by Jenn Stark
Don’t you forget about me…
She’s a Tarot-reading artifact hunter finally willing to own her supernatural abilities. He’s the all-powerful Magician of the Arcana Council who once loved her…but now doesn’t remember her, the result of a battle to defeat a terrifying enemy.
Isolated and alone, Sara must race time to help the Magician uncover his ancient knowledge, but can she live with what she finds? Will his dark past destroy them both?
Worse, a rival council, known only as the Shadow Court, has emerged to wage battle against the Arcana Council. And if Sara can’t help the Magician recall how to combat this insidious, mind-bending threat, the world will descend into devastating war.
Love could be your last, best weapon when you confront The Shadow Court.
THE
SHADOW COURT
WILDE JUSTICE, BOOK 4
Jenn Stark
For Sara.
Chapter One
Time was, I’d go anywhere, find anything, if the price was right.
Times hadn’t changed all that much.
“Bats,” whispered the man in front of me. I could smell the fear oozing out his pores, along with half his body weight in sweat, as he pushed aside a thick, heavy strand of vines to reveal the cave beyond. Though it was night, the humidity in this section of the French Guiana rainforest was clocking in at approximately two hundred and thirty-five percent, and the sweltering heat of the day hadn’t diminished much. It was like being trapped in a wet wool sock. With mosquitoes.
“You know that for sure? Or were you told?” I peered into the dark, slightly cooler space beyond the makeshift hole he’d just created. I’d already learned that a great deal of Alonso’s knowledge of this blighted section of South America was from hearsay and ghost stories. Some of which was helpful, most of which was not. Still, I needed the guy.
Here in the armpit of South America, nobody knew or cared that I was Sara Wilde, mighty Justice of the Arcana Council, dedicated to righting the wrongs perpetrated against the psychic underdogs of the world. They only knew I was a treasure hunter with money to burn. Sadly, not enough of them cared about that either. Even after I’d laid down an impressive number of euros in the shambledown café in Kourou, Alonso was the only guide willing to set aside his rum-soaked Ti’ Punch and take me into the jungle.
His terms had been specific and nonnegotiable. We could travel only at night under a clear and star-filled sky, alone, and as silently as possible. He didn’t necessarily believe in the old gods of his people, but that didn’t mean he wanted to piss them off.
Fair enough.
“I don’t know firsthand,” he confessed, surprising me. I appreciated honesty in my petrified guides. “But the men who survived Île du Diable and found this cave said the bats here were worse than there.” He left the implications of that hanging like the bats themselves, and I fought the instinct to flinch.
French Guiana wasn’t known for a heck of a lot besides being hot, sticky, and the site of one of the world’s nastiest penal colonies ever conceived, built on a cluster of three islands just off its coast. Devil’s Island had been closed in the 1950s and was now a tourist attraction, of course, but the stench of despair that still radiated from the very rocks of the place reached all the way to the mainland. It’d been a very bad place for very bad men…the guards even more so than the inmates.
The stories of the vampire bats were part of that lore. Hovering above prisoners who were tied to the point of virtual immobility, the bats would wait until the men drifted asleep, then swoop down and feast, sinking in sharp fangs and, true to their name, lapping up the blood. It was only one of a host of tortures the prisoners endured, and very, very few men survived the place. Of the eighty thousand souls condemned to Devil’s Island by the French government, mostly for crimes against the state, all but two thousand had ended up as food for the sharks that circled the island like it was free sandwich day at Chick-fil-A.
A tiny fraction of those two thousand had actually escaped Devil’s Island and survived to tell the tale. One of those tales had brought me here tonight.
“Let’s go in,” I said.
“You go in,” Alonso countered. “I will keep watch here to protect you from the wrath of Guabancex.”
I leveled a stare at him. “You’ve seen Indiana Jones, right? You know the guy who stays behind is the one who gets impaled by a million arrows?”
