Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2

by Jenn Stark

  Across the cabin, Armaeus watched me. He knew I was awake, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Things were starting off well for our first joint assignment.

  “How long has it been since you’ve traveled to ol’ Hermopolis?” I asked without opening my eyes. I liked talking to Armaeus this way. Much safer.

  “I prefer the name Khemenu, named after the eight gods it honored. And not for many years.” Which, with Armaeus, could mean a couple of centuries, but I let that go. “There is nothing left on the ground that will help us, if that’s what you’re asking. What wars have not torn down, the city’s government has. They say it is for building materials or religious reasons or whatever other excuse governments use to destroy the past in order to build up the present.”

  That did cause me to open one eye. A smile flickered over Armaeus’s face, quick and hard. “So if there’s nothing left, what are we looking for?” I asked. “I don’t recall there being any tombs opened up in this neck of the woods recently.”

  He shook his head. “Khemenu was not a city of death to the ancient Egyptians. It was one of birth. One of their principal creation myths was centered here. I believe Mantorov is heading here, in part, because of that myth.”

  I straightened in my chair, coming more fully back online. At the far end of the cabin, Simon snored lightly in his own chair, cradling his laptop.

  “Creation how? What was their take on it?”

  “Like many of the first civilizations, Egyptians believed in the concept of a family of gods that existed before the dawn of Earth and man. The Ogdoad was a system of eight deities, dual entities consisting of four pairs of gods and their consorts.”

  “Okay, makes sense.” In the Tarot, four was the most stable of the Minor Arcana cards, so it wasn’t surprising that the number showed up in a foundational creation myth. “Male-female aspects of the same element or whatever?”

  Armaeus nodded. “Nun and Naunet ruled the element of primeval waters; Heh and Hauhet held sway over eternity; Kuk and Kauket were the deities over darkness; and Amun and Amaunet represented air, or that which is hidden. Of the four sets, Amun alone went on to have a role beyond the original Ogdoad.” He smiled. “According to the myth, these eight deities—water, eternity, darkness, and air—interacted, creating an enormous explosion. That burst of energy was released at a mound in Khemenu, originally called the Isle of Flame, causing it to rise from the water. At that point, the sun was born. There are conflicting stories about how, but one of the most popular was that a cosmic egg was created by the gods of the Ogdoad. When it opened, it revealed the ‘bird of light,’ an aspect of the sun god Re, who went on to create the world and everything in it.”

  “Fair enough. But there’s nothing left of the buildings or this mound? No statues or obelisks or anything to point the way?”

  He shook his head. “There are statues, of course. The city became an important center of worship of Thoth, and statues in his honor remain.” He twisted his lips. “You can view them easily from the Christian basilica erected near the site of the old temple.”

  “Okay…” I thought more about it. “Water, eternity, darkness, air. Which all got together one day and combined to make an enormous explosion, resulting in an island of fire to add to the mix. So, water, fire, air, darkness, and, um…ternity.” I scowled at him. “Do not make me utter the phrase ‘The Fifth Element’ twice. I’m not strong enough.”

  “All the elements necessary for a new birth—except one. The words to make it so.”

  “‘And God said…’”

  He nodded. “But Mantorov has the words now, or thinks he does. He merely has to locate the right place in Khemenu where the energies aligned once before, and say the words.”

  “Somewhere on the Nile, has to be.”

  “In a manner of speaking.” He tilted his head. “How are you feeling?”

  I instantly tensed. Having Simon along for the ride had proven to be the perfect chaperone for this trip, but the moment Armaeus’s attention sharpened on me, my body responded. His touch was truly like a drug. A really good drug, with generally pleasant side effects so far. Except for that unfortunate total mind-numbing dependence part. Other than that, pleasant. “I’m pretty good.”

  He sighed. “Why do you resist me? I have been honest with you.”

