by Jenn Stark
I frowned, looking around. Since when did air flutter with promise?
“Miss Wilde.”
I turned as Armaeus stepped out of the shadows. How the shadows in this tiny garden managed to obscure a full-grown Magician was something I didn’t even bother wondering about. It was one of his many charms.
“How much of that did you hear?” I asked, feeling slightly abashed. Nobody would ever say negotiations were my strong suit, but I’d need to get better at them.
“Enough,” he said. “Enough to know you do understand the balance we have sought to walk all these centuries. That balance has never been more imperiled.”
“I…yeah.” For a full five seconds, I debated telling him about what I had learned about Miranda/Bartholomew. In the end, I decided against it for purely selfish reasons. I loved the Magician more than any man on this earth, but I understood him well. If he knew there was a Temperance still extant in the world, he would not rest until he brought him back to the Council. I needed to speak to Bartholomew first. About Abigail, about the In Between. About…so many things.
“What are you thinking about?” murmured Armaeus. Without the aid of magic or time disruption, the Magician moved toward me, until we were close enough to touch.
I instantly lifted my hands, more than happy to redirect him. “What do you know about steaming red flame?” I placed my hands in his, stretching the fingers wide as Armaeus’s eyes drifted shut and I felt the touch of his presence in my mind, along my nerves, and pulsing through my blood vessels.
“You healed Nikki,” he murmured. “With…dirt?”
“It’s sort of a long story.”
He laughed, drawing me deeper into the shadows. “As it happens, we have time.”
Tugging me close, Armaeus leaned in for a kiss. The moment his lips touched mine, however, I was beset with a terrifying spike of power. A panic of the kind I had not experienced with him in months. It surged up, bright and terrible, and I gasped, jerking back. Armaeus didn’t let me pull away from him, however, didn’t fully let me go.
“What is it, Miss Wilde?” he whispered, searching my face. “What is it you learned in the In Between that I have forgotten?”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I blinked, transfixed, my mouth moving but no sound coming out. Then the panic passed.
“What the hell was that?” I gasped, sinking against him. “That panic…that was for you, Armaeus. Not for me. I’m not afraid of you anymore. I trust you. I love you. You wouldn’t hurt me.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” Armaeus agreed, holding me tight. “Not intentionally, not directly. Not—”
“No,” I said, looking up at him. “You don’t need to make qualifiers. Not anymore. You don’t need to cover yourself against some action in the future that you can’t predict or control because there are too many variables to consider. Because the reality is, you love me. And not simply because you find me an intriguing experiment, no matter how much you would like me to believe that, and no matter how much I was willing to believe that for far too long.”
“This is what you’ve decided?” he asked with a slight smile, his face otherwise unreadable.
“This is what I finally understand. I mean, come on, Armaeus. You split yourself into multiple entities to find a way to protect me. You drowned yourself in a pit of dark magic to find some way to protect me. You sacrificed control over me and even allowed me to accelerate in my abilities to the point of temporarily being stronger than you are in an effort to protect me. There are a couple of common denominators here. One, it appears you have an endless supply of avenues to explore to protect me, and two…you seem to be unreasonably willing to go down every single one of those avenues, the worst of them—first.”
My voice had started wavering at the beginning of this explanation, but by the end, my words were little more than a halting sob. I tightened my fingers on Armaeus’s shirt and clung there, the most potentially powerful woman in the world unable to meet the gaze of the man she loved.
“You have to take better care of yourself,” I whispered. “I won’t be able to survive this world without you. I won’t.”
“Sara,” Armaeus spoke, his voice filled with such resonant emotion I blinked away tears I hadn’t realized had been forming. I lifted my gaze to his. His eyes were black, rimmed with red and gold, a holdover from the intense magic he had accessed to find ways to protect me, ways to deepen his own abilities so that he would be enough against whatever my burgeoning abilities summoned. “You can’t be afraid for me. It will render everything I’m doing moot.”
“Then you have to find a way to—ah!”
This time, the pain to my temples was so intense that I wrenched away from Armaeus and staggered to the side, nearly falling. I slapped my hands to either side of my head, flame billowing out around me, both the cool blue fire I was used to and the red, smoking liquid heat I wasn’t. Just as quickly as it had come, the pain disappeared again and Armaeus was at my side, drawing me down to the ground, cushioning me as my legs gave out from under me, my body completely spent.
“What’s happening?” I whimpered, and once again, Armaeus’s arms went around me. His voice was steady and sure, the voice of a trained master comforting a bewildered student.
When had I become the student again?
“You increased your abilities when you were driven to the point of extremity in healing Nikki in the In Between,” Armaeus said, his lips soft against my hair. “From all I’ve read, that is a wild and untrammeled space, shrouded by a veil that not even the gods can easily navigate. Mortals have managed it, but not gods. And not demigods either, until now. But its passage comes with a price, it would seem.”
“I wasn’t in there that long,” I protested. “How could it be affecting me so much?”
