Call of the Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  Chuckling, Kreios pulled my hand to his lips and drifted a soft kiss across my fingers, the power of his seduction so over the top that I didn’t bother stopping him. This was for show, not for any true intent, and if knowing his effect on me pleased him, then so much the better. He was doing me a service with Gamon.

  “And you are quite welcome for that. As I shall look forward to exacting payment.”

  Even as he said the words, he began to drift out of consciousness, becoming once more smoke. “Because you’re wrong about my true intentions, Sara Wilde,” he breathed. “Very wrong. As one day soon you will understand.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  When I arrived at the penthouse of Prime Luxe, however, it wasn’t Armaeus who was waiting for me. Instead, perched against the arm of the elegant sofa as if he wasn’t sure exactly how to sit on it, was the Hermit.

  My dad.

  I stopped in the foyer, unsure if I should call out, keep walking, or step back into the elevator. I turned and noticed that the bays had shifted to flat walls. The meaning could not have been clearer. No way out.

  Funny guy, Armaeus.

  Somewhere deep in the bowels of Prime Luxe, I might have heard a laugh.

  I moved into the doorway, and Willem of Galt looked up, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkling into deep lines when he recognized me. “Sariah—Sara,” he said, amending my name hastily, though when he’d last spent any appreciable time with me, it was when my name had still been Sariah. Sariah Pelter, in fact.

  I stopped a few feet away from him, not knowing what to do. We weren’t really the hugging type. You missed out on that when your father abandoned you as a two-year-old to guard the veil of the world.

  He fell silent as well, watching me, so I tried to take the lead. “Mind if I sit down?”

  Good lead, Sara. Strong.

  “Please. Join me.” The Hermit stood, then gestured to one of three different chairs sitting in a conversational grouping I didn’t quite remember being this robust, before moving to a different chair himself and perching in it. Sitting didn’t seem to be his thing, and I thought about that, idly, as he tried to make himself comfortable and clearly failed. The Hermit was always represented as standing or striding, carrying a lamp high above him. Like Socrates looking for the truth.

  What had my father been looking for when he’d found my mother, I wondered? Surely a goddess known as the Denounced would have been on some sort of list of girls to avoid.

  Probably not the best way to start the conversation either.

  Desperate, I pointed outside. “You, um, created a residence here, but I don’t think you ever use it. Am I wrong?”

  “No,” he said simply, his gaze going to the strange platform that soared above Excalibur. The tiny hut atop it gleamed in the sunshine. “It’s not finished.”

  That surprised me. “Are you planning to finish it?”

  “I…I thought perhaps I would, but then when I had the start of it, that small hut in isolation, it struck me that it was not so much different from what I have now, as the guardian of the veil.” His lips curled. “Guardian. I am not even that. I’m babysitter to Llyr. Llyr, the most feared god of all because he ruled Atlantis. Did you know that?”

  “I figured it out the hard way, yeah.”

  Though Llyr was written up in the mythologies of the world as an old Celtic god—and a minor one—that had been a deliberate mistake to dishonor the ancient mega-god. A mistake not unlike what had been done to Hera, I realized. And to my mother too?

  But no, there’d been no mistaking the ancient malevolence I’d seen and experienced so recently, when Vigilance turned on me in fire and rage.

  Willem and I settled into a brief, awkward silence. Given that he was the Hermit, it probably wasn’t surprising that I broke first.

  “So I met Mom,” I blurted. Sara Wilde, master conversationalist. “She…wasn’t what I expected.”

  Willem turned his gaze to me, his old, worn eyes still seeming amused. “No, I don’t suppose she was.”

  Then he fell silent again. I began to feel claustrophobic even in the giant room, and irritation snapped within me. I wasn’t here for my health. I needed to see Armaeus. Armaeus apparently thought my time was better spent with the Hermit, and that was fine. But not if I had to pry words out of the man’s mouth with a pair of pliers.

  “Look, um, Dad,” I started up again. His gaze wandered toward me, and I began to wonder if he had a screw loose. “I kind of need some answers here. There’s a lot of concern that the veil is going to come crashing down, and when that happens, everyone is pretty much expecting the gods of old to get unleashed on earth. We don’t want that to happen.”

  As I’d spoken, Willem’s brows climbed his worn, lined face. “The veil won’t crash,” he said. “It won’t…” He gestured vaguely through the air, like a magician whipping the cloak off a magic box, “fall away. That’s not how it was designed.”

  “And how was it designed?”

  “It will tear,” he said, with another gesture. “In some places only a little, in others, quite a lot. There will be…perforations. Where before there was only darkness, afterward will be light, and where light falls on the face of a god, that god or goddess will see the earth they left so many years ago.”

  “Uh-huh. And are these holes big enough to crawl through? Because that seems to be what we’re building up to. Mom already came through once. There doesn’t seem to be any way to keep her from doing that again if this veil thing is ready to rip wide open.”

  “Not wide—”

  “You get the point, Dad,” I snapped, my anger cresting now. “Your job has been to stop Llyr. Supposedly, your job description also including you stopping someone known only as the Denounced from entering our airspace, only she has, with a vengeance. And she’s given every indication of wanting to come back. She’s got earthbound mortals willing to worship her. Why wouldn’t she come back?”

