6 Forever Wilde

by Jenn Stark

  “Yes, really.” Armaeus stood, turning toward me, then his desk, then back to Eshe like a caged lion. “We’ve kept track of him, haven’t we, at least to some extent? Since that stunt in ’43.”

  “Well, yes,” Eshe said. “But it’s gotten very sketchy over the past few decades. Mobile devices—”

  “Do not remind me,” Armaeus growled. He turned on Simon. “Call up any files in the system under Tesla, records dating from 1856.”

  Simon dumped his computer and his lunch on Armaeus’s desk and leaned over the laptop, while my gaze pinged between an officially pissed-off Magician to an equally and oppositely affected High Priestess.

  “Tesla,” I managed. “You mean Nikola Tesla. The electricity guy.”

  “Files uploading,” Simon said. He quirked a look at Armaeus. “There’s an awful lot of encryption here.”

  “Good point. Stop it.” Armaeus stretched his hand out in a sharp punch in Simon’s general direction, and the Fool barked in surprise as his computer exploded in a crackle of electricity.

  “Cool, toasted gyro.” Simon grinned, salvaging his sandwich and batting out the wisps of flame that skated over his documents.

  With another wave, a second computer appeared at the far end of the desk, away from the mini conflagration. “Before you pull the data, see that you reinforce the firewall,” Armaeus said. “He hasn’t tried to break in since the last upgrade, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how.”

  “What makes you think he still cares?” Eshe sauntered over to the couch and leaned against its side, her mood improving by the moment. “He’s in his own special state of bliss slithering through the electrical streams. I doubt he has any connection to the real world anymore at all.” She coughed delicately. “It was tenuous enough when he tried it the first time.”

  “You’re talking about Tesla,” I repeated as Simon booted the replacement laptop, his newly toasted gyro to his right. “Nikola Tesla. The inventor. Father of electricity after Edison and all that.”

  “Edison was an ass,” Armaeus said, again rubbing his palm over his head. “Tesla idolized him. If Edison had merely thrown him a bone, Tesla wouldn’t have developed such an inferiority complex.”

  “He also wouldn’t have continued honing his craft well enough to become a Council Member—one of the most powerful of all time,” Eshe put in. She tilted her head. “Perhaps I should summon Viktor for this. By the time he knew Tesla, the man was already well into his end game and wouldn’t give poor Viktor the time of day.” She chuckled, apparently enjoying some joke at the Emperor’s expense. “Not that dear Viktor would have known what to do with him.”

  My head had started to pound. “Nikola Tesla is the Hanged Man. You have a dead guy on the Council, and you…you think I can bring him back? From the dead?”

  “He’s not dead,” Armaeus and Eshe said simultaneously.

  I lifted my hands, warding off their crazy. “Dude, I’m familiar with the History Channel. He is so dead. They found him in his hotel room. Laid him in state. Cremated him, for the love of Kansas. And even if he didn’t actually kick it in 1943, he looked dead. I don’t think he had any teeth left, and his face had gone all Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse. Now that I’ve gotten an up-close and personal look at the whole Immortal Whammy you guys have going on, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t give up that benefit unless you guys had kicked him off the Council…” My eyes widened. “Or unless he kicked himself off the Council.”

  “Neither, as it happens,” Eshe said, clearly enjoying the moment. “He and Armaeus had what you could call…a falling out, wouldn’t you say?” She beamed at the Magician, who stared stonily back. “And Viktor had ascended by then, of course, and he was such a burden, wasn’t he? Two megalomaniacs at once had to be a chore. Something was bound to fall through the cracks.”

  “Enough, Eshe,” Armaeus growled.

  “Okay, here we go,” Simon interrupted from the desk. “The firewall checks out, no breaches or attempted breaches in the last ninety days.” He glanced up. “Okay to open the database?”

  Armaeus nodded. “File titles only are necessary. I’ll know it when I hear it.”

  Simon’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and his recitation was quick and efficient, the names making absolutely no sense to me. When he got to “Blueberry,” Armaeus stopped him.