“Because while you were in there, you blended disparate elements from two very different planes. Three, if you want to count the In Between itself. You brought with you the very dirt of earth as well as skills both inherited from the spectral plane and evolved within you. You are a complete rarity. Did anyone speak to you other than Nikki?”
“What? No,” I said, my heart gradually slowing its frantic flutter. “I got in, I got lost, I got angry, I found Nikki, I used the dirt to heal her…or I did that—I don’t even know. Regardless, she was healed. And then we left. It’s not like I was there for a networking meeting.”
“There was no sound at all?”
“Well, there was sound, but it wasn’t like it was conversation. I heard the word Hallowed over and over again, but that could have been my mind playing tricks on me.”
“Or the fairies.”
I grimaced. “Or them. As for the rest, it wasn’t like I could translate the chattering of wild monkeys and understand what they’re saying other than ‘eat her.’”
“Monkeys?”
“Imps, whatever. But they look exactly like monkeys, only squatter, fatter, and with much sharper teeth and really sharp claws.” I paused, considering the image I recalled. “Okay, maybe not exactly like monkeys. But close.”
“And why do you think they weren’t talking to you when they were chattering, as you call it?”
“Maybe because I can translate any language known to man, even the languages I don’t personally know.” Even as I spoke the words, I understood their inherent flaw. “Well, it does me no good if it’s not a language known to man. So, see? I do have limits to my abilities.”
To my surprise, Armaeus only chuckled. “You are a wonder and a magic to behold.”
He dropped his lips to mine, capturing my mouth with a soft, searching kiss. As he did, I felt the touch of his presence skip through my mind.
“What are you looking for?” I whispered. I didn’t try to block him, beyond the natural defenses my system invariably raised. There apparently were certain things I wouldn’t share even with the Magician, as much as I’d come to love him. Some of those things I understood, some I di
dn’t know existed.
“What was said to—no.” Armaeus’s arms tightened around me as another flicker of panic woke to life. “I don’t like you being afraid. Of anything.”
He tightened his grip on me, and we both disintegrated into a rush of smoke. A second later, we materialized in a bedroom surrounded by a sea of white. White sheets, white pillows, white coverlet, white curtains draping snow-white walls and pale gray floors. It was like he’d transported us into a cloud sponsored by Restoration Hardware. There was a clock on a pale gray side table that glowed with ice-white numbers. As I watched, they shifted: 11:43 a.m. Otherwise, there was no movement in the room at all, no sound at all except our own hearts thudding in frantic time, our own limbs stretching on the luxurious bed.
I laughed softly. “I wonder how long you would last lying in the dirt.”
“I spent a good portion of my mortal life scrabbling in the dirt,” Armaeus said, his warm body as naked as mine. As he spoke, he trailed his mouth along the curve of my neck, pressing his lips against my collarbone before angling farther south, drawing one smooth cheek along the fullness of my left breast. “While I would not exchange those experiences for anything, it’s not necessarily a time I seek to revisit.”
I saw no reason to argue with him as he continued to explore my body with his hands, his mouth, his tongue. With every touch, he awakened in me a heat that had nothing to do with my spectral fire and yet everything to do with a profound sense of healing. I caught on almost too late, but by then, I no longer cared so much.
“I wasn’t hurt in the In Between, Armaeus.” I moaned as he scorched a trail of kisses up my thigh, pausing at the junction between my legs. His tongue slid along the sensitive skin, coiling me tight. “I would’ve remembered that.”
“Perhaps,” he said. “But it won’t do either of us any harm to make sure.”
My body arched beneath his in a jolt of pure electricity as he gripped my hips and lifted me, his breath and tongue and lips hot and urgent, creating an answering urgency within me that made me cry out with frustration when he didn’t move quickly enough. I reached for Armaeus’s shoulders, pulling him roughly up my body until his face was even with mine, our bodies hot and tightly entwined. The moment he filled me, my sight blacked out, and I existed in a space of pure light, pure energy, every one of my circuits exploding into brilliant life. This was the recreative force that Armaeus had given himself over to. This was the regenerating fire he was pouring into me. This was the spark of life that could be found in no other act so profound—
But this time, it was something more as well.
Armaeus wrapped his arms around me, flipping me until I straddled him and his face was a mask of emotion I couldn’t understand, his eyes no longer the deep black and gold I knew so well, nor even the crimson fire I’d seen more recently. No—the hue that raged deep within the fiery depths of his eyes was a cold and merciless white, like smoke on the verge of turning to pure ice. It was ancient and primal—far more ancient than even Armaeus—and it opened before me, sucking me deep before I had any chance of resisting it. It was the deepest force of creation, and it was mine—mine. It had always been mine to grasp, to hold, to have, to use—
“Sara.” Armaeus’s exultant voice drew me back from the brink, barely, and I realized his body with bucking with the storm of sensation jolting through him, so violently he was passing in and out of corporeal form—only each time he returned, he was larger, more powerful, and—
“Armaeus.” My own body reacted to the sudden surge of his shaft thickening within me, every inch of me mapped for a dance of pleasure and pain so exquisite, I couldn’t stop the climax from rushing up and over me, shattering me into a hundred million pieces. Armaeus cried out in a language I didn’t know, whether a curse or a blessing or a cry against the heavens I couldn’t guess, but his energy surged out of us, blanketing the room, the inn, the countryside, the sky, space, and reaching for the veil itself for the barest heartbeat—before plummeting just as quickly and pounding us flat against each other, an avalanche of power we could no more understand than we could fend off.
