Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 (22 page)

“Stop it!” I twisted away. “That so has to be cheating.”

“Not at all, Miss Wilde. I am not trying to provoke you. I am trying to prepare you. Your pain levels have exceeded my expectations, but by your own decision I cannot fully heal you. I work in a particular way, I apologize if that is not to your liking.”

”There are so, so many things not to my liking, Armaeus. We don’t have time to discuss them all. If you’d like, I can send you a bulleted list.”

The Magician might not have been able to read my mind, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew I was outraged at what he’d done to the Connecteds. Unfortunately, he probably also knew I craved his touch like a choking man craves air. Because as Simon ambled back to his seat, his eyes on his cell phone, all Armaeus did was smile.

Chapter Twenty

The ruins of the ancient city of Khemenu were not impressive.

As Armaeus had warned, the Temple of Thoth seemed to have been taken apart piece by piece, the good bits carted away while the remains were jumbled back together to give the approximation of what had come before. We’d moved on quickly from the large, quirky baboon statues of Thoth, Armaeus barely giving them a glance, and now stood in the center of…a whole lot of nothing.

More importantly, we were completely alone.

It was four a.m. local time. Clearly, no one was worried about whether or not we’d take another rock from the ancient burial site. But Mantorov wasn’t here either, and that was more of the problem. Because no way did we beat him to Egypt, no matter how fast the Fool had pushed us. He’d had a several-hour head start.

Worse, Armaeus was acting exceptionally strange. Since we’d landed, he’d gone quiet, giving instructions to the local man hired to drive us to our destination in soft, unhurried words. He’d watched the bleak, dark city roll by, illuminated at very occasional turns. The place looked downtrodden despite being nestled in the fertile plains of the Nile. But while trees grew all around this space, the hill of dirt we were currently standing on was nothing but fine sand and rock dust. And still Armaeus stared, as if he was soaking in the awesome that was…dirt.

My hands twitched. “You want me to check my cards again? Now that we’re here, we might have more clarification of the finer points on where to find Mantorov.”

“He’s here.” Armaeus hunkered down to the ground, reaching out to pick up the shifting sands. He scattered the pile at his feet, watching as it got caught in the stiff morning breeze. “It’s always been here, the power to create. And he has the key.” He turned to Simon. “Are you ready?”

“There’s not an electrical conductor within a million miles of this place,” Simon grumbled, but he set his phone on the ground. And tapped another button. The device vibrated, then narrow pinpoints of light exploded from it, hued a ghostly green.

The luminous rays shot around the space in a building block of squares, an elaborate wireframe. For a moment, we all stared. Before us stood the fabled Temple of Thoth, in full reconstructed glory. Green walls shimmered in neon splendor. Enormous bird-headed statues stared out from its roofline.

Armaeus’s gaze dropped to the doorway, set up high on the steps but off to the right from where it was expected dead center. He took several steps to align himself with it, then nodded.

The wireframe winked out. Simon was at his side, another device in his hand. “The charge is nonexistent here. Barely enough to register on the equipment.”

“He found it. So will we.”

“I don’t know how,” Simon shook his head, squinting across the bleak landscape. “There’s no excavation here. Nothing but rocks and dust.”

I scowled at the basilica and the outbuildings. “Maybe go down the well?” I gestured to the large cistern tip edging up out of the ground. “Gotta be deep enough.”

“No.” Armaeus walked forward, his hand outstretched seemingly to read the very earth. When he’d walked about twenty paces, he knelt. “This was the temple of my youth. The earth was good and plentiful, and the Nile gives birth to all things.” He unhooked his water bottle and emptied it over the sand.

A stain spread. Slowly at first, then faster, fuller, with the earth soaking up more water than could possibly have come out of his bottle. Armaeus’s lips were moving, and it was as if he could coax the ground to do his bidding. Then again, he probably could. These were his stomping grounds.

The sand gave way, rushing into the hole in the earth as stairs slowly emerged. Without waiting for the dirt to clear, Armaeus headed down.

Simon and I gaped at each other. “You think that hole is going to fill itself back in when we go down there?”

