The Shadow Court

by Jenn Stark

  My brows went up. “Illegal as in—”

  “Drugs and weapons, mostly, but both with a twist. Technoceutical and psychic firepower in particular. I didn’t know there were actual weapons out there that could be enhanced by psychic compounds, even in the hands of non-Connecteds, but apparently, it’s the hottest new trend on the arcane black market.”

  Kreios leaned forward. “Do you have any examples? Guns and stunners, or blades?”

  “All of the above is the rumor, but anything that’s been confiscated by Interpol has gone down a black hole. I’ve been on the team for a nanosecond, but I can already tell there’s something hinky going on.”

  I smiled, glad we weren’t on a video feed as we all exchanged glances. Brody was not a full-on Connected, but he was a homicide detective and had started his career as a beat cop. Most cops who lasted any length of time in their jobs possessed at least a rudimentary level of psychic ability, content with calling it instinct or intuition. Brody was a few levels above that, but not so advanced that he tripped any psychic wires. I could understand Armaeus wanting to leverage that.

  “Hinky how?” I asked.

  “Everyone I’m talking to is fully aware of the mental terrorist groups—that’s what they’re calling them; it makes them sweat less than psychic—that are gearing up. They’re laying all sorts of shit at their feet, and much of it we already know. Arcane black market and web activity, psychic coercion, drugs, illusion casting, the whole bit. They don’t all agree how they’re doing it, and the biggest skeptics think it’s nanotechnology deployed to influence an entire group at a time, but even the skeptics acknowledge that if it looks like magic and plays like magic, they’ve got to understand that people are going to call it magic until they prove anything otherwise. So far, so good. The problem comes with how the agency is handling it. We’ve got two distinct groups forming: catch and destroy the bastards behind all this, or catch and employ.”

  “So eradicate the Connecteds or use them for Interpol’s own purposes?”

  “A-yup. And both groups stretch pretty high up. They want to shape the message for law enforcement from the go, but there’s a lot of discord over what that message should be. And while people here are arguing it out, the hits keep escalating. This latest one is the most visible and violent, and we got eyewitness accounts of ‘spider people’ climbing walls and moving at high speeds, so now the story has to get crafted in a hurry.”

  “They tapping you yet for anything?”

  He snorted. “Gotta tell you, I thought my main role here was to sit on my hands and stay quiet, but Armaeus must’ve done a number on whoever brought me in. I’ve become the go-to guy on profiling the mental terrorists and explaining what all they can do. Which is damned near anything they want if you get someone high enough on the food chain. Everyone’s trying to figure out scope, and they’re not liking the answers they’re coming up with, especially since we’ve got nothing to stop these guys.”

  “Well, you still have conventional weapons,” Nikki pointed out. “So far, we don’t have anyone out there who can twist guns into pretzels or stop knockout gas from taking them down, right? And now we’ve got cells of these terrorists striking in the open, taking out civilian targets. They’re not untouchable.”

  “They’re not, but it’s kind of difficult to take a shot at someone who can scale walls and cover a city block in the blink of an eye.”

  Nikki tilted her head, considering that. “Fair enough. And law enforcement is looking for a way to nullify their abilities.”

  “Bingo,” Brody said. “And that tech is out there, just not large scale enough to be weaponized for law enforcement. Yet. Hell, they even call it null-tech.”

  Almost unconsciously, I found myself clenching my right hand into a fist, where the shard of Nul Magis rested. I’d caught that magic-nullifying bullet—literally—a few jobs back, protecting another magician from taking a blow that probably would have killed him. “That’s a really dangerous path,” I said, and Brody snorted.

  “It sure is. And nobody’s making the leap that shutting down psychic abilities will do anything more than keep these guys from pulling rabbits out of their hats. I’m trying to explain that it doesn’t work like that, that if you rip the magic from people, you’ll be damaging them badly, but things are escalating fast. The word’s already gone out to develop this nullifying technology, or null-tech, so that it can be mass-produced. Someone’s fronting big money for it. Not Interpol, of course. They’re not the ones on the front lines. But we’re talking government-level money. From what we can tell, another call has gone out for aug-tech, which is exactly what you think it is, tech that provides a psychic enhancement to users of those weapons. So we’ve got weapons that can amp up ordinary folks and supercharge psychics, and weapons designed to take out psychics. It’s not good.”

