The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  The second was the sound of a deep and throaty scream.

  Armaeus.

  My first instinct was to race through the library at full speed, balls of fire at the ready, but I forced myself to move carefully and cautiously forward. Armaeus was not your average Magician. His power derived from ancient practices that stretched all the way back to the founding of Egypt and were deeply rooted in the first chakra, the seat of ultimate life-giving power and sex magic. Those practices that had gained renewed traction in the mid-1600s when John Dee and Edward Kelley had gotten wind of them from a few of their chattier angels. Then there was another resurgence during Aleister Crowley’s tenure in the early 1920s, where things took on another layer of crazy. Armaeus tended to keep his practice to himself, but approaching him now, when he was apparently in the process of being flogged, might not be the negative that it would be if I was under the lash.

  “Ungh!” Then again, I wasn’t a big fan of anyone getting the crap beaten out of them, even if they ostensibly liked it.

  I moved more quickly through the maze of shelves, not missing the fact that the deeper I got into Armaeus’s lair, the older and more dilapidated the library became. Had it been this way the last time I was in here, when Nikki and I had found the Magician hunched over a cauldron of fire, attended only by the Devil? I couldn’t remember, and I didn’t have time to parse the details, as I came around the last bookshelf and skidded to a stop, my breath dying in my throat thankfully before I could release it in a scream.

  Instead, I clapped my hands over my mouth. Armaeus!

  The Magician didn’t move from where he lay slumped forward, hanging from what looked like Olympic rings, suspended by a cross beam high above him. His hands were bound to the rings but his feet and knees reached the floor, and now buckled beneath him. Behind him was a massive wall of smoke, and through that smoke hissed curling firebrands that lashed out at odd intervals.

  Another one raked across Armaeus’s back, laying open his flesh in a river of fire. As I watched, horrified, Armaeus closed the wound with a grunt of exertion, the skin knitting together in time for an equal and opposite lash to strike him from the other side.

  Unable to contain my mind the way I could contain my voice, my thoughts screamed out again. Armaeus, what are you doing?

  “You should not be here.”

  To my surprise, Armaeus’s voice didn’t sound in my mind as I’d expected it to, utilizing the telepathic connection he’d established with me more than two years ago. And it certainly wasn’t coming from his mouth. As I watched, the Magician hung forward, his head and hair drenched in sweat, blood pooling beneath him from the wounds he’d already healed. His skin was scored both black and white from the effects of the lash, and sparks of electricity danced across his arms as they strained to maintain hold on the Olympic rings. He looked like a man who was completely spent, not someone who’d been in casual conversation with me not fifteen minutes earlier.

  I narrowed my eyes, then spoke aloud. Loudly. “How long have you been here playing Hurt the Magician? Because that’s way more blood than you could produce with ten minutes’ worth of honest exercise.”

  “Miss Wilde—”

  “Don’t you Miss Wilde me. You want to hook up with a bunch of nymphs in a magic six-way, that’s your business, but since when is self-mortification your kink?”

  The laugh that sounded was long, deep, and decidedly dark—and it still didn’t come from Armaeus’s slumped body, but from somewhere high above me in the chamber. “There is much that you know about the Magician of the Arcana Council, and much that he has yet to share with you.”

  My brows went up. It sure as heck sounded like the Magician talking to me, but he didn’t typically refer to himself in the third person. “Can I assume it’s not Armaeus I’m talking to?”

  “I am merely one aspect of Armaeus. The clinician, you could call me. I watch. I observe. I track. I record.”

  “Yeah, I know that part of him. It’s the same aspect that tends to stare at me like I’m a bug he’s about to pin to a foam core board like a kid at a science fair. For the record, you’re one of the dickier aspects of the guy.”

  Against the Olympic rings, Armaeus convulsed in a laugh—a laugh that ended in a tortured groan as another lash of fire struck out, this one flaying open the meat of his arm.

  “Will you stop that?” I demanded.

  “Why?” This voice came from the other side of the space, and the sound was little more than a seductive purr. “What is it about the pain you see, the agony, that upsets you so…Miss Wilde?”