He stowed his device in his pocket and unhooked a flashlight. “I think it’ll almost have to. Which is going to make getting out interesting, but hey, that’s why we stick close to the big guy.” Then he hopped down too.

I had no choice but to follow.

Fortunately, it was easy to keep close to Simon. Sand and dirt immediately flowed over us, pushing us down, so that by the time we reached Armaeus, we were practically jogging. The Magician half turned back to us and murmured another word. The flow of debris stopped, immediately coalescing into a wall of solid rock.

“Nice,” Simon wheezed. I wrapped my headscarf around my face, trying to breath in filtered air. “Where are we?”

“Exactly where you should be, I should say.”

The gun pressed into my neck was a shockingly cool sensation, but I choked anyway, freezing in surprise. Simon had a similar gun at his head, while the Magician remained in front of us, still and silent, though he’d turned back to face Simon and me. It took me a bare moment to realize why Armaeus wasn’t moving, as flashlights flared on around us.

He’d been shot. And not by bullets, either. Four silver arrows were buried in his chest and torso, piercing the Magician in an eerily uniform pattern.

The men who’d loosed those arrows now stood with their bows discarded, automatic rifles apparently good enough for the rest of us.

But…why had they used arrows in the first place on the Magician, not bullets? And why was Armaeus so…frozen? Though blood gushed down the front of his shirt, his face was strangely serene. Granted, Armaeus wasn’t much on showing his cards. Generally the more impassive he appeared, the closer he was to spontaneously combusting. Given his current state of Zen-like calm, we were due for a cataclysm of epic proportions any moment now.

And yet, he didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He only sort of…gasped.

Shallowly.

I forced myself to stare harder at him, though the sight of all that blood was impossibly wrong. Those were big arrows, two of them piercing his chest just inside his shoulders, two of them apparently shot through his kidneys. Armaeus was the Magician. He was immortal. But he could still be killed.

Fear unfurled inside me like a sickness.

“Good thing I had sentinels.” Grigori Mantorov tsked, and then I saw the two men crumpled on the ground in front of Armaeus, clearly locals, the blood from their wounds already dried. “They warned me that you would be coming, and I confess I greatly anticipated this moment. I always did think there was someone else behind Kreios, bankrolling him. I simply never expected it to be a true servant of Thoth.”

“I serve no one,” Armaeus said. Even his words were too quiet. Too still.

“Oh, so you do speak. Excellent.” Mantorov nodded to one of the men, and a frequency filled the air, causing my bones to vibrate. So did the arrows embedded in Armaeus’s flesh. He scowled, his jaw clenched against the pain. “I need you to focus, though, dark priest. That is the purpose for this particular mix of base metals in these arrow points. As you are slowly bleeding out, you will remain stable. And I need you to translate for me.”

“No.”

“I don’t, importantly, need you to be alive to do it. Your voice will still work as long as one of the arrows remain inside you. The Egyptians truly were onto something with their death rituals.”

We were marched forward toward a bright rectangular opening at the far end of the room. I watched the dark pools spread across Armaeus’s back. He had to have known this was coming, right? The man read minds. He had to have known.

Mantorov pushed on. “Speak the words you were born to speak, then you may die in peace and comfort.” He snapped another command at his men, and they lit four torches at each corner of the room, then doused their flashlights. As steady beams were replaced by flickering torchlight, we saw the ancient underground chamber of the Temple of Thoth the way it was meant to be viewed.

I stared all around me. The room was walled in gold. The burnished panels gleamed in the incandescent light. At the center of the room, a large table stood. On it were the scroll cases, still closed. I should have been glad that I could get this close without the cases leveling me. I could sense the wards Mantorov had wrought to protect us, like layers of heavy air. The man knew his magic and wielded it well. But something else nagged deep in my brain, where Armaeus’s explanation lingered.

The original creation myth he had recited was born out of darkness, water, air, and eternity, he’d said. We were in an underground chamber, so yes, there was darkness, but very little air and no water. This setup didn’t seem quite right for the creation myth. What would that mean?

“Speak.”

Armaeus was pushed forward to the table, Mantorov reaching out to bear down on the edge of one of the arrowheads. Sweat dripped from Armaeus’s face as he grimaced in pain. I’d never seen him so taxed, the veneer of his cool civility completely wiped away. It was as if he was submitting, purifying himself in the fires of his own destruction.

