Born To Be Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 3

by Jenn Stark

  “I can block the Council’s awareness when I choose.”

  “Right,” I scoffed. “You can block their awareness, but you can’t keep upright. That makes sense.” I tipped more of the wine into his mouth, mesmerized by the process as he submitted to my embrace and let me feed him. No one would ever accuse me of being nurturing, but holding Armaeus felt different. It felt right in a way I didn’t want to explore too closely. And it felt dangerous in a way I knew all too well.

  He opened his eyes, and I noted the irises were stained a dark, smoky gold. The same psychic infusion Nikki was tracking through the Connecteds—a psychic infusion I’d helped create—had affected the Magician too, though I didn’t know exactly how. That power had called to me as well, but I knew I should protect myself against it, knew I should wait until I understood more.

  “Are you really hurt bad?” I murmured as he drained the last of the cup, his hungry gaze finding mine again, a gaze that was finally clearing, refocusing. “And don’t lie to me, because my third eye is watching you, and it has a special sensitivity to bullshit.”

  Armaeus sighed, the pure unaffected beauty of his expression arrowing through me as he allowed his eyelids to drift shut. “What did the Valkyries tell you about the cup?”

  Of course he knew about the Valkyries.

  Which meant he’d been keeping tabs on me after all.

  I shifted uneasily. “They said that it grants life but also death. Death seems kind of like the important part, by the way. And they said you owed them.” I went still, my heart clutching with a sudden fear. “Please explain exactly what’s going on, Armaeus. Right now. In small words. Because in the past thirty-six hours, I’ve been chased by dogs and shooters and a cockroach in the women’s bathroom at the police station, and I’m super jet-lagged and I won’t be responsible for my actions if I seriously just screwed up here.”

  Armaeus’s laugh sounded stronger. So that was promising. “The healing elixir moves through me, repairing the muscle and sinew torn apart. The silver-headed arrows were meant for gods, not men.”

  I frowned down at him. In the subbasement of an Egyptian temple several days earlier, Armaeus had taken those four arrows to the chest and torso. The wounds had been fairly vicious, but they’d also been healed once already. At least, he’d looked like he’d been healed. When it came to magic, though, I was never really sure.

  “Um, exactly how many times do we need to put you back together again before you can let that particular hit go? Because I thought we’d covered this.”

  “Not all of it.” His breathing had evened out, and color returned to his deeply bronzed skin. Lying there in my arms, he was quite possibly the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Rich sable hair parted to either side of his face, a face that was further marked by sharply winged brows, sculpted cheekbones, lush lips, and a strong jaw. With his eyes open, he was unsettling…but when he rested, Armaeus was perfect.

  Now he spoke again. “The weapons were effective specifically because of my immortality.” He brushed a spot on his chest where an arrow had pierced him. “Remove that barrier, and true healing becomes possible.”

  “Well, okay.” I tucked an errant lock of hair behind his ear. “But you can get your immortality back, right? ’Cause that’s kind of an impressive perk.”

  Armaeus was spared from responding as the door to his penthouse office opened and the Devil walked in, complete with his own manifested breeze. “I do hope I’m interrupting.”

  I glared at him. “You could have warned me.”

  “Yet this is far more satisfying, no?” Aleksander Kreios took in the scene with one lazy glance, then turned his attention to the empty cup lying on the carpet. “The Horn of Mim. Good.” He crossed the room, then leaned down to pick up the green-and-blue inlaid box. “But what is this, I wonder?”

  Kreios weighed the box in one hand as he swiveled back toward us. Today the Devil of the Arcana Council had adopted the full-on Adonis look—long, wavy blond hair that curled at his shoulders, his lightly bronzed face model perfect, down to the naturally jade eyes, sculpted cheekbones, and firm mouth. He wore a white linen shirt, barely fastened with toggle buttons, and frayed khakis. He could have been a tour guide for a Greek island tour instead of one of the most powerful Connecteds on the planet. He fixed me with an unreadable glance, and I sensed the shift in the undercurrents of energy swirling through the room.

  I wasn’t quite up to speed on my Arcana Sign Language, however. I sent him back a glance that could clearly be interpreted as WTF in multiple tongues.

