by Jenn Stark
In a club run by the Council. The Council, who were supposed to be all high and mighty in their noninterference. The Council, who were supposed to be doing what they could to help magic thrive—not allow it to be debased and defiled. The Council, who were not mortal…and who I was beginning to suspect had long ago lost whatever humanity they’d ever possessed.
Brody nodded, frowning down at his notes again as Nikki leaned forward. Both of them were concentrating hard enough not to notice as I wrenched open my mental barriers and blasted one word across the Strip—all the way into the heart of Prime Luxe.
Armaeus!
The answering pressure against my mind was instant and unnerving. I knew that touch; I remembered it. I’d so quickly gotten used to it being less powerful, less alarming, less threatening—but now it was back to how it’d been the first time I’d felt it. No, worse than I remembered it, somehow—whispering across my senses, crawling through my mind.
“A car is waiting for you out front, Miss Wilde,” the Magician purred inside my head. “You want to speak to me, you know where to find me.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I tried to keep my mad contained on the ride over to Prime Luxe, but I was too chilled, too shaky for moderation. It occurred to me as I sagged back against the overstuffed seats of the black town car that I was still jacked up over my sojourn in Hell. Worse, Armaeus was once more registering full-test in the immortal department.
Exactly what I didn’t want to face when I was at less than optimal strength.
He’d needed to make the switch back to immortal, though. As the limo angled toward the Strip, I could see the Emperor’s tower gleaming in the sunlight—it seemed to be bigger every time I passed it. The Emperor was pure dark magic, and he was aligned against the Magician. Eshe was on the Emperor’s side more than she wasn’t, and she was neutral. The Fool and presumably Michael were light magic and were in the Magician’s camp, and so was the Devil, who was also neutral. Death, the ultimate in gray alignment, was so neutral she was running on the Independent ticket. She wasn’t going to pick sides. That left dark and neutral against neutral and light, and I couldn’t help thinking that dark would always trump light in a head-to-head competition. Not that the Council members were at war with each other, per se, but they certainly weren’t planning any neighborhood block parties either.
And what was the deal with this private club? I’d never heard of Shiver, and I should have, arguably. Between Nikki and Dixie, I should know everything happening in Vegas.
Unless Nikki and Dixie were being prodded to look the other way, which apparently was exactly what was happening here.
My mad ratcheted up again as the limo turned into the gloriously kitschy front drive of the Luxor hotel, its enormous gaudy sphinx holding court in front of the glass pyramid. Prime Luxe soared above the Luxor in shadowy splendor, barely visible in the full light of the sun. And when I entered the Luxor’s main lobby, I had to brace myself for another round of double vision, with the elegantly appointed Prime Luxe foyer at odds with all the fake gold and bad carpeting, the sound of the jangling casino beyond filling the air-conditioned space. I strode over to the elevator bank and punched the secondary grid atop the Luxor’s button panel, which opened a separate set of elevator doors that didn’t exactly line up with the ones the rest of the world saw.
Just like everything else about the Council.
By the time I reached the top level of Prime Luxe, every mental barrier I possessed was reinforced and ready for action. I felt more than heard the Magician’s chuckle as the elevator doors snicked open, revealing his luxurious penthouse office.
“So we are back to this, it seems.” Armaeus spoke the words in my mind, but I saw him easily enough, mixing a drink at his office bar. Because when you’re the Magician, you did things like that at ten in the morning.
“Armaeus,” I said. It seemed a safe enough response, but I braced myself as he faced me, a tumbler of scotch in his hand. He seemed…off to me. Dangerous. And it wasn’t simply the suit, though that was sharp enough—navy-blue jacket, deep khaki trousers that flowed like butter, cerulean-blue oxford cloth shirt open at the collar. He was either dressing down or heading for a wedding in the Hamptons, I couldn’t tell which. “What’s the Council’s interest in Shiver?”
