Running Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  I’d feel pretty good about that, if I thought it was making a difference in the number of children still at risk in the world. It wasn’t, though. For every kid we rescued from child traffickers intent on making a buck by supplying human parts for black market technoceuticals, three others were being groomed for kidnapping by unscrupulous Connecteds or, even worse, non-Connecteds who were siphoning up every kid they could find who seemed to have a hint of psychic ability. It was constant, it was agonizing, and money wasn’t going to stop it.

  At this point, I didn’t know what would. The war on magic might leave the world a kinder, gentler place when all was said and done, or it might leave it a post-apocalyptic hellhole for anyone with psychic skills. Or, something else entirely could happen. What if in the battle, the veil did rip open, and gods flooded the earth? That wouldn’t be a catastrophe only for the Connecteds of the planet. The non-Connecteds would be forced to deal with it too…whether or not their worldviews were ready for it. There were far too many trigger-happy idiots in the world with access to nuclear weapons for that to be a good idea.

  I closed my eyes against the image of Tomahawk cruise missiles flying deep into the maw of the kraken. Things would get messy in a hurry if the gods walked the earth again. And the world was a much larger and more complicated place than it had been in the age of Atlantis. Would we even have the ability to pull together and force the gods out again, with so many people and so many different agendas?

  “What I wouldn’t give for a peek behind those mental barriers you are maintaining so savagely.” The Devil’s cool, amused voice brought me out of my reverie, and I realized he was still contemplating me with interest, apparently devising the proper carrot for me to do this job. We both knew I was going, though, vegetables notwithstanding.

  “All right,” I began, but he lifted an indolent hand.

  “Beyond the forgiveness of your debt to me, my payment to you in return for your work will be twofold. However, I will reserve the first of those boons for my own private amusement until I feel it’s the right time to bestow it upon you.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Oh, really.”

  “The second boon is both financial and strategic. Two million dollars delivered to Ma-Singh with my compliments, along with a peek into Gamon’s computer network.”

  “You have access to that?”

  “Currently, no.” He grinned. “But Simon has been hard at work at it for weeks now, buried under so much hardware, I fear he may simply become AI himself and save us all the trouble of needing the computer interface. I haven’t seen him emerge from his tech center in days, in fact. He’s close.”

  I frowned. “He’s spending all that time solely to look for a way to hack into Gamon’s network? And he hasn’t broken through yet?”

  “To hear him explain it, there’s an inordinate amount of downtime involved in such a hack. He puts certain commands in process, and then he simply watches and waits.”

  “Twenty-four hours a day?”

  “I suspect he plays Candy Crush to pass the time. Regardless, those are my terms. Do you find them acceptable?”

  “Sure,” I said, tossing back the rest of my drink. “Money and—whatever else you’re going to give me, which had better be good, since you’re being all Suzy Secrets about it.”

  He inclined his head again, his eyes glittering. Whatever Kreios’s idea was, he definitely thought it was good.

  “One other thing,” he said. “When you exit the library with the scrolls…you may not wish to give them to me right away. That is acceptable.”

  I looked back at him curiously. “You mean unacceptable.”

  “I do not. What’s important is that those scrolls do not remain in the Arcanum. They must be liberated. What you do with them immediately after that, I leave to your discretion. I can wait.”

  “That…totally sounds like a trap.”

  “How ever you wish to characterize it, those are my terms. You will agree to removing the scrolls from the Arcanum. I would like them after that, but your charge is solely to get them out. Do you understand?”

  I rubbed my jaw. “Fine, whatever. How long until we’re ready? I don’t usually do all that well with astral travel, so I’m thinking if it’s soon, we’ll need to put off food until I get back.”

  “Eat,” Kreios said, gesturing to the spread his people had laid out. “Remember, you won’t be astral traveling to the Arcanum Library, you’ll be moving bodily there, utilizing the pathway gifted to you. And for that, you’ll need your strength.”

  At his words, the ink on my right elbow heated up, and I glanced down, imagining the looping, twisting spirals Jimmy had injected into my skin. Yeah. I was definitely going to need some ballast for this.

  The decision made, Kreios joined me in a dinner that eschewed our location of more or less off the coast of South Africa and instead drew heavily on his own preferences for Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisine. My own preferences leaned toward any food I didn’t have to prepare or clean up after, so I was more than happy to stuff myself with hummus, olives, delicate flatbreads, and fruit. The more robust entrees I left to Kreios, and he ate with an abandon that seemed rare, even for him, all the while entertaining me with stories and anecdotes of his life on the docks. He seemed…almost happy, I realized. Safe.

  “Ah! Careful there, Sara Wilde,” the Devil said, and I blinked back at him, feeling suddenly exposed, though I didn’t at first understand why.

  “What?”

  He eyed me with keen, glittering intent. “You cannot let your guard slip around me so easily, you know. Unlike the Magician, who seeks complete mastery of any mind he seizes upon, I have more delicate and defined interests. So if you ever do find me poking around your memories…you’ll probably not have arrived in time to put me off from my primary task.”

  “I didn’t drop my barriers,” I retorted stiffly.

