by Jenn Stark
I frowned. “I don’t think she did him any favors.”
“It’s possible that the Emperor was not aware of the change in the High Priestess’s energies immediately prior to this meeting being called. He has been seeking such an audience for some time.”
“And you knew she was going to be hyper-triggered or whatever? Her aura was off the charts to me. Reading those isn’t really one of my skills, you know. But hers was insane. You could see it from the moon.”
“The High Priestess has been accelerating her abilities since you brought Lainie to her door. I know that was not your intent, but it has ended up being a remarkable development for the Council. Such a remarkable development that it begs the question of whether or not it was predestined.”
I rolled my eyes. “It was not. I ran into Lainie at a psychic festival. She didn’t come to me through Justice Hall.”
“Everything that happens, happens for a purpose, Miss Wilde. Perhaps not all your messages will come through traditional means, and we should remain hypervigilant.”
“You know, I get enough messages the traditional way, thanks. It’s not like I’m looking for… Um, what the hell is that?”
My attention had strayed to a row of flyers that were decorating temporary construction panels, flyers so faded, they could have been hanging there for years, not months. But these posters were promoting a current event. The first showed a retrostyle circus master with lions and tigers in the background, all of them grinning broadly. The top of the flyer read “A Call for Justice!” which was doubtless why it had caught my attention. But the bottom of the flyer promoted the Burning Man event with a start date of a few days previous. “What does a circus have to do with a call for Justice? Or Burning Man?” I didn’t miss the mention of “burning,” in particular. Did this have some connection with Lainie’s message in the smoke?
“There are more,” Armaeus murmured.
He was right. Nearly a dozen flyers distracted our attention from the linen-clad fire starters as we walked down the boulevard, each poster starkly different from the last, everything from neon ’80s splatter paint to high-tech hologram imagery that shifted as we passed it, to minimalist postmodern squares all boasting a Call for Justice above an ad for the Burning Man event in Black Rock City, Nevada.
“Burning Man… Dude. They don’t need to advertise. Not like this.”
I peered more closely at the posters, which seemed commercial grade, though that didn’t mean anything anymore when one could print from their home computer like a boss. But Burning Man—they were always very quick to make sure you didn’t call them a festival—was a pop-up collection of artistic installations and tent camps that served as a temporary home for something like seventy thousand people over a nine-day span every summer. Held out in the desert north of Reno, it mostly drew folks who yearned for a reason to go counterculture without getting too crazy about it, as well as celebrities, musicians, and social media nut jobs.
Bottom line, though, you had to have a ticket to get in, and those tickets sold out in a flash every spring. There’d be no point advertising the festival or whatever they wanted to call it in the height of August.
“Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured.
I saw it as soon as he did of course. The flyers shifted, the words across the top changing slightly. Where they had originally proclaimed a Call for Justice, that had changed. “A Cry for Justice,” I said drily. “Subtle.”
“The event is happening this week,” Armaeus said. “Most of the parties being held at Burning Man will be ratcheting up for their final weekend. Perhaps after you meet with your childhood friends in town for your reunion, we should respond to the call.”
“By going to Burning Man?” I curled my lip. “Have you been there before? Those people are totally nuts.”
The Magician didn’t respond, and I bumped my gaze forward again. “Our firebirds are going into the casino.”
“Indeed.” The Magician smiled. “Fortunately, like many of the older properties in this fair city, the Sahara Casino has been grandfathered into a type of reciprocal arrangement with Luxor.”
I smirked. “Meaning you guys can snack at each other’s buffets?”
“Meaning its technology is automatically fed into Simon’s systems. He has already reported the identity of the trio. The fact that we know their identity is encouraging, as that means they are likely not affiliated with the Shadow Court. We will gain more information about who they are affiliated with once they do something other than float around the pool or play the slot machines.”
“So until then, what? We wait?” I asked.
“In…a manner of speaking, yes.”
He reached for my hand, and a moment later, we were no longer walking down the sizzling-hot Las Vegas Boulevard, but sitting on a private veranda overlooking a vineyard. An actual vineyard, draped in the velvet dusk of a warm and humid evening.
“Nice grapes,” I deadpanned. “Just a little something you picked up?”
“So it would seem.” Armaeus selected a bottle of wine from the cart beside us, pouring the rich ruby liquid into crystal goblets. “Apparently, my family has owned this home since 1758. It is tucked into the Chambord area of France, fairly modest by most accounts, but with a surprising amount of land, which affords it exceptional privacy.”
I nodded, accepting the glass he proffered. “You didn’t know you had it?”
It wasn’t an idle question. Armaeus had recently recovered a swath of memories that had accompanied a surprising amount of real estate he simply had not remembered that he owned. Most of his discoveries were benign, but the sheer number of them was curious. To date, we had uncovered nearly two dozen properties spread out across the world, all of them occupied or at least managed by tenants or caretaking groups. Those maintenance contracts appeared to have been set in perpetuity, which was frankly remarkable considering the changes and governments, socioeconomic conditions, even wars that had occurred in the meantime.
