by Jenn Stark
I offered her a weak smile. “I used to be called Sariah,” I confided as Anya translated. “But then something terrible happened to me, and I changed my name. You could change your name too, if you want. What would make you happy?”
The girl stared at me. “Sariah?” she said uncertainly, as if I’d mispronounced it.
Beside me, Anya beamed. “There! You see! That’s the first clear word she’s said since I got here. I’ll fill in the rest for her.” She started speaking in rapid Romanian as my brain caught up with the girl’s reaction.
“No!” I said, too slow. “No, no!”
It was too late. When Anya reached the name “Sara Wilde,” the girl on the bench flung off her blankets like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, and launched herself at me over the pew. Her body was frail, her fingernails worn down to nubs, but I caught her and crashed back hard against the wooden bench, breaking our fall. I went practically rigid with the shock of the Connection—this girl was a high-level psychic, no matter how traumatized she was.
Setting that aside, I tried to protect myself from her feeble fists as she pummeled me weakly, her voice a shattered cry of Romanian and the two Hebrew words ‘Sheol, la! Sheol, la!’” In my bid for self-preservation, it took me a moment to realize she wasn’t trying to rip my head off so much as beat me back—but back from where?
“My goodness—my goodness!” Anya’s coo had risen a few octaves, enough to bring everyone into the room.
“Great bedside manner, doll,” Nikki chortled as Rutya finally stopped flailing and began sobbing in my arms. In an almost exact mimicry of the gesture I’d tried to make, she lifted her hand and followed my head as I flinched back, her fingers smoothing my hair down beside my face. “Sheol-la, Sheol-la,” she said over and over again.
Nikki and I met each other’s glance, but then Rutya started speaking in what appeared to be Romanian. Anya perked up and leaned close to the girl. “‘Don’t go, don’t go,’ she is saying. ‘It’s too dangerous, there is much darkness there.’”
“Go where?” rumbled Brody beside me.
“Yo, Anya, what about these two?” Nikki’s loud voice recalled the others to the couple sprawled out on the pew. They appeared to be sleeping naturally, their faces smooth and unlined despite the shadows beneath their eyes. “Did they say anything?”
“Nothing so coherent. Some pleas for help, but they weren’t specific. Nothing about where they came from or why they’re here.”
As their voices dwindled, I fixed my attention on Rutya, who had not stopped her rhythmic patting of my hair. As her arm extended, I was drawn to the long, twisting glyph on her arm, the mark of her slavery to Gamon. I could see long-ago scratch marks at the edges, as if Rutya had taken her own fingernails to the tattoo, trying to deface it. Now she was using those fingers to thread through my hair, as if I was some doll to be cared for, or an icon taken out of a box and prayed over. I grimaced, staring at her arm. What had Gamon said to these people about me—or what had Rutya seen with her own second sight?
“You must come back.”
I shivered, as the whispered words broke through my thoughts, to see Rutya’s eyes on me now, startlingly clear despite the hollowness of her face. I tried to speak, but she shook her head, her gaze shifting to the others, then back to me. “You must come back to lead us. To save us. The way is dark for you, but you must come back.” She put her hands on either side of my face, suddenly seeming far older than her years. I could feel the power of her Connected ability surging forth from her. She’d learned to bank it, mask it, but it was there—and it was trained on me. “Promise me!”
Tears pricked behind my eyes, but Rutya was beginning to tremble uncontrollably, and I placed my own hands over hers, drawing her palms down from my head to clasp them tight. “I’ll come back,” I said, staring deep into twin wells of pain and despair. “I will, Rutya. I will.”
I hoped.
Chapter Eight
It took us another three hours before Nikki and I stumbled up to my suite at the Palazzo, both of us leaning against each other as if we were too drunk to stand.
Not too far from the truth. I was so tired, my fingers sagged, my hands flopping against the button panel twice before connecting.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Nikki groaned as I punched the button to my floor. “It’s definitely cutting into my beauty sleep.”