  He seemed unfazed. “Armaeus is quite correct in what he’s done,” he said. “The Horn of Mim gives life and death, and he needed both to occur. He also needed you, a mortal, to be the one to give it to him, willingly and without coercion, which is why he waited until you found your way here.” He frowned down at Armaeus, who stirred, his color almost completely restored. “And given that he is mortal again, he has a certain latitude that he did not have before, in so many things.”

  A smile played over his lips. It wasn’t a good smile, exactly. The Devil kept his cards close to his impressively muscled chest. “No one will know this, of course, unless he chooses for them to know.”

  “But he’s mortal,” I confirmed. Armaeus pulled himself to a sitting position but appeared to be in no particular hurry to stand. Instead, he leaned heavily on me, which was kind of nice in a totally forbidden sort of way. “That’s bad, right? Isn’t immortality a prerequisite of the Council?” When neither of them spoke, I persisted. “How do we change him back?”

  Kreios placed the box on the table, drawing his finger along the edge. He shrugged. “That’s a very good question.”

  I stared at him. “You don’t know? Are you insane?” I swung my gaze to Armaeus. “Are both of you insane?”

  Before they could answer that one, I waved my hands. “Do you, or do you not need to be immortal to remain on the Council?”

  Kreios tilted his head, his gaze unreadable. “You do.”

  “Does immortality allow you do things that you can’t do as a mortal?”

  “Kreios—” Armaeus began, but Kreios cut him off. He had a thing with honesty. I liked that about him.

  “It does. Armaeus is at risk from many factions now, should they learn of his…altered state. Which of course, they won’t.”

  “But how do you know that?” I demanded. “It’s not like you people don’t have enemies. How hard is it for someone to figure out that one of you has put yourself in Time-Out?”

  Kreios smirked. “Time On, more appropriately.”

  “You know what I mean!” I snapped, but my heart gave a hard lurch. Armaeus was mortal. Would he age faster for some reason? Faster than regular mortals? Would all his years catch up with him at once? And would he fall prey to any stray illness or disease, with so many lifetimes of immunity he hadn’t built up? “He can’t stay like this, right? I’m right, aren’t I. Staying like this would be very bad.”

  Kreios’s lips firmed into a tight line. Then he nodded. “Eventually. Yes.”

  “Then how—”

  “There is plenty of time to consider the problem,” Armaeus interrupted me. He stood in one graceful movement, pulling me up alongside him. He squeezed my hand, then dropped it, and I fought the urge to blush. What was wrong with me? “Thank you, Miss Wilde.” He turned to Kreios. “I assume there’s a reason why you’re here, beyond oversharing?” he asked, his voice both fully restored and plainly exasperated.

  I blinked back and forth between them, then focused on Kreios as he pulled a long slender blade out of his jacket pocket. He brandished it at me. “Would you prefer to do the honors?”

  “Um…what’s that for?”

  Kreios clearly picked up on my concern, and his grin turned a shade darker. “I assure you, I’m not asking you to knife Armaeus in the throat while he has been weakened.” He pointed to the box. “Merely to open the treasure you provided us.”

  “With a kitchen knife? Do
you have any idea the kind of knives and picks and levers I’ve already used on this thing?”

  “You’ll find this more effective.”

  I glanced at Armaeus, who gestured me on. “I’m quite recovered for the moment, Miss Wilde. Open it.”

  Kreios spun the box toward me as I approached, then handed me a pair of white cloth gloves. “To allow you to handle whatever is inside without concern,” he said when I looked at him questioningly. I donned the gloves and took his offered knife. “It appears to be held together only with nails, no locking mechanism. I can sense no magical ward on it either.”

  I frowned, tracing my gloved fingers along the box. My enhanced sensitivities weren’t triggered by it anymore, which frankly bummed me out a bit. Kreios might get excited about artifacts that didn’t have magical overtones, but I wasn’t so sanguine. My stock-in-trade was the procurement and sale of magical artifacts. And I wanted to stay paid for this job.

  Beside me, Armaeus coughed a short laugh. “You seem disappointed. Can you sense nothing there?”

