Vegas Knights (34 page)

  Walter crouched among the couches, using one for cover as he pumped another round into his shotgun. Mamaci stood behind him, chanting something in a language I'd never heard before. Her hands glowed a dark red that grew in strength and intensity as she spoke. Houdini stalked toward them, undeterred by Walter's threats.

  "Come on!" Walter shouted. He let loose another blast at the dead man, but the buckshot disappeared before it ever had a chance to reach him. "Let's finish this, you vampire!"

  Houdini smiled. "I am nothing so cartoonish as that." He spread his arms wide in front of him and strode right toward the armed man.

  "Walter!" Powi shouted. "Knock it off! You can't hurt him that way."

  The chaos didn't seem to disturb Dad at all. "Just a little bit longer, baby," he said. "We're almost there."

  Houdini stopped right in front of Walter, his arms still spread wide. "Please," he said. "Give it your best shot."

  "No!" I shouted. "Don't!"

  Walter's gaze flicked toward me for an instant, but he ignored my warning. He jabbed his shotgun at Houdini's chest and pulled the trigger.

  The shotgun boomed, but Houdini didn't move an inch. Instead, Walter shouted out in agony and fell to the floor, blood blossoming from the gaping wound that had appeared in his chest.

  "You monster!" Powi charged from around the altar. "What did you do?"

  I stepped between her and Houdini, grabbed her by the arm, and swung her about. She had been too focused on Walter to notice me before, and she gasped in surprise and then hugged me. Holding her to me, I backed her away from Houdini.

  "I didn't pull the trigger that killed your friend here," Houdini said. "He did. I merely arranged for him to suffer the effects he intended for me."

  Mamaci glowered at Houdini. "Walter was a good man," she said. "You will pay for his death, Weiss, and for the harm you have caused so many others over your too-many years."

  "He can take up that topic with me in a few moments," Houdini said. "In the meantime, I need your help with a project of mine."

  "I will never lend aid to you," Mamaci said. She brought her hands up in front of her. They glowed with so much power that I had to shade my eyes to look at them.

  "How darling," Houdini said. "You actually think I was giving you a choice."

  Mamaci charged at Houdini, her hands spread wide, and he leaped into the air and kept going. He stopped just short of the room's high ceiling. She dashed straight beneath him and came skidding to a halt after she passed him by, like a bull grazing past a toreador. She spun around and saw him sitting lotus-style in mid-air, gloating down at her

  "You cannot escape me up there," she said. She rose into the air herself, and once she was level with Houdini she came at him again.

  He did nothing to avoid her. Instead, as she closed with him, he put up his hands to meet hers.

  Mamaci let loose a furious howl and struck at Houdini with all she had. Instead of dodging the attack, he grabbed her by the wrists and held her away from him at arm's length.

  "I will destroy you!" Mamaci said.

  Houdini let loose a humorless laugh. "Use your power," he said. "Pour it into your efforts against me. Do your worst!"

  Mamaci did just that, struggling against Houdini with all her might. Every muscle in her body strained with the effort. Her nostrils flared wide, and her lips drew back from her gritted teeth. The air crackled with power between them.

  Despite that, nothing Mamaci did seemed to affect Houdini in any way. The glow around her began to fade, and I wondered how much more she could possibly have in her.

  "Powaqa!" Mamaci said. "I need you!"

  Powi stared up at the two people wrestling in the air. "We need to help her," Powi said.

  "How?" I asked. "Nothing she's doing seems to be working."

  Mamaci screamed in horror and pain.

  "We have to do
something!
" Powi said.

  She broke away from me and dashed over to where Walter's shotgun lay next to him on the floor. Houdini had already shown how dangerous it would be to use a gun against him, but Powi seemed too desperate to worry about that.

  I couldn't let Powi suffer the same fate as Walter though. "I'm on it!" I shouted.

  I crouched down to leap up at the pair. Maybe if I flew at them hard enough and fast enough I could knock them apart. Or maybe I'd just get tangled up with them and find myself in the same dire trouble as Mamaci.