  But my father seemed to focus only on the smallest part of what I was saying. “The Denounced,” he said, frowning. “Who gave you that name for her?”

  “Hera did,” I said.

  “Hera…”

  “Yes. Greek goddess, scourge of mankind? She also came through the veil, dropped through easy as you please with barely more than a dinner bell to help guide the way. Armaeus even now is vetting her to become the new Empress.”

  The Hermit frowned. “But she’s a goddess.”

  “I know she’s a…” I stopped, and then it was my turn to frown. The Council had dedicated its entire existence to maintaining the balance of magic and keeping out the gods and goddesses of old who’d attempted to betray and rule humanity. Yet Armaeus had brought down Hera, big as life, and no one but the Hermit seemed to be batting an eye. What was I missing?

  My father seemed content to remain silent in his chair until he grew roots, so I pushed on.

  “I know she’s a goddess,” I said, more gently now. “But she’s come through. The Denounced has come through—”

  “That’s not her name.”

  I smiled despite myself. “Well, I figured, but—”

  “Her name is Lilith.”

  “Lilith.” Oh, this just kept getting better and better. “Like the creation story Lilith? Because everyone is starting to overlap, and I’m going to need a diagram to keep up. And I don’t want a diagram. I’d like you just to tell me that gods equal bad, mortals equal good, and they will forever remain apart. Full stop.”

  Willem swung his gaze to me. “It is not your mother’s name that’s upsetting you,” he said, as if bemused by my anger. “You want to know why I had a child with a goddess, when my job was to keep them from interacting with any human, mortal or otherwise.”

  “Well, that’d be a good place to start,” I allowed.

  “I saw her.” He shrugged, shook his head. “The god Llyr has grown…very strong in the past few years, his hunger for the mortal world he has been
long denied becoming ever more insatiable. He moves from weakness to weakness in the veil, waiting to be summoned, and I move with him. Where I see the veil fraying as we move, I make repairs. But the veil is not supposed to last without tears forever. Some weaknesses are allowed.”

  “What do you mean, it’s not supposed to last forever?” I protested. “I thought that was its point.”

  “The pendulum swings.” He shrugged. “There are ages when humans are to be protected from the gods, and ages when the gods are to be protected from the humans. The gods and the source of their light. Up until now, that light was safe enough here, in this world.” He waved around. “Now, the world shivers and crumbles, the skies darken with smoke and fire. It is not as safe a place to store something so fragile. There are those gods of particular power who would take back the light that burns upon this earth. But it is not yet time.”

  “And…Lilith…is one of those.” Lilith, I thought. Unbelievable. At least that explained the whole “Denounced” thing.

  “Lilith, and the dragon Llyr, yes. In truth, all the gods in turn would try to lay claim to this world, given the opportunity. It is earth. It is the light.”

  “So to keep them out, you follow Llyr around and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, whereas for the others, you keep them hemmed in or patch up the veil if it’s starting to look a little frayed around the edges.”

  He nodded, and I pushed more. “And along the way, you found Lilith. And you fell in love with her.”

  “She was so alone.” His face turned toward the platform again. “So very much alone, and she had not been created for that. She’d been created to be worshipped, adored, to sow the seeds of the world. She was swept out of the earth with all the other gods, the demons and the djinn, the fire creatures and the beings of shadow.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good group to be swept out.”

  “It was,” my father said, surprising me. “But the vastness of space is all-encompassing. It tends to give one perspective. When I saw Lilith, she had no more anger left within her, and…” He smiled a little sadly. “And I did not think the anger would return. I was wrong, but by then the cycle of life had taken hold, when I had not thought such a transgression was even possible. When she grew heavy with child, she assumed she would be returned to human form to give birth, but that was never to be. And so you were born in the darkness of space, and she believed you died.”

  “This is so wrong,” I muttered. I didn’t know what I’d thought had been the story of my birth, but I had at least assumed someone had been happy about it, somewhere. At this point, I was going to go through about fifteen hundred couches before I worked through all this goop in therapy.

  “Llyr moved, I moved with him, and that was when I could act,” Willem continued. “I exercised my abilities, passed through the veil, entered earth, and left you with a woman who would care for you.”

  “You left me with a waitress and a drunk,” I said, staring at him. “Who’d grow to tremendously resent the fact that she wasn’t Connected. You don’t think you could have been a little more careful?”

  “I didn’t have much time.”

  “You had two years, apparently,” I countered. “Couldn’t you have simply left me at the police station? I think they would have done a better job.”

  The Hermit looked at me with eyes that I hadn’t realized were so distant when we’d talked before. “You are alive. You are thriving. You are coming into abilities that no mortal has experienced since the gods last walked the earth. I could have—should have let you die in space. I didn’t.”

  “Well, bully for you.” Suddenly, I not only couldn’t remember what I needed to know to protect the mortals from the gods, I didn’t so much care anymore. I was beginning to think we needed to protect the mortals from the Council.

  “Miss Wilde.”

