by Jenn Stark
“To know that my granddaughter lived, I know,” Iskra said tiredly. “That once more, I’d not been enough. But you won’t succeed, Myanya. You won’t succeed.”
With a speed I would never have imagined, the old lady dashed forward, lifting her staff like a javelin as Heather’s face flashed with sudden recognition beneath Myanya’s mask. She might not know who her grandmother was, but she recognized the old woman rushing toward her.
In the end, though, it was Myanya who roared forth to greet Iskra. The confrontation of their magic shook the foundation of the magical plane, and Iskra vanished in a crackle of smoke.
Then, moving all in one motion, Heather whirled on Armaeus, who remained frozen in the pentagram. “I command you to claim me as my consort!” she cried.
I sighed. Not this again.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Armaeus stood with his hands outstretched, his face slack and his eyes fixed on a far distant point, but that didn’t stop Heather from lurching toward him. I was marginally closer, and I crossed the line of the pentagram before she did. Then a surge of power coming behind me blasted past my shoulder and hit Armaeus square in the face.
What happened next shouldn’t have been so upsetting, since I’d seen a version of it before, but it was. Exactly as he had in his inner sanctum, Armaeus split into twelve separate beings, each with a particular focus. Only this time, I saw as well as heard the reality of those splits. One laughed with the sheer might of his ability, bursting with power. One extended his hands out, his fingers dripping darkness. One practically oozed sex appeal, a side of Armaeus I frankly wished was closer to me, but that was not to be. Instead, the Magician nearest to me looked like Armaeus after a long stretch of bad road. He eyed me with unrestricted malevolence, and the tiniest bit of fear curled through me. This was not a side of the Magician I’d ever seen before.
I decided to try to reason with him.
“You knew this was coming,” I said, infusing my voice with admiration. It wasn’t a stretch. “You knew that you’d get hit with…this.”
“No,” Angry Armaeus seethed back. He seemed…unreasonably upset with me. “It was one of several hundred possibilities, but not the most likely. I was dealing with alters because of you. You and what you may face.”
That made me slow down, and I glanced around at the other Armaeuses. Several of them had turned toward me, and I realized belatedly that Myanya hadn’t entered the pentagram with me. She remained outside, apparently frozen in time, waiting for Armaeus and I to do battle. Which meant…probably something not very good.
Whoops.
“So, maybe you should introduce me around,” I said. I turned to the next closest Armaeus to me. He stared at me with an expression of rapt fascination on his face, looking so much like the absentminded professor, I almost chuckled.
“You have much more power than you should,” he murmured, lifting his hands. “That power should be fractured and siphoned off for the good of humanity.”
“Wait, what?” I lifted my own hands, a spate of blue fire sparking up. I threw the mass of it at Armaeus, tangling him up in a crackling miasma.
“What…is this?” he asked, his voice so captivated that it vibrated the air around us. “How…is this possible…” He turned away and wandered off, caught in my net of power, and I watched him go with some satisfaction. He’d stay busy awhile.
A second Armaeus rushed me then, this one barely a ghost. I caught a sense of pure, heart-wrenching agony, the sense of a love being lost that could never be found. I didn’t even know what to do with that Armaeus, so I did the only thing I could. I stepped to one side and let him blow by me, straight into the wall of fire that bordered the pentagram. He disappeared in a rush of black smoke, his long, mournful wail all that remained of him. My heart lurched at the sound, and I slowed…
Then was knocked sideways to the floor.
This Armaeus spread over me in a mass of circuits, all of them glowing the violent pink of his newly hardwired alien DNA. I didn’t understand enough of what that power did or was intended for to be able to stop it, so I went completely still, completely dark. I shut all my senses off and walled off my mind, freezing any contact to Armaeus out—
The pink mass disappeared. Another waft of agony suddenly all that remained of it.
I really didn’t like this game, I decided.
As I struggled to my feet, another, darker alt-Arma, this one eyeing me with single-minded possession, stood grinning at me. Then he moved forward.
