by Jenn Stark
I’m not sure what in my words struck him so forcefully, but Armaeus stared at me with surprise. Surprise, and something almost approaching fear, even as the power of our connection leapt and swirled around us. “Sara,” he murmured, the word almost a plea. “We can’t do this.”
“We can do this,” I whispered back, holding his golden-black gaze. “We can. If you want it.”
Armaeus’s initial response was a growl, low and deep in his throat. “I do,” he said succinctly, but still he didn’t move. His body quivered with anticipation and need, yet his gaze remained locked on mine. “I do want this,” he said again, the words even more tortured.
“Then maybe this will help,” I whispered back.
I stood away from him but only slightly, my mind slipping and twisting through all the lessons I’d learned in pain and duress and extremity, all the taunting, teasing words of Chichiro and Kreios and even Armaeus, that I could do so much more with my abilities if I simply allowed myself to, if I simply relaxed, opened my mind, and merely thought of what I most wanted, most needed, and brought that into—
“Miss Wilde.” Armaeus jerked back involuntarily, his gaze cutting down toward his own body in sharp surprise. I followed the trajectory of that gaze. It was more than worth a long look.
The Magician of the Arcana Council stood in front of me totally naked, his body a wonder to behold. His skin, burnished to a dark gold, stretched over broad planes of muscle, muscle that flexed from the curve of his broad shoulders to his heavy, flat pecs, to the rippling perfection of his abs. The thinnest brush of hair arrowed down from his navel to where his shaft swelled, full and erect, his legs wide and braced as my stare took all of him in.
“I really should have tried this sooner,” I murmured. Even as I spoke, however, I felt the cool brush of an unexpected breeze against my back—and just that quickly, I was naked too. I grinned up at Armaeus, my own heart leaping with pleasure as a smile creased his lips.
“Now, did you do that, or did I?” I asked.
“For once, I can’t say I really care.” Armaeus’s gaze swept my body, his eyes hot, his hands twitching, and I didn’t miss the sparks of energy that flared from his long fingers. A similar buzzing caught my attention in my own hands, and I bit my lip as I stretched out my fingers wide, the white-blue skitters of electrical current arcing upward. “Um…”
Another glance toward Armaeus—whose expression now sharpened with curiosity—and I gave my hands a vigorous shake, the energy winking out.
“No—no,” I insisted. “You’re not going to turn this into a science experiment, you’re not. Not right now.” I lifted my hands and placed them against Armaeus’s chest, pushing him hard. He fell back easily, but not merely the single step I expected. Instead he dropped back all the way to the floor, his hands reaching up to pull me down with him, until we sprawled together on the stone surface of the grotto…
A stone surface that now was buried beneath a thick pile of blankets that cushioned our fall.
“Nice,” I sat up, straddling Armaeus’s thighs and raking my eyes over his magnificent form. Another time, I would have watched with wonder as candles winked into being all around us—fat ones, skinny ones, tall and short, all of them illuminating the shadows of the grotto in a warm, welcoming embrace. But though I sensed the light show all around me, my eyes were only for Armaeus, beautiful Armaeus, laying back on the tumble of blankets, his dark hair spread out from his face, his golden-black eyes steady on me once more, as if he was trying to memorize this moment…memorize it and hold it for eternity.
His hands lifted to brace me against him, the wide, flat palms settling on my hips, the electrical pulse within them muted but not quite gone.
“Very nice,” he murmured, his gaze darkening as it swept over my naked body.
He wasn’t the only one getting an eyeful. Now that I studied him a second time, I realized that Armaeus’s skin was not whole and unbroken—far from it. A delicate tracery of scars danced over the burnished golden surface, some spidery thin, some wide and brutal, so translucent as to barely be a shadow of the brutality they once represented. I understood, of course. The Magician was an immortal with the gift of healing, but he could feel pain. His skin could be cut, his blood spilled, and it seemed he wished to retain the memories of those hurts. It was one of the few tenuous connections he still had to his humanity, and he held to it fast…much as he was holding fast to me.
