Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 Read Online Free Page B

would ever make her hug herself with delight and possibility.
    She was gone. I was too late.
    Always too little, too late.
    I reached out, and another explosion of activity on the monitors penetrated my consciousness. On the table, a ripple shuddered across the girl’s face, and I heard—felt — knew her last moments: the screams, the cries, the prick of the needle in her neck, and the long spiraling crash toward—
    “No!”
    I jolted awake, sprawled out on Armaeus’s chair. Scrabbling like a crab, I crouched back into the cushions, my gaze swinging around. “What?” I said, too loudly. “What happened! Why am I here? Why did you—”
    “I brought you out of the session early.”
    Armaeus’s voice was a rock in the middle of a stormy sea, and I floundered toward it, shaking my head, trying to see. Gradually, too gradually, my eyes cleared and the vertigo edged down long enough for me to breathe.
    “Where… what…”
    “Eshe has departed. She received the information she needed. You did well, as you always do.” He studied me with his inscrutable gaze, and every one of my nerve endings flared with warning. “Perhaps too well.”
    “I—oh. Good.” I realized I was clutching a pillow, and I forced myself to unlock my hands from it, ordered myself to breathe. Carefully, deliberately, I set the pillow on the chair’s armrest. Patted it. “We’re good, then.” I drew in a long, stabilizing breath, and willed myself to pull it together. “We’re good.”
    “You didn’t need to flee the city to avoid Eshe.”
    Irritation crackled through my system, healing me faster than any positive affirmations ever could. I flicked my gaze to Armaeus, glad to note that my eyes were focusing again. “I didn’t ‘flee.’ I got bored.”
    “Bored.” Armaeus twisted his lips around the word. “How intriguing that your ennui coincided with the call Father Jerome placed to you, advising you of the new flood of Connected children on his doorstep. Children who, through his intercession, had barely avoided getting kidnapped, killed, and dismembered for the use of their body parts, whether by dark practitioners, SANCTUS, or both.”
    I winced, seeing their faces. So many kids, their expressions tight with confusion, their eyes hollow with fear. How many had Jerome already hidden away? How many more would he need to hide as the war on Connecteds continued to heat up?
    And why hadn’t we known about the pale, fragile blonde, dead on some table in Istanbul because we hadn’t reached her in time?
    Armaeus continued, oblivious to my distress. “I presume you are far less bored now, given that Father Jerome’s bank accounts have been increased by more than a hundred thousand dollars?”
    I scowled. “Nothing in my contract says I can’t take on additional work.”
    “If you needed additional work, I could have supplied it. My assignments will always take precedence over Eshe’s, as does my protection. Had I known you were avoiding her, I would already have intervened.”
    I closed my eyes to avoid having to respond to that one. Armaeus’s “assignments” came at the price of me being around Armaeus. And that had its own set of challenges. He wasn’t merely sex on a stick. He was dangerous at a primal level, gigging my lizard brain even when I wasn’t in the throes of a viselike headache.
    Man, my head hurt.
    “Miss Wilde.”
    “Just resting my eyes. Carry on.”
    He sighed with irritation. “Your instability is becoming a problem.”
    Oh? I opened up my right eye, the one that hurt less. “Not to me.”
    Armaeus scowled at me in monovision. “You’re on retainer to the Council.”
    “Not true.” I opened the other eye, then squinted. “You talk a good game, but right now, Eshe is the only one of you guys paying me. Trust me. I keep track of that stuff.”
    “And I would suggest that to take advantage of additional work opportunities, you must actually be here .”
    Finally we were getting somewhere. I