“I stay here.” His dark eyes shone with terror in the moonlight, terror that seemed completely out of proportion to the threat of flying things with sharp teeth. Not that I was a huge fan of getting bitten by bats, but we were both wearing sturdy cargo pants and long-sleeved shirts, despite the staggering heat. Our heads were covered with mosquito-proof burka-style hoods, and a veritable arsenal of bug, bat, and crawly-thing repellant hung from our belts. Or hung from mine, anyway, and I was more than happy to share.
Alonso remained resolute. “I watch the gate to the underworld, where the Sun Lord dwells until morning. You disturb the Goddess of Storms at your peril, not mine. I am but a humble guide.”
“You’re a humble guide who’s been paid a thousand euros for a walk in the woods, buddy,” I pointed out, but it was clear this battle had already been lost. I turned and surveyed the cave. “How deep is this, according to the stories you’ve heard?”
“Three levels,” Alonso said quickly, relief rushing his words. “The first is an ordinary cave with an unstable floor and many holes, close together. Only one hole is the right one. The others drop you to your death. The second, it is little more than a ledge. Below that, the treasure rests in a hole off the side of the ledge. The treasure is too heavy to move. The men who fell into the chamber could not take it out, but they saw it, reached for it, and that was enough to curse them. They all died.”
“We all die eventually.” I squinted into the hole, which looked very hole-like, as Alonso’s words devolved into a low muttering. I could speak the local language credibly well, but I couldn’t decipher mumbled prayers. Though my client had warned me to expect this, I hadn’t believed local superstition would still be so strong sixty years after the last attempt for the treasure. Clearly, I’d been wrong. Virtually no one outside Kourou even knew this hoard existed, which was probably why it was still here. If it was still here.
“You go in, you go in,” Alonso announced, his gaze shifting to the sky. “There is no wind. You go now? Now is good. There’s no wind.”
He brandished a long machete and, with a few short, decisive whacks, had cut the hole large enough for me to slip into the cave—but not so big that it would be difficult to camouflage.
“Right, right.” I stepped in. No sooner had I cleared the opening than I heard Alonso carefully moving the vines back into place. I gave him about a thirty percent chance of still being there when I came back out, but I didn’t worry about that as much as I used to. I had better built-in navigation these days for getting out of tight spots than when I’d started hunting artifacts six years ago.
Six years ago. Time sure did fly.
I straightened and pulled my penlight from my belt, keeping the beam low and covered while I peered upward. Sure enough, there was a host of bats wedged into the eaves of the cave, which meant that the vine-covered entrance wasn’t the only opening into this area. The air wasn’t as dank as it should have been either, especially considering the thick layer of guano covering the floor. I panned the flashlight over the floor and confirmed that yes, there was a ton of batshit on the floor and no, it hadn’t been disturbed recently. As in not in years, from the looks of it. My client hadn’t been lying about this part either. This was about as virgin a find as you could hope for.
Which begged the question, why?
&n
bsp; Not moving from where I stood, which I knew was sturdy by the simple fact that I hadn’t fallen through the floor yet, I stuck the penlight in my mouth and fished my deck of Tarot cards out of another pocket. While most people wouldn’t interrupt their treasure hunt for a quick game of cards, this wasn’t your usual treasure, I wasn’t your usual hunter—and this wasn’t your usual card game.
Since learning to use Tarot cards at an unreasonably young age, I’d gone from being a celebrated child psychic to a barely-legal arcane artifact hunter in only a handful of years. I’d been good at finding things—a little too good. I’d caught the attention of the most powerful collection of Tarot-based sorcerers on Earth, the Arcana Council, and one job had led to the other until I’d joined their ranks.
And then I’d gone and fallen in love with the biggest, baddest Council member of them all.