  “That one,” he said, and Simon obligingly opened the file. With another keystroke, a panel moved on the Magician’s wall, revealing a long screen. Simon’s final tap had the file filling the space.

  “Nikola Tesla, born in Serbia in 1856, came to America in the mid 1880s, made his name with alternating current technology shortly thereafter,” Simon read as Armaeus and Eshe stared anywhere but the screen. “Then came the Chicago Fair triumph, his work at Niagara Falls, and the two laboratories he built, both in Colorado Springs and Long Island. He owns approximately three hundred patents, some of which are still unaccounted for, and the government seized a significant number of his papers upon his death in 1943, after he’d died a penniless old crackpot.”

  Eshe snorted delicately. “I’m sure he would appreciate that summary.”

  “It’s only the truth,” Armaeus said. “A genius sacrificed upon the shoals of humanity.”

  I looked between them, utterly confused. “So when exactly did he become the Hanged Man in all that?” I asked. “If he was this brilliant inventor who did all these things, working cheek to jowl with the common man, when did he have time to attend your networking dinners? Besides, all this happened in the US, but I didn’t think you guys got to Vegas until more like the forties—as in after he died.”

  Armaeus’s scowl only deepened, and I eyed Simon, who could only shrug and stare back at me. “Before my time,” he said. “I didn’t even know we had a Hanged Man on the team.”

  “Because he wasn’t on the team,” Armaeus said. “In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the headquarters of the Arcana Council was in Munich. We knew of Tesla, had known of him since his college years, but he didn’t see the value in ascending to the Council at that time. He only agreed when I explained we could assist with helping to heal him—heal his eyesight—to allow him to truly see without the overlay of energy between the worlds.” He flapped his hand at my confusion. “Temporal displacement issues. Tesla’s sensitivity was one of his greatest gifts but it was a challenge when he did not know how to manage it. He suffered from visions that he thought were the product of a faulty mind, but in fact were a gift of a transcendent value. He eventually agreed to ascend, but…the transition proved difficult for him.”

  “By difficult, he means impossible,” Eshe said. She glanced at the image of Tesla filling the screen. “You want to know why that’s the picture everyone thinks of when they think of Nikola Tesla? It’s because his vanity won’t allow any other picture to take prominence. He infused an electrical signature into this one so it’s more commonly chosen for public display than any other.”

  I stared. “He could do that?”

  “There was very little he couldn’t do, if he ever settled down enough to do it. He was vain and egotistical, yet we still couldn’t get him to see that Council life was a better option than struggling against the horde of mankind who were not ready for his genius—who are still not ready.”

  “So he was with you, but then he left to live a normal life.” I said. “A normal mortal life?”

  “No. His aging process was an affectation he was able to perpetrate quite successfully. He wanted to be mortal, yes. To live, to die. But he also wanted to be immortal, timeless, and perfectly formed. He wanted to be both human and god, both artist and inventor.” Armaeus’s tone had modulated as he stared at Nikola Tesla’s image on the screen. Now it was almost affectionate, for all its grim tone. “But he was a fool who trusted too easily and too much. He would lose all he’d built again and again.”

  “I still don’t get it. You guys are richer than God,” I said. “At the end of his life, Tesla was living in some horrible
fleabag hotel, talking to pigeons. I read one story that he paid for his rent by boxing up pieces of his death ray device and telling his landlord never to open it. It was only after his death that everyone realized that there was nothing in the box but old, broken electrical components.”

  “That was a close one.” Eshe nodded. I blinked at her.

  Armaeus continued. “The bottom line is, Tesla faked his death to evade his responsibilities to the Council, allowing him to fade into the ether,” he said. “The patents you speak of, many of them would not have been possible without the knowledge he gained through his work with the Council, the opportunity to expand his mind and see—truly see—how energy fields worked with each other, supporting life.”

  I lifted my brows. “You’re saying you helped him dream up all those inventions.”

