by Jenn Stark
“He’ll be at his max limit already. To reverse the process would require too much energy, effectively resulting in his death,” Armaeus said. “I don’t think he’s willing to risk that. Nikola is a complicated man, and the world has changed dramatically since he willingly closeted himself away in the airwaves. Now he would be leaving behind a far more technologically advanced society. Based on my calculations, he will decide that he can do far more to serve that populace alive than dead.”
“But he’ll look like Nikola Tesla. People will lose their minds if that’s the case.”
“A problem I’m sure we’ll address with the time comes,” Armaeus said. He stood and held out a hand. “For now, however, you and I still have work to do.”
Frowning at him, I took his hand. “What kind of work?” I asked, uneasily.
“We need to figure out exactly how powerful you are.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
If I thought Armaeus was going to take me out to a shooting range or rock climbing gym, I was mistaken. Instead, he ushered me to a bright, sunny sitting room, overlooking the park-like estate.
I frowned as he gestured me to a chair that looked remarkably like his own wing-backed office seating. “What’s this all about?”
“We’re going to explore a location that we need to understand before the events before us can play out,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes. “In English this time?”
“We’re astral traveling,” he said. “Both of us. To Memphis.”
I froze. “Why? I thought Tesla was here.”
“He is,” Armaeus said, and he steepled his fingers as he watched me. “But you were brought as an infant to Memphis, Tennessee, and cared for by a young waitress who your father, a powerful member of the Council, paid to pose as your mother. Your formative years were spent in that city, and your most powerful defeat occurred there. That bears looking into.”
A mixture of fear and queasy anger slithered through me. I didn’t want to look into my past anymore, especially not with the Magician standing by. It was a broken bone improperly set, all too ready to crack again under the right pressure. I had no interest in seeing what would seep out of its marrow after all this time.
“I can’t see how anything I did in Memphis matters,” I retorted. “It’s ancient history. My mother’s dead, Dad is floating out in the ether, and the Emperor, the guy who caused all those problems, is back on the Council. We’ve come full circle already with my origin story, nothing more to say.”
“Perhaps,” Armaeus said. “If so, this will be a pleasant diversion of a few hours. Tesla prefers to operate in the evening, a more suitable backdrop for his electrical display. We have time.”
“Then I should be helping Nikki. Start getting set up.”
“There’s no need for that,” Armaeus said softly. He watched me with hooded eyes, and despite myself, I fidgeted. “There is, however, a need for this. You’re the highest ranking immortal Connected who isn’t on the Council. That makes you—and your abilities—unpredictable.”
“I’m fine with unpredictable. And I’m not interested in joining up with the Council, if that’s what this is about.”
“I’m quite aware,” Armaeus said simply. “But tell me, Miss Wilde, what are you interested in?”
A ripple of wariness flowed through me, and I sat up a little straighter in my chair. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what is your end motivation here? You say you wish to provide protection for the Connected children, to preserve the community of psychics in a world that still would be more comfortable burning them at the stake than allow them to play a visible role in society.”
“I don’t just say it, I’m doing it,” I said. “Father Jerome and I are doing good work.”
“Yes.” Armaeus’s gaze rested on me a moment too long, and I tensed, remembering the children in the priest’s newest château. The Magician knew about them, of course. Simon had told him. Though Father Jerome had managed to keep them hidden, they were in danger now because of my association with the Council. Then again, Armaeus had dropped a sizable amount of cash on Father Jerome for the specific purpose of keeping Connected children safe. So what was his real game here?
Armaeus’s smile grew more challenging as I grappled with the questions ganging up in my mind. He added a few more to the pile. “But once the children are saved, once the threat is passed, what then?” he asked. “What do you mean to do with the children once there’s no more need for them to hide away?”
“I’m not going to do anything,” I snapped, defensive because I’d been wondering the same thing, not all that long ago. “They’re going to grow up and live their lives as happy, productive members of the community. Done and done.”
