Call of the Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  “You are the epitome of all that is corrupt and evil and, worse than that, stupid in this world. Do you think of magic as an inexhaustible supply, never to be tapped out? You are poisoning the very wellspring of that which you expect to grant you world domination.” He didn’t shout the words, but he didn’t have to. Rangi’s inside voice had the power to make rocks tumble on clifftops a thousand miles away.

  Gamon wasn’t giving him any quarter. “Big words coming from a sniveling wreck of a man who preferred to hide for the last untold millennia than to stand and declare himself. You and all your money and your gold, what has it brought you? What is the point of wealth if you can’t spend it, or power if you can’t wield it!”

  Behind each of these camps stood their men. Mercault’s looked like the mercenaries they were, dour and focused. Gamon’s looked like they’d just as quickly kill everyone in the room for fun as remain standing in their tight formation. Mine looked like they were watching a business meeting. Rangi’s, of course, were currently running around the Jubilee Gardens, trying not to be noticed as they completed their pre-work for blasting gods back to the stratosphere.

  The uproar stopped abruptly as I entered, and Gamon wheeled on me. She was looking surprisingly good for having been served up as chicken-fried witch only a few days ago.

  “About time,” she spat.

  But that was all she said. And Mercault pivoted toward me, his eyes wide, his face cowed. I didn’t like to see that expression on his face, frankly. Mercault could only do servile for so long before his natural cunning demanded to reassert itself. But I needed him—needed them all—for another few hours. After that, they could scatter to the four corners of the earth once more while I figured out how to handle cleanup.

  Rangi turned as well, but the argument seemed to invigorate, rather than deplete him. “Madame Wilde,” he began, bowing his head. “My men are on the ground.”

  “On the ground where?” Gamon snapped. “Just what is happening here?”

  “First, there are a few things you should know.” I made this statement without shouting, without even particular inflection. Gamon, Mercault, and even Rangi stilled, though I’d already made this speech to him.

  “We come together today for a single reason: to block the entry of gods to our world. That’s it.” Gamon looked mulish, Mercault aghast. Rangi merely watched me, silent.

  “Rangi has done it before, so he gets to say who goes where and does what. But Rangi has a vendetta against the Council.” Rangi stiffened, but I held Gamon’s gaze. “While you have a…friendship with one of the gods trying to break through.”

  She curled her lip. “Not a friendship,” she said flatly. Maybe she did remember those burns a little more than I thought.

  “And you,” I said to Mercault, “would welcome help from god or Council or a little green man from Mars if it would stop people interfering in your drug trade. We all have our issues. So I’ve put precautions in place.” I stared at them, one by one. “You attack any of the Houses or their generals, you will be incinerated.” In the corner of my eye, I saw Gamon flinch. Good. “You fail to hold your place, you will be incinerated.” I flicked my gaze to Rangi. “You attack any members of the Council, you will be incinerated. And so will your generals.”

  This last carried more weight with him than the assault on his person. Whatever worked.

  Outside, the storm howled. “Everyone clear on that?” I raised my hand.

  There was silence, and then, one by one, the other three House leaders raised their hands.

  “Good.” I nodded to Rangi, and he leaned forward.

  “This,” he said, “is how you banish a god.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  By the time we made it out onto the grounds of Jubilee Gardens, the weather had turned eerily mellow. There was no denying the storm brewing on the horizon, and the skies above us had turned a murky deep red. The rain had stopped and even the wind had died to an ominous swirl, rustling the trees as the lightning crackled on two sides of London. Throughout the city, sirens blared and traffic rushed. There were only a few media vans positioned on the corner of the gardens. No one knew where the storm would hit, precisely, and I got the feeling the news organizations were trying to spread their resources intelligently. On the far edge of the park, near the London Eye, I could just make out a man holding his raincoat against the scattering of rain and stiff wind, his muscular body and bald pate distinctive even at this distance.

