Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 (6 page)

“Now I can heal, yes.”

“Because you’re mortal.”

“Yes.”

Armaeus turned away, but I reached out and caught his arm. There was something about that that was important. Very important, but I couldn’t seem to get past the idea of touching him, my hand on his smooth silk shirt, my fingers wrapped around—

Focus.
“You can’t stay this way, though, right? How long until you have to turn yourself immortal again? Is there some sort of—” I stopped short of saying “expiration date,” but it was a near thing.

Armaeus didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he covered my hand with his, squeezed it. I sensed the blood draining out of my head again, and suddenly I felt dizzy.

“Despite the dangers, there are advantages to the mortal state,” he murmured. He was watching me again. “I need to explore them more fully.”

Before I could speak, however, he tilted his head. “There is a name in your mind, battering at you. I can sense it past your wards.”

Everything from the past day came back in a rush, and I tightened my hold on Armaeus, my gaze finding his. “Viktor Dal,” I blurted. “He hired a mercenary I know to find me in Germany.”

“Nigel Friedman.”

“If you know everything, is there a reason why I’m talking?”

Armaeus’s brows lifted, his gold-and-black eyes trained on me still, unsettling in their intensity. “Should you wish to allow me full access to your mind, it would make the process quicker.”

“Yeah, no. Anyway, Nigel found me but didn’t quite give me up. And he said Viktor Dal had hired him. Then there were these posters of kids, Armaeus, kids I haven’t seen in years—missing kids.”

There was no inflection in Armaeus’s voice. “From when you worked with Detective Rooks in Memphis.”

“And there
had
been a Viktor Dal back then. It’s just—I mean…no way. That guy couldn’t have been—he couldn’t.”

Without realizing it, I’d edged closer to Armaeus. He was close enough to kiss me, and I sensed his power snake around me like a whisper. “You want to see him, don’t you, Miss Wilde,” he said. “To travel.”

I swallowed, my throat constricting. All of me constricted, actually, caught in the trap of Armaeus’s magic. But I couldn’t deny what he asked. I wanted to know—needed it. “What if those kids are still alive?” I whispered. “I have to find them, Armaeus, I have to.”

He spoke the words.

I sagged against Armaeus as the familiar lurch of astral travel swept through my system. The ability to mentally project yourself into a different location somewhere in the world, astral travel was a skill I’d recently acquired like a bad sinus infection, and it was proving equally hard to shake. But I’d never tried to travel wrapped in the Magician’s embrace before. Mortal or no, his abilities sped up the process remarkably.

Instead of the usual sense of flinging myself across the planet, I was suddenly, simply…somewhere else. A house. A room. A vault.

“Where am I?” I managed.

“Describe it.” Armaeus’s words were sharp and clear, compelling me to speak with an urgency I didn’t expect.

“Room—white walls, marble floor. Like a bank. Brass drawers in the wall, brass…” I moved forward, confused. I’d been fixated on Viktor. Viktor Dal. The tall, slender, blond-haired man with the kind eyes and the scruffy beard, sensible shoes and faded clothes… Not this cold place of stone and metal. I reached the drawers—there were dozens of them, each the size of a shoebox, all of them numbered.

No. Not all. I scanned up and to the left. The first six had shiny new labels, etched in plates of—

I reared back as I recognized the last of the labels: MARY.

“No!”

As if triggered by the word, the drawers jolted open—all of them, not just the labeled ones—and suddenly the room was filled with flying ash. Ash and small bits of twisted metal and bone. I ducked and crouched away from the onslaught, but it seemed to follow me to the corner of the room, a room without a door, a room without an escape. And a voice pounded through my head, soft and kind and riveting and familiar, so achingly familiar, a voice I hadn’t heard for ten years and then only briefly, as a man with kind eyes and a scruffy beard and thick-soled shoes sighed and looked down at me and smiled and said:

“If anyone can save them, it’ll probably be you.”

“Miss Wilde!”

Armaeus’s shout was a slap across the face, and I lurched awake again, still in his embrace, my arms flailing, my legs churning. Only the solid mass of his body kept me from running right through the enormous glass windows of his penthouse and out into the far open sky.

“There were drawers, it was a mausoleum!” I blurted. “He killed those kids, Armaeus. He did it!”

