by Jenn Stark
Armaeus’s laughter sounded from the darkness. “I’ll be sure to take it up with management. But you’re wrong, Miss Wilde. Your powers remain as they have since you ascended to the Council. You have the ability to translate any language, to capture those Connecteds who have used their psychic skills to commit crimes. You have the ability to use your third eye to identify the magical connections and circuitry that bind our world together. You can wield your magic in physical form to deflect danger, preserve life, wreak whatever damage you wish, and stop whomever you wish.”
“Right,” I said, wanting to keep him talking. Because I still couldn’t see the Magician, and that struck me as…less than ideal. “Don’t forget my ability to make a mean peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
“You also retain your ability to manifest that which you truly want, and you’ve extended that to include people, not merely items, which is…an improvement.”
I nodded, circling around. “But corporeal travel kind of has a basic flaw,” I protested, peering into the shadows. The room simply wasn’t that big, and yet: no Armaeus. “I can’t randomly pop in somewhere I’ve never been. And, again, I’ve never been here.”
“So you know the logical answer to your question.”
My irritation flared. “I’m not really in the mood for a lecture, Armaeus. And will you please stop with the magic trick? Because you suck at hide-and-seek.”
Armaeus sighed, a long, lingering exhalation that sounded more like a moan than I wanted it to, and he gradually manifested into view.
I clapped a hand over my mouth, but didn’t move for a moment, wanting to be sure of what I saw. Armaeus lay on the ground beside the fire looking…not at all like the Magician I knew. He was…younger, was the only way I could describe it. This was a little difficult to discern in an immortal—especially an immortal who was a master magician—but there was something ineffably different about the demigod lying on the ground versus the one I’d last seen exploding into a bunch of mini-Magicians in Myanya’s pentagram. His hair was longer and fuller, his skin more darkly tanned, and he simply looked more…rested.
At least from the neck up.
From the neck down, which was made eminently more apparent given the fact that Armaeus was naked, he looked like the model for the invisible man, except the tracings of all his blood vessels were on the surface of his skin—and they were glistening with blood. A faint miasma of violet energy hung over him like a Snuggie, but it wasn’t enough to mask the very real trauma overtaking his body.
“For gods’ sake, Armaeus,” I whispered. “What happened to you this time?”
“Myanya did,” he said simply. “Or, perhaps more appropriately, you did.”
“I didn’t do this.” I rejected that idea immediately. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
Armaeus’s laugh was quiet. “But I attempted to hurt you. You attempted to defend yourself, as is your right. As is anyone’s right when faced with an unknown threat.”
“No.” I dismissed his response again. “Myanya did it, okay, I can take that. She…she’s a little bent out of shape right now. I can’t really hold her accountable, I don’t think.”
Again, Armaeus chuckled. “She surrendered to you, Justice Wilde,” he said, and the slight variation on my name had me looking at him again askance. He was hissing with steam, the blood exposed to the open fire crackling along his open wounds, so I approached him slowly.
“Why aren’t you healing yourself?” I asked him.
“Here, in this place, I am not who I am, but who I was. Innately magical, perhaps, but new formed, without training or experience or guile.”
I looked around the rude hut, seeing it with new eyes that were still unimpressed. “You definitely were due for an upgrade. But that takes me back to my original question. How’d I find you here?”
“Because you can seek me out, Miss Wilde. I am as real to you as any location on this earth you have visited. I’m not only a person to you, I am a place.”
By this time, I’d reached Armaeus. The up-close version of his wounded body was worse than the distance shot. “Well, you’ve definitely trashed my rental, I’ll give you that,” I muttered, dropping to my knees beside him. I lifted my hands, then hesitated as the heat from his body spiked beneath me. “Is it okay if I do something?”
“My dear, deliberately stubborn Miss Wilde. There is very little you can’t do once you choose to do so. You have the energy of Inanna within you, and the Eye of Horus upon you.”
