by Jenn Stark
Light exploded all around me, a radiance I was completely unprepared for. Instead of being surrounded by cold gray stone, waterfalls tumbled down on either side of me. Through their sheer cascading walls, I could see an absolute wonderland of beauty in the space beyond. Emerald grass rustling in a gentle breeze, trees bursting with blossoms, clear blue sky.
“What the hell is this?” I was so startled, I didn’t shore up my mind quickly enough. With a shock, I could sense Armaeus’s touch racing through my brain for the barest second before I shut off access again. Because by that point, I didn’t need him to find me. I had found him.
The Magician of the Arcana Council knelt before a pool of water, which was fed by a babbling brook, then spilled out into another waterway. It was such an incongruous place for him to be kneeling in his tailored suit, I blinked in surprise. Then I realized what it was he was mixing into the water and what was spilling forth to the stream that meandered off amid the grass and flowers, and I gaped.
“Is that liquid gold?”
Armaeus smiled and turned to me, his expression nearly making my heart stop in my chest.
I’d never seen him look so happy.
“It is,” he said simply. “I have transmuted water into rubies, mist into starlight, and now lead into gold.” He lifted his hand out of the water and held forth what was left of a dull gray cup. “It’s the full formula of transformation that John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer and head alchemist, had sought for so long, and it’s all here, perfectly crystallized.”
He sighed with deep and abiding peace. “The angels answered me when I sought entry to the In Between, answered me and opened its doors, though they wouldn’t—couldn’t—venture inside with me. But this… It’s everything I sought.”
“Everything?” I repeated, the word quiet and cautious, completely at odds with our rich, exuberant surroundings. I didn’t want to think too much about the fact that angels, with all their might and fire, considered the In Between a No Trespassing zone. “What else have you found?”
He lifted his brows, genuinely confused by the question. “What do you mean?”
I hit him with Death’s hypothesis as if it was already cold hard fact, because I was pretty sure it was. “Given what happened at the Sagrada Familia, you had to realize that with all that lost knowledge of angel speak, you also reacquired a piece of you you’d once thought would be better off stuck somewhere else. Namely, that you were kind of an asshat with anger issues.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, but I kept going. “Now that you’ve found your craft experiment here in the In Between, what other bad behavior did you stuff away with it? And while we’re up, what’s the piece of you that the Shadow Court and Abigail stole?”
“I haven’t encountered anything else. There’s nothing here but Dee’s formula. Hidden away in this place of…extraordinary beauty.” He sighed with deep contentment, turning his gaze to the perfect far horizon.
“Fair enough,” I allowed, though I didn’t believe him for a second. There had to be something else here. Then again, maybe Armaeus simply didn’t recognize that he’d changed yet again in some way. I certainly couldn’t tell, at least not yet.
I tried a different tack. “So, what happened to Simon?”
“Simon,” he murmured, as if he just now recalled he’d left the guy behind. “He helped me enter the In Between. He got me this far, then begged me not to go further. That there was danger, that he needed to map it, that…” The Magician shook his head like a bear coming out of slumber. “He got quite upset. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe because there was danger?” I asked, looking around Armaeus’s grotto more critically. It was undeniably beautiful, like something out of a fairy tale, but now it was starting to frighten me. Armaeus clearly had no idea he’d left Simon in relatively dire straits, and that wasn’t like any version of him. “Either way, we’ve got to get going. Pronto.”
Armaeus flinched, then set his mouth in a stubborn line. “No, we don’t. There is nothing in the outside world that we cannot accomplish from within this space, Miss Wilde. There’s no reason to ever leave. And now that you’re here, there is no reason for us ever to leave each other again.” He smiled so softly it made my heart quiver, even as my brain raced to understand his words. “It would seem I have a great deal of remembering to do when it comes to you in particular.”
“Yeah, well, this isn’t the time.” I resisted the urge to fall headfirst into the illusion the Magician was creating, for all that it was more appealing than the mess that lay outside these magical walls.