  The sound of my name spoken in the bodiless voice that was Armaeus and yet not Armaeus, not all of him, was unnerving. As I squared my shoulders, the second voice started up again, this time with a long and mocking laugh.

  “The Magician spends a great deal of his time protecting you. You think that he is protecting you from all outside horrors of this world. Occasionally, you think that he’s protecting you from himself. But the Magician knows far more about you than you realize, Miss Wilde. He knows that he is protecting you—”

  “No!” With what seemed like a gargantuan effort, the corporeal Armaeus gathered his feet beneath him and stood, easing the strain on his arms as he grasped the Olympic rings with fingers drenched in sweat and blood. He swung around toward me, his eyes naked with pain.

  “What are you doing here?” I gasped, and this time, I did move forward. Not all the way, though. Armaeus had inscribed a circle around him that contained both his little torture stand as well as the billowing smoke from which the snaking fire lashes emerged. “What is this test?”

  “Not—what you think,” Armaeus managed, but the test apparently wasn’t finished yet. Another lash of fire slashed out of the wall of smoke, catching him across the upper shoulders and driving him back to his knees. I pursed my lips together, feeling tears surge up within me. Armaeus was a demigod. He’d lived with and worked his magic for hundreds of years before I’d been born. It wasn’t my place to judge him for what he felt he needed to do. It also wasn’t my place to try to stop him from his magical practice simply because I couldn’t bear to see him suffer.

  “Not—what you think,” Armaeus growled again. He was looking at me and so didn’t see the enormous cat-o’-nine-tails that burst out from the smoke until it was practically upon him, raking over his head and back. He threw back his head and howled, and my third eye snapped open…then blinked.

  The Magician’s entire body had been fractured into a dozen different entities. He was there, in the center, glorying or wallowing in as much pain as I’d ever seen him endure. But at the same time, his mind manifested its varied aspects all around Armaeus. There was the clinician, the seducer, the teacher, the student, the tyrant, and the healer, and nearly a half-dozen more. All of them roared up to the heavens like they were in a battle with the gods themselves, and then—

  And then the gods roared back.

  The thunderclap of power had the effect of a sonic boom, dropping me to the floor as Armaeus flopped forward, his body bouncing off the mat beneath his feet and springing forward again, like a child strapped to an out-of-control swing. I staggered back up to my knees, but the pressure pummeling me was enough to take my breath away. Standing took tremendous strength, and I lunged forward, desperate to reach Armaeus as he hung lifeless in the rings. With each step, a reverberation of the sonic boom pushed its way up my legs, rattling my bones, until by the time I reached Armaeus’s side, I’d lost all sense of balance. I flung myself at him, sliding down his body, both of us now drenched in his gore and sweat. He was speaking, but it was a language so ancient, I couldn’t translate it, and it sounded more like he was repeating a mantra over and over again. Eventually, the words pieced themselves together in my mind.

  “The many become the one. The one, the many. The scattered becomes the whole, the whole, within each of the scattered.”

  I had no idea what any of that meant and focused o
n loosening Armaeus’s hands from the heavy rings. When I finally got one wrist unhooked, he sagged forward, seeming to break from his thrall.

  “You…shouldn’t be here,” he gasped, and I snorted, my focus on the other ring.

  “Then you shouldn’t do such a bad job of projecting your illusion to take a meeting with me. I totally knew you were faking it. I didn’t expect to find you faking it for torture porn.”

  He half coughed, half gasped, and the next strike happened so fast, I reacted on pure instinct. The lash of power struck out from the billowing smoke like electric fire, and I swung Armaeus out of its range.

  It was too late for me to form a fireball with my hands. Instead, I did what any red-blooded woman with her back up against a wall, her weapons useless, staring an honest-to-gods alien in the face would do.

  I screamed full and bloody murder.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Truly, there are moments when I feel you’re wasted on the Magician, no matter how much I love him. And verily, I do love him so.”

