The Shadow Court

by Stark, Jenn

  “Ah…if you’ve got something to say, you better say it,” I suggested to the priest, edging slightly closer to Armaeus. I didn’t think he was going to throw the priest off the ledge, but something the man had done had offended the Magician, clearly. And then there was that voice. “What were you doing down there?”

  “It was—ordered,” the priest managed, his breathing growing more labored. “By the Vatican itself. Draw the unbelievers to the basilica. M-make an example of them. Cast them down. They gave us—a machine. A machine to break down magic.”

  I grimaced. That explained the force field. The energy patterns of the Connected were extremely sensitive electrical circuits, and they could be manipulated as such, but only in the right setting. Like in an enclosed nave of gothic proportions.

  More importantly, a machine that took out Connecteds was something that SANCTUS would have been all over. “Who in the Vatican?” I demanded, but the man’s eyes rolled back in his head.

  Armaeus shook him again, his lip curling in disgust. Then he dropped him.

  “No!” I burst forward with a speed even I didn’t realize I had and caught the man as he fell. I would have been pulled right over the side of the scaffolding with him, except Armaeus reached out at the same time and hauled me back. For the second time in way too short a time, I slammed against the floor, the wind once more getting knocked out of me as my back screamed in protest.

  I pushed the deadweight of the passed-out priest off me and hauled myself around to face Armaeus. “What the hell was that?”

  “He’s a flunky of SANCTUS,” Armaeus pointed out, his voice still sounding a little too close to Darth Vader for my taste. “He knows nothing other than what they tell him to know.”

  “So you’ve become his judge, jury, and executioner now? Because news flash, that’s not your job.”

  “Who are you to know what my job is?”

  That took me back a step. The Armaeus I’d known would never have done any of this, but I had known him only a few years. In the lifespan of an immortal, that was barely more than a one-night stand. Nevertheless, there’d been absolutely nothing in anything that Armaeus had done up to this point that indicated he would demand retribution from any human, no matter how depraved. If that was the Magician’s jam, he would have started with Pol Pot, not this guy.

  “Fair enough,” I responded levelly. “So let me guess. You found the manuscript.”

  His smile was dark, almost sinister. “I found the manuscript.”

  “And you looked up the secret cookie recipe.”

  “Do not mock…” Once again, the voice sounded more like a croak than anything remotely human. Then he shook himself, and a second later, a new voice broke through, the Armaeus I’d known and still loved, even in his fancy poltergeist form.

  “You’re not as strong as I am, Miss Wilde,” the Magician warned, his eyes still swirling with malevolence as he took a careful step back, ostensibly to protect me. “You never were. Have a care.”

  “And you nearly threw a man off the side of the church,” I challenged, going for exactly the opposite of having a care. “You need to ratchet it down a few notches.”

  “I…” Armaeus’s entire body jerked again, his lungs heaving. “I read the book.”

  “I gathered. Where is it?”

  “Safe.”

  I considered that. “Did you eat it?”

  His eyes flashed again, this time with surprise and confusion. “What?”

  “Stay with me. Why’d you grab the priest?”

  “Because he’d given his men orders to kill you. Your defeat would have set in motion any of numerous outcomes, precisely zero of which were positive to me.” Armaeus continued to speak in a voice closer to normal, but there still was a ragged edge to his psyche, a degradation at the fringes I didn’t understand.

  I kept pushing. “How much of what happened downstairs was caused by you?”

  “None of it,” he answered flatly. “You orchestrated your own rescue. Had you not, I would have. Otherwise, the guards would have killed you, despite the arrival of the police. That was their order.”

  “I guess today is my lucky day.”

  At that moment, the priest groaned, rolled over, and began retching.

  “You choke on your own vomit and there will be hell to pay, buddy,” I warned, but the priest was well past responding to that. He did ease up on the dry heaves, though.

  I turned my gaze back to Armaeus. “So give it to me. How much do you remember now that you’ve read the manuscript?”

