by Jenn Stark
“As long as they lay off the shock and awe after this. It’ll get tedious really fast if every time they check in, it’s with a flame thrower.”
It took us another half hour to reach the lakeside house, Ma-Singh apparently taking no chances with us being followed. I caught sight of three identical limos keeping pace with us at one point or another during the ride, before sheering off. I had a feeling those limos would be heading to Soo’s other residences in the city, maybe even the Palazzo. Hopefully one of them would go fetch Nikki as well. And, Brody was definitely going to need a new fleet car.
“Have any chatter on Detective Rooks monitored,” I said, stifling a yawn. “If he ends up in the hospital, I want to know immediately.”
“He didn’t look like he had any intention of slowing down.”
“I know. And I am almost certain he’s okay, but…that anger. I didn’t do that, Ma-Singh. That’s not about me.”
The general was wise enough to accept my concern at face value. “We’ll inform you immediately. In the meantime, it’s nearly four a.m., and you haven’t slept. That seems unwise.”
“That seems very unwise,” I agreed. “I could easily drop off right here in the car if we’re not home soon.”
But even as I said that, the car slowed, and I peered through the windows to see us turning up the long, winding lane to the mansion. In another few minutes, I’d stumbled into what was quickly becoming my bedroom—the master suite of the mansion, set off from the others, with three separate entrances, each of them now under armed guard. For the moment, I actually welcomed their cover, for all that it was overkill. All I wanted to do was drop into a deep and nerveless sleep.
And so of course, I didn’t.
The nightmare started almost immediately, announcing itself with all the finesse of the Myrmidons. I sank into the deep, plush mattress of my bed—and kept falling, plummeting really, a free fall punctuated by sudden vicious bounces off obstructions I couldn’t see and had no way of avoiding in the dark. There were jagged walls and what seemed like flying boulders, each of them catching me unawares before I’d even fully recovered from the last, banging me to either side, every old wound I’d ever thought about enduring opening up to scream in pain at each new assault.
When I finally crashed into the ground, I lay there, whimpering, my eyes blinking open. I didn’t think you were supposed to feel this level of pain in a dream, and surely this had to be a dream. The landscape that stretched out before me was little more than a crust of earth over rocks, and I clearly hadn’t been the first person here. Giant swaths of old blood and new corpses littered the space, men and women alike, all of them dressed in skins and heavy cloth surrounded by their broken spears.
Spears. That seemed…like a bad thing.
Slowly, painfully, I pulled myself to a seated position, trying to take stock. There were others than the dead here, I realized, but they were far off, moving in a long snaking line toward the horizon. Their march was not one of victory, but neither was it one of retreat. It reeked of desolation even at this distance. So many men and women lost, so much death. So much anger to lay at the feet of the gods.
I frowned, looking up in sudden comprehension. This—maybe it wasn’t the fight that had given the House of Wands their Myrmidon name, but it might as well have been. It was a fight that had been brought to them not by a rival tribe or power, but by men and women fighting in service to their gods.
“You!” Without warning, a new burst of pain blossomed through me, and I lurched forward, the wind knocked out of me as something hard and abrupt was shoved against my back. My brain couldn’t process it at first, but I quickly realized it was a kick. More kicks followed, savage and punishing. I curled into a ball, desperate with pain, fear, confusion, until another voice shouted out, a male voice, and the kicking stopped.
I rolled over, barely able to breathe, certain that every one of my ribs had been cracked. I spit out a tooth and more blood, and peered up at my new tormentor.
For I knew instantly that was what he was. He stood taller than the others, his face lean, his skin tanned to a ruddy bronze. Like the first man I’d met from the House of Wands, he had the cast of a Pacific Islander to his features, but it was his eyes that seemed to hold all his energy, two fiery orbs that glared down at me as if I was the affront, as if I was the cause of all these problems.
“You dare to come here, goddess, to see the ruin your wrath has caused?” he growled at me, and there was nothing but disdain in his voice. He fairly spat the words, and then he spat in earnest, a huge gobbet of muck hitting me square in the chest. I ignored it, pretty sure I was in the process of swallowing one of my own teeth. “I should skewer you on a spit and roast you, waiting only for you to heal before plunging you into the fire once more.”
At this, his men—women too, I realized with misplaced horror, as if any of these savages were capable of anything other than hate—roared with delight.
He leaned down toward me. “Tell me, can an immortal regain her form if she’s been cut up and eaten? Can you tell me that?”
I stared at him, words bubbling up in my throat, frantic denials that I wasn’t who he thought I was at all, that there’d been some mistake, some terrible mistake, that we had only sought to help, to support! And that humankind itself had turned on each other in our name, humans and their petty wars and jealousies and vices and needs.
I dared not speak of course, but it didn’t seem to matter. Enough of my thoughts must have been plain on my face, because the man reached down with one gauntleted hand and struck me, hard, driving my face to the side with such a jerk, I felt my spine twist dangerously, scraping against my already broken bones.
“You come down to survey the wreckage you have caused, but you are the wreckage, goddess. You are the pain and the sorrow. And we will hunt you down. All of you. From the lowest of your children to the most exalted of your lords, we will find you and stuff you back into the darkness from which you sprang. You will never escape to rule us again.”
