by Jenn Stark
Well, not completely. The echoes of Kreios’s rich, rolling laughter whispered from somewhere deep within the Magician’s lair for another second, then that too was gone.
Silence descended around us like a dropping cloak, but Armaeus didn’t move. I didn’t move. I met his gaze across the expanse of the chamber but couldn’t truly see his eyes so much as feel their power, two burning coals of fury in his shadowed, cowled face. Silhouetted against the fire the way he was, he could have been a demon himself.
Beneath his heavy hood, Armaeus smiled.
Apparently, my mental barriers weren’t as good as I thought they were.
“Sara,” he whispered again, and this time, his power did not burst from him in a fiery explosion, it whispered across the space between us, like a living thing. I saw it coming, lifted my own hands in an instinctive gesture of defense, but I felt no real threat from Armaeus. And that, perhaps, disturbed me most of all.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my voice harsher than I wanted to be.
Once again, my question prompted a physical reaction in the Magician. Now both his hands came up, as if my words had to be captured and held before they could actually reach him. And in fact, the energy of those words turned into a small, fiery burst of color as he played it over his hands, a spinning purple-and-white crackle.
“Sara,” he said again simply.
This time, as his words reached me, I didn’t hold up my hands to defend myself, but to receive his energy in the same way he’d received mine. Where my words had turned into a tiny bonfire of purple and white, however, the Magician’s single word was a golden ball of energy. The sheer weight of it staggered me, and I gasped in surprise, only to immediately realize my mistake. With my intake of breath, Armaeus’s word swept into me bodily, and my entire central nervous system lit up like Times Square. I suddenly felt so filled with fire and possibility that the illusory walls of Prime Luxe had no hope of holding me. I could move mountains, I could drink oceans, I could shift the stars in the sky from their orbits, I—
As quickly as it had begun, it was done.
I staggered forward, the support of Armaeus’s magic vanishing. I hadn’t realized I’d leaned so much into that magic, it all happened so fast. Instantly, I straightened, anger replacing the momentary lapse into wonder.
“You want to warn me before you hit me with a party trick next time?”
Armaeus had moved away from the fire, his body blocking whatever it was that lay in the center of the flames. Instead, he moved toward me—but hesitantly, almost as if he’d forgotten how to walk.
Concern sharpened my focus, and I strode forward as well, nearly crashing into the collection of chairs and couches that sprang up in the space between us. Maneuvering around a low table, I reached for Armaeus’s arm.
“No,” he said faintly, lifting his hand—to grab me or to ward me off, I didn’t know.
It didn’t matter anyway.
The moment our hands touched, madness exploded around me.
Chapter Seven
Instead of the combustion of magic between Armaeus and me ripping us apart, it fused us, our hands melting together until the flailing ends of our electrical currents connected and became a closed loop. I arched back and cried out in a silent scream as the pressure and power grew and grew within me, a maelstrom of agony that seemed to swirl around two beating hearts at our center.
A pulsing heart of darkness emerged before us, darkness I’d only glimpsed when I’d connected with Armaeus’s power in the past. I couldn’t remember what it’d looked like before, but now it was a roiling, furious feed of pure dark energy—not evil, not in the sense that I had come to know evil, but the true carnal core of the creative force, wrenching something out of nothing and reverting it back to nothing again, the cycle of violent birth and brutal death playing over and over, as the resulting creations grew ever more beautiful, ever more staggering in their complexity.
I’d never been so close to such darkness, and it reached into me and stirred to life passions and possibilities I’d never before thought about, pricking my nerve endings into the full gamut of sensations from pleasure to pain and back again, conjuring up every twisted fetish I’d encountered in my long treks deep into the underbelly of the Connected world. I’d seen a little bit of everything in the arcane black market—sexual excesses and depravity, the desecration of all that was human and all that was good, the celebration of vice and hedonism. I’d seen the eyes of some of the most despicable excuses for humans, and all too many of them had burned with this same core of fervent pleasure that was now close enough to touch. Some of these horrible creatures, these dark practitioners, had been absolute masters of their arcane arts, using their spoils to create the kind of drugs and magical tools that others would kill to possess. That, as much as I loathed it, was the raw power of creation. That, as much as I feared it, was open to me now.
But then a second heart burst into existence beside the first, equally strong, equally implacable. The heart of humanity. It wasn’t the antithesis of the dark wellspring of creation that the Magician had opened up, nor was it a leavening hand—it was a fully altering force. The two beating hearts repelled each other, dark to light, as if each knew that they could not get too close to the other without risking grave danger to themselves. There would be no coming back from such a chemical reaction as this. And there was no way to predict its outcome.
Worst of all, it was my fault.
“Sara,” Armaeus said again, as if my name was the only mantra he could still access. It’d been several days since I’d helped the Magician reconnect to his power, but in so doing, I’d given him my love as well, tucking it in with his pack as he went on his long dark journey of the soul. I hadn’t intended for that love to open up this level of pain, however. This level of pain—or power.
“What’s happening?” I demanded, though I had some sense of it.
