Page 15 of Cathmoir’s Sons (Bad Boys of Bevington #5)

Chapter 15

Honeymoon in Vegas

LUCA

I stand at the back of the auditorium, shoulder-to-shoulder with Law. He’s watching Kellan as she sits between her friends Rachel and Teddy half-way down the tiers of seats. His intensity is creepy, even to me.

I elbow him. “Act casual.”

“Fuck off,” he hisses, although very quietly, since Jane Serpa’s speaking.

For someone who got to snuggle his estranged mate all night, he’s a grumpy fuck.

“Thank you to everyone who sang Carrie off to the Mother with me last night,” Jane Serpa says, her dark eyes touching face after face in the seats in front of her. “I can’t think of a finer way to honor her. Nor can I express how much peace I feel today. I know Carrie touched many people in her life. Anyone who wants to will have a chance to speak today. But Carrie left instructions that this ... man ... be allowed to speak first.”

Jane turns and nods at an elderly man sitting in one of the chairs behind her.

The man rises. I lift my head and scent. It’s impossible to pick out one scent among the hundreds in the auditorium, although I swear I catch an edge of Kellan’s scent, but I flick my fingers to use my Element to bring his smell to me.

Snakes.

The man smooths down a long, maroon jacket trimmed with gold braid that he wears over fitted pants and walks to the podium.

Jane recoils from him and quickly takes a seat.

“My name is Sheshdhar,” he hisses. He’s a Naga, like Jane and Doctor Prince, although he’s not making any effort at hiding it. “I am the head of Clan Hisaka. Doctor Prince was born into my clan. She carried many secrets, not the least of which was repudiating her clan and consorting with—” He looks over his shoulder at Jane Serpa. “ Ashuddh . Although she turned her back on her clan, we did not forsake our fallen daughter. When she came to me a week before her death and gave me this charge, I did not refuse her.”

I’m not familiar with the word he uses, but there’s no mistaking his tone and glance. He’s just insulted Jane. Newly widowed, grieving Jane.

He takes a box out of his jacket and sets it on the podium. It’s a square box, maybe six inches by six inches, inlaid with ivory or shell.

“Doctor Prince said the brightest minds in the Unseen World would gather today,” he says. “She charged me to put this box before you and bid you solve the box’s puzzle. Find Ulune’s Daughter and her treasure, before her doom falls on the world.”

He steps away from the podium. “I know nothing more. I and my clan will not help you. We mourn our fallen daughter in our own way and ask that you respect our loss.”

He bows, turns, and walks down the steps on the side of the stage. Staring straight ahead, ignoring the trail of whispers that rises in his wake, he climbs the auditorium’s wide steps and walks past us through the rear doors.

“You want to kill someone?” I whisper to Law. “Go kill that asshole. He just called Jane Serpa something unforgiveable.”

Law lights up and whisks out the door after the old Naga.

I pad down the steps, climb over several people who grumble and glare, and drop into an empty seat behind Teddy Nowak.

Kellan’s explaining the Naga’s words to her pink-haired friend. “Ulune’s Daughter was another name for Charybdis, the monstrous whirlpool of Greek legend. She sucked down ships, killing the crew and guarding their treasures in the vault of the sea. In some legends, Herakles killed Charybdis and took her treasure for himself. In others, she simply sleeps, waiting to rise again.”

“Her doom?” Rachel Arisdaughter asks.

Kellan shrugs. “I don’t know. But if a monstrous whirlpool arose in the Med that would be a serious problem. That’s a big shipping channel, to say nothing of the fact that the nations bordering the western Med are not exactly the most stable.”

“Sounds like a job for you, Professor Wyndham,” Rachel says. “Couldn’t be any worse than the shark god we squared off with.”

Kellan rubs the bridge of her nose. “Ugh, don’t remind me. I’m still picking his teeth out of my shoulder, I swear.”

Evan Lords, who is sitting beside Rachel, clears his throat. “ What shark god you squared off with?”

While Evan deals with the woman who makes his life both heaven and hell, I put my hand on the shoulder of mine. “Professor Wyndham.”

She twists in her seat. “Luca, hi. Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

“I ran a little late this morning.” I glance up at the stage, where Jane Serpa’s moved back to the podium and has invited Dean Quinn forward to speak. “Will you go after Ulune’s Daughter?”