He grinned at whatever he saw in my eyes, whether it was the confusion, the pain, or my own sudden longing for death, an emotion I’d never felt before, all the more sickening because it was to be denied me.
“No.” He leered. “Darkness would not be good enough for you. Not complete darkness. Your eyes we will take for our dogs to fight over. Your heart we will drain and set on fire. Your bones we will break and give to our children to dig with in the dirt. And we will watch you burn in our campfires, grind your stomach and your unholy womb beneath our heels. You may not ever die, but never shall you return again, either, you blasted whore, to suckle from humanity your pathetic existence. Never shall you breathe again the fresh air of mortals. On this we swear an oath so strong that it shall never be broken.”
And with that, his hands rose up, an axe suddenly in his grip, but an axe like nothing I had ever seen before.
“Wait!” I screamed, my hands lifting, lifting though I could barely force the words past my cracked and bloody lips. “Wait—who am I? Who am I?”
The Denounced was all I could hear in my mind, over and over, riddling through. The Denounced, the Denounced. I was so sure, so certain, that it crowded out all other thoughts. For surely I had to be a creature so vile, so horrifying, that it could only be someone known as The Denounced.
But the man wielding the axe just laughed. He dropped it with a huge and sickening thrust, its rough edge ripping through me, separating my shoulder from my torso, the new wave of pain fresh and raw and sickening.
“Suffer eternally, you undying bitch,” he growled. “You will rule as Hera no more.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I couldn’t get warm.
Sitting beneath the covered patio in the desert morning, I took in the men and women seated around me, all of them in light summer gear, their discomfort mitigated only by the fans and the scant breeze lifting on the air. I, on the other hand, was buried deep beneath a larg
e colorfully woven blanket, its bulk doing nothing to pull the clammy sheen of sweat from my skin.
“You should not be here,” Ma-Singh growled. “You are sick.”
“I’m fine,” I gritted out. Since awakening in the middle of the night with the dream whose horror had not yet left me, I hadn’t been willing to spend any more time alone. I’d even reached out to Armaeus but, strangely, he’d remained silent. Whether I’d unnerved him with our last conversation or he was simply on goddess duty, I didn’t know, but he wasn’t responding to me.
Goddess duty. I shivered. I had no idea if what I’d seen in my dream was true, or if I was being misled by my own brain, but it had felt real. I didn’t want to believe it, though. Moreover, I’d seen the field of death and destruction that the man who’d taken the axe to me had clearly blamed me for. I’d seen the ravaged faces, the sightless eyes. I’d felt the weight of that responsibility in such a clear and present way that there was no doubt in my mind that, regardless of what was truth, this man had believed that he was acting in good faith. He’d believed that killing me was the only way to save mankind. He’d believed…
And now we’d brought that same goddess back into the world.
It hadn’t even been difficult.
There’d been no fanfare, no eighteen-step extraction plan. Armaeus had asked me to go to an island, and I’d simply…gone.
My mind skittered and sheered around this information. Had Armaeus known? He was the Magician, how could he not know? And yet, he’d needed the Hierophant to share the story of Hera’s banishment behind the veil—a story so sanitized as to be unrecognizable from what I’d experienced last night. Was this full truth of what had happened to Hera—to all the gods—still carried in the vault of the Hierophant’s mind?
What was Armaeus doing?
“Madame Wilde.” Ma-Singh’s voice was not disapproving, but it was insistent. I blinked heavily, refocusing on him.
“Sorry,” I rasped, and as one, the assembled group flinched. These battle-hardened men and women were now staring at me with open apprehension, and with a sudden clearing of my mind, I realized how I must look to them. Not good.
And that wasn’t the game here. They couldn’t see me as a weak and febrile mortal. They needed me to appear the way they’d always seen Madame Soo. Strong, confident, in control. No matter that I was dealing with a whole lot of crap Madame Soo had never even imagined encountering. That was completely beside the point.
I straightened painfully in my chair and made up my mind. To my right, Nikki sat watching me with an expression so stoic, it was almost laughable, but I’d done that to her too. She could not show weakness. Up to this point, I’d been doing that enough for the both of us.
“It’s time,” I said to Ma-Singh. “I’m ready.”
That made the general stiffen, patently lost for a split second at what I was asking. And then satisfied certainty came over his face. An act, but a good one. He was my first general, and he would follow me beyond the veil if I asked him to. But he wouldn’t need to go that far. None of them would, I resolved.
Resolutely, I shifted out of the blanket, letting it fall from my shoulders to pool in a damp heap around me. I wore a simple sleeveless shirt beneath and dark pants, and I slipped my feet free of my shoes to settle them on the stone patio. I could feel the earth pulsing beneath me, and I took comfort in that. It would help with the demonstration.
I held the eyes of the generals and carried on the charade. “I’ve allowed myself to weaken so you would see me faltering and frail. As you may see me in the coming battle. I can be harmed. I can be killed. I can sicken and tire. But I need you to focus on your own people, your own missions, and not be distracted by me. No matter how weak or compromised I appear. No matter how threatened or chased or downtrodden. Because I have an advantage that you do not, and I will not see you risk your lives for me, when you have other work to do.
