by Jenn Stark
“Dollface.” Nikki gritted out the words. Both she and Brody were now frozen fast in their energy-sucking stasis light, but I was not like Brody and Nikki. I was not like Hale, I was not even like the mighty djinn of another time, virtually another world entirely.
Viktor thought he knew me, and maybe he did, the me I’d been all this time. But I also wasn’t that person anymore. I had learned all I could, had seen all that I needed to.
I took a deep, galvanizing breath…
In that same moment, a sudden commotion interrupted my focus, and a door burst wide, a man running though it like he was on fire.
Simon?
“No!” the Fool screamed as he caught sight of the trapped Hale. He wheeled on Viktor. “No, you can’t do this to her, you can’t do this anymore!”
“You have no power here,” Viktor snarled, and sure enough, Simon froze, his face caught in a paroxysm of shock. I doubted he’d ever confronted the Emperor before, certainly not in his own domain.
Fortunately, I wasn’t on the Council. Yet another bonus of being a freelancer.
Taking advantage of the distraction, I unzipped my hoodie and reached inside. It was the work of seconds to free the wands of life and darkness and grip them in my hands. The artifacts instantly flared to life, hidden by the corona of blue light that formed around my hands.
Viktor merely laughed at me. “This domain is my sanctuary, Sara Wilde, not yours. Not even you can harm me here.”
“Harm you? No, Viktor,” I said, surprised at the strength of my own voice. “I only want to heal you.”
I turned to the nearest wall, holding the wands aloft, their conflicting power surging forth through me, darkness and life. In that moment, I imagined what I believed to be etched into that wall, what I believed to be true. The same as I had believed—believed—that the inert chunk of plastic that Ginny had held back at Sensei Chichiro’s had been a bomb, I believed that this wall was not a wall at all, but a gateway…a portal that led to a place of pure and timeless perfection.
I struck out with the power of the ancients, the power of life and darkness, death and light, and believed.
“Shambhala,” I breathed.
The world erupted in brilliant white light.
Chapter Thirty-Four
An entire wall of Viktor’s prison room erupted in a dazzling display of fireworks as the wands of creation and destruction scored through the flat black walls and opened the gateway to Shambhala.
Instantly, that world beamed through the portal. The sky was the same rose pink fading to gentle blue, the clouds were thin, mere tracings against the mountainside, and the air practically vibrated with the sharp, crisp taste of freedom.
“No!” Viktor staggered back, rage and shock warring in his voice as he clearly recognized what lay beyond the portal. “No, it is not time!”
Simon’s voice joined the fray. “Hey…I know that place…I know it! I’ve been there before.”
“Viktor,” I breathed. “Simon.” I didn’t cry out the words so much as think them, the strength of the wands in my hands strong enough to carry my command all the way to Shambhala. And I felt the answering calls, the shifts of energy, even as Viktor’s scream lifted another octave.
Two bright streams of magic emerged through the portal, but once they crossed the threshold, boom. They disappeared.
My eyes widened. “No!” I gasped, surging forward as the wall was once more cloaked in shadows…and chaos exploded around me.
I whirled, stumbling back to get my bearings. The demons had somehow been freed—Nikki and Brody too—and all of them were now lost in a writhing clash with Viktor’s guards. Then another roar went up, and a dozen more combatants entered the fray: Simon’s army of Mongol warriors. I barely avoided getting clocked in the head as an old man and a young, fit, heavily muscled woman struggled past me, locked in mortal combat. What should have been an unfair fight was mitigated by the fact that the old man slipped and slithered out of the woman’s grasp like he was made of water, then came crashing back, striking her about the head and shoulders with a long, vicious-looking rod. But the woman was no idiot, and she rushed low and fast at the man, driving him to the floor as her fists flailed.
I realized I still had the wands of life and darkness in my hands, and I stuffed them in my hoodie’s pockets, shouldering past another clutch of fighters to get closer to Viktor and Simon, because that was where the action really was. Or at least that was where it should be. I couldn’t see either of them in all the raging battle.
