can work with that.”

She leaned forward, and her needle spun to life. Only then did I realize she wasn’t connected to the fancy array of bottles and inks next to her. She gave all the illusion of a traditional tattoo artist setup, but she worked strictly unplugged. As I watched her, my own tattoos flared to life on my own skin—not painfully, but with a heat that made me glance down to my right arm. So far, there were two, both inked by Death. The slashing path that had carried me to a demon’s bolt-hole in an alternate dimension, where I’d first encountered Warrick and the Syx…and a sinuous, snaking glyph that had led me to Atlantis.

Atlantis. I blinked as I suddenly recalled an image I’d buried in my mind, an image from Hell which I had no idea was fact or fiction, illusion or real. I’d stumbled onto a floor that displayed a bursting constellation of stars, each of the heavenly orbs picked out in mosaic tile. The entire round room had been covered in rich paintings from the baseboards to the enormous curved ceiling, all of it leading to a center oculus of glass, which had filled the space with light. It wasn’t the beauty that had flummoxed me, though. Not completely. It was what was depicted in those paintings. And perhaps more importantly, who.

None of the current members of the Arcana Council could tell me what I needed to know, before. Eshe was by far the oldest, but she’d ascended to the Council around the time of Caesar. The Devil had ascended in the 1900s, as had the Emperor. The Fool had joined the most recently in the 1980s, I was nearly certain—although he wasn’t talking—and Armaeus, of course, had joined the fight in the twelfth century, leaving behind the woman of his dreams.

But now there was Michael. Michael, who’d thrown a dragon to earth to usher in an age of immortals on the planet, where angels and demons walked among humankind until the gods became too strong and were banished by the very people they believed they could rule. Michael had been there for that, and he’d been there for Atlantis as well. He would know the meaning of the paintings on those walls.

Michael was with Armaeus, though. That seemed not the best place in the world for me.

“Yo, dollface, heads up. Detective Dishy is back.” Nikki snapped her fingers in front of my face, and I blinked back to awareness. Sure enough, Brody was standing at the front of the room, scowling as he spoke to Dr. Sells. I hadn’t briefed him on my plan with the victims, but his CSI techs had already taken their pictures and written their notes. These people could get on with the job of living now. Of healing.

Brody wasn’t alone either. Standing next to him, her blonde hair perfectly coiffed despite the morning hour, her soft pink jersey dress and high-heeled sandals somehow exactly right in a hospital filled with sharp angles and discordant clanging, was Dixie Quinn. The two of them seemed right together too, and I smiled, surprised to find I didn’t so much care anymore about the long-ago crush I’d nursed for Officer Brody Rooks.

I wasn’t the girl I’d been in Memphis, and I was getting used to the loneliness of the new me. The new me wasn’t going to be duped with illusions that couldn’t last. The new me would understand that love was for other people. The new me wasn’t going to be taken in by offers that weren’t real. The new me would take, and leave, and not spend so much time thinking about what could never be.

I stared around the hospital room. The new me had work to do.

“Anything on Gamon, do you know?” I asked Nikki.

“That would be negative. The guards who were captured lost their tongues.”

“Yeah, figured that.”

“No, really, dollface. They lost their tongues. They were in lockdown at the precinct house, the lights flickered, and then the screaming started. They had their tongues removed and the stumps cauterized. Most of them blacked out from the shock, and now they’re at the hospital, drugged to the gills. The LVMPD is not happy, and neither is Homeland Security. Pretty major breach.” Nikki shook her head. “Whoever this Gamon is, he’s one bad dude. And he’s coming up out of nowhere, fast.”

“No one comes from nowhere,” I said, my gaze drifting back to Blue. She was no longer at the boy’s bed, but several beds over at the station of a little girl. She was starting with the youngest victims first, I realized. That was right. That was good.

“Sara.” Brody called my name at the head of the room. “We gotta talk.”

I started for him, but a sudden realization struck me, so hard and sure I knew immediately I was right. I stopped abruptly, my adrenaline jacking out of control, and Nikki bumped into me from behind.