Mesmerized by the raw and unfiltered magic I could almost see coiling through Armaeus beneath the thin layer of his skin, I lifted a hand and laid it along his jaw, my fingers tracing his fine, sculptured cheekbones. His eyes drifted shut for a moment, his head turning softly to nestle into my palm, and I drew in a sharp breath at the rightness, the perfection of this moment.
I slid forward another inch, until I could feel the thick length of his shaft against me, setting the most intimate of my nerve endings on fire—though not literal fire, I reassured myself with a quick glance. But the liquid heat that was building between us couldn’t be ignored, and I lifted myself up to graze against the length of his shaft, as Armaeus’s fingers tightened against my hips.
“Sara…” he said again, and I looked up to meet his eyes—almost losing myself in the maze of their eerie depths—hundreds of years of memories, visions, yearnings, pain, loves, sorrows, hopes, doubts, dreams, betrayals—all came to this. This moment, this breath, these bodies, these hearts…this.
“Armaeus,” I said, never looking away. I shifted forward another inch, then sank over him.
And nearly shrieked.
Sudden, unexpected heat rocketed through me, the core of my being bursting into flame with white-hot urgency, melting everything around it. I half collapsed over Armaeus’s chest, taking in a ragged breath, but he held me steady, lifting up his head and finding my mouth with his. He kissed me deeply, and it took no more than an instant for me to catch up to the thrust and pull of his magic, and my own heat roared forth and joined with his, twisting and turning together. One of Armaeus’s hands left my hips to anchor my head above him, while the other splayed wide against my backside, guiding me as we rocked together, then trembling as I seated myself more firmly against him, taking him as deeply into my body as immortally possible.
For a long while, there was nothing but the frantic, chaotic slide of our bodies together, the smell of heat and fire, all of it overlaid with Armaeus’s cinnamon musk and my own strung-out need, the connection of our bodies forging connections in my mind that I hadn’t realized I’d so desperately wanted, connections in my heart that I hadn’t fully realized had been so tragically frayed and broken.
“It’s been—too long—” Armaeus half laughed, half gasped at last, his words tumbling over themselves in a spill of different languages that I could somehow understand for once. “Too long, I cannot…I don’t want to resist the pull.”
“Don’t resist it,” I said, my voice every bit as urgent. The pressure of his body inside mine was driving me rapidly toward a climax I had no intention of delaying, my need coiling so tightly that I was going to self-combust if I didn’t find some way to release it. I realized dimly that my hands were now fisted in Armaeus’s hair, my mouth tracing a desperate staccato of kisses over his lips, his jaw, his neck, until I brushed up against the fine curve of his ear. And then I whispered more—everything I wanted him to do for me, with me, to me, not only in this moment but in a thousand other places and a thousand other moments with a thousand other—
“Sara,” Armaeus finally gasped, and he rocketed over the edge of his own release, pulling me desperately with him...
And the earth didn’t just move under our feet—it exploded.
In a brief and fiery flash, the candles all shot off the rocky floor of the oubliette and pinwheeled into darkness, and suddenly, there was nothing but Armaeus and me, the burst of his pure and arcane energy, the very life force that he drew upon to generate his magic surging up into and through me. Armaeus’s body lifted off the
blankets in an arch of ecstasy so profound, it was death and life and death again, his breath whooshing in an agonized cry. My own body seemed to shatter outward into a million stars, each of them radiantly, perfectly right and true, before they all rushed back to supercharge my every cell and synapse with so much arcane energy that I felt I could spin the universe like a top with the merest wave of my hand.
A moment later, we collapsed on the blankets, which were now strewn halfway across the grotto, the thick pile barely illuminated by the half-dozen candles that had somehow remained lit through the cataclysm.
I sank onto Armaeus’s chest, and his arm snaked around me, holding me close. For a long—minute? day? century?—we lay there, with nothing but the sound of our own breathing breaking the silence.
Then Armaeus sighed, deep, rich, and full.