  “When did the call go out? The hit on the London hotel just happened thirty seconds ago. Up to this point, the mental terrorists, or whatever they’re calling them, have been low-key.”

  “Exactly my question. What I’m learning is it happened right around Christmas. Apparently, someone noticed the leveling up of the psychics and was savvy enough to know where the money would be eventually. I don’t think they expected to be in production just a few months later, so now there’s a gold-rush mentality. If somebody develops that tech, they could make a fortune.”

  “If someone develops that tech, they’re signing their own death warrant.”

  “I kind of get the feeling that’ll get sorted out after all the money’s been made.” Something chirped on the line, and Brody’s voice followed a second later. “Gotta bounce. We got another hit in London, Tower Ward. You got boots on the ground there?”

  “Crap.” My gaze leapt to Kreios, but he was already gone, leaving Nikki and me alone in the room.

  “We do now,” Nikki drawled. “What’s happening?”

  “Some church getting swarmed, that’s all I got,” Brody said. “Will update when I can.”

  The line went dead, and Nikki and I stared at each other, then at the door in the corner of the reception room for Justice Hall. It was the door that led to the library.

  “You have any idea where to start in there?” I asked.

  She sighed. “I do not.”

  We both jerked upright as another noise sounded from the opposite corner of the room. The door to my private office creaked open, and the familiar white-bunned head of Mrs. French poked out, followed by the rest of her body. As usual, my library caretaker was dressed in impeccably tailored period wear from the mid-nineteenth century, spotlessly proper from the top of her high-necked white blouse to the hem of her sweeping, lightly bustled dark gray muslin skirt. And she was holding three glass canisters to her bosom.

  “Justice Wilde,” she blurted. “I am sorry for interrupting, though I kept mum for as long as I could. But these just arrived, and—”

  “You were in there the whole time?” I asked her, cutting her off. “Why didn’t you come out?”

  “Well, begging your pardon, but you all seemed very focused, and then these canisters, well, I thought I should review them first to ensure you got the information you needed.”

  I scowled. “We’re running a little short on time, Mrs. French.”

  “And that’s as may be, but you’re apparently not the only one.” She stepped back, holding the door wide, and I sighed and trudged over, bracing myself to peek into my office.

  The position of Justice of the Arcana Council was all about responding to Connecteds who had been victimized by, hello, other psychics. In order for me to identify anyone as a victim, they had to send me an alert. A cry for help. Unfortunately, the last Justice, Abigail Strand, had rather abruptly vacated the office in 1853, and she’d not been replaced until I’d taken on the job a few months ago. While Abigail’s complaint-intake system was dated, it still worked perfectly well, and I hadn’t had time to upgrade. I’d actually come to enjoy the who
osh, whoosh, whoosh, thump, thump, thump of incoming canisters—most days, anyway.

  Now I stared at the wall of pneumatic tubes that stretched down from the ceiling and ended in a velvet-lined trough that provided a cushion for the new jobs coming in, and blinked. There were easily a dozen canisters still in the trough, and at least twenty more stacked on my desk. “These have all come in this week?” I asked, unable to keep the dismay out of my voice.

  “These have all come in this morning,” Mrs. French corrected me. “Each more strident than the last, and from all corners of the world, which does make it seem slightly less terrifying, because it’s essentially a series of isolated events that wouldn’t even get noticed except we’re serving as clearing house for all of them at once. But the issue is Connecteds are getting attacked, Justice Wilde. A quite specific type of Connected too, those who live more in the public eye. Now they’re getting attacked in their homes, on the streets, at their workplaces by other Connecteds. People who know their secrets, but who haven’t yet come out as psychic, in the main. It’s—it’s unnerving is what it is.”

