The Red King

by Jenn Stark

  I collected my cards and stuffed them back in my jacket, then pulled Leonardo and Ricky together in a jumble of limbs. Securing each of their upper arms with a hand, I squared my shoulders. Then I drew a long, steadying breath. This…was gonna hurt.

  I burst into flames.

  Chapter Two

  “Sweet Christmas, that hurts.” Still smoking, I stood up and turned around in the concrete entry bay of the abandoned warehouse that Judgment of the Arcana Council was using as her intake HQ.

  Ramrod straight and well muscled in full leathers, her thick, dark hair braided into heavy ropes, Gamon had come to her role of Judgment by way of ex-Mossad international terrorist, but there was no question she was the right woman for this job. She paused a second longer, smirking at me, then her eyes cut to the two figures beside me.

  “Who’s the kid?”

  “Ricky’s boss,” I said, also transferring my attention to the boy on the floor. “I didn’t plan for him to be there, but he was both marked and one notch higher on the supply chain, so I figured, fair game.” I nudged the bodies with my foot. “Aren’t they supposed to wake up?”

  “You catch a man on fire, it’s going to take him a minute to recover,” Gamon said drily.

  I made a face. To effect corporeal travel, I had to make myself lighter than air. So far, I didn’t know how to do that unless combustion was involved. “I don’t see why I can’t simply put them in the car and drive them.”

  “You could barely drag them three feet in the snow. You really think you could’ve hauled them down to a car?”

  “Were you there? No, you weren’t,” I said sourly, flinching as the cuffs snapped off Ricky and Leonardo and reappeared around my wrists again, once more delicate bracelets. The bonds of Justice lasted only as far as Judgment’s door, I’d already learned. I wasn’t yet sure how I felt about that. “I could have totally gotten them to a car.”

  “Secure them.” Gamon directed this comment to two dark-robed attendants who arrived with oversized rolling carts. The two men—I assumed they were men—picked up both Leonardo and Ricky and laid the boys on the carts, strapping them down ruthlessly.

  I flinched despite myself. “Ricky didn’t seem completely irredeemable, for the record. He was just another dude selling the newest version of weed under the open sky. And the other, Leonardo…”

  “He shot at you,” Gamon put in reasonably.

  “He did shoot at me, but who knows what his life has been like up to now? I mean, seriously, what is he, fifteen? And yes, I see the mark on him. But he’s totally a kid.”

  By now, Gamon was full-out staring at me. “You really do suck at this,” she said, not bothering to hide the tone of derision in her voice.

  “Look, all I’m saying is that—”

  “No, you look.” Gamon turned from me and gestured to a wall full of TV screens. I hadn’t noticed them before.

  “What’re those for? You catching up on The Bachelor in your free time?”

  “I had them put in after the last time you pulled this. Which was the last time you brought someone to me.”

  I winced. “She seemed like a nice enough old lady.”

  “Who also had the mark of Justice upon her. That should’ve given you a clue.” Gamon flicked her hand, and a dozen screens lit up with hundreds of faces. “These are all the people who Ricky has damaged—or killed—by cutting his harmless pot with technoceuticals even before he had the Black Elixir in hand, all of it under the direction of Leonardo.”

  I stared. Some were obvious long-term users, some were…not. “Those are kids.”

  “Those are kids,” Gamon agreed. “Pot is legal now in Colorado, but that doesn’t mean it’s easily accessible for those who need it most. Those whose parents are desperate, whether they’re Connected or otherwise. Those who—”

  “Enough,” I muttered, my stomach roiling. With a flick of my own hand, the screens went blank again. “I get the point.”

  Gamon was glaring at me now, her eyes flinty. “I don’t want to have to go through this explanation every single time, but I will for as long as you need me to. You see someone marked, their time for Justice has come. And that’s what you are. So you bring them in.”

  “And you judge them.”

  Gamon gave me a thin smile. “I let them know the error of their ways and their path to redemption. Some take it, some don’t.”

  “The old lady from the Strip?”

  She shrugged. “Took her chances on a different higher power. But at least she wasn’t selling street kids into the Connected sex trade anymore.”

