by Jenn Stark
“What!” I screeched, twisting one way, then the other. “What is this?”
I wasn’t in a stone hallway anymore. There were no walls or doors or floors or a building of any sort. I was crouching in the middle of an honest-to-God forest, with honest-to-God dirt under my feet, leaves on the trees, heat and sun and humidity and—
“What is this?” I growled again.
“Sara.” The voice came again, too strong, too full. Too…wrong. It was wrong, I thought with the one last remaining shred of my brain. Armaeus always called me Miss Wilde. Always.
Laughter sounded across the small space, and I finally realized he’d been standing there all the time. I stood up too quickly, all the blood leaving my head in a rush. That had to be the reason why I was so dizzy staring at the Magician. Not because he was standing in the middle of a freaking forest in the middle of freaking Hell. Not because he was staring at me with a shockingly beautiful smile on his face, laughter in his eyes, his skin tanned, his hair windswept, and his body tall and strong and—
“What’s happening?” I whispered, but no sound came out of my mouth. No sound came from anywhere, suddenly, except the pounding of my own heart. Tears sparked behind my eyes. He was so perfect, the Magician. So perfect and beautiful and—here.
“Sara,” he said again, stepping closer to me as my hands shot out, warding him off. “I hoped you would come, but there was no way to be sure. And no way to ask you to take such a dangerous step, not when I wanted it so much.”
“What?” I blinked as Armaeus edged closer. He was wearing simple brown trousers and sandals, the kind Kreios favored, and a long, loose shirt. I’d never seen him more casual, and I shook my head, trying to understand.
“Where’s the Hierophant?” I asked. “Why haven’t you contacted Eshe?”
“This place—time stops here, Sara. Stops.” He took a few steps forward and held out a hand. “I’ve been here for a decade already. How much time has passed on the outside? A day? An hour?”
“You think—you think a decade has passed? Ten years?” I clarified in case he was math challenged. “That’s not possible.”
“You above all should know that’s a foolish statement.” He laughed, and I focused harder on him. Tiny lines bracketed the corners of his eyes, lines that hadn’t been there before.
“This isn’t possible,” I said again. “I’m having a total Inception moment here. You know that, right?”
“Is it so hard to believe—still—that the most intriguing stories have some measure of truth as their basis? Look around and tell me this is any less real than the world you left behind. A world you haven’t truly left. This place, this land…” He waved at the forest around us. “It causes no harm at all.”
I frowned. “But…you’re older. I can see it. And you can’t age, Armaeus—that would be bad. The Council needs you to be immortal.”
“Yes, it does,” he said, his smile gentle, a trainer with a freaked-out puppy. “But we are here, Sara. We are real. That’s what you must focus on.”
He held out his hand, and I let him clasp my fingers, but no words would come. The surge of connection was so strong, I was swamped both psychically and emotionally. I gasped as he pulled me close, too overwhelmed to protest.
“What do you need from me to believe?” he asked, dropping a kiss on my forehead. Where his lips connected with my skin, fire blazed all the way down to my heels. “Don’t you want to see what I’ve built us while I waited for you?”
He tugged me forward through the leafy bower of trees. As the landscape spilled away from us, I stopped short.
There—there was an ocean in front of us as turquoise as the Caribbean Sea. Beside it soared a two-story bungalow with wide patios that angled out to the water. I stared from the vista to the house to Armaeus again, unsure of what weirded me out more. “We can’t stay here, Armaeus. We have to get back.”
“We will.” He drew me close and dropped his lips to mine, and once again I felt the zing of electricity surge around us, fusing us together, never to be parted. “We can spend as long as we care to here, Sara, a moment, a day. A week. A year.”
His lips roamed over my face as he talked, and I felt my knees loosen. It was all too much, too impossible. Armaeus here, me being able to touch him without pain or fear. When he drew me into an embrace, the touch of his strong arms around me was certain and true.