She glances from me to her friend, who has twisted in her chair to look at me, too. “I’ll need to think about it. Luca, have you met Professor Teddy Nowak? This is her family.”

Teddy tries to reach up her hand to shake but she has one baby bound across her chest and another little girl half-asleep on her lap. Teddy huffs and gives up. “Nice to meet you, Luca.”

“And you, Professor.” Look at my good manners. Not a single mention of the last time I saw Professor Nowak: hair down, shoulders bare, tits pushed up in her Hogmanay finest. Kellan will always capture my attention in any setting, but I didn’t miss the allure of Faery’s weirdest princess. “I understand you teach Chronomancy at Anadl Draig.”

Teddy’s brown eyes, which are glazed and red-rimmed from last night, sharpen. “Yeah, I do,” she says.

Her accent, nasal and harsh, keeps tugging at me, making me want to laugh. She sounds like a British brawler, as far removed as possible from the rounded syllables of academia. But she’s so well known that all I had to do to get access to some serious academic heavy weights in Europe was drop her name.

“I don’t have any Time-Walking talent, unfortunately,” I say. “But I’ve read your articles on Plane-Walking with great interest. Can you really reach the upper layers of Hell just through meditation techniques?”

Teddy’s eyebrows shoot up toward her dark hairline. Kellan chuckles softly, the noise almost lost as Dean Quinn starts to speak about her memories of Doctor Prince.

“Aye,” she says. “I can. Professor Wyndham’s even better than I am. Are you taking her Winter Study?”

I glance at Kellan, who is grinning. She should be feeling better. When I touched her shoulder, I gave her a healing nudge. I didn’t even have to pull on my Element. Our bond is so strong after finally consummating our mating that I think I could heal anything short of an amputation without much effort.

“Luca’s too advanced for anything but an independent study,” Kellan says. “We’re doing a private practicum this semester, aren’t we, Luca?”

“Yes, Professor,” I agree.

“In fact, why don’t we take a field trip? Are you free after this?”

I nod eagerly.

“Plan to come to dinner with Professor Wyndham on Sunday,” Teddy says. “We can talk about what you learned on your field trip.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’d love to.”

Teddy turns around to pay attention to what Dean Quinn is saying.

Kellan winks at me before she follows her friend’s lead. I take it that I made a good impression.

I sit back through the rest of the memorial. A dozen teachers follow Dean Quinn to the podium. Teddy hands her kids off to her husbands and speaks, telling a story about Doctor Prince mentoring her as a freshman. She cries freely as she speaks, provoking sniffles all around me. Kellan speaks after Teddy, sharing the memory of Doctor Prince bailing the threesome out of that human prison, which has Teddy and Rachel laughing through their tears and Jane Serpa coming to the podium to hug Kellan. Other former students follow Kellan, their stories pulling more laughter than tears out of the audience as the mood slowly shifts from grief to fond remembrance.

Finally, Jane Serpa rises and leads the audience in singing Doctor Prince’s favorite song: Forever Aquarius’s “This Is Not the End, My Friend.” The three women in front of me put their arms around each other’s shoulders and sway side-to-side through the song. The vestiges of their grief still darken the aether around them, but their hearts chime clear with each beat of the song.

Once the memorial ends, I expect Kellan to rush back onto the stage to join the circle of people examining the puzzle box. The competitive asshole, Rowan Wright, is up there, holding up the box and gesticulating.

Kellan stays in her seat, not looking up at the stage. She talks to Teddy and Rachel for a few minutes before they part with hugs. Jane Serpa comes down from the stage and works her way through dozens of condolences to Kellan. They have a brief discussion before Jane leaves with Teddy and her family.

Kellan slowly turns to face me. “Ready?”

“Always.”

She grins, holds out her hand, and when I take it, tears open the aether with her claws.

I get a glimpse of Ceòfuar’s green fields and fluffy sheep but we don’t even take a step toward the stream before Kellan’s pulling me forward again.

We step out in Las Vegas.

Magickal Vegas isn’t the same as mortal Vegas, although it has some similarities.