“Look at me, Sara.”
Despite the agony of subjecting my third eye to the sparking, exploding light show all around me, I allowed it to flicker open and even managed to slit my regular eyes to take in some of the chaos. Before me was Armaeus, beautiful Armaeus, his hood thrown back and his cloak flaring wide, revealing his long, sinuously muscled form beneath a tunic that stretched tight across his chest. His legs were set wide, his arms outflung, and both strained the fabric of his clothing. He was literally bursting at the seams, a man not crippled by age as I’d first assumed, but barely able to contain himself within his own skin.
But the most alarming aspect to Armaeus was his eyes.
I’d long used Armaeus’s eyes as a barometer for the Magician within. When I first met him, his eyes had glowed with the burnished sheen of antique gold, the whisper of arcane ability evident in his every glance. As our relationship progressed, however, and the danger to the Council and to magic on Earth grew, his eyes had undergone a definite change—at first subtle, then with gathering force. An inky blackness had begun to commingle with the gold, particularly when Armaeus wielded powerful magic. There were times of late when there was absolutely no gold to his eyes at all. Instead, they’d become nothing more than orbs of glittering darkness.
Now, even that had changed.
Armaeus stared out at me with eyes of pure white power, so intense I would have jerked away from him if I had anywhere to go. As it was, bound together with our shared magic, I could do nothing but feel the blast of his gaze like a wasting fire, certain it would blacken my own eyes—both my psychic one and my much-abused human ones.
“Open your mind, Sara.”
The command seemed to carry more weight than it should, and I was compelled to widen my gaze as Armaeus stared at me. There was an endless moment of white-hot pain, when all I could see was the bright light, all I could feel was the searing agony of my retinas being fried into pork rinds. And then he spoke aloud.
“You have given me the core of your power to limn the endless darkness, and in so doing have made me stronger than
you,” Armaeus said in haunting, multilayered tones. “I could kill you now, Sara Wilde. I should kill you now.”
Well. Hadn’t expected that.
Still, it didn’t change my fundamental truth. “I never sought to be stronger than you, Armaeus. I never wanted that. I still don’t want it.”
When Armaeus laughed, it was a sound that seemed dredged up from the core of his being, deeply disturbing in its primeval strength. And when he spoke, it was with that same ancient knowing.
“You don’t want it, yet you cannot ignore it any longer. Your abilities led you to me, and me to you. I did not know who or what you were. I used you, thinking I could control your magic, your raw Connected ability. But then you grew in strength, and grew again. Every adversity added to your power. Every crisis solidified your defenses. And without wanting to, you built an army around yourself. An army of humans—humans, not just psychics. Connecteds and non-Connecteds alike. You pledged yourself to help the children of your people, but you have drawn to you the children of a dozen other peoples…and not just mortal souls. Revenants follow you. Now the witches of the northern coven. Demons whisper your name on their sibilant tongues. Secret files and dossiers are being shared at the highest level of multinational organizations, with red code meetings on what to do about you, how to stop you, and debates on if they should even try.”
Some of this I’d known, of course. Having fallen into an unexpectedly tight relationship in a very short period with the mistress of the House of Swords, Annika Soo, I’d still been shocked to learn that she expected me to lead her criminal syndicate upon her death. A death that had occurred far too soon after we’d met. But now I was not only the mistress of the House of Swords, I’d gained the notice of Connecteds all over the world through the most unorthodox of platforms—a video game. That game had introduced me as a leader worth following, even if it seemed I was the only person left who believed I was anything but. When the players of this game discovered I wasn’t merely an avatar but a real live person shooting real live fireballs, their determination to find and follow me had only increased.
And here we were on the cusp of the war on magic.
I was their leader, and I needed to…lead.
My thoughts roiled and twisted over on themselves, and it was some time before I realized that Armaeus had stopped talking. I opened my own mouth to speak, but the words turned to ash in my throat. What really could I say, after all? Even I didn’t know who I was anymore.
But neither did I have any intention of giving up this role. Not anymore. I’d seen the eyes of those young Connecteds as they’d turned their gazes on me, filled with wonder and hope at being led by someone who truly cared for them. For so many years, I’d saved Connected children from our community's darkest practitioners, funneling money and risking my life to keep them safe. I’d never felt personally responsible, though. I’d been a walk-on part in the war, a fringe player, a shadow operative. Now I was at the head of the battering ram.
And yet I still knew…knew…I wasn’t enough.
“I don’t know how to lead,” I whispered to Armaeus.
“It is not a question of leadership. It is a question of ownership. Own who you have become, Sara Wilde.” The words were murmured inside my mind, and once again, Armaeus showed the image to me of two opposing hearts, light and dark. As I watched, the dark heart dissolved into an endless well of elemental power, creation and destruction turning over and back upon itself. It surrounded the gleaming brilliance of white crystal that throbbed and pulsed, adding a light to the darkness that made it glow from the inside out.
