Wilde Fire: Immortal Vegas, Book 10

by Jenn Stark

  “Kids today,” I muttered, but Danae continued, ignoring me.

  “The Magician has assembled some of the strongest Council members in centuries, pulling together those that had spun out to the four corners of the earth as well as adding new potential ascendants, such as Hera and Zeus, who even now are on the cusp of becoming the first manifestation of the Lovers that the Council has seen in millennia. He has called the Hierophant back from Hell and even reengaged the interest of Death. The Fool, once crippled, is now made whole, and the Emperor, once pure in his malevolence, is now crippled—and desperate to regain his single-minded power. The Magician himself is now fully coming into his magic, a magic he has not allowed himself in hundreds of years.”

  “So what you’re saying is—”

  “It’s chaos,” interrupted Nigel. “You’re saying the current Council is a group of individuals, not alliances. Every man for himself.”

  Chaos. Unbidden, the image of the Devil sprang to mind. The Devil, perhaps one of the most powerful of the Council members, whose only interest in anything was stirring the pot of humanity.

  “Kreios,” I muttered.

  “Kreios,” Danae agreed. “The Magician has gone dark, the Emperor is broken, there are gods ascending to the Council, and Connecteds are rising in power. Demons are awakening across the earth, and organizations heretofore unsure or even entirely blissfully ignorant of the strength of the Connected community are being forced to acknowledge them. And, of course, the gods seek to return to the earth—and will, through the ripping of the veil.”

  She glanced again toward the front of the house.

  “What is it?” I demanded. “Who’s coming here?”

  She ignored the question but kept talking. “The Magician has struggled long and hard for a solution that truly unites the Council. He has believed all this time that he achieved it, but in truth, the Council was merely dormant, with no real reason to oppose his will or to assert their own. The Council has always been a collection of individuals, and the smartest leaders of the past have assembled individuals who were markedly weaker than the leader himself or herself. The Magician has chosen—had chosen, I should say—not to do this, but his decision to return to his essential darkness is a critical departure from that ruling ethos. It speaks to him finally understanding what will be required for the world that is to come. He’s changed the rules that have needlessly bound him. But it is not enough.”

  She turned to level her gaze at me. “My coven has long supported the Magician of the Council, and we will continue to support him. But only if he is allied—truly allied—with the strongest members of the Council. He has not fully contained the threats that are facing him, and he has allowed some members to gain in strength without curtailing them or ensuring their alliance.”

  “You mean the Devil,” I hazarded. It was a fair rebuke. Kreios was the Magician’s best friend on the Council. It was never easy reining in your homie.

  Her smile was ghostly. “Surprisingly, I do not. While I blame the Devil for allowing the state of the world to evolve to its current morass of uncertainty and turbulence and even violence, the Devil is most assuredly at one with the Magician. Especially now that Armaeus has embraced the true nature of his dark abilities. But there is an equal and opposite force that is gaining in vengeful wrath that must be contained. The Hierophant.”

  I blinked. “The Hierophant? Are you kidding me?”

  “He’s the Archangel Michael, the most ancient member of the Council.”

  “Yeah, but, come on. He’s only just broken out of Hell. He’s like…a kid at the county fair right now.”

  “In another time and another century, I might believe you. But the Archangel Michael is first and foremost a warrior for his God. When pushed, as he will be with the coming of this war, he will revert to what he does best: smiting down the powers that are not of his God. The demons of this world, witches such as our own, Connecteds who do not fall in with his creed. The Magician.”

  “No, no, no,” I said, holding my hands up. “They’re friends. Armaeus went and got him out of Hell, specifically. He wouldn’t have done that if he’d had any fear of what the Hierophant might do to him.”

  “When the Magician collected Michael from Hell, he was not the same as he is now. Before, he was committed to balance, both within the world and within himself. And he was mortal—he would not have been able to enter the realm of Hell otherwise. Neither of these situations are the same anymore.”

  I scowled at her, a headache forming behind my eyes. “So what is it you’re telling me?”

