by Jenn Stark
“What are you thinking about?”
I started as Armaeus asked the question, then again as he reached for my hand, bracing myself for the visceral shiver I could neither resist nor control when our fingers connected. In some ways, holding his hand was like grasping that of a stranger’s, with the rush of awkwardness and emotion and unmistakable heat of a first crush. In other ways, it was the touch I’d known and craved now for well over a year, the touch of a friend, a lover. The one person who could understand me above all others, because he’d helped bring me to this present moment.
“How do you know I’m thinking of anything?” I challenged, my tone lighter and more teasing than I expected. “Maybe I’m simply taking it all in.”
“And I would accept that from anyone other than you, Miss Wilde,” he responded, his tone equally playful. This Armaeus was lighter, looser, more fun, and more dangerous than I was used to. I didn’t know how to handle him as well as I had before—a rigid, rules-following Magician beset with angst wasn’t always easy, but he was predictable. This Magician was… something else altogether. “But something shifted in your energy, a melancholy that is unlike you. A memory—but not a memory of us, I don’t think.”
“Not of us,” I agreed. I blew out a long breath.
And because it wasn’t us, it was somehow easier to keep talking.
“We found the girl who was searching for me, the one from my school who I didn’t really remember.”
“Rhonda Madsen,” Armaeus said. “Simon told me. He also told me that she was being safely delivered back to Las Vegas. Do you think she remains in danger?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think she was in danger to begin with. She came here because Arden and Marin found her a potentially convenient lever, but they wouldn’t have harmed her. I’m not saying there aren’t operatives in Vegas right now tracking down the other members of my class with bad intent, but I don’t think Rhonda was on anyone’s radar.”
“Which means the Shadow Court doesn’t know everything,” Armaeus said.
“They don’t. But they know a lot. Just now I was thinking about a day we had at my high school when I was a freshman. Back then I was attending school more regularly, and I happened to be in class when we had a pep rally. The theme was ‘country fair.’ I’d never been to a country fair before, that wasn’t exactly high on my mom’s list of things to do, but they had games of chance and a couple of rides that they’d driven in from somewhere, and stands where you could get lemonade and cotton candy and hot dogs for free. All my friends thought it was super lame, of course, but I secretly was amazed by it. All the lights and noise and smells. All for entertainment.”
Armaeus lifted our joined hands, gesturing toward the gathered throng. “I can see why you thought of it here. This entire place is given over to celebration and entertainment for no purpose other than like minds joining together.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s also strange, isn’t it? Nine days out of the year, people come together in this great conflagration of community, where they shed who they are on an everyday basis and become something else. We’ve got corporations giving away candy, everything works on the barter system, and yet there are also these elaborate tent camps where celebrities hang out that are every bit as exclusive as they are in the real world. Even among the great community, there’s a divide, an us versus them. I don’t know if it’s possible for that ever to change.”
“You’re thinking of the divide between the Connected and the Unconnected. Between those with magical abilities and those without. “
“Even more than that. We’ve met Connecteds tonight from communities I didn’t know existed. Maybe you did, but I’d never seen them. If their cries for help came through Justice Hall, I would treat them as individuals, of course, but I’d have no idea that they were part of a larger whole. And that’s been by their choice. What they perceived to be their only choice. They’ve had to stay hidden so they wouldn’t be kidnapped and exploited for their abilities…but now it’s even worse. Now the Shadow Court, or whoever is behind them, wants to inoculate them, to strip their magic away like they’re some sort of fringe parasite not worthy to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who have the better, purer magic. Who would even think of such a thing?”
The answer was obvious, of course. By now, I was squeezing the Magician’s hand far more tightly than I should, but I couldn’t stop. My stomach churned, thinking about the ramifications of this inoculation project. If the Shadow Court was truly trying to remove magic from societies that it deemed unworthy, and the Arcana Council didn’t do anything about it, if we didn’t stop them in some way, then we were no better than the Nazis they were so clearly emulating. “We have to do more.”
“We are doing more,” the Magician assured me. “You’re doing more as well. You’re answering the call, you’re validating their cries for help, and you’re leading the Arcana Council into a new era. You are the star in the night for the Connected to follow, wherever your path shall lead them.”
“And what are you doing? I don’t understand why you’re stepping down from Council leadership. You certainly can’t think it’s a good idea to let Viktor have any measure of control.” I sucked in a deep breath. “He’s working with the Shadow Court. And he’s messing with the people in town for this stupid reunion party. I think…I don’t know what to think.”
“The Emperor presents a compelling dilemma. There’s still far too much we don’t know. Will he truly try to take the life of Simon or another member of the Council? Has he already made the attempt and his better self struck down the urge? Is he working for the Shadow Court—up to and including putting your former classmates at risk—or working against them, and about to inform us of some deeper plot? We’ve heard what he was willing to reveal under the influence of the High Priestess, but the Emperor has depths to his power we haven’t fully explored. I’m unwilling to say for sure that we understand him fully either.”
