The Red King

by Jenn Stark

  “If you’re sure—”

  “Go!”

  The thug-bots abandoned their battering ram and rushed at me with the air of the possessed, so frenzied, so excited that once again I knew there was a trick in here, knew it in my bones. But I didn’t have time to work through the intricacies of the bad-guy plan. I hurled a bolt of blue fire at the three thug-bots coming at me, and with a speed I hadn’t expected, they dodged to the side. I braced myself, fully expecting them to come charging after me, while one small part of my brain remained occupied by the screaming boys. No one did outrage like a ten-year-old boy.

  But then things got weird.

  Well, weirder.

  The thug-bots didn’t come after me. My fire bolt blew past them, straight into the library door, which seemed to absorb all its weight for a long, fraught moment before bursting off its hinges. At that point, the thug-bots viciously kicked and ripped at the boys, flinging them aside, and dove for the library.

  What the hell?

  “They can’t!” howled the young boy on the floor beside me, hugging his knee to his chest as blood oozed out between his fingers. “You have to stop them from finding—”

  He passed out, which wasn’t his most helpful move, but I didn’t need any more giant blinking neon signs to get his point.

  “Miss Wilde.” Armaeus interrupted my mental chatter. I didn’t need him either.

  “Busy!”

  I raced for the door and burst into the library as well, pausing a second to get my bearings. As Nikki had said, the place was a warren of narrow alleyways between enormous stacks of books, scrolls, boxes, and cases, and a fair amount of rolling ladders and scaffolding as well. I could hear the steps of the thug-bots ahead of me, but the acoustics of the place were alarming—footsteps seemed to be coming and going at once, growing louder and fading into obscurity all at the same time.

  To my surprise, Armaeus kept talking. “For nearly two hundred years, there’s been no Justice of the Arcana Council, but two things have now changed with that situation. One, you’re here.”

  “I picked up on that,” I muttered aloud, edging my way down a long hallway as I lifted my hands, readying to create another bolt of magic. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be the brightest of moves. Nobody likes a fire in a library, especially a library dedicated to lost and tormented souls. But my fire didn’t ignite anything I didn’t want it to. It was, first and foremost, a burst of electricity. Electricity didn’t have to proceed to fire.

  Then again, I didn’t know this place, these books and cases. I should’ve brought something less magical as a weapon. Like a gun.

  “The second is that many cases thought lost to the mists of time with the departure of the last Justice have reappeared with you. Those cases have returned to this library.”

  And you knew that would happen. I switched to my inside voice as the library quieted, the steps leading away and toward me now hushing to silence.

  “It was but one likelihood among many, but it was one of the more viable likelihoods. Magic and the power that drives it does not spontaneously generate in a vacuum, and neither does it disappear without a force exerting itself upon it. That magic was merely waiting for its portal. You provided the portal. You made it appear. You can make it disappear.”

  Can we get to the part on where the bad guys are? It was tough to imbue exasperation into mere thoughts, but I did my level best.

  Armaeus hesitated. “The only Council member allowed in the library is Justice herself. That’s not due to your wards but Abigail Strand’s. Only Justice can see what truly is. Which means that only you could find the intruders. If only you had a particular skill at that.”

  “Oh, for the love of…”

  I shook out my hands and shoved them into my jacket. Sure enough, the cards were there, and I roughly drew two of them. I already knew that the thug-bots were hitting some sort of case file in the library, so this particular game of Clue was going to be short-lived. I simply needed to figure out—

  I flipped over the card, and despite myself, I smiled. The Hermit. Seeker of Truth and Knowledge—and a guy who virtually always, no matter the deck, no matter the time period, no matter the artist—was depicted as holding aloft a bright light to see by.

  If these bad guys were tied to someone’s long-past crime in some way, they probably knew where to find his case file. But even they would need light to see by.

  I placed my hand flat on the nearest wall, shooting a pulse of energy into every surface. The room went dark.