Certainty sank like a lodestone, drawing me down, back into the past and the nightmare of that job. The job that had taken everything from me. The job that had ruined my life. The job that had…

“What did you see, Miss Wilde?” Armaeus prompted, pulling me back from the edge of hysteria. “Specifically, what did you see?” He paused. “Was Viktor Dal there?”

“He…yes.” I drew in a deep, shuddery breath. “Well, his voice was there. But he said—he said something he’d said to me before, when I was a kid.”

Armaeus relaxed his hold marginally. “And what was that, can you remember?”

“That I…” All the adrenaline drained out of me, leaving behind a shell.

Because Viktor had been taunting me all those years ago. And I hadn’t even known it. I
hadn’t
been able to save those kids. I
hadn’t
been able to stop…him. I shook my head again, clamping down hard on my thoughts.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said woodenly. “The kids are dead.”
If anyone can save…
“He murdered them.”

I looked up, my gaze clearing. Armaeus’s face was impassive, and he looked at me without speaking. “I’m going to kill him,” I said into the silence. “Viktor Dal. If he’s still alive. I’m going to find him, and I’m going to kill him.”

“And if the children whose names you saw are not dead?” He studied me. His lids flickered, and I sensed his touch on my mind. “Mary, Sharon, Jimmy. Harrison, Corey, Hayley. If they are still alive? If you can yet save them? What would you do then, Miss Wilde?”

The sheer cruelty of his question took the breath from me. To hear the names of the children in his aristocratic, foreign inflection seemed to call them sharply to life once more—laughing, smiling videos of three kids I had watched over and over again, puzzling, obsessing, jumping at every thread of hope. And now there were three new kids in the same cheerful flat images, three kids I’d never seen before in my life. They had all simply…disappeared. And I had failed them.

I jumped as my phone rang, the raucous sound battering my nerves. I pulled out the device, and my stomach cramped at the name on the screen.
Brody
. He’d need to know. He’d need to know what I saw, what I knew. I sensed the touch of Armaeus’s mind on mine. Resolutely, I pushed him out.

“I have to go.” I pulled back from him, regaining my bearings. I refocused on the drinking horn, now empty on the table, then glanced back to Armaeus. “Are you—you going to be okay until I get back?”

The Magician nodded, his gaze steady on me. His irises were now completely black.

“I will,” he said. “And I’ll be waiting for you, Miss Wilde.”

Chapter Four

Brody was double-parked in the emergency vehicle space in front of the Luxor. He barely looked up from his phone as I got into his car.

“Are you going to make a habit of this?” I asked gruffly, my head still too stuffed with pain to let it all out yet. “I’m not going to jump every time you call.”

“I think you will for this.” Brody fired up the sedan and turned us back onto the Strip, but instead of heading toward the heart of the city, he turned south, driving toward the Mandalay Bay Casino and then past it, into an area that looked like a whole lot of nothing.

“Where are we going?”

“We have to talk.”

“We’re already talking,” I snapped. “That’s what people do when they speak to each other, they talk. Usually in coffee shops, not in cars heading out into the Nevada desert.”

He slanted me a glance. “Do I make you nervous?”

“Presidential politics make me nervous, Brody. You just piss me off.” I turned toward him, settling against the side of the door, putting as much physical distance between us as possible. The images crowding my mind pressed outward, but I couldn’t speak of them yet. Those six brass labels…

“So what do you have?” I asked when Brody didn’t speak first. “You’ve found something out about the flyers? The ones from the Memphis PD.”

“Not from the Memphis PD, actually.” Brody grimaced. “I called, and they had no idea what I was talking about. They had a record of the case, sure. But it’s long since gone cold. Ancient history. And no one has been sniffing around, demanding it be opened again.”

“Right.” My throat suddenly seemed a little tight. Probably choking on chemicals from the archaic air-conditioning in the vehicle. But no way was I going to drop the windows, no matter how fast Brody was driving. Which… I shifted in my seat, forcing myself to focus on what my eyes saw, not my brain. “You working out some issues with the speedometer there?”