  “Not enough,” he said, his voice deepening again. “I still don’t recognize you, other than through our interaction of the last two days. I do fully understand what was happening at the time that I first placed the chapter in hiding and stripped it from my memory, however. I also know why I believed that the arcanum found inside that chapter must never reach mortal hands.”

  “But you didn’t destroy it. Then or now.”

  He shook his head and blew out a long breath. “I didn’t have to destroy it. I just had to keep it safe. It is safe now.”

  “Mind telling me where?”

  Armaeus closed his eyes as if he were considering my request, then opened them again and held out his hand, as if to pull me to him. For the first time, I noticed it was shaking. “There’s no time,” he said. “We have to go to London.”

  Then he collapsed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I caught Armaeus as he was falling—he was far heavier than I expected. I’d always believed that reading was good for you, but apparently that didn’t include chunking down the salient points of the lost chapter of the Zohar. I staggered beneath the Magician’s body while the priest beside me groaned.

  “Uh, Armaeus, a little help here? Where in London?” I had no idea where Nikki, Kreios, and Simon were lodging, or if they’d made it to London yet. Asking did me no good. Armaeus was out.

  “Heretic.” This was from the peanut gallery still sprawled on the floor, and I craned my neck to see him better.

  “You know, you’re going to need to come up with another line.”

  “You won’t succeed. Not anymore. There are too many allied against you now. And your Magician cannot lead from his knees. The abomination of your kind will be ground under the righteousness of the faithful.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “For someone who I just kept from being a splat on the pavement, a little gratitude might be in order.”

  “You are filth,” the priest shot back. “The champions of God will rise up and overtake you. They will defend all that is truth.”

  “That what they told you?” I asked as I gave Armaeus an experimental nudge. He didn’t move. Aces. “Because I hate to break it to you, but anyone who can take us out is made of exactly the same stuff we are. Which makes you a hypocrite.”

  “No,” he growled, weakly batting his hands in the air. “You are wrong. In the hands of the faithful, the tools of science may be bent to God’s will, ridding us of the scourge of your kind. You are weak, scattered. Broken. They will come at you with poison, they will come at you with fire, they will come at you with the weapons of technology and the might of God. At last, you will pay for your millennia of…sacrilege…” The priest had the grace to pass out again, saving me the trouble of throat-punching him.

  Then sirens shattered the night sky, and the wind picked up, sharply flapping the tarps draped over the scaffolding. I refocused on Armaeus. And London.

  Without any other guidance, I had to rely on my own memories of the city, but it wasn’t as if I’d spent a ton of time there. Worse, the time I had spent was generally at a dead run. Still, I fixed on one of the most prominent landmarks along the Thames and clutched Armaeus’s deadweight as I boarded the Crispy Express, as Nikki had called it.

  My memory proved to be pretty good. We arrived bare moments later in London, which was not nearly as hopping as Barcelona was at three in the morning. Lightweights.

  The relative quiet of the park area
in front of the London Eye Ferris wheel gave me time to regroup. I hauled Armaeus’s meat sack of a body over to one of the park benches and dumped him on it, sucking in a deep breath.

  “Was that really necessary?” I asked his inert form as I sagged back on the bench beside him. “Could you not simply have waited to pass out until we were in our hotel room?”

  I patted my pockets for my phone, but while my ten-dollar deck of cards and ancient storm goddess totem were still onboard, my thousand-dollar phone had apparently not been up to the task of staying on my body. I didn’t know if Armaeus even had a phone, and I eyed his tailored suit. What were the odds that he’d incinerate me in his sleep if I tried to pick his pocket? Probably pretty good. Which meant I needed to wait for him to wake up, or drag him to a hotel. I scanned the area. There were several options, but all of them tourist grade, and I wasn’t in the mood to draw any more attention to myself than I already had tonight.