  I opened one eye, though there was no need for me to do so. I was surrounded in utter darkness, with nothing to indicate that the Devil of the Arcana Council was beside me except for the rich, mocking sensuality of his voice. But I knew immediately he wasn’t alone. “Who’s with you?” I gasped, my voice ragged.

  “I am,” Danae said quietly from the darkness. “I was the one who alerted Kreios to the danger you were in, and he helped me get you out.”

  That made me pause for a second. I’d been in danger? I mean, sure, there was the whole tentacle flog monster thing that had rushed me after I’d thrust Armaeus out of the way, but…danger?

  And how had Danae known I was in trouble?

  “What happen—” I swallowed hard, wincing against the pain. “What happened?”

  “You shouldn’t be able to enter the Magician’s lair when he’s invoking spells at that level. The fact you did so without even working that hard is something that will be occupying Armaeus’s next round of studies for, I suspect, at least a century or two. Fortunately, he’ll have a significant period of time to study that.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Of course,” Kreios said, sounding amused I’d even ask. “If you were to question him, he would say it was merely one of a myriad of potential outcomes for which he was eminently prepared.”

  “He didn’t look all that prepared to me. What was he doing?”

  Kreios moved beyond the pentagram. “He didn’t give me his protocol. Can you describe what you saw?”

  “He was hanging on some sort of sports apparatus, like Olympic rings, and getting the crap blasted out of him by something beyond a wall of smoke. Tentacles would come out and grind him up or cut him clear through to the bone, and then he’d heal himself.”

  “And then?” Kreios pressed.

  I pursed my lips, remembering. “And then he started talking to me with different voices, and after that, he sort of…” I let my own words trail off, my mind racing ahead. “I think I might have blacked out for a minute there.”

  Fortunately, neither Kreios nor Danae had the kind of mind-reading abilities that Armaeus did, and my mental barriers were more than enough to keep them from following my thoughts. But the reality was, Armaeus had broken into multiple personalities. That was exactly what I’d seen in his lair. And who else had recently been the subject of a dissociative identity disorder? None other than Abigail Strand, the last Justice of the Arcana Council.

  Was Armaeus doing research into what might happen to me, if I followed the same path that Abigail had? Or was he pursuing some other random curious path?

  I shook my head, trying to clear it of dread. “Where is he now?”

  “He reached out to me once your presence left him. He was in no position to follow you. However, he knew the energy to pull you free most likely came from Danae.” I could almost hear Kreios’s lips quirk into a smile. “Though you were unaware of the forces working on your behalf, I assure you, Armaeus was very focused on your safety, even in the face of his own distress.”

  “So he knew how…I got here? And he allowed it?”

  “He didn’t have a choice,” Danae drawled. “That’s how weak he was, no matter what Kreios would have you believe.”

  A match was struck, then another, and soon I was surrounded by five thick pillar candles, each at the far ends of a pentagram—with me squarely in the middle of it.

  I froze, looking at the deeply etched lines of chalk.

  “Exactly where am I?” I asked carefully. “And why am I in one of your little Etch-a-sketches?”

  “I took precautions,” Danae said simply. “When I saw you in your office. I gathered items you had touched, several strands of hair. Items from your desk.”

  I lifted my brows. The tour Mrs. French had given Danae took on a whole new meaning. “You know that’s super creepy, right? It’s only because I trust you that I’m not completely freaked out right now. But I may be freaked out later, I’m warning you.”

  “I’ve been working on a theory about you, Sara,” Danae replied, unperturbed. “You started working with the Arcana Council when you were little more than an artifact hunter and Tarot card reader. You had no formal training and even less predisposition for that training.”

  “I was really, really good at finding stuff,” I argued, peering in her direction through the glare of the candles. “That seemed to work out for me.”

  “It did. But then you began working more in earnest with the Magician of the Arcana Council. Do you remember when you and I first met?”

  I cast my eyes skyward, staring into the darkness. “We were in Las Vegas, and…dealing with a god-containment problem. You came to help reinforce the ley lines beneath Las Vegas.”

