Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5 (27 page)

“Nothing anymore. But I didn’t remove the scars you received entirely.” He lifted a hand, and an image turned before us, an image of me—my back bared to the waist. The skin looked pristine until Armaeus drifted his hand down. “I let them remain beneath your skin.”

I stared in horror as the image flickered, and a riot of angry scars surfaced, an interlocking web of pits and bursts and constellations of agony across my back.

“Why did you keep that on me—or in me, whatever?” I managed, my mouth dry at the pain I’d clearly suffered.

Armaeus looked at me with his otherworldly eyes. “Because the scars left behind from the demon realm weren’t simply burns,” he said. “They were a map.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

I couldn’t help it. I lowered the sword. “A map,” I repeated. “A map to what?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t recognize it for what it was until after I returned from the plane of Hell. After I began…meditating more deeply.”

I thought of what Eshe had said, of the Magician locking himself up in his fortress, deep in his arcane trance. “Yeah, how’s that going?”

“Well enough that I can see and understand many of the secrets of the dark mystics before me. To understand why they eventually turned mad.”

“So, dark doesn’t sound so great.” I sheathed the sword and took a small step toward the door. If the Magician had gone dark, I wouldn’t need weaponry, I’d need wings. “I thought you were neutral. Balance. Remember balance? That was kind of your thing. I was a fan of that thing, if you wanted to know. Just putting that out there. Balance is good.”

“And I am a fan, as you say, of understanding. Since the moment I found you in Rio, Miss Wilde, you’ve been impossible to understand.”

I hitched a shoulder. “It’s a gift.”

“One I am ready to open,” he purred. "Like this.”

The Magician didn’t move so much as
became
movement, his hands remaining frozen in place yet simultaneously lifting up, his designer suit unruffled yet suddenly swirling around him, a cloak of fire. I sensed the thrust of power shoot toward me even as I staggered back, but I didn’t reach for the sword this time. There
was
no time. Instead, my hands came together to shield me.

The blow of the Magician’s magic sent me crashing to the floor.

I lay there, pinned, barely able to breathe, to think. “Quit that!” I gasped, and the ball winked out. The pressure remained, however, like an elephant stepping on my chest.

“Crack through the ice with fissures of fire,”
Armaeus whispered, his voice was pounding through my head, my bones, my blood. “
Spear the fire with lances of ice.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I strained back, my sight beginning to dim. “Stop—”

The pressure changed but didn’t go away. Now, instead of death by big heavy thing, I was bleeding out, the weight that was crushing me becoming spikes that drove deep, piercing me through and pinning me to the penthouse carpet.

The spikes grew and twisted, ensnaring more of my flesh. This was an illusion, I knew it was an illusion, but that didn’t stop it from hurting me in a way that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. That didn’t stop it from leaving behind damage that couldn’t be undone. “Armaeus,” I gasped. “Please—”

He dropped heavily to his knees beside me, glaring at me.
“Fight back.”

The pressure changed again. There was no more physical pain, but it was as if a maw had been opened inside me, yawning with pain, with loss, with betrayal. Every friend dead, every hope destroyed, every belief shattered on the rocks of broken promises and unreached dreams. I gasped and half lifted off the floor, but I couldn’t stop this any more than I could halt his other assaults. Worse, this one wormed inside me to that special, secret place, the hidden vault that held the most devastating betrayal I’d ever experienced, and one so fresh, so new that the locks had not yet been tested, the catches never tried.

They were tried now.

“No,” I managed, though I might as well have been howling into a hurricane, so fierce was the attack against my will.

“I returned from Hell changed, but so did you, Miss Wilde.” Armaeus’s voice was once again all around me, this time ringing through the air. “I would know what happened to you. What you saw. What you—”

“No!” I screamed again. My hands came up as if released from the floor by some break in the magnetic force of the planet, the sudden movement too strong for me to check. I pushed Armaeus to the side, sprawling over him. I knew it was wrong, knew it was dangerous to touch this man in any way, but I couldn’t react to anything but the agony in my own mind. I needed him out of my thoughts, out of my heart, his leaching hands away from the last vestiges of my sanity that were keeping me upright and separate from him.

