The Shadow Court

by Jenn Stark

  “I do,” Kreios said. I merely stared at the boy. He’d spoken more to the Devil in the last thirty seconds than he had to me in five months.

  “So when Justice Strand wanted us to discard some of the boxes, well, we didn’t quite know what to do. Some we burned easily enough. Those were cases that were solved, you see. But those that weren’t, sort of didn’t want to go. They took longer to burn, made us feel bad.”

  I grimaced, imagining their conflict. All those cases waiting to be heard, and those that never got their own say thrown into the fire. The boys owed Abigail their lives, and she had provided them safe haven. But they still had their own sense of right and wrong.

  “Those were the old cases,” the boy continued. “The new ones she threw on the pile of discards, we knew hadn’t been solved because they came in on her time, you see. And we didn’t think it was quite right since it wasn’t a situation of an old crime finally getting its Justice. These were people who were still alive. They still could have their wrongs righted.” He pointed to the case Mrs. French still held in her hand, cushioned by all the yards of red and white velvet. “And that one she outright panicked over. She tried to destroy it herself, only it wouldn’t budge. She couldn’t open it either, was the problem. She couldn’t get rid of it, couldn’t solve it. She…well, she spoke to it in different voices, pleaded with it. But nothing doing. It wouldn’t budge. Finally, she just gave it to us and told us to take it out of Justice Hall, out of her sight. To keep till it was needed, though she never did explain that.”

  “That was in her quiet voice,” squeaked one of the boys hovering in the doorway.

  “Right, yeah,” the first boy said. “That voice, we’d never heard before or after. It sounded…it didn’t sound right. Not quite scary, but—not right. We took the box away and promised her we’d get rid of it, but of course we never could. Then we…” His cheeks colored. “Well, then we sort of forgot about it altogether until recently. Even then, it’s not so much that we remembered as we remembered we forgot.”

  The Devil didn’t actually shoot me a glance, but I felt his interest veer toward me anyway. His eyes, however, stayed on the boy. “Did she ask you about the case again? This particular one?”

  “She didn’t, no, sir. Not as I can recall, anyway. Honestly, she didn’t even know it’d come in until, what…a few weeks after it arrived?”

  “A month!” came another voice from behind the door, and a towheaded boy peeked around the corner. “Beggin’ your pardon. But it was a month. My birthday month.”

  “That’s right, a month. She left for several weeks—longest she’d ever been away. When she came back, she was like a new person. Happy, even singing, like the weight of the world had been lifted off her shoulders.”

  “She was in love,” Mrs. French said, but her voice was uncertain, as if she’d hit upon the answer only to realize it wasn’t quite right.

  “No, no, she was already that,” her young assistant countered. “Temperance Simms swore us to secrecy. This wasn’t love. This was…more like she was cured, it seemed. Cured of her, ah, changeability. Or we thought so, anyway. Till she saw that box and fell apart again.”

  His expression made my heart crumble a little, and I suddenly connected the dots. “Abigail had been helped by the Shadow Court. She’d already been vetted by them, and then the situation with the Magician and this hamlet drove them to meet with her. Then Cassius’s complaint frightened her, but she couldn’t get rid of it. She had to do something else.”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” Bobby said, lifting his shoulders. He still looked dejected, and I pulled my hands into fists, feeling the pulse of the Nul Magis in my right hand. Sometimes, having all your memories back wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “I only know that when she saw this new complaint, the one she couldn’t open, she was distraught all over again. The rest I’ve already told you.”

  “You’ve been very helpful,” Kreios assured Bobby, and he extended his hand. The other boys yelped and disappeared behind the open doorway to the library, but Bobby blinked, then stepped forward. Slowly at first, then with a little more verve, until he reached out and shook the Devil’s hand.

  “Thank you,” Kreios said. “You’ll find in life it’s better to know the truth and be sad than to be happy with your head in the sand. You did well.”

