by Jenn Stark
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. She had a point. Before I could come up with a reasonable reply, she straightened. “Here we go.”
Seamus McCarthy came out of his tent and nodded to three other people across the small clearing. They all turned toward another tent, this one set back off the public pathway, clearly some sort of supply hut. Sariah grabbed me and started forward.
“We can’t just follow them in there.”
“Sure we can. Or more to the point, you can while looking exactly like one of their own, which means I can as long as I’m hanging out with you. Pretty neat, huh?”
We followed the group closely, slipping into the tent behind them. It wasn’t a large tent, so we pressed ourselves up against the walls on either side of the opening, hanging in the shadows. Anyone looking might realize we weren’t who we seemed to be, but as Sariah clearly had expected, no one looked.
Seamus started right in. “She’ll be back.”
“She may be too angry,” another man spoke up, his voice gruff, accusing. “You let the Neo-Celts breach our wards to test her with that banshee. That could have gone very badly.”
I glanced at Sariah, who smiled smugly.
Seamus only shook his head. “It didn’t, though. And our cause here is true. Plus, she won’t be able to resist the attack on her own.”
“She killed the fairy witch,” one of the women said, a thin, hard-eyed blonde. “I didn’t think she had it in her.”
I shot another look at Sariah, who shrugged. They thought I was Sariah and that I’d killed someone in cold blood. Then again, the woman had attacked Nikki, and if I hadn’t had Sariah there to distract her while I attended to my friend, she might well have died. I could heal a lot of things, but I couldn’t heal dead. Still, there was a certain casualness to Sariah’s dispatching of the witch that unnerved me. Had a violent, pragmatic shard of my soul been stripped away that day more than ten years ago, a shard I never truly realized was gone? And what did that mean for that shard of a soul to have taken human form once more?
I couldn’t focus on that right now, but I’d need to. Soon.
“Will she act by Beltane is the question,” another man said. “If she doesn’t, this is all for nothing anyway. We’re dead.”
“She will act,” Seamus said. He looked up with ancient eyes, right at me. “Won’t you, Justice Wilde?”
“Shit,” Sariah muttered, and before I could move, she went up in fire and smoke, co-opting my traveling ability just that fast. I watched her go, but I didn’t need to follow her this time. I was where I needed to be.
I stepped forward, letting the veneer of my disguise fall away. The other people in the room stiffened, their faces blanking in surprise and mistrust—and maybe a little awe. I was fine with that. A little awe could go a long way.
“What else aren’t you telling me, Seamus?” I asked levelly. “This will be the last time I ask.”
He stared at me a long moment, then seemed to shrink in on himself. “Fair enough, Justice Wilde. The truth is, Conal McCarthy isn’t the only fool in my family. When I was much younger, I also prayed for the ancient gods to return. Unfortunately, I attracted not the Tuatha dé Danann, but their ancient foes, the Fomorians.”
“Are they sparkly, too?”
“Not at all. They also hold a grudge. Things could have gone very badly. As it was, my druid order vanquished them and all was well. But if they return, when they return—I will be a homing target for them, a beacon amid humanity.” He sighed heavily. “All that to say, I accept my responsibility here. And my sacrifice. Should you have need of bait…”
“No.” I spoke a little more sharply than I intended, and the entire crowd jumped a little, Seamus most of all. “If they come back, then first, you hide. Second, you contact me. If that doesn’t work, then you remember what it was you did to blast them back into their hole the first time, and do that. Screw being bait. I need you on the front lines, and I also need you to tell me everything you can about your kid.”
As I continued, the old man straightened, his chin coming up, his eyes fierce. Finally, he spoke.
“Our family has long been a member of the ancient order of druids, generation upon generation, age upon age, our teachings and practices handed down by the spoken word, the cycle ever unbroken. In the generations where there were no sons, our daughters would carry on the line, but for the past several hundred years we’ve kept the druid families intact, working in the shadows, honing our craft. In my own line, I was blessed with not one but two boys, several years apart, both of whom grew up to be straight and true, but only one with the spark of the green man within him.”
