Vegas Knights (29 page)

  "Ah." He smiled. "I suppose that seems like a long time to you. From my point of view, it's not so much. And I haven't been down here the whole time. I come up for supplies from time to time."

  "Either way," Bill said, "we need to get out of here. Now."

  "What's the rush?" Prospero said. "It's safe down here, and we have everything we need. Wait out that war. Far better to hunker down here than be killed up there."

  "That's a coward's way of looking at it," said Powi.

  Prospero's smile faded. "And who are you to call me a coward?

  Powi stuck out her chin and put her hands on her waist. "Powaqa Strega."

  "Ah. I knew your parents. They were as brave as you are, and they paid for that with their lives."

  Powi softened for an instant at the mention of her parents, but she stiffened the moment Prospero spoke of their demise. "I'd rather die out there than live down here like a rat in a cage."

  "Of course you would, but how about your friends? Maybe they're not so eager to march to their deaths." He pointed at Bill. "You're going to fight
for
the Cabal? And yet you're here with her? I'm surprised one of you isn't dead already."

  "I just joined yesterday."

  "That is an epic case of poor timing, my boy. Do you yet bear the mark?"

  Bill had been keeping his exposed arm away from Prospero, but now he turned it in that direction, putting his fresh tattoo on display.

  "Ah." Prospero grimaced. "Then for you it may already be too late. Has it started to burn?"

  Bill rubbed the ankh and nodded. "I thought it was just getting itchy because it was beginning to heal."

  Prospero shook his head. "That mark is no ordinary tattoo. It will never heal, and its ink will never fade."

  The man sat up and swung back his long hair, pushing his own shoulder into the light cast by the task lamp clamped over his workbench. An ankh sat on the middle of it, as dark and sleek as the identical one on Bill's arm."

  "You don't have a circle around your arm though," I said.

  "Good eye, my boy," Prospero said. "That's because I made my mark myself. I refused to let anyone bind me to him in the process."

  "By anyone, you mean Houdini."

  "Of course. No one else but Harry and I know how to make it. I came up with the magic behind the mark, and he thought of the cuff. I should have used it to bind him to me back then. Then we wouldn't have any of this nonsense."

  Powi, Bill, and I glanced at each other. "You came up with the mark?" I said.

  "Of course I did," said Prospero. "How do you think I've lived so long?"

  "It – it makes you immortal?" asked Bill.

  "Well, of course it does." Prospero glared at Bill. "That's the deal: live for ever but be bound to the Cabal for that entire time. Don't they bother to tell you anything when you get it?"

  Powi and I stared at Bill. He gave us a sheepish shrug. "I was pretty drunk."

  "So you live for ever?" Powi asked, her tone dripping with skepticism. "How old are you?"

  "Hold on." Prospero rolled his eyes toward the ceiling as he ran the math. "Yes. That's right. I'll be one hundred and thirty-four years old this week."

  "You don't look a day over one hundred," Powi said. "But that's hardly for ever."

  "Granted," Prospero said with a dismissive wave. "Time will put this to the true test, but so far it's worked all right."

  "Who are you?" I asked. "I mean, really. Your real name. Not the one you stole from
The Tempest
."

  Prospero squinted at me. "Now that's a loaded question, my boy. I do hope you're not one of those magicians who goes prattling on about the power you can have over someone if only you can learn his true name. You should know by now that's a load of hogwash."

  "I just like to know who I'm talking to."

  "Fair enough," he said. "I was born Ferencz Dezco Weisz, in Budapest, Hungary. We moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, when I was but two years old. I took on the name Theodore Weiss in our new home. My family called me either Theo or Dash, but when I grew up and took to the stage, I was known as Theodore Hardeen."

  My breath almost caught in my throat, but I managed to croak out, "You're Houdini's little brother."

  He stood and bowed. "In the still-living flesh. But I don't think I got your name yet either, my boy. Fair's fair."

  "Wisdom," I said. "Jackson Wisdom."

  Hardeen narrowed his eyes at me. "You wouldn't happen to be related to Luke Wisdom."