  To their credit, the thug-bots didn’t reveal their surprise with so much as an exhalation of disgust. They didn’t need to. There was a light in the room, all right, but it wasn’t coming from anyone’s iPhone.

  I took off at a run, snagging the first ladder I could to climb up to the next level of the scaffolding-like floors of the room. I realized the intruders I was chasing had somehow circled back beneath me, which meant they were now, technically, chasing me. As I raced through the library, I realized something else. The room moved. The variation was subtle at first, but as I leapt from one ladder to the next, where I ended wasn’t necessarily the same spot I’d fixed on when I started. The effect was dizzying, and by the third level, I had stopped paying much attention to anything but the mark at the top of the—

  The crack was distant, but there was no denying the accompanying burst of pain in my shoulder. “Hey!”

  I whipped around, hanging off the ladder with one hand as I craned my neck to see what’d happened. Sure enough, a bloom of blood had emerged along the sleeve where I’d been hit. And yea, though I was an immortal member of the Arcana Council, with a particular skill at healing myself, that didn’t mean gunshots didn’t hurt. Besides, since when had golems become gunslingers? I glared down into the gloom, but I couldn’t see anyone else. However, I also couldn’t climb up ladders with a lame arm. Which meant—

  “Screw this,” I muttered. I burst upward…

  Nothing happened.

  “Yo.” I sagged against the ladder, gripping my arm. With a concentrated blast of psychic energy—far more concentrated than I really should be expected to produce so many hours after my last caffeination—I felt the muscles of my arm knit back together, blood pouring in behind to reenergize the area and speed the healing process. With gritted teeth, I began climbing again. My healing efforts were working, but they were taking their own sweet time about it.

  “What’s going on?” I muttered aloud to the Magician. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “I’m not sure,” Armaeus said in that way of his that always made me feel like a particularly interesting bug he was studying. “It could be Abigail’s legacy wards on the library.”

  I grunted, hauling myself onto another platform. “Wards against a future Justice too? That seems pretty stupid.” I paused for a second, staring blindly at the cases lining the shelf at eye level. Gradually, they came into focus. Apparently, we were in the “D” section, because this entire shelf looked dedicated to dark practitioners, dating back to the Middle Ages.

  Good to know they rated their own section.

  Armaeus continued as I used a box of some forgotten Renaissance Master of Disaster to pull myself upright.

  “We know very little about Abigail’s final days as Justice. We do know that with each official case, her mind fractured a bit more and, well, she wasn’t exactly stable to begin with—”

  “Her mind what?” I didn’t bother keeping quiet, because somehow during my impromptu healing session, I’d lost my advance position in the labyrinth. Either that or the people below me had found a shortcut. How was it I didn’t know shortcuts in my own library? This place had a serious Chutes and Ladders problem.

  Either way, I arrived at the glowing box only milliseconds before the bad guys did. The prize they were after shone brightly behind another scroll tube, and I shoved the obstructing case away to grab the box. It was a very small box, but ornately carved, and its glow int
ensified as I held it in my hands. I noticed something else too: a date, in a faint silver script. Of course, the date was in Roman numerals, and I’d always sucked at reading those. But still, this little box was old.

  To my surprise, the men around me had gone stock-still as soon as I’d grabbed the prize. They stared at me, their eyes remarkably…empty-looking.

  “Who sent you?” I growled, not forgetting the boys in the lobby. “Because there’s going to be hell to pay if you hurt one of my team.”

  “You don’t have the right to keep the contract active,” one of the thug-bots said. To my disappointment, the voice that emanated from its mouth sounded vaguely intelligent, almost rational. I really preferred my golems to be stupid. The voice also sounded Middle Eastern, which narrowed things down not at all. “It’s been dormant for five hundred years.”

  “Well, it looks like it’s moved up in the queue. In fact, I have a feeling it’s going to be next in line.” I hefted the box, shook it. “What’d he do?”

