by Jenn Stark
Instead, I glared at Rangi, an inkling of the truth finally hitting me as I took in his wild, triumphant face. “Why’d you do it, Rangi?” I asked him, more as a guess than an accusation. “What did you need?”
He snapped his gaze to mine, his lip curling in mockery. “You have no power over me—”
“You’re wrong.”
I lifted a hand even as the ancient warrior of the Myrmidons burst toward me, and he froze in place, only his enraged eyes able to track me as I approached him.
“This little exercise has blasted us all to the next level, hasn’t it,” I said quietly, the words not a question. He didn’t respond. “Only you forgot something important. I’d already been blasted up a few notches, all on my own. So while you may all be experiencing the full flower of your abilities, I’m a freaking garden market. I could crush you all.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” he breathed, fighting against the constriction I’d laid upon him. “The power of the Houses is the only thing that can banish the gods anew, once they’ve done their work.”
Done their work? “I knew it.” Sickness roiled through me. “You did this.”
“The Council did this,” he retorted. “Bad enough that the Magician disturbed the archangel from his place in Hell. His actions to inspire the summoning of Hera was an act of betrayal to all of humanity. Countermeasures had to be taken, and they have.” Rangi eyed me like a conquering hero, impressive since he was still frozen in place. “We are stronger now, all of us, because we acted to propel the invading gods beyond the veil.”
“It’s a side effect from the act of banishment,” I realized aloud. “We weren’t amped by the Magician’s powers at all. We were amped by what that magic was used for.”
“Which he doesn’t need to know,” Rangi said darkly. “The less he uses his magic in this world, the better. The only thing that has curtailed him is his lip service to balance, thinking that if he overreaches, he’ll unintentionally trigger the abilities of mere mortals.” Despite the thrall I held him in, he managed to curl his lip. “But now that all will change. Now with the support of our own great god, the House of Wands can stand proudly again.”
“The support of your…” I frowned at him, then my eyes flared wide, my glance instinctively going back to the skies. There was no more evidence of the tear in the veil, no more evidence of the veil at all. Llyr, Lilith, the other bulky forms behind them…all of those had been banished.
But there’d been that shimmering breeze.
“Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no,” I said, lifting my hands to my ears as if to ward off Rangi’s words. “Do not tell me you actually succeeded in your summons.”
“To combat the goddess of death and misery?” he glowered. “I would have done far worse.”
“But I would have helped you build your army. Besides, you pledged to close the veil! Your entire existence has been dedicated to banishing the gods, not welcoming them with open arms.”
“My people were dying,” Rangi snarled back. “Dying, after all that we had done to survive and protect the people of earth. I could not allow that. In my place, you would do the same.”
“In your…place…” I was having trouble breathing. I could hear the voice of Armaeus searching for me, but distantly—so distantly. I was able to hold him at bay in a way I hadn’t been able to before, even I could tell. And if I could tell…he undoubtedly could too.
I couldn’t focus on that right now. “You don’t really expect me to believe you brought Zeus down to hatch a new group of ant men for you, do you?”
“Not ant men,” he retorted. “That infernal myth was planted by Hera and has haunted us throughout the millennia, no sooner vanquished than resurrected again by a new generation of overeager historians. Zeus never created men from ants, nor had our princess lain with an ant, of all the infernal things, to give birth to our people. The very thought is disgusting.”
“So what did he do?” Despite myself, I found my gaze searching the heavens again, looking for that shimmering mist. “And what is it you expect him to do now?”
“Exactly what we would have asked you to help us with, had we failed here today. But we didn’t fail. And so it will be Zeus conducting the Conversion. The Awakening.” Rangi sighed with something akin to awe. “The transformation of warriors who will close their eyes at night committed to their separate causes, and then open them in the morning dedicated to the House of Wands. A hundred fighting soldiers pledged to our war, each of them with their innate magic stirred to life by the god of the gods himself.”