  "I'm his son."

  A wide grin burst through his beard, and he stuck out a delicate hand. "My boy. You don't know how good it is to meet you. How is your father?"

  I shook his hand. Despite how grizzled he appeared, his hands were warm and soft. "He's – he works for your brother."

  "Oh." The grin disappeared. "Then things must have become very dire indeed. I had hoped that Luke would never return to Las Vegas again."

  "He came back here after my mother died. He wanted to work with Houdini to bring her back to life."

  "After they figured out the same for Harry, of course. It's one thing to keep someone alive, but another thing entirely to bring them back from the dead – especially when they've been gone as long as he has."

  "But not impossible?"

  "You can't create something out of nothing. If the spark of life is gone, we mere mortals cannot reignite it."

  "What about those zombies?" asked Bill.

  "Those are the results of Harry's failed experiments. He dumps them in the storm tunnels here to keep others out – and to keep me in."

  "Then what's with Houdini?" I said. "He's a lot more articulate than any of those zombies."

  "Can't say the same for his bodyguards though," said Bill.

  "I'm the one who brought him back to the land of the living," Hardeen said. "It was the hardest bit of magic I'd ever done, and I couldn't have managed it without his help."

  "He reached out to you from beyond the grave?" Bill said.

  "No. He and I worked on a lot of these theories before he died. We even worked out the secret of the ankhs and applied them to ourselves. While the ankh might keep you from dying, it doesn't stop you from getting killed. If he hadn't already had an ankh on him, though, there's no way I would have been able to bring him back to his current semblance of life."

  "And now he wants to finish what you two started," I said.

  "That's what we both wanted at first. But that was back in the days when we both got along. When we realized what it would take to bring him back to life, I balked, but he decided to press on. That's what finally drove the wedge between us."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" asked Bill. "What price would be too high to bring your brother back?" He looked at me. "Or to have your mother back, Jackson? Did they want you to eat babies?"

  "Much worse than that, I fear." Hardeen didn't want to meet our eyes. "The wall between this life and the next has proven impenetrable. To remedy that, Harry plans to destroy that barrier."

  Powi, Bill, and I stared at Hardeen.

  "And – and what happens then?" I asked.

  "Are you God-fearing folks?" Hardeen said.

We all shook our heads.

  "Well, if Harry manages to break down that wall, I suspect you will be."

 
 

CHAPTER THIRTY
 

Bill cried out in agony. He clutched at his arm as he fell over into one of Hardeen's musty couches.

  "What is it?" I rushed over to him. He had turned pale and clammy. His teeth were clamped together too tight for him to do anything other than growl in pain.

  I pulled his hand off his arm so I could get a look at it. The skin under and around the band of his tattoo had grown an angry red, and it was spreading.

  "Oh, no," Powi said. "I've heard about this before."

  Hardeen grunted. "That's what it looks like when Harry decides to drain one of his people dry. He steals all of their magical energy."

  "Is that fatal?" I asked, afraid I already knew the answer.

  "Life is magic. Magic is life," said Hardeen. "You can't separate them. You lose one, you lose the other too."

  "I thought Houdini could only do this with people in the same room with him though," said Powi. She glanced around the bunker, suspicious. "He's not here is he? Or are you doing this?"

  "It's not me," Hardeen said. "Now that the Indian shamans have finally decided to launch their assault against Harry, my guess is that he's decided it's time to put his ultimate plan into action. Otherwise, he risks losing everything."

  "What does that have to do with what's happening to Bill?" I asked.

  "Harry needs as much magical energy as he can control to pull off a feat of this magnitude. To get that, he'll have to drain every one in the Cabal at once. It makes him both incredibly vulnerable and monumentally dangerous at the same time."

  Powi nodded. "He won't have anyone to protect him, but he probably won't need it."

  "He's going to kill everyone who works for him? At once?" I said. "Bill? Dad too?"

  "If he's working for Harry, I'd bet on it," said Hardeen.

  "How can we stop him?"

