Chapter 5

Barry started crying quietly, so we kept our conversation to a minimum, gradually working our way through the corridors. Eventually, we crouched our way through a low opening in the rock. The rumble of engines and heavy equipment reached us from far overhead, and I lifted my brows at Sariah over Barry's head. "Are we out?"

"In Between, I'm thinking. Which means we can talk, at least." Sariah grunted, shifting her hold on Barry and glaring at him hard. "I'm not sure what Maria sees in you beyond your moony-eyed stares, buddy, but you are one lucky bastard."

He stiffened and managed to pull himself together a bit more. "What do you mean?"

"I mean she's the only reason we went in after you. She believes in you, even though you're a sack of shit."

"Maria?" he asked, still sounding dazed. "She knows nothing—she's safe. I've kept her safe."

"Yeah, yeah, you can tell her all about it—here we go," Sariah said.

She was right. As we came around the corner, a doorway stood open, cut into the solid rock. We drew even with it and stopped, peering into the shadows beyond.

"What's this?" Barry asked, his voice tremulous. Not even a trace of his former swagger remained, and he shivered uncontrollably as the thick shadows flowed away from the door, eventually revealing a woman lit by a pool of light. She knelt in front of a small table covered with a heavy dark purple fabric.

Maria clasped her hands in prayer, and the candlelight flickered higher, making the religious icons lined up next to the crystals and candles stand out in sharp relief. "He's a good man, a powerful man. He just needs a second chance," she pleaded.

Beside me, Barry sucked in a quick breath.

I glanced to Sariah. She rolled her eyes, then gave Barry a push toward the door. "You fuck this up, we're not saving you again," she informed him tersely.

He stumbled into the mists, and a second later, we heard Maria's cry of exultation.

We slowly closed the door behind them.

"There," I grinned at Sariah. "You feel better now?"

"I…do," she said, surprising me. She kept her gaze on the door a long minute. "That—yeah. It wasn't exactly all the truth, what I just told him, but it was true enough, I guess. There's a whole lot of people who are assholes and don't deserve to be saved. But some of them have people who love them anyway. I guess it kind of makes you want to see how things turn out, with the right kind of second chance."

I bit my lip, but kept my face carefully neutral as she turned back to me. Once again, how well did I really know Sariah, this reflection of me who'd taken a decidedly crooked path to get to where she was today? Not well enough, clearly.

"So where to?" I finally managed.

She squinted up the corridor. "If Kreios is topside, you can bet he'll have transpo home. You probably don't need it, but considering you caught him off guard by disappearing down the rabbit hole, it might be interesting to find out if he's learned anything. If the magic house of Tarot cards is about to take a tumble, we should probably know that sooner rather than later. Plus, I'm thinking he's going to be in a chatty mood."

"Oh?" I narrowed my eyes at her as we started walking again. "Any particular reason why you might think that?"

She shrugged. "He was close enough to touch at Demonico's, at least for a little while. I don't need that long to soak up a Connected's skills. My ability to use said skills doesn't last very long, but it's fun while I can access them—especially when they're at his level."

"You've gotten stronger."

"Oh, yeah," she said. "The Night Witch gig has some fringe benefits that weren't included in the job description, namely that my ability to sponge the magic off others has amped up like whoa. I can't draw blood from a stone, so the person I'm tapping needs to be pretty strong for the skill to be super beneficial, but everyone has something to offer. Maria was a low-level hedge witch. I couldn't do too much with that, because when I draw someone down, I deplete them, and that's no good for most humans. But Kreios? I don't think he even noticed. And I got a full-on view into his head—and into Maria's, for that matter…and into Barry's while I was up. It was…useful."

I considered that. Sariah was probably wrong. I quite seriously doubted that Kreios was unaware that his skills were being siphoned off. Far more likely he'd wanted it to happen just because he found the idea curious. He was a curious kind of guy.

"So that's why you guys aren't getting along?" I asked. "Because you hijacked his ability of discernment and didn't like what you saw?" Even as I asked the question, I shook my head. "That can't be right, though. You were pissed at him long before he reached our table."

"Yeah, well. I was kind of messed up after this last gig, and let's just say I got some visitors while I was laid up. With each new one that showed up, I tried soaking up some of their abilities."

"Uh oh," I said. "Visitors like who? The Magician?"

"One more tick down the Tarot food chain," Sariah grinned. "Eshe."