  “He has returned.” This from the golem standing behind the first one, a thin, reedy figure with hollow cheeks and shaking hands. In fact, none of these guys were looking nearly as robust as they had when they’d first entered the library. I narrowed my eyes, trying to pick out the rest of the intruders. There’d been four, right? Six?

  Oblivious to my attempt at recon, Trembling Man kept going. “Mak’rep has returned from beyond the grave to reclaim his place among his people. He has sent us to make him whole.”

  “Uh-huh. And Mak’rep would be?”

  “Time is short,” rasped the head guy. “You cannot pass judgment on a crime you did not witness and do not know.’

  “Fortunately, Judgment’s not my department. And she’s happy to take a pass at anyone. So why don’t we take a peek at what Mak’rep did that was so—”

  “Stop!”

  Opening the little box was clearly not on this group’s itinerary, because my move to do so goaded them into action. They exploded into movement around me, emphasis on the explosion. I whipped around, and several of my Tarot cards fell out of my pocket to the floor. At the first burst of activity, the lead guy’s head fell off his shoulders. A pool of light spilled out of him, illuminating his fellows. They now looked like little more than wraiths. They lunged toward me with howls so garbled that they defied translation, and I curled my body around the box, bracing myself for impact.

  It never came.

  I peeked up, and the men had been incinerated to ash in a circle around me. Scowling, I spoke aloud to Armaeus, who I assumed was still tuning in. “They shot me. I bled. I didn’t have any sort of protection then. Why do I now?”

  “It is curious…” Armaeus’s voice was faint, preoccupied, and I rolled my eyes, then looked down at the box.

  “Who’s Mak’rep?”

  “There are several gods attributed to that name, and god-kings besides, mostly dating from the Akkadian period.”

  “Right…” I said, turning the box over in my hand. “But this date isn’t Akkadian, it’s Roman.” I frowned, trying to see how to open the latch. “I don’t know what the deal is with this guy, but he’s pissing me off.”

  “No—please, stop—”

  It was the sound of pounding feet in an ungainly gallop that interrupted me this time, and the wide-eyed face of one of the scamp librarians who’d apparently not been hurt poked into view. “You cannot open that, Justice Wilde. You’ll go mad!”

  I blinked, my thoughts immediately flying to Armaeus’s comments regarding Abigail’s fragile mental state, but I wasn’t going to let fear get ahold of me my first day on the job. “Dude, no. I’m going to be okay.”

  Without another moment’s hesitation, I opened the box, ignoring the boy’s terrified gasp and retreating footsteps. As had happened with the canisters before it, a sheaf of tightly wrapped pages fluffed up, with a burst of some sort of powdery substance. Hopefully not anthrax. Did they have anthrax in ancient Rome?

  I slid the pages over and scanned the contents. “Mak’rep wasn’t a god. At least this one wasn’t,” I reported. “He was a sorcerer who lived in Rome during the reign of some dude named Tullus Hostilius…great name, by the way.” I pursed my lips, continuing to read. “Yeah, he deserves to be here.”

  “Do I?”

  I jerked my head up, realizing that my young librarian had vanished back down whatever corridor he’d sprung from. In his place, all the golem ashes had reassembled into…a much bigger guy. A guy who spoke English, though he was rocking some serious prophet robes.

  “Um…Mak’rep?” I shook the box again and sized up the man standing in front of me. “Wow, golem animation. That was awesome magic. Looks like you really are a sorcerer, and a bad guy too. So guess what, you win. You’re going to Judgment.” Mak’rep’s silver slash didn’t stop at his temple. His whole head was lit up like a disco ball.

  “I didn’t expect to be found,” the sorcerer said, his words a bare whisper in the silent library. He lifted his hands and waved them. Nothing happened. “The previous Justice had allowed far too many cases to pile up.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m not her.” After Mak’rep made another complicated gesture with his fingers and frowned, I glanced down at the cards I’d dropped. They were now lying faceup on the floor. Lovers, Devil, Justice, High Priestess.

  Interesting.