Despite that need, I was still mortal, and Armaeus profoundly was not. He was a Magician whose power source consisted of sex and fire, and with the briefest of touches, an entirely different sort of need ripped through me, raging along my nerve endings, twisting in my core.

“This,” I demanded—not a prayer, not a plea, not anything but the submission to my desire, a desire I had caged for far too long. To hell with it. Literally.

“This,” he growled back.

Some dim portion of my mind realized that here too was a trap that had been neatly sprung. The Magician’s process at once forward and back, yielding and attacking, learning where he could learn and manipulating where he could not. He didn’t give a crap about my secrets, I realized with sudden clarity. He wanted me to draw on whatever power I possessed—however he could get me to do so.

None of that mattered anymore, though. Because Armaeus’s gold-black eyes stared daggers even as his mouth met mine.

The touch of the Magician’s lips was never a purely sexual charge. It was too layered for that. But it was powerful.

Instantly, the penthouse went up in a stream of fire and sparks, not metaphorically but actual sparks, lines of power running around the room and tracing geometric patterns as sacred as they were arcane, before diving to the earth. There they intersected with the ancient lines of power—ley lines and their axes, each more powerful than the last.

The conflagration wasn’t only outside of me, though.

“You are not yet strong enough to fight Gamon’s magic.”
Armaeus’s hands gripped my shoulders, pinning me in place, but not to ravage me with his mouth, his body, the way I wanted him too. Instead he reached for me with his mind, clamping down on the broken places, battering against the strong.
“Gamon’s disciples have trodden the darker paths, and you must be prepared.”

“I can’t fight that way.” I stared into Armaeus’s furious gaze, and the world fell away. I peered into a roiling abyss. Black fire twisted and rolled on itself, daggers of red and gold shooting through it. The waves surged and retreated, crashing on a distant bank, revealing the skulls etched in bone and gold and amber beneath. “This isn’t what I am.”

“It’s what is necessary for you to survive,” he hissed in my ear. “I cannot give it to you, though, Miss Wilde. You must take it into yourself of your own volition, draw it and contain it so you can use it in your time of greatest need.”

“No.” I gripped Armaeus’s hands, a flailing climber scrabbling against a cliff face, knowing that my grip was weakening but unable to resist the allure of the emptiness below. I stared into the power surging beneath me, and I saw more than fear, more than pain. I saw choices and grays and shadows, confusion and doubt. I saw the true reasons for the petrifying terror of great ability—not that it would consume me out of hand, but that it was so easy to simply
let it
take hold of me, to release myself to its pull, to give sway to its desire and madness instead of fighting the endless battle to stay in control, balanced, on the path.

“Gamon has mastered this battle,”
Armaeus murmured, his words once again deep in my soul.
“To drink so long and so fully of such power as quickly as she has can lead to madness or transcendence, the same transcendence savored by the enlightened. The abyss is an easier place to start—it’s so much easier in the shadows. And nearly impossible to survive in the end.”

“Then why are you showing it to me?” I moaned, but I couldn’t turn away from raw power surging beneath me. It wasn’t promise of riches, or the surety of dominance. It was the safety of my friends, the protection of the Connected children. It was the flash of the Honjo Masamune, the vindication of Annika Soo and all she fought for. It was the validation that my own foster mother had not died in vain in her misguided attempt to protect me all those years ago.

And it was deception and insanity too.

“There must be another way,” I gasped, and Armaeus’s laugh was low and dangerous.

“There is another way, Miss Wilde. There is always another way. But it lies through me.”

Alarm bells clanged through every one of my cells, but the Magician’s voice kept on, inexorably.
“Should you wish to take part of the fullness of power, to prepare yourself adequately for the battle you will fight in the coming days and the terror you will face on its heels, you need simply to give yourself over to me. To commit to me, body and soul. To join with me in every sense of the word but with no barriers between us, no block to my touch in the deepest reaches of your mind. Then there will be no secrets of yours I do not know, no emotions I have not plundered. Then there will be no you where there is not also me. But you will have power and riches of the spirit untold, an access to the divine power of manifestation unparalleled in any of the mortal realm.”

