Free Aces Wilde: Immortal Vegas, Book 5 by Jenn Stark

move from state to state, plane to plane, and I could not protect the only woman I’d ever loved.”
    I really didn’t want to hear this. I even more didn’t want to see him as he spoke such words, their truth etched in every angle and plane of his face. But I couldn’t look away. I’d known Armaeus had changed in Hell, but looking at him now, it was as if he was a different person entirely. Gone was the smug self-assurance, the mild-mannered certainty that he was righteously correct in all his actions. In its place was an almost feral outrage that defied anyone to stand in his way—including and especially, me.
    “But she did not really die, it would seem,” he continued scathingly. “Not in the manner she should have, the manner that would have taken her from this place and moved her to the next plane of existence, for her to live and love as she was intended to. No. Her spirit would not loose its hold on this earth, and for that she was consigned to the plane closest to our own, where mortals go to live out their regrets—their regrets , Miss Wilde. That is what I found when I finally deigned to enter a plane I could have breached at any time in the last thousand years. A woman mired in the regret of a life she no longer held, all for the love of me.”
    I don’t know where the words came from that welled out of me. I didn’t summon them. I didn’t want them. But that didn’t stop them from boiling forth to spew at Armaeus in a scalding wash of pain.
    “You’re not the only one who suffered in Hell, Armaeus. You say that place was built for regrets? I regret ever setting foot in it, ever seeing what I was forced to see, forced to feel, forced to hope—”
    Once again Armaeus’s nearly preternatural awareness sharpened. His gaze raked over me so ferociously that I barely got my mental barriers set in time to avoid the blast of his attack as he reached out tentacles of ripping power, pounding into my skull.
    “Get out—no!” I gasped, clasping my hands to my head. “You have no right—get out!”
    “Make me, Miss Wilde.” Though my mind was beset with a howling wind, I could still hear Armaeus’s words slip silkily over the top of the storm, as insidious as the magic he blasted at me. “That’s twice you have wanted to betray something buried deep within you, so deep I cannot reach it. And I want to reach it. I want to know. You say you will do anything for money; then I will pay you. What is it you saw in Hell that gives you such pause? What is it that grips your entire energy with fury and despair whenever you rake over it, like a nail from the Holy Cross? I will pay you whatever you desire if you will tell me this—”
    “No,” I seethed, wrenching back from him, though he made no move to restrain me. “Get your bony ass out of my mind—now!”
    Without thinking, without even feeling, I pulled my hands away from my head and thrust them out, as if I was hurling a medicine ball out of my skull. The movement lit me on fire from my center up and out, and the world around me was suddenly too white—too bright—a fury of crackling energy blowing up between Armaeus and myself.
    I yanked my hands back just as quickly, and the illusion shorted out, leaving nothing but singed air in its wake.
    Singed air and a very feral-looking Armaeus. The Magician’s touch was no longer on my mind, nowhere close to me, in fact. It was as if my brain now floated behind vaulted doors and bulletproof glass, and I stood taller for it, my shoulders lighter, my eyes clearer.
    “What…” I said flatly, “was that?”
    “That,” Armaeus purred with a positively opulent interest that had never boded well for me, “was magic, Miss Wilde.”
    “Bullshit.”
    He took a step toward the side, as if he intended to circle me, the newest orangutan at the zoo. “Not the magic of illusion, or the psychic skill of a Connected able to astral travel or dimension hop. That was not a magic born of your mind. It was born of