Wicked And Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 4 (17 page)

Then he started speaking to her again, his words too quiet for me to hear, but his manner so gentle yet intense that they could only be endearments, only be exhortations for her to live, to thrive, to continue on, or that his heart would break.

My burning lungs could finally endure no more, and my own hacking cough broke free. Armaeus instantly looked up, his body taut, a warrior ready to protect his mate.

“
Witch
,” he snarled, glaring directly at me. “Make yourself useful.”

I stiffened with shock and embarrassment at being caught out, even if he didn’t fully recognize me. What could I say—what could I—

“Charming as ever, Armaeus.”

I flinched back, deeper into the shadows, and Eshe stepped out of the trees beside me.

The High Priestess of the Arcana Council was dressed as excessively over the top as always. No forest fire in the middle of Dark Ages France was going to cramp her style, judging by the long, flowing toga-style dress she wore and the gold jewelry at her neck, ears, and wrists. The one concession to the terrain was her footwear. She wore beautifully woven leather sandals that stretched all the way up her calves, reminiscent of Nikki’s gladiator heels but flat—as if they’d actually been made for gladiators.

Now she strode forth, and her gaze swept over me, then paused.

She saw me. Truly saw me.

She gave no indication, though, and strode on, dropping lightly over the ridge to the grotto below in a vault that would have made an Olympian proud…and probably had. Straightening, the High Priestess approached Armaeus. “What is it you would have me do?”

Once again, Eshe’s words were clear as truth in my mind, though they spoke Medieval French and I shouldn’t be able to understand them.

“You know what was done to me,” Armaeus pleaded. “Do it to her.”

“Are you mad?” Eshe’s mocking laugh filled the small grotto. “Armaeus, you
earned
the right to your position by your birth and your abilities. This woman you love has neither.”

My eyes flew wide at her words.
This woman you love?
Did everyone know the Magician’s history with Mirabel but me?

Armaeus sagged, and the truth of it was evident in his face. “I would do anything,” he said. His words would have been weak in another man, but in his broken voice, they took on a resonance that stretched across dimensions and time. “Whatever you ask, I will do. Whatever you need me to be, I will be.”

“Armaeus.” Eshe’s voice was softer than I would have thought she could manage on her best day. She was about as tender as a starving hyena. “There is nothing you can offer me that will change this, as tempting as the offer is. Your role as Magician is full of choices. You must give this woman up. You know that. You must give up any love for any mortal. Do it now, and you will spare yourself a millennia of pain.”

“As you have done?” Armaeus held the woman closer to his chest, but his face was an agonized mask. “Your heart was cut out a long time ago, Eshe. You have nothing left to give. I do not want to be you. I don’t want this role if there is no love in it.”

To her credit, Eshe didn’t flinch at Armaeus’s harsh rebuke. Then again, at this point she’d been kicking around for well over a thousand years. It’d be like getting dissed by an infant.

Her next words confirmed that. “It’s hardest this time, Armaeus. It will fade.”

“I don’t want it to fade!” His energy crackled in a cloud over the woman, and her coughing increased, her eyes fluttering open.

“Armaeus?” she said, and though I hadn’t thought this scene could get any worse, it did. Mirabel’s voice was ethereal, musical despite her rasp of his name. She sounded like an angel sent down to earth to give men hope for living. She probably talked to animals too.

I grimaced, trying to focus.

Armaeus gazed down at her, his face rapt with emotion as Mirabel’s eyes closed again. “Mirabel,” he breathed, and in that one word, a thousand hopes and dreams were shared. The love he felt for this woman was not sexual, not completely. It transcended that. It transcended anything I would have thought possible from him, and I’d known him for over a year—known his thoughts, his powers, his desires, his truth.

Or I’d thought I did. But the way Armaeus was holding this woman, this mortal who was no more Connected than a piece of fruit, made me doubt everything I’d ever held real. He ached with desire for her, a desire to be with her and to protect her, shelter her, to make the world better for her than it had ever been for him. I’d never seen a man look at another woman like that. I’d certainly never experienced it myself.

