by Jenn Stark
“It won’t change all that fast.” The boys who assisted Mrs. French had remained children for two hundred years. Their fortunes had changed once I’d become Justice. Hopefully for the better. They’d at least start aging normally, anyway.
I self-consciously rubbed the small scar in the center of my right hand, where the residual of the Nul Magis toxin I’d gotten struck with a few weeks earlier still remained etched into my skin. Though that toxin had allowed me to reset the boys’ biological clocks, it’d also been my first major injury sustained in my new job. I wasn’t at all sure what my Workers’ Comp was like. Something to take up with the big boss.
“No, it surely won’t,” Mrs. French agreed. She turned her attention to the pile around me. “You’re sure you don’t want to bring these into the main office where we have proper light?”
“I’ll get there eventually. I want to weed out at least some of these cases immediately.” I surveyed the huge pile with some dismay. “I didn’t think there’d be so many of them. I thought witches were…I don’t know. Quieter.”
“You can be as quiet as you please and still come to the attention of Justice.” Mrs. French sniffed. “We’ve more than two hundred official covens worldwide, and thousands more than that who call themselves covens but don’t adhere to the proper codes. What you see here are cases that involve witches or initiate witches in the traditional sense, plus anyone claiming to be a kitchen witch, hedge rider, hoodooist, Jewitches, or Gardnerian. I stopped short of the Feri witches. Once you involve the Fae, your troubles increase exponentially.” She gave a delicate shudder.
“Yeah, I don’t think that’s what we’re dealing with here.” I also didn’t think we’d be dealing with outlier covens. The male witch I’d delivered to Gamon two days earlier had been firmly entrenched in his entitlement and didn’t have any other information of use. He didn’t know who Myanya’s vessel witch was, specifically. He’d merely summoned her, and, after several tries, she’d picked up his call. He was a member of a Romanian coven, as ancient as it was powerful, though said coven was, of course, disavowing any knowledge of his attempt to summon Myanya. I’d poked around a little after resettling the girls with their parents, doing what I could to heal those who’d been injured and ease the pain of the families whose sons had died.
Alas, I hadn’t learned much else about the witch spirit who’d been summoned to Vlad’s side, and that bothered me. Even without the silver slash at her temple, Myanya reeked of trouble. But with it…she was now my newest, biggest problem.
She also hadn’t saved the children who’d prayed to her for deliverance, which I considered a significant mark against her. I frowned, thinking of the parents’ faces as Nigel and I had returned the lost children and shared the barest details about those who had died. Healing of the heart was a tricky thing. All too often, pain was a necessary reminder of the loss, and to take away that pain would be to diminish the importance of the loss. Humans were…complicated.
Of course, travelers weren’t the kind of people who went in much for formal therapy, but I’d been assured that the children’s emotional needs would be met. If anything, the fact that they had been singled out by one of the more powerful male witches in Hungary was a strange sort of balm to their traumatized community.
I refocused on Vlad. Though he’d been clearly willing to kidnap his helpers from the fringes of society, he wouldn’t be targeting his bride in that social sphere, I decided. I got the impression he was aiming high. Still, I really didn’t care about Vlad’s social network. I wasn’t in Budapest to mediate a meet-cute gone wrong, I was there to take out an asshat magician who was killing kids for his own gain.
Even as I thought that, however, a new question formed in my mind. Had I really only gone after Vlad because of the children? Or had his case called to me so strongly because there was a bigger problem here I simply wasn’t seeing yet?
Looking at the pile of witch complaints that had come in over the centuries but had never been addressed by Justice, I strongly suspected the latter. Which could prove…complicated. But, no rest for the weary.
“Myanya,” I said out loud, testing the name out. “I’ve never heard of her.”
“I certainly couldn’t find that name in the files, and you would think I would have.” Mrs. French humphed. “Mistress Danae will be visiting at ten o’clock, as you requested. She wanted to come here, which I thought was rather nice of her. She even asked for a tour of the library.”
“Not gonna happen.” Until I’d offered her the job as Mistress of Swords, Danae had been living quite happily as the head of one of the oldest covens in North America, a group of witches based in Chicago known as the deathwalkers. These were witches with no aversion to summoning both demons and the dead, which was a practice that some of the more modern sects had begun to avoid. She and her coven were very good at it, for all that her ranks had taken a direct hit during the recent war on magic. The deathwalkers were already rebuilding, however, and Danae’s role with the House of Swords was no doubt aiding in her recruitment efforts. She didn’t need the added benefit of a library card to a place where there were a whole lot of dead criminals. “What did you find about any deathwalker cases, specifically? Especially during Danae’s tenure?”
“So far, they appear to be encamped on the high road. No open cases with them going back at least two hundred years. Not to say that they were always pure as the driven snow, but they’ve done their level best to make it seem that way.”
“All right. Go ahead and get ready for her visit. She strikes me as a tea drinker this early in the day.”
