by Jenn Stark
I fanned through the deck, tuning in to the cards the way I always did if I had a chance. I could read from a cold deck, but generally that only worked if I was under duress. Being surrounded by a pillow fort didn’t seem to qualify. Still, I couldn’t deny the anxiety I felt at the travel I was about to perform. Some small part of me recognized that I was delaying it, no matter how frantic I was to get to Armaeus. Was that only because I’d probably throw up when I got back? I didn’t think so.
“What is it I need to know?” I murmured, shuffling through the cards. The generality of the question chafed at me even as I asked the question. The cards did best—or at least my readings were more accurate—when I could be specific. I balked against that specificity when it came to the Magician. I didn’t want to know the truth this time, didn’t want to hear the worst. But I couldn’t afford to go in completely blind here. If Armaeus was hurt, seriously hurt, I wanted to be prepared for that. And if he’d changed in any way, as sometimes happened when he accessed his deepest power, I needed to be prepared for that too.
I tried again. “What does this visit…” No, still too vague.
“Am I in danger?” My lip curled in disgust. When had I not been in danger since I started working with the Magician? The man was a walking disaster magnet.
“Will I be able to help Armaeus?” That sounded better, but in my heart, I knew it was still no good. If the cards were positive, well, fantastic, but they only were reinforcing what I already believed. If they were negative, then I might psychologically give up trying, and the cards were only predictions, not statements of fact. Using them to generate pure outcome statements was where most readers and querents messed up. The answers the cards presented indicated likely outcomes, yes, but it was the nuances that led up to that outcome, that fleshed it out, that were as important if not more important than the final card. Sometimes that card was contrary for the sake of being contrary, particularly in a longer reading like the Celtic cross, sometimes…
I blew out my breath again. I was so stalling.
“What is the danger I face with Armaeus?” I suddenly blurted, my words harsh in the silence for all that they were a bare whisper. Instinctively, I knew this was the right question, and I stopped my nervous sorting and quickly drew three cards, laying them facedown on my covered lap. I set the deck aside and flipped up the first card.
Two of Cups.
“Oh, that’s just freaking great.” I rolled my eyes. So I needed to be worried about the fact that I’d found my soulmate? Brilliant. But my immediate rejection of the card held its own truth. I needed to be wary of my emotional bond with the Magician, and the reasons for that weren’t hard to figure out. More than likely, definitely likely, he was going to ask me to do something. Do something, find something, be something I wasn’t ready for.
Or maybe I’d be the one doing the asking, and I needed to be careful what I wished for.
Though I didn’t usually do this if I was reading for a querent, I picked up the deck again, ignoring the two remaining cards for the moment. “Am I right? Will Armaeus ask me to do something I’m not ready for?” Or will I ask him?
I quickly pulled the card before I could criticize my own question. The Fool, the start of the Major Arcana cycle, and one of the universal yes cards. More to the point, the card of someone embarking on a new journey.
“Fine,” I grumbled, setting aside the deck again. I turned over the second card and frowned. Hierophant. That could also go a couple of different ways, but rather than ask the deck for more clarification, I revealed the third card: Justice.
I flopped back on the pillows. The variations of these two cards together were endless. The Hierophant could mean the actual member of the Council, and in that case, I could need to seek balance from him, or bring him to Justice. But he hadn’t done anything wrong, when you got right down to it, even if he was on Death’s suck-it list. He hadn’t originally loosed the demons into the world, nor had he eased the way of the gods to conduct their most recent attack on Earth. He’d done nothing but let himself get hauled out of Hell into a world that no longer appealed to him. The other option was that justice would be dealt by some governmental entity, but while that was certainly something that was on my horizon, what did that specifically have to do with Armaeus? The answer? Nothing.
“I’m wasting time,” I muttered. I drew my hands over the cards, sweeping them back into their deck. It wasn’t their fault I was asking questions at a juncture where there were too many variables in play. All I needed to do was go to Armaeus and see what he wanted from me, if he wanted anything, then see how it fit with the reading.
That made me frown again—Justice as an outcome card wasn’t super helpful no matter how you sliced it, because justice wasn’t always kind or good, for all that it attempted to be fair. I sighed, fatigue taking me over once more.
“What will happen to me as a result of this question?” I asked, but instead of looking at the card I then pulled, I rested back on the pillows, my hand gradually falling to the side. Like it or not, it was time to go. I found myself hearing Nikki’s voice in my head, chanting the ancient rite of travel, first with Eshe, then with Armaeus, and then, at last, those strong, powerful words were—
I slumped, sagging against the pillows.
A moment later, I was out of my body and out of the lake house, into the brilliant sunlight. Armaeus was barely twenty miles away from me, so the journey to Prime Luxe was beyond brief. I soared through the enormous twisting spires of his domain with the curious feeling of coming home, then shot through floor after floor, going deeper and deeper into the heart of the magical constructs. I found the Magician where I expected to, next to his fire and cauldron. I simply didn’t expect him to look so bad.
“Armaeus!” At my shocked exclamation, the Magician raised his head, then shook it hard. Something wrenched inside me, and as I knelt beside him, I felt—different than I usually did when I astral traveled. Supremely different. I glanced down at my hands, and they looked different too. Different as in fully formed.