“Ahhh…the green man.” I knew the symbol, of course. A man nearly hidden in a swath of foliage, representing the cycle of growth each spring. But I wasn’t sure exactly how it pertained, here.
“Yes, indeed. The highest blessing a druid can aspire to. I rejoiced at first to see such a strong light and nurtured it as best as I was able, bearing in mind my own foolish mistakes. But that spark grew quickly out of control several years ago. Eventually, I was forced to defend myself against my own son and stop his murderous hand as he turned his mania on his own brother.”
“Whoa, hold up. Brother?”
“Niall,” Seamus said with a soft sigh. “Conal’s older brother. A good, loyal boy, but he never had the spark. Eventually, Conal turned on him, too. Meanwhile, I’ve lived in exile from my own order ever since, unwilling and unable to take up arms against my own blood. But my position as father can no longer take precedence over my position as druid. Not when the fate of the world hangs in the balance.”
“What is it exactly that you think your son is going to do?” And whatever happened to son number two, while we were up? I didn’t waste my time disputing the man’s belief. While so much of religion was based on an unfounded faith, I’d seen too much magic in the world to know from a distance what I was dealing with here. Until I saw Conal in person, I wouldn’t have a clue as to his actual strength.
“First, let me answer that which remains unspoken,” Seamus said, surprising me again. “Niall, Conal’s brother, lives—more than lives. He’s become Conal’s right-hand man, helping him in all his pursuits.”
“That seems…imprudent.”
“I agree, but Niall is by far the weaker of the two, and what light he has, he hides.” He squared his shoulders, gesturing to the room. “Very well, then. You naturally want to know what Conal will do, and you want to know what he has done to engender such fear within me, within all of us. That’s a fair request, so I’ll start with what he’s done. In the space of the last two years, since he has begun his ministry in earnest, he’s gathered to him an international following that now numbers in the hundreds of thousands. With that following has come gifts of money and ancient gold.”
“Ancient gold?” That surprised me, and, curse my avaricious spirit, intrigued me as well. “What kind of ancient gold?”
“There was a very specific kind of gold mined in Ireland, a uniquely pale ore that was said to possess magical qualities. That gold was heavily sought after whenever it was sent outside of Ireland, which was often. Rome couldn’t vanquish Ireland, but it could take its gold, and it did. Not only Rome either. This pale Irish gold found its way into the royal courts of Europe and as far away as China and Egypt. My son has asked for that gold back, and it is coming to him.”
“Really.” I wondered how much the Magician knew about this. He’d said nothing when I’d received the summons from Seamus, but that didn’t mean he was unaware. His actions on this very festival today proved that.
“With this gold, my son has begun performing the rites that’ve been buried in our family to stir the people to him and give them what they need to believe. He has become the alchemist, determined to create a new conductive metal that can maintain a significantly high electrical current. High enough to change the vibration of anything around it. To hear him talk, it can shatter mountains into rubble
, crystallize oceans into ice, and vaporize people into thin air.”
“That does not sound good.”
“It isn’t good. And he has only tapped the barest potential of it. And as I’ve been trying to tell you, to bring this weapon to full flower, Conal says he will bring back the Tuatha dé Danann themselves by first setting the Fomorians free. And I believe he can do it.”
Chapter Six
Seamus didn’t have much else to say, but by then, he’d said plenty. A threat was coming, it would hit at Beltane, and…we needed to stop it. Between what he’d shared with me today and my up-close-and-personal vision of what newly empowered Connecteds could and would do without proper restraint, that was more than enough for me to get started. Our little powwow broke up shortly after that, and I emerged back out into the evening only slightly dazed. At least until I realized that Brody was standing there, waiting for me. Then I became fully dazed.
“Do not tell me there’s been another psychic food fight,” I said.
“No.” He held up his phone. “You ever see one of these before? It’s called a phone. You know what they’re used for?”
I felt around my pockets, and frowned. “I might have lost mine. I was a little busy earlier today.”