  "Jackson, no!" Dad shouted. I looked back to see him still sitting on the altar. Now, though, he wore the same reddish glow as Mamaci. While the glow around her had faded, though, his had grown.

  I knew then what was happening – and that I'd been about to attack the wrong person. I lowered my shoulder, leaped forward, and rocketed straight toward my dad instead.

 
 

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
 

I slammed into my father hard and knocked him backward off the altar. Together, we smashed through a window behind him and careened into the wraparound balcony just beyond. We didn't come to a stop until we hit the stone and steel railing.

  Dad bellowed in pain and frustration as we fell into a tangle on the balcony. "Jackson!" he said. "You idiot!"

  I shoved myself away from him and scrambled to my feet. "I can't let you do this, Dad. I don't care how good you think your reasons are. It's wrong."

  Dad's face fell. "You think I don't know that? I've thought about nothing other than that for years. I still haven't made my peace with it, but I'm going to do what has to be done."

  "Then I'm going to stop you."

  Dad spoke in a sad, quiet voice as he got to his feet. "You're too late, Jackson. It's already done."

  I turned to peer back in through the window, and I saw Houdini standing over Mamaci's body. Despite the fact she barely came up to my shoulders in life, I'd never thought of the woman as small. Crumpled into a heap, she looked tiny and shriveled.

  Powi charged at Houdini. Instead of firing the shotgun at him, she grabbed it by the barrel and swung it like a club. He reached up and caught it in one hand, and it bent around his grip as if it had been made of rubber.

  Powi was too surprised to stop Houdini as he twisted the shotgun out of her grasp. It clattered on the floor.

  "Please don't, Miss Strega," Houdini said to Powi. "For your own sake, you need to recognize that it's already too late. You've lost."

  "What do you mean?" Powi said. "Nothing's changed. Not one damned bit."

  I climbed back in through the window, keeping half an eye on my dad. I didn't think he'd try to sucker punch me if I turned my back on him, but if the night had proved one thing to me it was that I didn't know him as well as I thought I had. The man I knew would never have gotten involved in a scheme like this, especially if it meant that someone would have to die.

  "Of course it has," Houdini said. "Death no longer holds sway over any of us. The barrier between this world and the next has finally fallen. We have conquered eternity."

  A smile spread so far across his face that I thought it might split open his head. He looked at me and said. "We are all immortals now."

  I strode over to Powi's side. Tears streamed down her face as she glared at Houdini. "You murderous bastard," she said in a raw, low whisper. She pointed down at Mamaci. "Does she look immortal to you?"

  Houdini nodded in sympathy. "I needed her mojo for the spell. All of it, I'm afraid. She had to die – permanently – so that the rest of us could live."

  Powi launched herself at him, but I grabbed her by the arms and held her back. I knew that he would take her apart. We might not be able to die anymore, but I was sure Houdini could make it so that we wished we could.

  Powi spun around to snarl at me, then saw who I was. The grief for her grandmother shoved aside her fury for the moment. She wrapped her arms around my neck and buried her face in my shoulder as she sobbed. I held her close and comforted her the best I could.

  As Powi wept, I cocked my head at Houdini. "Shouldn't there be a pealing of horns announcing a heavenly host right about now?"

  "That's a foolish tale told to fool fools," Houdini said. "A fairy tale meant to make people feel safe as they face down the facts of their own inexorable mortality. The reality we've engineered today is much simpler and more beautiful than that."

  "How so?"

  Powi stopped crying and wiped her tears on my shirt.

  "Death no longer has dominion over humanity," Houdini said. "Our indestructible souls – for lack of a better word – those essential sparks of energy that make us who we are, they can no longer be forced from our bodies. We will all live for all eternity – and the dead will come back to join us."

  "And you really don't see how badly this might go?" Powi asked, her voice thick and raw.

  "The tragedy is that you don't see how right it will be."

  "Jackson." Dad spoke from behind me, his voice trembling with raw emotion. "Son. I need your help."

  I looked back to see Dad standing behind the altar, his hands splayed across its wide stone surface. He seemed to be trying to stare straight through it.

  "I think you've done enough today," I said.

  "There are a few details left," Houdini said.