  The boy’s eyes shot wide, and a smile of shy excitement burst across his face. He shook Kreios’s hand again, hard, then he turned and dashed back through the door of the library.

  “Well, I…” We both turned to see Mrs. French with her hands to her cheeks, tears leaking from her clenched eyes. “That was very kind of you, sir. Very, so very kind.”

  “Shhh,” Kreios said, lifting his hand.

  Mrs. French immediately straightened, exhaling a sharp breath and looking around as if she didn’t quite know where she was. “Right-o! That was something. So. I’ll be cleaning up the lot of these, then, if you’re done?” Without waiting for a reply, she hauled herself upright, shaking off the yards of red and white velvet, and began bustling about the room.

  “What are we going to do now?” I asked. “If you give Armaeus the key, and it’s more than a key, how can we let him go off to fight the Shadow Court? He’s not stable, even if he’s suddenly granted the insight he needs to beat them.”

  “He’s not stable,” Kreios agreed. He looked at the key, holding it up to the light. “I don’t believe there are any magical properties to this key whatsoever, or any markings of a more mundane sort to indicate that it might have actually gone to a lock.”

  “A key with no lock? What, was Cassius some kind of Riddler-in-training?”

  Kreios snorted. “I don’t know. He wasn’t my immediate predecessor, and I had troubles of my own to solve when I ascended. But I’ve spoken with Armaeus about all the past Devils he served with, and his memories of Cassius were always a little…fraught. It will be good to see what his reaction to the key is. A key, not a book. After the lost chapter of the Zohar and the journal of John Dee, I rather expected it to be a book.”

  I hadn’t thought about that, but he was right. “Maybe the key unlocks a book Armaeus forgot he had?”

  Kreios pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Perhaps. Or perhaps Cassius was clever enough to realize he couldn’t write anything down in this instance. Words leave a mark, but the whisper of truth baked into forged metal? Something else entirely. Either way, you’re right. Armaeus is not ready to fight. So any revelations this key will bring us won’t help in this immediate battle, the one the Shadow Court is setting up so assiduously.”

  I sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

  Kreios, however, kept going. “Which means you’ll have to fight it alone while I go present this key to Armaeus.”

  “Wait, what?” I squinted at him. “I mean, yay, fight—but why me in particular? And why alone?”

  Kreios smiled. “You, because the Shadow Court is clearly baiting you. There’s something they need from you.”

  “I don’t know about that. They pretty much know things about me I’ve forgotten myself.”

  “Ah, but as you told Armaeus—yes, he told me—learning someone else’s past isn’t memory, it’s history. They think they know you, and they will leverage that knowledge, but their logic is faulty if they think they know you better than yourself. And you will stand alone because we cannot trust the full Council in this fight, nor do we want to betray our hand about that. We don’t know who the Shadow Court has compromised, if anyone. We will need time to ferret that out, but time is something we do not have. Armaeus cannot stand for the Council because he cannot stand for himself. Right now, he is existing in a state of suspended animation, with pieces of him still lost, and those he has found—unfamiliar. Foreign. Like bones healed improperly that need to be rebroken.”

  I pulled a face. “That…sounds awful. But, fair enough. So how exactly do you expect me to defeat the Shadow Court by myself?”

  �
�I don’t. I expect you to fight them.”

  “But I’ve never really learned how to fight. Not properly.”

  Kreios’s smile was rich and full. “Fighting is life, Sara Wilde. You merely need to want to live. Do you want to live? Do you want Armaeus to live?”

  “Of course I do,” I muttered, rubbing one hand over my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept, but it seemed like…too long ago. “Armaeus has to live. I have to live. There’s no other way.”

  Kreios nodded. “Then you’ll know how to fight when the time comes.”