“Without a leader to guide them? To help them make the right choices? In some cases, their talents are quite impressive, are they not? Too impressive to let range free without supervision, certainly.”
I leaned back, glad for the comfort of the chair. It was solid, real, when everything about me was beginning to spin. “What’s your point, Armaeus? I already got promoted as the House of Swords’ keeper. I don’t need to become mother hen to all Connected kids in the universe. That can be someone else’s job.”
“But whose?” Armaeus persisted. “Gamon’s? Mercault’s? One of the other Houses? Who is it you will tell these children to follow, whose example will you demonstrate as the proper way for them to live their lives effectively?”
His questions were giving me a headache. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of a war here. Can we maybe hold off on the reconstruction until after there’s been a winner declared?”
His smirk only deepened, and irritation jacked through me, quick and hot. I was done with him asking questions. It was time for some of my own.
“What illness do you have, exactly, that manifests only when you’re mortal?” I asked bluntly.
If I’d intended to surprise him, for once I succeeded magnificently. The Magician went completely still. Inside the quiet house, the only thing I could hear for the space of a long breath was my own heart jackhammering.
“What do you mean?” he asked, his words nearly a mimic of my own a few minutes earlier.
“I mean why and how are you sick? And what kind of sickness preys only on mortal—not immortal—cells?”
He watched me now with hooded eyes, his gaze dark and predatory. “No sickness preys on immortal cells. They are too strong. Their innate molecular perfection wards against any intrusion.”
“Okay, so what did you have that chewed on your mortal cells? And don’t deny it. You told me you had this condition when we were in Hell. You may not remember that, but I lived through the conversation. And I can tell from the look on your face that I’m not wrong.”
He seemed to argue with himself for a long minute, then he came to a conclusion. “It’s a fair question, Miss Wilde, though I confess to find myself fascinated at the idea that I would have shared such a revelation with you. I can assure you, I don’t speak of it often.”
I stayed silent, and after a long moment, Armaeus continued. When he did, his voice was somber, as if I’d opened a door he’d long held shut, and he didn’t like what lay behind it. “But not yet. Our work with your past is more valuable than mine.”
I bristled. “I’m not going another night without you—”
“This evening, then.” He cut me off, fixing me with his golden-black gaze. “I will answer all your questions this evening. First, however, we must see what answers you can provide me.”
“Good luck with that,” I grumbled. Either way, my impromptu cross-examination had the desired effect. Armaeus’s cockiness was punctured, and as he explained the dual journey we were about to take, his voice remained low and subdued.
“We’re close enough here for there not to be any undue effects of traveling. And where we’re going should hold no threats to you, so that I may travel with you,” he said.
“And if
someone comes in here and strangles us while we’re trancing out?”
That merited me a thin smile. “A chance I’m willing to take.” He lifted a hand. “The house is not abandoned. We’ll be protected.”
“Fine,” I muttered, wedging myself more thoroughly into my chair. “You better hope I don’t fall. I’m no good to you concussed.”
“You won’t.” He lifted his hand and held it out to me. I studied the long fingers for a moment more, then reached out as well. “Is this going to—”
I slumped.
Traveling with the Magician was a definite improvement over solo flight, I decided immediately. There was no lifting out of Nashville, orienting west, and soaring over endless trees and bluegrass. Instead, one moment we were in the well-appointed study of our borrowed house, sunlight streaming all around us…the next moment we were in Memphis.
And not just anywhere in Memphis, but a place I’d never expected to visit again.
The first stop was what I suspected he felt would be the worst one. The section of the Mississippi River where the body of Sheila Rose Pelter—my adoptive mother—had been found. Though technically she was no blood relation, she’d been hired by the Hermit of the Arcana Council when I was an infant, and she’d played the role of mother to the best of her ability until the day she’d died. She hadn’t been perfect, maybe. She sometimes hadn’t even been very good. But she’d tried, which was more than I could say for my actual mother, whoever she was.