  “Not at all,” Armaeus said. “I’m saying we gave him the latitude and the conditions to dream up those inventions. Those patents. Those discoveries. We even assisted with…” He hesitated. “Adjustments to US policies to assist him when we were able. And, on occasion, to rein him in when he got carried away. But he knew the rules of the Council. He simply rejected those rules. The rule of nonintervention most especially.”

  “And he was incessantly in the public eye,” sniffed Eshe. “He had to age. Give the appearance of aging anyway. He had to die. At that point, he was supposed to return to the Council permanently. Instead, he vanished.”

  I frowned. “Or he just really, actually died. That happens, you know. You guys are killable. I’m killable.”

  “Technically, yes,” Eshe said, as if I was a dim little sister who wasn’t getting the point. “But Tesla didn’t die. He wouldn’t, not when there was so much still to discover. He shed his human form and took an incorporeal one, and he’s been literally in the wind ever since.”

  “But—”

  “Radio waves, right?” Simon supplied. “He couldn’t stay trapped in electricity, not back then. There weren’t enough towers to transmit it endlessly. But transatlantic radio, he could have done that. They had radio, and it was always on by 1943.”

  “Based on one of his patents.” Armaeus nodded. “It was what we thought as well, but the Second World War was still raging throughout the world, and then there was the rebuilding, and then gradually we stopped looking so hard for him. He didn’t appear again until the Stargate project in the 1970s through the early 1990s, but that program was…” Again with the hesitation, “declassified and later discredited, so his work there didn’t go any further.”

  I’d heard of Stargate, of course, the secret government program established in the late 1970s to investigate the potential use of psychics for military and domestic intelligence gathering. I’d further heard that it’d been shoved under the proverbial rug, like dozens of other unpopular defense programs during the changing of the guard in the 1990s.

  “How do you know he was part of it?” I asked.

  “Because he revealed Council secrets,” Eshe said, her voice laced with a grudging admiration. “Nobody believed him, of course, but a few of the more outlandish of his revelations escaped redaction when the files were released, and we knew. Those could only have come from Tesla. No mortal had access to the information.”

  “And these were Council secrets that were modern, not simply those from the early 1900s when he had firsthand knowledge of our activities,” Simon said. “I was on board then, and I remember when it happened.” From the look on his face, it’d been quite a show. “I didn’t know who’d spilled the beans or that it was a sitting Council member who’d done it, but I knew they’d been spilled.” He whistled. “Nikola Tesla. Literally the ghost in the machine for the past seventy years. That’s badass.”

  The screen filled with the data that had been leaked over time to an unsuspecting public. An unsuspecting and uncaring one, I realized. “How is it none of this is actually in the press?”

  “Because as it had been during Tesla’s natural lifespan, humanity’s limits of credulity are often far narrower than anyone suspects,” Armaeus said. “Tesla believed in knowledge for all, electricity for all, magic for all. His psychic abilities were highly developed, but he believed in his heart of hearts that any human could become capable of some level of psychic power. And if they could…then they should. He’d spent one lifetime trying to bring electricity to the masses. To him, the next logical frontier would be magic.”

  I frowned. “Is he right?”

  “It doesn’t matter. The role of the Council isn’t to usher humanity into a new era of psychic ability. If that’s meant to happen, they will need to accomplish it themselves.” Armaeus grimaced. “With the onset of cellular and digital technology, Tesla’s reach has grown broader, his ability to hide more cunning. He could be anywhere.”

  Armaeus waved his hand, and a green-on-black rendering of the global map appeared in place of the data stream, with flares of light all over the world. It looked suspiciously like the technoceutical powerhouse points I’d reviewed while staying with Father Jerome and then later at Soo’s mansion outside of Vegas, and I frowned, leaning forward.

  It didn’t look somewhat similar; it looked exactly like those maps. They could have been a direct overlay.

  Which meant at least a half-dozen of those dots belonged to me.