  “Oh my God,” Nikki breathed beside me. “That’s Jim Cantore from the Weather Channel out there. This storm is not fooling around.”

  I snorted. Beside me, Mercault was staring dourly out at the rain from beneath the shelter of a bus stop, the closest we could find to cover for him at this corner of the park. Gamon and Rangi had already taken off for their corners. Presumably the Magician and whatever Council members he needed were closeted away nearby. They had to remain cloaked until the last moment, and I suspected they’d holed up in the clock tower of Big Ben—or Elizabeth Tower, if you wanted to be precise. While the 315-foot tower was technically shorter than the London Eye, it had the advantage of being stable. And tall. And most assuredly empty. Given the storm currently bearing down on London, nobody had any interest in being anywhere that high up to watch it, if they could avoid it. Unless they were Jim Cantore, anyway.

  “You are foolish to trust Gamon.” Mercault spoke the words quietly, and with a gravitas I didn’t expect. I handed him one of the four linked over-the-ear radios the Houses would be using. For what we were about to do, the House generals weren’t going to be of much use, but they stood nearby to protect their leaders, if nothing else.

  “I appreciate the heads-up. You wear this headset, you repeat what Rangi says, and you keep repeating it.” I held up the flat coins next. “Hold these in your right hand, and don’t drop them. They’re mostly for ceremony, but they’ll also keep you safe. If you drop them, expect to be electrocuted. If you survive that, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.” I glared at him. “Got it?”

  “She will betray you,” Mercault said, his gaze remaining steady. He took the coins and continued, as if we were discussing logistics, though he kept his voice low. “There are only two types of people in this world, for Gamon. Those who can be used and those who are threats.”

  “Let me guess which one you are.”

  He shrugged. “By careful design. I can’t turn back the river, I can only move around it or, when necessary, through it. When Gamon advised me she had become House leader for Cups, there was no moving around her, and no way to avoid getting wet. So I became weaker the stronger she railed, and I am still alive for my troubles. You are alive because you are both useful and a threat to her.”

  I made a face. “And I could kick her ass.”

  “Perhaps…but perhaps not. Do not deceive yourself that she feels any gratitude for your healing of her broken body. In her opinion, you caused those burns more directly than the goddess did. But the goddess did not protect her, and so she is unsure as to what will come through the hole in the veil, friend or foe.”

  My next question was harder than I wanted it to be to ask, but I couldn’t not know. “Is it her or one of her people who’ve summoned the gods?”

  “No,” Mercault said, surprising me with his certainty. “Gamon is not yet prepared to confront a goddess, not while she is so weak. It’s not to her advantage. She will wait until she is on more equal footing. Until that time, you remain useful. The moment she regains her full strength, however, you return to being merely a threat. She will most likely kill Rangi first, then you.”

  “But you’re still going to be safe from her?”

  For the first time in longer than I could remember, Mercault gave me an honest smile. “I am never going to be safe from her, no. But I will be that much further ahead. If Gamon does succeed in killing you, she will have the Council to answer to. When that happens, I will have all the space I need to return to my
own business interests.” He brightened further. “That said, I would mourn your passing. So, by all means, do not die merely to make my life easier, d’accord?”

  Despite myself, I chuckled. “I’ll do my best.”

  Approaching Gamon a few minutes later, I found myself considering Mercault’s words in a new light. Gamon’s black uniform was now damp with rain, her generals spread out in a wide net, not clustered around her like Mercault’s. Each of them was armed to the teeth—with automatic weapons that I could see, and I was sure tactical blades I could not. Gamon herself had laid her gun to the side as I approached, and she held out her hand impatiently, her cold gray eyes betraying nothing.

  “You don’t need to repeat the instructions,” she said. “I will not drop the coins, and the radio will relay the rite at the appropriate time.”

  I handed her the coins. “You fail and you die.”

  “Convenient.” She smiled, showing all teeth. “As you will die whether we succeed or fail. Or had you not considered the reality of having Tezcatlipoca walk the earth a second time?”