The Magician had taken to bringing me to these discovered properties whenever the two of us needed to talk. It was too strange meeting in the places he remembered in every way except for how I interacted with him there, when I, of course, remembered them more fully. Armaeus’s library and spell room were okay as long as we didn’t go all the way back to where the pit loomed. I’d had some not so savory experiences with that pit. His office was awkward but manageable. His bedroom, not a chance. Even though I longed for the growing physical tension between us to be released, somehow—anyhow—we were proceeding cautiously on that front. Too cautiously, maybe.
Fortunately, the Magician couldn’t read my thoughts. I was one of the few people in the world who held that distinction, and I held on to it with both hands and a foot. He wasn’t an idiot, however, and he could still read my expression and pick up on all the feels I was giving off.
“There’s so much we have to discuss, Miss Wilde,” he said. “Much I want to discuss. But only when you’re ready.”
I sighed. I was never good at discussing my feelings, but I also felt an urgency to get this particular conversation out of the way. It gave us a chance to begin again, in a whole new way, a portion of our relationship that had started out not so favorably the first time around.
I took a long pull on the wine, savoring the rich dark slide of the complex flavors down my throat. I gestured to the tangle of vegetation spread out below us. Far from the usual lines of carefully tended grapevines, this vineyard was more of an overgrown thicket. “Is there a pathway through all that mess?”
He nodded and pointed to the stairs that led down to a small apron of manicured lawn before the vines took over.
“I am given to understand that there is even a gazebo with lights,” he assured me. “However, I have not had the opportunity to investigate this claim myself. Shall we?”
There was no denying the flirtatious undertone to Armaeus’s voice. It was exciting and unnerving and a tiny bit scary, and I fiercely longed not to be re
acting like a fourteen-year-old girl. But as I lifted my glass for another drink, I also couldn’t deny that my hand was shaking. I was ridiculous.
“Sure.” Wineglass in hand, I stood and moved toward the stairs, trotting down them as I peered into the overgrowth. As promised, there was an archway cut into the tangle, cool and inviting. I headed toward it, slowing only slightly as Armaeus reached my side.
This wasn’t a foot race, I reminded myself. This was supposed to be a conversation. But I couldn’t force myself to look at him as I spoke again.
“You still can’t remember me, can you?”
In the hushed closeness of the overgrown vineyard, his words were easy, unapologetic. “I have come to the conclusion that I am not meant to remember you, Miss Wilde. I am meant to rediscover you.”
I closed my eyes for a second, absorbing his comment like a physical blow. Something about those words drove a spear through the hard shell I hadn’t even realized I’d constructed around my heart. I had believed so fiercely that Armaeus would eventually remember me, that the hard work of our shared wins, our messy beginning, and slow understanding of each other would not have been in vain. But this, this was something else again. Something different.
Something better?
I grimaced, forcing myself to push onward. We had to have this talk, I knew. It was well past time. “So, way back in the beginning, we didn’t really start off on the best footing, relationship-wise,” I said. “You were my client, and I didn’t know who I was. I still don’t know, in some ways.”
Armaeus transferred his own wineglass to his left hand and then reached for my hand with his right. The two of us walked deeper into the vineyard, the path clearly marked despite the lengthening shadows. Sure enough, I could see the twinkling of fairy lights ahead and to the right, indicating that a gazebo had, in fact, been constructed in this near-silent idyll. The peace around us was broken only by the soft rush of birds overhead and the hum of insects.
“One could argue that perhaps we are both meant to discover you, then,” he said. “I believe the investigation would be rich with opportunity.”
I pursed my lips, girding myself to speak. But no words came.
Armaeus finally continued. “These are simply words between us, Miss Wilde. Words have no weight, no power that we don’t give them. Speak the ones that lie so heavily on your heart. I sense your hesitation stems mostly from your memories of our first attempt at intimacy?”
I sighed, watching the wine tremble in its glass. “Yeah. You could say that.”
We turned the corner, and the gazebo lay in front of us, a carved Victorian delight complete with padded seating around its ornately detailed railing. Armaeus drew me up the stairs and tugged me to one of the cushioned benches. We sat, and he took my glass of wine away, setting it to the side along with his own. Then he turned back to me, and I realized almost belatedly he had taken both my hands in his.
There was nothing innately magical about his light grasp, and yet the energy that buzzed between us was electric with possibility. “What happened, Miss Wilde?” he asked quietly. “What did I do to you?”
That made me jerk my attention upward, and I met his gaze directly. “You didn’t do anything to me, truly. I wanted your body, your touch, everything you wanted to give me. I just didn’t realize how mind-blowing it all would be. There was so much magic in you, and, I now realize, so much magic in me that I had never fully tapped. When I allowed myself to be vulnerable to you, to lie down beside you in your bed and let your arms close around me…when I fell into your kiss and opened myself to what you could give me…I—well, I couldn’t handle it. I blacked out. Then, when I came to, you were studying me from ten feet away like I was some sort of lab experiment you thought might spontaneously combust. It was mortifying.”
His lips twisted into a smile. “I’m sure you are mistaken about my expression.”
