When Samantha Black shares her
sandwich with a dog, his owner, Jon—a homeless man living in the Las Vegas
storm tunnels—gives her a poker chip worth a fortune from the exclusive casino,
Buried Pleasures. All Sam has to do is cash it in. Sam is in Vegas for one
reason only—to get her friend, Evie Holt, away from sinister magician, Darian
Fox, who holds her prisoner in an effort to force Sam to perform at his club,
Illusions. A neon circus tent of strange and mystical acts, Illusions is one of
the biggest draws in Vegas, and he’s hell-bent on including Sam in his
disturbing plans.
The shadowy Magda Gardener will
do anything to keep Sam from cashing in that chip. She knows that Buried
Pleasures is the gate to Hades and cashing in the chip is a one-way ticket across
the River Styx, which runs beneath the storm tunnels of Vegas. Jon is really
Jack Graves, owner of Buried Pleasures, and Graves is really the god of death,
himself, and if things aren’t already confusing enough, he and Magda know what
Sam doesn’t. Sam is the last siren. That her song can kill is only the
beginning of her story. Jon wants her safe on his side of the River, protected
from Fox’s hideous magic. But even Death fears Magda Gardener, who is none
other than Medusa, and the gorgon has her own agenda. If Sam is to understand
her heritage and win the battle against Darian Fox, not only will she have to
trust her heart to Death, but they’ll both have to work for the gorgon, whose
connection with Sam runs deeper than any of them could imagine.
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The mind-boggling project designed to offer flood
protection to a city built on bedrock and totally surrounded by mountains had
begun in the seventies. The individual segments reminded her of giant hollow
Lego blocks made of concrete. Originally there was to be over a thousand miles
of tunnels beneath Sin City. They were all designed to channel the waters of any
flash flood that threatened the financial heart of the city into Lake Mead,
some thirty miles away. The project was never finished, but there were still an
impressive two hundred miles of storm tunnels beneath the city, and they now
provided shelter for the homeless who didn’t mind playing the odds that their
meager belongings wouldn’t get washed away in the next deluge. They also had
provided a hiding place for murderers and thieves and who knew what else?
And apparently God hung out down
here, too. Who could have guessed? Though she didn’t see any of the dreaded
scorpions she’d heard so much about, she imagined she could hear them
skittering across the floor in the dark. “Ever been stung by one? Scorpion, I
mean,” she asked absently.
“They don’t bother me much,” came
the reply.
She saw the graffiti on the walls
as well as if she’d been walking in the sunshine, and yet the darkness around
her was almost a physical thing, a thought that almost made her laugh, since it
was obvious she no longer had the physical capability for feeling it.
Did the dead sleep? She only
wondered because it seemed that she slept or lost consciousness, or just
drifted off for a while. Maybe eventually she would lose consciousness
altogether and that would be the end of it. Maybe the whole recycling thing
just took a while to kick in. Strange, that thought didn’t disturb her either.
Still, Jon had said she was going to a very nice place. When she woke up, if
that’s what she did, she came to herself hearing the click, click, click of the dog’s toenails on the concrete.
To her surprise the surroundings
had changed. There was water – not just the constant water on the floor of the
storm tunnels, but more like a lake or a reservoir. A boat rocked gently at the
end of a stone dock in front of them. For a moment she thought they had ended
up at the Venetian with its canals and boats. But there were no red and white
striped poles, and the boat wasn’t right. It was broader, higher prowed.
As she took in her surroundings,
she saw that they were still underground, and she remembered reading somewhere
that at one time the whole basin in which Las Vegas was built had been a large
inland sea, and that there was still a sea of water beneath the bedrock. She’d
heard that people who built homes outside the city and drilled wells down
through the bedrock had an endless supply of fresh water, even in the dry
desert.
They were walking toward the
boat, her body still safely carried in Jon’s arms with her consciousness still
floating above.
A man she assumed to be the
boatman stood waiting for them. He was dressed in a flowing dark cloak, his
face obscured completely beneath a deep hood. As he looked down at her body in
Jon’s arms, what little light there was caught the shine of his eyes just
enough to dispel the disturbing sense that the hood was empty.
After a long silence, he looked
up at Jon and shook his head. “I can’t take her,” he said, examining her limp
body. “You know the rules.” His voice was like the scratching of dry twigs in a
storm, and no matter how hard she listened, she heard no breath, no heartbeat.
For some reason that disturbed her far less than the fact that she couldn’t see
his face.
“Take me where? Where are we
going?”
The two men ignored her.
“Know the rules? I wrote the damned rules,” Jon said, and
once again she felt the vibration of his voice in spite of being separated from
her flesh.
“Then you know if she hasn’t cashed
in the chip, I can’t take her.”
“Take me where? Are you coming
too?” she asked Jon. Still she got no reply.
“What the hell do you mean, she
hasn’t cashed in her chip? Dancy delivered her right to the door to do just
that.”