“Yeah, well, I’m unwilling to say that I understand Hitler all that well, but I still know he was a monster. There are certain boundaries you can’t cross, and I don’t know that Viktor ever has had the same definition of what those are as the other members of the Council. He’s proven over and over again he can’t be trusted, and now he’s in a position of leadership?”
“Constrained by the Devil,” the Magician reminded me. But he said it with a smile, as if even he recognized the ridiculousness of that statement. That gentle, knowing smile caught me off guard, hitting me with unexpected force and setting off a chain reaction of heat and an almost giddy anticipation that made me flush and glance away.
“Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured, and his whisper rolled through me, making me shiver.
He turned me to him in the center of the roiling crowd, and suddenly, the people around us changed as well. No longer were they writhing, laughing revelers, drinking and dancing in their wild costumes and glow-in-the-dark jewelry. Instead, they were flames of light surrounding us, while we stood on a wide and barren plain, a field of white beneath us.
“What is it you want from me?” Armaeus asked quietly.
His voice broke on the words, but not from the strain of despair or anger, not even from overwhelming passion or confusion. But from an emotion I suddenly got the feeling Armaeus didn’t experience all that often. Hope. “I would give you anything, you must know that. But I want to understand what you want. There’s so much I’ve already lost, memories I cannot recreate. I can only go forward. But I want to go forward with you. There is no other path for me.”
He said his last words with an unmistakable air of curiosity, almost wonder. As if he had never experienced such a thing and wasn’t sure if it was good or bad, but was equally certain that he must pursue it to the end. For a man who had lived for more than eight hundred years, it was undoubtedly disorienting. It was disorienting for me, and I’d barely lived twenty-eight.
“What is this place?” I deflected the question as the flames of
energy loomed closer.
Armaeus’s gaze never wavered. “It’s the field of infinite possibility, of creation at its very core. It’s what I see every time I look into your eyes.” He sighed. “I have so…many experiments begun in the wake of meeting you again. So much I know we can accomplish together, and yet—you remain an utter mystery to me. Your skills, your abilities, as great as they are, must have limits. Limits I haven’t found yet, in some cases, but must surely be there. I need to know those limits.”
I quirked a smile of my own. “Is this where you tell me that I may end up stronger than you one day, and for the good of the Council, you’ll kill me if you have to?”
He raised his brows. “I said that to you?”
“On more than one occasion, or words to that effect.”
“And perhaps, were I still the leader of the Council, I would be compelled to deliver on that promise,” Armaeus said, as if he was discussing a winning strategy for a board-game and not my actual life. Which made it almost like old times.
And then he switched everything up again, leaning closer to me. “But I’m no longer its leader, merely its weapon. That gives me a certain freedom that I confess I find…very refreshing.”
Without another word, his mouth came down on mine, and the pressure of his lips sent a wash of heat through me from the roots of my hair to the tips of my fingers, the currents of electricity sparking and rolling, joined once more to their source. All the jumbled thoughts in my mind became more ordered, the neural pathways evening out and laid bare to me, the beautiful symmetry of their complicated design seeming like a broad highway where I could see the beginning, middle, and end of every journey.
It was…peaceful, actually. So much more peaceful than anything we’d ever shared before.
Armaeus pulled away a second later, gazing down at me with infinite tenderness, but I could only stare. “What was that all about?” I managed.
His eyes lit with curiosity again. “You mean that didn’t happen before between us?”
I shook my head, trying to remember the tone and quality of our interactions before he lost his memories of me. I remembered great passion, a cacophony of light and magic, energy shooting through us and over and around. I remembered fear in the beginning, a fear of being subsumed into Armaeus’s own powers, being swallowed up whole. This was nothing like that.
This was like coming home.
“Kiss me again,” I murmured, and as my eyes drifted shut and Armaeus’s lips brushed mine, it happened once again. Clarity. Mind-blowing, heart-exploding, breathtaking clarity, where all the pathways of energy were laid out right and true, a kaleidoscope labyrinth with the through-line clearly demarcated from the opening gate to the gorgeous center. There were no longer the hints of darkness lurking at the edges of Armaeus’s magic. There were no longer the notes of fear keening at the far reaches of my need for him. Because he was who he was meant to be, and I was who I was destined to become, and together we could one day—
“Is this real?” I whispered against his lips. “Is this one possibility of life between us?”
“It is every possibility,” he returned. “But…there is a problem.”
“What?” I wanted to focus on his words, to the thread of alarm that snaked through me as he spoke, but all I could do was allow myself to get drawn further into the spell of his hold. He smelled of cinnamon and heat, and as his hands drifted around me, moved up my back, I felt the strength of him, the potential, the magic. And more than that, the heat and virility of a very live, very real man who wanted me every bit as much as I wanted him. Wanted him now, actually.
Suddenly, our bodies were no longer dressed, and Armaeus’s startled laugh had me blinking. “Ah—did I do that?” I flushed, already knowing the answer.
“I assure you, I did not. But I could not possibly mind less. I find this reversal in our roles also…quite refreshing.” He sighed against my hair, and I shivered as his lips brushed across the ridge of my ear, down to the nape of my neck, and over the rounded edge of my collarbone. My breath sucked in as he slipped farther south—
“Armaeus—Sara!”