A bead of his sweat dropped onto the table, and I blinked.
Water.

“Open them.” Armaeus finally said, but his voice wasn’t the rasp I was expecting. Instead, it resonated through the space around us with primal force. He was wounded, yes. But he wasn’t quite dead.

Mantorov was no fool, however. “Open them yourself.” He nodded to one of his men, and the man pushed the scroll cases toward Armaeus with gloved hands. Amped as I was, I vibrated with the electrical jolt when the Magician touched the cases. Simon, with his wellspring of kinetic power, felt it too. Mantorov straightened, but the other men around Armaeus didn’t flinch.

Armaeus stretched his fingers over the hieroglyphs, so similar to the ancient markings of the Egyptians but fundamentally different to my eye, older, richer. I thought about the coinage I’d seen in the Devil’s antique shop, how it had also looked similar to and yet different from so many different things.
Atlantis
, Kreios had said. Could that be possible?

I glanced around the underground cavern of gold, and decided…sure it could.

Armaeus spoke. The chanting rhythm of his words was heavy and hypnotic, but it didn’t mask the sound that grew up from beneath him, a rumble of heavy earth.

No, not earth. Water. Small holes spat water from the corners of the room, and water leaked forth. First in a slow trickle, then stronger, until tiny streams began to slither across the room.
Sweet Christmas, not another freaking flood.

Mantorov stepped forward and yanked one of the arrows out of the Magician. Blood sprayed, making my stomach pitch.

“Faster. I don’t plan on drowning down here while you gasp and mumble.”

Armaeus bowed his head and focused on the scroll case in his hand once more. But his energy had become erratic, unmoored. Four arrows, not three, were needed to ground Armaeus. Had Mantorov known? Had he deliberately destabilized Armaeus, or had he simply wanted to cause him pain?

At that moment, the first scroll case opened. Wind rushed through the cavern, putting out the torches—until nothing but darkness remained. Darkness and water and air. All that was left was eternity. From Armaeus’s grunt of pain, I realized Mantorov must have yanked another arrow out of him. He stumbled forward, and I realized what was happening here.
Eternity
. The breaking of eternity was needed for the spell to work, and how better to evoke that eternal element than killing a man who should not die?

Flashlights flared on again, all of them trained on Armaeus.

“Heard rumors of this, of you,” Mantorov said, eyeing him gleefully as the second, then third case snapped open. “Kreios was impure, his powers as dark and redolent with corruption as mine. He would be no good sacrifice to the gods. But you—you were their
servant
. Your immortality was a gift granted from them, not some elixir you forced down in the center of a screaming mob.
You
are a worthy sacrifice for me to make.”

He shoved the Magician down until Armaeus’s head was bowed over the final, smallest scroll case. “Open it!”

Armaeus’s hands spasmed on the scroll case, and it broke open.

A burst of roiling flame shattered the darkness, and all the creatures of Hell screamed forth.

Taking advantage of fiery chaos, I turned to the man beside me, who stood stupefied with shock at what he was seeing and hearing. I drew my hand back in a tight fist. The sound of my punch landing squarely on his jaw barely registered in the howling wind, but was far more gratifying than I’d hoped. Flames and sparks of electricity shot round and round the golden room. I vibrated with it, but Simon practically glowed. He turned to the man holding him and grabbed him by the throat. The redolent smell of burned flesh flashed through the air.

Armaeus and Mantorov still stood at the table. I dispatched a second guard, then turned, expecting Armaeus to be swept up in some kind of holy terror. But he wasn’t. He was staring at Mantorov as if he’d seen a ghost. No, not
at
Mantorov… Through him.

My gaze leapt to the wall beyond the Russian, who now stood transfixed, his eyes wide, his lips peeled back. And the wall…moved. Cracks of light arced out from its surface, the very stones on the verge of evaporating.

An unearthly whisper shuddered forth, filling the space.

“You cannot hold me forever,”
it rasped, speaking through Mantorov’s mouth.
“You cannot guard every portal back into the light. There are too many of them, Magician, and you are too few.”