The Shadow Court

by Stark, Jenn

  “And you think you’ve cracked that code.”

  “I have cracked that code in part for the first two memory lapses. Thanks to your help, I have cracked the beginning of the third, but I am in no way certain of what this knowledge nets us. You can rest assured, however, that either acting rashly or ignoring this knowledge entirely will be to our detriment. Right now, the Shadow Court isn’t aware of my evolution of understanding.”

  “Well, after last night, they’re certainly aware of my evolution of understanding, and they have to know we’re besties.”

  Something in my tone finally seemed to snap through Armaeus’s mental absorption. He slid his gaze back to me. “I can understand your impatience.”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure you can’t.” I wanted to say more, I did. I wanted to unburden the pain that was once again cresting in my traitorous heart. But as soon as I drew another breath, Armaeus continued.

  “I’ve summoned those who can most help us navigate this maze I’ve set for us. There’s no point in reviewing the information relevant to that strategy until they arrive. Your anger is, unfortunately, of no use without resolutions in hand to resolve it. That will not be possible until the team assembles. You’re not strong enough.”

  I blinked at him, my angst dissolving in this shower of unexpected wtfery. “Wait, what?”

  “In addition, discussing this without the other members of the Arcana Council present is not efficient.”

  Slowly and carefully, I sat back in my chair, shoving my hands into my pockets. The Armaeus of a few weeks ago would have quirked a smile at the move—it was something I did, too often, when I was annoyed. The Armaeus sitting in front of me, however, had no idea about my little habits or mannerisms. Which, of course, did nothing to improve my mood.

  “Actually, I think I need to get some of this out of my system before they arrive, if we’re going to be all about efficiency here,” I said. “Nobody has explained to me exactly how you can excise a section of your memories and why that was ever a good idea and what it means. Do you just rip a page out of a notebook, ball it up, and throw it in the corner?”

  Armaeus’s gaze rested on me, but I knew he no longer saw me. His gaze was fixed on a far-off point through me, his mind working through a thousand and one calculations. In that moment, he looked so achingly like the Magician of old, it made my heart hurt. Fortunately, my head was pissed off enough it superseded my heart, because nobody had time for that.

  “Your anger is unwarranted, Miss Wilde,” he said again, far too mildly. “I fail to understand how it contributes to our current—”

  “I’m not angry,” I countered, bottling up all my anger and shoving it far to the back of my brain for later fermentation. “I’m in a full-on panic attack. I am a member of the Arcana Council, and over the past year and change, with your careful guidance, I’ve been a science fair project of epic proportions. I’ve learned skills I didn’t know were possible. I’ve developed abilities that literally set my hair on fire.”

  He scowled. “I should not have allowed that. It was too dangerous for an ordinary mortal to undertake.”

  I gaped at him. Since when had I become an ordinary mortal? At every turn, Armaeus had told me there was no limit to my potential. That was okay, because he was installed as the head of the Council and, worst case, he could help me work through any issues should I end up exploding a beaker in the chemistry lab. What was going on here?

  Only the obvious, I suddenly realized. Armaeus had forgotten who I was. Who I was, what I could do, and even what I might be able to do once my super-secret decoder ring came in the mail. And now he was staring at me with absolute curiosity, wondering what I would say next. Because he didn’t know.

  I clenched my hands into fists against the deep pool of sorrow this insight opened up within me, catching me off guard. I would not cry, I would not react, I would not anything, I resolved. I. Would. Not.

  “Okay, let’s set all that aside for the moment,” I finally managed, my voice sounding only slightly strangled. “The bottom line is, you’ve forgotten me. Everything about me. And from what I’m picking up, you didn’t plan on doing any of this after all. Maybe you don’t remember this part either, but that’s not like you. You plan for everything.”

  He quirked a smile. “I prefer to.”

  “But you didn’t here. Why not?”