“I think…” he rumbled against the top of my head. “I think I won’t destroy any more oubliettes after all. At least not until we’ve had a chance to, ah…explore them. Personally.”
I chuckled softly, leaning back to glance up at him—and was held fast by the look in his eyes as he gazed back at me, the intensity of his emotion so transcendent that my heart suddenly seemed too big in my chest, my breath too full in my lungs.
Then, before I could say anything else, Armaeus pulled me close to him, and kissed me. Hard.
And I thought of nothing else for a very long time.
Chapter Thirteen
I came to with a jolt of confusion, blinking awake into the sound of far-off grunting and wheezing, like an old donkey running up a mountain. I sat up and nearly blacked out again from pain—those wounds had been mental, hadn’t they? I certainly didn’t see any blood on my body, and nothing seemed to jut out at wrong angles, but the agony was nearly overwhelming.
Then I remembered. Armaeus.
Armaeus.
My newly healed lips stretched into a tight smile, my mind suffused with so much pleasure that I almost didn’t mind the fact that I could once again count all my bones in decreasing order of perceived pain. The Magician had taken away the effects of Chichiro’s lesson for as long as he was with me, but now…now that he was gone again, I was physically healed but apparently, still mentally traumatized.
“You will keep the pain, for now, now that you have awakened.” Chichiro’s voice was steady but not unkind, and I managed to turn toward her seated form while only wanting to throw up a little. She gazed at me with the steadfastness of a woman who’d experienced both great joy and great hardship, and survived them both. Did she know about my interlude with Armaeus? If she did, she wasn’t saying…and I wasn’t about to share.
“But—it was—” I whispered. I couldn’t speak as well as I should, my breath only managing to fill my lungs shallowly. “Mind.”
“As I said before, what you see in your mind is often more real than what you experience with your other senses, if you feel it strongly enough,” she said. “And whether in your mind or in body, you react the same.” Her gaze seemed to flatten as she stared at me. “You were not willing to use your abilities to protect yourself, but you protected Nigel over and over again, in every test I set for you. Protected him and then allowed yourself to be distracted, resulting in your own injury.”
I gave a perfectly reasonable gasp, but she waved it off. “You’ve grown lax, knowing that no matter how badly you are injured, you’ll be restored. But what if you suddenly…weren’t?” Though she didn’t move again, the air seemed to shimmer between us, and I sagged back against my pillows, barely able to manage more than a bleat as wounds reopened on my body. Puncture wounds in my stomach and shoulder, a long, jagged gash on my thigh, the blood seeping through the sheets and turning the bed into a crimson horror.
Chichiro continued inexorably as a tidal surge of weakness swelled through me, and I could feel my life force draining away. “You count too much on abilities that should only be drawn upon in times of grave need, and on friends who may turn into enemies in the heat of battle. And you care more about the fate of others than you do yourself, when you are the one upon whom so many rely—you. Not an Ace with nice shoulders.”
I grimaced, coughed. “They’re really good shoulders, though.”
“Neither your bodyguards nor your generals nor your friends should ever take precedence over your own strength, Madame Wilde,” Chichiro said. “If you fall, you will have only managed to save them from death to be delivered into unendurable suffering. You might as well not have saved them at all.”
“Fine, fine, I get it.” I winced. I sucked in a slightly deeper breath, willing the pain down into small, manageable chunks of misery. Each large slab became a brick; each brick became a block. Weirdly, the exercise seemed familiar to me, though I couldn’t remember learning it.
Another grunt of satisfaction sounded from outside the window, and I carefully turned my head again toward the noise as Nigel came into view on the back lawn. He was blindfolded, wielding a sword, and three swords danced around him, forcing him to cut and parry by virtue of sound alone. I glanced—slowly—back to Chichiro, but the only thing moving on the old woman were the fingers of her left hand, drumming in a discordant rhythm on her chair. She remained staring at me.
Slabs down to bricks, bricks down to blocks, blocks down to cubes.