“Dollface!” Nikki reached out and collared me, hauling me to her side. “What did you do?”
“Where are Hale and Sariah?” I shouted, struggling to see through the skittering lights and bodies. “Are they—”
“No!”
The wave of Viktor’s cry was so intense, it had the effect of a sonic boom on everyone in the room, sending all the combatants sprawling. I broke away from Nikki to see Viktor staggering to his feet, his arms flung wide.
“You have no dominion here!” he screamed, and while he had every right to be bellowing at me…he wasn’t. He wasn’t looking at me, he wasn’t looking at anyone—merely into the shadows at the far end of the room.
Shadows…which suddenly moved.
“I suffered you.”
The voice that emerged from the darkness was almost familiar, but its malevolence gripped my spine and turned my bones to water. Nikki stepped back as if pushed by an unseen force, before recovering and shifting closer to my side, her gun out, her eyes sharp.
“I suffered you to ascend to the Council, because I saw your strength, your capacity for control. Your innate power. Though your soul was clouded and dark, I saw the light you could possess. The light you did possess, at least at the beginning. But then you banished that light.”
“Armaeus?” Nikki fairly squeaked the word, but I could only stare into the darkness. It seemed to take on an almost human form, but it was still far too indistinct. Viktor’s guards crouched on the floor, leaning away, but were held fast by their own horror. Simon’s Mongols stood silently, their heads bowed, and the Syx, the mighty djinn of Atlantis, now stood at attention, shoulders back, faces fierce, their hands clasping the hilts of their swords as they stared into the same nothingness I did.
No. It wasn’t fully nothingness, I realized. There was something else there, besides Armaeus—two shimmers of light, incandescent against the darkness, one a peaceful lavender, one a harsh ice blue. The shards of Victor and Simon, waiting to come home.
I reached for my wands.
Viktor wasn’t focused on the shards, of course; he was focused on Armaeus. “You can’t kill me,” he seethed, straightening as well. “I am the Emperor of the Council, and this is my domain.”
“Go,” I whispered, directing the lavender light forward as I clutched the wands tightly in my hands.
“My dominion is what gives the Council strength,” Viktor continued, but as he spoke, the drift of lavender reached him, curling around his robust form. Suddenly, he looked like a man on the brink of a nervous collapse. His hands twitched and shivered; his face contorted in a range of expressions that he visibly sought to contain. His armor was still plated in gold and silver, but now the metal was shot through with bands of deep lavender, bands that seemed to widen as Viktor squared off against the Magician. “You need me,” he insisted.
“I need what you were, and what you might still be, but there will be a price to pay for what you are now.” The Magician’s voice had gone stony with malevolence. “There is always a price.”
“I will not—” But even as he began to say the words, Viktor’s body contorted. His mouth turned from a snarl to an expression of such open wonder that it sent a chill through my body. When he spoke again, it was not Viktor who spoke at all, but the entity I’d met on the mountaintop, an entity who was no more Viktor than I was, and yet…and yet….
“What was sundered is now one again, and the battle has turned inward,” the Emperor in
toned. “It will take a great deal of effort to fight that battle, and it is one I may not win.”
“If you do not win it, you will die,” promised the Magician from the darkness, his voice harsh with hate. “I will not suffer your lies any longer. You were ascended to serve the Council, and serve it you shall.”
For one long sickening second, Viktor’s face returned to the snarl I knew so much better. His therapy couch was definitely going to need new springs.
“You are weak,” the Emperor seethed. “You’ve always been weak. How you ever became the Magician, I will never know. The magic you have kept out of this world will be kept out no longer. The veil has already torn, the gods have descended, the day of enlightenment is at hand.”
“The veil has torn. The gods have descended,” Armaeus snarled back, with such certainty that my blood went cold. “But you will never speak the words of enlightenment.” He paused. “Miss Wilde.”