He sighed heavily. “That’s what Nikki thought, but she wanted you to know. She’s not doing so hot—”
Without hesitating, I lunged forward, wrapping my arms around Brody. We appeared a moment later in the lobby of Justice Hall, where there was no Nikki. Instead, there was only Mrs. French, wringing her hands and white as a ghost.
I whirled around as Brody spun away from me sputtering curses, batting furiously at his shoulders as flames licked along his cheap polyester suit jacket. “Don’t you ever—and I mean ever—do that to me again—”
“Where is she?” I tried to modulate my voice, but I could practically hear the walls vibrate with my shouted question, and even Mrs. French took a step back.
“She’s safe, she’s completely safe, she told me that herself, that that would be the first thing you would worry about, the very first.”
“Mrs. French—”
“But she said she’d be in tip-top shape in no time, those were her very words, and that you weren’t to worry at all, just—”
“Mrs. French,” I tried again. “Where is she?”
This time, it was Brody who spoke. “She’s under observation at Dr. Sells’s clinic, if you would’ve let me get a word in edgewise. Apparently, no sooner did you drop her off than she collapsed, and then she went poof.”
That stopped me. “Went poof. Never mind. Where’s her room? Have I been there?” I began to destabilize even as I spoke, but Brody held up his phone again.
“Sara! You need to take a breath. She’s okay. She’s got Dr. Sells watching over her, and the Council is on it. We can go there now, but we should go the ordinary way.”
I blinked at him, hovering on the edge of corporeality. “What ordinary way?”
“By car. Which means you need to take us back to the goddamned festival so I can get mine.”
“Well! That’s no trouble at all, Detective,” Mrs. French said brightly. “Justice Wilde has several vehicles at her disposal here. You can take any of them at all.”
I glanced at her. “I do?”
“Indeed yes, ma’am. But please do keep me posted on Miss Dawes’s condition, if you would? She’s a bit cheeky, but it’s all for show. Oh! And while you’re here.” She bustled out of the lobby and into my private office, but I was already shaking my head as she reemerged.
“No way,” I said, lifting my hands. “I’ve got no time for new work, not now.”
“Well, this isn’t new, exactly,” she said. “Before she collapsed, Nikki said something about the Green Knight of the Celts, and that name rang a bell, I mean, beyond the Arthurian legend, of course, which was all tosh and nonsense. I pulled what I had on past cases regarding the reference, and—” She offered up the file.
I took it from her, then skewered her with a look. “How bad was Nikki? And do not lie to me.”
“Well, ah—” Mrs. French swallowed, shooting a look at Brody, who stared steadily back. My guts twisted as I watched the parade of emotions across her face.
“Spit it out, Mrs. French.”
“She—well, you see, dear, she’s in a coma—”
I didn’t wait around for the rest. I’d been to Dr. Sells’s clinic often enough in the past year, and though she had multiple locations around the city, the biggest and best equipped was also the one with which I was the most familiar. I showed up at the entrance to the clinic blowing sparks, startling a mother and her two kids as they hurried past me into the parking lot. I rushed through the front doors and looked around wildly, making a beeline for the woman at reception.
“Nikki Dawes,” I snapped. Once again, there was a weird shimmy-shake to the walls, and the woman looked at me with wide, frightened eyes as I practically climbed over the desk to read her monitor.
“ICU!” she squeaked. “Third floor but you can’t—”
I couldn’t poof to the ICU because I couldn’t remember if I’d been there, but I did race up the stairs with impressive speed. That was another skill I’d picked up along the way of my development, sort of like the miraculous power of healing, and apparently, it was still extant. So why hadn’t I been able to heal Nikki?
I reached the third floor and burst out onto the main hallway, immediately catching sight of Armaeus Bertrand, Magician of the Arcana Council.
Same bronzed skin, same perfect hair. But unlike his more formal suit from the psychic fair, now he wore a typical summer-weight suit and gleaming laced loafers, platinum winking at his wrists and neck. He looked up at me as soon as I skidded into the corridor, and while I didn’t expect a smile given the circumstances, I also didn’t expect the panic in his gaze.