“Do you sense anything here of importance?” Armaeus asked me now. We stood on the breezy banks of the Mississippi, looking out across the water. Though we weren’t exactly corporeal, we were a far sight more…present than I typically was with astral travel. And we still held hands, the shared intimacy of that unexpected act making me feel oddly uneasy, almost shy. “Is there anything left of Sheila Rose Pelter in this place?”
I cocked him a glance. “You mean like her ghost? No.”
“Not her ghost.” Armaeus breathed out a few words in a language I didn’t know, and I suddenly tensed, wondering what he was about. “I’m looking for a signature, a mark that she was here. An energy blueprint, if you will.”
“Left by whom?” I asked. The Emperor had been the man behind my mother’s death, though from what I understood, he hadn’t dealt the killing blow himself. One of his many minions had, eager to please his employer. My mom, for her part, should never have been here that day. She’d been passing herself off as someone she wasn’t. Me, essentially: someone with psychic abilities, which she patently had never had.
She’d wanted to have them, though. She’d wanted to be more than what she was.
Unbidden, an image stirred in my mind. A horde of mortals, straining, pulsing. Yearning for a bright shoreline far away from the dank waters of their reality. My surrogate mother, I realized, would have been one of those mortals. Shunned and forbidden as not good enough, not worthy enough to stand in the bright sunlight of magic.
“It’s gone,” Armaeus said suddenly, and I shook the image off. “There was something here, once. A touch, a note. I’ve felt it before, but it’s no longer here.” He turned to me. “Where were you most successful?”
I lifted my brows. “Dude, I was a teenager. I didn’t look at the world like that.”
“Yes, you did. Where were you when your biggest rescue happened, or when you learned that your work had been successful?”
“The precinct house,” I said, cutting him off. The shock of the sudden memory stabbed through me. “Downtown.”
It took us only a blink to reach it; Memphis somehow seemed far smaller than I remembered, even through the prism of astral travel. Drifting through the downtown streets was surreal, and it was strange to be looking at it through eyes that were ten years older now. Ten years and several lifetimes.
“Why are we here, Armaeus?” I asked softly as we approached the precinct house.
He didn’t answer me but simply urged me forward out of the shadows. As we emerged into the bright sunshine, I felt something too. A wash of nostalgia, maybe, a hint of remorse. A brighter, shinier tone too, however. Pride.
“It’s here. Stronger. You can feel it.”
“I feel…something. Are you doing that?”
He shook his head. “No. You’re more sensitive now in your immortal state, with your purer, clearer connection to your abilities. This sense was likely always here, this touch. More so when you were still a child, but now, all these years later, it’s still present. A resonance, a feeling. Something.”
“A person,” I said, my body on the edge of a shiver I could never quite finish. “A person was here. Like someone walking past, wearing perfume.”
He smiled and took another step down the block toward the old building. “Exactly like that,” he murmured.
But as he stood ahead of me, my traveling partner, it wasn’t the long-ago touch of another that I felt, the illusion of a phantom presence. Instead, I saw Armaeus. With my mind and his mind fully opened as they were, engaged in this psychic connection, he was no longer a mask to me, a house full of hidden rooms. He was nearly transparent. And in that transparency was pure, raw, transcendent…
Grief.
I must have made a noise, faltered, because Armaeus turned back, his questing smile and curious expression shuttering immediately as he stepped quickly toward me.
“What is it?” he said, his hand steadying my arm. “What did you feel, what did you see?”
“It—it’s gone, I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “It was something there again, full and real and true, and then it left so quickly, it was like it’d been ripped away. Sorry,” I repeated, though I couldn’t in truth explain what I was apologizing for. Still, I felt full of remorse and regret, my heart heavy in my chest. Like I’d had something special in my grasp…and lost it just as quickly.
“What did you do here that helped so greatly?” he asked into the wound of my silence, the two of us staring up at the old building.