And what made it worse…so incredibly worse…was that this was what I wanted. What I’d already glimpsed with him. What I yearned for.
“It’s not real,” I said against his mouth, and he pulled back, his eyes a deep, burnished gold. That was different too. There was no black in his irises at all, drowning out the ancient gold. His eyes were clear. Perfect. And filled with tenderness.
“It’s as real as this.” He leaned forward and kissed me again. Not a passionate kiss, not a searching one, but the long-drawn-out kiss of a man with nothing but time on his hands. For the merest breath, I thought—maybe—that perhaps we could spend an evening here. A night, a day. A week. A month.
Armaeus pulled back, grinning down at me. “I’ve been waiting so long. I knew you would come, eventually. If I didn’t reach out for you, didn’t return immediately. I hoped you would find me. And so you did.”
“You knew—about this?” He was tugging me toward the house, and I realized that steps had been cut into the steep ridge, steps lined with stones, perfectly crafted and set into place. A task that would have taken months, I suspected. Years? The walkway twisted down the ridge and flowed into a wide patio. The house had no driveway—there was no need for a car. There was no need for anything, really, except the two of us and the open sea, the leafy jungle surrounding us, and the gentle breezes off the ocean.
“Is there anyone else here?” I asked, and he pulled me to him once more, seeming unable to stop touching me, as if he was refilling a well long since emptied.
“Eventually, there could be,” he said. “If you wanted it. I confess, I’ve thought for a great many years about the simple prospect of having you to myself.”
“You… Oh. Sure.”
He smiled at my confusion, a disarming, lopsided grin, and I couldn’t keep from staring. Something brittle seemed to melt inside me, not an entirely pleasant feeling. He squeezed my hand, feeling warmer and truer than anything I’d touched in my lifetime. How was this possible?
“There are all the animals of the forest here, and fish of every description. It is, in a word, an idyll. That’s all. A time out of time.” He tugged me in a new direction, toward steps I hadn’t seen before but which descended from the house in a gentle, rolling arc. “Would you share it with me, Sara? For just a little while?”
I didn’t know what to say, but words suddenly weren’t necessary. We walked down the long stone steps to the ocean, and strolled along the beach, and slept that night under the stars on the open powder-soft sand.
The next day, we explored the forest, and the day after that, the overgrown fruit trees over the ridgeline, carrying back enough citrus for a dozen people and laughing under the sun. And the nights passed into new days, and we talked of everything, eventually. The day we met, the first time we attempted to make love. The dangers of possibilities that faced us in the war on magic. Every night we slept in each other’s arms, and I watched the sun work highlights into Armaeus’s hair, watched his skin deepen its tan. My own skin lost its perpetual greenish cast from too many days spent indoors or underground, and I shed my hoodie and pants for the same serviceable outfit Armaeus wore.
And with the shedding of the clothes, I sloughed off other layers too. Gradually, so slowly I didn’t fully realize it was happening, I unbound my emotions, opening up first a little, then a bit more, and then all at once. Armaeus held me as the sun dipped into the far western horizon, his lips on my hair, his arms tight as I sobbed the tears I had never cried for my mother, my lost life, my lost self. My heart felt so full of possibility in those moments, I thought it would burst—but it di
dn’t, and the sun finally set and rose again, and there was more laughter to be had.
We walked everywhere holding hands, as if we needed the certainty of the other person, but of nothing else in the world. Despite my initial question, we never invited another person into the idyll. It was…perfect. It was whole and complete with the two of us. Everything I’d wanted but had never known.
And some nights, like this night, we would talk about returning.
Armaeus lay on the teak bench he’d carved for the deck, his long body sleek and magnificent in the sunlight. His hair had somehow grown gray in the intervening…weeks. It had been a few weeks, I thought. Not months or years. I would have noticed that. Weeks, then. He smiled, and the lines at his eyes and around his mouth deepened and mellowed his face.
“What do you most want, Sara?”