A quick surge of revulsion bit through me as I forced my own petulance away. This wasn’t my history, wasn’t my experience. This was Armaeus’s. And if I wanted to understand the man who was opening up my powers bit by painful bit, then I’d damned well better start paying attention. Even if it hurt.

Especially if it hurt.

I forced myself to refocus on the scene. “She cannot die, Eshe,” Armaeus was saying now. “I won’t be able to bear it. She must exist, somehow.”

“You would have her be a ghost?” Once again, Eshe’s seeming harshness had a thick seed of concern at its heart. “You would have her haunt this world as a wraith, not able to go on and experience her next life, her next step on the path? We choose our fates, Armaeus. You chose yours. Allow her to choose death, if she means to die.”

“She did not choose this!” Armaeus growled. “She did not call down this storm upon her village, threatening her life, her people, her—”

“Of course she did, Armaeus,” Eshe said, and though I could not see her face, angled as she was, I imagined her rolling her eyes. “You’re not the only one who loves, you fool.”

Eshe raised her hand, and the words she spoke next called to mind the garbled utterances of the oracles. Then an orb appeared in her hands, and she spread her fingers wide to brace it until the bubble was three feet wide. In that bubble, Mirabel knelt in prayer next to another figure, robed and bowed as well, with lined hands that worked over a circle filled with symbols, drawn into the sand.

The Magician gasped. “But—who? How?”

“She wanted you to come, Armaeus,” Eshe said. “She knows you are changed, that magic fills you. She knows, and she’s afraid, and she wanted you to come anyway. So she did the one thing she could. She paid a dark practitioner to bring you to her side. I’m sure she didn’t expect all this to happen. I’m equally sure she didn’t expect to bring down fire upon her own village. But she did it, nonetheless.”

“Paid what?” Armaeus’s stare was fierce. “I’ll kill him.”

“It was a she.” Eshe’s tone was derisive. “And not like that. She bartered information. Information about the very soul she craved.”

At that moment, Mirabel’s eyes fluttered open once more. The expression on her face as she realized that she was being held in Armaeus’s arms took his mind completely off what Eshe was saying, but it didn’t dislodge me. Information? What kind of information? What information did Mirabel have that would be worth anything to a sorceress of the medieval world? Had Armaeus confided in her? Told her his secrets? Had she betrayed Armaeus himself?

That last was impossible to believe as Mirabel cried out with joy, Armaeus crushing him to her with a relief that was so palpable, it shimmered through the grotto in waves. Even Eshe stepped back for a moment before she rallied, crossing her arms with a haughty toss of her head that neither Armaeus nor Mirabel seemed to notice, let alone mind. As she watched them, however, I watched her. The smirk on her face was quickly replaced by a resignation, then sadness. She didn’t give the two their privacy, though, but stood as sentinel as they kissed and whispered and sighed.

I tried to give them privacy, however. I did. But I simply…couldn’t leave. I needed to burn this image into my brain. I needed to understand why her, why this Mirabel, why this Unconnected woman who was like any other woman, no matter her beauty or the fact that angels probably wept when she cried, why she had captured Armaeus’s heart. I needed to understand why he loved her…her, and not me. It was humiliating, but it was why I had come into this history in the first place, I realized now. To see the inevitable end of the vision he had shown me so recently of himself, desperately lost, desperately hunting for something.
Someone
, I knew now. Someone who still held sway in his mind nearly a thousand years later.

“It’s time, Armaeus,” Eshe said at length. “If you’re not going to let her die, which was what has been fated here, then you must give her a different sort of death. The death of your illusion.”

“No.” He keened the mournful word.

“Yes.” Eshe’s words were absolute. “The villagers will discover she’s not in the house soon. If you don’t want her branded as an arsonist or a consorter with sorcerers, you must return her to her home. Return her and erase yourself from her memories. It’s the only way. No one can live with the memories of a loved one who has spurned them, not even for a good reason. It is among the cruelest pains.”

I blinked in surprise as Eshe’s words floated over the grotto. Mirabel clutched at Armaeus, and her grip redoubled at Eshe’s words. “What is it?” she asked, and I saw in her face that she could not hear Eshe, she could merely see the shift in Armaeus’s face, the regret and sorrow in his expression. “You are here now, you are here! It will all be better now.”

