Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5 (26 page)

Unlike Eshe, Viktor did not appear to be mollified by Mercault’s attention. He did bark a few questions at the man, asking mostly about his genealogy, which made sense given his Eastern European upbringing and the fact that he’d lived through the First World War. Mercault didn’t know that of course, but he would if he hung around Viktor enough. The Emperor had been…if not in league with the Nazis, then definitely in mutually beneficial collusion with them. Reason number four thousand and sixteen I detested him.

Kreios moved on before Dal turned my way, and I gave him my profile as the Devil introduced Simon. “The Fool is a technological master and can be relied upon for the most innovative of solutions, if not always the most practical ones.”

Simon grinned. “You’re going to want to get a new phone after you leave here,” he said, tapping his computer. “It’s been bugged. Not a very good job either. My bet is someone in your operation, if only to keep tabs on you.”

Mercault reached for the device, squinting at it. “What do you mean?”

“The bug’s got no audio,” Simon said. “Which means the tracking is intended only to LoJack you, but it’s more souped up than a typical tracker and doesn’t rely on the phone being on or within cell range. Plastic disk, no larger than a pinhead. Not fancy but effective.” He flashed a grin. “Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe someone is worried about you, doesn’t want you to go paws up without anyone noticing. If that’s cool, then cool. If not—”

“No one plants tracers on me without my knowledge.” Mercault scowled. He turned back to his goon, who stared at him with deceptive impassivity. Nikki, on the man’s other side, watched with a smile playing around her face. She saw what the man saw. Her eyes connected with mine, and I nodded.

“I’d start with your girlfriend,” Nikki said, and her grin widened as Mercault’s attention whipped to her. His guard, meanwhile, stiffened only a hair’s breadth, not even noticeable unless you were looking at him, which I was. “Your man here doesn’t trust her farther than he can throw her, and my hunch is he’s on target.”

Mercault’s eyes widened, first at Nikki, then at his own man. “Charles-Jerome, you warned me.”

“Yeah, well, don’t let her show up in the Seine,” Nikki said. “Better to use her nosiness against her.” She shrugged and leaned back against the wall, tipping an imaginary hat as the bodyguard scowled at her. “Good instincts,” she said to him, and he turned back to Mercault, shaking his head.

“And I am Michael,” the Hierophant said, foregoing Kreios’s introduction, and using the far shorter version of his name, perhaps thinking the addition of his Archangel title might make the Frenchman’s head spin. Given the man’s religious icons in most of the homes I’d visited, he wouldn’t be wrong. “The Hierophant, at least for this time on earth. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Sir—” Mercault caught himself from genuflecting, and I grinned. Michael had that effect. Though he’d begun assimilating into life in Las Vegas—and kept his wings from manifesting, which was a blessing all around—he still carried the ethereal expression of a being truly meant for worlds beyond our understanding. The longer you looked at him, the happier you got, if only because he was proof that such brilliance, such perfect joy did exist in this world. Or at least it existed for the moment, which was more than we probably deserved.

“We shall have to discuss your homes in France, Monsieur Mercault,” the Hierophant said, his eyes glazed with a look of faraway satisfaction. “You’ve done much to keep them true to the goals of their original builders. That much patience is a rarity among men, even those who are Connected.”

“It is a trait common to the House of Coins as well,” Kreios put in, bringing the conversation back to him. “In all its numerous incarnations.”

“You are still asking questions to which there are no answers,” Mercault said stiffly. “The heritage of the House of Coins begins and ends in my line, I’m afraid. It was a gift conferred, not unlike the transfer of the House of Swords by Annika Soo. Nothing was left of the original House—it had been destroyed for centuries. The gift consisted of a small amount of money and a promise of riches untold if we kept the secret of the House.”

“Five hundred guilders and a ring of pure diamonds of unparalleled worth, yes?” Kreios said, and Mercault turned to him with wide eyes. “That ring has been a source of mystery. I see now the mystery has been right in front of us all this time.”

“Five hundred guilders,” Mercault echoed. “How do you know such a thing?”

