“Whoa,” Simon finally said, his voice hushed.
“An apt summary,” the Devil drawled.
He gestured with his right hand, and the room around us shifted. No longer were we in one of Armaeus’s conference rooms, no matter how remodeled; we were most definitely in the Devil’s domain. An oasis of tropical plants, babbling water, and real sand encased in a glass solarium at the heart of his residence high above the Flamingo hotel. It was a testament to how completely accepting I was of the illusions the Arcana Council created for their own amusement and distraction that my brain didn’t balk at our sudden transition. Instead, I turned to Kreios.
“You mind explaining to me what just happened? And use really small words, because you pretty much lost me the second Eshe said hello.”
He grinned, but behind his usual indolence, there was an edge I didn’t normally see with the Devil. Ever since I’d met him, Aleksander Kreios had impressed me with his suave, relaxed, and, well, devil-may-care attitude. But this was more intense, an underlying steel that gave form and strength to his easy manner.
“I confess, I had no idea that the High Priestess had such a delicious skill of manipulation. I always knew there were depths to her we had not fully explored, but in this, she surpassed my every expectation. She truly became the oracle of the ancients in all her twisted and confounding ways.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You missed the part about small words.”
The Magician interjected. “When ancient supplicants approached the oracle, they had a question in mind, a burning desire they had to satisfy. Though there is very little written record of what the oracle’s answers were, hers or any of her priestesses, the oral tradition is clear. The oracle gave answers that were effectively nonanswers. So confusing that it left it up to the querent to interpret her true intent. Ultimately, supplicants made their own determinations, answers that were uppermost in their hearts or perhaps, more accurately, the hearts of those who had sent them. But the truth of Eshe’s ability is subtler than that.”
“So Viktor was going to kill me?” Simon asked, cutting to the heart of the matter. He sounded remarkably sanguine about the idea.
“That is one of his possible truths, yes, a path he appeared to have considered most sincerely. The second path is one he shared with us under a lesser compulsion.”
“Because you weren’t giving him your Devil face, were you?” I gestured at Kreios. “When Eshe first sat down, Viktor was more under your influence or whatever. And her aura was out of control.”
The Magician turned to me. “You could see that? How does it appear, specifically, to you?”
“Deep purple when she entered the room. When Viktor invaded her personal space, it flared out to an almost harsh blueish white, and after his first little bombshell, it diminished to a soft lavender before sort of fading away altogether. Do those colors matter?”
“To us, perhaps not. To a dime-store fortune-teller, perhaps a slight bit more, but to Eshe, the answer is unequivocally yes. We will need to determine what they mean to her. To your point, however, the initial truth that Viktor spoke was more deeply buried. If it was deeply buried because he was horrified, but he would consider it, that is concerning.”
“Yeah, right,” I muttered. “That man hasn’t been horrified in his life. That’s not how he’s built.”
“Every sorcerer has his breaking point,” the Magician observed mildly, a little too mildly. “But the fact remains…”
The Devil took up the conversation. “The fact remains that we have an unparalleled opportunity here, an access point into an organization that heretofore did not exist. We can be assured that Viktor was approached by members of the Shadow Court. We can also be assured that he turned them away unsatisfied at this time. I do not believe, and he did not explicitly say, that they had given up on their request for his involvement in their affairs.”
“So he still plans to shoot me,” Simon pressed. Again, he didn’t seem particularly upset about it, more indignant. “I’ve got people too, you know. And mad skillz. I’m not without my defenses.”
The simple truth of that statement struck a chord in me, and I slanted a glance to Simon. The youngest of the Arcana members, in temperament if not actual length of time on the planet, he was also the Council’s tech expert, and he lived for his work, quite literally. He definitely had mad skillz.
“You have eyes on him?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. I’ve got eyes on all you guys—just kidding.” He grinned in a way that made me think he wasn’t kidding at all. I didn’t mind so much. Simon hadn’t always had an easy go of it. He’d earned his paranoia. “But I don’t have record of Viktor meeting with these two yahoos from the Shadow Court, I can tell you that much. Which means he either got them into his little Emperor hidey hole above Paris casino or—”
“Or they met in a dead zone, someplace where magic doesn’t work and you don’t have surveillance,” Armaeus said. I hadn’t known dead zones existed until a few weeks earlier. I wasn’t a fan.
Simon nodded. “Or, as Kreios pointed out, someplace where they control the surveillance. The business with the ghosts was interesting. There’s got to be a way for me to unscramble the code so that we can actually see faces. If I do that…”
His words trailed off as he started setting up the pile of laptops and devices he’d hauled in for the meeting but never used. As he busied himself with his electronics, the Devil spoke.
“There’s also the question of the summoning fires. Detective Brody was informed of a third fire just now.”
“Really?” I asked. No wonder Nikki had wanted to go with him. “What about Eshe?”
“Insulated as she is by Viktor, she will likely not be drawn out. Lainie, on the other hand, is already at the scene.”
“Then I should go,” I said, getting to my feet. “That girl has been through enough.”
The Magician raised a restraining hand. “We will both go, but there is value in allowing this third discovery to proceed for a short while without our interference.”
I sat back down. “Why? Do you want whoever is setting these fires to know that we have a posse? Non-Council members committed to the cause?”
“It’s not an unreasonable strategy,” the Magician returned. “For a Council who has prided itself on not meddling in the affairs of humans, to our own detriment, it would now appear, putting forth the understanding that there is a very human-support component to Council activities adds a different flavor to the proceedings.”
I considered that. “Fair enough. The Houses wouldn’t qualify because they don’t really support us. They’re technically at odds with us, or they’re supposed to be.”
“Whereas human organizations not exclusively known as magical who assist us—or individual Connecteds not affiliated with a larger group—add a measure of credibility to our efforts. The Shadow Court has its own inroads into similar organizations, you can be sure.”
“Those videos at Castle Odermatt.”
“Totally tracked those down,” Simon jumped in, his fingers racing over the keyboard. “Solidarity Pharmaceuticals is freaking huge, basically a delivery system for about eight hundred pharma labs worldwide. They’re totally pushing technoceuticals along with legit drugs—and they’re underwriting that Nobel science guy’s worldwide rainbow tour, supplying him with his vaccination drugs for disaster victims. The drug they’re pushing for that is a new one to me, Novadrine, and they’ve also got a secondary additive for local drinking supplies, some kind of catchall water purifier. They’re supplying him strictly for PR reasons, I think, and believe me, the PR is good, but I’m still digging into the background there. The time-share is a nonstarter. Standard monster villa in the middle of paradise, but their terms totally suck.”