by Jenn Stark
By now Nikki was outright staring at me. “They’re Connected?”
“Not even remotely.”
“But they know about the Arcana Council?”
“It would appear so.”
“Um…and how long have they known about the Council?”
It was a good question; one I didn’t have an answer to. “I got the impression it’s been for a while, but I don’t know for sure. But I do know that Armaeus and Kreios weren’t aware they were on their Christmas card list. Which means that they’ve got some serious firewalls set up to keep prying minds out of their business.” I paused, something else coming to mind. “That made sense, because the room where we met was totally blocked—and I mean totally. Kreios couldn’t see into their little lair either, and it was right under his nose. They had some sort of warding system against magic that was damn near airtight. I tried to cough up a fireball and barely got some finger flames.”
“And Armaeus didn’t know about them.” Nikki cackled. “That’ll teach him not to underestimate mortals, though sucks to be this Sentinel Group now that they’re on his radar. What is it they think they can offer the Council?”
“The short answer to that is—a new veil, fueled by both tech and magic. Classic Reagan-era Star Wars strategy, only now it actually works.”
Nikki whistled low as I laid out what the Sentinel Group proposed, but she nodded along as well. If what they offered was possible…
“It could work,” she allowed.
I nodded. “It could work. Add to that, Armaeus thinks Operation Armageddon is underway. He says it’s going to hit soon. Like as in today, not three days from now.”
“That explains the supersun we’ve got going on,” Nikki said grimly, and I glanced outside. We both fell silent as the limo ate up the miles between the city and the House of Swords’ headquarters. I knew it was mostly my imagination, but the desert foliage that we passed on the way to the lakeside mansion was looking decidedly peaked in the unusually strong afternoon heat.
Nikki finally stirred. “You really think we’re gonna suddenly have seven suns up in the heavens? Because I read that Buddhist sermon. They seemed to think it was going to take a lot more time between solar flares.”
“They wouldn’t be the first sacred scripture to get Armageddon wrong,” I said drily.
“Fair. Did he have any specifics on how this is going to go down?”
I shook my head. “All I got was the urgent-warning bit. He told me to prepare my House. I can’t help thinking the unspoken context there is ‘for the worst.’”
We held that thought for a long, fraught moment…
Then our phones exploded.
Chapter Twenty
“What the—!”
My device was lying beside me on the seat, but Nikki still had a grip on hers. She instinctively tossed it away, turning her head in anticipation of a flare of shrapnel. But the phones remained surprisingly intact, for all that their screens were cracked and they held no charge whatsoever.
The driver touched his hand to his ear. “Call coming for you, Miss Wilde,” he said, his voice strangely smooth and more than a little amused. “On a protected line, naturally.”
“Kreios?” I demanded. “Is that you?”
“Not precisely.” The voice emanating from the young man had the same rich Mediterranean intonations as the Devil, though, layering over the smell of fried electronics. “But Simon wanted me to relay that, while your own headquarters is untouched, he’s taken the liberty of blasting the personal communications devices of everyone on the list of world leaders for whom you created a certain video. A series of miniature targeted solar EMPs, as he calls it.”
I stared at the driver, who kept his eyes on the road. Safety first. “What are you talking about? Why?”
“To get their attention. Apparently, an unexpected solar storm is about to strike the earth. Quite devastating, really, to most of the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere will be less impacted, but they’ll be dealing with the rise of the seven suns behind the solar eclipse, so they’ll have their hands full. Such a pity that will only be visible at the southern tip of Argentina, though the effects of that radiation will, of course, be cataclysmic. Especially since all of Antarctica will essentially melt in less than two hours.”
“Are you insane? The entire world will be flooded.”
“In glorious fashion. It’s a rather impressive extremity. Then again, a rather localized one as well. The solar flares will create a light show and fry some major power grids in the northern hemisphere, but they’re nothing that Tesla and Simon can’t handle, given the time they’ve had to prepare. They’ll be deflected in the main, and those grids that are hit will miraculously come back online within, say, six hours. Long enough for panic to ensue, but not so long for the looting to begin in earnest. The issue at the bottom of the earth, however, is not so clear-cut. It will take everything you’ve got.”