  “C’mon, buddy,” I muttered, risking Armaeus’s reaction to take his hand. It was warm and dry, so that seemed promising, and the heat only grew as I touched him. Grew and seemed to radiate out, taking the deep-night chill from the air and replacing it with a mild baking sensation. Not unpleasant, but definitely weird.

  “Uh, Armaeus?”

  The Magician didn’t respond, and my third eye flipped open. Sure enough, the heat that was emanating from Armaeus had a very distinctive signature and a head full of steam. In a few short seconds, it extended out from the Magician in brilliant arcs, gorgeous tendrils of light diving into the earth and skating up trees, shrubs, even dipping into the fountains and swirling around. Another tracery of magic flowed out among the man-made obstacles in its place, benches in concrete and cars and buildings. Separate from and weaker than the strands of energy that were tied to living things, but still connected to them.

  It was pretty, but I didn’t understand it. I’d never spent too much time analyzing the electrical connections the Magician used to tether himself to this world, so I didn’t know if this was new, the results of the arcane lore that he had just assimilated, or if this was just Tuesday night in the park for him.

  Then I heard the sound of running feet, and I stiffened.

  “Armaeus,” I said, more urgently this time. He groaned, the kind of groan that gave no indication of him being actually conscious, and seemed to sink further into himself. Not helpful. I’d settled on trying some sort of invisibility spell when the running feet suddenly came into view, attached to a person. A person in priest’s ropes.

  Oh, geez. Not this again. I was full up on annoying men of the cloth right now. Still, the short, stout, older man reminded me so much of Father Jerome that I could only stare as he bustled up to us and abruptly stopped.

  “They said you would be coming,” the old man said breathlessly, surprising me. “They said you would be coming and to take you in.”

  “They, who?” I challenged, holding up a hand to keep the man from getting any closer.

  “It was all around me, voices of angels,” the man insisted, flapping his hands. “But you must come! There are too many shadows in this place seeking to banish the light. You will be safe with me, but only if you come now.”

  With the benefit of my third eye, I could read the man’s energy signature, and there was nothing in it that raised a red flag. And the truth was, I needed to get Armaeus off the streets. He was the most powerful Magician in the world, but not right now. Right now, we were both sitting ducks.

  I waved the priest to come closer, and he burst into motion again, his long robes flying. I didn’t think priests wore robes this fancy outside their hallowed sanctuary, so that meant there was a church nearby. To my surprise, however, the priest helped Armaeus to his feet while muttering a raft of low prayers, then somehow managed to get the Magician to semicoherence enough for both of us to support him through the park and across the street. The breeze kicked up and seemed to propel us along until we turned the corner, where the priest left me to hold Armaeus and approached an old but decidedly not church-like building. He waved his hand in front of a sensor, and the wrought iron gates that blocked the front door popped open. We pushed inside.

  “I’m afraid you’ve caught me at my studies,” the old man said. “If I hadn’t been in the atrium, I don’t know that I would have heard the call. I’ll take you there.”

  There turned out to be an inner courtyard that’d been transformed into a kind of Japanese Zen garden, with flowing water, ornamental trees that rustled and whispered in the breeze, and long tables with clusters of electric illuminated candles. The man helped me get Armaeus to one of the tables, where the Magician promptly slumped over, his arms cradling his head.

  I sighed. “Sorry, I’m not sure exactly what’s gotten into him. I’ve never seen this before.”

  “It’s as may be,” the priest said, and I realized that his brogue was less English than Irish—and that his robes betrayed no hint of a Catholic collar at the neckline. “I’m Brother McCullough, and I’ve seen this before. It happens to every mystic who drinks too deeply of the cup of knowledge. Who is this man you’ve brought to me? He’s very powerful and very broken. It makes for a difficult combination.”

  I took in the rush of words, more confused than ever. “If you don’t know who he is, why are you helping us? And brother of what, exactly?”