Armaeus appeared to be swallowing rocks. “I cannot stay, my heart. You know that. I cannot stay.”

“But you must! Armaeus, you must.” Her voice sounded desperate, and I slid my gaze to Eshe, then back to the hapless woman. “I cannot bear for you to leave me again.” A new wave of tears flowed down her face. Even crying, she was absolutely stunning, and I watched, transfixed, as Armaeus lifted a hand to her cheek to cast a tear away.

“I will care for you the rest of your life,” he said. “You will not want for anything. You’ll not suffer any pain. You’ll have—”

“I want you!” The woman clutched at him, and I tried to dislike her for it, I did. But she was losing the man of her dreams with every passing second, and I got the sense she would do anything to hold on to him, no matter how transparent her actions.

Transparent they were too. Eshe stood stonily now, watching the scene with a stoic expression that couldn’t quite mask her…what? Anger? Indignation? Had she been fought over so hard and so long, I suddenly wondered? Had she had a man on his knees, begging her not to leave him, not to take on this mantle of work that would lead her from his side?

“Please, Armaeus. At least…this.”

Mirabel reached up and pulled Armaeus into a long, searching kiss, and I could practically see what was going to happen next, no crystal ball required. I reared back from the edge of the grotto, putting my hands to my own damp face. Armaeus had loved. He had well and truly loved, and he had left behind the one woman that he’d ever cared for, to take up his work as Magician. This was his sacrifice, and I sensed it was not the only one he had made over the course of his centuries in the role. But it was the first, and the greatest.

This was the one he had never forgotten, all the long years. This.

I dragged myself far from the grotto and into the forest, until the sounds of their conversation could not dog me any further. My hands were trembling, and my throat burned. Armaeus had had several lifetimes before he had met me. It was foolish of me to think he had never loved before.

But
I
had never loved before. Not fully. I had never given my heart, not even to Brody, though I’d crushed as hard as any seventeen-year old possibly could have on him. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to care for Armaeus until—until this day, when he’d held me in his arms, night after week after month in the cocoon of a world outside of time. A world that didn’t exist anywhere but in my own mind.

And it
had
existed there. I hadn’t forgotten. I didn’t have the mercy of Armaeus waving his magic wand and winking himself out of my memories. At this point, I knew that was the bitterest of blessings. But it was a blessing I would never, ever willingly give up. For all that it was an illusion.

For all that it was a lie.

Something happened behind me, and Armaeus shouted, his cry a long-drawn-out wail of agony as a man who could do anything gave up the one woman he could not have.

My heart was ground to dust.

Chapter Fifteen

I awoke alone on a stone floor, with stone walls all around, and lay there curled in a tight ball for a minute more, cackling at the irony of waking up in
yet another rock-walled prison.

Eventually, I realized I could move, sort of. I crawled to the far wall to lean against it, gradually inching my way up to a seated position. Everything on my body hurt, especially my face. I lifted my palms to my cheeks and winced as they settled against abraded skin. Burns. I’d been burned in that fire, I must have been. Burned and hadn’t realized it, my mind too transported by what I’d seen, what I’d felt. What I could never unsee or unfeel.

Nothing mattered anymore.

I sighed as I sagged against the wall, trying to remember why I’d come to this place of despair. Beneath my card pouch, the jade amulets were both slung securely around my neck, and were both cool to the touch, their work done in this place. They were reunited, their magic whole.

Mine had been torn asunder.

“Snap out of it,” I grumbled, gingerly rubbing my face again. It was rough, but it wasn’t bleeding. The skin was intact.

Progress.

And at least I was alone, my evil twin electing not to travel with me anymore. So things were definitely improving.

I leaned forward with the clear intent of getting to my knees, then my feet. Instead, I simply fell, my arms giving way like string cheese. My face bounced hard off the floor, and I winced but could do nothing other than lie there and experience the pain arrowing through me for a long moment.

I hadn’t thought anything could be worse than what I had seen between Armaeus and Mirabel, but this was, in a strange way. Because now the shock was over, and I was left with the aftermath. This was the first moment of living with the awful understanding, and knowing it would haunt me for a lifetime.