by Jenn Stark
“Five hundred guilders and a ring of pure diamonds of unparalleled worth, yes?” Kreios said, and Mercault turned to him with wide eyes. “That ring has been a source of mystery. I see now the mystery has been right in front of us all this time.”
“Five hundred guilders,” Mercault echoed. “How do you know such a thing?”
Kreios nodded to the Hierophant, whose blush turned his pale skin almost rosy. “I confess I was a student of the Houses for a time,” Michael said. “I do not know the modern history, I’m afraid, but I had made quite a record of their earlier trials. Before you, the House of Coins had been held by another prominent family, one with whom you do business even to this day.” His smile deepened. “I should not, were I you, discuss this passage of leadership. I knew only that a lone wanderer set off in search of an enterprising household, far away from the corruption of his own. I did not know where he landed, but, ah…he was of German descent, if that is helpful.”
Mercault frowned as he stared at the Hierophant, then understanding lit his face. “Oh…” he said, startled laughter spilling from him. “Oh…oh my. No, I should think the Fuggeren family would not be amused to find so precious a prize slipped from their fingers all those centuries ago.”
Fuggeren? I grimaced. I’d met the current patriarch of that clan more than enough times to know Mercault would have his hands full keeping anything secret from them for long.
Mercault tilted his head, rocking back on his heels, a student of history meeting a like mind. “Did you know that amid the five hundred guilders were ten keys in the form of small disks?” he asked Michael. “And that those keys unlocked treasuries that bore no mark or seal?”
The Hierophant nodded. “The lines of House leadership begin, flourish for a time—a century, sometimes more, sometimes much less—then die out. It is a pattern we have traced through millennia. But of all the Houses, that of Coins has been, if you’ll excuse the characterization, the least steeped in mysticism and the occult. It has been the province of Connected, yes, but the Connecteds run by intuition and intelligence, less by the arcane. Therefore, it has held a clearer line.”
Mercault shrugged as only a Frenchman could. “Bien sûr.”
“But that is being called into question now, it would seem.” The Hierophant’s eyes lit. “I should like to trace the history completely, learn whatever you know. For you see, perhaps there are more in your stockrooms than you even realize.”
I looked between them, startled by the sudden kinship between two such disparate people, then turned to the Magician. His gaze met mine across the room, his eyes shrewd as mine narrowed. This was a neat trap, and one Mercault was falling into all too willingly. But Mercault was a grown man, capable of making his own decisions—and his own mistakes.
So was I.
The meeting broke up a few minutes later, the objective met. Armaeus had wanted us here, in the sway of the Council. He’d gotten that. Mercault and the Hierophant now sat with Simon and even Viktor at the conference table. Kreios had lured Nikki away to God only knew where. Eshe had flounced off with a need to rest, though it took Mercault at least twenty minutes to let her go.
That left Armaeus and me. We left by separate doors, but I was unsurprised to see my only option as I stepped inside the elevator was “P”: Armaeus’s penthouse office.
The doors opened on the wide vistas of the entire Strip. I stepped onto the deeply plush carpet, scanning the room. Armaeus stood at his desk, leaning against it, and leveled a menacing glare at me. I stared back and manfully refrained from flipping him off.
“You’ll find you won’t need the sword,” he said, gesturing to the Honjo.
“I’m good so far,” I said. I stopped well short of his desk, staring at him across the room. “I think it might be best if you started explaining—oh, I don’t know. Anything. Everything.”
“We’ll start with the first.” Armaeus moved sinuously away from the desk and stalked toward me. I didn’t want to sit, not with the sword, but standing seemed problematic as well. In a chair, he could merely pull up another chair. Standing, he could step right inside my hula hoop.
He stopped before that, though, about five paces distant. I dimly realized that the configuration of chairs was different than I remembered it, rendering the space more open. Real, or another trick of Armaeus’s, to make me think I had more room to escape him?
“You won’t need to escape me, Miss Wilde.” He lifted a hand, effectively cutting off my words—not by the gesture, but by what he held in his fingers.
Er, above his fingers.
He spoke over my stare. “Furthermore, you won’t want to. You’ve forced my hand with this allegiance you have built with the warriors of the House of Swords. You have introduced true magical ability into that House. Despite the legends that swirl around them, none of the Houses were built for magic, not true magic like this. They were built for mortal ingenuity and instincts.”
I frowned at him, though I couldn’t stop staring at the prism he held suspended in the air above his palm, crackling with energy. It was the most minor of abilities—suspension and, perhaps more importantly, suspension of disbelief—but it wasn’t the prism itself that held me so enthralled as it was the images I glimpsed in the center of it. Places I’d been to—the bolt-hole of the djinn, Atlantis, even Hell—and others I had not. A city of ice. A vast desert. A kaleidoscopic wormhole.
“But you, who are mortal, even if your father was a Council member at the time of your conception, you are becoming what you should not be. What you cannot be, truly, if you would stay within the confines of your body, held within this plane of reality. You’re building a true magical ability within you, and it is beginning to fray you at the seams.”
“English, please,” I muttered. Armaeus was moving now, pacing around me, and I shifted carefully to pivot with him. Not truly turning in an arc, to avoid getting dizzy, but matching him at the angles.