“Um…am I really here?”
“You’re really here,” Armaeus groaned, the weakness of his voice leavened by the twitch of a smile on his lips. “Well, mostly here. You can’t help me if you’re mostly back lying in your bed, worrying over your cards.”
“Hey, get out of my…” I stopped my own words as Armaeus sank down, lying so flat, he almost seemed to melt into the floor. “Stop that. What’s going on? What can I do?”
Another faint smile. “I’m afraid, Miss Wilde, I’m rather in need of your healing abilities.”
I bit my lip but shoved away my own panicked thoughts as I pulled Armaeus’s head into my lap. Without asking again for permission that had already tacitly been granted, I stared hard at his gaunt, unshaven face, my third eye opening wide.
Armaeus was…a wasteland of pain. The circuits that made up his rich interconnected magic were nearly all dark and broken. A few wayward sparks crackled as I pushed myself along the damaged networks, but I had never seen him so broken, so depleted. I honestly didn’t think it was even possible for him to be so damaged.
“What happened?” I gasped, unable to even begin the process of healing until I understood the full magnitude of what I was seeing. I wound deeper and deeper into his core, and still there was no light.
“The gods…evolved,” Armaeus moaned. “The war was to come in waves, but not layers. The layers were unexpected. Not…fully planned for.”
“The solar flares?” I prompted. “But Simon was ready for those. We knew the power grids were going to be at risk.”
“Not the solar flares,” Armaeus said. “The core magic of the gods, crystallized. You…saw it.”
I stared at him even as part of my mind still roamed the networks of his shattered body. “The colored stones.” The ball of dread that had lain in my stomach since the eclipse now rolled around grumpily. The jewels of the gods, glinting in their grasp. Even in the midst of all the chaos, I’
d been struck by their beauty and confused by their presence. “What do you mean the gods’ core magic?”
Armaeus gave a deep, shuddering sigh. “The gods were not always the beings we see them as today. They, at the dawn of all life, were vital force alone. The force of creation and destruction, darkness and light. They were banished for their hubris and their entitlement and strength, but that did not change their essential nature. Now they want back in, back onto the plane of mortals that, millennia upon millennia ago, had allowed them to evolve from that core vital force to become great and powerful beings worthy of worship. They want in, how ever they can make that happen.”
I tried to think back to the explosions that had taken out the gods, the wave of magic we had pushed out to them, the joint force of the Council and the Houses of Magic. “But we stopped them,” I said. “You and the Council—the Houses. We stopped all of them.”
“We stopped them from entering as their true selves, but not as their core magic. Seven seeds of that rogue magic were dropped into Earth’s field at once. Seven pearls of highest worth. And I could not go after them, couldn’t do that and also fix the damage they had caused. To the gods, a flooded Earth would mean a reset of the world, so many fewer people, governments ruined, entire societies wiped from the planet, a population cowering in fear. There would still be plenty of souls to worship them, in time. But…”
“But you couldn’t let that happen,” I finished for him. “That’s why you summoned the Houses to stand at the bottom of the world. That’s why you used us.”
“I used you,” he whispered. “To heal a world I no longer had the strength to heal myself. I invoked the right of the Council.”
He sounded as broken as he looked, but finally—I found it. The tiniest ember of light, deep in the center of his being. I reached forward with my mind, gathering it close as Armaeus groaned in real pain, then opened my hands to the rest of his body.
The tiny ember lit the nearest circuits, and slowly, so slowly, the fire grew from there, tracing the ashen pathways, sweeping away the charred remains and replacing those fibers with new, vibrant currents of energy. In giving healing, I healed myself further as well, and as Armaeus’s body grew warmer in my embrace, I hugged him close, forcing myself to think only of making him right and whole, only of his strength returning to pour into him. I could sense my own energy beginning to falter, but I poured forth still more, unwilling and unable to stop, not when his breath was still so ragged, not when his pulse was still so thready beneath my fingers.
“Why are you so damaged?” I nearly moaned. “You would not have tried what you thought you could not do.”
“I am damaged for two reasons,” he said. “One, invoking the right of the Council is not without risk—it is flagrantly ignoring the balance of the magic in the world, and that is an offense I answered for immediately. The second is—I was demanding of you that which you did not give willingly, not at first, yet my magic is made up in part of your heart. So I was at war against myself, you could say, in forcing you to act. Your magic did not find that amusing.”
“I would have helped,” I said, horrified. “Willingly.”
Armaeus chuckled grimly. “There was no time to ask you, and I knew I could take faster than you could give. I’d thought—” He coughed hoarsely, but when he spoke again, his voice was stronger, firmer. “I thought I had protected you enough by sharing my source magic with you. And I did make you stronger. But not…strong enough to resist me, in the end. Not without you consciously making the choice to do so.”
He sounded genuinely remorseful about that, but I knew what he said was only the truth. Worse, Gamon had known it too. We could still be controlled by the Council. We were not equal to them.
“Then…how?” I whispered, “What do I have to do?” I wanted—needed to know.
