by Jenn Stark
Whatever that meant, it was the wrong thing to say. Armaeus’s face shuttered, and I could feel him withdraw. Well, bully for him. I wanted to withdraw as well. He hadn’t lived a lifetime of warmth and possibility only to learn it was a lie. He hadn’t heard an anguished scream of love and loss that had nothing to do with him. He hadn’t—
“What else have you seen in your travels here?” he asked coldly.
“You know, I think we can save the debriefing for after we get home,” I said. Even the word “home” sounded facile in my mind. Vegas was not my home, Armaeus was not my family. They were both way stations on this effed-up trip, not the destination themselves. “I got Soo’s amulet. You knew she’d send me for it.”
He gripped the compass box too hard, but I couldn’t read his emotions, and I didn’t much care to try. He nodded. “She could be an ally in the coming conflict.”
“Right.” I blew out a breath, glad to be focusing on something—anything—less painful. “She could also cheat and undercut us—the Council, I mean,” I amended when he flicked his gaze to me. “She’s running her own game, Armaeus. She wants money and power and control, not balance. Why do you support her?”
His regard turned stony. “I don’t support any one faction over another, Miss Wilde. I seek balance. You know that.”
“But balance against what? We are already working with Mercault. Soo is the next strongest kingpin, and she has SANCTUS in her back pocket. What’s out there that I’m not seeing?”
His response was tight-lipped disapproval, and I stared at him, unfamiliar with the anger surging up inside me, but drawing from its strength all the same. “You know, if you really want me to take a greater part in this, you’re going to have to clue me in, Armaeus. You know something that I need to know, then spill it. If not, go grieve on your own time. It’s not as if I don’t have enough of that on my own to manage.”
He glared at me. “We are leaving,” he growled, shoving the compass box at me. “Soon enough.”
“Right.” I took the box as a thousand ridiculous comebacks came to mind, but all of them soured in my stomach. “Well, don’t take too long with your good-byes. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”
Chapter Nineteen
“That went well.”
“I’ve had about enough of you.” I scowled into nothingness. My alternate self sat down noisily beside me. I was back on the hill above the grotto, with the wide sea below me, but I was lying with my back flat on the ground, my arm flung over my eyes. I doubted I’d be able to look at the ocean ever again without the agony of a life never lived, merely imagined.
“I don’t think you’ve had nearly enough. There’s still work to be done, and you’re not doing it.”
I groaned, in no mood to ask her what work. I was fetching Armaeus back; that was enough. I didn’t have to do more. Not now.
Not yet.
“You’re pathetic,” Sariah groaned, though I hadn’t said anything. “Either way, you’re not out of here yet. Despite all this walking down memory lane, there’s someone you’re forgetting.”
That caused me to pull my arm down from my face. I squinted up at her. “Don’t say Mom. I know she’s not here.”
Sariah made a face. “Then who’s that?”
I shifted my gaze to where she pointed. It is an illusion, I told myself. But I couldn’t help but stiffen as I took in the woman standing at the promontory, staring out over the ocean. She seemed…smaller than I remembered her. More frail.
“I can’t do this,” I whispered.
My alternate self snorted. “Oh, right. You’re going to make Armaeus face his past, but you can’t? That’s real mature. How is it you think you get out of here, anyway? You think you were gonna simply click your heels together and think of Nikki? Give me a break.” She flapped her hand at me. “And don’t bore me with the fact that that woman over there wasn’t really your mother. She was the closest thing you had to anyone giving a shit about you for the first seventeen years of your life. You owe her for that. You owe her big.”
I scowled at her. “I have to face her before I can leave?”
She shrugged. “You don’t have to, technically, but it’s the fastest ticket out. Not an easy ride, though. Dear old Mom didn’t plan on ending her life quite so soon.”
Another bolt of guilt riddled through me. “I didn’t know she was out there that day. I didn’t know it until I saw it on the news.”
“I’m not the one you need to tell. Go ahead, I’ll wait here. Faster you make your peace, faster you go home.”
