Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 Read Online Free Page B

garden silenced them. We darted up the access drive and into the main street, where a sleek limo waited, a woman at the door.
    “Here,” the geisha said, somehow managing to look elegant even as she slid into the car. I piled in after her, decidedly less graceful, my gun still in my hand.
    I took the opposite seat from the geisha as the limo pulled away from the curb.
    “What’s going on here?” I snapped. “How’d I piss off the military?”
    “They sought to question you privately. When it became clear that General Asaki was not going to grant them access, they arranged to take you.”
    Question me. Right. “Those guys weren’t Japanese.”
    “No.” She shook her head. “A precaution in case they failed. There will be no ties between those men and anyone inside this country, by careful design.” She inclined her head. “My name is Yori,” she said. “We are in your debt.”
    I scowled at her. “You people tried to kill me.”
    “Merely to stop you. We didn’t know what you were.”
    “I get that a lot.”
    “I am sure you do.” Yori remained perched on the edge of her limo seat. Unlike the women on the emperor’s yacht, she was not heavily made up or dressed in traditional garb, but her everyday kimono screamed inviolable traditions and ancient rules. Before I could speak she nodded again. “You spoke with the kara’pei.”
    My fingers spasmed on the gun in my lap. I didn’t remember much of my dance with the sky kraken. After Ren’s people had fished me out of the water, burned to a crisp, I’d remained helpfully delirious as the Imperial Guard had pulled anchor and raced the traumatized guests to shore. It was only later that I’d gotten the story from the good general, in between bursts of morphine.
    According to Ren, the thunderous gale had stopped within sixty seconds of me throwing myself off the boat and into what he kept referring to as “a thicket of tentacles,” which never failed to make me giggle. In that one minute where I’d clutched my own private limb of death, he’d seen me light up with the same yellow miasma that had coated the screens in the monitoring room, and he’d heard me scream in a language he didn’t know. Then the tentacles had shot up into the sky, I’d fallen into the ocean, and the storm had abruptly abated.
    But I knew the name kara’pei, now that Yori said it. It’d been one of the words burned into my brain as I’d try to shoo the sky kraken away, pleading with it that we didn’t come to steal but to restore, we didn’t seek to destroy but to understand.
    My impassioned speech had made little impact: Yes, the thing had uprooted its tentacle farm, but it’d left behind a disaster under the calm surface of the sea. The Yonaguni monument had imploded. The twin slabs we’d targeted were presently buried under a pile of crumbled rock nearly two meters thick.
    “That’s its name? Kara’pei?” I tried the word on for size. I wasn’t impressed. “He was kind of quick on the trigger.”
    “No one else had ever come close to finding the sunken artifacts buried at Yonaguni,” Yori said. “The Imperial Guard had long shown interest in the arcane, but discreetly, almost as an afterthought, or so we believed. Then we learned of this boat, the closing of the monument to outside crafts, and we tracked the ebb and flow of power between the emperor’s and prime minister’s bases. When we realized there was a credible threat to the monument, we acted.” She lifted one delicate shoulder, as if summoning a sky kraken had been a reasonable call to action for a summer afternoon. “The dance of swords was part of the ritual but would have come to nothing if you had not truly found the location of the artifact.”
    “So you’re saying that thing was my fault?”
    “Not your fault. Your strength. We have not had contact from the kara’pei since the twelfth century, when it manifested as a great wind to defeat the Mongols’ fleets.”
    “Then you’re