“Trust me, I’m not. It’s your favorite expression. But I was still embarrassed. It took me a while after that to be willing to connect with you again. You were fascinated by me, I think, because you realized why I had blacked out. You sensed the underlying ability within me that I wasn’t fully accessing, and you wanted me to access it. So you didn’t give up trying.”
He chuckled. “I suspect there was more than a simple academic interest in your abilities behind my desire for you.”
“Yeah, well…” I flushed and dropped my gaze again, staring at our clasped hands.
“There certainly is more than an academic interest behind it right now, Miss Wilde.”
I glanced up, and if I hadn’t become used to the force of the Magician’s gaze, it would’ve blasted me all the way back to Las Vegas. There was a question in his dark and fathomless eyes, their ebony depths ringed with gold, a question in the curve of his lips, that didn’t need to be spoken—but I nodded anyway.
“Yes,” I murmured.
He leaned forward to brush his lips against mine.
Time didn’t just slip away, it fully fractured. Lost in the Magician’s touch, I only vaguely sensed his hands coming up to lie gently on either side of my face as his kiss deepened, fully consuming my every sense. My mind went cartwheeling through space and time, my heart surged with relief and joy and surprisingly—pain, breathtaking and magnificent pain, to be once more in the Magician’s arms. Every nerve ending in my body flared to life with a pleasure so acute, it transcended any sense at all and became a force unto itself, a live wire of sparking possibility.
I gasped at the immense and absolute knowing of how much I had missed about the Magician, how much I’d never truly grasped, and how much was left before us to explore. Because now we were on equal footing, or perhaps better stated, now I understood there was no inequality between us. There was only strength matched up to strength, weakness matched up to weakness, light matched up to shadow in equal measure. And I saw a glimpse, the barest glimpse, of an arcane and wild darkness, a feral, raging joy deep within the Magician’s heart. As I watched, transfixed, it exploded in a dance of death and fire, bursting forth, consuming itself, then raging once again, over and over. It was glorious and terrifying and—
I pulled myself away, gasping. And I blinked around, realizing something was gravely different. “Um…why is it so dark?”
The Magician sat ramrod straight beside me, his eyes practically burning in the gloom, embers of gold crackling in the blackened deaths. When he spoke, it was as if his voice was emanating from a place far, far away.
“Four hours,” he rasped. “Four hours we lost in our connection—and it was only a kiss. Four hours, Miss Wilde. That shouldn’t be…”
My phone blared in my pocket, startling enough that we both jumped. I yanked it out, not sure if I was panicked or irritated with the interruption, even after I realized it was Brody calling.
“What?” I snapped.
He didn’t hesitate. “You busy?”
“Extremely.”
“Yeah, well. We’ve got a problem with your name all over it. Stratosphere casino, drunk and disorderly, women dancing on tabletops, never mind it’s barely four o’clock—that kind of problem.”
I scowled, lifting my brows as Armaeus watched me with an interest that was becoming markedly less carnal by the second, damn Brody’s eyes. “I don’t see how that could be my problem. Was anybody shooting fireballs? Attacking a Connected? Zapping each other to death with mystical light shows?”
“Nope,” Brody said. “But it’s still your problem. One of the people on the bar top is Amy Franks Bucher. You remember Amy Franks, don’t you?”
I began to get a bad feeling about this. Amy Franks had been a blonde-haired, blue-eyed sweetheart of a girl who’d been Mary Clemson’s pinkie-swearing bestie. “Ahh, a little, sure. I figured I’d meet her again this weekend at the stupid reunion.”
“Yeah, well, the party’s already started, and you were most definitely invited. Lucky for everyone, Sariah answered the call. From everything I’m hearing, she’s way more fun
than you are.”
“Oh, for the love of—”
I crackled into nothingness, heading for the Stratosphere.
11
I wasn’t as familiar with the Stratosphere as I was with many of the other Las Vegas casinos, but I still had plenty of bad memories from the place. Finding it was no problem.
The house music raged several decibels higher than seemed reasonable for the time of day as I appeared at the front doors to the Sky Lounge. Given how packed the place was, no one apparently seemed to mind the noise. Far below, deep within the bowels of the casino, I could almost hear the clanging bells and raucous, tinny music of the slot machines, but all these floors above, it was utter chaos. I stepped inside the lounge, peering into the semidarkness. If Sariah was involved, there was little doubt as to where she would be. I headed straight for the bar—and ran straight into my doppelgänger. Whose hair was…wet.
“Yo, it’s about time you showed up,” Sariah announced, grabbing me and yanking me to the side to clear the path for a bachelorette conga line, complete with tiaras and sashes. “Your old friends are batshit crazy.”
I glared at her. Sariah and I had a complicated history, but we’d started out as the same person a long time ago. “My old friends? You know these people as well as I do, and I’m not the one who apparently was going Coyote Ugly on the bar in the middle of the freaking afternoon. What the hell is wrong with you? And why do you reek of beer?”
She grinned, flicking a soaked strand of hair over one shoulder. “You should see the other guy. More to the point, I remember Mary Clemson as being nothing but pigtails, pink cheeks, and cheerleading uniforms, don’t you? I had no idea she could throw back that much tequila.”