“Then she’s a good sort, right there.” Mrs. French hesitated, eyeing me with concern over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses. Today she was wearing a deep-blue muslin dress with a frilly white lace collar, her white hair swept back in a neat chignon, and she looked exactly like a genteel librarian should. At least if that librarian had been shelving books since the Victorian Age. Unlike her library assistants, Mrs. French hadn’t been bespelled into undead service. She merely was a Revenant—a race of mortals that were exceptionally long-lived. She’d been a young girl when she’d begun working in the library, and I suspected she had many, many secrets of her own.
“I will say, I’m not too fond of leaving you back here alone, Justice Wilde,” she continued. “You’re sure you’ll be all right? There’s…well, there’s the unpleasantness that can be found in some of these boxes and tubes, and there’s simply no telling where it might crop up. If it would be anywhere, it’d be here.”
She waved her hand over the piled-up containers. I grabbed the nearest one, a scroll tube, and shook it experimentally.
“I’m pretty sure this one is safe,” I said casually enough, though I set the tube down without opening it. I waved off Mrs. French. “Go.”
I waited until she left and then cast another glance over the boxes. My reason for having Mrs. French out of the way and keeping the majority of these boxes in the library of Justice was twofold. First, I was actually capable of a little bit of magic within this warded hall. My predecessor, Abigail Strand, had worked as Justice for approximately three years back in the 1850s. Along the way, she had slowly lost full control of her exceptional mental faculties, until she met an early demise, hastened in part by her inability to keep her fractured attention focused on her own safety. Abigail had been a relatively high-level Connected, but beyond grappling with multiple aspects of her identity that would come to the fore at various times when she was threatened, she’d clearly been frightened of those Connecteds who were more powerful than her. As a result, she had deadened the library to all magical abilities, even those of a future Justice, which would be me. While I appreciated her zeal, I needed to break through those wards. Otherwise, I was never going to be able to get through all these cold cases, as well as deal with the influx of new jobs that were piling up every day.
Secondly, despite what I’d said to Mrs. French, I was concerned about the
rumor, misbelief, superstition, or whatever it was that said that part of Abigail’s deteriorating condition had resulted from the cases themselves. That every few cases, she would open a box, tube, or arcane file folder that quickened her mental decline. There had to be a way of identifying which of the containers were problematic, and I didn’t really want that process to be spied on by outside eyes. Because in its way, this supposed plague was a safety mechanism of the library. And as such, there had to be a reason for it.
Where better to learn what that reason might be than to start with an embarrassment of witches?
Lifting my hands, I allowed my third eye to flicker open. As I suspected, the containers before me immediately responded to being viewed through the perspective of a magical lens. The energy currents zipped and shivered along their surfaces, and they all pulsed with a power invisible to the naked eye.
In fact…
I turned and surveyed the library around me more closely, as far as my third eye could see. I’d done that before, but now, with the benefit of focus and stillness, I realized that the library wasn’t quite the labyrinth of crazy I had at first supposed it to be. The jobs that had come in for Justice were ordered by type and year, a rough approximation anyway, but there was a secondary layer to their organization as well. The more potent the cases, the higher up in the shelves they were positioned. By the time you reached the very top tiers of the library, the ceiling glowed with a virtual constellation of power.
I stared at that ceiling, dumbstruck. Had Abigail realized that the most intense cases were hanging out above her? Talk about a sword of Damocles… Every time she entered the library, there must’ve been unconscious heaviness from above that settled over her, weighing her down, jacking up her crown chakra. If she hadn’t had the ability to identify what was happening, was it any wonder that she’d begun to doubt her own mental faculties? There had been some indication that Abigail Strand had suffered from a dissociative identity disorder, but a new theory suddenly presented itself to me. What if there were identities, aspects of her personality, that were simply drawn forth in the presence of so much latent power hovering above? What if they weren’t called out merely to protect Abigail in a general sense, but to battle a very specific threat?
Either way, it gave me an idea for the containers before me.
Focusing all my energy, I breathed out and extended my hands, the crackling of my blue fire barely skittering past my own fingers. But it wasn’t my magic that I wanted to direct. Not this time. The way these books and boxes and scroll tubes were shelved hadn’t been the result of Mrs. French and her helpers’ mad organizational skills. They hadn’t been able to intuit where the cases should go. In fact, I already knew from personal experience that where the young librarians thought they’d stored particular items wasn’t always where they were eventually found. They were close—the same section, the same set of shelves—but some were higher than the boys had remembered them, some lower. The assistants hadn’t figured out the movement because they hadn’t known what they were looking for.
I did.
“Order yourselves,” I murmured. “By your own rightful power.”
Nothing happened. I kept my hands stretched wide, energy crackling between my fingers but serving as little more than additional lighting, and watched the containers before me. They quivered and glowed, and some seemed to shift ever so slightly, but they mostly remained in place.
“Come forward, greatest among you, or be judged for your weakness,” I tried again.
Still nothing. I wasn’t pulling on the right trigger. In my mind’s eye, I considered the library as some sort of fell hierarchy of power—the more banal the Connected issues, the lower the shelves. But that seemed too easy. In any given moment, the most boring case in the house could end up being the one of crucial importance, and it wasn’t sophisticated enough to simply say “look up” to find all the cases of any merit.