We collapsed, boneless, until the eddies of fire sluiced off our bodies and sizzled into nothingness.
For a long, long moment, we simply breathed.
Then the clock on the side table shifted, clicking over the time: 11:43 a.m. Not a single second had passed.
I stared at the glowing numbers, unable to do much more than sigh against Armaeus’s chest.
“Time was away and somewhere else,” Armaeus murmured, the phrase catching at me.
“What’s that from?”
He glanced at me. “A poet from the mid-1900s, born in Belfast, as it happens. I never thought much about that until this moment. His work will bear some new review. But more to the point, it would appear our idyll is at an end.”
He handed me my phone, opened to my text stream. There was a link repeated over and over again, all coming within the last ten minutes, but from different numbers.
“What’s this about?” I asked, trying to refocus.
“When I decided to come to Dublin to see the situation firsthand, my projections indicated my arrival here would accelerate the timetable for action. Currently, that probability sits at—”
“I don’t want to know,” I said sharply. “Probabilities make me sad.”
Armaeus smiled. “Very well. But the empirical evidence also holds. Beltane doesn’t officially begin until tonight at midnight, yet your phone is currently being flooded by texts of an increasingly urgent nature. It can’t be a coincidence.”
I waved the phone at him. “I need to click this link, don’t I?”
“It seems a lot of people think so—”
Another text popped up, this one also from an unknown number, but the message was far more succinct. Sara! This is Simon click the goddamned link.
I did, and a web page opened up on my phone that immediately made me sit up in bed. Because a full-bodied representation of me was at the top of it, swathed in a cloak of midnight blue, with a crown of stars above me, the scales of justice in one hand, a sword in the other. And alongside this goddess-like portrait was an exhortation to arms to all Spectral Opposition Warriors.
“Heed me and know that I will fight to the death to protect you against the criminal acts of magic levied against you, rousting you from your homes, striking you down in the streets. I am committed to protecting all from the tyranny of the few, no matter their strength or force of will. The right of magic is the right of coexistence, and the choice to believe and be that which you will—but not to be forced to abide in a world of anarchy.”
“These guys are out of control,” I muttered.
“These guys know that help is needed to maintain the balance of magic. They simply don’t know how to render that help.”
“How about not at all? How’d they even find me? It’s not like I put an ad out.”
“Seamus,” Armaeus said. “Who remains in the wind, though the Fomorians have been returned In Between.”
That stopped me. “You got them?”
“We didn’t get them. We were able to identify their energy signature and close in, but they opened a portal—or found one—and returned to the In Between before we could confront them. Where, as I may have mentioned, I can’t go.”
I made a face. “Well, you’re not missing much.”
“Anything denied becomes desired eventually,” Armaeus countered, a ghost of a smile tugging at his lips. “Seamus hasn’t come out of hiding, but his troops remain at the ready, awaiting your command, it would seem. Spectral opposition warriors. It has a nice ring.”
“Well, I didn’t ask for them. How do you return an army?”
“You don’t. So you better find a way for them to work for you and with you, because in the absence of that, they will eventually work against you.”
I winced, but I knew he was right. “How do I tell them to just—stop? I need t
o get out ahead of this, but I feel like I’m already too late.”
“You’re not too late. The Council’s exhortation for balance has not always been for the sake of people, but for the sake of the Council as well. That said, there has never been anyone on the Council quite like you, Miss Wilde. Command your warriors to stop when the time comes. Or to protect but not strike. You have led Connecteds before. You can lead these Connecteds too.”
“Really not the best use of my time.”
Armaeus chuckled again. “You will know what to say and how to say it when the time comes.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
As I focused more fiercely on the website, wondering how to connect with a group of highly charged humans spread all over the globe, the Magician’s words grew softer, almost indistinct. “If anyone can rally a vengeful army to rational thought, I believe it’s you.”
I rolled my eyes, turning on him. “Dude, have you met me?”
But it was too late. Armaeus was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
My phone buzzed again, and I swiped at it, realizing that Simon was phoning me now, not texting.
I sprang out of my now-empty bed, yanking my clothes on. “What?” I demanded, moving toward the window.
“Where are you?” he demanded in turn.
“I’m in some sort of hotel room, maybe?” I scanned the room, trying to find anything that looked like a typical hotel, but of course the Magician would never stay in a typical hotel. “Or maybe it’s someone’s private home? I really don’t know.”
“Pinging your phone.”
My brows lifted as I moved to the window, fighting my way through the gauzy curtains. “You can do that?”