And then, of course, I figured it out. This place was what he’d stuffed away with John Dee’s alchemical formula. This whole beautiful, terrifying place.
“You’ve created some sort of trap here, Armaeus, something that makes you want to stay more than it makes you want to leave,” I said. “I have a feeling you learned how to create this mental bouncy house right around the time you discovered Dee’s breakthrough. It proved too alluring for you, so you killed it. You stuffed it in the In Between where it could no longer tempt you.”
That caught Armaeus up short. He glanced around, and it almost hurt me physically to see the possibility strike him all the more powerfully, because I was right.
“I’d created an escape,” he murmured. “An escape I could not resist. How…foolish…”
He closed his eyes and slumped to the ground, all tens of thousands of dollars of suit, shoes, and ancillary bling sprawled out on the emerald green grass by a babbling sapphire stream.
“Uh, Armaeus?”
He didn’t move.
“Armaeus.”
I launched toward him, bounding across the swaying grass and vaulting the bubbly stream. Then I dropped to my knees beside him, pulling him into my arms. “Armaeus, dammit, wake up.”
For a moment, I thought I’d lose him to the entirely different escape of a coma. Then his body convulsed, his hands lashing out. The idyllic tapestry of sky and grotto faltered, and I could once again see the cold stone walls of the In Between for the briefest moment. Armaeus flailed again, his face contorting, but the sky and grotto returned, seeming more vibrant than ever.
“A…a memory, Miss Wilde…” Armaeus gasped, speaking in my mind. “Just one. Some connection between us…”
I could feel his pressure on my mind, and I knew instantly what he wanted. Something, anything to hold onto, to give him the strength to fight this illusion, this trap he’d so thoroughly constructed. I had easily a hundred thousand memories I could share with him, and I knew instinctively that any of them would do. I picked the safest one I could imagine, simple and clean, the two of us in Paris in the springtime, outside Saint-Germain-des-Prés—
Then, to my horror, a totally different memory surged forth in my mind, bold and terrible and shining bright. A memory of a trap I’d fallen into in Hell, where I’d believed that Armaeus and I were together, forever, our yesterdays and todays and tomorrows perfectly entwined. I’d come out of that trap reeling, and I’d never spoken of it to anyone—least of all, Armaeus. In fact, I’d thought I’d buried that devastating experience so deeply, so permanently, that it would never ever see the light of day.
Now it was the only thing I could think of.
“No,” I gasped, but even as I struggled to pull away, Armaeus’s body jerked again, and I felt him seize upon my own traitorous thoughts, plunging through them like a fist through glass.
“What do you need from me to believe?” Armaeus asked, dropping a kiss on my forehead. Where his lips connected with my skin, fire blazed all the way down to my heels. “Don’t you want to see what I’ve built us while I waited for you?”
“Stop it!” I growled, but I couldn’t stop it, I couldn’t stop any of this. Because Armaeus now saw, felt, and knew absolutely everything I had seen, felt and known during that cruel deception—because he was inside my mind, experiencing it even as I’d experienced it—
He held me as the sun dipped into the far western horizon, his lips on my hair, his arms tight as I sobbed the tears I had never cried for my mother, my lost life, my lost self. My heart felt so full of possibility in those moments, I thought it would burst—but it didn’t, and the sun finally set and rose again, and there was more laughter to be had.
“Stop,” I whispered, far more weakly this time, because I knew what was coming next, knew what I had kept from Armaeus since the moment of that betrayal in Hell, the moment where I’d thought I’d lost him forever—
“There is something you have to know…”
“Noooo…” I groaned, shaking Armaeus violently now, trying to break his connection with my mind, my heart, my precious, precious memory—
“I love you, Sara.”