Kreios nodded to the Hierophant, whose blush turned his pale skin almost rosy. “I confess I was a student of the Houses for a time,” Michael said. “I do not know the modern history, I’m afraid, but I had made quite a record of their earlier trials. Before you, the House of Coins had been held by another prominent family, one with whom you do business even to this day.” His smile deepened. “I should not, were I you, discuss this passage of leadership. I knew only that a lone wanderer set off in search of an enterprising household, far away from the corruption of his own. I did not know where he landed, but, ah…he was of German descent, if that is helpful.”

Mercault frowned as he stared at the Hierophant, then understanding lit his face. “Oh…” he said, startled laughter spilling from him. “Oh…oh my. No, I should think the Fuggeren family would not be amused to find so precious a prize slipped from their fingers all those centuries ago.”

Fuggeren? I grimaced. I’d met the current patriarch of that clan more than enough times to know Mercault would have his hands full keeping anything secret from them for long.

Mercault tilted his head, rocking back on his heels, a student of history meeting a like mind. “Did you know that amid the five hundred guilders were ten keys in the form of small disks?” he asked Michael. “And that those keys unlocked treasuries that bore no mark or seal?”

The Hierophant nodded. “The lines of House leadership begin, flourish for a time—a century, sometimes more, sometimes much less—then die out. It is a pattern we have traced through millennia. But of all the Houses, that of Coins has been, if you’ll excuse the characterization, the least steeped in mysticism and the occult. It has been the province of Connected, yes, but the Connecteds run by intuition and intelligence, less by the arcane. Therefore, it has held a clearer line.”

Mercault shrugged as only a Frenchman could. “Bien sûr.”

“But that is being called into question now, it would seem.” The Hierophant’s eyes lit. “I should like to trace the history completely, learn whatever you know. For you see, perhaps there are more in your stockrooms than you even realize.”

I looked between them, startled by the sudden kinship between two such disparate people, then turned to the Magician. His gaze met mine across the room, his eyes shrewd as mine narrowed. This was a neat trap, and one Mercault was falling into all too willingly. But Mercault was a grown man, capable of making his own decisions—and his own mistakes.

So was I.

The meeting broke up a few minutes later, the objective met. Armaeus had wanted us here, in the sway of the Council. He’d gotten that. Mercault and the Hierophant now sat with Simon and even Viktor at the conference table. Kreios had lured Nikki away to God only knew where. Eshe had flounced off with a need to rest, though it took Mercault at least twenty minutes to let her go.

That left Armaeus and me. We left by separate doors, but I was unsurprised to see my only option as I stepped inside the elevator was “P”: Armaeus’s penthouse office.

The doors opened on the wide vistas of the entire Strip. I stepped onto the deeply plush carpet, scanning the room. Armaeus stood at his desk, leaning against it, and leveled a menacing glare at me. I stared back and manfully refrained from flipping him off.

“You’ll find you won’t need the sword,” he said, gesturing to the Honjo.

“I’m good so far,” I said. I stopped well short of his desk, staring at him across the room. “I think it might be best if you started explaining—oh, I don’t know. Anything. Everything.”

“We’ll start with the first.” Armaeus moved sinuously away from the desk and stalked toward me. I didn’t want to sit, not with the sword, but standing seemed problematic as well. In a chair, he could merely pull up another chair. Standing, he could step right inside my hula hoop.

He stopped before that, though, about five paces distant. I dimly realized that the configuration of chairs was different than I remembered it, rendering the space more open. Real, or another trick of Armaeus’s, to make me think I had more room to escape him?

“You won’t need to escape me, Miss Wilde.” He lifted a hand, effectively cutting off my words—not by the gesture, but by what he held in his fingers.

Er, above his fingers.

He spoke over my stare. “Furthermore, you won’t want to. You’ve forced my hand with this allegiance you have built with the warriors of the House of Swords. You have introduced true magical ability into that House. Despite the legends that swirl around them, none of the Houses were built for magic, not true magic like this. They were built for mortal ingenuity and instincts.”

I frowned at him, though I couldn’t stop staring at the prism he held suspended in the air above his palm, crackling with energy. It was the most minor of abilities—suspension and, perhaps more importantly, suspension of disbelief—but it wasn’t the prism itself that held me so enthralled as it was the images I glimpsed in the center of it. Places I’d been to—the bolt-hole of the djinn, Atlantis, even Hell—and others I had not. A city of ice. A vast desert. A kaleidoscopic wormhole.