  "My guess is that you can't. Once Armageddon starts, there's no stopping it."

  Powi and I gaped at him. Bill rolled on the couch and groaned in heartbreaking agony. Somewhere in Las Vegas, my father – and all the people I'd met in the magician's lounge – were probably doing the same.

  "You can stay here with me if you like," Hardeen said. "It's not much, but we can probably hole up here indefinitely. I can even show you how to put the ankhs on yourselves."

  I rushed Hardeen, grabbed him by the front of his greasy shirt, and shoved him up against his worktable. "That is not an option," I said through gritted teeth. "You're going to get us out of here, and we're going to stop that bastard or die trying."

  He smiled up at me. "Death it is then. There's no stopping Harry. He'll kill us all for sure."

  "And then he'll break down the barrier between this world and the next, and we'll come back and try it again," Powi said. "What do we have to lose?"

  I pushed myself away from Hardeen and gave Powi a high five that pulled us into a hug. We looked at each other, scared as hell, and smiled. "I like the way you think," I said.

  Bill bellowed in pain, and I turned toward Hardeen again. "Just get us out of here then," I said. "If the rest of the Cabal is in the same kind of shape as Bill, we should be able to just walk into Houdini's home and put a bullet in his head."

  "It's not that simple," said Hardeen. "It never is. Even without his magicians, Harry commands a good-sized army of well-trained, fully armed security guards."

  "I have just the thing for them," I said. "How many of those zombies are out there anyhow?"

  Hardeen goggled at me while he worked out what I meant. The pounding on the door outside of the bunker hadn't slowed down one bit. Then he hazarded a small smile. "Maybe just enough."

  Powi stared up at the ceiling. "We can't just run out past them though," she said. "They'll catch us for sure."

  "There's a back door right there," Hardeen said. "Straight back beyond the bed. It opens onto a stairwell that ends in a steel shack on the edge of the empty lot up above us. From there, it's a straight shot to Bootleggers."

  "Right down one of the busiest streets in Las Vegas." Powi put her head in her hands. "But I don't have any better ideas."

  "We need to keep them as focused on us as we can," I said. "Hopefully everyone else will get out of their way."

  "What about Bill?" Powi said. "We can't just leave him here. They'll kill him for sure."

  "Of course you can," said Hardeen. "That will give us the head start we need."

  "Forget it," I said. "We're not leaving him behind. I'll carry him the whole way if I have to."

  "Wait," Powi said. "'We'? Are you coming with us?"

  Hardeen smiled. "I can't very well stay here while you lead a horde of zombies through, can I?"

  "Does that mean you're going to help us?"

  Hardeen's smile morphed into a grimace. "I'm responsible – at least in part – for what Harry's become. At this point, I don't know that all the magicians in the world banded together could hope to stop him. But I've had a long, miserable life, and I gave up on hope long ago anyhow, so I don't see why that should stop me."

  "That's great," I said, "but I'm still not leaving Bill behind."

  "If you insist." Hardeen sighed. "Come upstairs with me. I have something that should make the journey a little easier."

  I hauled Bill to his feet. While Powi held him steady, I bent down to grab him around the waist. With a grunt, I threw him back over my shoulder and then stood up. "Let's go," I said to Hardeen.

  He led us through the debris in his sleeping area and unbolted and unbarred another steel door for us. He brought us up the stairwell beyond and opened an aluminum hatch that capped it. That brought us into a small, sweltering shed made of corrugated steel. He opened its lone door, and we emerged into the dying rays of the Las Vegas day.

  The sun had already set behind the mountains, leaving the sky a bright but darkening blue. A few stars shone in the eastern sky, chasing growing streaks of orange and purple across the cloudless expanse.

  "Here you go." Hardeen pushed a shopping cart over to me. "Put him in here."

  "You have to be kidding me." I said.

  "I had a bellhop's cart up here for a while," he said. "But some college kids absconded with it."

  I looked north up the Strip toward Bootleggers. To get there, we'd have to cross a major road, then hoof it past Revolutions and Circus Circus before we reached Bootleggers.