  “What makes you think she’ll suffer you to live either?”

  “Because I went after her,” Gamon replied immediately. “You didn’t. You rejected her, and if there’s one things the gods cannot abide, it’s that rejection. And think about it, you’re her own daughter.” She said the word with a mixture of reverence and mockery. “Your blood is infused with her power, her godhead, and you turned your back on her when she called you to your duty.”

  I peered at her more closely. “Did I miss a few circuits when I healed you? Because I’m happy to give it another go.”

  I lifted my hand, and Gamon flinched back, her anger mounting as I couldn’t quite hide my smirk.

  “You would have done better to let me continue underestimating you,” she said darkly. “Your pride and your foolish belief in the Council will be your undoing.”

  “We good here?” I asked her as she glanced down at the flat gray coins in her hand. They reeked with age but not particular value. They looked like pennies from a long-ago era, the kind of coins you’d put on the eyes of a dead person to usher them into their eternal sleep. Fitting, I supposed.

  I drew in a deep breath. “Gamon, you’ve got more power than Mercault by a long shot, maybe more than Rangi, depending on what you’ve got rolling around in your system right now. But the game here is, apparently, balance. Don’t try to blow their circuits. You’ll tap yourself out, and that’s not going to help anyone.” I didn’t bother sharing my concern about how well she’d truly healed. That would have fallen on deaf ears, and I didn’t have time.

  To my surprise, Gamon merely nodded, her gaze now on the sky. “Go to Rangi and take your position,” she said, her voice clipped. “I feel like our timeline is moving up.”

  I glanced up and felt it too. The sense of fraught, increasing urgency.

  A mass of thunderheads had begun to gather over the city, not particularly heading toward Jubilee Gardens, but close enough. Every bad movie cliché I’d ever seen for the end of the world was beginning to crowd in my head, and none of it was helpful. I simply couldn’t imagine what this rift was going to look like when it happened—a literal tear in the fabric of the sky, with a giant paw poking through? I’d experienced three entries so far of entities from beyond the veil, and they all had been the sudden, in-your-face appearance of beings clearly not of this world. Would that be the case here, as well? It had to be. Llyr had pushed through the veil bodily, landing in the Bellagio fountains and nearly clawing his way out before Armaeus had blocked him. My mother had slipped through a crack Gamon had wedged open, and Hera…

  “Madame Wilde, you must focus.”

  The admonition came from my radio, not anyone in front of me. Rangi. I looked up, frowning. I was almost to my position. I ducked beneath a large tree, pressing myself against the bark to avoid the worst of the rain.

  I tapped the earpiece of my radio, knowing the circuit was open to the four Houses—and Nikki, of course, who also carried a unit.

  “What kind of visual are we looking for, Rangi?” I asked. “A rip or a hole? A burst of light? An eclipse would be a little pointless, given the cloud cover.”

  Rangi hesitated. “Manifestations vary depending on the god or goddess. If, as you say, there are multiple gods seeking to make entrance, that will change its appearance.”

  Gamon groaned over the radio. “So in other words, you don’t know. They could show up with enough firepower to blow up half this city, and we’ll be caught completely off guard.”

  “Not completely,” I said, looking up. I flicked my third eye open. Instantly, the web of energy encircling the world presented itself to me, the net decidedly bowing downward over Jubilee Gardens. It was an obvious point of strain, but for the first time, I realized what that strain actually looked like in the veil.

  The electrical circuits were still there, pulsing and radiant, but in the section of the veil over the park—over this entire area of London. Those currents were decidedly dimmer, sparking more faintly than the circuits around them. It was as if a section of Christmas lights had gone out in the middle of the tree, nothing left but dull amber flickers in a sea of sparkling white pinpoints. With such a relatively dark section, it was no wonder that the gods could see down into this earth they’d loved and lost so long ago.