  I almost barked the laugh. “You’ve not been remotely honest, but thanks for playing.” I waved around the cabin. “This little excursion is the closest I’ve seen you get to an honest reaction since we’ve met.”

  He lifted his brows. “Do you believe so?”

  “Tough to fake being pissed.”

  “And because I am not angry with you at this moment, you immediately mistrust what I say or do.”

  “I don’t know what you are with me.” I leaned forward in my chair. “You’re my employer. We have a connection which you’re happy to exploit, and I’m happy to let you. But the fact that you’re able to put me back together again doesn’t take away the fact that you’re also able to take me apart. Don’t think I’m not aware of that.” I waved my hand around my head, as if warding off a fly. “And stop with the mental pressure thing, Armaeus. I already have a headache. There’s no room for you in my brain.”

  He stared at me, exasperation creeping into his gaze. He leaned forward too, and I shifted back, trying to keep an exactly perfect distance between us.

  Simon breathed out a deep, contented sigh. “I so love it when you two fight. It makes it feel like home.”

  Armaeus didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge Simon. “I won’t assault you, Miss Wilde. That would void our arrangement, and I have no interest in doing that. However, I need you to be at your sharpest for what is to come.” He grimaced. “To achieve that, I need more cooperation than you have been willing to give.”

  “Yeah, no.” Still, there was no denying the pain rocketing through my brain. “I’ll settle for slightly less agony, and slightly more sharpness, if you can do that while keeping your shorts on.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to change my mind.

  Moving quickly, he closed the last bit of space between us and reached his hand to my face, cupping my cheek and jaw. When I naturally shifted my head away out of some innate sense of self-preservation, his other hand came up, trapping me.

  Light exploded inside my skull. My gaze was transfixed by the golden intensity of his eyes and my ears registered that he was speaking words, words I should follow, words I should track. But all I could see was the burst of light that seared through my brain and lifted me off my chair on a wave of electrical jolts that seemed likely to catch my hair on fire. Something caught my attention, and I dropped my gaze to his lips, lips that were still moving. Soft, sensual, incredible lips. They had roamed my mouth, my face, my body before, drawing a line of fire over and around and through me. And now they were whispering to parts of my inner self that typically didn’t get a chance to chat back. Even my ankles practically vibrated with sensual promise, my entire body jacked up on a live wire of energy and want and—

  He pulled his hands away.

  I slumped in my chair, gasping. The Fool did too.

  “Please tell me you’re going to do that to me next,” Simon breathed.

  Armaeus ignored him, straightening. “The trip to the temple will be a short one. It’s currently a barren wasteland, but beneath it—deep beneath it—flow the waters we seek.”

  “What, the Nile?” My voice wasn’t working quite perfectly, and I tried again. “That seems a fair distance away from the temple ruins, based on the map I saw.”

  “The isle of fire erupted out of the water, but water was essential to the creation of it. The Nile is not a river that prefers to stay in its banks, and that was yet truer in the time of Ancient Egypt.”

  “Meaning?”

  But Armaeus didn’t seem to be listening to me. “Water is the source of all life in Egypt. It is the source of creation. It moves, and creation moves. It is not a fixed point. Regardless of where the river
now flows, what we are more interested in is where it flowed during the time of the Old Kingdom and what aquifers it fed. ”

  I couldn’t shake the idea that Armaeus was talking in a deeper, more resonant tone the closer we got to Khemenu, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. Bad, I suspected.

  I drew in an experimental breath. There was no pain anymore, anywhere in my body. It had been replaced with an almost maddening electrical hum.

  My gaze found Armaeus’s again. “You did something to me that went beyond Excedrin Migraine, didn’t you?”

  “Do you feel better?”

  Panic fluttered. How much had he seen? How deep had his touch gone? “I don’t know how I feel.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No.”

  “Then that’s better, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’m still waiting for my blast of mojo over here.” Simon’s voice was petulant, but it served to pierce the tension building between Armaeus and me.

