Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 (16 page)

“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 weighed 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.

I ruthlessly forced all that I had learned about Armaeus at our ocean-side home from my mind. I was not months or years older, I was merely minutes older than what I’d been when I’d gone into that rabbit hole of the beach and the ocean and the forest and—and an Armaeus who had never been, never would be. I needed to focus on the facts, and that was what I was being presented. Possibly. But at least this was something I could verify, on the outside. There would potentially be records of this village, this fire.

“This is history?”

“Preserved for all eternity,” Sariah said, her voice wry. “You’ll notice, though, Hell doesn’t really go in for the happy memories.”

“But is it memory, or history?” It didn’t matter. I already had one leg over the wall, and I could smell the pungent forest, the wasting fire. It was spring, I realized. Everything was wet with rain and buds and blossoms. A fire would not have started easily. It had to have been set.

Whatever Sariah said after that was lost in the howling wind as I jumped off the rocky wall and stumbled the rest of the way down a steep embankment. After I half rolled to a landing, I paused, gathering my wits. The fire was close enough to create a haze of false light, and my belief that this was some sort of medieval settlement was reinforced. Had Armaeus ascended yet? Become the Magician? Somehow I hadn’t imagined him coming from such a simple place. Then again, it’d been the twelfth century. Civilization had an entirely different meaning back then.

Either way, I was done with moving forward without guidance I could count on. Stepping into the lee of a tree, I fished into the pouch hanging around my neck, pulling out three chips. The gloom was too heavy for me to quickly discern them, but I gripped the chips in one fist as I edged forward. I could hear the screams now, the chaos, as the village pulled together to save the houses that had been set ablaze.

When I got close enough to see detail, I opened my hand, flipping over the chips until they were faceup. Drawing them this way, I had no idea what came first or last, but I could easily see the miniature painted surfaces to know what lay in store.

Five of Swords. Two of Cups. Ten of Swords.

Some days, it didn’t pay to get up in the morning. “But is this real?” I muttered, thrusting my hand back into the pouch one last time and quickly flipping up a disc. Sun. There was no stronger “Yes” card in the deck, for all that there was nothing sunny about the chaos in front of me now.

I dropped the chips back into my pouch and tucked it under my tank top, zipping up my hoodie fully. I would be a stranger to these people, but it was dark and everything was ablaze. No one would notice me.

A woman’s scream set my feet in motion, and I burst forth, rushing into the tiny village. The first thing I noticed was the heat. The second was the smell of burning timber.

“Oh! Oh!” shouted a man in my ear before thrusting two heavy pails at me. He rushed off as soon as I staggered beneath the weight. He was no taller than I was, but sturdily built, and I could barely haul the buckets of water forward. I had no idea where I was, but I heard the thick accents all around me and the flow of words, and almost recognized the cadence. French. The villagers were speaking a type of old French.

I didn’t know French, but I was less ignorant of it than the rest of the world’s languages outside of English. The word for water was “L’eau.” Even in medieval times, apparently. As I stumbled forward, I grimaced, recalling the scene in the park with Officer Brody. I’d been studying French that day, at the tail end of my first year of the language. First and only year, since I’d never gone back to school after that, let alone college.

I shook my head to clear it, the memory evaporating as I plunged into the small crowd of villagers hacking, pounding, beating at the houses. Instantly, I saw the problem. There had been a storm of some sort, not a deliberately set blaze. The trees standing closest to these houses had caught fire, possibly by lightning, and had fallen forward into a sort of paddock filled with straw. That straw had caught on fire, and the fire had swept forward, licking along the fence line toward the two huts huddled closest to the forest.

“L’eau!” I cried, thrusting my buckets at the nearest knot of villagers. A man took them without really seeing me and barreled forth, clearing the crowd in his wake. I hung tightly behind, scanning the crowd. These people were small, smaller than I would have expected, most of them no taller than I was. They all were dressed in rough-cut tunics and wrapped leggings of some sort, men and women alike, but some of them had wound strips of wet cloth around their faces as well. As they approached the wall of heat, they slowed, but the ones with the head wrappings leapt forward with shovels and buckets. Medieval firemen to the rescue.