  Armaeus blew out a long breath. “I simply don’t know, Miss Wilde. From what I’ve been able to gather from Kreios, you and I were quite close.”

  I looked at him in horror. “You asked the Devil to give you dirt on our relationship?” Aleksander Kreios had many foibles, but one of his most enduring was a long and unremitting desire to tell someone exactly the truth they most sought to hear. Very, very rarely was that truth as reassuring as the person hoped it would be. “What did he tell you?”

  “Only one thing,” Armaeus said levelly. “That you had allowed me to read your mind before, and that if I wanted to understand our past, it would be fastest if you allowed me to read it again.”

  My mental barriers, already locked down tight, suddenly bulged out about six times thicker, like a blowfish in a flop sweat. The panic that shot through me at the very thought of Armaeus rifling through my brain left me quivering, and I forced myself to stay in my chair, staring at him, instead of fleeing the building as I so desperately wanted to do.

  “No,” I said flatly.

  He tilted his head. “He also said there was likely no way you would allow me access to your mind. I find this curious.”

  “And I find the Devil to be a pain in the ass. That’s more relevant.” The panic wasn’t going away, unfortunately. I felt my hands begin to tingle in my pockets, the shard of Nul Magis throbbing in my right palm. I’d caught that curious enchanted splinter from a sorcerer bent on destroying the magic ability in a rival, and it tended to react whenever there was too much magic being flung in my direction. Like now.

  “You’re afraid of me,” Armaeus said quietly, his tone edged with dismay and what sounded like genuine concern. “I’ve hurt you, haven’t I?”

  “Oh, for the love…” I cast my gaze away from him, taking my turn at staring at the wall. “I don’t want to have this conversation.”

  “I think you can see, for the benefit of the mission that we’re about to undertake, it’s a conversation that needs to happen.”

  He’d caught me quite neatly in the trap, and I knew it. Opening my mind to him would be the fastest way for Armaeus to remember the events of what had happened between us, but there was a very distinct flaw to that plan, which he clearly was discounting, but I couldn’t quite.

  I swung my gaze back to him. “You read minds all the time, right? It’s a thing with you.”

  Whatever he’d expected me to say, it wasn’t that. “It’s certainly a skill I’ve derived great benefit from over the years, of course,” he demurred.

  “And the information you get, how do you know that it’s accurate? Eyewitness accounts are notoriously flaky.”

  “Not all of them,” he countered. “There are some accounts that are cool and rational and accurate as far as they can be. When there is a great deal of emotion or energy around information I seek, I take the consensus among several parties.”

  “Okay, well, then you’ve laid out the problem. Thing one, no one has ever accused me of being cool and rational. And my eyewitness account of our association, as you call it, is definitely not cool and rational. It’s colored by all sorts of emotions that have fogged the past, confused my memories, created willful denials and equally willful manipulations of our shared history so that what I remember may or may not even be accurate, let alone useful.”

  “I assure you, I am well accustomed to sorting through the vagaries of human emotion.”

  His nonchalance made my stomach clench. “Thing two,” I continued on, feeling the sweat trickle down my back. “There’s nobody who can give you a consensus of our relationship because the most important bits didn’t hav
e an audience.”

  Perhaps not surprisingly, his gaze lit with interest. “We had an emotional relationship, and a physical one. That was…reckless of me. You would not have been prepared for that.”

  I made a face. “See, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. I’ve had plenty of experience with you, enough to note that it isn’t unreasonable for you to have thought at one time that our relationship was reckless. But we still had that relationship. It wasn’t something you undertook without careful consideration either, though you certainly pushed the physical barriers between us early and often.”

  He frowned. “I would not have done that unless there was an urgent need to advance your abilities. And even then, I would have told you why I was doing what I was doing.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s just say that I was focused a little too much on what you were doing and not so much on what you were saying. Regardless, the beginning of our relationship was extremely fraught. Obviously, there was a sexual attraction, but when we started acting on it…” I broke off, a sudden wave of embarrassment overtaking me. I could feel my cheeks flush, and now my hands were no longer sparking, they were cold and clammy. “I can’t even believe I’m telling you this. I can’t believe I have to tell you this.”