I blinked. "Eshe came to see you? Seriously?" The High Priestess of the Arcana Council wasn't exactly chummy with anyone, and I'd never thought she'd considered Sariah as anything more than a nuisance.

Apparently, Sariah's siphoned mind-reading skills had faded somewhat. She gave no reaction to my internal musings. "Yup. And once she was done, she left behind a parting gift I know for a fact she hadn't intended. I had some wicked dreams. In addition to tipping me off to check out your incoming caseload at Justice Hall, and cluing me in to the value of a doughboy army, those dreams basically made our buddy Kreios out to be, well, kind of an asshole. Sort of like his predecessor, if I'm getting my history right."

I squinted at her. "Kind of an asshole, how?"

"For starters, I think he's looking to try to kill the Magician."

"What? There's no way. They're friends. They've always been friends."

"Uh-huh." She glared right back. "Am I the only one who's noticed that he's taken over the Magician's jobs, and here we are in the middle of a basic, boring opportunity to get some Justice done, and he shows up out of nowhere, sticking his nose in things?"

"But that can't be right," I protested, though in reality, Sariah could absolutely be right. I'd always liked Kreios, we'd gotten along, but how well did I really know the demigod?

The answer, of course, was not very well—especially since I didn't have the Devil's mad skills of being able to see into others' most intimate thoughts.

I scowled at Sariah, though we kept moving briskly along the corridor. "How did you keep him from knowing your suspicions?"

She laughed. "That part's easy. I didn't. He knows I'm not currently a fan, and he knows why. He may not know the specific details of it because I hang around with you enough to be able to keep my mental barriers shipshape, but he knows that I've gotten some bad feels about him—and I think he's surprised. I think it makes him curious about me, which could be good, could be bad."

"It could be very bad," I agreed. "I've never seen Kreios actually interested enough to go after someone for any reason. He usually just…"

"Gets them," Sariah said with a nod. "As in, they fall into his lap. Yeah, I noticed that too. But I don't think he's gonna show up on my doorstep carrying flowers, if that's your concern. He's got the hots for Nikki."

I snorted. "Everyone's got the hots for Nikki if they're smart, while she's got the hots for at least a half dozen people right this second. The Devil knows that better than anyone, and supports it. But since we're on the subject of relationships…"

Before I could finish the question, Sariah raised her hand. "Don't even start with me and Brody," she said, her words conjuring up images of the rumpled, square-jawed Las Vegas detective who was one of our few friends left over from childhood. "I'm never going to see him as anything other than the knight in shining armor that he still is, and he's never going to see me as anything but the little sister of his ex. We may keep knocking the idea around a few times because he is hella hot, despite his Boy Scout act, but that's not going anywhere. And I don't need any more friends."

Something in her voice caught me up short. Between my work and, well, my work, I didn't have a lot of friends either, but I did have some—who I valued more than I did my own skin. What had Sariah's life been like in Hell? Had she always been this alone?

The name came to me immediately.

"Who is Barnabas?"

She chuckled a little ruefully. "I figured you maybe heard that. He was a ghoul, I guess you'd call him, but a good guy, as ghouls went. A low-ranking lieutenant of the fat-bodied fucker we just took out. After that asshole and his buddies used him as fodder for one of their black dark-magic parties, they killed him. I mean, sure, I guess he was already dead. But after the spawn got done with him, he was dead, dead. First time I realized that could happen down in Hell. I didn't take it well."

I nodded, my heart twisting a little. If your best friend was a ghoul, what did that say about your social group? "I'm sorry."

"Yeah, well, you win or you learn. One of the joys of walking through Hell, you figure out how not to get too attached." She squinted ahead, slowing her stride at last. "This looks promising."

We approached a rough metal door bolted into the wall of sheer rock. Its sides were melted and warped, but the door itself appeared legitimate enough. Sariah tugged on its handle. The door opened inward toward us, revealing a smoothly efficient metal and concrete hallway beyond.

"That's one heck of an emergency exit," Sariah quipped as we moved into the much more official-looking corridors of what I assumed was the Newark airport. We walked quickly, not wanting to explain our presence so far underground, but we needn't have worried. The first staircase that presented itself led up to an access doorway that dumped into a more central hallway, and soon we were on the ground floor of the airport, near the private tarmac. The gleaming black jet that waited out on the far edge of the tarmac didn't look familiar to me, but Sariah moved toward it confidently.