  The Magician regarded the Fool with amusement. “Simon’s powers extend well beyond what he would have you believe. And,” he said meaningfully, “he is not in any pain.”

  The Fool groaned. “So you all keep telling me. But so far all I can incarnate is mad code and naked teleporting.” He sighed. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” He stood and stretched, then ambled off, muttering about the unfairness of it all.

  “Can you do that to him too? That energy jolt?”

  “I could, but it would not be necessary.” Armaeus shook his head. “He doesn’t need more electricity flowing through his veins. When he took on his role of Fool, he became pure energy. He recognizes the exchange in others, desires it the way that like appeals to like, but he doesn’t need to expand his own current.”

  “So he’s a mini Electro?” I let my gaze wander to where Simon had left his laptop. “No wonder he goes through so many computers.”

  “Where he fails is in recognizing the most profound of his gifts,” Armaeus continued. “The Fool whispers in the ear of others, suggests the unthinkable, prompts the unexpected leap of faith. He is not meant to do, he is meant to compel others to do.”

  “Yeah, well maybe he enjoys being more hands-on.”

  “Like this?” He reached out and drifted a hand over my shoulder. Every nerve in my body leapt, as if aligning to a lightning rod. I was drawn instantly alert, short of breath, my heart pounding, my brain fully engaged.

  “Stop it!” I twisted away. “That so has to be cheating.”

  “Not at all, Miss Wilde. I am not trying to provoke you. I am trying to prepare you. Your pain levels have exceeded my expectations, but by your own decision I cannot fully heal you. I work in a particular way, I apologize if that is not to your liking.”

  ”There are so, so many things not to my liking, Armaeus. We don’t have time to discuss them all. If you’d like, I can send you a bulleted list.”

  The Magician might not have been able to read my mind, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew I was outraged at what he’d done to the Connecteds. Unfortunately, he probably also knew I craved his touch like a choking man craves air. Because as Simon ambled back to his seat, his eyes on his cell phone, all Armaeus did was smile.

  Chapter Twenty

  The ruins of the ancient city of Khemenu were not impressive.

  As Armaeus had warned, the Temple of Thoth seemed to have been taken apart piece by piece, the good bits carted away while the remains were jumbled back together to give the approximation of what had come before. We’d moved on quickly from the large, quirky baboon statues of Thoth, Armaeus barely giving them a glance, and now stood in the center of…a whole lot of nothing.

  More importantly, we were completely alone.

  It was four a.m. local time. Clearly, no one was worried about whether or not we’d take another rock from the ancient burial site. But Mantorov wasn’t here either, and that was more of the problem. Because no way did we beat him to Egypt, no matter how fast the Fool had pushed us. He’d had a several-hour head start.

  Worse, Armaeus was acting exceptionally strange. Since we’d landed, he’d gone quiet, giving instructions to the local man hired to drive us to our destination in soft, unhurried words. He’d watched the bleak, dark city roll by, illuminated at very occasional turns. The place looked downtrodden despite being nestled in the fertile plains of the Nile. But while trees grew all around this space, the hill of dirt we were currently standing on was nothing but fine sand and rock dust. And still Armaeus stared, as if he was soaking in the awesome that was…dirt.

  My hands twitched. “You want me to check my cards again? Now that we’re here, we might have more clarification of the finer points on where to find Mantorov.”

  “He’s here.” Armaeus hunkered down to the ground, reaching out to pick up the shifting sands. He scattered the pile at his feet, watching as it got caught in the stiff morning breeze. “It’s always been here, the power to create. And he has the key.” He turned to Simon. “Are you ready?”

  “There’s not an electrical conductor within a million miles of this place,” Simon grumbled, but he set his phone on the ground. And tapped another button. The device vibrated, then narrow pinpoints of light exploded from it, hued a ghostly green.

