Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 by Jenn Stark

passed them, I headed down the corridor at a faster clip. As I walked, I realized that the walls weren’t solid rock at all, but sort of a catwalk gallery, open to the massive room below. Through each of the cut-out sections, I could see a large table sitting in the center of the chamber. The Council was already gathered, it appeared, and were simply waiting for the stragglers. Stragglers which would include me.
    I glanced over—and abruptly slowed my pace.
    This wasn’t anywhere close to being the right Council.
    Twelve men and women sat around the wide space, none of them familiar. I glanced back to the knights, but they paid me no attention as I crept over to the edge of the corridor for a closer look, peeking over the side. Like the current Council, these apparent members were all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors. Unlike the current Council, they had no electronics. The table was spread with maps and laden with platters of bread, meat and enormous goblets filled with what could have been wine or blood, depending on exactly how much of a throwback these people were.
    A crack of thunder rent the air, and I shrank back. But there were no exterior windows near me, no way of knowing what the weather was doing outside this enormous room. The Council members looked up expectantly as the thunder rolled again.
    “It’s nearly done,” said one of the women. She was dressed in an ornate toga, with gold at her ears, arms, wrists, and fingers, exactly the style Eshe preferred but without the sneer. “Llyr is banished. The veil holds.”
    “It is not done,” countered a man bristling with indignation. He pounded his fist on the table, and I thought: Emperor. He was not at all similar to Viktor, the current Emperor. Where Viktor was pale and almost gentlemanly, this man was huge, coarse, and brawny. His helm sat beside him on the table, and his cloak boasted a set of epaulets that bulged with steel points. “Llyr will not go quietly. He has enjoyed his time on earth too long. He will constantly seek ways back in, on the backs of mortals or through cracks in the veil. We cannot keep constant vigilance.”
    “You have no choice.” A man at the far end of the table spoke now, and I swiveled toward him. He was tall and slender, with long silvered hair that flowed over his shoulders and down his midnight-blue robe. He held no staff, and he didn’t wear a pointy hat, but his dark eyes spoke of mystical visions and his manner was that of a conjurer. This Council’s Magician, had to be. “The war is not at an end but a beginning. Without balance, Llyr will reenter, and we have no guarantee that he will not win tomorrow where he has failed today.”
    “We beat him once,” the Emperor groused. “We can beat him again.”
    “We are immortal, not undead,” the Magician countered. “You are strong, Elias, the strongest of us all potentially, if brute power was all that was needed.” The backward compliment had the intended effect. The Emperor bristled but could not find fault with the Magician’s careful wording. “But you—all of us, we may be killed. Balance is the lone prescription for a permanent solution.”
    “There will be those who seek to topple us, to gain Llyr’s return,” an old man with a querulous voice put in. He stood at the far corner from the Emperor and leaned on a staff. His robe was frayed at the cuffs, and he swayed as he talked. A long ago Hermit, had to be. Which put this Council well earlier than the Middle Ages. “We fight not only a threat outside the veil, but within it.”
    “In that, your worry is misplaced. Mortals are not strong enough.” The young man who spoke lolled back in his chair, one leg over the armrest. He was blonde and almost painfully beautiful to witness, a fallen angel in the midst of toadstools. I had no idea what his position was, but I suspected the Fool. “Don’t spin gloom where there’s already darkness, old man.”
    “Mortals are not strong enough—yet. But their