“Well, Myanya is…” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Why did you call her Inanna? Did you and Gamon go to the same psychic reading? Because that business that she’s an ancient Sumerian goddess—”
“Matches up perfectly to her incarnation as the prophesied strength-bringer,” Armaeus said.
To shut him up, I bent over him, focusing on his body with my third eye. Speaking of stubborn, it seemed like every time I turned around, Armaeus was deliberately injuring himself. But this time was worse than most. The violet pink of his neural networks now were spiderwebbed with angry, fizzy strands of white gold that hissed and sparked as I moved my hands nearer to them. One lashed out, poking me with petulant fury, and the sudden, shocking pain was all it took.
Rage poured out of me.
Rage for Armaeus and his beautiful broken body, rage for Inanna or Myanya or whoever the hell she was, the fierce star-bright spirit who had endured so much to allow her power to burst forth, a dawn star in a bleak, unforgiving sky. Rage for Iskra, who tried so hard to preserve her family from a legacy she couldn’t shake.
Rage for so many bright and dancing lights out there, whose stars were dimmed by those who would oppress them.
They would not oppress them anymore.
“Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured, and I eased up slightly, but I didn’t break from my task.
“You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself,” I gritted out as I chased the furious, crackling energy around and through and over his nervous system, flooding Armaeus with white, protective light. “I need you, dammit.”
“I know,” he said, and that…
That did make me stop.
I lifted my hands like a surgeon needing to be gloved and stared down at Armaeus. He was once more pristine—his skin smooth, bronzed, unbroken. As it turned out, I hadn’t managed to manifest any clothes along with the healing, but hey, a woman can only be expected to do so much.
Armaeus waited until I thoroughly inspected my handiwork. By the time I lifted my gaze to meet his, one side of his gorgeous mouth was curved into a half smile. I suddenly felt vulnerable, and I scowled at him, dropping my hands in my lap as I sat back on my ankles. “I mean, I don’t need you a lot,” I grumbled.
His smile stretched farther across his face. “You don’t need me at all in the sense that most would use the term. But there is much that I can give you. My strength, my knowledge. My experience. My willingness to stand in front of the fire for you, wherever that fire may be.”
“Right.” I blew out a breath. “Well, yeah. I guess I need all those things. And maybe a few others.” I wasn’t going to name those, of course. It was like a whisper to the devil, and with my luck, the Devil would be hanging around close enough to hear me.
“What you don’t seem to realize is that I need you too.”
I glanced up, ready with a sharp comeback, but there was something in Armaeus’s eyes that I didn’t expect.
Tears.
“Whoa,” I blurted. I shifted back onto my knees and scooted forward, lifting my hands to his face. His cheeks were wet, and I put my palm to his forehead, expecting a fever of malaria-level proportions. “What’s wrong—what’s happening to you? Did I miss something?”
The tears crested over his long, luxurious lashes and dripped onto his face, a new one forming as fast as I brushed away the last. “Dammit, Armaeus,” I said tightly, feeling my own tears unaccountably surging in my eyes. “You even cry pretty.”
&nbs
p; “Sara,” he whispered, and I was so startled at his use of my name that I froze, not moving even when he lifted his hands to cover mine and pull them gently away from his face. He held them against his chest instead, and I could feel the beating of his heart. It was—too loud, too fierce, even for the Magician. The heart of a young man in the first flush of his power, whom I’d helped heal.
“Ahh…Armaeus?” I offered, and his gaze fixed on mine. It was deep, black, and far too intense, and it never wavered from mine. “You feeling okay?”
“Inanna is not the only god who has been reborn with your actions tonight,” he said. “You set her spirit free, her light over all the world. A light that has found its way to those who need it most.”
“You need to stop with the Inanna stuff,” I said, though the tiniest twinge of concern pinged deep in my heart. I’d dropped Myanya’s medallion over the edge of Gamon’s precipice, and it had set off its own little merry firestorm. Had that been the wrong thing to do? I needed to start being a little more careful with the artifacts I was flinging around.
