“Oh my God, Sariah, you’re back! Let’s do this—Farraday Forever!”
I gaped as Tiffany Sacksteder burst out of the crowd, her bright eyes and wide smile shocking me to my toes. She looked like she hadn’t aged at all since I’d last seen her, when we’d both been seventeen and she’d been one of the most popular kids in class. She’d never been mean to me—hell, I think she’d invited me to one of her birthday parties—but it wasn’t like we were besties. What the hell had Sariah done before I’d gotten here?
The crackle of magic shot across the floor so quickly, I could do nothing but react. I knocked Tiffany to the ground and dove for Mary, cutting off the burst of magic before it reached her. Instead, it hit me square in the back.
And it hurt. A lot. I screamed, having missed the section in my Arcana Council user’s manual on how to be a tough guy, and internalized the racketing energy as best I could as another blaze of crackling energy shot across the room. I curled up in a ball as the delighted shouts around the bar turned to real concern.
After the shower of sparks petered out, I rolled to the side to see one of the most enigmatic members of the Council watching me with curiosity, his face alight in the electrical show. Nikola Tesla, the Hanged Man and arguably the planetary go-to guy for electricity. I should’ve known he would come down for all the excitement, since the Stratosphere was his domain. But who was shooting the fireballs?
Another burst of electricity skidded across the floor, but this time, Nikola stepped forward, gesturing with one elegant hand. I realized he had a wand of some sort in that hand, a wand that seemed to suck up all the exploding energy and redirect it upward, turning the ceiling into a constellation of stars. One of those stars literally burst in a shower of multicolor lights, but now everyone believed this was part of the show. They erupted into spontaneous applause as I scrambled over to Mary, who now huddled on the ground, her curly hair decidedly singed.
“Sariah?” she squeaked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said, reaching toward her, then realized my fingers were still spitting sparks. I focused a little harder and willed my hands to return to normal. Around us, the crowd had swung back into full-tilt party time, but I recognized the fastidious pants legs of Nikola Tesla sharply creased above his polished wingtip shoes as they strolled up to us. The guy made absolutely no attempt to hide his identity, and unlike many of the members of the Arcana Council, he had a quite well-known face. This being Vegas, of course, everyone just assumed he was an impersonator, but he didn’t seem to mind that either. Nikola Tesla was happiest when he was pulling something over on a gullible crowd. Some things never changed.
Now he helped me up, extending an aristocratic hand to Mary as well, and she rolled to her feet, her eyes going wide.
“Wow, you look amazing,” she gasped. I didn’t know if Mary had any idea who Nikola Tesla had been, but her enthusiasm was as warm and infectious as it had been when we were fifteen. Even the Hanged Man was not immune to her charms.
“You’re unharmed?” he asked. She nodded enthusiastically, giving him a broad smile.
“Nothing hurt but my ego. It’s been a few years since I’ve tried a handstand.”
“Mary,” cried Tiffany, bursting back on the scene with two full glasses of a vaguely tropical-smelling concoction. “You’ve got to try this.”
“Ha! Farraday forever!” Mary laughed delightedly, the two of them turning from me and tipping their heads together in a gesture that reminded me so forcibly of high school that I blinked. I suspected these two women had gone on to different lives, certainly different colleges and cities after they graduated, and yet they’d come together again as if no time at all had passed. Once more it was as if I was standing on the outside looking in. Not excluded intentionally, but excluded nevertheless.
I’d forgotten I had an audience of my own.
“Surely, you’ve gotten used to it by now,” Nikola observed beside me, the comment oddly human from a guy who’d been little more than ether when I’d met him, hiding in electrical fields to avoid his work on the Council. “Though I suppose you are still quite young.”
“Nice wand,” I countered. “Something else you put a patent on?”
He spread his hands, and the wand reappeared in his palm for just a moment before vanishing again. “A Tesla grounding rod, actually. The latest technology. I’m honored you’ve been keeping up with my research.”
Nikola Tesla had not been idle these past several months since he’d returned to the Arcana Council. Though he took some pains to keep his work under the radar, his patent processes had caught the attention of Simon, particularly since Tesla insisted on submitting them under his own name. To a one, they’d been rejected with strongly worded reprimands about identity appropriation.
“You’re going to have to come up with a pseudonym,” I informed him.
He waved me off with an imperious gesture. “There is no patent on an individual’s name. If a Mary Smith from 1932 submitted a patent, and a Mary Smith from 2019 submitted a patent, is the latter Mary Smith to be denied simply because she had the audacity to be named the same as a previous patent owner? Surely not. I will persevere.”
“Was that what all this was here, then? Some kind of magic show? I felt someone watching me right before the energy jolt. Did you do all that?”
“I did not,” Tesla informed me, his own excitement sharpening. “I recognized the gathering of extreme electricity in my domain, of course, and checked the video monitors. I saw that abomination of your alter ego carrying on with the tourists as if she had no sense of pride, but that in and of itself was not alarming. She is an effusive volcano of chaos.”
I grinned, but didn’t disagree with him.
“Importantly, my security cameras also picked up on three individuals in the crowd I could not identify. A man and two women. While their bodies were in relative view, their faces were blurred, almost masked, which, of course, should not be possible. Not with the Arcana Council’s technology. At that point, I came down to investigate in person, and by then you’d arrived.”
Instantly, I thought of Simon’s admission from earlier today. “So you mean the Shadow Court has upgraded, somehow? There’s now someone out there with masking tech that’s defeating even our best surveillance?”
Nikola lifted one elegant shoulder. “So it would seem.”
“Well, great. Now that they’re aware we’re trying to find them, it appears they’re taking particular interest in reminding us of our failings. Were you able to figure out who they were even without facial recognition?”
He hesitated. “The man left with the arrival of Sariah, the women only departed after I redirected their electrical display. Those two were young, perhaps in their mid-twenties, dressed casually. They kept to the back, deliberately avoiding the fracas at the bar.”
“As if they thought they might be recognized.” Was one of these women the person who sent me the antagonizing note? Did I have more than one enemy at Farraday High? And who could have possibly held a grudge that long, anyway? I’d been a virtual nobody in high school, even after I’d started working with Brody. Whoever had penned that note had said I wasn’t worthy, and back then—she’d been right. I definitely hadn’t thought of myself as worthy. So how had I pissed someone off all those years ago?