  "I did this for you." Dad stared at me with wide, red eyes, then caressed the stone under his hands. "You and your mother."

  I felt ill.

  "You're out of your mind. Even if you defeated death, what good does that do Mom? We never found her body. You want to just go back to Grandma's and wait for Mom's rotting corpse to drag itself out of the delta and come dripping up to the door?"

  "There's no need for that," said Houdini. "You don't need to hunt for her. She's already here."

  I goggled at him and then at my dad, who stood next to the altar. He couldn't meet my eyes.

  "I spent the better part of a year finding her. Recovering her," he said. "Once I found her, I knew – I knew what I had to do."

  A pounding sound came beneath Dad, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Looking down, I realized I had started to fly off in my terror and was hanging a full foot off the floor. Powi pulled me back down.

  The pounding sound came again and again. It started off slow and hesitant but became louder with every beat.

  "Desiree?" Dad threw his arms wide across the top of the altar. "I'm right here, baby."

  "Who?" Powi said. She was still angry, but the way Dad was acting had given her pause.

  My mouth had run dry, and I had to swallow before I could reply. "My mom."

  Houdini came over to stand at the altar, directly across from my dad. Dad looked up at him with tears welling in his eyes, and Houdini nodded. They each reached down and put their hands under the top of the altar, then lifted.

  The lid came right off. Made of a thick slab of stone, it had to have weighed hundreds of pounds. I would have needed a forklift to move it – without magic.

  Dad and Houdini hoisted it up and slid it over to an open spot on the floor as if it were made of Styrofoam. When it hit the floor, it sounded like an explosion.

  "Luke?" The voice came from within the exposed center of the altar. I recognized it right away.

  The granite box sitting in Houdini's office all this time had not been a desk or an altar.

  It was my mother's tomb.

  "Oh, Dad," I said. I wanted to say more, but horror choked me off.

  "Desiree?" Dad leaned over the edge of the crypt to peer in at my mother. "Oh, baby. Oh, no. It's going to be all right."

  I didn't want to look. I wanted to remember my mom as the sweet and beautiful lady I'd always known her to be, not a bloated, bug-eaten corpse. Then she called my name.

  "Jackson?" she said. "Where's Jackson?"

  "He's right here, baby. We're both right here."

  Dad glanced at me, but all I could do was stay with my feet rooted to the spot. I shook my head at him. The fact that he'd worked so hard for this – that he'd abandoned me in New Orleans for so long – meant that he needed this to be a success. Even if everything went wrong, this had to be a success in his mind, or he might entirely snap.

  Dad reached in to the crypt and hauled Mom up to a sitting position so he could hold her in his arms. That's when I finally saw her.

  She looked better than I had expected. Her skin seemed rubbery and gray, but it had not decayed much over the years since she had died. She reeked of formaldehyde. I noticed a bit of vapor rising from the crypt, and I realized the interior must have been refrigerated, keeping Mom as well-preserved as possible for all that time.

  Her eyes, though, were gone. Empty sockets gaped back at me instead of the beautiful brown orbs I'd looked to as a child for love and guidance. She opened her mouth to speak, exposing blackened gums holding crooked teeth where there had once been a dazzling smile.

  "Where are you, Jackson?" she said. "Where's my baby? I'm so cold. Can someone turn on the lights? Why can't I see my baby?"

  "We need to heal her," Dad said. He held out a hand to Houdini. "We have to heal her now. We can't leave her like this."

  Houdini frowned. "I have been waiting for far longer than your wife, Luke."

  "But you're not in the pain that she is. Look at her."

  Houdini scoffed. "She is beyond pain. The discomfort she feels is only in her mind."

  "Who is that?" Mom said. "Luke? Who's speaking?"

  "Shh, Desiree." Dad stroked her hair, some of which came out in clumps. "Don't fret. He's a friend. He's here to help."

  "It's Houdini, Mom."

  "Oh, god, Jackson! Is that you, honey? Where are you?" She reached out for me, and there was little I wanted more than to run into her arms and hold her and tell her everything was going to be all right. But I couldn't. This wasn't my mother, I knew – just her hollow, tortured shell.