As he spoke, Armaeus solidified himself beneath me, once again becoming the Magician I knew instead of the portal to an alternate dimension filled with screeching, untamed magic. His fierce eyes searched mine; his grip tightened. I could see the truth of what he was offering me. I would have ultimate power but give up ultimate individuality—and worse, his words had been very carefully chosen.
He
would not be giving up that prize. He would not be sharing all of himself the way I would be sharing. He would still be in control.

“And the power behind Door Number One?” I gritted out, my heart quailing as the overlay of Armaeus’s humanity slid off like rainwater, revealing once more the aching maw of power within him. “That’s permanent?”

“No,” he whispered. “If left unfed, it is spent like a drug. Unlike the magic of the ancients, born of light, darkness cannot sustain itself in isolation. It must have more darkness. Cut off the source, and you cut off the power.”

I eyed him. “But you’re the source.”

“Now and evermore.” Armaeus’s words were tight, almost desperate, and the roiling field beneath me snapped and hissed. I realized suddenly how close he too was to the edge. “But I can control what I keep—and what I give.”

For now, at least
, were his unspoken words. I could sense them, hanging between us as I witnessed his struggle.

“You could take me now, couldn’t you,” I said. “The way you were saying. Plunder everything without stopping.”

“This close to you, Miss Wilde, I could do whatever I wish,” he said, his dark words ending a sibilant hiss. “But I don’t want to take by force what will one day be freely given.”

I jerked back from him bodily, the assurance in his voice suddenly more frightening than anything the black well of doom could hold for me.

“No!” I snapped.

Before I could think, before I could question—I dove into the sea of blackness.

The waves reached up to take me and pull me under, hard and sure, and suddenly I was swimming for my life. A problem, since I couldn’t swim. But that didn’t stop me from flailing out, my limbs churning in all directions. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t even scream. Then, without warning, the full ocean of darkness didn’t simply surround me, it twisted and shuddered, and somehow
I
was drawing
it
in, drinking it even as it gathered me close. As if I was the mouth of the world and it was a cup poured forth, the tide of black fury not banking until the last of it sluiced into my body, over my skin, not splashing away but sinking into every pore, every cell, swamping my ears, my mouth, my eyes.

“Miss Wilde!”

The voice was distant, too distant and wrong, but it was pulling at me nevertheless—no, the voice alone wasn’t pulling. There were hands at my shoulders, my arms, yanking me, dragging me bodily forth, but there was no need to rescue me anymore, no need for fear.

Because the whole of the world was in me, and I was strong.

Strong.

“Sara!” This time Armaeus’s voice was sharp, a command that even the power now churning within me could respect. My eyes snapped open, and I quailed away from the Magician as he loomed over me, his hands outstretched, his eyes a glittering dark gold that would not let me go.

“As small as a seed held in a child’s hand, a single grain of rice,” he proclaimed, or at least I think he proclaimed it. There were other words too, in Latin and Greek and tongues even more ancient, languages that had not been spoken since the dawn of the world. His hands reached for mine and held them fast even as my own fingers seemed to explode into flame, the mix of fire and acid scalding me bone-deep. Armaeus folded my hands over on themselves and caged them until the blaze dwindled down, down, down, its flame turning white and hard and cold. Finally, there was nothing left in my hand but the smallest grain of rice nestled against my palm. Armaeus lifted that and held it before my face. It dissolved into a powder so fine, my own breath blew it into nothingness.

I stared at him.

Armaeus leaned back on his heels. He was kneeling before me, and I vaguely remembered him starting out that way, but then…

I cleared my throat. “What just happened, exactly?”

He watched me carefully. “You took a measure of power into yourself to strengthen yourself against Gamon’s magic. Dark power. You took it willingly, and you will release it willingly when its work is done.”