  “If you would simply let me read your mind, I could spare you the embarrassment. It would take a matter of seconds.”

  Perversely, that upset me too. “I know you’ve been the Magician for an awfully long time, Armaeus, but just as a point of reference, not too many women would like to hear that you can hoover up your entire multi-year relationship with them in a matter of seconds. But moving on from that, my initial issue still holds. My perspective of what happened between us is flawed. I am flawed. I’m a basket case of neuroses and anxieties which have done a good job keeping me alive, but which are not necessarily useful in getting a clear-eyed perspective on what has happened between us. And there’s nobody to tell you otherwise until you remember our relationship on your own.”

  “But—”

  “Why did you forget me?” The question was out again before I could restrain it, and it carried a level of raw emotion that finally broke through the Magician’s façade. He looked at me sharply, as if seeing me for the first time, and true remorse clouded his expression in a way I’d never seen before.

  “Miss Wilde, I assure you, it was not something I did lightly.”

  “But you don’t know that,” I countered. “You don’t know who I am. At all. Wiping me so cleanly from your memory banks was a deliberate act on your part. You don’t know if you did it lightly or not.”

  “That…that’s not true.” His earnestness caught me up short, piercing the shroud of self-pity I was currently draping around myself.

  “I am experiencing pain at this moment,” the Magician continued, the wonder in his voice somewhat mitigating the impact of his statement. His eyes widened as he looked at me. “I’m enduring physical reactions consistent with great loss and great sadness. That has never happened before when I’ve tried to recall the memories I’ve released. I don’t know its significance.”

  I passed a hand over my forehead, feeling as limp as a rag doll. “Well, it’s not like I can help you out with that.”

  He watched me even more keenly. “You don’t want to share your memories with me for another reason. Can you tell me what that reason is?”

  “Oh, will you stop,” I sighed. He was right, of course. I was being completely truthful when I told him that my filter of our relationship would probably not be the most accurate assessment of what really went on. I made no apologies for that. But there was also the very nature of our personal relationship to consider, which had been forged under a set of unique circumstances. The memories that I would share with him would not create a reinstatement of the Armaeus I’d known before. It would create a new and different Magician, working off a set of premises that originated outside himself. I didn’t want that. It’d be like programming a computer instead of knowing somebody chose to feel the way he did because it was how he felt.

  All this was way too much emo for me to actually explain, of course. “There’s got to be another way. What else can give you the information you need without you spelunking through my mind that way?”

  His brows went up. “There are other events I cannot recall that you might,” he acknowledged. “At the moment I lost my memories, Kreios advised me you were there. He gave me a partial accounting of what he saw, but he was not focused on me at the time. Were you?”

  I grimaced. “I was. You were in the middle of a city park in Dublin, Ireland, helping us take down the ancient gods of the Irish. You don’t remember any of that?”

  “Actually, I do,” he said, surprising me. “Up until I moved to the center of the green. There was a bright light, and then I woke up in Dr. Sells’s care.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I…well, I can help you there. I can show you that—only that.” I could, right? I could compartmentalize, keep everything safe that needed to stay safe, while sharing information that the Magician legitimately needed.

  Without saying anything more, he reached out and placed a hand on mine, and I let my mental barriers slip before I could reconsider. It took a second, no more. I felt Armaeus’s touch as a fleeting presence in my mind, retreating almost as soon as it took hold. He looked at me in horror.

  “My dear Miss Wilde,” he whispered, his eyes tortured. “I am so sorry.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Oh, will you stop,” I protested, kicking myself for whatever errant emotions and memories had slipped past my control. “It wasn’t that bad.”

  The words had barely had time to coalesce between us when a tinkle of bells sounded throughout the house. I stiffened, pulling back. “What’s that?”