The walk to my room was mercifully short, despite our shuffling pace. Once there, it took me three tries to get my key card to work, and the impossibly heavy door struck us both as hysterically funny. We leaned against the door as it tried manfully to keep us out of our own room, and eventually managed to shove it in, the two of us sprawling forward on the tiled floor. We were beyond simple fatigue. The events of the day had left us soul tired, and the laughter that spilled forth took us dangerously close to the edge of hysteria.
I was mumbling the first two lines of an otherwise forgotten song by the time the giggling trailed off, Nikki muttering some repetitive snatch of poetry as we lurched toward our respective rooms. I barely made it to the sumptuous bed before I passed out completely.
I didn’t stay oblivious for long.
The dream started simply enough, in the way dreams do where you find yourself someplace completely impossible, yet you accept it without question.
I’d been summoned to the Council chambers, which was not an unusual experience for me. But this Council wasn’t meeting in Armaeus’s luxurious penthouse office but somewhere deep in a remodeled corner of the Excalibur hotel. The walls appeared to be hewn out of pure rock, and there were actual rushes on the floor beneath the thick carpets, and tapestries on the walls. I hadn’t been inside Excalibur since that unfortunate hatchet-throwing incident several months earlier, but the place had clearly undergone a massive upgrade.
I rounded the corner and was smote in the face with the heat of a hundred sconces crackling down a long corridor, past a large doorway flanked by rent-a-knights—who were wearing honest-to-God chainmail shirts over their richly colored tunics. Nodding my appreciation as I passed them, I headed down the corridor at a faster clip. As I walked, I realized that the walls weren’t solid rock at all, but sort of a catwalk gallery, open to the massive room below. Through each of the cut-out sections, I could see a large table sitting in the center of the chamber. The Council was already gathered, it appeared, and were simply waiting for the stragglers. Stragglers which would include me.
I glanced over—and abruptly slowed my pace.
This wasn’t anywhere close to being the right Council.
Twelve men and women sat around the wide space, none of them familiar. I glanced back to the knights, but they paid me no attention as I crept over to the edge of the corridor for a closer look, peeking over the side. Like the current Council, these apparent members were all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors. Unlike the current Council, they had no electronics. The table was spread with maps and laden with platters of bread, meat and enormous goblets filled with what could have been wine or blood, depending on exactly how much of a throwback these people were.
A crack of thunder rent the air, and I shrank back. But there were no exterior windows near me, no way of knowing what the weather was doing outside this enormous room. The Council members looked up expectantly as the thunder rolled again.
“It’s nearly done,” said one of the women. She was dressed in an ornate toga, with gold at her ears, arms, wrists, and fingers, exactly the style Eshe preferred but without the sneer. “Llyr is banished. The veil holds.”
“It is not done,” countered a man bristling with indignation. He pounded his fist on the table, and I thought: Emperor. He was not at all similar to Viktor, the current Emperor. Where Viktor was pale and almost gentlemanly, this man was huge, coarse, and brawny. His helm sat beside him on the table, and his cloak boasted a set of epaulets that bulged with steel points. “Llyr will not go quietly. He has enjoyed his time on earth too long. He will constantly seek ways back in
, on the backs of mortals or through cracks in the veil. We cannot keep constant vigilance.”
“You have no choice.” A man at the far end of the table spoke now, and I swiveled toward him. He was tall and slender, with long silvered hair that flowed over his shoulders and down his midnight-blue robe. He held no staff, and he didn’t wear a pointy hat, but his dark eyes spoke of mystical visions and his manner was that of a conjurer. This Council’s Magician, had to be. “The war is not at an end but a beginning. Without balance, Llyr will reenter, and we have no guarantee that he will not win tomorrow where he has failed today.”
“We beat him once,” the Emperor groused. “We can beat him again.”