  The luminous rays shot around the space in a building block of squares, an elaborate wireframe. For a moment, we all stared. Before us stood the fabled Temple of Thoth, in full reconstructed glory. Green walls shimmered in neon splendor. Enormous bird-headed statues stared out from its roofline.

  Armaeus’s gaze dropped to the doorway, set up high on the steps but off to the right from where it was expected dead center. He took several steps to align himself with it, then nodded.

  The wireframe winked out. Simon was at his side, another device in his hand. “The charge is nonexistent here. Barely enough to register on the equipment.”

  “He found it. So will we.”

  “I don’t know how,” Simon shook his head, squinting across the bleak landscape. “There’s no excavation here. Nothing but rocks and dust.”

  I scowled at the basilica and the outbuildings. “Maybe go down the well?” I gestured to the large cistern tip edging up out of the ground. “Gotta be deep enough.”

  “No.” Armaeus walked forward, his hand outstretched seemingly to read the very earth. When he’d walked about twenty paces, he knelt. “This was the temple of my youth. The earth was good and plentiful, and the Nile gives birth to all things.” He unhooked his water bottle and emptied it over the sand.

  A stain spread. Slowly at first, then faster, fuller, with the earth soaking up more water than could possibly have come out of his bottle. Armaeus’s lips were moving, and it was as if he could coax the ground to do his bidding. Then again, he probably could. These were his stomping grounds.

  The sand gave way, rushing into the hole in the earth as stairs slowly emerged. Without waiting for the dirt to clear, Armaeus headed down.

  Simon and I gaped at each other. “You think that hole is going to fill itself back in when we go down there?”

  He stowed his device in his pocket and unhooked a flashlight. “I think it’ll almost have to. Which is going to make getting out interesting, but hey, that’s why we stick close to the big guy.” Then he hopped down too.

  I had no choice but to follow.

  Fortunately, it was easy to keep close to Simon. Sand and dirt immediately flowed over us, pushing us down, so that by the time we reached Armaeus, we were practically jogging. The Magician half turned back to us and murmured another word. The flow of debris stopped, immediately coalescing into a wall of solid rock.

  “Nice,” Simon wheezed. I wrapped my headscarf around my face, trying to breath in filtered air. “Where are we?”

  “Exactly where you should be, I should say.”

  The gun pressed into my neck was a shockingly cool sensation, but I choked anyway, freezing in surprise. Simon had a similar gun at his head, while the Magician remained in fr
ont of us, still and silent, though he’d turned back to face Simon and me. It took me a bare moment to realize why Armaeus wasn’t moving, as flashlights flared on around us.

  He’d been shot. And not by bullets, either. Four silver arrows were buried in his chest and torso, piercing the Magician in an eerily uniform pattern.

  The men who’d loosed those arrows now stood with their bows discarded, automatic rifles apparently good enough for the rest of us.

  But…why had they used arrows in the first place on the Magician, not bullets? And why was Armaeus so…frozen? Though blood gushed down the front of his shirt, his face was strangely serene. Granted, Armaeus wasn’t much on showing his cards. Generally the more impassive he appeared, the closer he was to spontaneously combusting. Given his current state of Zen-like calm, we were due for a cataclysm of epic proportions any moment now.

  And yet, he didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He only sort of…gasped.

  Shallowly.

  I forced myself to stare harder at him, though the sight of all that blood was impossibly wrong. Those were big arrows, two of them piercing his chest just inside his shoulders, two of them apparently shot through his kidneys. Armaeus was the Magician. He was immortal. But he could still be killed.

  Fear unfurled inside me like a sickness.

  “Good thing I had sentinels.” Grigori Mantorov tsked, and then I saw the two men crumpled on the ground in front of Armaeus, clearly locals, the blood from their wounds already dried. “They warned me that you would be coming, and I confess I greatly anticipated this moment. I always did think there was someone else behind Kreios, bankrolling him. I simply never expected it to be a true servant of Thoth.”

  “I serve no one,” Armaeus said. Even his words were too quiet. Too still.