The words were so unexpected, so impossible, that it was all I could do not to fall off the teak bench. I opened and closed my mouth like a carp tossed onto the shore, but Armaeus didn’t say anything further. He simply watched me with those unfathomable, impossibly golden eyes, eyes that seemed to see directly into me, healing me, making me whole. “I don’t—I can’t—”
“You can,” Armaeus leaned closer then, his lips brushing mine. Something shattered completely inside me, the last little bit of resistance I had, and I crumpled against him as he pulled me close, his mouth firm and hot, his fingers gripping my shoulders, his lips rough and insistent on mine. “You do,” he growled against me, then leaned back, his expression impossibly fierce.
And then he spoke again, only it wasn’t the Armaeus of my memory speaking, it was the Armaeus lying in front of me, his eyes wide and staring, filled with shock and wonder. “You are,” he whispered, reverently.
Without warning, a burst of energy exploded from me fully formed, spreading into huge, glorious wings of fire that arced up and over us, then collapsed and poured into Armaeus’s body, setting him ablaze. The wild, frenzied energy consumed him entirely for a one breath, two—racing over, around, through him—
And then it was done.
A scant heartbeat later, we stood in the center of a roughly hewn stone chamber, bare except for a small table in the center. On the table sat a thin leather-bound journal, and beneath the book, a cloth embroidered with stars and planets. No more babbling brook, no more grassy plain, no more blue sky. Now, only stone and silence surrounded us.
Armaeus drew in a long, shaky breath. “I… Thank you, Miss Wilde.”
I could only stare at him a long moment, mute with shock and emotion so thick I felt strangled. When Armaeus didn’t say anything further, though, I finally, shakily, cleared my throat.
“You, ah, feeling better now?”
His lips quirked. “In a manner of speaking. There’s much I have learned here.” He reached out and picked up the book, wrapping it in the strip of embroidered cloth. He held it close to his chest, allowing his eyes to drift shut for the barest moment. Then he looked at me and shook his head. “And now I have something else, too. This memory of us, together.”
I put up both hands. “Yeah, well, no. None of that actually happened,” I said curtly. “It was a trick, a trap. I was in Hell, and I was being played—so it was all a lie. All of it. It didn’t—”
“I understand,” he said, his eyes still warm and wondering, his expression so gentle, I suddenly wanted to cry. “But I thank you for it nevertheless. Without it, I wouldn’t have had the strength to break free of this trap I’d so neatly set myself. Without it…I wouldn’t have understood a lot of things.”
“Well…fine, then,” I said gruffly. “But it didn’t happen.”
“As you say, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus said quietly, a soft, bemused smile still softening his lips. “As you say. But now, I think we should go.”
He gestured to the doorway cut into the thick rock, and together, we started walking.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We slowly journeyed back through the endless maze of corridors, the trip seeming to take five times longer than the way in. When we finally reached the green glow that told me Simon was right around the corner, Armaeus froze.
“What did I do here?” he murmured, stepping away from me.
I squinted at him, but there was no sugar coating the truth. “Ah…well, you left Simon pretty much in a coma such that Death had to watch over him while you were playing change-the-metal-into-gold.”
“I left Simon in harm’s way?” He echoed, aghast.
I sighed. “Well, perhaps not in harm’s way, but definitely in its general vicinity. Simon couldn’t come out of wherever you stuck him on his own. Death came to watch over him, but he didn’t seem to be getting any better.”
Armaeus shook his head. “Death is the bridge between life and the next plane. She has some grace with the living whose paths are not yet complete, but she cannot heal. That’s not her job. It’s mine.”
I waited for him to say, and yours as well, but he didn’t. He simply kept moving, and a few moments later, we reached Simon and Death. Death stepped away as Armaeus knelt beside Simon. Reaching out, he touched the Fool on the forehead. Simon abruptly sucked in a strangled breath, as if he’d been holding it this entire time.
“No!” Simon shouted as he looked up and grabbed the Magician by both shoulders. “Don’t go in there, don’t go in! It’s dangerous.”