“What?” she asked, her voice strident as I swung around. “What’s wrong?”

“Soo.” I bit out. “This auction—these people—it’s all a distraction. A trap! And we got sucked into it.” I shook my head fiercely, yanking out my phone. “Gamon wasn’t trying to stage an auction. He wanted to lure Soo to Vegas. He couldn’t do it with the drugs, so he did it with her people. Now she’s here. I know she’s here. And Gamon knows it too.”

Across the room, Death looked up, her steely eyed gaze meeting mine. I turned and ran for the door.

Chapter Twenty-Six

One of Death’s ink posse was gracious enough to give me a ride into the city. From the back of his motorcycle, I texted Soo I was coming. She texted back immediately, reassuring me that she was very much alive—and safe. And at the Bellagio.

Of course.

Two men in suits stretched tautly over their heavy muscles greeted me at the hotel, clearly part of Soo’s entourage. We entered the Bellagio’s perfumed lobby without comment, the sound of soft music lilting through the air as both tourists and guests milled about in a brightly colored synchrony.

I strode quickly across the space, thinking of the last time I’d been dropped in front of a lavish hotel to see Annika Soo, half a world away. The one thing missing…

The tinkling of stringed instruments caught my attention, and I glanced across the enormous lobby to a roped-off area surrounded by phone-camera-wielding tourists. In the center of the raised platform beyond the ropes were a half-dozen geishas, four of them dancing the sedate, elaborate steps of a ritual dance, two of them playing tiny guitars.

I blinked.

No.
Way.

“Through here, Miss Wilde.” The man’s Asian accent softened the words, but not his level of authority. He stepped forward, blocking my view of the geishas, and ushered me into the waiting elevator bank.

The head of the Chinese syndicate occupied a different floor than another kingpin, Guillaume Mercault, had when he’d stayed at the Bellagio a few days earlier. Soo no doubt had determined where the Frenchman had staged his rooms and wanted to avoid giving any appearance of following in his footsteps. But the suite of rooms she’d chosen was no less grand, and I walked into the sumptuous space silently, thanks to the deep-pile carpets and heavy tapestries lining the walls.

Soo waited for me in a giant drawing room, her hands folded over her stomach. Her long-sleeved suit was a deep india ink, and her hair was caught simply at the nape of her neck. She watched me approach without speaking, and when I reached her, she bowed to me slightly. “Gamon cannot reach me here,” she said. Reproach laced her words, though not heavily. She was angry at my impertinence maybe, but more distracted, I thought. Maybe she was a little worried after all.

“I’d double up your guards anyway, now that you’re here,” I said. “And I have what you sent me for. It hasn’t left my sight.”

I glanced at the guards, and Soo gestured. The men visibly relaxed and backed off a few steps, and I leaned forward, lifting my hands to my neck.

“Stop,” Soo commanded, and I froze. “What is that?”

I glanced at the device affixed to my left hand’s ring finger and grimaced. “Not a wedding ring, trust me. Council tracking device. I received it earlier today and don’t know if it’s bugged for sound. So if you’re going to say anything bad about Armaeus Bertrand, speak loudly toward that hand.” I kept moving and slipped the double row of amulets off my neck. I offered the first to her. “Your grandmother’s amulet,” I said, nodding. I held up the other. “And yours.”

The expression on Soo’s face was beatific as she took her grandmother’s amulet and gazed at the one I held. “It is the correct one,” she said, her words little more than a sigh. “You have found it. My mother did not die in vain.”

I nodded, struggling to speak past the lump in my throat. The moment carried more weight than I’d intended it to, more meaning. “And now it’s yours again.”

Soo reached out her left hand for it, and the edge of her sleeve lifted slightly, revealing the long, sinuous tail of Gamon’s mark.

The explosion that rocked the room was so shocking, so unexpected that I thought I was back in Hell again, once more the prisoner of illusions that made no sense. The huge main doors to Soo’s suite burst inward, and a swarm of soldiers flowed in, looking like human-sized beetles with hard-cased armor and black spindly limbs bristling with weapons. In their midst stalked a tall, slender man in a dark robe and black, featureless mask.