Another clang of the sword pulled me back, and I flinched with pain as I turned my head too quickly. I noticed something important about Nigel: his beard. Nigel didn’t wear a beard.
Slabs to bricks, bricks to blocks, blocks to cubes, cubes to squares.
“How…long?” I finally managed, the words sounding almost like conversation. “How long have we been here?”
“You have run variations on the same exercise now for four days running,” Chichiro said. “In some cases, Nigel must be sacrificed—you do not let it happen. In others, he betrays you—you let him live at grave personal injury to yourself. In still others, you know, you truly believe that you must kill him…yet every time, you find a way to spare his life.”
I gave her a lopsided smile. “Imagine what a wreck I’d be if I actually liked the guy.”
Chichiro’s glare turned harsher, and the pain flared up in my gut, my shoulder, another lash searing across my temple. “Unlike any other warrior I have trained, you have no innate ability to fight, no ingrained intuition when it comes to wielding your weapons. You simply fling everything you have at the problem, even if—especially if—there is great risk to you. You are fearless for others, no matter how terrified you are for yourself as you meet the challenge.”
I made a face. “I wouldn’t say terrified,” I muttered. “Mildly alarmed, maybe.”
“There is only one way I’ve found to get you to flip the switch where you use yourself as the tool you are—and protect yourself as well,” Chichiro continued. “Do you want to know what that is?”
“I’m guessing we can’t just forget that happened and move on?”
“When you are directed by a member of the Council to act in a certain way. Not all members. You paid no attention to the Emperor or the Hanged Man. But the Magician, the High Priestess, and the Devil all held varying degrees of sway with you.”
“Well, the Council’s been my piggy bank to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars at a pop. That’s worth a lot of sway.” Still, my heart sank at Chichiro’s words, and I knew she spoke the truth. If the Magician told me to jump—I would. I trusted him. I trusted Kreios, though arguably, I shouldn’t. I was surprised that she believed I trusted Eshe. Then again, the High Priestess had had my back for many of my astral travel experiences, particularly in the early days, when it could be more aptly described as astral flailing.
Chichiro merely nodded. “There comes a time when you must realize that even those who merit your trust and love cannot sway you from the path that you must take, Madame Wilde. A path which has already chosen you.”
I watched Nigel out the window, an unexpected and unwelcome melancholy filling me.
As if sensing
my mood, Chichiro asked, “When did you meet him?”
I smiled, wincing against the pain of my torn face. I lifted a hand to flick away a trail of blood as I stared at the British operative. “The first job? I probably had interacted with him a half-dozen times without knowing it, but the first job I came up against him was in Cairo. We were both going after the same artifact, and I ended up winning. I wasn’t a good sport about it, and he didn’t take losing well. After that, we seemed to see each other everywhere, especially after we met up in Rio.”
“You won that exchange as well, I assume?”
“Yeah, in the end. But he gave me a run for my money. He always has.” I shook my head. “I didn’t even know half the deals he’d done with people, how he worked as a House Ace, none of that. I was too busy running around finding toys and tools and selling them to the highest bidder.”
“Most often the Council,” Chichiro said.
“Most often.” I nodded. “Not always.”
“And when it wasn’t?” Chichiro’s voice seemed to be growing more distant, and I shook my head, trying to focus.
“Money,” I said. “When it wasn’t the Council, the trail always ended with money.”
“Connected?”
“Not usually, actually,” I said, my words sounding hollow to my own ears. I watched Nigel swing and thrash, his movements at turns jerky and fluid. He needed to be more fluid, I decided, like water over rocks. To flow as if the blade was an extension of his arm, and the movement of the opposing blades the right and natural result of how his blade flowed, not the other way around.
Chichiro remained silent, and I tried to remember what she’d said last. Connected. Money. “Yeah,” I said, regaining my place in the conversation. “The highest bidders, the ones who really fought the hardest for the toys, before the Magician got me out of the mix and had me on retainer, were the rich people without psychic ability. They cared the most to have these artifacts, even when they couldn’t do anything with them. Especially when they couldn’t, it seemed.”