The lighting is softer, witchlight instead of neon and sodium, but perpetual fireworks shoot from the roof of Pandora’s Box, the mage casino tucked behind Excalibur. I stare up at the red, white, and blue explosions through the casino’s glass roof for a minute. Then my eyes are drawn back down to the gaming tables that box in the open central courtyard and lazily meandering river on all sides.

“Compulsion charm?” I ask Kellan, crossing my arms over my chest.

She nods as she follows my eyes down. “They can’t force you to gamble, but they can make it hard to ignore.”

“I think I’ve read that the human casinos do the same thing, just with their interior decoration.”

“Mmm.” Kellan flares her nostrils as she takes deep breaths. “Smell the Air? That’s a subtle enchantment. Mental stimulation but physical lethargy. Makes you seek entertainment but your body doesn’t want to go anywhere.”

I shake my head as I look around. The casino’s so large it doesn’t feel crowded, but there are many more magi here than were at Doctor Prince’s memorial. They’re clustered around the gaming tables; they’re lounging on chaises ringing the courtyard while men and women in white bikinis with feathered wings sprouting from their shoulders deliver tall, fancifully fizzing drinks; they’re floating round and round on the lazy river in rings glamored to look like sea monsters.

Despite the huge crowd, the casino isn’t noisy. There are no slot machines, because technology is so unreliable around magic, but some of the tables have soft chimes. There’s a constant murmur of conversation, broken occasionally by exclamations of victory or failure, but it’s a low buzz, quieter even than most classrooms before the lecture starts.

“Muffling charm?” I ask Kellan.

She tips her head. “I think so. Even subtler than the stimulation/lethargy. I can hear you without any trouble. But even when I try to pay attention to a conversation over there—” She nods at the nearest roulette table. “I can’t hear them clearly.”

“And surely those fireworks going off overhead are making some noise we should be able to hear?”

She nods. “Welcome to Pandora’s Box. This level is the geniuses: honors, pleasure, riches, gaming—obviously—taste, fashion, and false knowledge. We’re going down a level, but first I need to snag a deck of cards.”

“Okay.” I can’t imagine why she needs cards. Surely we’re not going to gamble and I have zero divination ability, so I hope that’s not necessary for Kellan’s form of Plane-Walking.

Puzzled, I follow her to a row of black-and-white striped canvas booths set back against the casino wall, away from the gaming tables. The booths are kiosks and with a quick sweep of my eyes down the row, I see they sell everything from Pandora’s Box branded dice, to designer clothes and bags, to a bewildering display of sex toys. Kellan peruses the hundreds of different tarot and playing card decks while I examine a butt plug bigger than my fist that seems to have a sparkler attachment.

She pays for a pack of cards, then peers over my shoulder. “Uh.”

I twist my neck to look at her. She’s gone an amusing shade of red.

“Yes?”

“I don’t, um, think that’s very practical.”

“Speak for your own butt.”

Kellan sputters a laugh. “Come on. I’ve got the cards.”

We walk along the marketplace to the middle of the casino floor where there’s a huge spiral staircase leading down. Where the geniuses level was artificially bright from the fireworks, the lower floor’s cast into gloom as soon as we descend the stairs. The legend Nescitur Ignescitur burns over the staircase in fiery letters. Magi in everything from string bikinis to black tie ascend in the other direction, heading up into the light. Most of them are laughing but a few wear fear on their features.

Like the upper floor, the lower floor is richly carpeted, with the river from above extending down through the level like an aquarium.

When I see what’s lurking in the dark bottom, only ten or fifteen feet from the bathers splashing above, I gulp.

Kellan’s eyes follow a banded water snake as it winds away into the murky depths. “Ignorance,” she says. “One of the seven bringers of evil. Envy, remorse, avarice, poverty, scorn, inconstancy, and ignorance.”

“A reminder that things aren’t as they seem here?”

She nods.

We wind through more gaming tables ringing the huge aquarium. Finally, Kellan finds a pair of unoccupied chaises with a round table between them. When we sit down, a curious shark appears from the murky water and mouths at the glass, showing us rows of teeth.

“It looks well-fed at any rate,” Kellan remarks. With a shiver, she turns her back on the tank as she opens the box of cards and fans them across the table. She toes off her ankle boots and pulls her legs up on the chaise to sit in lotus-position, with her hands loosely resting on her thighs. She’s wearing soft pants in midnight blue, a lacy, tunic-length top, and a boxy, brown leather blazer with sleeves that tighten around her wrists and flare to points over the backs of her hands. I sense Larissa and my mother’s influence.

