Getting Wilde (33 page)

“Back in the day, I wasn’t Sara Wilde. I was Sariah Pelter, or Psychic Teen Sariah.” I rolled the glass in my hand. There was no judgment coming from Nikki. I suspected she’d been a pretty good cop at some point.  “Your comment about knowing your gifts as a kid making it easier? It does and it doesn’t. My mom knew what I could do, and she told her friends, who told
their friends. I’d read cards for them when they came over to play poker. They all got a great laugh out of it. Eventually, I was maybe about twelve at this point, someone asked me if I could find her lost dog. God love her, she loved that dog.” I shook my head, remembering it. “Little Jack Russell terrier, most annoying thing you ever could imagine. She was beside herself with worry.” I let my words trail off, remembering the woman’s lined face, her florid bottle-red hair, her heavy makeup. And her eyes. Her eyes had been the worst. She’d known from the start.
 

“Let me guess,” Nikki interrupted my thoughts. “You found the dog in a neighbor’s backyard.”
 

“Put out in the trash. I didn’t predict that part. She guessed when she went home that night and saw the trash cans all lined up along the street. She attacked everyone’s garbage like some sort of crazed maniac and found Kiki within twenty minutes. My mom told me that later.” I shuddered. Of all the terrible things I’d seen since then, it was that story that gave me the willies. Maybe because that was when everything had started. “It didn’t take long after that.”
 

“And how long did it take for puppies to become kids?”
 

I glanced at her sharply, and once again, despite the kimono and turban and the thin film of facial cream, the eyes that stared out at me were dead-on cop.
 

“You said ten years ago was when you were tangled up with Brody. For him to give a shit, he had to be working with you. Not a huge leap to have the community psychic brought in on an investigation, even if she’s a kid. Especially if she’s a kid.” Her eyes narrowed. “Schoolmate, I bet.”
 

I worked my hands around the glass. “Maryann Williams. She’d been gone three days. I didn’t know her, not really. She wasn’t in any of my classes. But her mom told someone else’s mom, who told my mom and also the police that I probably knew something because I could find anything, and my mom, of course, was more than happy to march me down to the station to
prove their stories true.”
 

“She sounds like a prize.” Nikki’s words were slightly more judgmental now. “But you did your thing, I’m thinking. You found the kid.”
 

“Yeah.” I swallowed. “I was too late, though.”
 

Nikki took another drink and considered that. “Bet you weren’t after that.”
 

“Not usually.” My words were barely a whisper now. “I became sort of obsessed. I would pore over the missing persons reports, amber alerts. My mom kept bringing me to the station. I’d give information to anyone who would listen. They even investigated me as being an accessory once.”
 

“Gotta love the system. They assigned you to Brody after that?”
 

“He was new on homicide, and they tossed him into Crimes against Kids or something like that. He got saddled with me before he could say no.” I shrugged. “After a while, it just seemed natural, working together.”
 

“And how long before it blew up?”
 

I looked out the window again. Scandal was lit up in pulsing purple and red. As I watched, it slid to blue, then green. Like a skyscraping lava lamp. “Three years. Then I just—I had to leave the city. For good. And I couldn’t leave a trail. I was off the grid for a long time after that. But eventually, I sort of drifted back, I guess.”
 

“We all do.” Nikki rolled the champagne around in her glass. “And then, eventually, Brody transferred here, and you never came clean on the fact that you’d been alive all this time.” She looked at me somberly. “Cops take that kind of thing personally. We lose too many as it is.”
 

I winced, remembering the almost crazed look in Brody’s eyes as he’d searched my face, unwilling to believe at first that I wasn’t some hallucination. “I know.”
 

“But that definitely explains you’ve always been hell-bent on leaving this place almost
before you touch down.” She stopped moving her glass. “Until this time. Because of those girls.”
 

“I made a deal with the council.” I sensed the slightest touch of Armaeus in my mind, but I ruthlessly shut him out. “Fitz pumped a lot of that Pythene gas into me, and it did something to me. For the time being, I have the same visioning skills that Jos and Prayim do. So they don’t have to play Eye of God for the council. I can.”
 

“How’s that working out for you?”
 

“About as well as it looks.”
 

Nikki pursed her lips, her glass almost empty as she leaned down to scoop up another donut. “There’s more to it, isn’t there? The girls—before they disappeared, the first time, they said something’s come for us. Hunting us down. And that they were coming here next.”
 

I saw no reason to deny it. “Yeah.”
 

She shook her head. “Well, it’s a great place to party.”
 

I laughed again despite myself, and Nikki eased the conversation away from all the dark corners and sharp edges that were forming in my mind. At some point, she helped me to my feet, but the pain in my body had dulled from the alcohol and sugar. I stumbled into bed, telling myself that tomorrow, everything would work out. Tomorrow, I’d find out when the girls would be able to return home. Tomorrow, I was one day closer to getting my own freedom back.  
 

Sleep didn’t creep up on me like a whisper in the night—it hit me like a baseball bat. I’d no sooner closed my eyes than my mind unhinged, and I found myself sifting and drifting through a flood of random, unconnected thoughts, sinking deeply into a profoundly subverbal bliss. Gradually, the mind-static firmed and a soft, familiar murmur slid over me, as intimate as a lover’s touch.
 

Exactly that intimate, in fact.
 

Sweet Christmas, yes.
I needed a really good dream right about now. I let the smile curve
my lips, pleasure prickling along my skin, warming it, as I arched in response to the pressure on my body. I sighed with completely unfettered appreciation as the mattress beneath me shifted to accommodate the body of a large, delicious-smelling man, knocking my Sleep Number to an absolute 10. Not any delicious-smelling man either, but a beautiful, dangerous, lust-magnet muffin of stud who I wasn’t entirely sure was trustworthy, but at this moment, I pretty much didn’t care,
because I was dreaming
. And if a girl couldn’t throw caution to the wind while she was sacked out for the night, when could she?
 

Except…except there was decidedly something non-dreamlike about the hand sliding up my thigh, about the soft murmur of breath along skin, the feeling of lips pressing to my hipbone, my rib cage, my shoulder. And the Magician’s voice when he’d spoken was close—too close. Like, right-next-to-me close. Despite my brain insisting that waking up was seriously not in my best interests, even if all of this was a dream, I pried my eyes open a slit.
 

Just in time to get body-checked into the mattress by a full-frontal bronzed demigod.
 

“Miss Wilde,” the Magician purred. I felt myself sliding back down a rabbit hole of unconsciousness, unable to escape. Then his next words sent me spinning in an entirely different direction. “It’s time for our work to begin.”