“We’ll get to that presently. I trust you’re quite recovered from your travels?” He gestured to the collection of chairs and couches in the center of his office, and I dutifully headed toward them, scrambling for some semblance of normalcy. All my nerve endings were pinging with anxiety, fear, excitement—and if I had to be honest: lust. It was as if every one of my sensory circuit boards was overheating, and I couldn’t figure out why. Armaeus wasn’t attacking me, nor did he give any indication that he was about to jump my bones.
But somehow, everything seemed harder now, more personal. All the laughter and stories we’d shared in Hell—all the whispered promises—suddenly rang loudly in my mind. It didn’t matter that they’d never happened. They’d happened to me. They were real to me, and I could still remember them. And they left me feeling raw, vulnerable.
Stop it. I threw more sandbags against my mental barriers and prayed they’d hold.
A tumbler of cut crystal sat beside the wingback chair, and I zeroed in on it, dropping into the seat and reaching for the glass, desperate for the business of drinking to mask my confusion. Eventually I remembered that Armaeus had asked a question, and I offered him a wisp of a smile.
“I’m not sure if Hell’s a place you recover from, exactly, as much as hope to forget.”
As soon as I said the words, I knew they were wrong. Armaeus didn’t react, however, but approached me with the grace of a leopard. He eschewed the farthest chairs and sat down on the couch, close enough that he could touch my knee if he edged forward. He didn’t, though. He sat back, one arm draped casually over the top of the cushions. Gold glinted at his wrist and fingers, and I narrowed my eyes on the slender gold band that adorned the ring finger of his left hand. That was new.
That was also annoying.
I took a long drink of scotch, reminding myself that the tradition of marriage rings was likely much different in the early Middle Ages than it was now, and that Armaeus was allowed to wear diamonds in his ears and bells on his toes for all I cared.
“Yes, forgetting. There was much to forget there for you, perhaps more than for me, I think.” He rolled his glass in his hands. “What is your interest in Shiver?”
“What’s yours?” I snapped back. “Why is there a private club for Connecteds that the top Connecteds in Vegas conveniently forget about for long periods at a time? What do you have going on there?”
“The mortal state is one of ever-changing preferences, interests, methods, and needs,” Armaeus said. “It is expedient for the Council to study those who engage in magic, much as Michael has done since before the dawn of recorded history.”
I curled my lip. “You’re studying people in a bar? People are drinking there, dancing. That’s not real life.”
“It’s a gathering of like-minded souls who find comfort in their own community.” He shrugged. “You would have been moved to go there yourself, if I’d desired it, Miss Wilde. I didn’t. I could observe you more easily at close quarters.”
Irritation riffled along my nerves. “You shouldn’t be observing us at all. We’re not bugs under glass, Armaeus. We’re Connected. You’re Connected. You might be higher up on the food chain, but that doesn’t make us fundamentally different.”
His lips twitched. “In that, I’m afraid you are wrong, Miss Wilde. And the sooner you realize the depth of your mistake, the better for us all.”
I demonstrated my world-class eye-rolling talent. “Yeah, yeah, I got this line already. You’re not fully human. Your Council signing bonus included an upgrade to demigod status. I don’t really care. You know what’s right and wrong. You know what’s interference and what’s not. You want to talk to me about balance? How balanced
is it that we’ve got a rash of Connected slaves showing up—in Vegas, on your freaking patch of sunshine—and they’re going to be auctioned in your club? How is that possibly something you—”
The glass shattered in Armaeus’s hand so quickly, my eyes registered the sight before my brain could fully process it. What happened after that was beyond mortal comprehension, beyond human comprehension, I supposed, if you wanted to put a superfine point on it.
In one moment, Armaeus was sitting on his penthouse couch, the cut crystal tumbler in his hand exploding out in all directions, a shower of glass and scotch and ice.