The shout was so incongruous, so jolting, that I broke away from Armaeus, spinning around at full attention. Our clothes returned to our bodies and the field of white around us exploded, while the flames of light became, once more, the laughing, drinking dancers—with Simon at their edge, gesturing frantically to us both.
“He’s down, he’s down! Dr. Rindon is in Bali, and the typhoon’s about to hit.”
18
Simon was right on both counts. Dr. Rindon’s plane had landed in Denpasar, Bali, a scant hour before the typhoon was scheduled to hit the coastal resort city of Gretek. But the danger the typhoon promised for the resorts was only part of the problem, as Simon hastily informed us.
“I went ahead and ran the local demographics of the area, cross-referencing it against everything we’ve already discovered regarding the area’s indigenous peoples and any Connected enclaves that might be at risk. We hit the jackpot almost immediately. The Bali Aga have a whole raft of sacred sites on the eastern side of the island, but none so important as the area around Lake Batur. There’s a village there, Trunyan, that, according to our intel, is the seat of one of the most powerful and isolated Connected societies on the planet.
“Bali,” I echoed as we hustled through the Burning Man crowds with Simon, heading for our tent camp. “I haven’t gotten anything from Bali regarding any sort of threat. I would have remembered, because I would have gone. I would have officiated an arm-wrestling contest if it would have gotten me to Bali.”
“You wouldn’t have gotten anything from this crew,” Simon said. “They don’t seek outside help because they don’t need outside help, not for any Connected issues. But their people are still people. They live on the shores of Lake Batur, and they’ve been absolutely pounded by storms this season. The last one resulted in floods driving them out of their lakeside homes. They sought shelter closer to the coast, where the runoff eased as the water dumped into the ocean. They were just beginning their trek back up to their home village when this new typhoon hit the radar screen. Now they’re stuck on the coast, and they could possibly be washed out to sea the way this thing is going. Worse, their leaders have gone missing, so the villagers are hunkered down and fearing the worst.”
“How long until the typhoon is past?” asked Armaeus.
“Outer edges are already lashing the coast—it’s moving fast. Rindon may get on the ground there before it hits full force, but it’ll be tight.”
I raked my hand through my hair. “We need to see him in action before we can make a decision about whether or not he’s helping or harming these people, but—”
“But we can’t risk him inoculating one of the oldest and strongest Connected societies on the planet,” Armaeus agreed. “That’s not going to help anyone but the Shadow Court.”
He skewered Simon with a sharp look. “Do we have any official antigen to the tainted Novadrine serum yet?”
Simon grimaced. “We’re close, but not yet. It needs to be sustainable, and so far, we’ve only managed to counteract the magic-nullifying drugs with a heavy load of countermagic. That magic will fade if not used right away, and we can’t know when someone will get exposed to the elixir of evil. Their supply needs to be sustainable.”
“Agreed. But these people are isolated and in immediate danger. So we’ll do it the old-fashioned way.” He turned to me and held out his arms. I instantly moved toward him, and the two of us disappeared in a haze of smoke.
We reappeared a moment later, immediately beaten back into the side of a building, barely protected by an overhang as wind and rain lashed down onto the structure. We’d landed in what appeared to be a four-star resort but which had now been deserted, and hastily so—windows shuttered and locked, but nothing boarded up, and all visible furniture lashed down.
There was no one in sight.
“Why here?” I screamed. Perhaps
not surprisingly, my words were swept in the sideways sheeting rain. Guabancex, I thought immediately, recalling the goddess of storms whose totem I’d recently stolen from the jungles of French Guiana. She would have been in her glory in this raging typhoon. If I was going to be a goddess of something, storms would certainly be a good choice.
Oblivious to my future career speculation, Armaeus waved his hand in front of his eyes, and I turned, bracing myself against the wind, allowing my third eye to open. Even in the midst of a howling storm, I could see the reason for us landing here immediately. A light emanated from the central building, a fitness center of some sort, that had nothing to do with man-made electricity. All electricity to this area had long since been shut down, I suspected. Instead, this glow was that of a Connected group of people sheltering in place beneath the raging storm that whirled around them. I expanded my gaze and found other pockets of humanity, all of them seeking to ride out the storm in the central buildings of the resort that was ground zero for the typhoon. None of them glowed anywhere close to the level of the group in the fitness center, however. Those people had to be the Bali Aga.
“Miss Wilde.” Rather than continuing to try to scream into the wind, the Magician opted to use his inside voice, his words warm and reassuring in my mind. “The typhoon will pass over in a matter of hours, and the devastation will be significant for the coastline. This resort will fare better, but the surrounding roads will be destroyed.”
Cool. If you know all this, how come you can’t help stop it?
He didn’t answer, and I rolled my eyes. I thought you were coming around to the Council playing more of a role in the affairs of mortals?
“More of a role yes, but only insofar as it serves the purpose of magic. The devastation of natural disasters will continue. I told you, it’s not a tide we can turn back. It’s also not something any true magician would create, not anymore. We learned those lessons long ago.”
