The Shadow Court

by Jenn Stark

  I blinked. “Burned to the ground?”

  She nodded, still seeming totally distracted, almost mesmerized by the contents of the case. “Very sad. The complainants weren’t Connected, but they were entering their plea on behalf of the Connecteds who’d died, it seemed. One of the richest families in the area, known for their largesse, helping the community thrive, and all that. So…so very tragic. To see them go up in flames like that was devastating for everyone, and they begged for help.”

  “Help for what? It was a rich family that was harmed. How did that impact the others? Were they employers?” I couldn’t imagine an Armaeus in any incarnation burning a mortal dwelling to the ground, certainly not in the 1850s, when society had evolved enough to report such things in the news. Someone would complain about the disaster—someone clearly had complained, and if Armaeus was to blame…he should have been brought to Judgment.

  But Abigail hadn’t done any of that. She’d left Armaeus in his role, intact, and, what…merely wiped the memory of this crime clear from his mind?

  “Well, that’s a good question, because…” She kept scanning the page. “Oh, here we are. It was a mansion owned by Maximilian Fuggeren.”

  I stared at her, my third eye flinching against the sudden flare of light. “Fuggeren? You’re sure?”

  “Quite, quite,” she said, continuing to read the documents with a reflective look on her face. By now, she was completely surrounded by the fiery light. “And I will say…I remember this one, now. Justice Strand went personally, and she returned—well. I would almost have thought she was in love, as happy as she was, though it wasn’t quite romantic love, more…I guess admiration. She said it wasn’t the Magician’s fault, exactly, though he’d done a bad thing. Very bad. Very wrong. That he wasn’t himself. But we can’t always be ourselves, can we? There has to be forgiveness and grace, and the Magician was not about either of those things—couldn’t be, in his role. He was all logic and certainty and balance. But we’re not balanced souls. We, all of us, have our darker moments that are ours to have and right and true and deserved to hold sway, and he needed to step out of the way of the shadows and let them be…”

  She broke off, rocking a little, and I narrowed my eyes on her, trying to parse her words into something resembling coherence. “Ah, Mrs. French?”

  “I’m quite all right, quite.” She sniffled. I realized to my shock she was crying. I stepped forward—and was pushed just as quickly back by the flare of light from the other cases. The sudden pain that erupted within me took my breath away, but Mrs. French seemed not to be afflicted in the center of the flames arcing over the cases.

  I hissed out a breath, battling the pain. “What about the others?”

  “Oh…oh, those.” Mrs. French obligingly dabbed at her eyes and pulled the other boxes close. She popped open the second box, a case of shiny gold, without issue. “This one was before, a complaint—oh, well. Not against the Magician, but against a young sorcerer, also in Austria, also…hmmm. Well, he’s a fine-looking man, now, isn’t he. Blond and bright. Denarja was his name, just that one name, but it’s a fine name as well.”

  “It means money. In Slovenian,” I offered, but Mrs. French still seemed in full swoon as she read the slips of parchment in the case. “What did he do?”

  “He did nothing wrong, you can be sure of that,” she said staunchly, though her eyes didn’t stray from the picture and pages she clutched in her hand. “There’s a second note here, in Abigail’s own hand. Denarja was a fine man, a beautiful man, and he did warn Justice Strand of what was to come, he surely did. Warned her and begged for her grace, he did, not for himself. Not for himself. But for the Magician. For what was to come.”

  “Did he now?” My disbelief warred with my anxiety, but there was no doubting that Mrs. French fully believed what she was reading, was in the moment and swept along by the pageantry of what was playing before her eyes. “If he did nothing wrong, what was the complaint?”

  “Not a complaint at all,” she sighed. “She tells it plain. He wanted to catch Justice Strand’s eye is all. Catch her eye and tell her how strong she was. Oh, what a flattering fellow.”

  “Right.” I gradually figured out that most of the energy that was pulsing up from the cases was coming from Denarja. He was the lure that had pulled Abigail in, and she’d never been able to part with the case. But why wouldn’t she have removed the Magician’s crime entirely if this guy pleaded for grace on behalf of the Magician?