“Great.” I got to my feet. Kreios hadn’t told me this, but he had gotten squirrelly at the end about how, specifically, I would be leaving Hell. Furthermore, it did make a certain sort of sense that facing my own past would be the quickest and cleanest way to leave. I shoved my hands into my hoodie pockets as I stomped through the high grass. Perhaps that was what was really behind the Magician’s desire to see Mirabel one last time. Letting go of his past.
Yeah, right.
I walked toward the figure on the promontory, not surprised when she didn’t turn toward me. I hadn’t truly thought a lot about my mother—well, foster mother—after the first few years. I hadn’t wanted to. She’d given her life for me. And even if she’d simply been putting her nose into a situation that was way over her head, I’d convinced myself that she’d done so in part because of a misguided belief that she could protect me. The fact that I hadn’t realized I’d needed serious protection was very much beside the point.
When I reached her, however, she edged away. My heart quailed in my chest. I wasn’t going to run around the woman, forcing her to meet my eyes. I simply stood there, the weight of guilt hitting me squarely.
“Hi, Mom,” I muttered, not knowing what else to call her. She said nothing, hunching further. This was way harder than I’d expected. I looked out over the far ocean, and I realized my foster mother’s clothes were wet—not soaked, but damp. The clothes of a woman who’d been pulled from the Memphis River after her head had been bashed in.
Sweet Christmas. The rush of despair that came up on me was unexpected, and I planted my feet firmly. After all this time, Sheila Rose Pelter deserved an apology. I could at least give her that.
“I-I know what happened to you, Mom. Now. I didn’t for a long while. I know about how you posed as…well, it’s not that you didn’t have psychic powers yourself, you did, of course. But you didn’t have as much as you thought you did, and—and you still went out there to meet the man you thought had taken those kids. The kids Officer Brody and I were searching for. You found something out, and you went after it, and you didn’t stop until someone stopped you. Until someone…”
I swallowed, imagining the events of my mother’s last day as I had so many times since Brody had shared the details of the police report with me. She’d dressed in her best clothes—the ones she was wearing now. A long tunic and black tights and expensive boots that I’d thought had taken a month’s worth of take-home tips from her waitressing job. She’d been found in the Memphis River and her car was parked nearby, at a pretty overlook she and I had visited for picnics and laughter and all the stupid things that mothers and daughters talked about that filled up a life. Even a life that had been a lie, because Sheila Rose Pelter had carried secrets she’d never shared with me.
But none of that mattered. Because that morning, my mother hadn’t gone to the promontory with a picnic lunch. She’d gone to confront people she thought were no worse than a group of lowbrow thugs to fool them into believing she was psychic, so they’d leave me alone. She’d succeeded. “That took bravery and guts, and I don’t know that I would have done it,” I said. “I don’t know that I could do it now, not without protection or a gun or a real grasp on my psychic abilities and…”
My mother never spoke. The wind picked up, and I shoved my hands deeper into my hoodie pockets, my heart heavy as a rock.
“I wanted to say—well, thank you. For that. And for everythin
g else. Thank you for being there for me when no one else was. I met…my father.” My mouth quavered into a smile. “You told me he’d died, and he might as well have, but I’m glad that he provided for you, in the end. I’m glad that he gave you the money you needed to live the life you chose, especially since that life included…you know. Taking care of me.”
A sob caught on the breeze, and I realized it was my own. Sheila Rose Pelter stood unmoving, and I wanted more than anything else for her to take me into her arms, to comfort me, to tell me that it was all right, that she understood, that she forgave me for the pain she must have suffered in her last moments, the awful pain and the fear, the doubt.
I dragged in a ragged breath, but she never shifted, barely moved, her tangled hair lifting in the soft breeze the only evidence she wasn’t a statue.
It suddenly occurred to me…what must she look like? Annika’s mother had borne the evidence of her attack thirty years earlier. My foster mother had been killed more recently than that. I needed to see her, no matter the cruelty of her wounds. I deserved that image, to carry with me for the rest of time.