“We are immortal, not undead,” the Magician countered. “You are strong, Elias, the strongest of us all potentially, if brute power was all that was needed.” The backward compliment had the intended effect. The Emperor bristled but could not find fault with the Magician’s careful wording. “But you—all of us, we may be killed. Balance is the lone prescription for a permanent solution.”
“There will be those who seek to topple us, to gain Llyr’s return,” an old man with a querulous voice put in. He stood at the far corner from the Emperor and leaned on a staff. His robe was frayed at the cuffs, and he swayed as he talked. A long ago Hermit, had to be. Which put this Council well earlier than the Middle Ages. “We fight not only a threat outside the veil, but within it.”
“In that, your worry is misplaced. Mortals are not strong enough.” The young man who spoke lolled back in his chair, one leg over the armrest. He was blonde and almost painfully beautiful to witness, a fallen angel in the midst of toadstools. I had no idea what his position was, but I suspected the Fool. “Don’t spin gloom where there’s already darkness, old man.”
“Mortals are not strong enough—yet. But their time will come. We have ushered in a new age,” the Magician said. “We cannot predict where it will go, though we’ve all tried.” He regarded the High Priestess. “We must prepare for war. Both within the veil and without it.”
“We must help the mortals understand, I think you mean.” A soft-faced woman with shining white hair and a voluminous dress of emerald green shifted on her seat, her bright eyes earnest. The Empress? Had to be. “They are not our enemy. Gods help us if they ever are. There must be a way to educate, indoctrinate them into the way of the Council, teach them what they must know.” She spread her hands. “We are not here to enslave mortals to our cause. That would make us no better than Llyr.”
“You speak of mortal houses, again, and I am here to tell you no, again,” the Emperor objected with a sneer. “It is a foolish idea. Those who can rise, do. They find their way to the Council when the moment demands it. There is no need to muddy the water by feeding the vanity of lesser sorcerers.”
“Vanity like yours?” The High Priestess was too distant for me to see if she arched a brow, but her tone was ripe for eyebrow arching. “Your ambition is showing, Elias.”
“Hold,” the Magician said, lifting a lazy hand. “A system of houses is worth discussing.” His fingers twisted, and the air shimmered in front of him, four rotating objects winking into view—a sword, a long rod, coins, and a large goblet. “Each dedicated to its own strength, a strength that is broken if the houses work against each other, and strengthened a hundredfold if they work together. Swords, Staves, Coins, and Cups. It could be a worthy guild for the Connected to grow in strength and balance. There is no shortage of interest.”
“There’s no shortage of posers and fools either,” the Emperor growled. A squabble broke out, and I leaned forward, straining to hear.
“Miss Wilde.”
The voice whispered in my mind, and I flipped around, suddenly uncertain. Where was I? If I was watching some ancient incarnation of the Council, then how could Armaeus be here—if he was here, if that was possible, if he—
“Up,” he said. I peered to the ceiling, then across the wide chamber again. There was a gallery on the other side—a double one. On the upper level, I saw a movement in the shadowed windows.
I started walking again. It seemed imperative that I reach Armaeus, that we meet, touch—while the Council raged in argument below and the storm crackled and rolled overhead. The figure above shifted as well, going in and out of view as he cleared columns and sank into shadows, until I lost him completely at a wide platform that overlooked the Council chamber, as if set up as a viewing arcade.
“This was not their house.” And suddenly the Magician was in front of me, startling in his raw power.
Standing well over six feet tall and sleekly muscled, Armaeus Bertrand would always dominate a room, but his crackling, kinetic energy was the Magician’s true intoxicant. His hair was dark and lush as it curled to his shoulders, longer than I remembered. It framed a face that looked as if it had been chiseled out of bronze—high cheekbones, sculptured lips, and eyes the color of dark gold. Those eyes had become all the darker in recent weeks with the amount of power he’d been channeling. He was dressing down for Hell, apparently, his white dress shirt rolled up at the sleeves, his buttery charcoal trousers perfectly draped over rubber-soled shoes that still managed to look elegant.