  And why couldn’t I get any closer?

  I tried again, and once again, the pain that ricocheted through my body had the force of a lightning bolt. It had a curious nature as well, sharp and cutting, almost furious. My eyes went wide. Jealousy? It felt like the incarnation of jealousy, keeping me from approaching the case. The case of Denarja somebody or other, a sorcerer of Austria, who’d developed an almost guru-like hold on Abigail. One aspect of Abigail, anyway. He’d exerted a hold on her so strong that she’d, what, forgiven the Magician for a crime against a mortal? Or against a Connected living in a mortal’s home—but even that made no sense. Even if the Magician had acted improperly, there shouldn’t have been any evidence left behind, not for long. Armaeus was a champion at cleaning up after himself.

  I focused on Mrs. French again. “What about the third case?”

  “Same as the second,” she said without taking her attention from the picture of Denarja. “Came in exactly at the same time, two different complainants.”

  “Can you read it for me?” I asked after a moment, when I realized she had no interest in looking anywhere but at the case of the sorcerer.

  “Oh, if I must,” she said crossly. She leaned over and picked up the third box, but the clasp wouldn’t budge. “Nothing doing. It won’t open.”

  “Try harder,” I blurted as her attention moved back to the second case. Her head came up with a sudden snap, and she scowled at me through the curtain of fire that she couldn’t see but that had leapt up between us in fiery anger.

  “There’s nothing to see in that one, Justice,” she practically snarled. “Abigail tried to toss it, tried to have all of us toss it, but it wouldn’t toss. Some of the cases are like that, sticking around where they’re not needed anymore, but she’s got the whole library now, doesn’t she, for troublesome cases like that. Plenty of room.”

  “She wanted to destroy it?” There went my theory of Abigail keeping something to help the Council against the Shadow Court, unless she thought Denarja was that guy. I wasn’t feeling that, though. And there was something about that third box…

  “Who issued the complaint?” I pressed. “Is there any marking on the box, anything at all? Because it looks like it’s…um, kind of melting.”

  “It’s doing nothing of the sort,” Mrs. French insisted, no matter that, in the flare of heat surrounding her, the surface of the box was practically bubbling. Where it had started out as a plain black box, now it was glowing a fiery red, and beneath that, a cerulean blue was peeking out, neon bright. I struggled to move forward through the curtain of fire, but once more, I was rebuffed. My own hands lit with blue flame, but the pressure against me only seemed to increase. Abigail had been a Justice, like me. She’d come to her role with powers of her own, psychic abilities I knew very little about. She was blocking not me personally, but quite literally the position of Justice. The position she had to have suspected would be filled once again after she had passed on. One of her identities must’ve realized that she was not strong enough to stay in that position forever, immortality or no. And her guru, her guide, must remain safe.

  But there was this other box…

  “Keep trying to open it, Mrs. French,” I urged. “It’s important. If you could let me know at least who had launched the complaint, that would be so helpful. Then I’ll leave you to your research on Denarja.”

  “Oh.” Mrs. French’s eyes widened with absolute delight, and she focused more closely on the box in her hands. “W
ell, perhaps if I just—”

  Disregarding entirely the flames that licked and roared over the surface of the box, Mrs. French drew her fingernail along one seam, cackling with delight as something appeared to give way. “Well, now, that’s more like it,” she said, eminently pleased with herself. She bent closer to the box, ignoring the searing heat, and pressed the surface harder. “Justice Strand always did tell me that I had a gift, beyond my own long-lived ways. She said I never gave up, even when I should. I was just too inquisitive that way.”

  She smiled absently as she fiddled with the box. “She didn’t pay me much attention, you know? Appreciated what I had to offer but never asked me to do much more, when I was always so willing to do anything for the woman. She was such a precious soul, such a grace.”

  “She was lucky to have you,” I murmured, my attention fully on the box.

  “I was lucky to have her, you mean. She trusted me.” Mrs. French sighed. “That’s one other thing she would say. Bless my soul, I haven’t thought about it in years. But she always told me she knew she could trust me. That no matter who she was in any given moment, my genuine affection for her would never change. She was never afraid of me.”

