“Is Viktor even aware of what he revealed today?” I asked. “If he revealed anything?”
Armaeus didn’t respond, but gestured me across the street, glancing both ways as if expecting trouble. Nothing came, and he inclined his head. “Viktor wanted to share what he did…at least part of it. He came to me a week ago, eager to talk, and welcomed the engagement of the High Priestess to help exonerate him from what he considered to be Kreios’s unwarranted focus. Not that he had a problem with the focus itself, just the intensity of it. He wanted the chance to share his story and would not do it without the High Priestess present.”
I frowned. “I don’t think she did him any favors.”
“It’s possible that the Emperor was not aware of the change in the High Priestess’s energies immediately prior to this meeting being called. He has been seeking such an audience for some time.”
“And you knew she was going to be hyper-triggered or whatever? Her aura was off the charts to me. Reading those isn’t really one of my skills, you know. But hers was insane. You could see it from the moon.”
“The High Priestess has been accelerating her abilities since you brought Lainie to her door. I know that was not your intent, but it has ended up being a remarkable development for the Council. Such a remarkable development that it begs the question of whether or not it was predestined.”
I rolled my eyes. “It was not. I ran into Lainie at a psychic festival. She didn’t come to me through Justice Hall.”
“Everything that happens, happens for a purpose, Miss Wilde. Perhaps not all your messages will come through traditional means, and we should remain hypervigilant.”
“You know, I get enough messages the traditional way, thanks. It’s not like I’m looking for… Um, what the hell is that?”
My attention had strayed to a row of flyers that were decorating temporary construction panels, flyers so faded, they could have been hanging there for years, not months. But these posters were promoting a current event. The first showed a retrostyle circus master with lions and tigers in the background, all of them grinning broadly. The top of the flyer read “A Call for Justice!” which was doubtless why it had caught my attention. But the bottom of the flyer promoted the Burning Man event with a start date of a few days previous. “What does a circus have to do with a call for Justice? Or Burning Man?” I didn’t miss the mention of “burning,” in particular. Did this have some connection with Lainie’s message in the smoke?
“There are more,” Armaeus murmured.
He was right. Nearly a dozen flyers distracted our attention from the linen-clad fire starters as we walked down the boulevard, each poster starkly different from the last, everything from neon ’80s splatter paint to high-tech hologram imagery that shifted as we passed it, to minimalist postmodern squares all boasting a Call for Justice above an ad for the Burning Man event in Black Rock City, Nevada.
“Burning Man… Dude. They don’t need to advertise. Not like this.”
I peered more closely at the posters, which seemed commercial grade, though that didn’t mean anything anymore when one could print from their home computer like a boss. But Burning Man—they were always very quick to make sure you didn’t call them a festival—was a pop-up collection of artistic installations and tent camps that served as a temporary home for something like seventy thousand people over a nine-day span every summer. Held out in the desert north of Reno, it mostly drew folks who yearned for a reason to go counterculture without getting too crazy about it, as well as celebrities, musicians, and social media nut jobs.
Bottom line, though, you had to have a ticket to get in, and those tickets sold out in a flash every spring. There’d be no point advertising the festival or whatever they wanted to call it in the height of August.
“Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured.
I saw it as soon as he did of course. The flyers shifted, the words across the top changing slightly. Where they had originally proclaimed a Call for Justice, that had changed. “A Cry for Justice,” I said drily. “Subtle.”
“The event is happening this week,” Armaeus said. “Most of the parties being held at Burning Man will be ratcheting up for their final weekend. Perhaps after you meet with your childhood friends in town for your reunion, we should respond to the call.”
“By going to Burning Man?” I curled my lip. “Have you been there before? Those people are totally nuts.”
The Magician didn’t respond, and I bumped my gaze forward again. “Our firebirds are going into the casino.”
“Indeed.” The Magician smiled. “Fortunately, like many of the older properties in this fair city, the Sahara Casino has been grandfathered into a type of reciprocal arrangement with Luxor.”
I smirked. “Meaning you guys can snack at each other’s buffets?”
“Meaning its technology is automatically fed into Simon’s systems. He has already reported the identity of the trio. The fact that we know their identity is encouraging, as that means they are likely not affiliated with the Shadow Court. We will gain more information about who they are affiliated with once they do something other than float around the pool or play the slot machines.”
“So until then, what? We wait?” I asked.
“In…a manner of speaking, yes.”
He reached for my hand, and a moment later, we were no longer walking down the sizzling-hot Las Vegas Boulevard, but sitting on a private veranda overlooking a vineyard. An actual vineyard, draped in the velvet dusk of a warm and humid evening.
“Nice grapes,” I deadpanned. “Just a little something you picked up?”
“So it would seem.” Armaeus selected a bottle of wine from the cart beside us, pouring the rich ruby liquid into crystal goblets. “Apparently, my family has owned this home since 1758. It is tucked into the Chambord area of France, fairly modest by most accounts, but with a surprising amount of land, which affords it exceptional privacy.”
I nodded, accepting the glass he proffered. “You didn’t know you had it?”
It wasn’t an idle question. Armaeus had recently recovered a swath of memories that had accompanied a surprising amount of real estate he simply had not remembered that he owned. Most of his discoveries were benign, but the sheer number of them was curious. To date, we had uncovered nearly two dozen properties spread out across the world, all of them occupied or at least managed by tenants or caretaking groups. Those maintenance contracts appeared to have been set in perpetuity, which was frankly remarkable considering the changes and governments, socioeconomic conditions, even wars that had occurred in the meantime.
The Magician had taken to bringing me to these discovered properties whenever the two of us needed to talk. It was too strange meeting in the places he remembered in every way except for how I interacted with him there, when I, of course, remembered them more fully. Armaeus’s library and spell room were okay as long as we didn’t go all the way back to where the pit loomed. I’d had some not so savory experiences with that pit. His office was awkward but manageable. His bedroom, not a chance. Even though I longed for the growing physical tension between us to be released, somehow—anyhow—we were proceeding cautiously on that front. Too cautiously, maybe.