“And you needed Zeus for that? Seriously? You couldn’t just have sent out a recruiting email like any normal cult asshat?”
“There was not enough magic in the world,” Rangi snapped. “Now there is.”
I wanted to shake him, but with my luck, my hands would get stuck in the same casing I’d woven around him, particularly since I wasn’t entirely sure how I’d done that. “And what exactly do you plan to do with Zeus once he gives you all your toy soldiers again? You think he’s going to just retire to Belize and fish?”
For the first time, Rangi turned mulish. “When the time is right, he shall be returned through the veil, much as you returned the Denounced not two weeks ago.”
“I had the Council on my side, you idiot, just as we had here. You think you can just rent them out like a wedding band? Because you can’t.”
Rangi struggled mightily against the bonds I’d laid around him. “Free me,” he demanded.
Instead, I raised a hand. He went still.
“When will Zeus do his bro-hood thing on your warriors? What did he promise you?”
Rangi’s answer was smug. “It will be done before they close their eyes this very night. One hundred men of fighting caliber, their abilities quickened in their sleep and their hearts turned to serve the House of Wands.”
“I got that part.” I looked up to the sky. “So tonight, then, if I don’t reach him before.” The rain was lessening outside our bubble, and in the distance, I could see the London police and their military counterparts struggling upright again. Another glance to my left revealed the Eye of London, no longer on fire. It was half-hidden by the sheeting downpour, but it looked…remarkably whole.
The sound Rangi made was somewhere between a groan and a sob, and I fixed my gaze upon him.
“Do not stop the god, Madame Wilde,” he practically begged. “We have fought nobly for countless millennia, always in the shadows, but we have fought. The return of the goddess who tried to destroy us once… We could not let that pass. She would have tried it again. The favor her consort had granted us all those millennia ago would not have been forgotten.”
We stared at each other a long time. “How did you even reach Zeus?” I asked wearily. “How did he know to be ready for…all this?”
At that, Rangi only chuckled. “The gods’ eyes may have been closed by the hands of man, but their ears are ever open. So we did what we have done since time immemorial. We prayed.”
Couldn’t argue with that. I sighed.
“Go,” I said, and with a wave of my hand, I released him. To his credit, he didn’t stumble forward but immediately straightened. “Go to your island and rebuild your House. And when I call you again, and I will call you, Rangi, you damned well better answer.”
Still, he hesitated. “You will not stop the god from fulfilling his troth to us?”
“I won’t. But you better hope he’s already on it, because he’s not going to be running loose for long.”
Rangi nodded once, his face set in a fierce and wild grin. Then he turned on his heel and melted into the pouring rain.
Even as he did so, I could feel the structure of the Council’s bubble degrade around me. I steeled everything I could steel, then stepped free of it myself.
Instantly, I was surrounded by chaos—whipping wind, pummeling rain, shouts and screams and spitting radio chatter.
“Dollface!” Nikki’s stri
dent voice crackled in my ear. “We’ve retreated to safe positions. What are you doing in the open? They’ll see you!”
“Status?” I asked, bending against the storm.
“Insanity. The garden’s still a mess, several exploded cars, and the Eye looks like it’s smoking, but it’s back to normal again. Also, we’ve lost time.”
I nodded, hunching over as the rain streaked down. “How much?”
“Best I can tell, about ten minutes. They were a hell of a ten minutes, but they’ve gone poof. I checked my watch at two before the hour, and when I looked again, it was still two before.” She snorted wryly. “That’s what tipped me off that something was hinky. Double-checked with every timepiece I could find. With one exception, everywhere in the world, we’re looking at a loss of ten minutes. Give or take a few seconds.”
“You mean you don’t know, precisely?” I said. I kept moving through the storm, slipping into the trees even as the uniformed officers and combat squad mobilized and began forcing their way through the rain. Only, they weren’t running toward where we’d been collapsed, I realized. They were running for the Eye. “You’re slipping.”