Brody growled something indistinguishable but didn’t lay off the gas pedal. He left the main road without speaking, and we bumped through two subdivisions, each more depressing than the last: short, square, stucco-covered homes, hunkered down in the heat. When he pulled into the driveway of one particularly nondescript tract home, I knew where we were. No way could anyone live on purpose in such a pitiful little house unless he was a cop. There was no landscaping except for a few scrubby cactus plants, and the sunbaked concrete of the driveway was bleached white. The garage door, also bleached white, looked like it hadn’t been opened since the Cold War.

“Please tell me you don’t have your dead grandmother in there.”

He didn’t grace me with a response to that, and we exited the vehicle in silence. The heat was a wall of oppression that we had to fight through to get to his front door, but the moment we stepped inside his house, I relaxed. The house might be one sad sack of ugly, but Brody kept the place on arctic. Clearly, he was my kind of guy.

Living up to the exterior’s promise, the house was spare to the point of Spartan, but as he led me into his office, I refined my reaction. Brody had toys, all right. They were just highly specialized. “Nice.”

The entire space had been converted into a crime lab, with a map of Vegas taking up most of the far wall, pins assembled in clusters to denote gangs, white-collar criminals, popular targets of tourist violence. Stacks of reports and no less than three laptops lined the wall beneath the map, but the material showed signs of being pushed to the side recently, making space for the new crime that had occupied the detective’s interest.

Six tattered flyers lined a table that had been shoved up against another wall, and the large-screen computer behind it blinked to life as Brody touched a panel.

Unjustified panic surged anew in my throat. I hoped this wasn’t going to become a constant issue, or breathing might become a problem. “What is this, Brody?” I still couldn’t tell him what I’d seen. Six brass labels on drawers full of ash and bone. Six kids.

If anyone can save them, it’ll probably be you.

“This is how I spent the first few years after your disappearance.” Brody’s harsh voice cut across my reverie. “I’m not happy to be back at it. Trust me, you’re only going to get the abridged version.”

The screen flared to life, and three school-picture photos identical to the ones on the flyers flickered in front of us. “Hayley Adams, Corey Kuznof, and Mary Degnan,” he said grimly. “As they appeared ten years ago. We didn’t have age progressions then because the pictures were current. But these…” He tapped the flyers. “They hold up. We ran the images through our system at the LVMPD, and the pictures are solid.”

“Except they have backgrounds. Real backgrounds, I mean. Those actually look like photographs.”

Brody’s lips tightened. “Except they have backgrounds. So someone is messing with us, or these kids are alive.”

I winced. “I don’t think so, Brody.”

He didn’t seem to hear me, though. He brought up another set of images. “These three kids weren’t part of our original search. Harrison Banks, Jimmy Green, Sharon Graham. Taken from different small towns in Tennessee and Alabama. They weren’t reported right away, didn’t make it into the system when our case blew up. And there were other differences too. No reason to connect them to our case.”

“They were never found either, I’m guessing.”

He blew out a long breath. “They weren’t. And of course, we had you to add to that list after you left town.” He stabbed the flyer. “But I didn’t make flyers for you, Sara. It was considered an inside investigation, because we didn’t know the circumstances of your abduction or disappearance or whatever the hell it was.” His jaw was tight, a vein pulsing in his temple. “And we certainly didn’t know you were alive and kicking back in someone’s RV somewhere.”

I grimaced. “It was a long time ago, Brody.”

“And a long time where you could have reached out, contacted me. At least let me know that you were goddamned alive.” His voice cracked a little, and I winced again. He wasn’t wrong.

“At the time, it seemed better to let the past be the past. I didn’t know what had happened to my mom. You were the only one who was left standing. I wasn’t going to risk that.”

“And now?”

I shrugged. “I still don’t want to risk it.”

Something in my tone tipped him off, and he turned sharply to me, his eyes narrowed. “You said you didn’t know who was shooting at you.”

“I don’t. But I seem to be pretty unpopular this week.” I blew out a long breath. I had to tell him. “I think—what are the odds, Brody that, um, Viktor Dal had something to do with the kids?”

“Sara.” Brody’s voice sounded tortured.

I turned back to the computer. “Seriously, hear me out. I mean, we knew back then that he was a shrink in my school district, but we had no reason to suspect Mr. Congeniality. Everybody loved him, he was super helpful. But what if… What is that?”