I tightened my jaw, inhaling a potent mix of bat poop and rotting vegetation to keep my senses sharp. Because the powerful, enigmatic and brilliant Armaeus Bertrand, Magician of the Arcana Council and yin to my yang, didn’t know who I was anymore. In the midst of fighting off a cabal of gods attempting to breach Earth’s borders, he’d recently jettisoned an entire swath of his memories—including everything to do with me. Now he wanted to find those memories, and I’d been voted the girl most likely to help him get that job done.
The icon buried deep in this cave would buy me the information I desperately needed to get started on that quest. More than enough reason for me to fall down the rabbit hole again, even if I had a creeping feeling of dread at what I might find at the bottom. Why had Armaeus forgotten me?
Unfortunately, there was no answer to that question. I refocused on the task at hand.
Shuffling Tarot cards in a rainforest was a fool’s game, but I did the best I could, then pulled out three cards in quick succession. I didn’t know this cave, I didn’t know this idol I’d been sent after, I didn’t know a lot about these people, the Arawak, or the superstitions they held about their storm goddess. But I did know the cards. Back when I’d first joined the artifact-recovery racket, they were the only thing I had to give me an edge over all the other treasure hunters out there, and they’d very rarely failed me.
They weren’t going to fail me now either. Even if they made no sense right this particular second.
“Asshats,” I muttered around the flashlight, scanning the cards before I stuffed them back in my pocket. I retrieved my penlight and swept the space again. I needed to know how to get down to the next level, ideally without falling and cracking open anything vital, so I’d expected one of the cards to deal with a floor of some sort. Nope.
I’d pulled the Three of Swords, Six of Pents, and Tower. The first was interesting enough, a heart pierced by three swords, and I obligingly pulled my own narrow machete free of my belt. The Three of Swords was the card of necessary cutting, so maybe the trick wasn’t stepping on the right section of guano-covered rushes, but hacking into it. The droppings had the consistency of cement, after all, so it wasn’t completely unreasonable. Maybe I’d need Alonso to man up and help me after all.
The Six of Pents was more problematic. It showed money raining down from the skies, but the only thing likely to fall on my head in here was a bunch of disgruntled bats. Gross.
Most troublesome of all was the Tower. That was the card of things exploding, foundations being ripped apart, and general kabooms. I didn’t want kabooms. I didn’t want so much as a jump scare while I was down here. I wanted to cut my way into the second level, find the hole where the treasure was, grab the storm goddess totem, and get the hell out. I wasn’t too picky about how I managed that last part either, though I was trying to keep a low profile here.
It was one thing to show up in a run-down aboriginal bar looking for treasure as a no-name, scruffy-looking bounty hunter. Far different to shout out my exact identity by lighting my hands on fire and poofing into nothingness, skills I’d recently developed since meeting the Magician and his friends. If anyone was paying attention, I’d telegraph exactly who I was, and that wasn’t a good idea for this job. Nobody could know I was here.
My client had been very clear on that part. He’d been jonesing for this icon for the better part of thirty years, but he’d never gotten up the guts to go after it, mainly because he’d also needed to keep a low profile about obtaining the icon, though for a very different reason. Anyone who knew he had it apparently would come after him with everything they had. And if they knew it had been picked up by me, same problem. Because my client and I had done work together—a lot of work. The upper echelons of the arcane black market were a very small community. If I wanted the information I’d been promised, I’d have to be very, very subtle.
I could do subtle. I’d spent a lot of years being subtle. Reckless too. But mostly subtle. I could do it now.
“Necessary cutting,” I muttered, scanning the floor again. It all looked the same—a carpet of dung. Above me, the bats shifted, emitting a weird, alien chittering noise that snaked through the shadows as I took an experimental step forward.
“You find it?” Alonso’s voice surprised me, and I half turned, glancing back to the opening he’d redraped with vines. Then I saw the bodies.