Stuffing the wands back in my pockets, I stepped forward. I pulled the gold case free, gazing on its beauty for one long, precious moment.
“Behold,” the Magician said, and his words were icy cold as I stepped out into the center of the room. “Behold and see the most powerful among us, who yet is not among us. And know that you have created her, Viktor, as surely as you have created your own downfall.”
“What are you talking about?” Viktor demanded, but I didn’t care about him so much anymore. Not when I had something of importance to return to the library. I knelt and placed the scroll case on the floor.
Almost before I released it, the gold case burst into another arc of light. I threw up my hands to block the explosion, but I could still see, I realized. See and know the extraordinary truth.
The floor opened beneath the golden case. A surge of thick, coiling tentacles reached out to reclaim the artifact, gathering it up in its slick embrace. The librarian. A long, fraught moment passed, then the coils, the hole, and the case…vanished.
“And you’ve just sealed the fate of humanity,” Viktor railed, doing his able best to ignore the wiser soul now taking up residence in his skull. “Without the scroll, when all that will come to pass lays waste to this earth, humankind will never be able to rise up out of the ashes. Without the words upon that scroll, there will be nothing left when the gods are through with us.”
“Yes,” Armaeus sneered back. “Without those words, we will be forced to rely on our own abilities to keep the worst from happening. But you will first be made to pay…and not by my hand, as my hand cannot strike you here. Rather, by the hand you forged into being.”
“What?”
Viktor still didn’t understand, but I did. I pulled the wands of life and darkness free once more and directed them at the Emperor, my gaze falling on the etchings…etchings I could now understand, because I willed it to be so. The power of their creation filled me almost to bursting, the ancient magic of Atlantis seeping out of my very pores.
“Finish it,” I murmured. “Be subsumed by your stronger self, Viktor Dal,” I commanded. “Be the light you have become.”
“No!”
The arcing fire of the wands burst forth and wrapped Viktor in a wave of heat, and his screams reverberated off the walls.
Then suddenly, Simon was in front of me, his body shaking uncontrollably, tears streaming down his face. And behind him hovered the faintest skiff of energy, shimmering in a brilliant ice-blue hue.
“You have…you have to help me too!” he cried, his hands reaching out for the wands of life and darkness, though he was much too far away to pull them free. “I feel like I’m losing him. After all this, I know I will be punished, but I just…I can’t. I can’t go on with the shame of not owning who I really am!”
“Oh, Simon.” For a moment, I remembered the wild-eyed Fool from Shambhala. Desperate to escape. Desperate to be remembered. Desperate to be forgiven. “You don’t need my power to be at peace with yourself. Beside you is all you seek. All you have to do is accept it with open arms as part of the man you are.”
“I…” Simon went fully still then, his eyes locked on mine as the drift of blue energy slipped around him. While I didn’t use the weight of the wands to guide that energy, I poured everything I had into the connection between us. Simon had stalked me, betrayed me, put Connected at insane risks in the pursuit of me.
But he had tried his best to find a way through that horror. He had tried to make things right.
It was time for Simon to be made whole.
And now, as I watched his eyes take on the clear blue-eyed aspect of a totally different Simon, from a totally different place, and I saw those eyes fill with tears, Simon’s face open and vulnerable…he was.
He finally was.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Night finally fell on Las Vegas the following evening after a long, fraught day, the sun retreating at last to rest beneath the far mountains. I stood with Nikki outside the hospital room at Dr. Sells’s clinic, while Brody stood closer to the open door, looking in on the two women currently under observation.
“They should have woken up by now,” he muttered.
By they, he mostly meant Sariah, and Nikki and I exchanged another worried glance. Brody hadn’t made any of the comments we’d expected from him upon seeing Sariah, like Gosh, she’s your twin, that’s weird, isn’t it? Or: Wow, how is it possible that she’s you and you’re you, all at the same time?