“Ah, Sara,” Armaeus murmured, fatigue finally taking hold of him. “You know…you know. And I pledge to support you, to do whatever you ask of me if it is within my power, but in the end, you must…choose…”
He slumped to the floor again, and instantly, I felt my hold on my physical form in this place growing looser, less corporeal, struggling to remain present with Armaeus though I could feel the tug to return to my own body.
I sat there staring at him, but though he hadn’t finished his words, I didn’t need him to. Armaeus was opening up a path I had never wanted to travel, but a path I kept winding back to, over and over again. He wanted me to choose the Council. Of course he did. And he’d help me ascend the moment I made that choice. Whatever you ask of me…
But there was simply no way. I couldn’t ascend to the Council and live with those rules, those people. I couldn’t suffer under the structure that was now so irretrievably broken that it would take a miracle for Armaeus to put it back together again. There was simply no way…
You must…choose…
“No,” I whispered, though Armaeus was far past hearing me.
In time, I lifted myself up, passing through the awe-inspiring might of Prime Luxe, soaring over the city I had come to love. In time, I fell back toward the earth, to my own home, my own bed, and slipped once more into my body, reclaiming it with a surge of nausea that had me sitting bolt upright in the center of a rolling surf of pillows.
Something bit into my hand, and I glanced down.
The final card that I had pulled.
Death.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“How’s it going, Princess Elsa?” Nikki eyed me over the top of her coffee mug the following morning, her casual question not even remotely fooling me.
“Better,” I said honestly.
She, Simon, and I were back in the war room of the House of Swords, but we were, for the moment, blissfully alone. Ma-Singh and his generals had been dispatched around the globe to assess damage and render aid, and we’d reduced the house guard to a skeleton staff so that all hands could be put to their best use.
And I really did feel remarkably good, given the givens. It always surprised me how the act of healing someone else, particularly someone as powerful as the Magician, ended up making me feel like I’d gone on a three-day spa bender. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same about the rest of the world. I stared morosely at the screens, trying to make sense of the chaos that less than a half hour of tragedy had caused. “I thought we’d done a better job with all this.”
“Statistically, we did a fantastic job. But there was always gonna be fallout.”
It was Simon who spoke now, from one of the screens. For once, his fingers weren’t racing over the keys in front of him, but instead were clasped behind his back and then in front of him, the fingers twining and retwining. “Despite our masterful team of Connected gamers who zapped the crap out of incoming threats, the world sustained a pretty impressive solar storm that temporarily knocked out grids and scared half the planet, even if they didn’t see anything hitting the ground. There’s no current explanation for that solar storm, so that’s setting everyone off too. Apart from that, the extra-hot sun that spilled out behind the eclipse set fire to a good portion of southern Argentina, not to mention a few islands, and there was still considerable damage to the ice shelf even with you guys dumping a bunch of freezer burn into the really big hole that opened up. Scientists are pretty much losing their minds over what just happened, because it makes no logical sense.”
“So what information are you feeding them?”
“Not as much as I wish I could. The satellites were legit knocked out for the time that the gods made their run at Earth, and the veil ripped down the middle, but it’s not like that’s going to be information that anyone can turn into a sound bite. The sun has also conveniently gone back to its pre-flare state, and even that isn’t adding up because it all happened too fast. Something as big as the sun takes some time to build up a head of steam. For it to suddenly stop acting out makes people think something ran into it. We’re kind of going with that.”
“Ran into it.” I eyed him. �
��Like it got injured?”
“Look, it’s kind of murky territory here,” Simon said defensively. “All we really have is that an anomalous solar event blew the crap out of an expected eclipse and generated solar flares that caused major electrical disruption—temporarily. And then everything went back to normal. On the face of it, that seems like a good thing. In reality, it’s bad because none of this follows any sort of predictive logic. EMPs fry circuits—but not here. Now the circuits are magically up and running again, no problem. The sun overheats and melts the universe—except not this time. This time, it blew up like a toddler with toothache and then, for no discernible reason, went back to eating Cheerios. Doesn’t make sense. We’ve got the Hermit doing damage control.”
“The Hermit?” Dad?
“Sure. We’ve had fake credentials for him for years, some obscure planetarium type, a few articles a year, lather-rinse-repeat. He can talk the talk, and he’s certainly seen shit that plays well with the scientific community, so right now, he’s convincing everyone that their equipment experienced the mother of all malfunctions because it got barbecued. He’ll keep that up for a few more days, and hopefully this will go away.”
“Hopefully,” I said. “And if it doesn’t?”
“If it doesn’t, then we’ll try something else. But it’s happened before. You really think that the whole ‘flying saucer’ thing in the 1950s was something a bunch of yahoos made up out of whole cloth? That took a while to debunk. And did you think the Stargate experiments of the 1970s were seriously so poorly run that none of them worked? Not true. In fact, we learned a great deal about the Connected capabilities through those experiments. But we couldn’t actually let all that information be released into the scientific community in an uncontrolled way. And there was no dire need for it to be discovered by the general public. Better for it to be quietly buried until the world caught up with its ability to tolerate the X-Men among us.” He grimaced. “It would appear we’re still not there, sadly.”