41.
Beyond the visitor center, double doors opened onto the museum lot. The grounds were a loving tribute to Vegas history, a sprawling maze of salvaged signs from the city’s birth through its golden years to today. There was the jagged flair of the Stardust’s marquee, the Arabian Nights spire of the Sahara Hotel, the sleek red lines of the Riviera. Memories of casinos long gone, nothing left of them but siren calls forged from neon and steel.
The signs and the footlights sat dark tonight, shadows under a muddy sky, and the only light came from the strobing police barricade beyond the perimeter wall. My host in the balaclava gave me a nudge with the barrel of his gun, marching me deeper inside.
They had five hostages, not three. Along with my brother, Seabrook, and Harding, a pair of employees sat kneeling and cuffed with zip ties in the heart of a small clearing. They were sweating, but they weren’t bleeding. Teddy was the most disheveled of the bunch, his shirt torn and his face scuffed. He’d tried to fight. I figured he would. My escort in black had a pack of friends. I counted eight heads and eight guns, mostly rifles with a few sidearms in the mix. A couple circled the kneeling hostages like sharks. Another walked the top of a low steel sign, patrolling like a prison guard on a catwalk. They didn’t look nervous.
Teddy’s eyes went wide when he saw me, but he kept his lips tight. I didn’t have time for a family reunion anyway. Ms. Fleiss, back in her human form, was striding my way.
“If he takes one step toward his brother,” she said, “shoot him. In fact, shoot them both.”
Now I had eight muzzles pointing right at me. Fleiss stood before me, imperious.
“That was the plan, wasn’t it?” she asked. “We are aware of some of the wand’s properties. You were going to feign a surrender, lay hands on your brother, and teleport him to safety.”
I let my shoulders sag, just a little. “You got me.”
“And leave the others to die.” Fleiss tilted her head. I watched my reflection in her onyx sunglasses.
“What can I say?” I replied. “I’m ruthless like that.”
“Hand it over. Now.”
I gave her the mailbag. She shook it out between us, opened it with both hands, and peered inside. Then she looked up at me, somewhere between puzzled and irritated.
“What is this?”
“Oh, that’s an empty sack,” I said.
“You’re playing games with me? Now? With your brother’s life hanging in the balance? What do you think you’re doing, Faust?”
“We were already playing a game. Your game, Elmer Donaghy’s, the monsters you both answer to. I didn’t have a choice. You forced me to join in. But here’s the thing: I’ve always believed that if you don’t like the rules of the game you’re playing, change the rules. If you can’t do that, cheat like your life depends on it.”
Fleiss glanced to the closest gunman and snapped her fingers.
“You. If Mr. Faust doesn’t produce the wand and the hat in the next ten seconds, shoot his brother in the left kneecap.”
Teddy had kept his silence, not sure how to play this, but now he shot a nervous look in my direction. “Uh, Dan?”
“We will start with the left kneecap,” Fleiss told me.
“I came here with a gamble in mind,” I said. “Did you know the wand only works when you’re trying to save a life?”
She curled her lips in a sneer. “Yes. And to transport someone away from danger, it only works with direct physical contact. There’s ten feet between the two of you, and unless you’ve developed some remarkable new abilities since we last met, you can’t outrun a bullet.”
“That’s not the gamble I’m making. And it’s not his life I’m trying to save.”
I flexed my wrist, triggered the spring sheath, and Canton’s wand dropped into my outstretched fingers. A spark of raw magic surged along my arm and the wand kicked in my hand like a conductor’s baton.
I touched the bone tip to Fleiss’s heart, grabbed the rim of the sack with my other hand, and pulled it over both of our heads. The canvas billowed down and the darkness swallowed us whole.
* * *
The first and only time I’d teleported with the wand, it had been almost instantaneous. One moment I’d thrown myself into a locker and shut the door, the next I was bursting out onto a catwalk twenty feet above a firefight.
This time, the darkness in-between lingered. I felt the bag trying to open, straining against my willpower as it struggled to disgorge its passengers. I breathed slow and steady, steeling myself.
Beside me, Fleiss wheeled around, flailing in all directions and clawing at the void.
“Where are we?” she snapped. “Let me go. Let me go!”
“The wand wouldn’t work if you weren’t in danger, isn’t that right?”
“Meaningless.”
“It wouldn’t work if I wasn’t trying to save you,” I said. “If I didn’t want to help you.”
She turned on me, seething. “I don’t need your help.”
A thin gray rectangle opened in the darkness, off to our left. The exit. I wouldn’t be able to hold the bag back much longer before it spewed both of us out into the world again.
“Listen to me,” I said. “Who taught you?”
“What?”
“Simple question. You’re a witch. Who taught you how to use magic?”