One of the older generals straightened, and I saw worry in his face. “You are sick, Madame Wilde. Ma-Singh has told us of the effort you expended on the behalf of others. You owe us no explanation.”
“No,” I said. “I owe you this.” I placed my hands on the table, grateful for its thick wooden construction, its legs driven into the ground to become one with the earth beneath it. When I drew in a breath, it did not merely fill my lungs with oxygen, it drew the energy of that earth toward me, filling me up, making me as the rock and the sand and the distant water, the even more distant sky. I allowed my third eye to flicker open, only instead of peering outward, I looked inward, picking my way through the complex patterns that swirled within me, networks of electricity that had reached perfect order during the shift I’d made to immortality. For that was all that immortality was, the human body in its natural, perfect order. Nothing out of sync, nothing out of place.
I found the disruptions to that perfection easily, once I gave myself over to the pursuit of healing, and though before I’d been tentative, even apologetic for manipulating these connections in other people, in myself I was ruthless in my speed and ferocity. The energy had to be righted, the balance restored, and I ripped along the neural pathways like a wasting fire, cauterizing and stamping out any weakness I found.
The entire process took about a minute, and I could feel the sweat pouring off me distantly, even as I sensed the color returning to my skin, the sharpness to my focus. In another ten seconds, I snapped my eyes open, meeting the startled gazes of the men and women around me.
“Madame Wilde,” Ma-Singh said gruffly. He stood at my side and offered his hand to lift me out of the chair. I took it, bowing to him, then turning to face the generals once more.
“You cannot and will not waste your time protecting me, unless we are in battle side by side,” I said again. “My path is not your path, and your obligation is first to the House. Understood?”
I stopped short of making them pinkie swear, but I was pretty sure they got the picture. Even Ma-Singh looked a little queasy at the transformation to my skin, my eyes, my manner. Nikki merely stared back at me, watching and waiting. I half suspected she thought I’d keel over, but I needed to keep focused.
“We will be summoning the four Houses for a meeting on neutral territory,” I said. “Not here.” I didn’t bother explaining why, but the horizon was clear, both figuratively and literally, beyond the borders of Las Vegas. There would be no terrible storm to combat.
I looked at Ma-Singh. “What’s the report we have on the weather disturbances? Where are the worst?”
“Tokyo, New York, London.”
I nodded. “And the worst of those?”
“Appears to be London. There are two fronts opening, both expected to shift away, but if they move in the wrong direction and converge, it will be the most damaging combination by far. And one of them,” he frowned, “is moving south, and shouldn’t be, based on typical weather patterns. We think it’s being pulled by some energy, instead of pushed by winds as usual.”
“London, then. A place to start, and central location between the others, more or less. What properties do we have in London?”
He didn’t hesitate. “There are three. The most central and largest is on the Thames, an office building facing Jubilee Gardens. You own the top three floors.”
I nodded. “Very well. That’s where it will be. Mercault is still in France?”
“He is. Keeping very quiet.”
“Summon him with a gilded invitation and an armed escort. Only him. His men aren’t trained enough in the kind of skills we’ll need. Make sure he doesn’t reach out to Gamon.” I blew out a breath, considering. “I’ll want to handle that myself.”
At hearing the name Gamon, the generals all stiffened, their anger palpable as Ma-Singh scowled.
“She has a personal vendetta against you, Madame Wilde. She responds to military might, and the House of Swords has defied her many times over the years.”
I grimaced. One of the Swords’ own genera
ls had been Gamon’s stooge, and I wasn’t comfortable with how she would receive the others. Before I could respond, though, Nikki spoke up. “Send Kreios.”
“Kreios?” I turned and looked at her with surprise. “We don’t need the Council to do our work for us.”
“But we don’t need to waste a resource either. And that’s how we should look at the Council—as a resource. More to the point, the Council has ignored Gamon for decades now. She’s proven herself to be a sucker for power, with her decision to go after first the House of Swords, then the House of Cups. She also has a thing for goddesses, if her recent attempts to pull down Vigilance is any indication. Kreios will cater to her vanity, and she won’t be able to get the upper hand. Plus, he’s close by. He can escort her personally to wherever we need her to go.”
I thought about that. Kreios had seemed particularly off-kilter when I’d seen him last. Maybe he was bored, maybe he needed distraction. Either way, him meeting Gamon was something I wished mightily I’d be able to watch myself. “It’s a good idea.”
“And the House of Wands?” asked Ma-Singh.
“Definitely not the Council.” I made the statement with such authority that several of the generals blinked at me, but healed or not, I wasn’t going to be forgetting that dream anytime soon. “The House of Wands has only come out of hiding in recent days, without reason. A likely possibility is the arrival of Hera as Empress-elect, as they have a long and entrenched enmity with her. I suspect they’ll agree to anything if they think it will give them access to her, especially if that access results in her banishment beyond the veil once more. That said, we still need their help. The four Houses together enabled humankind to banish the gods the first time around, along with the help of the Council. The House of Wands has remained intact since then. They’ll know how to do it again.”