“Found a child,” I said. “That really was the long and the short of it. Found a child—a little boy this time, the son of a woman who’d gone through hell on earth for eight long weeks waiting and watching and wondering. Praying to any god she could find who would listen, making deals with the heavens in her every waking breath. The boy’s dad had died the year before and this…” I shook my head. “It nearly broke her, but it didn’t. She lost weight from grief and anxiety, whittled herself down to a hard sliver of fury and fear, but she came down here, every day. Every day she’d ask me to help, to do one more reading. To ask one more question.”
I drew in a ragged breath. “And then one day she asked me to do a reading for her son, not about him. To ask him mentally, as if he was sitting right in front of me, to shuffle and draw the cards. I’d never even thought about doing that, had never done it before. But she asked, and I did it, and the cards…” I cleared my throat. “The cards were happy cards, Armaeus. Cups and Pentacles and the Star. This little boy was telling his mother to hold on, that it would be okay, that he would make it…and then another card seemed important, and I pulled it and—it was the Six of Cups. The Six of Cups, which we’d pulled so many times before, only now, in this context, the mother said the image on the card suddenly reminded her of her son’s previous daycare building, the one he’d attended a full year earlier. He’d been happy because there was a large outdoor play area, just like the picture on the card. We found him within a week, alive and remarkably unharmed. The window in the attic where he was being kept allowed him a view of that daycare center. His abductor was—a neighbor. Not evil, not depraved, thank God. Just an old battle-ax of a woman who’d quietly lost her mind without anyone realizing it, trying to recreate a family long dead.”
I sighed. “But the mother of that little boy did the work in that case, Armaeus. Not me. Or not me alone, for once. And she wasn’t Connected, not in any traditional sense. She wasn’t psychic. She simply believed enough, wanted to find her child enough that she reached ou
t and made it happen by letting the child reach back to her.” I blew out a long breath. “That was pretty cool.”
“It was you,” he murmured. “You who gave her the hope to trust in her own instincts, her own abilities, Connected or not.”
His words rang in my ears, too loud, and I blinked, trying to shrug them away. Too many questions, too many words…
But Armaeus wasn’t going to let me off the hook quite yet. He stood next to me, close enough to touch. “There’s one more place to visit, Sara.”
I nodded, knowing our destination. It had been my destination since I’d left this place, really. The end and the beginning of everything.
“It’s not far,” I said.
They’d never built on the lot where my house had exploded, ten long years ago. Instead, the place was overgrown with thick brambles and brush, the trailer park abruptly ending in this thicket where once there’d been a home with two bedrooms, a galley kitchen, a living room with a threadbare carpet. A microwave that sometimes worked, a TV that never did.
At the time, I hadn’t thought much about whether or not we were poor. It was simply where and how we lived. Until the day that it wasn’t, and I’d been running for my life, debris falling all around me, fire surging upward, my heart in my throat and my mind racing with one thought, one goal: to run. Run as far as I could go, so far that no one would ever find me. Not my mother—who I’d known was dead, known it, though no one had yet informed me of it—not Officer Brody Rooks, not the children who I’d so utterly failed.
“What do you feel?” Armaeus asked now, standing solidly beside me.
“Regret,” I said, almost automatically. I frowned at that, lifting a hand as if I could sense the emotion emanating from this long-ago abandoned plot. “I feel…sadness. Loss. But most of all regret. I don’t know why, though. Was there something else I could have done? Could have been?”
“I don’t think so, Miss Wilde.” Armaeus’s voice surrounded me, and once again I didn’t see the neighborhood as earth and tree and sky, brambles and trash and the faded real estate sign. I saw it as energy. The interplay of electrical waves, moving out and around and through, only—in this place, unlike any other I’d seen, the energy was different. Slower, sadder, its flashes of light moving with agonized sluggishness, as if even to cross over this space was to suck life away. This was a patch of earth built on the ashes of terrible loss, an open wound begging for healing and never getting it. This was a place of pain.