  Armaeus didn’t move for a long moment, then seemed to shake himself back to reality. “That would be the team I summoned. They landed at Charles de Gaulle forty-five minutes ago. I’m surprised they got here so quickly.”

  “Who—”

  “We’re not finished with this discussion, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus said quietly. “Please know I will work to make right all that I have done to wrong you.”

  That seemed a little more ominous than necessary, but Armaeus was already standing and turning toward the front of the house. I took an extra second to rub my hands over my face, surprised at how wrung out I felt. I didn’t remember much about the moments leading up to the Magician’s collapse at St. Stephen’s Green. He’d been attacked by the ancient gods we’d assembled to push back beyond the veil, back into the In Between and beyond. His assailants had attempted to turn back the Magician with a powerful electric current, but Armaeus was made of energy. Most of their assault, he’d absorbed. The rest, he’d endured. He’d been hurt, but how badly, I hadn’t known. I’d only known I needed to get to him, get to him above all other things, that he was the most important part of my universe.

  Was that what he’d seen when he’d read my mind? Was that even useful?

  I shoved myself back from the table and set off after him. I could hear raised voices in the foyer, but it wasn’t until I neared the front of the house that I truly focused on who Armaeus had assembled to help vanquish the Shadow Court. Then I stepped into the room, caught sight of the four newcomers, and was nearly bowled over by six foot seven inches of pure sartorial perfection.

  “Dollface!”

  Nikki Dawes would be impressive no matter where she showed up, but for Paris, she brought her A game. Her hair was now styled into a close-cropped, gamine black bob, which paired perfectly with her black-and-white minidress, the top cut into a halter style that showed off her powerful arms. Her legs were bare and gleaming with some sort of glittery lotion visible above the tops of her jet-black thigh-high fabric boots. I had no clue how she kept those up on her legs unless the secondary ingredient of her lotion was glue, but as always, she pulled it off.

  She hugged me longer than was technically necessary, but as I instincti
vely shifted back, she hissed, “We gotta talk.” Then she leaned away from me with a broad smile, giving my shoulders a squeeze. The smile didn’t reach her eyes. I knew why, and it didn’t have anything to do with the information she had to share with me.

  Like most midlevel Connecteds, Nikki’s psychic abilities tended to focus on a very narrow set of skills. In her case, she could read the memories of anyone she touched. The memories, not the minds, which was an important distinction, and one that had been particularly helpful in her former life as a Chicago cop, well before her years as a Vegas-based psychic. With her embrace, I knew she had access to any memories I wanted to share with her, and the ones she swept up from the surface of my mind apparently knocked her back a step. I wasn’t feeling very forthcoming today, so that was all I wanted to share. She knew me well enough not to pry until I was ready. Nikki always knew what to do and when to do it. And apparently, she had intel I needed to hear.

  But not yet. As I emerged from her embrace, I was surprised to see the other team members Armaeus had assembled, which included the Devil, the Fool…and a completely unexpected man hovering at the front door, looking at the foyer like it was going to bite him. “Uh, Brody?”

  “Before you ask, no. I don’t know why I’m here,” Detective Brody Rooks said gruffly, shifting his gaze to glower at the Magician. “I’ve already got a job. A job I love. A job I’m good at.”

  The Magician merely smiled. “The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department has very graciously allowed you to be on loan for the foreseeable future. I’m surprised they didn’t share that with you.”

  “They did share it with me.” As usual, Brody wore a rumpled gray suit over a clean white button-down and a tie of undetermined provenance. His sandy-brown hair was as tousled as his jacket, and his blue eyes were electric with annoyance. “They were practically jumping up and down to share it with me. But you don’t just get randomly assigned as a special liaison to Interpol, Armaeus. That shit takes time and paperwork, and none of it was in play before yesterday, I know for the God’s honest truth. Yet now, suddenly, I’m here.”