  I grimaced. Mrs. French obviously didn’t know that Abigail had warded her, though clearly those wards were fairly light if she was able to get even as far as she had with the box in her lap. Had Abigail assumed that Mrs. French would never get this far? Or if she did, that there’d be nothing to worry about?

  “Oh!” Mrs. French finally said, and I could hear the lock pop, the report as loud and abrupt as a thunder crack. I winced, thinking about the poor residents of the Palazzo Hotel beneath me and wondering how much of that psychic boom had been heard in the floors below. But I still couldn’t get any closer to Mrs. French. I could only watch as she sat back abruptly on her skirts, looking for all the world like a butterfly perched on a mushroom cap, and stared up at me with wide and startled eyes.

  “Well, bless my soul,” she breathed with total shock. “It was Cassius D’Angelo. He’s who leveled this complaint, Justice Wilde. I didn’t even know that was possible.”

  “What are you talking about?” I’d never heard the name Cassius D’Angelo before, but the way Mrs. French spoke it, it was clear she did. “Who is Cassius D’Angelo?”

  The brightly burning streams of energy suddenly guttered out, and a stiff breeze rocked me back on my heels, hot as the blast from the furnace. Before I scarcely drew in my next breath, there was another figure in the room with us, looking as dashing and self-assured as he always did, from the tips of his long, tawny locks to the soles of his battered beach sandals.

  “I never do tire of saying this.” Aleksander Kreios sighed with deep and obvious pleasure. “But speak of the Devil, and he shall appear.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Who—what?” Mrs. French sat on the floor with cases scattered around her, her expression entirely bewildered.

  “Cassius D’Angelo was the Devil in 1852.” I didn’t pose it as a question, and the Devil didn’t bother nodding, just gave me an indolent shrug.

  “You can’t hold me accountable for my forebear’s actions, but what did he do now? He was a colossal ingrate by all accounts. He came from Sardinia in the late 1700s, when the country was constantly at war, and he never could shake that off. He lasted until 1878, when he waded into the wars of the Ottoman Empire and was killed for his troubles. Nasty bit of business there, from what I’m told. He went down in Austria. The Magician got to him too late to save him, but not too late to incinerate his torturers.”

  “Torturing the Devil.” Mrs. French crossed herself. “Who would’ve thought it was possible?”

  “So the Magician couldn’t save him, but he tried? Which meant—I mean, if he and Cassius weren’t friends, they were at least allies.”

  “Strong allies,” Kreios confirmed. “Cassius didn’t agree with Armaeus’s penchant for balance, but then—who could? They were at odds a great deal during the last twenty years of Cassius’s life.”

  “Last twenty years…” I turned to Mrs. French. “What was the nature of the complaint he sent to Justice?”

  “A complaint?” Kreios’s elegant brows arched. “How interesting.”

  “I…ah…a moment.” Mrs. French grew flustered again, as if she was surprised to find the box still in her lap. She picked up a single card from a bed of red-and-white material. The card contained very few words from what I could tell, and she frowned down at it. “It’s in Latin. ‘For shame, Magician. You see only the lock, not the key.’”

  “The lock, not the key?” Kreios echoed. “I can’t say he was wrong, but what does that mean?”

  “And how does that constitute a complaint?” I complained. “Is there anything else in the case?”

  “Not at all—well, no, that’s…” She pulled out a tuft of red velvet—and kept pulling. No sooner had she cleared the first strip than another nudged up, this one in snowy white. Then a third, once more in the same deep crimson of the first. The material seemed to grow exponentially as it cleared the case, until in a very short time, Mrs. French was surrounded with a luxurious pile of confetti in yards of rich red and white velvet. And then she pulled out something different.

  “Bless my soul,” she whispered as she held the item up.

  “It’s a key,” I said flatly. “Give me that.”