“My…my lord did.” Fleiss took a halting half step back. “He created me. He taught me everything I know.”
“Really? Is he a witch?”
Her jaw clenched, her bottom lip starting to tremble. “No, but he knows things.”
“Tell me about one time,” I said. “One memory where he taught you something. I mean, you must remember, right? I could tell you stories for days about when I was learning magic. Tell me one of yours.”
“I don’t…I don’t want to.”
“There’s one thing no magician ever forgets: the first time a spell actually worked. Everybody has a story about that. Tell me yours. What was it? What did you do?”
The fuzzy gray oblong kept growing. Fleiss spotted it. She ran over, hooked her fingers around the edges, and tried to wrench it open.
“He didn’t create you,” I said. “He just stole you. But this is your chance. You can run. You don’t have to go back to him. Let me help you. Let me take you home.”
“He is my home,” she shouted, her voice edged with jagged-glass desperation.
I only had a few seconds before the spell would shatter, before she’d escape and I’d lose any hope of saving her. There was one card left to play, the words of the Lady in Red.
“What is a witch’s creed?”
She froze. The oblong grew to the size of a door, crackling with static and cold gray fog. Wide open, but she didn’t step through.
“You’re a witch,” I said, “so tell me: what is a witch’s creed?”
“Freedom,” she whispered, in a voice too soft for the power of the word. A voice that didn’t believe.
Then she plunged her arms into the gray and the spell ruptured, spitting us both into reality with a dizzying, ear-popping lurch of motion. I spilled onto hard gravel, rolling, and Caitlin’s hands caught me. She helped me up and Jennifer rushed to stand at my side.
Wind whipped by, icy and swift, and I snatched the second half of the plan—the other canvas sack, my intended destination—before it could blow off the edge of the roof.
We were on the other end of the block, up on the roof of the Siegel Suites. Fleiss looked to the distant cordon and then to the neon boneyard on the far side of a wall of cops. Her nails stretched, turning jagged and black, as she turned to face us.
“I will kill you all,” she whispered.
“Thank you,” I said. The wand flared, sensing the threat, and Caitlin and Jennifer both touched my shoulders. One riffle of canvas, a glimmer of shadow, and we were gone.
* * *
Caitlin was the first to burst loose on the other side, breaking free from the billowing sack in a full-on sprint. She ran, low like a panther, drawing a crackle of gunfire as she scrambled up a cold neon sign. The shooter on the makeshift catwalk had just enough time to scream before she was on him, her shark’s teeth tearing into his throat.
The distraction turned heads and bought us the two seconds we needed, popping out right on her heels. One for Jennifer to toss me the backup deck of cards she’d been holding onto, and one for me to let it fly. The cards flew in a hornet swarm toward the hostages and I twirled my wand, evoking Canton’s Multiplication. Fifty-two cards sprouted and became five hundred and twenty, forming a whirlwind. A desperate peal of bullets plowed into the cards, dropping a handful to the dust, but the hostages inside the fluttering shell were still in one piece.
Jennifer broke right, chrome gleaming in her fist. She let off two shots and a gunman’s head snapped back, blood spray trailing him down like an arc of wet rubies in the dark. I grabbed his fallen rifle, swung the barrel around, and let it rip, lighting up the park with short staccato bursts.
A thunderclap sounded from the visitor center. The cops had heard the gunfire and assumed the hostages were being executed. They were coming in.
I’m a lousy shot with a rifle, but all I had to do was keep the shooters by the exit pinned down. A ragged, wet howl off behind my left shoulder told me Caitlin was on the move, picking off anyone who tried to get close. Jennifer crouched low outside the whirlwind of cards, adding to the hail of bullets.
My rifle ran dry as white smoke erupted from the visitor-center doors. More shots echoed from that direction, the hoarse shouts of the incoming SWAT troopers ringing out over the dying groans of one of Fleiss’s men. I tossed my empty weapon to the ground and let the whirlwind fall; playing cards clattered to the pavement in a cardboard hailstorm.
Then I got on my knees next to the other hostages and laced my fingers behind my neck. Commissioner Harding was right beside me, looking like his eyes were about to jump out of his head.
“Great job,” I told him. “Getting yourself free and grabbing a gun like you did, shooting all those bad guys. You saved us all.”
The wind shifted and the white fog washed in. Sudden tears stung my eyes, and the back of my nose burned like I’d snorted a fistful of chopped red pepper. I looked to my left, seeing dark figures storm in through the smoke. And Caitlin and Jennifer, kneeling on my other side, following my lead and playing hostage. I figured I should say something pithy, but then I got a lungful of the smoke and the racking, heaving coughs began, and I couldn’t think about anything except how much I hated tear gas.