I blew out a long breath. “Mom,” I said, my voice wet with tears. “Mom, it’s okay. I don’t mind seeing you.” I reached out, hesitating for a final moment. “I want to see your face.”
I placed my hand on her shoulder—and it kept going.
There was no one there.
“No!”
The shout roared through the air, Armaeus’s cry, and I jerked back as the image of my mother’s figure burst into a million shards of light. Sariah was no longer behind me on the mountain, and I heard Armaeus cry out again.
I started running. Topping the small rise, I saw the grotto before me, deep in its leafy bower. But Armaeus hadn’t been in the grotto—he’d been moving toward the deeper forest that tumbled down the mountain toward the ocean. I pulled out the compass from my hoodie pocket and flipped open the box, and the lodestone dial spun crazily for a moment before pinging hard to eleven o’clock. I took off, holding it in front of me, mindless of the uneven terrain beneath me. The grass grew thicker and then there were trees, shadowy beneath the brilliant sun above, and I ran faster, crashing through the scrubby brush and saplings that finally gave way to wider tree trunks, a full-fledged forest.
I burst into a small clearing—and gaped.
My alternate self stood with Mirabel in her arms, a long, wicked blade at the woman’s throat. Mirabel held her fingers to Sariah’s forearm, but she was too small, too frail to do anything but hold on for dear life, her terrified gaze fixed on Armaeus.
She was beautiful even in her terror, her eyes wide and luminous, her hair swept off her face to tumble down her back, pinned between her and Sariah so her head was held taut, her throat exposed.
Sariah laughed darkly as I started forward again. She caught my eye and dipped the blade forward, and a thin trail of blood streaked down Mirabel’s neck. Mirabel whimpered, and Armaeus growled an unearthly, feral sound. “Stand down, Sara,” he spit, and I flinched. He only used my given name in times of high emotion, and for him to use it here, now—he didn’t understand who I was. He didn’t understand that he was looking at an illusion.
“You never could make the hard decisions,” Sariah mocked. But she wasn’t watching the Magician, she was staring beyond him, to me. “You never could make that final choice. You’ve let your life carry you along without heed to the consequences, burying your instincts. You know what you have to do, every time, and you won’t do it.”
“Stop it!” I cried, but no sound came out of my mouth. The blade dipped farther, and Armaeus stood tall, his hands coming up. The wind intensified around the small glade, and I swung my attention to him. He was the mightiest sorcerer in the world, and he was drawing upon the very core of his powers to confront Sariah, to confront me. Because of the woman Sariah held in her hands.
“No,” he pleaded now, his eyes wide as Sariah shifted her stance. “She is all I have left.”
“Yeah, then why did you leave her down here, rotting and waiting all these years? You have any idea what that’s like?” Sariah was goading the Magician, angling her body around. I could see what she was doing. She was forcing the Magician to change position until he was directly in front of me, his back exposed. She was forcing my hand as well.
She wanted me to attempt to kill him. Here, now. To take the final step to turn Armaeus back immortal. The way he needed to be.
There were broken sticks littering the clearing, any one of them sharp enough to break skin. What was it Kreios had said? The stronger one’s desire to hold on to the past, the harder it would be for them to leave this place? Would Armaeus leave Mirabel if he didn’t have to? If he wasn’t forced to?
I had no connection with any of my pasts. They were all a lie, I realized now. The illusions I’d experienced with Armaeus would haunt me for the rest of my life, but they were merely illusions. They could only be that.
What Armaeus had shared with Mirabel was something different. Something that had sustained him in isolation for nearly a thousand years.
“I didn’t leave her,” he hissed. “I didn’t know she was here. Not really…not whole and perfect. Not until…” He took a step forward. “Not until you arrived. When you broke the plane of Hell in your dreams, I saw her for the first time. Here. In this grotto.”
My own eyes widened at Armaeus’s back. Is that true? Did it matter?