As I took him in, his presence surrounded me with all the comfort it had assumed over the past several days, a comfort that was already far too familiar to me. I’d known the man for several months—over a year in truth—and for those months, he’d inspired a curious push-pull attraction. He pushed, I pulled back. He stayed still, I crept closer. But there’d been more than simple sexual attraction between us. There’d also been fear, at least for me. Panic. The knowledge that if I got too close, I’d not only get burned, I might not be able to survive it.
But no longer. Since the Magician had become mortal, when he touched me I felt only deep satisfaction and sensual craving. There was no fear, no panic, no trepidation about what might come or how I might withstand it. Only desire. Desire and need and electricity and power and—Armaeus.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he murmured as he leaned down to nuzzle my lips. “I could not have entered this place without strong magic.”
“You are strong magic,” I murmured. “You must have brought me here.”
His arms went naturally around me, and his kiss deepened, resonating within me. I didn’t quite know what to do with my hands, but I brought them up against the broad planes of his back, feeling the strength of him against my fingers. Armaeus Bertrand was light and magic fused into human form. And nowhere was he stronger than when I saw him in my dreams.
“Why is that?” I murmured, and my mental barriers must have been down, because he chuckled against my lips, pulling me tightly against him.
“Because of you, mostly. You have an inflated opinion of my abilities, which is handy if not entirely accurate,” he said. But something in his words sounded false to me.
“No, truly,” I said, leaning back. “You’re powerful in the light, but in the shadows, it’s as if you’re not fully human.”
“Have you stopped to consider that I might not be fully human?” he asked. “Are those Council members seated down there fully human?”
“Yes—” I frowned. “Of course they are. And you too. Other than the immortality trick. You were all born human.” I paused. “Except, I guess, Michael.”
“Except him, naturally.” Armaeus’s voice was teasing, clearly amused, and I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Knock it off. You’re in Hell, but that doesn’t give you the right to go all cryptic on me. If you’re trying to tell me something, say it. How is it you’re not fully human?”
“In time, you’ll understand everything. For now, know this: The Council calls us to be our best selves. When we are not fully bound to the Council, we remember the other parts of our existence. As you say, I’m in Hell. An ability not granted to most Council members, other than Michael. And you could say he was grandfathered in. Since I’ve arrived, I begin to understand his attachment to the place.”
I frowned at him. “Meaning?”
“I can be my full self.”
“You’re not when you’re on the Council?”
“Not precisely.” He rumbled a laugh. “The Council requires many things. Discernment. Clarity. Balance.”
“Those are good things.”
“They can be. They can also confuse the truth. This dimension gives you the ability to see beyond that confusion, to view the past as it existed, not as a memory fogged by emotion or pain. This is a luxury I did not expect. It has been…most gratifying.” To forestall my obvious question of what it was he wanted to see that he could not accurately remember, Armaeus drew me back from the arguing Council below us, and to the far end of the gallery. Here there were additional windows, but these faced outward, not inward. A storm did rage beyond the castle walls, but nothing was truly visible but rain and fog.
“The fog is rising from the sea,” Armaeus said, his voice alight with wonder. “The floodwaters have risen all the way to the lowest walls of the castle. It will eventually overtake it. I have seen it happen already.” He shook his head. “I have watched this Council meeting a dozen times over.”
I blinked. A dozen times over? Both the Spinners and Kreios had mentioned the danger of Hell—its hold on the living, weaving illusions until it left its visitors unwilling or unable to leave. Was Armaeus becoming too entranced with the past? Was that why he’d broken off contact with the Council? I didn’t want to press the point until I could do something about it—until I was down here with him. Now, I simply needed him to keep talking.
“The entire Council dies here?” I asked.
“No—they’ve made provisions. But they won’t stay here long. They will scatter to their homelands to help their own people recover. And to sow the seeds of the future to prepare against the coming war.”
