Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 (2 page)

Armaeus had activated my third eye a few weeks ago as sort of a gift with purchase while helping me recover from a particularly painful run-in with enemies of the psychic community. He was big into healing. I had an impressive skill for getting injured. So it worked out.

Since then, however, anything remotely supernatural lit up like a glow stick if I focused hard enough. And as I looked up again, I could definitely see a trail of magic arrowing down the ceiling of the throne room toward a far door.

An excited buzz in the room indicated that the auction was about to begin, and the fabric covers were pulled away from the art displays. While everyone else surged forward, I edged back. This was my cue to leave.

My backward progress was stopped as I came back to chest against a large, solid mass: Nigel again.

“Going somewhere?” he murmured in his impossibly civilized British accent.

I turned toward him, taking in his easy smile. Too easy. Every one of my nerves prickled, and the Seven of Swords mocked me in my mind. Something sneaky was going on here, I knew it. But I gave him a wide grin anyway.

“Thought I’d take some air.”

“I wouldn’t advise it. The castle has trained attack wolfhounds on the grounds, and they’re out in force tonight.”

I’d been worried about machine guns, not wolfhounds, but I appreciated the heads-up. Especially since I didn’t plan to leave this place by the front door. “Good to know.” I shrugged. “You find what he had you looking for?”

Nigel fairly hummed with satisfaction. “I did.”

His move was so fast, I almost missed it, but I instinctively jumped back as the flash of bright metal cuffs streaked across my vision. Blocking Nigel’s hand with an elbow jab, I yanked out my Arcana Council-provided hairpin and clipped him in the neck. The voltage from the tiny device lifted Nigel off his feet. I sent a cheer out to the council’s tech wizard as the Brit staggered back—stunned but upright, gaping at me in confusion and clearly unable to speak.

Worked for me.

Sliding my hairpin back in place, I turned on my heel and strode quickly down the long throne room, keeping the trail of stars in my peripheral vision. The entire third floor of the castle was open for the event, with docents in every room and additional artwork on display beyond the main hall. No one batted an eye as I turned sharply into the king’s bedroom.

More neo-Gothic magnificence greeted me, but I kept my gaze fixed to the ceiling with its swirl of stars. According to Armaeus, Ludwig had gushed to the famed composer Richard Wagner about an esteemed guest he was looking forward to housing at Neuschwanstein. Scholars had assumed that guest was Wagner, the object of Ludwig’s massive crush. Armaeus believed that the guest was something far more precious than a king’s potential lover, however. He believed it was a famed cup of antiquity, a cup that had come to be represented as the Holy Grail.

I stepped into another antechamber. Here there was only one docent, and only one piece of art on display, a lovely Moorish vase. More to the point, the stars suddenly stopped. I whirled, ignoring the startled look of the docent, who was distracted by a rather wobbly Nigel stumbling into the room.

“Stop her!” Nigel shouted, or tried to shout. The vocal cords nearest to the impact site of the electrical shock would take a while to recover. I’d been warned not to use the zapper anywhere close to my target’s vital organs, if I wanted to stay discreet. Based on the fact that Nigel was starting to twitch violently, his hand slapped to his neck, that’d been a good call. The docent, confused, looked back to me—and then I saw it, right over her shoulder.

A gilded, swan-festooned panel engraved with a silver cup. Silver, not gold.

I turned away from the panel and dashed back to Nigel. “Oh no!” I cried to the docent at the door. “He’s having a stroke. A stroke!”

His eyes burning with fury, Nigel lunged at me as the woman gasped. I blocked him easily and swiped my leg behind his knees, dropping him to the floor. I fell down on top of him. Heavily. “Get help!”

As the woman rushed out, I leaned down close to Nigel, not letting up on the pressure I had on his throat. Or on his solar plexus. He gurgled for air, and I growled at him. “Why did this Viktor person send you after me?”

His eyes focused finally, a hint of amusement leeching in. “I always—did like you, Sara,” he managed. “Job was—to find—not take you down. Figured I could collect the fee
and
warn you. Win…win.”

“But why—” My eyes flared wide as reality dawned. Someone
else
was supposed to collect me. Probably lots of someone elses. I glared at Nigel. “Cutting that warning a little close, aren’t you?”