In that exact same moment, Armaeus was up and whirling around toward the far wall—no, not toward the wall, toward the Strip and its fairyland collection of casinos that towered above the mere human structures. His hands stretched out, fingers wide, and a ball of magic seemed to explode outward from him—magic no less powerful for all that it was invisible but for the strangest shimmer that speared through the illusion of his penthouse and burst into the open air above Vegas. Then Armaeus wrenched his hands back toward his chest, fingers curved as if he held the skeins of time in his grasp.
In that identical moment—that moment of the exploding glass in front of the seated Armaeus, the moment of the ball of magic flying out from the whirling Armaeus, the moment of his wrench of power back into this place, this penthouse—in that same moment, Armaeus turned toward the door, his face a mask of fury and indignation, his mouth set into a snarl, his eyes flashing with an otherworldly fire.
“What,” he demanded, “have you done?”
I jerked my gaze to the door as well.
The Emperor stood in the doorway of Armaeus’s penthouse office, his face set in an equal and opposite mask of fury. “I suppose civility would be too much to ask of someone who came to his seat on the Council during the filthiest time in humanity,” Viktor Dal snapped.
I sat frozen in my chair. Viktor Dal and I went way back—a decade and more back—and he looked exactly the same as when I’d first seen him in Memphis, working a case with Officer Brody Rooks. Then, as now, he was a slight man of narrow, pinched features, his blond hair dropping easily over his forehead, barely dusting his deep set, enigmatic eyes. Others had called those eyes kind, compassionate. I hadn’t thought they were anything special. Certainly not the eyes of the man who’d kidnapped children for his own twisted, magical gain. Certainly not the eyes of a man capable of ruining my life.
But now Viktor was in Vegas—and not just an asshat, but one of the most powerful asshats in the world, a full-fledged Emperor of the Arcana Council. And apparently, he’d just tripped the Magician’s trigger.
“You have been here a week, Viktor. Two,” Armaeus said. “And you already seek to infect the city with your base magic?”
“What are you talking about?” Viktor’s surprise seemed remarkably authentic. “I have barely been able to endure the stench of this place, let alone work any magic. Believe me, you would know if I had done so. You and your puny parlor tricks do not impress me, Magician.”
“Spare me your boasts,” Armaeus growled. “I’m talking about the defiled Connecteds you have brought to Vegas.”
“The what?” Viktor stared at Armaeus, so clearly at a loss that even I found him convincing. “Defiled Connecteds—the entire thrice-damned lot of them are defiled in this hellhole. Why you insist upon remaining here when there is better magic, purer magic ready and waiting to host the Council—”
“Enough!” Armaeus thrust his hand up, and Viktor didn’t just disappear, he was swept out of the penthouse like yesterday’s garbage. Armaeus turned back to me then, his smile dark with entirely too much satisfaction.
“What the hell was that?” I spluttered.
“That,” Armaeus said smugly, “was a demonstration for the Emperor’s benefit. More to the point, however, while Viktor was blathering, I read his innermost truth. He did not do this. What is happening at Shiver tonight is not a construct of the Council, but of its human operators.”
“And you don’t know what they’re doing?”
“There is usually no need to monitor them so closely as that. Better that it has been brought to our attention organically, so that we can intervene to protect Council interests if and as necessary.”
I sat up straighter. “Well, I’m here to tell you, it’s necessary. Intervene. If what’s going on there tonight is a slave auction—”
“Then it bears further watching, Miss Wilde. Good that you will be there. Contact me when you learn something of more use, and I can direct you accordingly.”
“Yeah, well, I might be busy once we get there,” I retorted. “Why not simply crawl around in my head if you want to talk to me?”
Armaeus spread his hands, his manner changing with quicksilver fluidity. He looked almost…abashed. I blinked at him as he smiled with disarming humility.
“If you want me to speak in your mind, Miss Wilde, you must grant me permission. You’ve grown stronger.”
“Oh.” I nodded, surprised. I hadn’t realized I was still barricading myself from Armaeus. Since Hell, it’d become a knee-jerk reaction, apparently. “Well, fine.” I slipped the bounds of my mind and felt the rush of the Magician’s touch—his touch, and something more.
