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She pursed her lips, which were currently Day-Glo orange, and grabbed something flashy and purple from the rack behind her.
“There
’s always the catsuit. Of course, it’s skin tight, so we’ll have to hide the candy, but I can help with—”
I managed to grab Pritkin’s arm before the catsuit ended up in pieces. “They know what you look like,” I pointed out while pulling on my own disguise. “And even if they didn’t, you’re covered in blood. You can’t go out there like that!”
“If I’m going to die tonight, I would prefer it to be with a little dignity!”
“I don’t get you,” I said, leaning against the wall for support. My five-inch, fire-engine-red, glitter-covered Mary Janes were just as hard on the ankles as they looked. “You just spent over a day in a woman’s body—”
“Not by choice!”
“—and you’re hundreds of years old. Didn’t men once wear makeup and—”
“Court fops, perhaps. I wasn’t one!”
“Then expand your horizons,” I told him, throwing a boa around his neck. “And pick something.”
Pritkin eyed the selection Dee had provided with loathing. She noticed and crossed her arms over her massive chest. “You’re cute, but you’re getting on my last gay nerve.”
“I’m never going to live this down,” Pritkin muttered, snatching up an opera-length cape made of a profusion of gold lamé ruffles. It must have been designed with platforms and towering wigs in mind, because it swept the floor after him and the hood covered his head and face. I decided it would do.
A few minutes later, three sequined and bejeweled visions glided out of the club and into the middle of the crush on Main Street. Dee was in front, providing distraction, her massive breasts jutting out in front of her like the prow on a ship. Pritkin and I followed behind. I was kind of short for a drag queen, even in the platforms, but the rainbow-sequined jumpsuit and towering Marilyn Monroe wig more than made up for it.
The mages were everywhere, their eyes scanning the exiting crowd. Yet most barely glanced at us, despite the spectacle we made. And those who did quickly looked away when Dee blew them kisses or flashed a little thigh. It looked like hiding in plain sight might work after all. I’d barely had the thought when a vision crashed into me with all of the subtlety of a baseball bat to the head. It knocked the breath out of me and dropped me to my knees. It was like nothing I’d experienced before, vivid and crystal clear, and so solid that I couldn’t even see the street anymore.
Vegas was burning, fire leaping into the sky, shedding sparks like shooting stars. It was impossible to recognize anyone in the darkness and chaos or to pick out a single voice among the panicked crowd. Just screams and faceless, running people.
Beyond, the desert sand was being consumed, mile after mile under a blackened sky. Long after all the scrub had burnt, it raged on. Like a forest fire without a forest, or what it was: a seemingly endless exclamation of wrath from a creature with power and rage and centuries of bottled resentment but no compassion. No compassion at all.
The world had remembered the healer, the lyre player, the golden god, but had forgotten the other stories. The ones that whispered of brutal punishments, of rape and murder and a beautiful face that laughed as it flayed its enemies alive. They remembered now, for an instant, before memory was wiped clear in a rain of blood.
The vision shattered as abruptly as it had come, leaving me gasping on all fours in the middle of the sidewalk. “—a little too much wine with dinner, you know how it is. Always was a drinker,” Dee was saying to someone. She reached down and pinched my cheek. “Come on, love. Up you go. You can pass out at home.”
She dragged me to my feet and I did my best to keep my head down when what I actually wanted was to run back up the street screaming. My dreams had been warning me all along, but I’d been blind to what they really meant. And now it might be too late.
A cold wire tightened around my heart. There was something wrong with my chest; I couldn’t seem to get a deep breath. What had I done?
Dee and Pritkin started towing me back toward the lobby again. I gripped their arms. “We can’t leave.”
“Oh, yes, we can,” Dee said. “I think I just ruined this dress. My heart can’t take another scare like that!”
“We’ll deal with whatever it is later,” Pritkin told me, hurrying us along.
“Apollo’s here.”
He stopped abruptly, and we were almost run down by a harassed-looking woman with a kid in each hand. “Watch it!” she snapped, pulling the kids around. Pritkin dragged me over to the sidewalk.
“That’s impossible!” he hissed. “The spell—”
“He got around it,” I whispered. “I don’t know how, but I Saw it. He’s here!”
He was shaking his head in disbelief. “That spell has held for more than three thousand years. Yet he suddenly finds a way around it now?”
“I can’t explain it. I just know what I Saw.”
“It could be the future, the outcome of a civil war within the Circle. What could happen if we don’t solve our internal—”