  So it wasn’t a matter of cutting a hole through the veil at all, it was merely pushing through it at a place where you thought you could. That was all it took. Belief.

  Belief…and a summons.

  “What did they look like when they were banished?” I asked Rangi. “The gods—at the fall of Atlantis. Did they change form before they vanished beyond the veil?”

  “Their forms do not change,” Rangi replied over the radio. “They remain as they ever did, merely trapped in—”

  “I’m not buying that. There had to be something taken away from them, something big, to ensure that they remained behind the veil. Otherwise they would have come back through under their own power.”

  “Madame Wilde.” Mercault’s voice crackled over the radio now, panicked. “There’s a change above me. Can you see it?”

  I turned toward Mercault’s corner of the gardens, first looking with my ordinary vision to see the angry, boiling cloud that was spinning above Mercault, like meringue spilling out of a mixing bowl. Then I peered up with my third eye, and frowned. The veil held strong there. The issue, however, was more in the center of the park, where the already fragmented circuits had begun growing ever dimmer.

  “I got you, Mercault,” I said anyway, because he couldn’t see what I could, could only see the runoff from the energy that was building behind the broken parts of the veil. “Rangi?”

  “The rite was created in a language not spoken outside the House of Wands since the fall,” Rangi said. “It translates loosely to ‘stripped and torn asunder, banished by your own hand.’ You don’t have to understand the words I give you, but you must hold that sentiment in your mind. That the gods being turned back is an act of their own doing, brought about by their own hand, by their own—”

  “Will,” I said, my heart quickening. “Their own will. That’s what they lose, why they don’t see earth until the veil is torn before them. That’s why they only appear when they’re called.”

  “What?” Mercault demanded, his voice rising in panic. “What are you talking about?”

  But my mind was working furiously as I turned, and turned again. My mother had come through the veil at the behest of Gamon. Demons, sprites, fae, ghosts—whatever spectral creature you could think of, all of them had to be summoned to this earth. They could not enter on their own, even if they were positioned right in front of a rip in the veil.

  But what had happened in the Norwegian Sea to put all this in motion? Who had disrupted the atmosphere enough to create the storm that was now racing toward us, poised to compromise the veil completely?

  Wh
o had risked humanity’s freedom, in a gamble to free the gods?

  It could only be a Connected of tremendous power, who possessed deep and assured knowledge of everything we were facing here today. A Connected who’d remained one step ahead of me at every turn. A Connected we’d run out of time to find.

  “Now!” Rangi cried.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The heavens met Rangi’s cry with a torrent of rain and a blast of lightning so strong it set the world ablaze for a long, protracted moment, the unexpected brightening so foreign that it was more shocking than it should have been—and not just to me. What seemed like a collective wail went up from the buildings around the park. I squinted up through the rain and realized that while plenty of Londoners and tourists had left the area altogether, far too many more had simply fled like beetles to the nearest buildings, and were now lining the windows and staring out at the storm half in wonder, half in fear.

  I’d seen that reaction before when the gods were close at hand. Too many mortals did far too good a job at simply freezing up, ready to be subjugated by a force they perceived as larger than themselves.

  Thunder didn’t roll across the sky so much as stomp down on it, and the clouds seemed to drop a hundred feet closer to the city, the sound loud enough to send a new torrent of screams up from the spectators. Distantly, sirens began to blare and horns honked furiously, as if in human defiance to nature’s display.

  Another crackle of lightning, and half the city went dark. Fantastic.

  “Wilde!” The voice was female, Gamon, and I realized belatedly that Rangi had asked a question of the group.

  “Yes—I’m ready,” I said, planting my feet firmly on the ground, the coins in my left hand, the radio over my ear, my right hand lifting up. Rangi hadn’t stipulated that we needed to do anything specific with our hands. Some warriors folded them over, as if in prayer, he’d said, some held them to their hearts, some pounded them toward the sky. I was definitely Team Pound.