  “Well…good.” I’d sensed the woman was bad news when I’d first seen her, despite the appearance she displayed to anyone without my quirk of vision. She’d appeared to be a dozing old drunk enjoying an early morning snooze in the gardens at Caesars Palace, but there’d been no denying the silver slash along her right temple—a scarlet letter for Connected modern times. She couldn’t see it, no one around her could see it, but ever since I’d ascended to the role of Justice a few weeks ago…I could see it.

  This brought up yet another key fact I’d learned about my role as Justice, though it made a certain sort of sense. I wasn’t called upon to track down every soul who’d trespassed against a fellow human, only those who were psychic, otherwise known as Connected, and who’d also passed a threshold of villainy I hadn’t yet entirely figured out. I had a bad feeling there would end up being a hell of a lot more bad guys than I’d ever expected.

  The information of the old woman in her file hadn’t been clear on her crimes, but I’d seen the mark across her temple and had acted. I’d grabbed her, and a second later, we’d arrived at Gamon’s front door. The old woman was passed out. My ears were on fire.

  Screw this lighter-than-air stuff. I needed a teleporting Uber, stat.

  “We need to know more about this Black Elixir,” I said as Leonardo stirred on the gurney. “And there was a guy Ricky mentioned, someone called the Red King. I want to know who that is, too.” In Tarot, the Red King meant the King of Cups, a good-natured patron of the arts, heavy on the emo and mindfulness, light on the soulless analytics. But I hadn’t heard of any dark practitioner called the Red King, and from Gamon’s flat, unconcerned expression, she hadn’t either. So either the guy was pretty new to the scene, or Ricky was out of his head with the drugs he’d already taken. Or both.

  “Fair enough,” Gamon said. “Since Ricky is taking his time rousing, we’ll start with the formal judgment of Leonardo deSalvo.” She followed my gaze and signaled to another attendant, a hooded human whose face was impossible to read beneath the shadows of his or her heavy cowl. I didn’t know where Gamon got her minions, and I didn’t particularly want to ask. Either way, the attendant moved forward with surprising grace, snapping off Leonardo’s restraints before the boy fully realized he’d been bound. As a result, when he came to, he bolted upright and swung his legs over the cart, his eyes darting around the room.

  He wasn’t an idiot. He was surrounded on all sides by hoods, walls, and now-dead screens, with Ricky on the cart beside him and Gamon and me blocking the only exit. His shoulders dropped almost immediately, and despite the obvious evidence of his supreme fail as a human being, I grimaced at the forlorn expression on his face.

  “You’re so pathetic,” Gamon muttered beside me. She fixed the boy with a glare. “Who’s your dealer? And who’s the Red King?”

  Leo’s gaze immediately hardened, teetering between mutinous and desperate. “Who’re you?”

  Gamon didn’t hesitate. It was one of her defining characteristics, so in its way, it answered the boy’s question without words. Her hand went up, palm out, and with absolutely no physical contact, the boy was punched off the cart and hurled backward against the far wall. The minions in the area neatly sidestepped the movement and also appeared unmoved as the boy’s angry shout turned into a terrified scream. Not surprising, given that his feet were now a pool of blood and go
op below his shins, the putrefaction rolling up his legs like a red tide.

  “I don’t know any Red King! My dealer’s name is Coronado, and he’s in LA. LA!” the boy cried, his words coming more urgently as his kneecaps dissolved.

  Gamon was, among many other things, a master of manipulating fear. She needed to work on her finesse, though.

  “Gamon,” I warned as the boy started to hyperventilate.

  “Wuss,” she muttered back, but with another wave of her hand, the boy’s legs were back where they were supposed to be. He collapsed against the wall, breathing heavily. He wasn’t a high-level Connected, I realized, no matter how quick on the draw he’d been. Probably a couple of steps up from your basic intuitive, which made him ideal at picking out his foot soldiers and marks to support his drug trade.

  The screens around him flickered to life again—more of them, this time. Not only Ricky’s clients, but dozens, hundreds more. Leonardo had been busy, mostly targeting kids. Why these kids? Was there something special about them, or were they truly random marks? I had so many questions, but this was Gamon’s rodeo. Ricky and Leo were supposed to be my warm-up act, nothing more. Then again—the mention of the Red King clawed at me, digging at my cerebral cortex. Why did it sound so familiar? Was it simply the Tarot reference?