  McCullough spread his hands. “You’re right in asking those questions. I’m no longer a priest, though I can’t seem to keep from dressing like one. Force of habit, if you’ll pardon the pun. But when I say brother, I mean it most sincerely. I belong to an order of like-minded men and women who believe there is more to this world than meets the eye. We have felt the surge of power, and we have watched the demonstrations, the news stories that quickly get squelched. We’ve felt the unrest, and we’ve seen the shadows. We have merely been waiting for a guide.”

  “A guide to what?” I didn’t want to break it to him that despite his many talents, the Magician would make a questionable guide. He didn’t care as much about humans as he did about maintaining the balance of magic, and he now seemed to care less about balance than learning. That could be…dangerous.

  At that moment, Armaeus stirred. With what seemed like a tremendous amount of concentration, he flattened his fingers on the surface of the table and pushed himself back. Our transcontinental journey didn’t seem to have improved his mood any. His eyes were still jet black, now tinged with red, and his face seemed even more haggard.

  “Armaeus?” I offered, and he swung his gaze toward me, staring through me without seeing. Then he shook his head slowly.

  “I remember,” he murmured, and my heart gave a little flip, but he gave no other indication of recognizing me. My hopes were more thoroughly dashed as he continued speaking.

  “The reason for the removal of the last section of the Book of Radiance was that it was one delivered directly by angels to the scribe. And the purpose of this last chapter was wholly different from what came before it. It offered not just the motivation to see, it offered to tear the veils from the eyes of anyone who read it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Master.”

  Showing a remarkable lack of care for his own personal safety, Brother McCullough rushed forward and put both hands on either side of Armaeus’s bent head. And instantly turned into a human lightbulb.

  “What the hell!” I wrenched the man away from Armaeus, and then it was my turn to cradle him as he collapsed against the bench. The spectral light went out almost as soon as it had consumed him, but it had consumed him. Though he didn’t appear to have suffered any physical harm, he’d completely lit up from within, to the point where I could count all his bones. If only I knew how many bones he was supposed to have, I would’ve given him an update.

  “Ohhhhhh,” McCullough moaned.

  “What happened?” I demanded. “Are you all right?”

  In response, the not-a-priest opened his mouth—and started speaking quickly and em
phatically in a language I’d never heard before and couldn’t translate. Which brought me up short. One of my skills was language translation, so for me not to recognize this…

  “English,” I interjected, and McCullough jerked himself to attention, his gaze swinging toward me again, his eyes bright and fevered.

  “All things are Connected, all things true. All things are Connected, all things true. It is love. It is love. It is always and ever, your love. You can, you do, you are. All things are Connected, all things true. All things are Connected, all things true,” he babbled, the words sounding far more deranged now that I could understand them—which was saying something, because they’d sounded seriously messed up before.

  “All things are Connected. That’s great. What happened to you?” I tried, inserting the brief phrases every time the man drew a breath. But it was no use. He kept muttering the same words over and over again, rocking now, and while he didn’t seem to be in any distress—seemed exultantly happy, in fact—I knew this wasn’t right.

  “All things—”

  “Stop,” I ordered at last, placing a hand on his shoulder. He shut up, contenting himself with merely shivering.

  Another quiet voice broke over us. “You begin to see the problem, yes?”

  I turned to look at Armaeus and barely kept myself from flinching away. He now glowed with the same spectral light that’d taken over the priest, rendering his face skeletal, his black eyes ferocious and hungry within.

  “There’s no end to the problems I’m seeing right now. You mind telling me what the hell is happening to you?”

  The sharpness of my question made Armaeus blink, and he glanced down at himself as if surprised by his own radiance. A second later, the light winked out, and he’d returned to his normal Magician-looking self. Even his eyes had dropped their feral hunger, though they remained black as coal.

  “Brother McCullough,” Armaeus murmured, and beside me, the former priest and present whatever he was suddenly went boneless, the strictures of whatever was possessing him leaving his body. He collapsed so abruptly, I leaned forward and checked him for a pulse, but his heart was beating in a heavy, reassuring rhythm. He was well and truly passed out, but he was no longer in distress.