“When I first met you, you were an accomplished finder of lost articles,” he said. He snapped his finger, and the prism blinked from above his hand to over his left shoulder. I tracked it with my gaze, stepping back as Armaeus moved forward. Maintaining the distance between us. “Then you showed an affinity for astral travel.”
“That’s on you,” I said. “That explosion with Llyr set all that in motion.”
“Not entirely. It improved your abilities, deepened them, but they were there to be deepened. Still, arguably, it was an extension of your finding skills. Easily explained away.”
Without warning, the prism snapped out of its orbit over Armaeus’s shoulder and hurtled toward me. I kicked out the guard of the Honjo’s hilt with my thumb, then pulled the blade free in a sweeping arc, not even getting it fully out of its scabbard before it connected with the prism. The impact sent the small crystal crashing in the other direction until it shattered in a burst of light against the far wall.
“Now you are doing things that defy explanation.” He gestured at the sword, which I now held out between us in defensive posture. “You should not be able to master the Honjo Masamune, certainly not on a level surpassing that of a well-trained samurai. I didn’t teach you to do that—no one did, in fact.” His lips twisted. “And no, YouTube videos do not count in this regard. You further should not be able to react with the instincts of a warrior, even if you somehow came to know and understand the blade.”
I kept my grip firmly on the Honjo’s hilt, my gaze never leaving Armaeus. “I’m a very motivated learner.”
“Of that I have no doubt. But there is more. I’ve spoken to Warrick of your time on his plane.”
“Warrick!” I squinted at him. “He’s a demon, and hardly reliable. Furthermore, I was on his plane all of thirty-seven seconds. Long enough to do the job and get the hell out.”
“A job that, as you describe it, was quite above your pay grade. You should have returned the djinn to earth as they intended you to, then been left a hollow shell. You were not.”
“W
ell, don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back. I know you healed me.”
He shook his head, his gaze turning more intense. “It would take a god to heal you, as badly as you were damaged, Miss Wilde.”
Armaeus’s words were low and resolute. And starting to scare me.
“I didn’t tell you that at the time, of course,” he said. “There was no value in it. But then you returned again and brought the children back with you.” He gestured gracefully with his long-fingered hand. “Do you recall that second journey?”
I didn’t appreciate the reminder. There had been fire, fire and rending pain, as if all the stars in the universe had ripped across my skin. “Vaguely,” I said.
He nodded, a soft and seductive smile creasing his beautiful face. “The scars on your back from where you were burned were not mere wounds, Miss Wilde. Do you remember receiving them? Specifically?”
“I…” I shook my head, pushing the lingering agony away. “You were there, Armaeus. You were there, and you healed me. I break and…you heal me. That’s the one constant between us.”
My lips turned down at the corners. That was true in so many ways. Until the time that Armaeus himself had caused me soul-rending pain. Pain that had left a hole that could not be healed by him—or by anyone, really.
He moved again, and I turned instinctively, pace for pace.
“I healed you, yes. And you allowed me to heal you, which is always the price. Your acceptance. Your submission, though I know that is becoming a price that is harder and harder to pay. But the price will grow steeper still.”
“Yo, I’m not—”
He overrode my protest. “More is required to understand what is happening to you, Miss Wilde. Your skills are growing too fast, too much. The balls of fire you’ve generated here and to heal the Sword general tap into wells of ability that you should not be able to plumb. And your back—”
“Enough with my back,” I growled, though all I wanted to do was throw down the sword, pull off my shirt, and run to the nearest mirror. “What’s on me? What did you find?”
“Nothing anymore. But I didn’t remove the scars you received entirely.” He lifted a hand, and an image turned before us, an image of me—my back bared to the waist. The skin looked pristine until Armaeus drifted his hand down. “I let them remain beneath your skin.”
I stared in horror as the image flickered, and a riot of angry scars surfaced, an interlocking web of pits and bursts and constellations of agony across my back.
“Why did you keep that on me—or in me, whatever?” I managed, my mouth dry at the pain I’d clearly suffered.
Armaeus looked at me with his otherworldly eyes. “Because the scars left behind from the demon realm weren’t simply burns,” he said. “They were a map.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I couldn’t help it. I lowered the sword. “A map,” I repeated. “A map to what?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t recognize it for what it was until after I returned from the plane of Hell. After I began…meditating more deeply.”
I thought of what Eshe had said, of the Magician locking himself up in his fortress, deep in his arcane trance. “Yeah, how’s that going?”
“Well enough that I can see and understand many of the secrets of the dark mystics before me. To understand why they eventually turned mad.”
“So, dark doesn’t sound so great.” I sheathed the sword and took a small step toward the door. If the Magician had gone dark, I wouldn’t need weaponry, I’d need wings. “I thought you were neutral. Balance. Remember balance? That was kind of your thing. I was a fan of that thing, if you wanted to know. Just putting that out there. Balance is good.”
“And I am a fan, as you say, of understanding. Since the moment I found you in Rio, Miss Wilde, you’ve been impossible to understand.”
I hitched a shoulder. “It’s a gift.”