That same glow was now illuminating Armaeus, and I saw what he had tried to explain to me. He was powerful, but not simply because he was reveling in his own personal dark side. Through my attempts to keep him safe, to hold him close, to—I don’t know, send some sort of stupid Valentine with him as he’d embraced his deepest power—I’d given him a key. My love, my heart. More importantly, it wasn’t as if I’d given it to him at the price of my own suffering. My heart, my soul still throbbed within me, not lessened in the slightest by the fact that I had shared it.
But though I was willing to share of myself, I had not ever been willing to accept.
Armaeus’s whisper slithered around me. “The time for battle has come ever closer, Sara. You have cleared my vision with the gift of your heart, your love. I would harden yours with the gift of my darkness.”
“You make it sound like you’re a bad guy,” I said, though I knew I was hedging. I stood at the edge of that abyss and looked deep into the wellspring of Armaeus’s creative force, and my stomach pitched with queasiness. This wasn’t simply dipping my toe into the primordial murk and hoping I didn’t come away with a fungus. This was jumping into the Hot Tub of Darkness and hoping like hell that my shiny white crystal heart could do the same for me that it did for Armaeus. “You’ve done a lot of good in your day.”
His laughter was low and resonant and didn’t make me at all feel better. “I have done nothing save for the good of the Council in all the centuries since the death of Mirabel,” he said, and unaccountably, my heart twinged. Mirabel had been Armaeus’s betrothed when he’d ascended to the Council hundreds of years ago. She’d died shortly thereafter when he’d not been able to protect her. He’d…not taken that well. Since then, he’d devoted himself to the work, and only the work.
Until me.
“You see the good in me because it is what you choose to see,” he said now. “You see the good in the Devil though his entire ethos is manipulating others. You see the good in the Fool though he betrayed you over and again—”
“That wasn’t really his fault,” I put in quickly, but Armaeus kept going.
“I now see the good in others because of your gift to me. But my essential nature is darkness, Sara. Now more than ever. And I need you to see the evil in others, from the lens of your essential nature of good. You have to be able to understand that there is darkness and there is light and when the balance cannot be recovered, there must be consequences.”
I frowned. “It’s not my place to pass judgment.” Even as I said the words, they hung in the air, resonating with force. As if I had unleashed something unwittingly that, once freed, could not be recalled.
Armaeus’s words curled around me. “That is not your place,” he agreed, but he said nothing more. I got the feeling he was holding out on me, but I found it difficult to focus on him for the moment, difficult to focus on anything but the writhing murk that lapped at my feet.
“But you must also acknowledge the power in yourself. You cannot allow me to be stronger than you. Not now, not ever,” Armaeus murmured, his mouth now at my ear though I could no longer see him, couldn’t see anything but the darkness. “Even if you accept my rule as the head of the Council, you cannot allow the possibility that I might ever rule you.”
My reaction was immediate, visceral. I would not be ruled by anyone. I could not be—not now, not ever.
As if hearing my unspoken thoughts, however, the Magician leaned closer. “Because I would rule you, Sara. With the power you have given me, I would turn you inside out, make you a tool and a weapon of my choosing while reveling in the endless potential of your magic. You are drug and death and destiny to me, and I cannot—will not—resist the call of that, no matter how much I love you. If you do not act now to strengthen yourself, to take this last step into your own power, to truly know that you can lead in your own right, not by the obligation handed to you from the affronted or because someone has given you permission…then I will devour you piece by impossibly perfect piece until there is nothing left of you that is not also me.”
“Why are you doing this?” I gasped, and I could smell the deep, redolent scent of the darkness now, the rich spices and exotic hints of worlds and centuries gone by. “Why are you pushing me away?”
Armaeus shuddered in real pain. “Because I will not be strong enough to deny my essential nature for much longer. The window is closing o
n my own control of what I am willing to do or not do. You must act now, or we will never be able to continue. I will subvert you, I will destroy you, or I will own you. And I don’t want to own you, beautiful, bright Sara, who gives more of yourself in one breath than others could give in a lifetime. I want to love you.”
With that, Armaeus fell away, and the shove to my back I was sure was coming never materialized. Armaeus wasn’t going to push me into this step. It was mine to make, or not make.
I looked down at the deep and endless pool of darkness, knowing that from this decision, there would be no return. In my heart of hearts, I knew I would become stronger than Armaeus—maybe not right away, but eventually. In my soul of souls, I knew he was doing this for exactly the reasons he stated—that he wanted to be my partner, to love and work with me…not to rule me or own me. I’d unwittingly given him the power to enforce that ownership, and he was now, desperately, trying to restore the balance between us again. Not even restore it, but to tip it to my favor.
If I accepted his power into myself, however, if I opened myself up to that wellspring of core creative and destructive force…the rules would change. My relationship with the Council would change. Everything around me would change. And most terrifying of all…I would change. And I didn’t know who I would be on the other side of that change.
“I love you, Sara,” Armaeus whispered in my mind. “Become who you were meant to be.”
I jumped.
Chapter Eight
“There you go, dollface, take it easy. You got this.”