  “What’s Black Elixir?” Gamon demanded, refocusing my attention.

  “It’s magic.” The boy looked up at the name of the drug, his eyes saucer wide as he uttered the words exactly like Ricky had not two hours earlier. “You can do anything, see anything, be anything with it. When you mix it with another base, you got no pain for days—days, not hours. And you can maintain that dose, without issue, forever.”

  “Okay,” I cut in. “Then what’s all this with the fifth hit?”

  Leo’s smile turned craftier, less full of wonder. It made him look far older than the fifteen years I suspected he’d lived on this earth. “If you increase your dose, even a little, that’s a new hit. But with each new hit, you get more. A lot more. You get visions. You don’t just lose your pain, you lose some of whatever it is that’s hurting you—cancers diminish, broken bones go back together, your memory returns, whatever. That’s hit number two. And even then, you can return to the lower dose, and you’re good, you maintain. But…”

  “But there’s always the allure of hit number three,” I supplied.

  Leonardo had returned his gaze to his knees, as if reassuring himself they were still there. “You brought them back,” he murmured, stretching his fingers down to brush his thighs.

  “Not for long,” Gamon said noncommittally. She lifted her hand, and the boy must have sensed the movement.

  “No,” he blurted, his head jerking up again, words tumbling out of him. “Hit number three and you can predict the future, your personal future, anyway. You can’t know if your sister or your cousin will be killed, but you know what’s going to happen to you within the next day or two, no more. You can almost make out the people around you when it happens, so you can predict when the thing you got in your vision will happen exactly, you see?”

  “It always works?”

  “Always,” he said with a certainty that bordered on reverence.

  I pursed my lips. What the hell was this drug?

  The magical drug trade of the Connected community had been going full tilt for half a century now, each new concoction worse than the last. But to make the best technoceuticals, the kind that worked on Connecteds and non-Connecteds alike, you needed strong genetic material as a base. Which meant humans. Connected humans. And all too often, Connected kids.

  It’d been a decade—more than a decade—since I’d first stumbled over that reality. Sometimes, I liked to think I’d evened the odds a little bit in my work to protect the most vulnerable of the Connected community. Most times, I knew better. I’d been a fringe player, a mercenary. At least until a few weeks ago, when I’d exploded the war on magic and then leveled up to Justice, with a whole lot more than merely the children of the world to look after.

  I stared at the still-shimmering, faintly visible silver slash across Leonardo’s right ear. “So how’d you not know I was going to haul your skinny ass to Judgment?”

  It wasn’t an insignificant question. Leonardo hadn’t been surprised to see me. He’d clearly started following me the moment I’d gone after Ricky. If he’d known I was going to take him in, though, why hadn’t he run instead? Had the elixir shown him something of his future that I didn’t fully understand? Did he know more about what was going to happen than I did?

  It was Gamon who answered. “He never took the third hit,” she said stonily. Leonardo had turned his attention back to his legs, which had started another rotting rotation. “He made Ricky take it.”

  “He wanted to take it,” Leonardo insisted quickly, his face jerking up again.

  “I’m thinking as juiced as he is, Leonardo here has never actually sampled Black Elixir. Have you?” Gamon continued inexorably, her flat glare pinned on the kid. “You’ve seen the effects too many times. You’ve seen how the allure of the next hit becomes too much to bear. Even though someone doesn’t need it, even though their pain is managed perfectly well to the point where they can pursue other forms of healing to take care of whatever it is that ails them. It isn’t enough. They can’t stop. The visions, the dreams, they always keep thinking that the next hit will make it all worth it. And that they can always stop in time. How many people have you seen take the fifth hit?”

  Leonardo’s expression had turned mulish, but Gamon didn’t let him think about his answer too long. His hands started to quiver too, fingers liquefying as he yelped and jerked against the wall. “I don’t know—I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty, maybe. Enough. I’ve seen enough of them.” His fingers reformed, and he shook them hard, as if reassuring himself they were still there. “Ricky was up to three doses, and he…” Leo shrugged, his gaze darting over to his comatose friend. “He may have had four. He’s been acting weird.”