I wore black, skinny jeans, a plaid kilt, a gauze sweater, and a dark purple trench coat to Doctor Prince’s memorial. I push off my Docs, tug the kilt up around my hips, and mirror her.

Kellan lifts her hands and the cards rise from the table. They shuffle, fan through the air between us, and shuffle again.

“There are many different ways to conceptualize the planes,” she tells me. “Everyone has their own method. Professor Nowak, who you met today, thinks of the planes like the branches of a tree.”

I nod, remembering the articles I read. “The World-Tree. Yggdrasil. Professor Nowak talks about Plane-Walking as finding the right branch of the World-Tree.”

Kellan nods. “A lot of Plane-Walkers think of it that way. But Carrie Prince helped me figure out a different construct when I struggled with the World-Tree.” She flexes her fingers and the cards rise in a narrow stack between us. A card near the top of the deck glows and slides out to face me. Four of Hearts. “Instead of the World-Tree, I visualize the planes as an ever-shuffling deck of cards.” The card slips back into the deck which shuffles and spreads into a fan. “To get to the plane I want, I just have to draw the right card. Spend a minute watching the cards, let them rearrange themselves in your mind. Then close your eyes and draw the Ace of Spades. That’s our plane.”

“I get it.”

It’s a powerful technique. Easier than trying to imagine the World-Tree with its thousands of branches, I think. The cards draw up into a stack and I watch until their movement plays behind my eyes even when I close them. I follow the shuffle in my mind for several minutes, hearing the soft slide of the cards, seeing the glimpses of their faces as they flick through the air. Finally, I catch a glimpse of that single spade, follow it through the deck, and when it reaches the top, tug it free.

When I open my eyes, the card is hanging in front of me.

I take it and turn it around to show Kellan. She grins. “Fast learner. Now put it back in the deck.”

I keep my eyes open and use my Element to push the card back into the deck.

The card slips like it’s greased and pops out the other side. Kellan grabs it with two fingers before it goes careening off into the crowd. She reaches around the stack to hand me the card.

“Try again. Push it with your mind instead of your Element this time. It’s all about conceptualization.”

Gritting my teeth, I nod. I hold up the card in front of me and close my eyes.

When I let go, the card slides effortlessly into the stack, drawn almost magnetically into place.

I open my eyes and blink at the cards which have begun a dramatic shuffle, arcing high into the air over the table.

“Show off,” I say.

Kellan’s mouth twitches. “It’s the cards. When I do this with cards at home, they don’t do showy shuffles.”

“Uh-huh, likely story.”

She snorts. “I want you to think about associations for the cards. I have strong associations between the suites and the planes, but you may have different associations, so mull it over while you focus on your breathing. I want you to count, breathing in and then breathing out for five. Fifty inhales and I’m going to release the cards. You take them and shuffle them. You don’t have to do anything fancy.”

Of course I do, because I want to impress her.

“Do you have any association with the number of the card and the planes?” I ask as I start the breathing exercise.

“Yes, but I don’t want to taint your associations.”

I nod and close my eyes to focus. By the time I’ve counted to twenty, my magickal senses have expanded. I can feel the flutter in the aether as Kellan manipulates the cards. I can hear her matching my breathing. I can even feel the shark circling a few feet away.

I reach out slowly with my mind, the same way I’d push my consciousness toward Law if I was trying to get his attention when we’re both in our fur. It’s always been impossible when we’re in our skin. But the breathing technique helps me focus. I run my mental fingers through the aether and when the cards come down from one of their arcing shuffles, I cup my consciousness under them and pull them wide instead of throwing them upward again.

Kellan grunts softly but releases her hold on the cards.

I spread the cards over the surface of the table in two fans, then pull them back into a single stack. Fanning and stacking over and over helps me get a fine feel for the cards. I pull the Ace of Spades again and tumble it to the top of the stack and then to the bottom, flipping it around the deck.

The card slips out of my grasp and lands face-up on the table when Law’s mind connects with mine.

I lift my head without opening my eyes when his scent fills my nose.