  “Nope. It might as well be a cigar box.” I looked at him. “Why, can you?”

  He gave a brief nod, and I caught sight of his eyes again. They’d gone completely black. “Umm…”

  “Open the box, Miss Wilde.”

  The command sounded in my head, the first evidence of Armaeus’s strength that I’d experienced in what seemed far too long. And clearly, being mortal didn’t dim his magic too much. That was reassuring. Without hesitation then, I slipped the blade beneath the lid of the enameled box and pried up against the cover. The nails held on for all of three seconds, then popped up like daisies in springtime. Pulling the lid away, I peered inside.

  But it was Kreios, not Armaeus, who put a steadying hand on my arm. “Proceed very, very carefully, Sara Wilde. What you have here is rarer than diamonds.”

  I frowned, looking down at the deck of cards. “They’re cards, right?” I squinted up at them both. “Since when are cards rare?” I reached inside and pulled out the deck. Or chunk, better said. The cards—if they were cards—had adhered together over time, the entire mess shellacked together in a block.

  Oddly, neither one of the Council members moved. “Could be the Marseille deck,” Armaeus murmured. “Intact. That would do it, would it not?”

  Kreios snorted. “It would, but it’s unlikely,” he said. “The Church seemed quite proud of themselves for eradicating the last of the Devil cards well in advance of any Marseille decks finding their way to the salons of Italy and Paris. None of those decks remained intact.”

  “Well, good luck prying these babies apart.” I flipped over the deck and froze.

  A single eye stared back.

  The one card visible in the deck was definitely not a Tarot card. It showed an eye drawn in the heavily kohled outline favored by the Egyptians, but it wasn’t the eye of Horus, exactly. It didn’t have the sharp lines extending down and at an angle. Rather, full rays extended outward from the center eye, beginning at a point and ending wider, eight pie wedges circling the eye and stretching to the edges of the card.

  The image practically ached with age, and I remained still, staring back at the flat black center of the eye. “What the hell is this?”

  “Different mythology,” Kreios said. He made no move to take the deck from me. “You may place them back in the box. We’ll separate the deck later.”

  Resisting the urge to tell the Devil to put the cards back himself, I did as he asked. When I handed him the box, he didn’t move to take it. “Close the lid,” he instructed instead.

  “Are you weirding me out on purpose?” I asked as I shut the lid. I gave him back the box. “Because if so, you’re doing a really great job of it. Just saying.”

  Kreios bowed with a slight smile. “My thanks as always.” He hefted the box and looked entirely too pleased with himself, then slid his glance to the Magician and smirked. “Told you so.”

  “I look forward to your report,” Armaeus replied, refusing to rise to whatever bait Kreios was dangling.

  I, however, was not so restrained. “Told you what?” Ignoring Kreios as he strolled out of the room, I turned to the Magician, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with him. He looked as he ever did, his color was back, but something was seriously off about his energy. He seemed more approachable, but also…darker. More dangerous, but in a new and undefined way. “What was that box all about? Those weren’t Tarot cards, so what were they? And from where?”

  The Magician’s gaze swept over my face, and I got that bug feeling again. Good to know some things didn’t change. “Stop looking at me like that.”

  His brows drifted up, but he continued to regard me with curiosity. His eyes glittered. “Explain where you found the box again?”

  “It was in my report. There was a room of artifacts, but I was on the run. I grabbed the closest thing that looked good. And small. Small was important.”

  He nodded. “And how did you choose it? Why did it stand out to you?”

  “Well, it glowed. I mean, all the crap was glowing, but this was the brightest thing that was small. I figured it was probably important.” I tried to see deeper into his flat black gaze. “Is it?”

  He nodded. “It would appear to be Atlantean in origin.”

  “Oh, right. Atlantis.” Not this again. Over the past several months, I’d gotten used to Armaeus’s quests for artifacts from the ancient, mythological civilization. I’d brought back bowls, plates, and a shiny bronze shield he’d been convinced were from the sunken island. But never had he acted so weird with the artifacts, so mysterious. “Well, fine, then. Isn’t that good?”