"That's Kreios's," she said. "He's now the head of the Arcana Council, so of course he's going to have a fancy jet. He's even got the welcome wagon waiting for us."

Sure enough, a black limo with two guards and an aviation official stood at the ready as we emerged from the gate area. We were swept into the limo and driven the short distance to the private plane. Probably not typical TSA protocol, but it appeared to work for Kreios.

He wasn't alone on the airplane when we boarded, either. I sensed the shift of power as soon as we stepped off the steep stairway to enter the plane—which was far bigger than it appeared to be on the outside, bigger than any private jet reasonably should be. But I could only process one shock at a time.

"Armaeus is here?" I asked.

Sariah nodded, peering around with newfound irritation. "I'm telling you, something hinky is going on. I thought I brought you to Jersey on my own, but now, I'm beginning to wonder if even I wasn't manipulated in some way. If so, that shit's gotta stop."

I frowned, but I didn't have the same sense of manipulation she did. More likely it was just the Devil and the Magician taking advantage of circumstances that presented themselves to them. It was what they had done best in all the years they had worked together. The tally of those years was going on a hundred. Kreios had joined the Council in the early 1930s if I recalled correctly, whereas the Magician had been a fixture since the late 1200s. The reality of that date tugged at me. Armaeus had spent a long time as head of the Council, and he'd given up that role on a whim?

For the first time, it struck me how odd that was. Yes, Armaeus had had good reason to step down while his memories had been compromised, but why had he stayed out of the top position in the weeks and months that had followed? Was Sariah right and more was going on here than I suspected?

We reached the main compartment of the jet, and I knew one thing was certain—this was not the Magician's private plane. While Armaeus's conveyance was elegant, pristine, and efficient, Kreios's approach to the interior design of his jet was entirely different. Leather seats, sofas, and reclining chairs adorned the space, each one more vibrantly colored than the last. Carpet lined the floor, the padding so thick that it was noticeable even through my boots. The windows were tinted a faint rose, so the light that filtered through the space took on a pink haze. An enormous bar took up one side of the cabin, and not surprisingly, that was where the Devil stood, regarding us with a self-satisfied smirk as we emerged from the doorway.

"Congratulations." He lifted a glass. "Barry will have a full recovery and will go on to run the Eastern Seaboard operation of the Black Diamond syndicate. George Demopolous, meanwhile, will continue his leadership in the Sapphire syndicate. Both men are very aware of their most excellent good fortune, and understand they will be very handsomely rewarded for their interactions with the Arcana Council going forward. Meanwhile, we have secured a solid position in two prominent organizations. A job well done."

I could feel Sariah's irritation ratchet up with his little speech, steam trickling off her as she studied him. "So you were behind this the whole time?" she asked. "You tricked me?"

"Not at all," Kreios said with credible sincerity. "I didn't know where you were heading until you got there, but after I looked in on the situation, it quickly became clear how the Council could benefit. And given the givens, it's important for us to maximize any opportunity for benefit. Time is running short."

I considered his words carefully. The Devil wasn't one for false alarmism. If anything, he took, well, a devil-may-care attitude toward the business of running the Arcana Council, or the business of life, for that matter. He rolled with every punch and came up not just swinging, but with a cocktail in his hand and a smile on his face. What had changed?

I had felt the tension winding tighter all around me these past several days, in the tenor of requests that I was getting at Justice Hall, the energy that jittered and skittered up and down the Las Vegas Strip where the Council made their home. But I was used to worrying. There was always someone else to find, protect, heal. None of those things were the Devil's province.

Sariah knew it too. "Since when do you give a shit about anything but having a good time?" she asked, with perhaps a little bit less decorum than I would've been able to manage. "You expect me to believe that you're taking your role as head of the Arcana Council to heart? 'Cause I'm not really feeling that."

For a long moment, Kreios studied Sariah, his face impassive, his green eyes emotionless. Then his mouth kicked up at the corner into a smile.

"You're quite right," he murmured, his tone dangerously soft. "But there is one thing I do care about."

A presence hovered in the doorway of the main cabin, and I turned as the full force of that presence struck me—crackling with energy, power, and possibility, but encased in stultifying darkness, a panic-filled chaos of fear…and even the whisper of death.

"Sara," the Magician gasped.

Then he collapsed.