Instead, Brody had said only “She’s Sariah Pelter. That’s all that matters,” and went back to staring at her silent form. It was beginning to wear on my nerves, but I didn’t know how to broach the subject delicately. Of all the strange things the detective had gotten used to over the years, a second, edgier version of me might be one cup of crazy too much.
Still, eventually, he turned back from the door. Though he’d lost the armor and sword of his Knight of Swords persona the moment he’d run through the portal into Viktor’s tower, he’d been genuinely heartbroken at leaving his horse behind.
Simon, trying to help, told him that the steed still waited patiently for him, outside Viktor’s digital domain. Simon clearly had never had children. This information had only made Brody more despondent—or maybe he was transferring his anxiety over Sariah to something even crazier.
“Any updates?” he asked Nikki now.
She gave him a reassuring grin. “About what you’d expect,” she said. “Marguerite Dupree and Roland Fiat of Interpol are back with a vengeance, hammering your phone with calls that you’re going to have to answer.”
Brody cast his bloodshot eyes toward me, and I winked at him.
“I’m good,” I said. “I’m ready to talk with them.”
I was too. Armaeus hadn’t been kidding with what he’d said in Viktor’s tower yesterday. The veil had torn in several places, and the Weather Channel was in a lather over all the meteor showers. Astrologers were in a full-out faint, and even the stick-in-the mud astronomers of the world, who would sooner self-immolate than declare anything a less-than-scientific event, were at a loss as to why so many stars were shooting through the sky…or why seven stars in the heavens suddenly seemed so much brighter. They claimed it was the result of a weird atmospheric anomaly, while across the world and throughout the internet, far, far more bizarre theories were being posted—that they were seven suns from far-off galaxies, wanting to be seen by earth; that they were Chinese satellites about to blow everyone off the planet; that they were alien spacecraft, ready for their next close encounter.
But I knew the truth was even stranger.
Seven suns. I recalled Happy Viktor’s ranting in Shambhala, about the reign of terror that would start with the arrival of seven suns. There was no way that was a coincidence.
The world needed to know that something was coming, even if I didn’t exactly know what it was. They needed to be ready for it.
I was ready too. Finally, I was.
“And Dixie?” Brody asked, interrupting my reverie.
“Dixie is recoverin
g at home, surrounded by those who love her,” Nikki said staunchly. There was still a tangle to unravel there, but that didn’t need to happen today. That could wait, we’d both decided, for Dixie’s breathless blonde laughter to ring out into the arid Las Vegas morning. We both missed that laugh, we’d realized. We both were looking to have it back, whatever it brought with it.
Brody, for his part, merely nodded. “And…the girl?”
“She’s recovering too,” Nikki said.
I turned toward the second young woman, lying under a large plastic tent. Hayley—Hale—Adams hadn’t dropped out of her sphere of light the way the others had in Viktor’s tower, stunned but ultimately sound. She’d remained in what the doctors were calling a medical coma, her brain alight with activity, but her eyes steadfastly shut, her mind far away from the rush and tumble of the world cascading around her. Her aunt, mother, and father were now in the waiting room, where they’d kept a vigil since the moment we’d pulled Hale out of Viktor’s domain. She would recover from this, I knew. After that, it was anyone’s guess.
“Good…good,” Brody said, and then his eyes were back on Sariah. Sariah, who also was out cold, when she probably would have appreciated having the full and undivided attention of Officer Brody Rooks, after she’d been waiting for it so long.
She would get her chance, though, I thought. From the look on Brody’s face as he watched her, more worried than I’d ever seen him in my life, she’d get more than her chance.
Nikki didn’t try to stop me as I slipped away from the hospital rooms, heading back down the long hallway. I picked up two Swords tails as I angled toward the elevators, both of them riding down with me, neither of them acting like they knew the other. I didn’t mind their presence—welcomed it, in fact. I wasn’t a lone gunman any longer, and I was done with acting like one, at least ninety-nine percent of the time.
But there were still some things I needed to do alone.