  “I’m telling you that if you want the support of the covens, at least the ones of North America, where I have influence, you will put the power of your House and your skills behind the Magician—and against all those who rise up against him. And rise they will.” She gave me a wintry smile. “The war on magic will be fought on many fronts. Humanity against the gods, the non-Connecteds against the Connecteds…and the Council against itself. Do we have your vow?”

  A gong sounded from far to the front of the house, but Danae’s gaze remained implacable. Whoever she was going to meet would have to wait for this.

  I stared at her a long time, my mind whirling. I didn’t know the Hierophant, but I thought I knew his nature, his essential self. He was a creature of wonder and delight, marveling at the world around him, a world from which he’d sequestered himself for millennia. Had I truly been that wrong about him?

  Then again, the Michael I’d seen looked nothing at all like the warrior angel depicted in religious art since ancient times. In every painting, every sculpture, God’s fierce agent had been paired with a flaming sword, tearing down his enemies, claiming victory against all who would dare stand in his way. As much as I hated to admit it…I’d been exactly that wrong.

  “You do,” I said to Danae. “You have my bond.”

  “Good. Now go, that we might finish our obligations of this night and honor our sacred dead.” She nodded to the front door, where her next appointment apparently waited. “We were not the only coven to make summons this evening; I fear the reports of the others will be the same. Ultimately, however, that will serve you well.”

  She leaned forward, fixing me with her solemn gaze. “By the time the New Moon steps in to cast her cool shadow on the earth, eclipsing the sun, I will have the might of the covens for you to command.”

  Chapter Six

  Nigel and I spent another night in Chicago, technically to be on hand to dispatch any more demons that threatened Danae and her coven. Mostly, I needed the sleep—which I took, face-planting for hours while my Ace stood watch, then switching off with him while he rested. I’d healed both of us, yes, but the residual stain of the demons’ poison took longer to shake than I’d expected. If I ever encountered such a toxin again, I’d be prepared, but that first hit was a doozy.

  Once we finally returned to Vegas, however, my first stop in the city was one I couldn’t make with Nigel. Not because the man wouldn’t follow me to the ends of the earth, but because he couldn’t.

  Fortunately, the second Ace of the House of Swords could.

  “I am absolutely not feeling the love here, dollface, and I gotta tell you it’s giving me the absolute heebie-jeebies.”

  Nikki Dawes peered around the lobby of the Luxor with a shrewd gaze, her face tight beneath her wire-rimmed glasses. Today she was rocking a full-on ensemble of legal counsel to the rich and famous, her hair swept back in a platinum-blonde chignon, her dark red power suit perfectly matching her lipstick and pumps, and her thousand-dollar leather satchel the ideal size for a personal laptop or semiautomatic pistol, only one of which she was packing.

  She knew what she was looking for: the telltale sign of the hidden-in-plain-sight elevator bays that would take us up to Prime Luxe. Only, the configuration appeared to be different today, different enough to give me pause too. I was used to the vagaries of the Magician as he randomly changed the layout of his spectral aerie, but instead of t
he usual onyx-and-steel bays visible in the shadows of the gaudy golden kitsch of the Luxor, the bays were now shaded a deep midnight blue. Pretty in their way, but not something I would have expected from the Magician. Particularly since he had embraced his dark side so recently. If anything, I was expecting something more along the lines of dense black or the color of Nikki’s suit, a deep blood crimson. Blue simply seemed too passive for a man girding for war.

  I recognized I was probably reading too much into the Magician’s color scheme. Danae’s proclamation had served as intense conversational fodder for Nigel and me during our flight back from Chicago. We’d arrived in Las Vegas only an hour earlier, and he’d handed me off to Nikki with thinly veiled irritation. But he had his own job to do. If what Danae had indicated was right, and there was no reason to believe it wasn’t until we gathered more data through the House of Swords’ worldwide network, we needed to act, and act quickly. As it was, I now had our team combing the internet for signs of anything that could be construed as a demon sighting, but that kind of scan was only the beginning. If demons were really walking the earth in greater numbers, serving as a threat to humanity, we’d need to let the local authorities here in Vegas know about it, all the way up to Interpol. There was no way they could take on the horde themselves, but they had to know it was out there. I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.

