Getting Wilde (22 page)

Why was he here in Vegas, and why was he here in this room, now, with two down-on-their-luck Strip rejects with money to burn but not a whole lot of it? It didn’t make sense.
 

I took in his stumpy form. The picture I’d been given of him five years ago when I’d gone after my first artifact had clearly been pre-body mods. Now Fitz had more metal and plastic implanted under his skin than the Terminator, with not terribly attractive results. But he did look scary enough, I supposed. And those mods… Something about those mods made me nervous. The tech on this job was becoming a little intense, like the bright shiny map of the planet in the Magician’s French stronghold, and the electronic death helmet that had encased Kreios beneath the abbey.
 

Magic had always been about low-tech mastery, you and the force of nature, the
ephemeral connection between and around all living things. Magic, psychic skills combined with electronics was…an unknown quantity. It went beyond the technoceuticals and into places like the Stargate experiment of the 1970s by the US Department of Defense and Russia’s Cold War push for dominance. Back then, those experiments had failed.
 

I got the feeling they wouldn’t be failing now.
 

Fitz finally seemed ready to give us his full attention. “Welcome, welcome,” he oozed, turning from his high-tech command center, with its knobs and screens and levers. “What is your question? How can I help you achieve the peace you so deserve?” He glanced at Nikki, smiling indulgently at her garish outfit, then switched his gaze to me.
 

And froze.
 

Freezing is never good.
 

“You…” he said wonderingly. In that moment, I made a half-dozen quick realizations. First, Fitz was either batshit crazy or high on technoceuticals. His eyes had that glittering frenzy of someone stretched to the breaking point, and everything on him twitched. Second, he didn’t look nearly as bad as he should have for someone hopped up on drugs. He was positively spoiled with health, in fact—skin tone rich and flush with blood, hair still on his head, teeth intact. Third, his breath smelled of burnt acid, which may or may not mean anything more than a really bad burrito for lunch.
 

But it was the last set of insights that were the most troubling. One, he wasn’t wearing a weapon. That meant he didn’t need one, which didn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Two, he was solidly built beneath all the body mods, so he wasn’t going to go down easy.
 

Third, he clearly recognized me. Or thought he did.
 

I took a step back as Fitz barked out a command in some language that—once again—I couldn’t recognize. Clearly, I needed to brush up on my ancient tongues.
 

But it was too late to consult the Rosetta Stone now. In the space of a breath, two guards were at either side of me, bracing my arms so hard they lifted me off my feet. Another two guards held Nikki—the bouncers from the front door, as it happened, which I didn’t know was a good thing or a bad thing. Without being told to do so, they pulled her from the room and back into the chaos of the club, so I decided: good thing.
 

Meanwhile, my personal set of guards had liberated the gun from my holster as well as my deck of cards, dumping both on the table in front of me, along with my box of Tic Tacs, cell phone, some stray euros, my tourist map of Rome…and a key-fob-sized Magic 8 Ball. I frowned at the last item. Granted, it was a really cute tchotchke to have on hand as a backup to my cards, but it wasn’t mine. In fact, I’d never seen the thing before. Where the hell had it come from?
 

That thought, of course, led me straight to Kreios. Had the Devil planted the toy on me when I wasn’t looking? And if so,
why
?  
 

Ignoring both me and my perplexing pocket toy for another moment, Jerry Fitz leaned over the console in front of him. Suddenly, the panels lining the wall slid apart, revealing two stunning young women collapsed on the floor behind a sheet of glass. I surged forward, but the guards held me tight. The two sprawled girls were nearly naked, their hair fanning out around them, but there was no question that they were the twins from Father Jerome’s list—and from Dixie’s wall of wonders. Both of them sported matching black hair, pale skin, delicate features, long limbs. Both of them appeared dead to the world. Both of them were Greek goddesses in the flesh who moved only when a gong-like chime sounded at a flip of Fitz’s fingers.
 