  “You didn’t have to. You felt sympathy for me—no, something more than that. Affection. Kinship. And here’s a little secret from the other side that you should know.” He leaned forward, his smile condescending to the point of being a leer, though there was nothing sexual or seductive about it. He was being deadly serious here, and I found the tiniest curl of fear worm its way through my stomach. I braced myself.

  “Emotions trump logic,” Kreios fairly purred.

  Then he sat back, looking far too satisfied with himself.

  “That’s it?” I eyed him. “Emotions trump logic? That’s your big reveal?”

  “When it comes to pushing through a weakness, yes. When it comes to surviving the unsurvivable…yes.” He pointed an elegantly curved cheese knife at me. “And when it comes to skirting even the most well constructed of defenses, absolutely. Emotion is always the weak point. You install a mental barrier with logic, and it will hold—except in those places you don’t feel like you need to shore it up. But if you install it with logic and powerful emotion…it will not only hold, it could well become a weapon in its own right.”

  This was quickly edging toward the line of the kind of Byzantine arguments the Devil and the Magician entertained themselves with, and I rolled my eyes even as I tucked the information away to consider later. The Devil never lied, I knew that. If he was giving me this information, it could well be for his own nefarious purposes, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t truth.

  “I’ll, ah…I’ll keep that in mind.” I pushed back from the table, suddenly wanting to get this job over with. “So when do I make the jump? Because you may not remember my last trip using the inked-up highway, but I kind of got a little singed.”

  I grimaced, the memories now coming back to me. I’d used the pathways inked into my arm once before—twice, really, in rapid succession. Once to travel to Atlantis and find my way home, and once to travel to the bolt-hole of the Emperor’s cadre of demons. Neither trip had gone according to plan, and both had had the benefit of two members of the Council present, not just one. I’d also had the advantage of having som
eone on this side to ground me, to bring me back. Someone I trusted.

  Kreios didn’t exactly qualify, but any port in a storm. “I don’t want to catch on fire this time,” I muttered.

  “I don’t want that either. You’re bringing back very fragile artifacts.”

  “Uh, about that,” I said, remembering another pertinent detail of my last attempts. “Do I need to skewer myself on these amber and jade tubes? Because that was also a problem with getting things back, the last time I tried this. Undesirable piercings.”

  “Fortunately, that won’t be at issue here,” Kreios said. “Like Hell, the Arcanum Library is located in a dimensional fold that resides on this side of the veil. It is accessible for you despite the fact you are immortal, so it’s not exactly like Hell. Otherwise, Death could not enter either. But you can remove artifacts without the…strictures that your visit to Atlantis required.”

  I rubbed my hand over my forehead. “And you know that how?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s just say there have been other arcane codices that have made their way out of the library and into common usage before, though often at great risk to those who sought them out.”

  “Um…such as?”

  “You’re familiar with the study of alchemy, surely.”

  “Well, yeah, but—that didn’t pan out so well.”

  “It didn’t for the most famous of practitioners, no. But there was a reason for such fervent belief by so many alchemists in the practice. They saw it, after a fashion. Saw it successfully rendered. They didn’t remember seeing it, not in any way they could access again, but it did happen. And that memory, that whiff of a moment’s recollection, colored their whole lives.”

  “Who had it?” I asked. “Or I guess…has it, then? Though it would seem like the power to turn lead into gold would have gotten some additional press by now if it was still out there.”

  “It would, if that was the pure focus of the magical formula. It, of course, was not. Instead, the focus was on the transmutation of flesh into spirit, if you recall, a practical form of enlightenment.”

  “And that’s owned by…”

  He smiled. “It’s never struck you as odd that there are so many Connecteds in our world today, out in the open? Whereas for centuries, millennia even, they were relegated to the shadows?”

  “They’re still relegated to the shadows. That’s kind of the point.”

  “But there are more,” he said, and once again, there was a trace of fervency in his voice. “They rise. No census is taken of their numbers, officially. We all have tried, but the data shifts and spins. Not even Armaeus can accurately track it down. Like every other species’ population expansion, the number of Connecteds has been exploding. And that is, in part, why they are emerging on the radar screens of organizations such as Interpol.”

  I grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”

  “But to answer your question, the Arcanum Library brought such magic as the philosopher’s stone into the world, was the very father of alchemy by reintroducing the art into the world. Alchemy’s practice fell out of favor when modern chemistry took its place, but the true work had already been done. The seeds had been planted, if you will, in race after race. The memory remains.”

  “Because someone stole a manuscript from the Arcanum Library.”

  “Stole—or transcribed. The history of alchemy is long, and the Library has held on to its secrets for centuries.”

  “But they could as easily have copied that manuscript out of the original Library of Alexandria,” I protested. “You don’t know for sure that it was pulled out of the Arcanum.”

  Kreios hesitated, and I speared him with a look. “What?”

  “You were not the first artifact hunter employed by the Council to find the ancient cylinders I seek. Before you, there was another, and another before that. If you go back long enough, you will find that the Council even acquired the codex for alchemy, strictly for itself, at great cost. It was clearly not an original transcription. It also bore an insignia that matched no library in existence.”