  Each of the cards was a perversion of the others—similar, yet decidedly different. What was truth? Or what did I merely want to believe? What was a real threat, and what was merely smoke? What was actual, and what was a mere shadow of itself?

  Opposite me, Mak’rep muttered something I assumed was an ancient Roman curse. “I have no magic,” he said, clearly irritated. “But you can’t take me anywhere either. You’re not as strong as I am.”

  That brought my head up, and I considered Mak’rep anew. He…wasn’t completely wrong, I decided. I could feel the power rolling off him in waves, even if he couldn’t wield it quite yet, and though I’d never heard of the guy, there was no denying from his paperwork that he’d packed a serious punch back when he’d been Mak’rep the Magnificent or whatever. Time to go before he figured out a way around the library’s wards.

  “Be that as it may, your little minions were right to keep me from trying to open your box. This place is hell on sorcery, and you’re a very bad man.”

  I stepped forward and grabbed the sorcerer by his toga. To Mak’rep’s obvious shock, he was too weak to twist away. Tightening my jaw, I prepared to destabilize us both enough for one quick, smokin’ hot trip to Judgment.

  “You can’t do this,” the sorcerer insisted. “You’re not Justice Strand.”

  “And you are super observant. I like that in a case file.”

  As fire exploded around us, Mak’rep was still coherent enough to manage a startled scream.

  Good man.

  Chapter Six

  Mrs. French and the boys weren’t in the lobby or my office by the time I made my way out of the library, and by then, thankfully, most of the blood had been cleaned up. I still spared an extra second to glare at the place where the boys had fallen, though. The golems had come through on my watch, in those blasted pneumatic tubes. There was no other explanation. Which meant the harm that had befallen the boys had been my fault.

  My gut churned at the thought of that. Some things never changed.

  A familiar voice jerked me up and out of my spiraling self-disgust.

  “Why is it I only hear of you returning to town after you’ve caused a disturbance?” Detective Brody Rooks of the LVMPD stood in the center of the room, his usual hangdog look achieving entirely new kennels of somber. He was tall and strong without being bulky, with the kind of toughness that had been earned the hard way from his years as a beat cop in Memphis, Tennessee. That was where we’d first met. I’d been a scrawny teen with some skill at reading cards and serious stage mother issues. He’d been a rookie, and he’d drawn the short stick and had
to work with me and my mom as members of the community wanting to help with local child disappearances.

  Brody and I had made a good team back then. Now too. Usually.

  The good detective had also developed a healthy understanding of my recklessness over the years, but I’d done nothing to deserve this particular scowl.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said flatly. “I took a new job, and the terms of that job were not clearly laid out to anyone, least of all me.” I glared at the Magician, who’d taken up his post out of the fray, leaning against the far wall. His eyes gleamed with curiosity, which was never good. “Did you know I had a sorcerer in my library?”

  “Not until you uttered his name. It was a fascinating gambit,” Armaeus said, his gaze unfocused enough that I knew he was still rehashing the events in his mind, exploring all their myriad angles. “Your essence is trapped in a case that can only be opened by Justice. If you’re Mak’rep, do you tempt a brand-new Justice into opening the case and run the risk of annihilation, or do you bide your time, running the risk that she will only get stronger?”

  I shook my head…then had to stop myself from continuing to shake it. Something…felt a little sloshy in my skull. That was weird.

  “How did he send his minions in for him anyway?” I asked. “I thought sorcerers were barred.”

  “Not barred from entering, merely barred from forcible entry. Only Council members other than you, as well as gods or demons, are truly barred. Humans can enter, even the Connected.” He raised a brow. “Otherwise, your young assistants wouldn’t be able to do their work.”

  “Right.” I nodded gingerly. “So they got in by approved means, somehow.” My brains had seemed to settle a bit, but I felt the curious need to hold my arms out to my sides, as if I might trip over my own feet. It wasn’t that I was dizzy, exactly, but…

  Brody sighed loudly. “Will someone please explain to me what is going on?”

  I focused on him. “Bad guy in the library attacked me. I attacked back.”