“You?” I asked sharply. “Don’t you mean, we, kemosabe?”
“Ah, here we are.”
The limo turned into the long drive toward the Swords’ Vegas headquarters and shot up the lane toward the house. We were out of the vehicle before it had even stopped rolling. Moments later, we burst into the war room, but while the monitors were still racing with images and texts, no one was looking at the walls. They were looking at the ceiling.
Nikki and I cast our gazes upward as well, and it was all I could do not to cower back.
Armaeus’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “What you are seeing is the start of the solar eclipse, viewable only in Ushuaia, South America, and of course, in Antarctica. I could not bring you all there and ensure your protection, though that would have been ideal, and so I am bringing the eclipse to you. It will be unique in that, start to finish, it is quite short, less than forty minutes. But the totality will last a full seven minutes. It is during that totality that our efforts will need to be concentrated. Whatever comes through to menace the earth, we push back.”
Push back.
“Who all is hearing this?” I whispered to no one in particular. Armaeus’s strategy was classic goal tending. Block anything that got anywhere close to the net, hurl it back up the field. And now, we actually had a way to close that endless loop of attack and deflection. By the time any of the gods came back for another assault, the Sentinel Group’s tech net would be in place as the new veil. It…could work.
It had to work.
Ma-Singh shifted beside me. “Simon contacted us immediately before he hijacked our systems. This scene is being projected into the offices of every world leader.”
I winced. “Even the unhinged ones?”
“Especially the unhinged ones. What they see and can perceive, however, according to Simon, is different from what you see and can perceive.”
“We are ready!” The bold sound of Rangi’s voice over the loudspeaker jolted everyone to attention. The head of the House of Wands appeared on a quarter of the screens along the walls, his feed presumably not going out to the entire world. Then another set flickered.
“We’re not ready!” Another voice sounded over the intercom, and suddenly, Mercault’s face filled the screen, his eyes wide and glassy, his skin pale. “We don’t have so many Connecteds. We have money—money! That’s what we have. Not psychics, for the love of—” His words devolved into a rush of histrionic French, his hands waving to punctuate his rant.
I grinned. “I know, Mercault. I know. But you’ve got help.”
The Frenchman pulled his hands away from his face. “We do?”
“Coming through now.” A subset of the screens dedicated to the House of Pents flickered, and a familiar face stood, peering into the camera. I hadn’t visited the old man in person in far too long, but Father Jerome looked as strong and vibrant as I’d seen him in years, for all that his face was pinched, his finger coming up to poke at the screen. Beside him, a handsome young man was trying to pull the priest's hands away, murmuring assurances.
Father Jerome’s right-hand man, Max Bertrand.
“Father Jerome,” I said, my heart swelling. “You’re ready to assist?”
“Sara!” The priest’s face abruptly cleared, and he stood back from the screen even as his eyes sharpened. “You look terrible. When did you sleep last?”
Beside me, Nikki snorted. “You’re ready?” I pressed.
“Of course, of course.” Father Jerome waved to the children behind him, all of them standing, their faces tilted up, their eyes shining with purpose. So many of these were children who had been the victims of the dark practitioners. Some had been returned to their homes, some were still living in the homes that Jerome had opened for them throughout France, but all of them seemed united in a shared purpose. “The young people of this world have never been so needed or so prepared. Mercault, we are at your service.”
Mercault’s face completely changed as his own screens now showcased multiple units of young Connecteds. He beamed with astonishment. “An army of the future,” he breathed. “The future!”
“Cups online,” Ma-Singh shouted, and another knot of fear unraveled within me. Despite her words at the feet of Christ the Redeemer, I hadn’t known if Gamon would stand with us.
Apparently, she hadn’t either.