“The magic of Myanya is ancient, primal,” he murmured, his voice rich and deep. He stalked me as I stepped back. “It calls to the basest, most elemental needs of my power. And it’s telling me to take what’s mine.”
“Ah…” I swallowed, then tried to redirect him. “Doesn’t Myanya want you to take her?”
His smile was pure carnal malice. “Oh, she does. But she can wait. She can’t see what’s going on in this veil, now that she has set her spell in motion. She is forcing me to prove myself to her. She’ll find that she should be careful what she wishes for.”
Truer words were never spoken, but then Armaeus turned, backing me into a wall of white-hot coals.
“What the hell!” I gasped.
It was another incarnation of Armaeus, only this one was spitting fire. In a flash, I was surrounded by flames, and I twisted and turned, struggling to get away. I couldn’t seem to gain any purchase. Behind me, sounding truly distressed, the fiery incarnation of Armaeus howled, but he didn’t loosen his hold on me. I’d never felt so much pain in my life, and I’d been dipped in the primordial goop once when Armaeus was hell-bent on leveling me up.
Once I started thinking of that goop, in fact, I couldn’t stop. I felt the fire of Armaeus’s attack melting through my skin, muscles, and even bone, consuming me, making me one with his agony. But my brain seized on the pit Armaeus had opened deep in his fortress, the glimpse into the dark essence of creation. Seized on it desperately as someplace—anyplace—that wasn’t here.
The intensity of that place in my mind, and the fact that my cells were already mostly destabilized…and the fact that I was already on fire…made it relatively easy for me to lurch through space and spectral fields to reach the location inside Armaeus’s home. There in the center of Prime Luxe, I stood in Armaeus’s magician cave, right at the edge of the deep and miserable pit that he seemed to favor so highly when he was trying to work his magic. I wasn’t alone, unfortunately. I was still wearing Armaeus like road rash.
Before he could respond, and before I could really take stock of what I was doing, I stepped off the edge of the pit and plunged straight down. The moment we hit the pool of goop, Armaeus let me go. With the buoyancy of a cork plunged deep into water, I shot straight back up again, through several feet of dark, seething magic and then blessedly clean oxygen, until I lunged to the side of the pit, grabbing its edge. Barely more than bleeding bones at this point, I hauled myself up over the edge onto the cool concrete floor of the chamber. I rolled to my side, whimpering as I struggled to find my own healing magic.
It eluded me.
For what felt like a long time, most everything eluded me except the simple act of breathing. Far below, Armaeus’s screams weren’t unhappy ones, a part of me was relieved to notice. I huffed a garbled groan, my thoughts focusing as intently on my internal processes as I could make them.
But the fact of the matter was, Armaeus had ripped the crap out of me. He’d well and truly set me on fire, and I found my attention fracturing as I stumbled over that fact. Wasn’t he supposed to love me? Wasn’t he supposed to have my back—not roast it?
“Sara.”
The word was spoken softly, almost reluctantly, and I lurched in a feeble roach-like motion, gasping as I stared up. Eshe stood there, the High Priestess of the Arcana Council. I knew she bunked at Armaeus’s and pretty much had the run of the place, but neither of us were the kind to paint each other’s fingernails. “What?” I managed
through blistered lips. “I’m kind of busy here.”
“I know. You’re fighting aspects of the Magician, but you’re missing the purpose of that battle.” She glanced over the edge of the pit, where the Magician was still howling in one part pain, two parts ecstasy. “Extra style points for that, though. If you had enough time, you probably would be able to subdue each of Armaeus’s aspects.” She looked back to me. “But you don’t. In fact, while you’re busy whittling down his power, you’re essentially making him weaker. And I can’t help but notice that you’ve left most of him behind to fend for himself as a Magician in pieces, while Myanya only needs one fragment of him to succeed.”
She was right. I knew in an instant she was right, and I clicked my eyelids closed, forcing a bolt of ice-cold healing magic through me, the equivalent of ripping off the rest of my skin with duct tape. “Son of a bitch.”