  He flicked his gaze away, considering. “If it shone so brightly, perhaps it wanted to be taken.”

  “Maybe. But so what? If I’d been down inside that hole, I’d want to be taken too.”

  “Perhaps,” he allowed with a ghost of a smile. “Yet it interests me that of all the pieces, a card deck from a cursed civilization called to you. It bears study.”

  “It’s not the only thing.” I didn’t want to talk about Atlantis, about the cards. Even if the lost civilization had actually existed, it didn’t trump the fact that Armaeus had been collapsed on the floor when I’d found him. “You mind explaining why you were making out with the carpet when I got here? I thought you were all fixed.”

  “I wasn’t.” He waved dismissively. “The weapons used against me were calibrated specifically to attack the part of me that was not mortal. I suspected that, but couldn’t confirm it until I’d ruled out all other possibilities. And now it’s confirmed.”

  “So now you’re okay.”

  “Now I can heal, yes.”

  “Because you’re mortal.”

  “Yes.”

  Armaeus turned away, but I reached out and caught his arm. There was something about that that was important. Very important, but I couldn’t seem to get past the idea of touching him, my hand on his smooth silk shirt, my fingers wrapped around—

  Focus. “You can’t stay this way, though, right? How long until you have to turn yourself immortal again? Is there some sort of—” I stopped short of saying “expiration date,” but it was a near thing.

  Armaeus didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he covered my hand with his, squeezed it. I sensed the blood draining out of my head again, and suddenly I felt dizzy.

  “Despite the dangers, there are advantages to the mortal state,” he murmured. He was watching me again. “I need to explore them more fully.”

  Before I could speak, however, he tilted his head. “There is a name in your mind, battering at you. I can sense it past your wards.”

  Everything from the past day came back in a rush, and I tightened my hold on Armaeus, my gaze finding his. “Viktor Dal,” I blurted. “He hired a mercenary I know to find me in Germany.”

  “Nigel Friedman.”

  “If you know everything, is there a reason why I’m talking?”

  Armaeus’s brows lifted, his gold-and-
black eyes trained on me still, unsettling in their intensity. “Should you wish to allow me full access to your mind, it would make the process quicker.”

  “Yeah, no. Anyway, Nigel found me but didn’t quite give me up. And he said Viktor Dal had hired him. Then there were these posters of kids, Armaeus, kids I haven’t seen in years—missing kids.”

  There was no inflection in Armaeus’s voice. “From when you worked with Detective Rooks in Memphis.”

  “And there had been a Viktor Dal back then. It’s just—I mean…no way. That guy couldn’t have been—he couldn’t.”

  Without realizing it, I’d edged closer to Armaeus. He was close enough to kiss me, and I sensed his power snake around me like a whisper. “You want to see him, don’t you, Miss Wilde,” he said. “To travel.”

  I swallowed, my throat constricting. All of me constricted, actually, caught in the trap of Armaeus’s magic. But I couldn’t deny what he asked. I wanted to know—needed it. “What if those kids are still alive?” I whispered. “I have to find them, Armaeus, I have to.”

  He spoke the words.

  I sagged against Armaeus as the familiar lurch of astral travel swept through my system. The ability to mentally project yourself into a different location somewhere in the world, astral travel was a skill I’d recently acquired like a bad sinus infection, and it was proving equally hard to shake. But I’d never tried to travel wrapped in the Magician’s embrace before. Mortal or no, his abilities sped up the process remarkably.

  Instead of the usual sense of flinging myself across the planet, I was suddenly, simply…somewhere else. A house. A room. A vault.

  “Where am I?” I managed.

  “Describe it.” Armaeus’s words were sharp and clear, compelling me to speak with an urgency I didn’t expect.

  “Room—white walls, marble floor. Like a bank. Brass drawers in the wall, brass…” I moved forward, confused. I’d been fixated on Viktor. Viktor Dal. The tall, slender, blond-haired man with the kind eyes and the scruffy beard, sensible shoes and faded clothes… Not this cold place of stone and metal. I reached the drawers—there were dozens of them, each the size of a shoebox, all of them numbered.