“Two summons in one day? I blame you for this, Sara.” The head of the House of Cups stood at the fore of an army at least thirty strong, but instead of being dressed like tribal warriors as Rangi’s men were or wearing the blank uniforms of Mercault’s guard, they were all in white lab coats, most of them staring at the ceiling with a look of sheer panic on their faces.
“You did this on purpose,” Gamon continued. “The timing. Our beta tests are complete, and we’re in full production. We would have flooded half of Europe by morning with the newest synthesis of the Life drug, and you have to go and tell everyone the world is ending.”
“Gamon!” I stared at her in shock, and her dark, swarthy face creased into a hard smile at my reaction. She looked unreasonably satisfied.
“Lead us into your foolish battle, Swords,” she said, echoing the words she’d said to me not twenty-four hours earlier. “The House of Cups will help you stand when all else would fail.”
“But what are we doing here?” This was Mercault again, his gaze once more fixed on the ceiling. “We cannot stop the sun.”
I grimaced. This would be harder for the Frenchman than the rest of us in some ways, because his psychic abilities were not as strong. But, like the drugs that Gamon created, there were ways to temporarily fix that, ways to—make it easier.
“Mercault,” I said, and something in my voice made the man tear his gaze from the ceiling, his eyes filled with panic as they sought mine. We were not in the same room, but we were connected by the only thing we needed to be, I knew, the only thing that mattered—pure energy.
My third eye opened as our gazes locked, and suddenly, the structure of that energy sprang into sharp relief around me, lines and arcs and circuits all alive and crackling with expectation. Those same circuits flowed in and around and through Mercault in his luxuriously appointed conference room, and I could see in an instant that the man was correct. The people who surrounded him were not Connected, not anywhere near the level of Gamon’s scientists and Rangi’s warriors and Father Jerome’s children. But he would need to be for this. He would need to amplify what meager resources he had and add that strength to Father Jerome’s army. It would be enough.
I pushed my own energy toward him on the mass of circuits, blue-white fire bursting out from me and into the electrical net that connected both people and machines. A second later, it set everything alight in Mercault’s conference room, and the man himself jerked upright as if shocked. It was over in a matter of moments, then his gaze whipped heavenward again.
“Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu!” he gasped.
The Magician spoke over him. “It is beginning.”
He wasn’t kidding. The image on the ceiling now showed the disc of the sun gradually being eaten into by the circular shadow of the moon. But while the corona of the eclipsed sun should be flaring beautifully around the hard outer circle of that moon, this corona didn’t quite look right. The sun seemed to bulge outward, with a rogue burst of fire, first on one side of the moon’s shadow, then another. Not evenly, but in pulsing bursts, like little kids jostling to get out from behind the leader. Deep in the Swords’ war room, someone burst into tears, while another person started cursing below her breath in fierce, rhythmic expletives.
I squared my shoulders. The images in those bursts were indistinct to start, but they became steadily clearer. And now that the eclipse had reached its totality, there were seven distinct bulges around the moon’s edge, each of them thrusting into clear, radiant relief.
The first and most obvious one was the huge, sinuous head of a dragon, arcing around to roar with fury in fiery red splendor. Llyr. I’d expected him, and he appeared to be leading the charge. Opposite him on the other side of the shadow, was a creature bathed in white gold, so fierce and beautiful and bright I could not fully look upon her. Lilith, or the goddess of a thousand other names. My mother.
But the other gods were no less fierce. One burst forward with the hiss of steam, a being I couldn’t recognize, but roiling with tentacles and an enormous, angry maw. A sea creature so ancient, it likely had never made it into the annals of history. Then there was a triad creature similar to the Celtic gods we’d encountered in Prime Luxe, only this one was female, her triple body arcing around something I hadn’t seen before, something important: an amethyst ball of pure power.