  “Jesus, we’re eating our own?” Nikki protested, while I narrowed my eyes at Mrs. French.

  “Attacked how?”

  “Stunners of some type seems to be the consensus. Some of them rather crudely modified, some quite sophisticated, some simply off-the-shelf tasers.” She pointed to my right hand, now clenched into a fist. “They’re trying to nullify their magic. And a few of them are succeeding. Which is only inciting their victims to anger and violence of a decidedly nonpsychic type.”

  “That’s going to escalate quickly,” Nikki muttered.

  “Keep tracking it,” I told Mrs. French. “But tell me this first. You know anything about the Shadow Court?”

  Her brows lifted, a frown marring her face. “Can’t say as I do, Justice, though…” she frowned harder. “Now no, no, I take that back. There was…there was…something, I think.”

  Her hand fluttered up to her brow as she winced, and I slid a glance to Nikki. “You have the text I sent you still?” I asked. “This is a new phone.”

  “On it,” she said, sliding her phone out of her décolletage and swiping it on as Mrs. French brought her other hand up, starting to massage her temples with her fingers.

  “I could swear I have heard that name before, but it isn’t coming to me, and it should—it surely should. Because there is nothing that’s occurred in the world that I didn’t know since the day I arrived here, and that’s only the truth,” Mrs. French muttered. She dropped one hand to her voluminous skirts, pulling out a small silver bell. She rang it, then placed it on the side table next to the glass canisters, but her face was drawn now, pale with the exertion of trying to remember.

  “Here we go,” Nikki said. She turned the phone around to Mrs. French, who drew in a sharp breath, then her legs went out from beneath her. She dropped heavily into the overstuffed chair that was, thankfully, right behind her, and I crouched beside her in alarm as the sound of light, running feet pattered from behind the library door. The door burst open a second later, and a quartet of bright-eyed, tousle-headed boys tumbled out, all of them wearing clothes of the same vintage and craftsmanship as Mrs. French’s. Her library assistants.

  “Boys,” Mrs. French said weakly. “There’s something I’d like you to look at. I need your help.”

  Eagerly, they pressed forward and eyeballed the phone. Then the boys all started chattering at once. “The Court—Shadow Court, right?” “They were a regular pain in the bum, weren’t they?” “So much trouble, right up till they weren’t.”

  I stared at them. “Wait, you recognize this?”

  “Well, not the tattoo itself, ma’am, but the design of it, certainly,” the closest boy said. “We got shelves on shelves on ’em, or we…” He stopped and tilted his head, his eyes moving up and to the right as he tried to recreate the library in his mind’s eye. “We did, I should say. We may not so much anymore. Justice Strand was right clear on how she solved those problems right down to the nubbins, had us clear out the lot of the cases.”

  “We didn’t get them all, ’course,” a second boy said. “We tried. But there was a regular pile of them.”

  Nikki and I exchanged a look. “You could find them again?”

  “Oh, sure.” The boys looked at each other, their grins growing. “Bobby would know. He’s buried so deep in the library, he didn’t hear the bell. He was talking just the other day how he seemed to be remembering more and more about things he’d not realized we had, or hadn’t thought of in a while. I bet he’d know.”

  “Go,” Mrs. French said faintly. “Bring back anything you can find and—well, I do apologize, Justice Wilde, I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Recalling such a simple thing.”

  I patted her shoulder. Mrs. French had been Abigail’s closest companion and still revered the former Justice. She wouldn’t take kindly to knowing she’d been afflicted by the same spell that had stolen the memory of the Shadow Court from the Magician. The boys didn’t seem afflicted at the same level, which confused me, but as they disappeared through the library door, I continued.

  “When they come back, we’ll be looking for where the Shadow Court was based. Hopefully, whatever’s left of the information about them will make that clear somehow.”

  “Oh! Oh, that’s an easy one,” the smallest of the boys said, his eyes bright with satisfaction that he could speak, since the older boys were off on an assignment. “They had a place in Hamburg, Germany. Pretty as a palace, Justice Strand always said.”