I rushed forward as well, pulling my hoodie up to cover my mouth, keeping low as I encountered the surge of smoke. The space between the two houses was barely wide enough to fit a pair of horses through, and as I ran into it, I heard a woman screaming for help. I headed toward the noise, only to be shoved out of the way by strong hands.

“Mirabel!” The voice was loud and full of force. And familiar.

So was the electrical connection.

I wasn’t alone in noticing it either. The man whipped around, his eyes wild, his face hard, confusion evident on his achingly young face as his gaze raked over me. I stumbled back, trying to understand what I was seeing, but Armaeus Bertrand paid no more attention to me as he surged toward the smaller of the two houses, ignoring the flames and the heat. He didn’t flinch as he pounded his fist against the door—through the door. He practically broke the thing down in one thrust. Definitely the Magician, and definitely pissed. Another loud crack, and I realized he wasn’t coming back this way.

The smoke around me cleared enough for me to also figure out that no one else had ventured this far into the blaze. They wouldn’t know Armaeus was here, necessarily, they would be focusing on stopping the fire from moving farther into the village. So of course Armaeus would flee the opposite direction—through the forest.

Instead of going into the hut itself, I circled it, but the flames were too intense to the right, and by the time I made it around to the left, I could see that the pathway Armaeus had cut through the back paddock was already closing, the fire licking forth once more. I leapt forward and felt the sting of magic around me. This corridor was not a natural one, hewn by hand or scythe. The bundled straw had been cut clear through with an edge as sharp and straight as a razor. I ran into that breach as the fire leapt back over the open space, and the farther I got from the house, the clearer the way was before me. The paddock fence crackled and shuddered as I raced through its broken gate, and then I was into the forest once more, running fast.

It seemed to take another hour to get far enough into the forest to be able to take a deep breath, and I nearly devolved into a coughing fit as I did so. My lungs almost burst with pain but my brain insisted that silence was the better course. I sucked in oxygen in shallow, panting breaths as I tried to get my bearings. When the sound of my own frantic pulse finally dimmed in my ears, however, I heard voices.

I crept forward to the edge of a ravine, then sagged against a tree as I stared down.

The ravine opened into a grotto of sorts, with a stream that bent at an angle, allowing a deep pool to form before it spilled over several rocks and continued on its way. The village sounds were far distant now. I had no idea how far we’d run through the forest, but Armaeus was the Magician and could run at incredible speeds, and I’d apparently held my own with him. Now he was crouched over the body of a woman at the close edge of the pool, sluicing water over her, his hands moving in long, sweeping motions as his words sent a haze of power sizzling forth. I couldn’t understand the language he was speaking—it wasn’t French. It wasn’t exactly Latin. But it was definitely arcane, and I leaned forward, struggling for a better view.

The woman on the rocks moaned, a pitiable sound, and Armaeus edged closer still.

“Mirabel.” He spoke the word with a resonating force strong enough to make the earth beneath my feet tremble. He’d used vocal projection with me before, but this was infinitely stronger. Who was this woman to him, I wondered. His sister? His mother?

“Mirabel, you cannot die,” Armaeus said. And though he used a language I couldn’t decipher, the words were translated in my head as neatly as if he’d implanted a Rosetta Stone there. “You are my first and only love.”

My eyes flew wide. Definitely not his mother.

Chapter Fourteen

I felt like the dirtiest of voyeurs, but I couldn’t help leaning forward.

As Armaeus shifted back, Mirabel already seemed much better for her stint in his care. She was sturdy and fair, her features disarmingly beautiful beneath a mass of dark curls that tumbled around her head, surrounding her face in a wild corona. Though her shift was ripped and charred, it appeared well made, not the pieced-together robe of a poor serf, and as Armaeus continued to whisper to her, the color gradually returned to her face. At length, her lips parted and she exhaled a ragged gasp. Beside her, the Magician sagged with relief.

She lay without moving for a long moment. Then Armaeus bent swiftly, touching his lips to hers, the gesture so infinitely tender that it ripped open a wound inside me I hadn’t realized existed.

I pressed my fist against my mouth. This had all happened over eight hundred years ago. This meant nothing—could mean nothing to him anymore. And yet I couldn’t stop the hopelessness that dawned within me as Mirabel struggled back toward consciousness, her body convulsing with a coughing fit as Armaeus propped her up, allowing her lungs to clear as he wiped her face and eased water into her mouth with his own cupped hands.