  “You better be right,” I said as I heard Mrs. French’s startled exclamation, followed by the staccato clatter of a dozen new canisters sliding home in my office. Thump, thump, thump. Complaints, I knew instinctively. Complaints against the Shadow Court, or at least the drugs they were pumping into Western Europe. Thump, thump, thump. “Because apparently, it’s going down now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I crackled back into awareness at the shipyard in Hamburg, my favorite place in the city by dint of the fact that I’d now been there multiple times. It was midmorning, but though the place was a beehive of activity, I mercifully did not incinerate anyone on arrival. My borrowed motorbike was, of course, long gone, but a squat, gunmetal-blue container truck with official-looking lettering on the side trundled by me as I sucked in my first gust of Hamburgian oxygen. I stepped up on the truck’s back bumper and clung to its ladder on impulse, if only so I wouldn’t be left standing in the middle of the yard.

  This wasn’t a good long-term strategy, of course, but it did give me a second to get my bearings. I scanned the shipyard wildly as the truck bounced along, splashing through puddles and drawing no attention whatsoever, even with the leather-jacketed stowaway on its back. Sadly, nothing immediately popped up as “this is your next step.” When the truck took a hard right into a sea of pallets and container boxes, I traded one ladder for another, hopping off the back of the truck to clamber up the nearest stack. Better views up high, I reasoned, and I wouldn’t be quite so noticeable.

  When I reached the top of the pallets, I did a quick scan around. Seeing no one, I went flat on the wooden surfaces and pulled out my phone. Could the Shadow Court and their goons track my phone in the city? Could they pick up a call if I tried to contact Nikki? I had no idea, but I punched in her number anyway as I stared out over the Great Container Sea. If I needed to bring the party to me, at least I’d found a really great dance floor.

  She answered on the first ring. “Dollface. Where are you?”

  “Shipyard, but probably not for long. Anything happening?”

  “Not a damned thing,” she confirmed. “No word out of Paris that we can get, everything locked up tight. They’re calling it a domestic terror attack, but we know that’s not right.”

  I tightened my jaw. It wasn’t right. It was a message, and one delivered just to me. The Shadow Court was going to continue to push and push until I pushed back. Not a problem anymore. “And local—you track how they’re getting drugs out?”

  “That would be negative. The port of Hamburg has been rocking with shipments this whole week from a laundry list of Connected bad actors, and the whole thing is running slick enough that you know it’s business as usual. They’ve been doing this a long time, which means we just sort of stumbled into their supply chain. So the drugs…”

  “Are already out there. Whatever this new batch is, it’s just the latest flavor.”

  “But it’s big, and it’s causing a lot of buzz. We’re getting the idea that these tips are coming in from Connecteds who are actually part of the supply chain, who’re suddenly getting cold feet with what’s now getting fed into the system. Now that we know what to look for, Simon’s been jacking his IV drip with enough caffeine to fuel some pretty epic search algos on the arcane web. There’s enough of these new drugs everywhere from global powerhouses to Third World powder kegs to make a pretty big boom if they get released into the general populace. We still don’t know how they’re using these technoceuticals either. Weapons, gotta be, but against who?”

  “Against everyone,” I muttered. Something shifted in the far distance, the lightest flutter, and I scowled. I couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Not with the Shadow Court’s speed demons or whatever they were. “I gotta roll. Keep trying to track down any actual illicit drugs we know about that are shipping in the mix. It’s the only way we’ll be able to get Interpol to act.”

  “Roger that. What about you?”

  “I’m going to—oof!”

  My phone went flying as the first wave of bodies hit me, three operatives appearing as if out of nowhere, blasting into my side. The phone skittered over the edge and went soaring into space, so I mentally checked the device off my “things to break” list and rolled up to my feet, zigging out of the way in time to miss another flying leap. That guy also went over the edge, so I added him to the same column as my phone.

  That left the two initial bad guys squaring off against me, but neither of them opted for dodgeball as their game of choice, instead going for their guns—

  I blasted them.