Nikki gave another exhausted laugh. “You out of the gardens yet?” she asked. I moved another twenty feet or so, sidling into a crowd that was even now emerging from a pub, blinking up in wonder at the destruction of the now-clearing storm.
“I am now. I’m at the riverbank.”
“Good,” she said. “Because right now, everywhere in the world, it’s exactly nine twenty. Look past the Eye and tell me what you see.”
Even as I walked, I turned back and lifted my gaze toward the river, beyond the enormous Ferris wheel and farther down the river. There was the immortal icon of London, standing tall in the face of a city without power, its enormous clock still ticking.
Its elegant hands marked the time as nine thirty-one.
“Miss Wilde.” Armaeus’s voice eased across my mind, as cool and confident as ever. “It would seem you have a problem.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The next hour and a half passed in a blur of movement and frantic phone calls, each more troubling than the last.
Nikki met up with me, hustling me toward a chartered car idling outside an abandoned frozen yogurt stand just south of the Golden Jubilee bridges. We took it without question, barely avoiding the cluster of cops still being pounded by the rain.
Traveling at “freaked-out tourist” speed, the car had taken us on a long, circuitous route to the Langham Hotel in Marylebone, well away from the disaster at the Thames. While we drove, Nikki patched her phone through to Ma-Singh, whose men were tracking the scattering of the other House generals as well as Rangi, Gamon, and Mercault. Mercault disappeared almost immediately into the wind, Gamon didn’t. Instead she holed up in Westminster, far too close to MI5 for my taste. Nigel had been contacted in the midst of his deep cover to lean on some of his old contacts in British special forces, ideally to discover if Gamon was up to anything, but so far, we didn’t have much. Rangi had departed London for France via the Chunnel, where presumably he’d be heading back to his island sanctuary to await his new Zeus-fueled army.
I winced even thinking about that, now huddled in my guest room and staring at the stack of cards that beckoned from the coffee table in front of me. I’d shuffled and reshuffled them, cut once, twice, a third time. And still I couldn’t focus my thoughts enough to make a reading. What I really needed to know was—
A brief knock on the door made me flinch.
“Hey, doll—whoa. Am I interrupting?” Nikki came in quickly and shut the door behind her. Unlike me, she still wore her combat gear from the Jubilee Gardens. It would take more than the closing of the veil to ruffle her auburn flip.
“No,” I said, gesturing to the cards. “There are too many questions. I don’t know where to begin.”
She tilted her head. “That’s because you’re focusing on other people’s priorities,” she said. “What’re yours? What do you most care about?”
“Figuring out if Gamon just betrayed me to Interpol on top of whatever Dixie shared? Drawing a bead on what to do next? Figuring out how we’re going to get Zeus stuffed back in his bottle?” I grimaced. “Even I can’t pick a priority.”
“One, two, three.” She waved at the cards. “Don’t make it so complicated, just go.”
I barked a short laugh, but obligingly reached for the cards, spreading them in a quick fan. I pulled three cards, stared, then lifted my head again to Nikki. Our eyes met, and in hers I felt the tug of conflicting emotions. “So, Gamon sucks,” she said.
I glanced back to the cards. Brushed them all into a stack. “Ten of Swords. Yup. But that card has many layers. It’ll take a bit to figure out which one applies to her.”
“And the Eight of Cups?” Her voice had gone a little hollow, but before I could reply, her phone buzzed. Frowning, she unclipped it. “They’re ready for us upstairs,” she said, a little gruffly.
“And the Lovers…that makes no sense at all. Not with Zeus,” I said.
Nikki snorted. “Not unless he’s planning on hooking up while he’s here on vacation. That’ll piss off Hera.”
My stomach rolled. “Do not even think it.”
We left my room, and I followed Nikki along the hallway and up a short flight of stairs to the coolly plush sitting area of Armaeus’s private penthouse suite. If my mind had been churning before, with the quick read of the cards it was a full-on maelstrom. What was I supposed to do with Lovers when it came to Zeus? It would only make sense if…
The synapses in my brain jolted together hard enough to give me whiplash, then Nikki’s voice cut across my thoughts.