Armaeus watched me with a smile on his face. “In this case, the artifact you flung around proved to be that which was most needed for more souls than you realize.” He leaned forward, brushing my lips with his. “Including yours.”
When I instinctively began to move away, uncomfortable with where the conversation was going, he tightened his hold on my hands. “No, you must listen to this.” He flattened my hands over his heart, and I felt the gentle thud of it beneath my fingers, oddly reassuring in the strange, half-lit room.
“The first gift you gave me this day was to fight me, to fend me off when you thought I was a threat to you, but it wasn’t your only gift. You also allowed me to reach back to a time when I was not the Magician at all, simply a man, a human. I needed to reestablish that link.”
“This was really your house?” I asked, looking around. “Because no offense…”
Armaeus chuckled. “It was the eleven hundreds. At the time, this hunting cabin was more than sufficient for my needs.”
“Did you actually hunt? Or were the rats sufficient quarry?”
“You’re deflecting.”
“It’s a skill. I’m really good at it.”
“This—is certainly true. However.” He flattened his hands over mine more firmly, and I didn’t miss the uptick in his heart rate. “You need to know that I’m not the only one whose connection to his source magic has been reborn. You’ve given that gift to any who are open enough to take it. Lost souls, newborn mages, cynical veterans. Everyone.”
His smile shifted then. It was tender, almost painfully so. “Yourself.”
I lifted one shoulder. “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t feel any different.”
Still, when he tugged me toward him, I didn’t resist. I laid my head down on his once-again healed body and reveled in the strength of him, the mended perfection of, well, the scarred warrior. Though my magic had taken the surface of his skin and made it whole, there was nothing that could take away Armaeus’s scars or the memory of his pain, his suffering. Those were his as truly as Myanya’s had been hers, both her shield and her sword.
They were my shield and sword too, I thought distractedly, allowing myself to let my eyelids drift shut. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I felt truly at peace. With myself, my abilities, my role of Justice. Was this what Armaeus meant by being reborn?
Above me, Armaeus tightened his hold on me and chuckled, the sound deep and rolling in his chest. “Not…exactly, Miss Wilde.”
Chapter Thirty
The office was quiet. I picked up the case and turned it around in my hands, flicking my third eye open to see the locking mechanism when my regular eyes didn’t catch it. With a quick turn of a lever, the case opened with a hiss, the scent of musty papers filling the room.
I carefully spread open the rolled-up sheaf of parchment, weighting the edges down with small bean bags, and leaned closer to peer at the tightly crabbed handwriting. Another complaint against a long-ago male witch, who might or might not be the village blacksmith. Sorrow wafted from the pages as it detailed the death of the complainants’ beloved pets, and a suspicion of other affronts in the small town—a farm going bankrupt, a baby dying in childbirth, a husband forced into a war not of his choosing. So many crimes over the past millennia had been laid at the feet of Connecteds, it was easy to dismiss the cases out of hand.
But I couldn’t do that. Each crime deserved its review, and my experience in the library of Justice at the start of this case, with some of the crimes in witchdom jostling for position while others leered down from on high, made me realize that there was more than a little malice lurking in the huddled stacks. It was odd to think of the cases themselves harboring ill will for their investigators, but such was the contradiction of being a Connected.
I closed my eyes and flattened my hands on the pages, unable to read its energy, exactly, but, as of very recently, able to do the next best thing.
“Speak,” I murmured.
“It wasn’t my fault.” The voice was low, tortured, and ineffably sad, and I raised my gaze across the room, where a man in a long leather apron stood, gripping a pair of long, metal tongs. He looked like a man who’d once been broad-shouldered, robust, but who’d shrunken to a shadow of his former self.
And then there was the fact that he was dead.