“Gamon!” Soo cried, but she didn’t sound surprised—or even particularly scared. She sounded exultant. Which made one of us.

Quick as a blink, Soo whirled away from me, and her mother’s amulet went flying. Diving for it, I missed and stumbled to the side, then scrambled toward the nearest guard, weaponless. I don’t usually pack heat at the Bellagio, but if this sort of thing kept up, I was going to have to reconsider my approach.

Soo reacted to the intrusion with almost superhuman speed, her hands up and out as her men and women also responded with clockwork efficiency—every one of them down to the chambermaids turning on the soldiers and attacking with fists and feet and knees and elbows, kitchen knives and comfortable shoes. One of the soldier’s guns skittered toward me, and I dove on it, coming up hard and taking out the farthest men from the action. I couldn’t afford the chance of missing Gamon’s bad guys and hitting some of Soo’s. In the hierarchy of evil, Gamon and his goons definitely topped the tree.

As I dodged bullets and fired off my own rounds, I watched Soo and Gamon square off. Soo hadn’t dropped her mother’s amulet, I realized in a flash. She’d thrown her grandmother’s, the one that held no energy for her. Her mother’s was now around her neck, and Soo seemed to almost float above the carpet, surrounded with a miasma of power.

Gamon noticed it too. He rasped out another laugh as he stood back from Soo, the two of them an island of serenity amidst the chaos of their battling minions. In the distance, I heard sirens, but they would be too late. No matter what happened here, they would be too late.

I finally got close enough to snatch up her grandmother’s amulet, slinging it back over my neck as Soo and Gamon attacked each other. The fight seemed on one level to be purely physical, and on a second level to be a battle of minds and hearts. I’d already been on the receiving end of Soo’s mad ninja skills, and she slashed and kicked and rushed at Gamon with the same elegance with which she’d wielded a blade. Gamon’s quick blocks and feints and return shots were also elegant and impossibly fast. Soo was a trained combatant, but Gamon quickly proved himself to be as well. They moved more quickly than my eye could follow, and I was distracted with the problem of having bullets fired at me, as soon as the soldiers realized that not all their opponents were stealth warriors wielding plates and dinner forks.

I leveled shots and picked off outliers, hoping like hell the artwork I was striking wasn’t as old and authentic as it appeared, while Soo and Gamon took pieces out of each other. Something seemed off about Gamon. I couldn’t fix on exactly what, though. He was strong—but he didn’t overpower Soo as quickly as I would have with his no doubt greater strength. He was fast—too fast, and he worked the whole of his body, not solely his torso and arms. He fought at Soo’s level, combating her tricks but not coming up with any of his own. Something was strange about that, something important—

“Hey!” I spun around with the force of the bullet that pierced my left arm, and glared down at the blood welling up at the graze wound, then up at the men rushing toward me. Fury swamped me, and I roared as I came up swinging. A shadow darted behind the man, and I forced myself to focus, swinging hard with my rifle as I clocked my assailant across the chin. He sprawled in the other direction but another man was right behind him, three of them actually, all of them crowding close—too close for me to get a shot off.

I shot anyway, toward their feet, dancing them back until I could crack another round at their bodies. By then a new attacker flew at me from the side, and I was pummeling back, battering him as his fist came down hard above me—once, twice, banging into my temple and forcing me into a crouch.

“Back
off
!” I snarled and heaved myself up again. The man stepped back easily, noting my lunge and the fact that I was losing my footing in my pain and rage. As I swung up again and missed, he grinned at me fiercely—

Right up until the point of an elegantly slender blade poked through his sternum.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Kekai!” The geisha cried the word like it was an absolution. Then her blade slid out just as quickly, and I gaped as a whirl of brightly embroidered silk flew past me, and a half-dozen new entrants to the battle took up their stations and laid into Gamon’s warriors with their vicious blades.