Lady of Misrule (Marla Mason Book 8) Read Online Free PDF

Oh.”
    “Quite,” Hamil said. “I would have to consult the latest edition of Dee’s Peerage to find out who is currently chief sorcerer of Las Vegas, but in a city that ripe with human emotional energy and the power of random chance, I’m sure someone is in charge, and likely someone powerful. Find the local magical authorities and tell them you know who’s causing the cold snap, and you may even be rewarded for your information.”
    “Thanks, Ham–” Rondeau began, but the big man had already hung up. He turned to Pelham, who was hanging up the other extension, where he’d been listening in. “Hamil makes a good point. I was thinking of this as Marla’s problem, and by extension our problem, but it’s also the city’s problem, so we should go see the chief sorcerer here.”
    “Do you know this person?” Pelham said.
    Rondeau nodded. “If you’re going to do magical business in Las Vegas, the smart way is to get permission from the guy in charge, and make sure it’s a good deal for him, too – which is to say, you make regular payoffs. So we’ve met. Most people call him Mr. Amparan. Some people call him the Pit Boss. He holds court in a secret casino underground, accessible from various places around town by a series of hidden tunnels. They play games for creepy stakes down there. Weird, dark stuff, I’m talking Korean-horror-movie freaky – roulette with eyes for balls, tables where you can wager your gall bladder or your sense of smell for a chance to win your heart’s truest desire. Mr. Amparan is the real deal. He might be able to do something about Regina.”
    “Then let us make our way to his... pit,” Pelham said.
    “Yeah,” Rondeau said. “It’s almost time to drop off this month’s tribute anyway.”
    “How much do you pay him?”
    Rondeau grinned. Pelham probably had a better sense of the financial situation in the casino Rondeau co-owned than Rondeau did himself, and was clearly curious about this unrecorded monthly expense. “I don’t pay him in money,” Rondeau said. “I pay him in luck.”
    •
    They went out into the cold, dressed in bulky ski gear that still failed to protect them entirely from the viciousness of the dry and frigid air. Pelham informed Rondeau that there were portions of the planet Mars that were warmer than Las Vegas on this particular day. The streets were not piled deep with snow, because there wasn’t enough moisture in the air to produce such drifts, but there was a thin dusting of the stuff, and many patches of ice. Pipes had burst all over town, and some of that water had bubbled into the streets and over the sidewalks and formed treacherous slicks.
    They made their way to a trapdoor two blocks from Rondeau’s hotel, in the corner of a trash-strewn parking lot. The trapdoor was frozen shut, of course, and they had to go back and get a tire iron to pry it open before descending down an iron ladder – the rungs so cold Rondeau was sure he could feel the chill even through his bulky might-as-well-be-for-an-astronaut gloves.
    They walked along an icy brick-lined tunnel to a shining round vault door, which stood wide open and unguarded. “That’s bad,” Rondeau said. The leather bag full of luck squirmed in his pocket. He harvested the luck from the losers in his casino, every bad turn of the cards or disastrous roll of the dice a tiny piece of luck sliced away from them without their knowledge, collected in special crystals secreted in the ceiling, used to pay the monthly tribute to Mr. Amparan, AKA the Pit Boss, greatest probability-mage and stochastic magician in the western United States.
    Rondeau and Pelham went into the underground casino, which was just as cold as the streets above. The gaming tables (with shackles at the corners, for advanced play) and the wheels of fortune (with their possibilities that ranged from the sadistic to the sublime) and the steel cages where the living collateral were usually housed, all dripped with icicles,