They were little more than skeletons, actually. Three of them, right at the mouth of the cave, all clearly caught midscrabble, with thick, rusted swords shoved into what had been their torsos. Their legs were buried under guano, so they had the illusion of being sucked down into a hole, but I stared at them a long second before I heard the guide’s voice again, drifting through the thick foliage. “Miss Croft?”
My lips twisted. Alonso wasn’t much up on his American pop culture, and sometimes, I couldn’t help myself.
“I’m good. You say no one’s come after this treasure for a while?”
“Not since the Space Center was built, no. They asked a lot of questions then, but no one told. No one wanted anyone to look. Guabancex would come and kill us all.”
“Right.” I moved forward to the pile of bodies and took a closer look. There was nothing left of clothing, barely any meat left clinging to the bones, but the swords looked old. Then again, most swords did. These were long and straight, just like in the Three of Swords card. So either these guys had been killed climbing out of the right hole, or they’d been killed trying to clamber out of the wrong hole. Either way, the swords pierced their shattered rib cages. Right through the heart, which fit the Three of Swords to a tee. This was my spot.
I rehooked my penlight to my belt, moved to the side of the skeletons, and kicked the skulls out of the way. These guys wouldn’t be needing them. Then I squatted down and studied the swords. They were buried halfway in the guano, and they were wide bladed, sturdy. I stood again, leaned my weight on the nearest one, and pushed.
The ground beneath the sword resisted for a half second, then gave way. I pressed a little harder, and the sword dropped until the hilt connected flush with the dung-covered floor—but it didn’t press all the way through.
Okay…
I turned to the next sword and shoved that down as well. It also dropped after a momentary resistance, but it also didn’t go all the way through the floor. The third blade was more at an angle. I took a step toward it—
And bats exploded above me.
Easily two dozen winged monsters burst forward in a flurry of movement, each of the creatures seeming much bigger than when they’d been tucked up into the ceiling. Mindless of the heaps of guano, I flung myself to the floor, covering my head as they whooshed over me. Tiny claws wrenched at my hat and along the back of my shirt, and damned if I didn’t feel the bite of tiny feral teeth into my shoulder. That alone was enough to make me flail, and I screamed, leaping to my feet again and reaching back to knock the thing off me, my hands sparking with heat in my panic.
“No, no, no—!” My own self-admonition was cut off as my next problem struck me, literally. The shower of rocks from the ceiling cascaded do
wn over my head and shoulders, some as small as pebbles, others as large as baseballs. Very heavy baseballs, and I yelped with pain and surprise as I danced from side to side, trying to avoid the shower. I stepped right in the center of one of the bodies, cracking the rest of the poor guy’s ribs…and my foot kept going straight through the cave floor.
“Alonso!” I howled as the soft surface gave way beneath me, but my voice was lost under a hundred years of batshit and death.
I fell into open space, screaming.
Chapter Two
The fall was short and painful.
I crashed to the floor, every bone in my body bouncing with extreme prejudice. The machete was jarred loose from my hand and skidded across the stone surface before the sound of its progress ominously cut off a few seconds later, only to be followed by the clank of metal hitting stone once, twice, three times. The sounds progressed deeper and deeper into the belly of the earth until finally—there was a splash.
A splash?
I rolled over on my back, gasping. What was this place? From Alonso’s stories, there was supposed to be a ledge broad enough for three or four people to stand on, the treasure dumped into a third hole beside it. But this ledge was barely wider than I was, and the hole on at least one side dropped way the hell too far to be useful. I sat up as I heard Alonso’s terrified bleats above me and called out, but he didn’t respond. The odds of him waiting around for me had just dropped to a cool fifteen percent.
That wasn’t my only problem either. I unhooked my penlight and flashed its beam up to the ceiling where I’d crashed through, and realized the cave fall-in had not only sent rocks crashing down on my head, but several dead bats as well. Worse, the hole was now almost completely blocked by rocks, dirt, and a few stray, still-wriggling bat bodies. I made a face. That exit strategy had become seriously nasty. Not going to happen.