Death’s Eye of Horus tattoo on my arm burned hot as I regarded the man, taking in his pleading eyes. I didn’t speak, and, like so many others, he rushed to fill the vacuum of silence. “The children died. The animals too. But I had no quarrel with my neighbors, and they none with me. But I was a witch. Everyone knew it, accepted it. And when things went wrong, well…they needed someone to blame. They ran me out of town, forcing me to barely make a living as a traveling smith, but when that wasn’t enough, they—” He looked around. “They contacted you. You never came, though.” His hangdog expression deepened. “I prayed you would. I wanted my name cleared.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. There were two sides to every cold case. The criminals who got away—and the wrongly accused who never got a chance to breathe freely again, who lived their lives with the weight of the allegations against them pressing them down, inescapable. But I could see the blacksmith clearly, and there was no silver mark at his temple, only the faint, purplish corona of the wronged around his slumped shoulders. “Rest in peace, Herr Smith. May your soul be light as you take the next step in the journey.”
The spirit before me smiled in genuine relief, for all that the smile was rueful. “I’m grateful for your time, Justice. I am. But there’s no more journeying for me, I’m afraid. For me, all that’s left is…”
I pursed my lips as the spirit’s eyes lifted and fixed on something over my left shoulder. His eyes widened, surprise and wonder lightening his whole face, and then—
And then he disappeared.
I leaned my elbows on the table, watching the pages of the case before me crackle with energy until they too faded out of existence. Only the case itself remained, destined for some utility closet deep in the heart of the library that only Mrs. French knew the location of. I sighed, weary to the bone, but satisfied as I blew the remaining parchment dust across my desk. “That’s never gonna get old.”
A sharp, irritated rap sounded in the reception area, and I smiled as I heard Mrs. French call out her reassurance that she would greet the caller. Still, it was past nine on a Thursday night. Nothing good ever happened after nine p.m. on a Thursday except football. And the season was over for the year.
For a moment, I thought it could be Nikki, but Nikki had made several new friends with the burly, brusque, highly skilled security team the Devil had handpicked to guard Lara’s house in LA. Nikki was on indefinite leave at the moment.
“Oh! Well, my goodness, what a surprise, ah, miss, ah…ma’am. You make yourself comfortable, and I’ll—oh! Please, there’s n
o need for—”
A second later, a slender form filled the doorway to the inner sanctum, the woman’s silhouette instantly recognizable in her black combat gear. Gamon, Judgment of the Arcana Council, gazed around my office with clear derision before flicking her gaze to me.
“Nice place,” she said sarcastically. “Are you ever going to upgrade from Mid-Nineteenth Century?”
“I’ve discovered quite a fondness for Mid-Nineteenth Century.”
Gamon snorted, but she didn’t move from the doorway. Because my third eye was already open, I didn’t miss the agitation in her energy field, the desperate humming of her circuits. Gamon had been a stone-cold killer in her day. She didn’t get agitated, and she didn’t do desperate.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing happened. No, that’s not true. You happened.” She strode a few steps into the office, then pivoted as Mrs. French bobbed into the doorway behind her. “I’m not going to eat her. You can stop hovering.”
“Well!” Mrs. French’s huffy response made me smile as she straightened indignantly. “I was going to put on a pot of tea for you, but I will simply leave you to your conversation. Good night, Justice.” She bobbed a curtsey, then spun on her heel.
I watched Gamon drop her body into one of my client chairs, her tension still wound tight, and waited for her to continue. It didn’t take long.
“Something shifted in the Connecteds’ energy field when you dropped that thingamajig off the precipice,” she began. “I’ve looked for it, and it’s gone. Do you have it?”
“The star of Myanya?”
“Inanna.”
“Whatever. No, I haven’t found it,” I said. “And for the record, I wasn’t the one who wanted to drop it. You practically shook it out of my hand.”
“Well, ever since I did, things have—gotten weird. I don’t like it, and I want to—” She flapped her hand. “Undo it. Somehow.”
“Is there trouble?”
“No, no…nothing like that.” Aggravated, Gamon pushed herself back out of her chair and stalked around the room, peering with distaste at the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century oil paintings adorning the walls in ornate frames, the delicate side tables and the reupholstered coach. “Where’d you get all this crap?” she muttered.