“Who the hell took those?”
She barked the question practically the second she crossed the threshold into Armaeus’s rooms, and an instant later, I saw why.
Simon sat at the main table of the suite, dressed far more discreetly than I’d ever seen him, in dead black shirt, trousers, and shoes, his skullcap also black. But it wasn’t Simon that had captured Nikki’s attention, but what was on his computer, which he angled more fully toward us as we entered the room.
Shots of the London Eye on fire. The pods in the river. A group of four figures hunched over, apparently getting blown to pieces in a lightning strike, then one figure moving fast across the park. The last photo was of Big Ben, its hands marking a time in contrast to a scrawled number at the corner of the image.
I looked closer. “That’s a hard image, not digital.”
Simon nodded, chuckling with grudging appreciation. “One of those throwback polaroid camera things,” he said. “Popular with club kids and ten-year-olds, but not exactly standard issue for cops.”
“Yeah, well, no ten-year-old took those pictures.”
Armaeus turned toward me. His face had a studied coolness that I didn’t miss. He’d tried to brush across my mind no less than ten times in the last ninety minutes, but he wasn’t trying now. “In that, you are correct. While we remain uncertain how she acquired the camera—most likely having stolen it from a fleeing tourist—the photos were snapped by one of the agents on scene whose phone had been rendered inoperable by the electrical pulse.”
I lifted my brows. “Electrical pulse?”
“An unfortunate side effect of the storm. All power came back online within thirty minutes, with the exception of the Big Ben anomalous time, currently being ascribed to high winds.” He shrugged. “Fortunately, the clock will soon be closed for maintenance, the anomaly forgotten.”
I nodded. “That’d be good.”
“Nothing on the news about the photos,” Nikki said. She’d moved over to a different set of screens. In the corner, Ma-Singh grunted something in a language I didn’t understand, but I took it to mean the same.
“So why do you have those…oh.” The screen changed again, and my face came up, the same face and profile Interpol had used for the Blue Notice a few days ago. On
ly now the frame surrounding me was red. I wasn’t up on my Interpol color coding system, but red couldn’t be good.
Armaeus continued. “We can, of course, eliminate the photos, but they have now been entered into the system, and knowledge of them has spread to multiple countries and law enforcement agencies.”
“But this shows the London Eye on fire, blown up, and it clearly didn’t blow up.” I pointed to a breathless Jim Cantore, expostulating mutely in front of the attraction, grinning ear to ear despite his bandaged head. “It’s there, big as life.”
“Of course,” Armaeus said.
Simon cut in. “According to what we’re monitoring online, the pictures were confiscated by MI5 operatives who were onsite and immediately recognized the, ah, discrepancy from what they were actually seeing. From there, the images were shared with Interpol since there was no recovery of personnel on-site.”
I pointed as he scrolled through more photos. “Well, that woman walking through the park could be anyone.”
“It could, except she is petite, athletic, with long dark hair. She matches your description. And she’s on the site of a major explosion—potentially a major explosion, but certainly a major disturbance,” Armaeus ticked off. “In addition, you’ve been recently linked by Marguerite Fiat and Roland Dupree to multiple international incidents. It’s more than enough to bring you in.”
I grimaced. “I don’t want to be brought in.”
“We have many safe houses created for exactly this purpose, their locations hidden even from Madame Soo, by her own directive.” Ma-Singh had stood now, and his face was resolute. “We will protect you, Madame Wilde.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want to be protected either. We got bigger problems than Interpol on the horizon.”
I turned my gaze to Armaeus, then Simon. “You know that Llyr and Lilith weren’t the only gods in play up there?”
The Magician nodded, his gaze steady on mine. “A male god energy emerged, and dissipated before the full energies of the Houses of Magic could be directed to close the veil.”