Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3 by Jenn Stark Read Free Book Online

gloved fingers along the box. My enhanced sensitivities weren’t triggered by it anymore, which frankly bummed me out a bit. Kreios might get excited about artifacts that didn’t have magical overtones, but I wasn’t so sanguine. My stock-in-trade was the procurement and sale of magical artifacts. And I wanted to stay paid for this job.
    Beside me, Armaeus coughed a short laugh. “You seem disappointed. Can you sense nothing there?”
    “Nope. It might as well be a cigar box.” I looked at him. “Why, can you?”
    He gave a brief nod, and I caught sight of his eyes again. They’d gone completely black. “Umm…”
    “Open the box, Miss Wilde.”
    The command sounded in my head, the first evidence of Armaeus’s strength that I’d experienced in what seemed far too long. And clearly, being mortal didn’t dim his magic too much. That was reassuring. Without hesitation then, I slipped the blade beneath the lid of the enameled box and pried up against the cover. The nails held on for all of three seconds, then popped up like daisies in springtime. Pulling the lid away, I peered inside.
    But it was Kreios, not Armaeus, who put a steadying hand on my arm. “Proceed very, very carefully, Sara Wilde. What you have here is rarer than diamonds.”
    I frowned, looking down at the deck of cards. “They’re cards, right?” I squinted up at them both. “Since when are cards rare?” I reached inside and pulled out the deck. Or chunk, better said. The cards—if they were cards—had adhered together over time, the entire mess shellacked together in a block.
    Oddly, neither one of the Council members moved. “Could be the Marseille deck,” Armaeus murmured. “Intact. That would do it, would it not?”
    Kreios snorted. “It would, but it’s unlikely,” he said. “The Church seemed quite proud of themselves for eradicating the last of the Devil cards well in advance of any Marseille decks finding their way to the salons of Italy and Paris. None of those decks remained intact.”
    “Well, good luck prying these babies apart.” I flipped over the deck and froze.
    A single eye stared back.
    The one card visible in the deck was definitely not a Tarot card. It showed an eye drawn in the heavily kohled outline favored by the Egyptians, but it wasn’t the eye of Horus, exactly. It didn’t have the sharp lines extending down and at an angle. Rather, full rays extended outward from the center eye, beginning at a point and ending wider, eight pie wedges circling the eye and stretching to the edges of the card.
    The image practically ached with age, and I remained still, staring back at the flat black center of the eye. “What the hell is this?”
    “Different mythology,” Kreios said. He made no move to take the deck from me. “You may place them back in the box. We’ll separate the deck later.”
    Resisting the urge to tell the Devil to put the cards back himself, I did as he asked. When I handed him the box, he didn’t move to take it. “Close the lid,” he instructed instead.
    “Are you weirding me out on purpose?” I asked as I shut the lid. I gave him back the box. “Because if so, you’re doing a really great job of it. Just saying.”
    Kreios bowed with a slight smile. “My thanks as always.” He hefted the box and looked entirely too pleased with himself, then slid his glance to the Magician and smirked. “Told you so.”
    “I look forward to your report,” Armaeus replied, refusing to rise to whatever bait Kreios was dangling.
    I, however, was not so restrained. “Told you what?” Ignoring Kreios as he strolled out of the room, I turned to the Magician, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with him. He looked as he ever did, his color was back, but something was seriously off about his energy. He seemed more approachable, but also…darker. More dangerous, but in a new and undefined way. “What was that box all about? Those weren’t Tarot cards, so what were they? And from where?”
    The