That was another thing. Since I’d first found him here, I’d never once been “Miss Wilde.” At first I’d missed it, but this—this was different and wonderful all on its own. This was sweet and perfect and true.
He turned to me, and I noticed the lines on his forehead as well. He really was aging. There was no question. A sudden fear cropped up in my stomach, unwelcome and unwanted. “This,” I said, surprised at the honesty in my words. “I want this. I want you. I want us.” I blushed, but Armaeus nodded, apparently satisfied with the answer.
“I want that too,” he murmured. “I’ve always wanted it, since the moment I first saw you. Come here.”
I moved to his side, and he sat up and gathered me close, shifting so that we watched the ocean. It was our favorite way to end an evening or start a morning, curled up so tightly that we didn’t know where one of us ended and the other started.
“There’s something you need to know, Sara,” he murmured into my hair. “Something important.”
I froze in his embrace. Armaeus’s tone was light and even, but it distressed me all the same. This wasn’t a place of darkness, my mind insisted. This was a place of endless, joyful us.
“Okay,” I said when he didn’t speak.
“I’m sick.”
I stiffened further, but Armaeus held me close, unwilling to let me go.
“It happened when I first became mortal—not this last time, but centuries earlier, when needs dictated that I return to the mortal state to transact some business with the Council. When I returned to the immortal state, the disease halted its progress, and my strength returned, quickly and completely.”
“Then you have to go back—” I twisted in his arms to find him regarding me with such a sense of peace, of contentment, that my fear morphed to anger. “What have we been doing here!” I demanded. “You could have told me, we could have left—”
“It was already too late.” He leaned down and nuzzled my ear, but I was cold inside, my mind refusing to process his words. He sighed and leaned back, the truth in his eyes knifing through me. “I knew the moment I stepped into Hell how rapidly the disease was ravaging my body, and I chose to travel here. To this place I knew where you would eventually come.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” I demanded, not recognizing my own voice. “You have all the magic of the world at your disposal, Armaeus. Kreios—the Council. They could and will come to your aid. They will find the solution throughout all the dimensions.”
“There is no solution, Sara.” He tightened his hold on me. “You should know this as well. Now, before I grow weak.”
“Before you what?” The chill in my belly extended to my bones. I felt ancient, suddenly, crippled. Armaeus didn’t appear merely older now, he looked tired. Had he been dying before my eyes without me knowing it? “What are you talking about?”
“I love you, Sara.”
The words were so unexpected, so impossible, that it was all I could do not to fall off the teak bench. I opened and closed my mouth like a carp tossed onto the shore, but Armaeus didn’t say anything further. He simply watched me with those unfathomable, impossibly golden eyes, eyes that seemed to see directly into me, healing me, making me whole. “I don’t—I can’t—”
“You can,” Armaeus leaned closer then, his lips brushing mine. Something shattered completely inside me, the last little bit of resistance I had, and I crumpled against him as he pulled me roughly close, his mouth firm and hot, his fingers gripping my shoulders, his lips rough and insistent on mine. “You do,” he growled against me, then leaned back, his expression impossibly fierce.
And then it melted.
I jerked back, but Armaeus’s hands were iron clasps around my shoulders, and I couldn’t escape, couldn’t leave, couldn’t breathe as the impossible vision of his face disintegrating on itself blasted against my retinas and stained my soul. I didn’t realize I was screaming until my throat began to burn—as everything tilted and warped and exploded and—
“Got you,” sneered a voice beside me in the darkness.
And it was mine.
Chapter Thirteen
I wrenched away and slammed into a stone wall, my head cracking against the surface hard enough to make lights dart across my vision. I shook my head and gritted my teeth against the pain of the headache that blossomed at the base of my skull. It was nothing compared to the pain deep in my gut, though. My stomach roiled, and my heart seemed shrunken down to a tiny piece of coal.