  “Exactly. Here I was, one of the oldest and most well-known witches in the northern hemisphere, and I was being asked to support a young woman who barely knew what a witch was. You stared at me as if you’d never seen any of my kind before.”

  “You know, I’d been kind of busy.” I struggled half upright now, curling my knees beneath me. I still felt a little woozy, so I wasn’t much in the mood to stand up, but I felt like this was the kind of information that should at least be taken sitting up.

  Danae’s laugh was quietly amused. “And yet, even then I sensed your abilities as a spell caster, as a sorceress in your own right. I was happy to support you in your efforts. I also noted that the Magician already loved you more than he loved his own life.”

  I rolled my eyes, though the effect was lost in the gloom. “He needed more cannon fodder to target his own spells, if I’m recalling correctly.”

  “He needed you, perhaps more than I truly realized. His need for you is even greater now. You are arguably one of the world’s most quickly evolving magic wielders. Some would say you could easily become a consecrated witch, should you wish.”

  “I’m no witch,” I said, frowning down at the pentagram. “And I’m not big on spells. What I do is…” I shrugged. “Simply what I do.”

  “You’re correct. But as one of the strongest sorceresses in the world at this moment, you could reasonably be a target for the energy of Myanya. Do you understand the danger of this?”

  “Wait, what?” I shook my head. “Danae, you’ve got this completely backward. I was there in Vlad the Impaler’s cave of doom when he summoned Myanya. I was also there at the tail end of the Jones brothers nearly getting their ankles ground up like hamburger. In both cases, I was on the outside of the pentagram, not the inside. I would have noticed if the reverse had been true.”

  “And in both cases, you made yourself known to the scarred warrior’s spirit. That means she can identify you.”

  “Well, that’s super unfortunate since I’m the one who’s supposed to be identifying her.” I rubbed my head. “How does this figure into you pulling me out of Armaeus’s little torture pageant?”

  “By allowing me into your inner sanct
um, you accepted my care and concern for you. I heard your pain and trauma, and I moved to end it.”

  “Uh-huh. Once you made a little voodoo doll of me, right? And, what, you invited Kreios over to help you set up your candles?”

  The silence between us suddenly grew heavy in the room, and I peered around, trying to fix both of them with my glare. I couldn’t do it.

  “Are you guys hooking up?” I asked, trying not to choke on a laugh. “If so, I am really sorry for harshing your mellow.”

  “My dear Sara Wilde, your imagination has always been one of your best features,” Kreios practically purred, but I noticed he didn’t confirm or deny. “I was consulting with the Mistress of Swords because her challenge is one that intrigues me. It’s not every day that we have the rage-filled warrior prophecy enacted in our world.”

  “Well, maybe not every day, but at least every twenty-eight years, right? For you guys, what, that’s basically about as often as you go in to get your oil changed?”

  “The prophecy was broken in 1962, and it was not detected in 1990, though it’s possible that it was fulfilled but the legacy of the scarred warrior never acted upon,” Danae said. “That brings us to today.”

  “Back up, Sparky.” I waved her off. “What do you mean, never acted upon? What’s the point of going through all that pain if you’re not going to reap the rewards?” There was something else pinging in the back of my mind too, something Armaeus had mentioned. What was it?

  “The spirit of Myanya is not for the faint of heart,” Danae said, cutting through my thoughts. “And though she chooses her vessels as carefully as she can, she has experienced more than a few times the results of overmatching the physical and emotional strength of the vessel in which she places her faith. In 1962, her attempts to overpower her chosen warrior and draw her deep into the veil of submission failed.”

  The dots connected abruptly. “Armaeus said that too. The vessel witch she chose rejected her?”

  “That seems to be the case. It was not well publicized, of course, but what I’ve uncovered is that a young woman in Moscow successfully fended off Myanya’s attempt to make her the vessel witch to bring the prophecy to life. Then, in 1990, Myanya either did not make the attempt, or she did and the result was the death or mental destruction of the vessel witch she chose.”