“Fortunately, Miss Wilde, I’ve grown stronger too.”
Fury lashed through me, quick and hot—not my anger, but Armaeus’s as he poured acid into my mind and pounded spikes through my mental barriers before I could yank them up again. The seething, roiling rage he spilled into me was reminiscent of the nerve-shattering violence he’d pummeled Sariah with in Hell—and, to a lesser extent, me.
“Stop it!” I gritted out. “You knew what I was doing the whole time with Mirabel. You could have stopped me without pain.”
“I could have.” His words screamed through my brain, faster and far more brutal than I’d ever experienced him before. “But where would have been the vindication in that? You had no right to touch Mirabel. No. Right.”
“She died nearly a thousand years ago! You had no right to keep her lingering in that pit, waiting for you to return.”
“I didn’t know!” The agony in Armaeus’s voice transcended his anger for a moment. “You think if I had the opportunity to see her, to be with her, that I would not have breached the bounds of Hell long before now? If there’d been any chance—”
His voice caught, and every perfect, precious moment—every beautiful memory I’d made with Armaeus—shriveled and died within me. He wasn’t merely proclaiming his love for Mirabel, he was discounting everything between us, all the illusions I was clinging to so fiercely—still clinging to, even though I knew they were false, knew they were baseless. Even though I alone suffered for those lost illusions, my heart shot through with so many holes it could no longer hold so much as an ounce of hope, of love, ever again.
“You’re the Magician,” I shot back. “If you didn’t know, you should have. If you did know but didn’t want to make a decision, instead getting caught up with the wonder and the possibility of it, then good for you. Hopefully you let her go this time, at last.”
He paused long enough for me to know he hadn’t. “Unbelievable,” I snapped, and reinforced my barriers against the pain that clanged in my soul. “You suck worse than I thought.”
“Fortunately, we have all the time we need to discuss what is and is not appropriate pushing of boundaries, Miss Wilde. I assure you it is a lesson I look forward to both giving and receiving from you.” Armaeus’s words slid through me with equal parts threat and promise, leaving me angry and filled with need at once.
“Starting now.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I swallowed, my mind spinning too fast now, trying to keep up. Armaeus continued, not giving me a chance to breathe. “You are a knotted skein that will need to be unraveled. What you learned in Hell, intentionally or otherwise, will be useful to the Council.”
”Great,” I managed. “I’ll send you a report.”
<
br /> His smile deepened, and he lifted a hand. “I could simply touch—”
“No! No,” I gritted out. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to do anything remotely close to touching me. That would be very bad, I think. Seriously bad. Terrible.” I couldn’t seem to stop talking as my hands spasmed around my glass.
“You’re uneasy around me.” Armaeus sounded amused. “More so than before.”
“I have every reason to be.” I stared out the enormous plateglass windows of the suite. Once again the casinos of the Council members loomed large in my vision—including the farthest one, recently come to life as a shimmering white obelisk. “Is Michael taking up residence in the White Tower?”
“Not quite yet,” Armaeus said, his voice silky with threat. “If I didn’t know better, I would say you are trying to change the subject, Miss Wilde. Why would you do that?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.” I shifted back in my chair a little farther as I realized that Armaeus was seated on the couch again and leaning forward, crowding close to me. “I need to speak to the Hierophant. If he’s here, I could use him.”
“You wish to understand what you saw in Hell. I wish to understand that too.” He edged nearer. “You were split in two, Miss Wilde. I hadn’t expected that. It quite made everything more confusing when you attacked Mirabel, but I suppose that was your intention.”
”You know, I didn’t intend most of what happened there, and that’s the honest truth. But I wasn’t—I don’t know who that was, Armaeus. It was me, but not me. It was the me who did things I wouldn’t do. She damages. I don’t damage.”
“Don’t you?” he murmured, and I gripped my glass more tightly. At this point, it would be the second shattered tumbler of the day if I wasn’t careful, but I couldn’t ease off.