“You’re kind of pathetic, you know,” my alter ego informed me. She was perched on a low wall with columns to either side of her that extended as far as the eye could see. Beyond her was a sun-drenched, grassy field, and the corridor seemed to run forever in either direction. “You should have known you were being manipulated from the start.”
I gaped at her. “Illusion,” I managed, and she grinned.
“A good one too. Don’t blame me, though. It took me a while to figure out what was real and what was bullshit myself. Anything that sounded like what I most wanted to hear…”
The sickness didn’t dissipate. “You could have warned me.”
She snorted. “Wouldn’t have done any good. I’m the epitome of decisions you’d never make. I’m the voice in your head you constantly ignore.”
“I would have made an exception for that.”
“You need to grow up is what you need.” Sariah pulled herself off the ledge and dusted off her pants. “Newsflash. The Magician isn’t sitting around all dreamy eyed for you. You’re a tool to him. A convenient one.” The glance she sent me was dark. “The sooner you realize that, the better.”
“I guess.” Absently, I rubbed my chest, feeling the twinned amulets and my pouch of Tarot chips, needing the grounding of their reality. My heart still ached as if I’d had a dying man ripped from my arms after he’d declared his love for me. My mind couldn’t divorce itself from the illusion of what had been presented to it. What I’d wanted to believe. “He—none of that was true? He’s not sick?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” Sariah scowled at me, then shook her head. “You don’t get it, do you? The Magician is old, dude. Seriously old. When you put together that many centuries, you know what you lose? Not simply your mortality—you ditch your humanity too. You’re basically a computer on legs, and everything is done for a purpose, nothing left to chance. You really think he has any feelings for you?” She gave a disgusted snort. “You should have stayed with Brody. Anything the Magician says is bullshit with a capital B.”
“And I should hold you to the same yardstick, I assume,” I snapped. “You’re every bit as much of an illusion.”
“Yeah, but this time when you talk to yourself, you should listen.” She grinned. “And something else too. Hell’s not simply about lies. It’s also about uncomfortable truths. And you’ve got a few you need to see.”
“I’ve had enough illusions.”
“Not so much illusions as a history lesson. C’mon. Check this out.”
Sariah hopped off the wall and leaned against it, peering out into the bright, sunny day. I shuffled up next to her, tears threatening against the backs of my eyes. Exhaustion wei
ghed down every cell in my body, as if I really had spent months away and somewhere else, living a life day in and day out. How stupid could I be? Of course my time with Armaeus had been an illusion. Of course he wasn’t sick, didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with me, cut off from all his abilities, his friends, his history.
Of course he didn’t love me.
I closed my eyes, feeling a thousand times the fool.
“Okay, here we go, what your mind is serving up as what you really have to see above all else.” Sariah let out a low whistle. “Man, you are a glutton for punishment.”
The smell of firewood burning touched my nose, and I blinked my eyes open, scowling, ready to discount what I was seeing on general principles. “What is this?”
The scene before us was suddenly nothing like the wide grassy plain that had been there before. Instead, it was a village of some sort on the edge of a forest, a collection of huts straight out of a Renaissance Fair. It was nighttime, and there was a fire—multiple fires, actually, despite the roiling clouds above, presaging a rainstorm. The village was on fire.
“Stop it. I’m not watching this,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, you are,” Sariah said. “This is what actually happened to Armaeus Bertrand the last time he intersected with Hell. The place has a tendency to keep those kinds of records.”
I frowned at her. “He’s never been here before. I know that as fact.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t say he had, but someone important to him has, someone he knew. Someone he loved. Because that,” she hooked a thumb at the scene in front of us, “doesn’t happen by chance. Someone is reliving history.”
“That’s impossible—” And then I realized what I was seeing. I had been shown this landscape before, albeit briefly. The village on the edge of the forest, the fires. The darkness. It had been in Armaeus’s mind when he’d connected with me in an unguarded moment in his penthouse home in Vegas. For once, it’d been his mental barriers that had slipped, not mine. And this village was what I’d seen.