I poofed out of the room and back to Lara’s home, but I stopped myself just shy of entering the pentagram of Magicians. I’d leveraged Armaeus’s power to get out of that pentagram, but I didn’t know if I’d have the strength to break out again, especially if he was an iterative learner. But the moment I crashed back to the floor of the solarium, I understood why Eshe had moved herself to stop buying togas on QVC long enough to warn me.
Armaeus stood in front of Myanya, kneeling.
One aspect of him, anyway. The aspect of the Magician who’d burst through the wall of fire. The aspect who’d lost the most important thing to him he could possibly imagine—the love of his life. A woman who’d lived eight centuries before I’d been born and who’d been perhaps the first and most damning sacrifice of Armaeus’s long tenure as Magician. I knew the Magician’s love for me had no equal, but there was more tied up in his feelings for the impulsive, free-spirited Mirabel than simple nostalgia. He had failed her when she’d needed him most. He had abandoned her, never realizing the impact of that abandonment. He had pursued his calling as Magician of the Arcana Council, and she had died in a terrible accident while he’d been gone. He’d never forgiven himself for that, and he’d carried the weight of that condemnation for nearly nine hundred years.
And now she was standing in front of him.
“Mirabel,” Armaeus whispered, and my heart twisted. Myanya no longer looked anything like Heather. She was a short, curvy woman with a mass of dark curly hair, and her eyes were huge and luminous. Her bow-shaped mouth tilted in a radiant smile, and she nodded at Armaeus encouragingly as she held out her hands.
“We can be together, Armaeus. You and me, as we were meant to be all those centuries ago. You can save me.”
“Save…you,” Armaeus said, sounding like a man who’d been drugged. And maybe he had been.
“Arma—”
Another roar of anger erupted beside me, only it wasn’t Armaeus but a phalanx of witches closing in on me, ready to keep me out of the game. I groaned as I realized my force field on the solarium had failed when I’d trotted off for points east, and I hadn’t reset it. The witches were taking advantage. I was smote with one, two, then six different silver rods, the small devices clearly some kind of tool that I was not familiar with, all of them spelled to the hilt.
“That hurts!” I gritted out as another rod connected with my temple, but I spun around, ducking beneath my attacker and shoving her away. I seemed to be everywhere at once for one mind-bending moment, my magic sparking to life again and exploding in all directions. The witches went down in a flail of skyclad limbs, and I raced toward Armaeus again.
He was standing, his arms open, hands tilted toward each other. I couldn’t decide if he was welcoming Myanya with open arms, preparing to fry her, or setting up for one mean bout of cat’s cradle—but I couldn’t take the chance.
I changed my trajectory and barreled straight into the modern-day incarnation of the ancient scarred warrior witch.
The first sensation I had was fire. The second was…heart-rending pain. Literally…as if my heart had been split in two.
Turning around, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. A line of robed acolytes staggered down a narrow passageway, wailing and moaning, wringing their hands. They reached the bottom and disappeared, and I lunged after them. A second later, we all spilled out into a large chamber where a spit stood above a roaring fire.
Impaled on a pike above that fire was Myanya.
Her body was broken and bleeding, her skin waxy, and flames crackled along her feet and legs. Having caught myself on fire more times than I cared to count in the last few weeks, I could attest that this was no picnic. But even as I started forward, another priest burst out of the crowd and cried out to Myanya at the top of his lungs, clearly attempting to save her.
A spear shot out of the shadows, toppling him into the fire.
Okay, so, no saving the witch queen.
As I watched, Myanya looked up at me and smiled through cracked lips. “No one saves the witch queen,” she said, and as she spoke, her mouth opened wide and I saw her body was filled with wriggling black beetles. They fell from her mouth to deep fry in the fires below, and I struggled to keep the revulsion from my face.
Myanya laughed anyway.
“All who come to look upon me shudder and shy away, but you stare openly, Sara Wilde. In all the centuries of my divine suffering, you’re the one most worthy of my pain.”
“Well, I’m not, actually—”
It didn’t take more than a second for our positions to be reversed. One moment I was standing on the side of Camp Roastable, the next I was skewered on a pike, flames licking along my clothes and hair. Even if it was an illusion, it was a damned realistic illusion, and I screamed, grabbing the pike with both hands.