  I glanced to Ricky as well. How much of the Black Elixir had he taken?

  It didn’t matter. He was in Judgment’s capable hands now and out of mine. He’d wake up again, even if he didn’t want to.

  Gamon leaned forward, still focused on Leonardo. “And you weren’t about to start acting weird, so you never even took the first hit. That’s pretty disciplined, Leonardo. I’m proud of you.”

  Gamon’s voice was laced with malevolent disdain, but not all of her disgust was targeted at the boy, I knew. Gamon’s past was longer than most and darker than most. She’d murdered men, women, and even children in her quest for a vengeance I still didn’t fully understand. She’d trodden the worst paths of the arcane black market to build her strength and destroy her enemies. Some of those enemies had been people I’d known, respected. There was a core of darkness inside Gamon so deep and wide that I wasn’t sure she could ever fully step into the light. Her ascendance to the role of Judgment had been as much to control her Connected abilities as to put them to greater service, not unlike me. And one day she—both of us—would be judged as well.

  But not today.

  “Take him,” Gamon snapped out the order to the assembled minions. “I’m not done with him yet.”

  “Wha—what?” Leonardo looked at Gamon in confusion as her attendants moved closer to him. “What’re you going to do me?”

  “We’ll have to see about that. You’ve got a lot of dead kids to account for, and I don’t think you’re going to like your rehabilitation plan.” Gamon’s lips twisted as understanding finally lit Leonardo’s eyes. Understanding…and terror. “Maybe you should’ve taken your own hit after all.”

  Chapter Three

  Two hours later, across Vegas and back on the Strip, I stood in the hallway of the penthouse floor of the Palazzo casino hotel, eyeing the single door at the end of the long hallway. My office as Justice of the Arcana Council was the legit penthouse level of the building, part of the original lux
ury Vegas hotel. The Palazzo was one of the jewels anchoring the northern end of the Strip, along with the Venetian, Treasure Island, and the Wynn casino. I’d been a fan of the Palazzo since my earliest days in Vegas, when I’d reluctantly visited the city as an artifacts hunter for hire. That’d been over five years ago and felt more like five hundred.

  Now I was someone different, something new. Frankly, after today, I wasn’t so sure I’d made the right employment choice.

  I was even less sure when I strode the length of the hall, pausing only briefly at the door. There was a small brass plate to the right of it, etched with the number eleven, the number for the Justice card in the Tarot’s Major Arcana. I hadn’t decided yet what else the placard should say, mainly because I hadn’t stepped foot inside my own office yet.

  Clearly, it was time.

  The door unlocked as I approached—another perk of my position. I turned the knob and pushed the door half open, then shoved it the rest of the way, wincing as something loud crashed to the floor behind it. I edged into the room and peered around. There were boxes. Lots of boxes. All of them open and brimming with paper.

  “Um…what is this?”

  “Yo! Dollface.” The shout came from another room, through one of two doors that exited what should have been the reception lounge of the brand-spanking-new Hall of Justice, a name that usually made me grin, except right now when said hall looked like an episode of Hoarders. “Give me a sec, I’m stuck in 1973.”

  “You’re…” I blinked as Nikki Dawes emerged from the door to the left of the lobby, which should have led to the library of my new office. “You don’t look like you’re stuck in ’73. More like World War II.”

  “Well, duty calls, so I’m workin’ it.”

  Nikki grinned, flexing her impressive biceps. At six foot four not counting her heels, which today were heavy, thick-soled work boots, Nikki would be remarkable when she wasn’t even trying. But she’d never be known for not trying. She currently was rocking a Rosie the Riveter ensemble that had her springy dark brown curls tied up in a bright red-and-white polka-dotted hair scarf, her heavily mascaraed eyes flashing brightly as her glossy red lips parted in a generous smile. Her denim jumper’s sleeves were rolled high, but in a sartorial move that I suspected would’ve left Rosie aghast, the jumper itself terminated in a set of cuffed short shorts, exposing approximately eighteen miles of leg atop Nikki’s red socks and black boots.