  “Goofy color scheme or no, we should go up before we start getting the side-eye,” Nikki said beside me. Obligingly, I moved forward as she almost tentatively hit the button to open the doors of the elevator to Prime Luxe. The doors slipped open soundlessly to reveal the more expected stainless-steel interior typical of the Magician’s conveyance up to his domain.

  “Maybe the reno job isn’t finished yet,” Nikki said, eyeing the stark interior of the elevator. “Because he totally needs some art in here.”

  We were whisked into the sky a distance of easily three or four times the height of the Luxor Casino itself. When the doors finally opened, we were in for another surprise. I’d seen many chambers in the Magician’s fortress; usually the conference room, Armaeus’s personal office, or even his bedroom. This was none of these.

  “Definitely a new decorating job,” Nikki said, and her voice had dropped to a hush. Fitting, for where we appeared to be.

  The chamber that stretched before us could best be described as a library, but a library that could only have been assembled by a madman. Tomes lined the room floor to ceiling, but the walls were built in a series of curves so that there was no way to see any one stretch of books at a glance. There were no library ladders or scaffolds to allow someone to reach the uppermost level of books either, and the ceilings were so high that the top several rows of shelves were cloaked in darkness. Interspersed with the books were video screens, all of which were lit, streaming with text or images or randomly shifting colors. Additional books and tablets were piled haphazardly on all manner of tables, some of them high, some low, some with chairs or stools before them, some shoved off to the side as if forgotten.

  Though we couldn’t see all the way to the back of the chamber, given the configuration of walls and shelving, it was clear that there was something going on back there that involved a large fire.

  “Is he going through a Merlin phase?” Nikki asked quietly as we stepped into the room. “Because if we come around the corner and he’s wearing a Mickey Mouse Fantasia hat, I’m not gonna be responsible for my actions.”

  I stayed silent, as bemused as she was. The last time I’d seen Armaeus, he’d just reassimilated his darker self into the depths of his being. He’d appeared weak and out of sorts, but he’d assured me that all he needed was time alone. I’d envisioned that time alone encompassing a lot of napping, not a retreat like this. Now I half expected to find the Magician bent over a cauldron while waving a crystal wand.

  The floor was thickly paneled wood, but it absorbed our footfalls as if it were deep-pile carpet. Clearly, Armaeus didn’t want to be disturbed, yet if he truly didn’t want to allow us access to him, the elevator would have dumped us out into a series of hallways and chambers from which we might never emerge.

  The heat from the fire increased as we passed the first set of shelves, and we could see more of the light then. The electronic tablets and screens all but disappeared in another few steps, leaving musty old tomes and the kind of scroll cases I’d last seen in another library tucked just outside the plane of this world, though fortunately, there were no chittering hamsters here. The shelves also shifted in size, no longer reaching toward the ceiling but extending in haphazard rows, like dominos set up by a crazed toddler. In between shelves, the walls weren’t made of drywall or steel or even stone, but mottled rock. An illusion, sure, but a completely convincing one. We were approaching a cave, and the fire was now visible above the tops of the bookshelves, leaping high in the center of the room without making a sound. In fact, there still was no sound—not from our own feet, not from the fire, and not from the man we finally saw standing in front of the flames as we came around the last shelf of books.

  Two men, actually.

  Nikki breathed out a long, strangled sigh of relief. “At least he’s got a spotter.”

  At her quiet words, the second man turned and glanced our way, his smile brilliant in the firelight, his gaze sharpening fiercely on Nikki before shifting to me almost as an afterthought.

  The Devil, Aleksander Kreios, in the flesh—not literally, fortunately, at least not yet. From the way he eyed Nikki hungrily, however, that wasn’t going to be the case for long.