  I moved forward and took the key from Mrs. French’s unresisting hand, but even with the careful scrutiny of my third eye, I found absolutely no energy signature emanating from it. It was a flat dull skeleton key, fashioned out of some sort of metal. “What is this, lead?” I asked, handing it to Kreios. The Devil took it without hesitation.

  “So it would seem,” he agreed, turning the key over in his hand. “It may mean something to Armaeus, but not to me.”

  I frowned, something niggling in my brain…something about a key… I turned to Mrs. French. “When did this complaint come in, again? Before or after Abigail’s run-in with Denarja?”

  “Who?” Mrs. French blinked at me, and I sighed. Whatever magic had been caught up in these three cases, it was strong and beguiling, even a hundred and fifty years on.

  It took only a brief explanation to bring Kreios up to speed on the events of 1852 and the tale of Armaeus incinerating a hapless hamlet, but the Devil was equally taken aback. “I can tell you, in all the time I’ve known him, Armaeus never destroyed any outpost like that where there weren’t actual outright enemies to the Council. And even then—no mortal structures were destroyed in any way that could be laid at his feet.”

  I squinted at the material lying at our feet. “Red and white—that could be the Austrian flag, right? The hamlet was in Austria. What does that have to do with the key?”

  “The key is a symbol,” Kreios agreed. “You only see the lock, not the key.”

  “Lock lock as in block? Or lock as in portal or keyhole? It could go either way.” I scowled, frustrated. “We’ll have to ask him.”

  “That…is somewhat problematic,” Kreios said. “After you left, Armaeus faltered again. It was almost as if he’d been holding it together on sheer willpower alone and could no longer. He became disoriented and started mumbling to himself in full conversations, as if there were several stories being told to him at once, and he couldn’t follow the right track.”

  “The angelic communication,” I said. “He hasn’t shut it off. He needs to shut it off, but he won’t.”

  “Most likely, but it presents a problem. This key, whatever it is, may be the last trigger required for him to understand not only the existence of the Shadow Court, but also how to fight it. Or it could completely unhinge him.”

  “Or it may mean nothing at all,” I countered. “Cassius wanted the Magician to fight. If he leveled a complaint, it follows that there was a fight to be had, and Armaeus didn’t take it on.”

  “Or he didn’t finish it,” Kreios agreed.

  “I’ve g
ot the date now,” Mrs. French piped up. “Eighteen fifty-two, right after this box here…”

  She picked up the golden box, the one that had contained the missive from Denarja. “Don’t open that,” I blurted, and she dropped it just as quickly, blinking at me.

  Kreios regarded me curiously as well.

  “Sorry,” I offered. “That one had some sort of mesmerizing spell built into it. You open it again, we might be here all night.”

  “Well, I say,” Mrs. French murmured, but she tapped the third box. “The Devil’s complaint also came at the same time as the complaint against Armaeus, leastwise by the dates on the box.”

  “So all three could have been linked to the same incident. Denarja contacts Abigail, Armaeus blows up the house of this Austrian lord, the Devil issues a complaint.”

  Kreios snorted. “Explosions seemed to make Cassius happy, though. Why would he have any issue with this one?”

  “Maybe he blew up too little? Maybe he blew up the wrong thing?”

  “You see the lock…not the key,” Kreios mused. “And he sent this complaint to Abigail. Which she promptly ignored.”

  “That’s not quite right, beggin’ your pardon, sir.”

  We all turned to see Bobby Haymoor standing at the door of the library, the others hovering behind him, ready to bolt. He looked at Kreios with wide, admiring eyes, and the Devil immediately picked up on his sense of wonder.

  “By all means, share what you know,” Kreios said, in a voice as gentle as a sigh. “Whatever the truth you most wish to speak.”

  “I…” Bobby took a step forward almost without seeming to realize it, then straightened. “We knew there was something off about some of the boxes Justice Strand had us sort, right? I mean, you’ve seen the library. It’s chock-full to the brim of cases she’d completed, petitions she ignored, and those she refused to touch for reasons only she knew. And no matter how many shelves we filled up, there were always more shelves to go. You can’t fill Justice Hall. There’s always room for those who seek it, you see?”