  You knew this! I’d been waiting for Armaeus to appear, but now that he finally had deigned to show up in my mind, all I wanted to do was rail at him. You knew my father was a dirtbag and you let me believe that he was some sort of good-and-true stand-up man who fell in love with my mother, and together they brought me to life like I was some sort of miracle baby. Not some kind of horrible mistake. You knew!

  Armaeus went silent again. Whether that was agreement or disagreement or he simply didn’t want to deal with a meltdown I didn’t know, but no matter what, I was receiving a craptastic lack of response, especially given that I was still stuck in his office with Father of the Year.

  Willem looked at me with something approaching pity in his eyes now, which merely wound me up more.

  “What…do I need to know…about the veil,” I said, making my words short and steady, and putting all my focus on them, so I didn’t throw him out the window. “How can we reseal a breach from this side?”

  He frowned. “You can’t.”

  “Bullshit,” I snapped back. “These stories we have of vanquishing demons, banishing gods, overthrowing dragons—they went somewhere, Willem, and where they went was outside the veil. So there’s a way to pierce the thing from the inside, and there’s a way to sew it back up so anything we get rid of stays gotten rid of. How?”

  “Mortal magic hasn’t had that capability for two thousand years.”

  Two thousand years. The time of Christ. I didn’t even want to think about how that played into this little drama. “So how did we do it back then? Or during the fall of Atlantis?”

  “The belief of disparate forces joined as one, raised to the heavens,” Willem said, with such formality that I got the instant impression he was quoting from a manual. I was going to get my hands on that manual if it was the last thing I did.

  “That’s it?”

  He scoffed at me. “That’s more than enough. And it’s impossible, Sariah. You are strong, but you’re not that strong.”

  “My name isn’t Sariah, it’s Sara,” I bit back. “And I’m not planning on doing this alone.”

  I harangued my father for another half hour, but he had nothing else to say of any value. No, he’d never seen Lilith again after their fateful encounter, no, he didn’t plan on seeing her. No, he didn’t know that she’d been planning to pierce the veil, but he didn’t seem all that upset about it, since she’d been chased right back through the same hole, and a mortal had sacrificed herself to seal it.

  I winced. That mortal had been Gamon, and she in no way had intended that to be the result of following her goddess back through the rip in the world. She’d nearly fried herself in the process, and I had no idea how she would take Kreios’s suggestion that she join forces to protect the world from entities even worse than…Lilith. It still seemed impossible that she had a name. As much as I’d disliked the Denounced or even Vigilance, now that I knew a little more of her story, I had a few other names I could lay at her feet.

  And then there was Hera too, whose own trail of destruction was likely every bit as terrible as Lilith and yet, she was to become the new Empress?

  No wonder the Myrmidons of the House of Wands were trying to kill me.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Armaeus apparently wasn’t taking callers, and after my nonstarter of a conversation with the Hermit, I didn’t feel much like hanging around. Besides, I’d already been given my answer, sort of. All the Houses of Magic had to do was get ourselves in position in case the heavens opened up in earnest and started raining down gods, and join in solidarity against them.

  With Interpol now quietly circulating my Blue Notice, Ma-Singh wasn’t taking any chances. He’d asked for and secured the use of Armaeus’s private jet to take the representatives of the House of Swords to the meeting point with the Myrmidons…wherever that should happen to be.

  “What do you mean, we still don’t know?” I scowled at Ma-Singh now as the other generals were busy buckling themselves into their own seats and scanning the interior of Air Magician with interest. The House of Swords had money, but we didn’t have this kind of mone
y, and it showed in our transportation. Still, if it was something they felt was important…

  Focus. If the storm hit while we were en route, it wouldn’t matter whether or not we had a complete entertainment system in the main cabin, it’d matter if we had life jackets and rocket launchers.

  Ma-Singh looked pained. “We did everything we could to secure a contact from the House of Wands. Unfortunately, the men identified by Detective Rooks have checked out of the various hotels, there is no record of their existence, let alone a phone number, and they appear on no database we can access.”

  “So where exactly are we flying, if we don’t know where they are?”

  “We have set a course for Geneva and filed the flight plan. As you’ll recall, the House of Wands knew precisely where Miss Dawes was driving you when you arrived in Las Vegas, were able to locate you in Club XS, and appeared on the elevator leading to your private rooms in the Palazzo Casino when you had stepped onto the floor only moments earlier. In all cases, they’ve been ahead of us. It’s reasonable to think they will be now.”

  “But you don’t know that for sure. So we could be going to Switzerland for nothing but chocolate.”

  Ma-Singh shrugged. “They are very resourceful. For ant men.”

  Beside me, Nikki looked up from her magazine. “Anything more on what Interpol’s up to? If we’re flying into Geneva, that feels awfully close to their headquarters. We don’t actually want to deliver ourselves to them on a platter.”

  “It’s in part why we chose the location. France was not ideal because Mercault is currently in residence at his private château. We’ll be transferring the request to him tomorrow, once we’ve confirmed Gamon’s status.”

  Nikki snorted. “Kreios is going to talk to her. She’s totally in.”

  “She may not be swayed by the Devil,” Ma-Singh said stiffly. Clearly, Kreios was not his favorite person.