“One I am ready to open,” he purred. "Like this.”
The Magician didn’t move so much as became movement, his hands remaining frozen in place yet simultaneously lifting up, his designer suit unruffled yet suddenly swirling around him, a cloak of fire. I sensed the thrust of power shoot toward me even as I staggered back, but I didn’t reach for the sword this time. There was no time. Instead, my hands came together to shield me.
The blow of the Magician’s magic sent me crashing to the floor.
I lay there, pinned, barely able to breathe, to think. “Quit that!” I gasped, and the ball winked out. The pressure remained, however, like an elephant stepping on my chest.
“Crack through the ice with fissures of fire,” Armaeus whispered, his voice was pounding through my head, my bones, my blood. “Spear the fire with lances of ice.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. I strained back, my sight beginning to dim. “Stop—”
The pressure changed but didn’t go away. Now, instead of death by big heavy thing, I was bleeding out, the weight that was crushing me becoming spikes that drove deep, piercing me through and pinning me to the penthouse carpet.
The spikes grew and twisted, ensnaring more of my flesh. This was an illusion, I knew it was an illusion, but that didn’t stop it from hurting me in a way that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. That didn’t stop it from leaving behind damage that couldn’t be undone. “Armaeus,” I gasped. “Please—”
He dropped heavily to his knees beside me, glaring at me. “Fight back.”
The pressure changed again. There was no more physical pain, but it was as if a maw had been opened inside me, yawning with pain, with loss, with betrayal. Every friend dead, every hope destroyed, every belief shattered on the rocks of broken promises and unreached dreams. I gasped and half lifted off the floor, but I couldn’t stop this any more than I could halt his other assaults. Worse, this one wormed inside me to that special, secret place, the hidden vault that held the most devastating betrayal I’d ever experienced, and one so fresh, so new that the locks had not yet been tested, the catches never tried.
They were tried now.
“No,” I managed, though I might as well have been howling into a hurricane, so fierce was the attack against my will.
“I returned from Hell changed, but so did you, Miss Wilde.” Armaeus’s voice was once again all around me, this time ringing through the air. “I would know what happened to you. What you saw. What you—”
“No!” I screamed again. My hands came up as if released from the floor by some break in the magnetic force of the planet, the sudden movement too strong for me to check. I pushed Armaeus to the side, sprawling over him. I knew it was wrong, knew it was dangerous to touch this man in any way, but I couldn’t react to anything but the agony in my own mind. I needed him out of my thoughts, out of my heart, his leaching hands away from the last vestiges of my sanity that were keeping me upright and separate from him.
Despite that need, I was still mortal, and Armaeus profoundly was not. He was a Magician whose power source consisted of sex and fire, and with the briefest of touches, an entirely different sort of need ripped through me, raging along my nerve endings, twisting in my core.
“This,” I demanded—not a prayer, not a plea, not anything but the submission to my desire, a desire I had caged for far too long. To hell with it. Literally.
“This,” he growled back.
Some dim portion of my mind realized that here too was a trap that had been neatly sprung. The Magician’s process at once forward and back, yielding and attacking, learning where he could learn and manipulating where he could not. He didn’t give a crap about my secrets, I realized with sudden clarity. He wanted me to draw on whatever power I possessed—however he could get me to do so.
None of that mattered anymore, though. Because Armaeus’s gold-black eyes stared daggers even as his mouth met mine.
The touch of the Magician’s lips was never a purely sexual charge. It was too layered for that. But it was powerful.
Instantly, the penthouse went up in a stre
am of fire and sparks, not metaphorically but actual sparks, lines of power running around the room and tracing geometric patterns as sacred as they were arcane, before diving to the earth. There they intersected with the ancient lines of power—ley lines and their axes, each more powerful than the last.
The conflagration wasn’t only outside of me, though.
“You are not yet strong enough to fight Gamon’s magic.” Armaeus’s hands gripped my shoulders, pinning me in place, but not to ravage me with his mouth, his body, the way I wanted him too. Instead he reached for me with his mind, clamping down on the broken places, battering against the strong. “Gamon’s disciples have trodden the darker paths, and you must be prepared.”
“I can’t fight that way.” I stared into Armaeus’s furious gaze, and the world fell away. I peered into a roiling abyss. Black fire twisted and rolled on itself, daggers of red and gold shooting through it. The waves surged and retreated, crashing on a distant bank, revealing the skulls etched in bone and gold and amber beneath. “This isn’t what I am.”
“It’s what is necessary for you to survive,” he hissed in my ear. “I cannot give it to you, though, Miss Wilde. You must take it into yourself of your own volition, draw it and contain it so you can use it in your time of greatest need.”
“No.” I gripped Armaeus’s hands, a flailing climber scrabbling against a cliff face, knowing that my grip was weakening but unable to resist the allure of the emptiness below. I stared into the power surging beneath me, and I saw more than fear, more than pain. I saw choices and grays and shadows, confusion and doubt. I saw the true reasons for the petrifying terror of great ability—not that it would consume me out of hand, but that it was so easy to simply let it take hold of me, to release myself to its pull, to give sway to its desire and madness instead of fighting the endless battle to stay in control, balanced, on the path.