“Sara,” he whispered in my mind.
My heart skipped a beat as I broke stride, Armaeus now seeming too far away from me. I tripped, the lower half of my body losing all feeling, and then I looked at the floor to see what was impeding my feet. The floor was suddenly a lot closer than I remembered it being before, and my heart was hammering a lot harder, and—
Armaeus’s strong arms wrapped around me before I face-planted in the linoleum.
I blacked out, which made it easier to accept the full energy of Armaeus flowing through my body, racing along my circuits. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t hear, but I could feel his presence even if nothing else made sense. He was like a balm to circuits that I hadn’t even been aware were scorched, but at the first pressure of his touch, I nearly collapsed all over again with pent-up pain. How had I not been aware I was so damaged? And when had this damage happened?
“Sara,” Armaeus said again, but everything he spoke after that was a blur of soft, melodic syllables I had no energy to follow, as much as I wanted to. I fell down into a deep, dark hole, and I was only aware of lights sparking on the fringes. I wasn’t in pain, exactly. I wasn’t even truly afraid. I was just—so…so tired.
Why was I so tired?
The crack against my sternum came so quickly, so abruptly, that my eyes flew open and my hands sprang wide, defensive blue fire immediately erupting at my fingertips. I lurched off the bed only to be shoved right back down again, and I stared from the beautiful, tortured face of Armaeus to the haggard face of Brody Rooks right behind him—to the face of a third person who I hadn’t realized had entered the room, but whose smirk I’d still remember when I was ten years dead.
Aleksander Kreios. The Devil of the Arcana Council.
“I told you that would work,” Kreios said smugly. Today, he’d adopted his most familiar glamour, that of the Mediterranean playboy, with a long flowing mane of hair, sun-kissed skin stretched over high cheekbones, a strong jaw, and achingly soft lips, brilliant green eyes, and a long, lean body that would have looked just as comfortable lounging on the beach as loitering at the side of a
hospital bed, in an open-necked linen tunic and frayed khakis. I couldn’t see his feet, but I assumed they were shod in thick-soled beach sandals. Because: Kreios.
“If I’d known there were going to be so many people in this room, I would have assigned you your own ward. Now move it.” Dr. Sells’s autocratic tones sounded from the doorway, and I blinked my gaze that way. The crisp, efficient, gym-teacher-with-a-stethoscope Dr. Sells, the Arcana Council’s chief clinician for now going on eighty years, with her tightly banded chestnut hair and her no-nonsense glasses, stalked into the room. Brody and Kreios obligingly moved to the side, while Armaeus didn’t stir. One of his hands remained planted on my leg, and his eyes were glued to the monitors beside the bed. That alone was so strange, I scowled at him.
“Um…since when do you need to check the monitors to see how well you’re healing someone?”
“Since the poison blanketing your system made me blind to you as well, Miss Wilde,” he said, his words soft, almost formal. “As it made you blind to yourself. If you hadn’t the shard of Nul Magis embedded in your palm, eradicating the worst of the magic, you would likely already be dead. This is deep and unknown magic to me.”
I blinked in shock, but Armaeus refused to look at me.
“He’s right about the poison,” Dr. Sells said, switching out my IV bag with an efficiency born of generations of experience. Originally human, she’d been conscripted into Armaeus’s personal army in the 1940s, when he’d first come to Las Vegas. “We haven’t seen anything like it before. The toxin was likely administered orally, but for something as strong as this, you should have tasted it or known it was entering your system. Before she dropped into a coma, Nikki confirmed you’d both consumed beer from the festival. Is that right?”
“Wait, she’s still in a coma?” I demanded, sharply enough that Armaeus finally glanced at me. “Why aren’t you with her?”
“She’s recovering.” Once again, it was Kreios who spoke. “She, like you, simply needed to be reminded of the dangers of going too deep into herself. Sometimes the body is smarter than the brain. Not often, granted, but sometimes.”