“I’m already back,” Armaeus assured him, but the revelation did little to improve Simon‘s demeanor. The Fool flinched, an expression of fear crossing his face. Then his glance shifted to me.
“What is it?” I asked quietly. “What is it you were afraid of?”
Simon shook his head, his eyes wide. “I don’t know. I knew there was a trap. A terrible trap that he wouldn’t be able to leave on his own. Not ever.”
“A trap of my own making,” Armaeus said thoughtfully. “One which will take much study when the time is right.”
“Which would not be now,” Death snapped.
He looked around until his gaze found Death, and nodded grimly. “What did I do?”
“You trapped Simon too, in the doorway to your little hideaway,” she said flatly. “If you hadn’t returned…”
Silence fell between us for a long moment, then I spoke.
“So…” I asked Armaeus. “Now that you’ve got Dee’s little book of spells and everything, is there anything else that’s coming to mind?”
He turned to me, and his eyes seemed to shift a little, his expression shuttering. “No. There’s an awareness of a lesson I have yet to learn, a certainty of a sorrow I have yet to understand. No further. But I have regained the language of the angels as well as the secret of the transmutation of elements, and time is of the essence. I have gained all that I have lost and can take a stand against the Shadow Court.”
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I felt the wrongness of Armaeus’s statement but proceeded as diplomatically as possible. “Well, you haven’t gained everything you’ve lost, because you don’t remember me. And if you don’t remember the Shadow Court itself, including all the stories and problems and crises that led up to the point at which your memory was taken away, then we still have a problem, and we still don’t know what we’re up against.”
“Fair enough.” The Magician turned to Death. “I’ll need to return to this place one day to resolve that which I could not resolve today. But for now—”
“For now, I’m getting the Fool out of here. And you…” She swung her gaze to me. “Be careful. I mean it.”
At that point I was treated to my second experience of Death’s mad transpo skills. After all, with Simon still groggy, there was no way we could trust him to make the jump on his own, especially out of the In Between.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Death traveled with the same economy that she did everything else in her immortal life. While Armaeus preferred to disappear in a puff of smoke and I lit myself on fire, Death simply was there one moment and gone the next…much like life itself, for far too many people.
> The Magician exhaled. “I didn’t think it would be easy to get rid of her. Which means she knows what’s coming, and knows it’s meant to be.”
“Uhhh…what do you mean, what’s coming?” I thought of Death’s admonition of thirty seconds earlier, and my nerves prickled. “We should get out of here too. Why aren’t we getting out of here?”
“Because there is more to be learned in the In Between, Miss Wilde. Far more. And I, once again, will need your help to confront it.”
As if on cue, the walls shuddered around us, and where there had been rough but unbroken stone before, several fissures suddenly appeared in the wall running from the ceiling to the floor. First only as wide as my finger, then as wide as my fist.
“They’re here,” the Magician said, his words barely a sigh. He grabbed my hand and pulled me along as he began sprinting back down the corridor. Down, not up.
“Wait, who’s they?” I spluttered. “Why aren’t we leaving?”
“Because there’s something I left here. Something I must find.” Armaeus delivered this without breaking stride, the two of us racing through the darkened passageways as if the hounds of hell were on our heels. While it wasn’t a pack of dogs, there was something pursuing us through the winding corridors. Something that chittered and rustled and yowled, moaned and cried. It was like amateur night at a death metal concert, and I was not a fan.
And it was gaining ground. “I’m serious! Who is they?”
Before Armaeus could respond, the corridor dumped into a box canyon. We stumbled to a stop, blocked.
With no other choice, we whirled around, forced to face our pursuers. And instinctively cowered back. The creatures lurching after us were more shadow than form and reeked with power. Lots of power. Extremely messed-up power. Even with my third eye peeled wide, I couldn’t make any sense of the riot of crisscrossing currents of electricity and snarl of tangled energy. It looked like someone had blown up an Arkham Asylum dollhouse and then patched up the inmates with a staple gun.