“He’s right,” Sam agreed, though
she was no longer sure the men could even hear her. How long had she been dead
now? Would Jon cease to be aware of her at all after she’d been dead for a
while? He wouldn’t if he were God, she reasoned. “Some woman named Magda
Gardener told me I should wait till tomorrow. I shouldn’t have listened to
her,” she added. “I wouldn’t be dead now if I had gone ahead and cashed in the
chip like I wanted to.”
But the two men still didn’t
respond. She was beginning to suspect that being dead was going to be a major
pain in the ass.
Jon carefully laid her down on
the cool mosaic floor. She only now realized that it was mosaic, something with
an astrological motif, she thought, her cheek pressed against the dark bicep of
the Sagittarian archer. Her attention was drawn away from the mosaic when Jon
slid his hand into her pocket and pulled out the chip. It glowed golden in his
hand as he turned it over and over again. She didn’t remember it doing that
when she held it. Probably just a trick with the lights.
“Should have cashed it in when I
had the chance,” she said. “You can have it back if you want. It won’t help me
now, will it?”
He simply stuck it back in her
pocket and cursed under his breath. Then he stood and paced back and forth in
front of the boatman. “Well that’s a damned inconvenience, isn’t it?”
The boatman nodded beneath his
hood. “Sure as hell is. I was expecting her. She had reservations. Had
everything ready for her, just like you said. Looks like I made the trip for nothing.”
He shrugged, and the cape rustled as it settled back around his body. “Not like
I have anything else to do, I guess.”
For a moment the two men stood in
silence, looking down at Sam’s body resting against the mosaic of the archer.
Then the boatman heaved a hard-put-upon sigh and asked, “What will you do now?”
“Take her back,” Jon replied, and
the dog whined softly and plopped down next to her. “I have to, don’t I? She
would have been happier here, and safe,” he added as an afterthought.
“Pity,” the boatman said. “Gonna
be a rough ride for her now. You know I’d take her if I could.” He nodded
across the expanse of water, and for the first time, Sam realized she couldn’t
see the other shore.
“Oh, I don’t blame you, Chuck,”
Jon said. “You’re just doing your job.” The dog offered a soft woof of
agreement.
“You think that bitch, Magda, had
anything to do with the mix-up?” the boatman asked.
“Oh, I have no doubt.” Jon ran a
warm hand along Sam’s cheek and she was surprised that she could still feel it.
“Well, nothing for it now. Can I borrow your cloak? She’ll be cold when she returns,
and it’s a long way back.”
“Of course.” The man shed his
cloak in a sharp snap that sounded like the canvas of a sail slapping in the
wind and, in that instant, the world went black and Sam could no longer see the
tunnel around them. For a moment she had that feeling of falling, the kind of
falling that jerks you awake from the dream world to find that no, you’re still
safe and sound on your bed. Only it was more of a rough and tumble, as though
she were struggling with the fall, somehow being tossed about, riding first a
rollercoaster, then bouncing high on a trampoline, then being dragged
feet-first down steep stairs, her head banging on each step.
She yelped and reached out desperately
to feel Gus’s soft fur close to her body and, as she groped in the darkness,
her hand came to rest first on Jon’s chest and then on his stubbled face. And
there was substance—her hand, flesh and bone, touching flesh and bone. His
breath was warm against her cheek, and the smell of ozone and deep forest
peaked as he whispered, “It’ll be all right, Samantha. Don’t be frightened. It’ll
be all right. I have you now. You’re with me.”
Then his lips brushed hers and
she wrapped her arms around his neck with the urgency of one who was afraid of
falling. His breath! She tasted his breath, she needed his breath. She had none
of her own, and the rising panic felt as though it would smother her with its
weight. “Shh, Samantha, shh! I have you now. You’ll be all right.” He spoke
softly against her lips. “You’ll be fine. I promise.”
She clawed at him, desperate to
hang on, desperate to breathe, fighting claustrophobic dizziness that felt as
though she were being sucked down a drainpipe.
She might have screamed or she
might have only imagined it, but Jon kept up a soothing, soft chatter that she
struggled to understand above the ringing in her ears. Then she felt like she
was being shoved back in her body, down her own throat and up under her ribcage,
a suitcase being hastily stuffed over-full, as though somehow she had expanded
in her time outside herself. In the beginning, she was certain she was being
suffocated, but when she gasped the first blessed breath of air, it was
accompanied by a bright flash of searing pain, and the lights went out with her
clutched in the arms of the homeless man, the dog whining softly at her side.
Author Bio:
Voted ETO Best Erotic Author of 2014, K D Grace believes
Freud was right. It really IS all about sex—sex and love—and that is an
absolute writer’s playground.
When she’s not writing, K D is veg gardening or walking. Her
creativity is directly proportional to how quickly she wears out a pair of
walking boots. She loves mythology, which inspires many of her stories. She
enjoys time in the gym, where she’s having a mad affair with a pair of kettle
bells. Her first love is writing, but she loves reading and watching birds. She
adores anything that gets her outdoors.
K D’s novels and other works are published by Totally Bound,
SourceBooks, Accent Press, Harper Collins Mischief Books, Mammoth, Cleis Press,
Black Lace, and others. She also writes romance under the name Grace Marshall.
Find K D
Here:
