Read 0.5 One Wilde Night for Free Online Page B

stripped off my jeans in one long movement. That done, I stared at what was left of my once healthy, unmarked body.
    I was a mass of bruises and burns.
    The bruises, now starting to swell, were the easiest to write off. They chronicled the long day’s worth of abuse I’d suffered, first squeezing my way through the orgy enthusiasts, then at the hands of Fernanda’s flailing. After that, I’d done pretty well until Nigel had nicked my neck with his blade, and things had gone downhill from there. My feet were a disgusting, scraped mess from my impromptu run through the streets of Rio. My side still seeped blood.
    The deepest damage had come at the hands of the Russian, though. She’d made the most of her small frame and had beaten the crap out of me with swift kicks, grabs, and punches that ended up making my skin look like a patchwork quilt of jagged, uneven welts. I checked my teeth for good measure, relieved they remained in my head.
    “Shower,” I muttered to myself, knowing that when I woke up, I wouldn’t be in any mood to deal with it. Still, it took another five minutes of me staring at myself with hollow-eyed confusion before I could move again. The water in this hotel was blistering hot, and I hugged the tiled wall and whimpered as it pounded my muscles into jelly. By the time I stumbled out of the shower, I was lousy with fatigue.
    Wrapped in a towel, I made it back across the room to recover my clothes. I swiped for my go bag, too groggy to focus, and merely managed to push the bag off its perch. Contents spilled across the floor, and I frowned down, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
    Cards. Several of my Tarot cards had literally jumped out of the bag, landing face-up on the carpet like abandoned toys. Great .
    That tumble of cards might not matter to most people, but I wasn’t most people.
    For the past several years, I’d made my living as a finder of lost things. My compass of preference was a Tarot deck—seventy-eight cards, each with their own unique images, which arranged themselves into spreads I could decipher with remarkable success. Whether the cards aligned properly out of luck, coincidence, or because secret fairies made it so, I never much cared. I simply knew they worked.
    My skill wasn’t unique, but my mastery of it was, and word had gradually gotten out that I could find some of the treasures the world held secret, particularly those treasures with a psychic or magical energy. Those kinds of trinkets went for big money on the arcane black market, and finding them had been just the ticket I’d needed to get back onto the grid four years back. Everyone who’d chased me off said grid was dead, after all, no thanks to me. Being a Connected was not for the faint of heart.
    Now I knew I should pick up the cards, but that would involve getting down on the floor. If I did that, I’d likely stay there.
    Nevertheless, habit and a sense of self-preservation forced me to at least review them where they lay, to note their image, position, and placement…
    I blinked.
    They were all the same card. The Magician.
    Six Magicians littered the floor, like soldiers marching off to battle. “What the…”
    In most Tarot decks, there was one Magician card. That’s it. One. Even the Thoth deck only had two, for reasons I’d never quite figured out. But six… Six wasn’t possible.
    Bracing myself on the chair, I leaned down for a closer look, then—
    The cards had changed.
    They weren’t all Magicians after all. One of them was, certainly, the card farthest out of the bag. But the others were a mash-up of majors and minors, exactly what you’d expect to see on the floor. I knew they meant something, and probably something important. They’d literally point the way, in fact, for those with eyes to see.
    “Tomorrow,” I muttered. Now that they were behaving, the cards weren’t going anywhere, and neither was I for a few hours. Instead, I turned and swiveled toward the suite’s separate