With an almost ghostly languor, the girls stretched upright, stirring toward wakefulness. Eventually, they pulled themselves to their knees, and then their vacant gazes swung toward the glass. Resolve knifed through me. These faces would
not
haunt me, dammit—they would not join the ranks of the missing whose lives I could not save.   
 

“Lost.” The whisper slowly built. “All is lost.”
 

The Oracle of Delphi was ready for her close-up.
 

Beside me, staring at the plate glass, Fitz fairly bounced with excitement.
 

“Do you have any idea how long it is between visits from a truly gifted Connected?” he asked, though who he was asking, I wasn’t really sure. The two creatures holding me in place weren’t talking, and I wasn’t much in the mood for twenty questions. “I seek so little in this world. The chance to explore. To learn. To put my creations to the test, refining and improving them until they could take their place with angels. But I must always wait. Be patient. It is…tedious.”
 

“What are you doing here, Fitz?” Did he truly know who I was, specifically? Somehow, I didn’t think so. I didn’t think he’d truly looked at my face. He’d just sensed something about me at twenty paces, the same way I could sense the level of magical ability in a person by touch. Either way, whatever he sensed in me now had him chortling to himself.
 

I wasn’t a fan of Fitz chortling.  
 

“It has taken many years to perfect the formula.” He fiddled with more controls as I assessed my situation. I couldn’t overpower the guards without my gun, and the room wasn’t offering much in the way of other great ideas. Fitz had decorated the place in vintage Hugh
Hefner, all silk pillows and shag rugs, rosy light and artful porn. Whoever he entertained here on a regular basis was either male or extremely open-minded. Shelves filled with artifacts lined the walls, some of the pieces worth quite a bit to my trained eye, but none of them close enough to matter.  
 

An unearthly moan sounded over the speakers, and my gaze snapped back to the glass wall. The young women in the chamber were now swaying, colorful gas filling the room around them. Fitz turned another dial, smiling as their faces creased in pain. “I call it
Pythene
: methane, ethylene, benzene, and a few other nice additions to make the oracles more animated,” he said, watching the girls as if they were his prized pets. “Admittedly, the combination is quite lethal after prolonged exposure. But my newest subjects have proven to be delightfully durable. And, in the end, there are always more voices to add to the song.”
 

His oily glance slid over to me. “Like yours, my dear. I have a knack for sensing talent, I should tell you. Yours is exquisite.” His hand shook with his own pleasure, and I squinted at his wrist. A large black metal cuff adorned it, etched with a glyph that looked almost like—
 

“Speak!” Fitz commanded, watching me, and I jerked my gaze back toward the girls. They now stood pressed up against the glass. Despite myself, I shrank back. Their eyes were dead, their mouths agape. And they were staring at me.
 

“Chosen,” they intoned, and Fitz leered at me.
 

“You see? I am never wrong. You’ve been sent to me like a gift, to further my exploration. To take me closer to the ultimate truth.” He turned back to the women. “Why is she here?”
 

“Finder!” the woman on the right cried out, her hands lifting to her ears.
 

“Chosen!” the other moaned before lapsing into unintelligible babble.
 

They both rocked on unsteady feet, their loose shifts slipping off their shoulders,
revealing the bodies of girls who were barely teenagers. They pressed their hands against the glass as if straining to get out, their faces tight with pain. “Darkness,” they all but sobbed in near tandem, one echoing the other in some sort of twisted overdub. “Death and war and darkness.” Revulsion coiled in my stomach at their words, their panicked faces. What must these women be seeing?
 

Fitz almost giggled. “And so you have come into my place of darkness, on the brink of death and war, to achieve your potential.” With another sharp crack of his command, the guards shoved me down to my knees. I was now eye level with my scattered cards.
 

“Sorry, guys,” I muttered, knowing that no matter what happened in this room, I probably wouldn’t be keeping hold of them. Half the cards were on the floor, but the one topmost on the tabletop pile was faceup. And I really wasn’t happy to see it again.
 

The Tower.
 

In a Tarot reading, being dealt the image of an exploding building was very rarely a good thing. Especially when you were currently trapped
inside
a building, with no discernible way out.
 

“Speak to me.” Fitz stood right in front of me now, his bug eyes bulging as he held up something that looked distressingly like a hookah. He pushed the nozzle of the contraption into my mouth as one of the thugs clamped down on my jaw and pinched my nose shut.
 

Then—with a sharp brutality I wouldn’t have thought he had in him—Fitz shoved his fist into my stomach.
 

Startled, I blew out a sharp gust of breath, then inhaled before I could resist the primal urge. Only, the gas from the hookah hose now stuck in my mouth was nothing like actual air. I instantly convulsed, going rigid in the guard’s hands as Fitz did something with the device shot that more gas into my lungs. My head filled with images and noise, my stomach roiled, and when he finally yanked the hose out of my mouth, I lurched forward, ready to throw up everything I’d
eaten for the last six weeks.
 

Instead, only words spewed out of my mouth, thick and hot.
 

“Death comes for you,” I wheezed and took some satisfaction from how Fitz’s face suddenly went from cackling enjoyment to confusion. “Destruction. Loss. Your kingdom— vanquished.” I said this last on a gasp, and the effort it took to push the word out grated along my windpipe, as if the word itself had claws.
 

I swung my gaze to the women behind the glass. Was this what they felt every time they were compelled to speak their prophecy? The pain was raw and fiery, and it didn’t dim with the passage of words. Not when more of them kept bubbling up insistently. “Lost. Failed,” I wheezed. “Destroyed. Forgotten.”
 

“You haven’t been properly prepared,” Fitz growled, thrusting the tube at my mouth again despite my efforts to squirm away.
 

The gas poured into me once more, and my eyes practically rolled back in my head, the images shattering through me those of destruction and pain, fire and noise. Once again, with startling clarity, black papal seal seared across my memory. I flailed forward, grasping Fitz’s wrist to where an identical seal was etched into his cuff. “You are betrayed!” I gasped.
 

“Get off me!” Fitz threw up his arm, and clearly his mods included some sort of steroidal component, because for a small man he really could pack a punch. I staggered back against the guards, barely coherent as they hauled my body up once more, Fitz beside me the whole time, blasting my face, my eyes with the gas. As I mumbled words that made no sense, I was dragged across the carpet, dead weight in the arms of the two guards. A door opened, and they tossed me to the floor. “Full dose,” I heard Fitz call out as the door slammed behind me, and I blearily turned to peer through the glass.
 

What I saw was a nightmare.   
 

There was no longer just the sleazily posh room of Jerry Fitz and his thugs on the other side of the smeared glass, but the throng of dancing humanity
beyond
it as well, then the worn-down Binion’s casino beyond that, people hunched over faded baize-topped tables, acrid smoke heavy in the air.
 

And I could see farther, to where the Devil reclined in some glassed-in penthouse, sipping from a golden chalice—then off again through streets and deserts and cities and oceans, until I soared far into the East, to the seat of Fitz’s master, amid a glorious palace.
 

Beyond that, as if lying in wait, something alien stirred in the darkness—a blue figure wrapped in a field of red. And in the midst of all this, in the center of a great, arched room hung with gilded paintings and glittering treasure, I could see soldiers standing at attention around a black-robed man whose slight stature belied his strength. They all bent over a gleaming black console—as sleek and dark as Fitz’s wrist cuff, emblazoned with the same grim seal, minus the dagger that also adorned Fitz’s. While gas filled the small chamber and the young women beside me sent up a keening wail, I lurched toward the glass.
They’re coming!
 

“Speak!” The voice crackled over me, so loud it could be God himself demanding me to share my desperate vision.
 

“SANCTUS!” I cried, and I could sense Fitz stiffen, though his guards didn’t flinch, apparently unaware of the meaning of the name, unaware of anything except the commands of their leader. I pounded against the glass, my words frantic now, panicked. “Death! Destruction! Your kingdom turned to fire!” I shook my head, frustrated at my own confusion
. I need to be more clear!