His smile was sardonic, despite the pain. “You’ll manage.”

The sound of pounding feet barely penetrated through the thick castle walls. I ripped off Nigel’s surveillance bug and dropped it on him, then delivered a roundhouse punch for good measure, cracking the man’s head against the tile floor. When he went slack, I moved quickly to the cup-engraved panel and shoved all my weight against it.

It sank immediately into the wall, and a second panel beside it popped open, as if the lever had been set yesterday, not generations ago. I dove inside. A quick backward push against the door popped it closed again, but I didn’t bet on it staying closed. I sucked in a deep breath and pulled out my hairpin, which was proving to be way more useful than a Swiss Army knife. It crackled to life to illuminate the empty space around me.

The shallow, completely empty space.

The room was a narrow-paneled closet, airtight, but there was nothing in here—no cup, no altar, no easy chair. Nothing to indicate where to go next either, other than back the way I’d come. My card reading could offer no more help—the Seven of Swords and Star had played out, and the Ace of Cups too.

But I still didn’t have my prize.

Crap.

Voices erupted on the other side of the panel, and a sudden tattoo of fists pounded on the door. I didn’t speak German, but I suspected I wasn’t gaining any friends. I swept the light around the room again, struggling to see past its crackling glare. Then I heard the sickening sound of the panel triggering the mechanism in the wall behind me…

Exactly as the wall in front of me spun.

I clicked off the hairpin and burst forward, plastering myself against the wall as it completed its semicircle—carrying me safely around until the wall clicked once more into place. I didn’t have time to congratulate myself, though, because in front of me—there was nothing. Not even a floor.

With a sickening lurch, I half bounced, half slid down a sharp stone slope, banging off no fewer than three concrete abutments before landing in a heap atop the remains of a ladder and one particularly creepy set of bones.

I didn’t generally have a problem with bones, truth be told. They usually meant their owner was dead. Didn’t mean I liked to land on them, though.

Rolling to the side, I flicked my crackling hairpin to life again, instant Zippo. The bones were shrouded in a simple woolen robe, the whole mess a sad puddle at the edge of the floor, as if the deceased had been doubled over when he’d shuffled off this mortal coil, lost in prayer next to the shattered ladder.

In…prayer?

Cautiously edging forward, I poked at the bones. First gently, then with more force. At the second shove, the robed skeleton sprawled over to the side, and from its center rolled a long silver-embossed cup. Not the famed “cup of a carpenter” at all, nor the goblet of a king, but a long Nordic drinking horn rimmed in hammered silver, a thin silver and leather braid attached to it in two places.

Armaeus had given me no indication of what the cup would look like. I’d completely assumed it would look more holy grail than ox horn, but who was I to judge?

More shouting sounded above me, along with some ominous pounding on the wall. I scrambled up, draping the horn around my neck by its braid, and swung my minilight in a wide arc.

The room immediately opened out into a cavern that appeared to have been hewn out of the very rock of Neuschwanstein. I vaguely recalled that there had been two older castles on the site before King Ludwig’s getaway had been built.

Whether or not this room dated back to those original castles, there was no question about what it had been used for since then.

“Sweet Christmas.” Every avaricious nerve ending in my body snapped to attention, reveling in the bounty spread out before me.

Dozens of crates were stacked in neat rows, many of them lined with neatly stenciled German words, exactly none of which I could read. Piled on the boxes, leaning up and scattered around, were statues and what looked to be covered paintings, as well as huge bowls and jars of pottery and friezes tumbled on top of each other like a Jenga game gone terribly wrong. Some of the boxes had other words scrawled on them—Cyrillic, Egyptian, French, Japanese. A hidden horde of artifacts moldering in the bowels of the Disneyland castle.

More of the famed Nazi stores? Had to be.

But how had it stayed secret so long?

Something rustled in the far shadows, and I swung around, stifling my urge to call out. A whirring flutter, the sound of a flock of birds hopping to a new ledge, whispered through the gloom. My third eye flicked open, and I staggered back.

Magic arced through the chamber in a kaleidoscope of crazy lines running over and under and through the items gathered within. These weren’t simply artifacts, they were magical treasures, a virtual cornucopia of the kind of items my clients would spend fortunes on. And I was
here…alone
…with only two hands!