“I did not bag Vlad the Impaler only to end up on the end of your dumbass toothpick,” I growled. I inched myself along the pike, every movement filling me with agony.
“You are strong enough, and the Magician is already your consort. You’ll do.” Myanya said, and she shoved me back down on the pike. I stared, numb as real blood began to pour out of me. It was the oddest sensation…like I was being emptied out, a cup of wine drained to a dangerously low level. “You will be ground under the heel of my rage, not the Magician’s. And you will be so much more powerful for it.” She laughed as I struggled on the pike. “Save your strength. Armaeus will soon be called upon to fulfill his duties as consort as well, when I’m done with you. Having seen some of his aspects, you’ll need all the strength you can muster. Fortunately, my spirit will be filling you by then, so what you cannot bear, I’ll gladly endure.”
My back flared with sudden, unexpected heat, wholly different from the warmth of the crackling fire beneath me, and I thought of the furious Magician who’d grappled me, pouring himself over and into me, drugging me with the same malevolent primal force that filled him up. I still had the lacerations from those wounds striping my back, and now they sizzled and popped with so much anger, I almost didn’t mind the pike damned near bisecting me. But as I swung my gaze to the grinning Myanya, I saw her differently.
I saw her through Armaeus’s eyes.
While I could view psychic souls with my third eye as crackling lines of Connected energy, this was different. Armaeus not only read people’s essential nature, he categorized their strengths and weaknesses like a 1980s Dungeon Master fresh off a Gary Gygax singalong. And Myanya was rolling a twenty in strength, twenty in charisma, and twenty in intelligence, but her wisdom had tanked out. Girl didn’t believe in learning from her mistakes. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe that was simply how the prophecy worked.
I wasn’t sure how that could help me, then my back flared up again like I was getting flat-ironed by Hephaestus. Finally, I got it.
Myanya couldn’t bear to lose.
The maelstrom of her immortal agony took on meaning only if she was able to revisit it upon an unfortunate soul and watch that individual suffer as she suffered, be redeemed as she was redeemed, and go on to power as she went on to power. Ev
en if that transformation from victim to victor lasted only for one brief shining moment, that was all she needed to justify all her actions.
Iskra had taken that satisfaction away from her, and she’d never recovered. Her hunt for new blood wasn’t merely for new blood; therefore, it was to reset the playing field and launch an entirely new generation of power.
“Not gonna happen,” I gritted out.
I stopped trying to pull myself off the pike, and instead wrapped my hand around it, focusing Armaeus’s incendiary glare on the pike. With the borrowed intensity of his remembered magic, the pike disappeared in my grip, a burst of healing magic pounding back through me as my body sought to put itself back together again.
I dropped straight into the fire, but surrounded as I was in Armaeus’s power—with my own surging to the fore—I barely felt it. Instead, I staggered out like a true believer at a Tony Robbins firewalk and flung my hands forward. This time, it wasn’t a blue orb that trapped Myanya—it was the silver cuffs of Justice.
“You dare!” howled Myanya, her roar cut off as I set us both…yep…on fire.
Because why stop now?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Myanya and I exploded into the brick-and-steel entryway of the fortress Gamon called home. As Judgment of the Arcana Council, Gamon’s job was to take the Connected criminals I delivered to her and, well, pass judgment on them. She was exceptional at it.
She also wasn’t here.
“You dare!” Myanya roared again, and I scrambled around to face the scarred witch, bemused by the fact that her bracelets had snapped off her wrists. Further, she no longer resided in Heather’s body. She straightened to her full height, and I looked up, then up still farther. Myanya…was tall.
She was also masked. A Phantom of the Opera-style white mask covered half her face, baring her eyes that glared like twin supernovas and part of one cheek. As I watched, she turned slowly to take in her surroundings, which were still quite noticeably devoid of people. Several giant screens lined the circular room, all of them also helpfully blank. It was as if I’d popped in on Gamon on New Year’s Eve, never imagining she’d actually be off, actually celebrating the holiday. Because…Gamon.