“But you, who are mortal, even if your father was a Council member at the time of your conception, you are becoming what you
should not be
. What you
cannot
be, truly, if you would stay within the confines of your body, held within this plane of reality. You’re building a true magical ability within you, and it is beginning to fray you at the seams.”

“English, please,” I muttered. Armaeus was moving now, pacing around me, and I shifted carefully to pivot with him. Not truly turning in an arc, to avoid getting dizzy, but matching him at the angles.

“When I first met you, you were an accomplished finder of lost articles,” he said. He snapped his finger, and the prism blinked from above his hand to over his left shoulder. I tracked it with my gaze, stepping back as Armaeus moved forward. Maintaining the distance between us. “Then you showed an affinity for astral travel.”

“That’s on you,” I said. “That explosion with Llyr set all that in motion.”

“Not entirely. It improved your abilities, deepened them, but they were there to be deepened. Still, arguably, it was an extension of your finding skills. Easily explained away.”

Without warning, the prism snapped out of its orbit over Armaeus’s shoulder and hurtled toward me. I kicked out the guard of the Honjo’s hilt with my thumb, then pulled the blade free in a sweeping arc, not even getting it fully out of its scabbard before it connected with the prism. The impact sent the small crystal crashing in the other direction until it shattered in a burst of light against the far wall.

“Now you are doing things that defy explanation.” He gestured at the sword, which I now held out between us in defensive posture. “You should not be able to master the Honjo Masamune, certainly not on a level surpassing that of a well-trained samurai. I didn’t teach you to do that—no one did, in fact.” His lips twisted. “And no, YouTube videos do not count in this regard. You further should not be able to react with the instincts of a warrior, even if you somehow came to know and understand the blade.”

I kept my grip firmly on the Honjo’s hilt, my gaze never leaving Armaeus. “I’m a very motivated learner.”

“Of that I have no doubt. But there is more. I’ve spoken to Warrick of your time on his plane.”

“Warrick!” I squinted at him. “He’s a demon, and hardly reliable. Furthermore, I was on his
plane
all of thirty-seven seconds. Long enough to do the job and get the hell out.”

“A job that, as you describe it, was quite above your pay grade. You should have returned the djinn to earth as they intended you to, then been left a hollow shell. You were not.”

“Well, don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back. I know you healed me.”

He shook his head, his gaze turning more intense. “It would take a god to heal you, as badly as you were damaged, Miss Wilde.”

Armaeus’s words were low and resolute. And starting to scare me.

“I didn’t tell you that at the time, of course,” he said. “There was no value in it. But then you returned again and brought the children back with you.” He gestured gracefully with his long-fingered hand. “Do you recall that second journey?”

I didn’t appreciate the reminder. There had been fire, fire and rending pain, as if all the stars in the universe had ripped across my skin. “Vaguely,” I said.

He nodded, a soft and seductive smile creasing his beautiful face. “The scars on your back from where you were burned were not mere wounds, Miss Wilde. Do you remember receiving them? Specifically?”

“I…” I shook my head, pushing the lingering agony away. “You were there, Armaeus. You were there, and you healed me. I break and…you heal me. That’s the one constant between us.”

My lips turned down at the corners. That was true in so many ways. Until the time that Armaeus himself had caused me soul-rending pain. Pain that had left a hole that could not be healed by him—or by anyone, really.

He moved again, and I turned instinctively, pace for pace.

“I healed you, yes. And you allowed me to heal you, which is always the price. Your acceptance. Your submission, though I know that is becoming a price that is harder and harder to pay. But the price will grow steeper still.”

“Yo, I’m not—”

He overrode my protest. “More is required to understand what is happening to you, Miss Wilde. Your skills are growing too fast, too much. The balls of fire you’ve generated here and to heal the Sword general tap into wells of ability that you should not be able to plumb. And your back—”

“Enough with my back,” I growled, though all I wanted to do was throw down the sword, pull off my shirt, and run to the nearest mirror. “What’s on me? What did you find?”