  “You think these locations are likely, why?” I asked, casual as all hell. Armaeus may have gotten a peek into my brain, but I still held some secrets in reserve. Soo’s operations were one of them.

  Armaeus didn’t back down from the question, though. “Tesla was not difficult to figure out. He was a romantic with a passion for knowledge, and he worked ceaselessly toward his goals. There’s no reason to believe that changed merely because he shed his human body. If he was interested in bringing psychic abilities to the masses, or enhancing the abilities of Connected to unforeseen levels, he would be where the action is. These sites are known technoceutical hotspots, the biggest production points, suppliers, and distribution points,” he said.

  “Okay, but why technoceuticals?” I pushed. “Why not robotics or straight-up medical research?”

  “Because he also had a fascination with magic. What he didn’t have, however…”

  Armaeus waved his hand again and two-thirds of the points disappeared. “Was a head for business, strategy, commerce of any sort. So he wouldn’t be interested in the buying-and-selling side of the technoceutical market. If he could give away what he created, he would.”

  “He did, in fact,” Eshe said, her voice wry. I couldn’t get a bead on her. I wasn’t sure if she liked Tesla or disdained him, but my focus remained on the map.

  “That’s a dozen different locations,” I said. “And you seriously have no idea where he is in any one of them?”

  Armaeus’s smile was arctic. “Oh, he’s in America. He has a weakness for the latest technology and a bias toward American engineering. Plus, it would need to be a major facility to earn Tesla’s interest.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said, my eyes widening as Armaeus reoriented the map to the United States. “You know these places exist—these breeding grounds for the technoceutical market—and you just let them be. Practically in your own backyard.”

  “Ours is not to interfere, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus said stonily. “The Hanged Man will learn that even if he disdains our rules, he cannot escape them. Not when he was living…and not when he’s dead.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Tesla is dead, got it,” I said, not giving Armaeus’s little proclamation any attention. The angrier he got, the more he was prone to pontificating. And that wouldn’t help us find the Hanged Man.

  Fortunately, I knew what would.

  I fished in my hoodie, but Armaeus shook his head. “You won’t need your cards for this. A sweep of the American incubators is all that’s necessary.”

  I blinked. “Incubators?”

  “Technoceutical startup pods,” he clarified. “New York, Nashville, New Orleans, Silicon Valley.”


  Oh, great. Of course, one of them was in Nashville—and what were the odds that Music City’s premier, um, pod was also on Soo’s short list of incubators-most-likely? High. Way too high.

  I blew out a breath. I was now the chief patron of a top medical technology facility in Nashville, whatever it held. If Tesla was hanging out in my circuitry, then at least we’d found the guy. Then again, if this incubator held the secret Ma-Singh had described, enabling humans to level the playing field of magic, I wasn’t too keen on letting Armaeus barge in like a bull in a china shop. I’d have to be careful here.

  “We have our suspicions about which of these four Tesla favors, but all of them bear scrutiny,” the Magician continued. “If we’re going to do this, we might as well scan the whole lot.”

  And by “we,” he meant me, via my ability to astral travel as the Council’s incorporeal bloodhound. I didn’t mind the going. It was the returning that sucked sideways.

  “Well, I’m not doing this in the conference room,” I said, settling back in my preferred wingback. “I can astral travel my face off from right here.”

  Eshe immediately moved to my side. “She’ll have less of a distance to fall when it’s over.”

  I shot her a glare. “I don’t have to collapse every time, you know. If you people would do your job for once and quit arguing while you’re supposed to be watching me, I’d totally stick my landing.”

  “Perhaps you can practice that now.” Armaeus moved to my opposite side, but instead of looming over me, he crouched down beside me, bringing his black-gold eyes level with mine.

  “This is not your average reconnaissance mission, Miss Wilde,” he said, his gaze a little too intent for comfort. “You will be treading—potentially—into a sphere where you won’t be alone. You may also trigger wards against which we have not tested our strength. If you encounter any resistance, you leave. That resistance is as much an admission of the Hanged Man’s presence as anything.”