  My hand pulsed as he spoke, and I stared at it. The boys in Mrs. French’s care had been spelled into eternal youth, making them fixtures in the library whether they wanted to be or not. When I’d become Justice and had caught the Nul Magis in my right hand, I’d used the shard of magic to lift the spell that’d been placed on them so long ago, allowing them to age normally again. But when I’d touched the shard to their tousled mop tops, had I done more than I realized? Had I also, without realizing it, lifted Abigail’s spell that made them forget the Shadow Court?

  I hadn’t needed to unspell Mrs. French, which was why she was still fighting the effects of Abigail’s influence as she struggled to remember what she’d been forced to forget. But the boys…

  “Hamburg,” I echoed, and the littlest librarian beamed at me.

  “Pretty as a palace!” he agreed.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In all the time I’d been working as an artifact hunter, I’d been to Hamburg, Germany only a couple of times, both for less than a day. The only thing I’d ever heard about it was that it was a test site for one of Elon Musk’s goofier inventions, the hyperloop, which made it no different from LA, San Francisco, Reno, and Austin—as well as a dozen other cities across the world. One of Europe’s ancient port cities, with a shoreline that glittered above the Elbe River as it fed in from the North Sea, Hamburg was considered one of the top ten most happening cities in Europe.

  Tonight, all that was happening was a torrential downpour.

  I stared at the inscrutable horizon, a watercolor blur behind the sheets of rain, as Nikki paced behind me, staring at her tablet. “Got an update from Kreios. We’ve still got nothing on the location of Death, Simon, and the Magician. But the fires in the hotel and church were contained without anyone dying, and most of the victims who did end up in the hospital aren’t seriously injured. London is up in arms, understandably so, over the fact they know so little about the attackers.”

  “Join the club,” I muttered.

  “Local law enforcement has brought in more Interpol agents on this, including Detective Delish,” Nikki continued. “He’s up to his ears now as the resident mental terrorist expert, but according to Kreios, there’s a rush of other experts flooding law enforcement agencies throughout Europe. They’re all in on the mental-terrorist-connection angle, but they’re spinning it to be more mutants and aliens than psychics.”

&nb
sp; That pulled me away from my vantage point at the window. “Really?”

  “Really. Whatever the reason, people are not good with their woo being too abstract. Way easier to believe in aliens than ESP, apparently.”

  “Interesting. And outside of Europe?”

  “Surprisingly little reaction. We can thank all the regular straight-up terrorists for that, I think. Places getting blown up isn’t big news anymore, especially if nobody dies. The psychic element of the attack is either being ignored entirely by the major outlets or blown up by the clickbait farms as a case of wacky Euros believing in fairies. If there’s nothing else to feed it, which I hope to Mother Mary and all the saints there isn’t, the story will die off in a day or so. Less if there’s a political tweet storm Stateside to distract people.”

  “Never thought I’d be lobbying for one of those.”

  “Exactly.” She swiped her thumb across the screen. “So what’s the plan here? Assuming it ever stops raining?”

  “I want to find their home base. Mrs. French is going through the cases the boys have found, but there’s not much there. Most of the complaints are from in and around Hamburg, but not in any concentration within the city. It’s safe to say that the Shadow Court has been here for a while, though. The earliest complaint came in to Justice Hall around 1400. The Shadow Court’s only a minor player in that one, probably why it escaped Abigail’s notice.”

  “Makes sense.” Nikki resumed staring at her screen, which I could see was a map of downtown Hamburg. “Lot of ground to cover if all we’ve got to go on is that the place looks like a palace. Most of the older buildings do, though there was a fire in 1842 that knocked out a good chunk of the earliest architecture. By Abigail’s time, there’d been some reconstruction, but not a lot. If there was a residence that was pretty as a palace, it probably was one of the buildings that survived the fire. No way of knowing if it also survived the city getting bombed within an inch of its life in World War II.”