It didn’t of course. Nothing mattered but that Armaeus returned to the mortal plane…as an immortal. I knew that now. Nothing else counted but that.
“Yeah, well,” Sariah sneered, interrupting my thoughts. “Now you’re going to need to let her go. Sorry about that.”
“No!” Armaeus allowed his hands to fall apart, but the power he was stirring didn’t bank. If anything, it gathered in intensity. “I know what you are, Sara. I know your lineage and the fire that burns within you. Without me, you’ll never achieve your full potential, never live out the powers that build unchecked. You need me, Sara, and you know it.”
“I don’t need you.” But Sariah’s gaze once again wasn’t on Armaeus. It was on me. This was something she wanted me to hear, wanted me to know. “I didn’t know you existed before a year ago.”
“And now that you do, you cannot survive without me,” Armaeus snapped. “I have been in your mind, in your blood, Sara Wilde. I have seen what you can do, alternate futures that have not yet been fully chosen. You destroying, you creating, you killing, you being killed. I have all of these in the palm of my hand, dice waiting to be thrown. Do not harm Mirabel.”
“Then don’t threaten me.”
Shaking, I leaned down and picked up a long, brutally broken-off stick. It could have been a vampire stake, straight and true. It didn’t matter. The death of Armaeus wasn’t the real purpose here. It was the attempt on his life that was critical. And I could make him believe that his life was in danger. That’s what Kreios had told me. That he had to put his focus on saving his life, and solely on saving his life, and he would shift back to his true form. But it had to be real; it had to be credible.
And apparently, it had to be at the expense of the woman he loved most.
A woman who wasn’t me.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you,” Sariah sneered at Armaeus. “Even now, with war about to break forth among the Connecteds and against SANCTUS, you’re trying to play the odds to figure out how you can remain here with this waste of skin.”
“Please don’t hurt him,” Mirabel whimpered. I looked up sharply, and she too wasn’t staring at Armaeus, but at me. I wanted to throw up. “Please.”
I firmed my grip on the stick.
“She won’t hurt you, Mirabel,” the Magician growled. Despite his anger, he said her name like a benediction, and something hard and crushing twisted in my gut. “She can’t.”
“Can too.” Sariah dipped her dagger again, and the Magician brought his hands together in a quick smack. A ball of fire erupted from hi
s fingers, arcing behind the knot of Mirabel and Sariah, blasting Sariah from behind.
“Careful, you bastard,” Sariah ground out, but I could feel the rage of his power against my own back, knew the agony she was feeling as her nerve endings lit on fire.
“Let her go!” The Magician held up his hands, and I sensed the impact of that movement in my own nerves. Every one of them twisted in agony, and Sariah screamed on the other side of Mirabel as her body canted oddly, as if the Magician held her as a puppet on the myriad strings of her nerve endings, each one exploding with the fury of his magic. Even my own body shuddered in pain, the shadow version of what my alternate self was experiencing enough to make my knees buckle. I stumbled forward and realized—I could still run. I could still strike.
“Let her go!” the Magician cried again, and he twisted his hands.
“No!”
Sariah and I screamed the word simultaneously, then I was flying toward the Magician, my legs pumping, my hands up, arms taut as I pounded toward Armaeus. At the last moment, he turned in surprise and his arm went up, but not before I was close enough to drive the stake home.
I could see his realization of where I was, what I was doing and the danger to his own life pass over his face in barely a breath. A breath was all I needed. I thrust forward, and the magic that exploded between us ravaged my body, catching us both up in its fury as Armaeus spoke words from no language I’d ever heard. I only knew that I was blasted back—not against the trees but through them, my clothes and skin and muscles tearing, my bones on fire, my body wrenched and shattered in the grasp of his rage.
And through it all, I could see him—truly see him, the Magician in his pure form. His power was far stronger than anything I had ever imagined, a surge of darkness that blasted up and through and out of him, mixing with electric white energy currents, the two elements fusing together, the whole infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. He was magnificent. He was ferocious.
He was immortal once more.