Unless…
Unless Abigail truly had feared not only what was in her head, but also above her head. Thus, because magic often fed on emotions, the most powerful and dangerous of the cases in the library of Justice had followed her unwitting direction. Grinning down at her like gargoyles, their power and their anonymity enhanced by their safety in numbers. After all, these cases weren’t exactly accusing the Girl Scouts of the Connected world. Why wouldn’t they be as cunning in their traps as they had been during the execution of their crime?
I needed to cut to the chase. I’d assembled all these containers bearing complaints from or about the witch community because I suspected I’d find the fiery resurrected spirit of Myanya at the center of at least a few. And if I could learn what she’d done in the past, I could perhaps understand what she was doing now. Because I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt she was doing something.
“I am Justice of the Arcana Council,” I murmured. “Myanya, your time has come. Defy me if you dare.”
That did the trick. The energy leapt in the cases, shimmering forth, and several of the boxes visibly slid toward me. Willing to take their chances, or…maybe they knew something I didn’t. Either way, progress. But progress wasn’t success.
I tried again. “Myanya, your time has come. All must be known. All must be shown. I am Justice of the Arcana Council, and you are in my house. Show yourself!”
The pressure in my head suddenly exploded in a burst of bright white light. My eyes widened—all of them—as the library around me was transformed. Instead of the gloomy, crowded labyrinth of twisting stacks and shifting scaffolding, it was awash in colors, but no less a trap. And in the middle of the trap, I saw Abigail. Running for her life, a malevolent coiling fiery spirit twisting after her—Myanya, it had to be. Abigail looked over her shoulder, and I realized that I was seeing her for the first time—her open, expressive face, her delicate chin and high cheekbones, her large, terrified eyes. Her deep auburn hair was down around her shoulders, and her slender body was stretched to the utmost, until finally she smashed into a shelf in front of her. She threw her arms in a protective cross above her head, crying out with horror as the light came crashing down—
I blinked, my eyes refocusing.
Five containers sat in front of me, the rest of them gone. I glanced quickly to the stacks around me, and could identify them all—glowing like tiny stars throughout the room. Some on the bottommost shelves, some higher up, many, many more still in the upper rafters of the library, winking down at me like mini strobe lights. There were many containers that held powerful crimes sent to Justice to solve, but only five that apparently held Myanya or whatever she’d been in previous incarnations—incarnations strong enough to go toe to toe with Justice of the Arcana Council.
Five, I could handle.
I stood up, keeping my mind carefully blank, and bundled the five containers into two large sacks, wrapping each in the bits of cotton cloth that I found at their bottoms. There were more than enough cloth rags for the containers, and I wondered at that. How many containers did Mrs. French think I’d exit with?
Slinging the bags over my shoulder, I made my way back toward the front of the library, to where the main offices of Justice Hall waited. I could feel the pressure of all the crimes I left behind as I walked, and I once again marveled at how real and immediate that pressure was. Abigail had been all alone, facing it without proper preparation. These five cases, had they unraveled while she was Justice, might well have overtaken her.
But I wasn’t Abigail, and I’d eventually learned that doing things completely alone was not only unnecessary…but stupid.
I wasn’t going to be facing Myanya’s past crimes alone.
Danae would be facing them too.
Chapter Five
I emerged from the library to find Danae already seated in the lobby of my office, her gaze riveted on me the moment I exited the door. She made to stand, but I waved her off.
“Danae, please, stay seated. I’m sorry I made you wait.”
“I
t was no trouble. No one in my coven was even alive the last time Justice came calling. The tales of your office and your library are all that we have.” She smiled with dry amusement. “It appears nothing at all has changed.”
I thought of the pneumatic tube system in my office and noted that that door was open to the lobby as well, the better for Mrs. French to overhear, I was sure. No doubt Danae got the limited tour of my office and its case-delivery system, as well as a quick look at whatever cases had come in today. I didn’t mind. The more cases piled up, the more I thought I wanted someone—anyone else other than me—to know about them. It seemed inappropriate to let them wait on my convenience, but I was only one person. There was only so much I could do.
Right now, however, I wasn’t alone in my efforts. As usual, Danae was stunningly beautiful without even trying, her long, glossy fall of black braids cascading over her shoulders, her dark skin accentuated by high cheekbones and chiseled features. Her nearly black eyes flashed with curiosity as I set the bags filled with cold cases down on the coffee table in front of us.
She set her teacup down in its dainty saucer, her inquisitive gaze moving from the bags to me. I settled into a chair opposite her as Mrs. French bustled out of the office once more. She poured coffee into a mug that looked like the roller derby skating cousin to Danae’s teacup, and doctored the brew for me while breezily making conversation.
“Three new cases have arrived, Justice Wilde, all set up for you on your desk, once you’ve finished your meeting. Mistress Danae, would you care for more hot water? Fresh tea?”
Danae murmured something noncommittal, and Mrs. French buzzed around us, resupplying us with water, napkins, and a plate of what I suspected were scones, that she no sooner set down, then whisked up again, her gaze on the shopping bag.
“Oh!” she breathed out. “So few of them. Did you expect to be bringing out so few?”