  I blew out a long breath. “So the Magician has it,” I said. “Cool.” It made sense. Armaeus never found an artifact he didn’t like.

  “No,” Kreios said. When I looked at him, he pointed to the ink on my arm. “It was discovered at the tattoo shop. Jimmy was at least able to give me that information. He didn’t like the scroll, never had. Couldn’t read it, didn’t want to. But he did let me see it. Death had never forbidden him otherwise.”

  “And that’s how you found out about the library. The codex of alchemy had to have come from somewhere, and Death had to know about it. You figure that somewhere is this bootleg library.” I frowned. “Why do you think Death is there now?”

  “A reasonable assumption,” he said. “War is coming. If it hits, she more than most will be affected. There will be far too many souls that will perish in the flames of a war on magic.”

  I thought about that and didn’t like the images Kreios’s words were calling to mind. “Okay, let’s do this,” I said, sitting back from the table and taking a deep breath. “Where am I looking in the library? Should I pull more cards?”

  He shook his head. “You’ll discover that for yourself—but only there. Any readings on this side of the barrier will be misdirections.”

  “And you know this how?”

  He smiled thinly. “As I said, you’re not the first artifact hunter employed by the Council attempting to reach the Arcanum Library. It’s our hope that you’ll be the most successful one.”

  “Most? Or only?”

  In response, Kreios looked away. Quietly, resolutely, he began speaking words I’d never heard before, in a dialect I would never be able to decipher. I felt myself slipping almost immediately, and I yanked the cards from my pocket, gripping them in my cupped hands.

  Then I collapsed.

  Chapter Six

  I’d astral traveled enough times that I was used to the process, but this wasn’t astral traveling, precisely. Further, I’d never before had Kreios as a guide for any type of journey, astral or otherwise.

  Note to self: the Devil sucked as a guide.

  Instead of soaring out of the yacht and into the wide sky, then orienting myself in the proper direction, I was yanked out of my position in this world and sucked downward in a stomach-churning descent. I couldn’t hear Kreios speaking, I couldn’t hear anything but the whoosh of air in my ears—air, not water, which I considered to be particularly good news, since I’d started out in the middle of the ocean.

  When I painfully collided with the first precipice of the new dimension, the breath was knocked out of me, but it didn’t stop my descent. It was only after the fifth one that I lost consciousness completely.

  After that, there was only darkness for a very, very, very long time.

  When I finally came to, however, I wasn’t alone.

  Something was near me. Many somethings.

  I woke with a start, keeping my eyes firmly shut as I heard the distinctive scratching noise very close to my head. Another one near my foot. Had I heard it before? Was it closer this time? Scratching I could handle, I told myself, freaky as it was. I kept my eyes closed, assessing the damage to my soft tissue.

  Given that the entire point of astral travel was that I traveled incorporeally, I usually didn’t have to worry about the pain of landing. But, like Atlantis, the Arcanum Library was a physical destination in an alternate plane, and I’d traveled here bodily, not mentally. Now, given how roughly I’d landed, my body hurt. A lot.

  I shifted slightly. Despite my positive self-talk, I couldn’t help being unnerved by the noise of the creatures at my head and feet shuffling back. “You’d better not be rats,” I muttered, drawing in a shallow breath.

  “Shhh!”

  The sound was so unexpected but so undoubtedly one of hushing that I blinked my eyes open—and flinched back hard enough to crack my head against a shelf. “Ouch!”

  “Shh!” the creature in
front of me implored again.

  I sat up somewhat woozily and stared back at the thing, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. An animal approximately the size of my fist stared up at me, all tiny arms and paws, quivering ears, and fat-bellied body. It looked sort of like a bunny. Or a gerbil. And its stare was so soulful, I was stunned into silence.

  “Shh…” it breathed a third time, a peculiar hissing noise it managed through its oversized front teeth, and it jerked its gaze toward the far wall. I’d expected the chamber to be pitch-dark, but the whole of it was lit by a myriad glowing crystals hanging from the ceiling. Lightbulbs? LEDs? Neither of those two felt right, but there was definitely no flame spiraling up from the mini light sources. They illuminated a room lined with floor-to-ceiling shelving, cluttered with a half-dozen enormous tables arranged haphazardly around a large dry basin carved into the floor. I’d apparently crashed into one of those tables, then bounced to the floor, judging from the scroll cases that had been disturbed from their location. They were now scattered about the marble floor like a dropped jar of toothpicks, and I winced, taking in the sight. If these things wanted me to be silent, I’d clearly ruined any hope of that.

  “Sorry, guys,” I muttered, glancing around to get my bearings.

  On second glance, the room in which I’d landed looked exactly how a library should—if the library contained tubes, not books. Instead of featuring dusty old tomes on uniformly horizontal surfaces, the bookshelves boasted thick rods that stuck out to form cubbies for each of the scroll cases. And everything was in a case, not lying loose. From what I could tell, in this room alone there were easily a hundred scrolls or more, large and small, fat and skinny, in cases that ran the gamut from ridiculously ornate to intensely simplistic. More to the point, there were at least a half-dozen in jade, and more in amber.