  Worked for me. Nikki was here to protect me, and if we’d been facing an ordinary human threat, or even an ordinary Connected threat, there was no one I trusted more on this earth. But we weren’t among humans anymore. The members of the Arcana Council could be killed, technically, and most of them had been human to begin with, but they’d traded in a not-insignificant portion of that humanity to take their seats at the Council table. In return, they’d received an intense deepening of their Connected abilities, immortality, and, I was sure, a few other door prizes I hadn’t yet stumbled on.

  Regardless, now that we were on Council turf, Nikki, of all people, knew that if Armaeus and Kreios wanted to strike out at me, I’d be better off on my own, without worrying about her. She was here mostly as a sop to the House of Swords, which was still getting used to my abilities. Hell, I was still getting used to my abilities. And so we danced around my need for protection in this upper echelon of Connecteds, and Nikki stepped in whether she was needed or not.

  “You good with this?” I asked her now.

  “What, being shunted off into some darkly opulent pleasure dome of the Devil’s creation for him to make good on his bid to distract me while you catch up with the second most powerful sorcerer in the world?” Nikki asked drolly, but there was a hint of steel in her voice. She might understand that she couldn’t truly help me here, but that didn’t mean she liked it.

  I slid my glance back toward the devastatingly gorgeous Kreios, who eyed Nikki like he wanted to eat her alive. Okay, maybe she liked it a little.

  “I suppose I can put up with it,” she muttered.

  At the fire, Armaeus finally straightened as well. As he did, my heart surged into my throat, my hands lifted slightly, my breath caught. Without warning, I was swept up in a wave of longing, hope, possibility—and most especially, magic. My entire body was suffused with energy, riven with wonder. This was the man who’d captured me, body and soul. This was the man I’d captured as well, the Magician who’d confessed his love to me in tones so broken I couldn’t tell if I was a blessing or a curse.

  But there was no going back now, I knew. We were as bound together as two souls could be, and the only way out was through.

  “So good of you both to come—as always, when you are needed most.” Kreios’s words pierced my distraction, and I finally noticed something else about the Magician: his strange, too-slow movements. He turned toward us, head still bowed, as
if he were a thousand years old.

  Granted, he was almost a thousand years old, but normally, he was as fit and robust as the Devil in appearance. The Devil who continued to speak.

  “Of course you realize, to my utter dismay and disapproval, Armaeus has asked to speak with you alone, Sara, while I must endeavor to entertain the inimitable Miss Dawes. It is a challenge I will do my utmost to—”

  “What’s going on?” I cut in sharply, but neither Council member replied at first. I could feel the power in the room intensify, skittering across my internal circuits. Why wasn’t Armaeus talking?

  “It would appear that your recent assistance to the Magician accorded him access to powers that ran far more deeply than he anticipated,” the Devil said, his voice rich with satisfaction. “You never do cease to amaze, Sara Wilde.”

  At the mention of my full name, Armaeus lifted his head, and once again, the power in the room shuddered and dipped like we were aboard an airplane in choppy air. Beside me, Nikki hissed a curse, her hands going wide to steady herself.

  My third eye flashed open, then screwed shut again, momentarily blinded by the impossibly bright light of the energy patterns swirling through the chamber. Instantly, I was on my guard, testing my mental barriers, gratified to see they held. I’d pledged to give my all to Armaeus Bertrand, but I wasn’t an idiot. He’d amped his abilities exponentially by accessing his dark magic. I didn’t know what that meant, entirely, but I felt the impact of his gaze as an almost physical force.

  “Armaeus—” I began, but the Magician lifted a hand to cut me off.

  “Sara,” he said, the word seeming to vibrate the walls of Prime Luxe down to its spectral foundations.

  Without warning, a jolt of intense power roared out from the Magician, so fast and so devastating that I didn’t have time to breathe. The Devil twisted in the maelstrom, his body bursting into fifteen different incarnations until there was not one but an army of Devils, all of them different, all of them huge, muscled, dark eyed, and wrapped in dancing fire, all of them racing toward me—not me, actually, but Nikki. The conflagration of Devils swept over her with a laugh of pure carnal pleasure, and the two of them exploded into a brilliant flare of glittering fireworks, until even that light show was sucked into nothing, both of them completely vanishing.