  I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t care about anyone noticing me. I didn’t care about how badly I hurt these asshats. My hands came up as if of their own accord, and my version of gunfire shot across the open space of the pallets and lit their bodies up with electricity, a full-on taser strike without all the silly string to clean up. They were jacked up to the point of levitation, then collapsed, quivering on the surface of the Container Sea, down for the count. Which was good, because no sooner had I leapt over them than a shout sounded in the distance. I whirled to see an entire wave of goons reach the top of the pallets and storage containers—and take off after me.

  “Crap!” I had no idea how much electrocution juice I had left in my tanks, but it wasn’t enough to fight off the swarm vomiting up from the alleyways between the pallets—and I immediately got the sense that no matter how many of these asshats I took out, the Shadow Court would just make more. Maybe to tire me out, maybe simply to piss me off. They didn’t expect this to be the actual fight, just the first course.

  They were still playing games.

  With a roar, I flicked open my third eye and noticed a similar chaos of energy circuits that I’d experienced at the Sagrada Familia. This army were all Connected—or Connected enough—and they were linked to each other, moving together as a single unit and directed from a single point of origin. That port of origin was what I needed to get to. I couldn’t run away from this, not forever. They’d simply keep hunting me down or killing people to get my attention.

  I had to run toward it.

  Taking advantage of the five seconds it had taken me to put all this together, the next wave of supersonic attackers hit me square. They were moving too fast to use guns, and I thrust my hands out to either side, pummeling them back with a wave that I deliberately focused on the same electroneural networks that were binding them together. They erupted in a roar, some of them literally catching on fire, but there was nothing I could do about that right now. Instead of running this time, however, I followed my surge of energy forward. The throng of bad guys parted like the Red Sea, all of them flailing, jerking, and grabbing for me, screaming and crying and gasping with agony, the entire chaotic scene looking like Dante’s hell or the last panel of a Bosch triptych, played out under the bright and cheerful Hamburg sun.

  But I kept moving. As I passed body after screaming body, I felt the Shadow Court soldiers’ energy blasting out to me, saw their eyes, touched their faces—mostly to shove them away from me, but I also needed an image, a picture, a place, a location. I needed that location to be strong enough that I could fix on it—fix on it and embed it in my mind and believe that I’d been there before. I needed to believe so desperately that I could reach it again that even having never been there, I could flash myself into existence exactly where I needed to be.
As I moved, I also yanked weapons away from my damn-near-electrocuted assailants—a knife, a gun, another gun, a switchblade, stashing them on my body. I didn’t know what I’d need later, but I believed in being prepared.

  I finally got through the wall of humanity and hurdled over a makeshift alley, the space beneath me still crawling with more Shadow Court flunkies racing up the walls. I blasted another sheet of electricity into the space between the pallets for good measure, then looked up—and out.

  Three more sets of assailants were hauling their bodies up and out of the shadows beneath the Container Sea, and they all were coming for me. From different directions.

  “No!” I gasped as a hand locked on my ankle and yanked my leg out from underneath me, flipping me hard to the surface of the pallet. I grunted as pain shot through me and blasted the asshat who’d gotten to me, but he barely staggered back. Meanwhile, the seven circles of hell were closing in, and unless I detonated a nuclear bomb, there was no way I was going to get this wave off my back. They’d take me, and that was not going to happen.

  Then I recognized him. It was the guy from the motorcycle that first night in Paris, and the guy standing on the corner during the downpour in Hamburg. The assassin who kept turning up like a bad euro. But this was no drone, dammit. This was someone I could work with.

  This was someone I could use.

  “You!” I spit out, and instead of a defensive maneuver, I sprang toward him, wrapping my legs and arms around him as he grunted in surprise. I pinned my third eye wide and stared straight into his stony glare as I caught us both on fire—

  And flashed to the first image that sprang up in my mind.

  We crackled back into existence on a cobblestoned street that I vaguely recognized as being part of the Speicherstadt area, and sprang apart. None of the horde came with us, but before I could get my bearings beyond that, I sensed more than saw the guy’s hand arching out, the flash of the blade. He was going to knife me right across the neck, the same move he’d done to Nikki.