I stared at that central jewel, and the first inkling of danger swept through me. That jewel…that jewel wasn’t right. Wasn’t what we’d planned for. Wasn’t something we could manage. I didn’t know why, but my dread coiled tighter the longer I stared at it. Then my attention was distracted as a fifth, then a sixth god erupted into view behind the shadow of the moon, and even tens of thousands of miles away, I quailed back at the sudden blast of heat and radiation that poured through the image.
“Fire breaking out in southern Argentina. Catastrophic damage already recorded in the Antarctic ice shelf. Think of it as a volcano erupting in the center of a block of ice.”
This voice was Simon’s, and I yanked my gaze to the bank of screens he had appropriated, his voice reporting the damage to the polar south to a mass of men and women in well-appointed rooms, all of them dressed well, all of them shocked into silence, surrounded by their top military brass, who also were frozen in horror. These leaders had seen it all. Some of them had done it all. Some of them had ordered atrocities committed on their behalf that had devastated their own citizens or the citizens of their enemies…but none of them had any immediate answer for this.
“Three minutes into totality.”
Armaeus’s voice brought me back into focus. Instinctively, I knew we had to wait to strike until the gods were more in our plane than their own. Until they had committed to breaching this world utterly. Their momentum would serve us well, but only if it was built up to the point that we could turn that energy against them.
“Sara…” To my surprise, it was Gamon’s voice that came across the system, and I realized I had lifted my hands in a defensive posture, the blue light of my own energy glowing between them, though the threat wasn’t anywhere near me. I shook my head, clearing my conflicting thoughts, and looked again at the play of the gods.
Another jewel of fire had emerged in the chaos, this one at the heart of the conflagration that was Lilith.
“What in sweet Jesus are those things?” muttered Nikki, her body stiff, her hands up, all the focus of her considerable psychic energy primed and ready to be directed.
“It’s like the other one. The triad god—no. There’s a third.” Brody bristled beside me, his eyes going everywhere, and sure enough, he was right. A god with the head of a jaguar and the upper body of a man was wriggling its way out of the shadow of the moon, but every time it r
oared and snapped, an emerald jewel burned from deep within its throat, as fierce as Lilith’s white-hot diamond and the triad female deity’s amethyst and the sea creature’s…holy crap. The sea creature held a deep sapphire in the heart of its tentacles now, bursting with radiance.
“What is this, Armaeus?” I asked, not with my mind but my voice. We had no time for subtlety here.
“Five minutes into totality,” Armaeus intoned, ignoring us.
“Solar flares! The sky!” This voice was from the bank of monitors, and I flicked my gaze—it was one of the world leaders, the prime minister of Sweden, I was pretty sure, but he wasn’t staring at the ceiling but out his own window. Behind him, his military personnel had been galvanized into action.
“Got it! I got it!” Simon’s voice rang out, and suddenly, explosions in the sky turned the enormous bolts of light into smoke. Cheers rang out, excited and full.
I winced, recognizing the excitement of those voices and knowing instantly who they were. The gamers. Tucked into their lofts and their brownstones and their basements, their hands on their consoles and their gazes on their screens, ten thousand Connected souls were hunched over their computers, setting the sky on fire. “Counter mission to solar flares underway! We’ve got this!”
Similar attacks were being reported across other screens, but the brightness above me pulled my attention back inexorably to the ceiling.
“Six minutes into totality,” Armaeus intoned. “And—now!”
At once, all seven gods wrenched themselves out from behind the shadow of the moon, the effect a fiery constellation of power. As one, each Connected lifted their hands in the war room—not just Connecteds either, but every man and woman standing, adding their energy, their life force to our defense against the gods. The wave of magic that shot up from our bunkers blasted into the atmosphere with incredible force, but it didn’t push the gods back into their box. If anything, it burst them into several lesser pieces, then lesser pieces again, some of them—most of them—shorting out with screams of rage and even terror, but not all—not all! And spinning within the center of these explosions were those damned jewel-like orbs, pulling in the power we were throwing at them, pulling it in but still not shorting out.