I scanned the room wildly, forcing myself to concentrate on whatever glowed most brightly that was small enough to carry. In the Neuschwanstein Art Grab video game, I’d clearly made it to the bonus round. I was
not
leaving without some sort of prize.

Time, sadly, was not on my side. The sound of the panel cracking open high above me sent me fleeing deeper into the room, toward the far door I could barely see ahead. I scooped up one of the smallest boxes as I rushed past. It shimmered with such a white-hot frenzy that I assumed I’d singe my fingers, but I was happily surprised to find it cool to the touch. I tucked it against my body like a football and bent into my run.

I reached the far end of the room and dived for an arched doorway as the first of the men chasing me shouted out in surprise and wonder. I knew their discovery of the room full of spoils would delay some of them, but from the sound of boots crunching on stone that continued to get nearer, clearly not all. I charged into the doorway—only to practically face-plant into a wall. The corridor beyond teed sharply. I swung right, then left, desperately shoving my crackling pin light into the darkness to see which direction was the better option.

A whistle was the only warning I had.

I flattened to the ground as the men burst through the doorway as well, their cries indicating they’d taken the brunt of the arrow blast I’d triggered. Clicking off my light, I scrambled down the corridor, away from where the arrows of death had emerged, keeping low, racing blindly.

Well, not quite blindly.

As I rushed forward, I felt a keen pressure in the center of my head. Then light pulsed above, around, and through me, illuminating the corridor with a glittering green glow.

My third eye apparently had a night vision mode. I vastly preferred relying on my Tarot cards, but any port in a storm.

A path lay dead ahead. As I gained confidence, I gained speed. The tunnel dropped precipitously, carrying me farther into the mountain. I twisted and turned and chose direction after direction, split after split, all following the pulse of energy. Exhaustion weighed on me, the drag of the energy expenditure tapping stores I didn’t know I had.

I’d pay for this later, I suspected. But I had to keep moving.

I wasn’t sure when the men behind me stopped following, but when the tunnel finally spit me out onto the rocky valley below Neuschwanstein’s sister castle, Hohenschwangau, I didn’t stop scrambling. Nigel and a posse of hired goons remained at the main castle. And unless he’d been lying to me—there were attack dogs up there too. Attack dogs were never good.

I swung around, squinting in the darkness, using my real eyes to lock down my position. I could see the glow of Hohenschwangau on the next rise. The auction’s overflow of parking would be in the village between the two castles, farther down the mountain. There’d be cars there. Motorcycles.

I sucked in a deep breath, preparing to launch myself forward. I could totally do this. With speed and luck and a decided lack of Fido, I could seriously—

“Halt.”

The absolute authority in the voice caught me up short. I looked up, then up farther. Ordinarily, I wasn’t much on following direct commands. Then again, ordinarily, I wasn’t being ordered around by people whose voices made my bones vibrate…and who were sporting honest-to-God wings on their backs.

I stopped.

Surrounding me were a half-dozen women, easily topping seven feet tall, their wings adding another few feet to their height and quite a bit to their width as well. They were beautiful in the way an ice storm was beautiful: cold, austere, and hard-angled, their eyes a brilliant light blue, their skin fair to the point of snow. Three were blonde, two brunette, one a deep auburn. They were dressed in long robes cut open over thick breeches, and they did not look happy.

Valkyries.
Had to be. Except…were Valkyries a thing? Why hadn’t I known they were a thing?

I squared my shoulders as the nearest one gestured to me. When she spoke, her voice sounded of wind and rain, chilling me to my toes. “Mim’s horn is sacred to the swan king. It is death to those who drink from it. Are you so ready to die, Sara Wilde?”

I frowned down at the horn slung around my neck.
Mim’s horn?
I wasn’t up on my Norse mythology, but I vaguely recalled Mim and his compact between heaven and earth, a compact sealed with…a drinking horn. Because that’s how the Vikings rolled.

The Valkyrie appeared to be waiting for an answer, however, so I gave the only one I had. “It’s not for me. But the person who asked for it isn’t big on dying either. It’s kind of a thing with him.”