The Red King

by Jenn Stark

  “They’ll make mincemeat out of full-grown Connecteds, because they figure they were already much further down the path than your average child could be, even a Connected child,” I mused. It sort of made sense, as did Stone’s reticence to discuss it. He’d just painted a target on the back of every high-level Connected on the planet.

  Nikki frowned. “And those magicians are all heading to Venice. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply warn them?”

  Stone sighed. “My friend’s request of me was to ensure that nobody stays away from Venice, in fact. It’s the key time of the year for magicians of a certain caliber to meet and mingle, to share their knowledge and advancements. If they miss out on this opportunity, particularly in the wake of such a powerful surge of magic, my associate feels the collective will never reach the heights they would have otherwise. They will never maximize the impact of the magic, and they will continue to remain at an imbalance with entities such as, well, the Arcana Council. My friend is quite highly placed in the senate of magicians in Venice, and parity with the Arcana Council is a coveted goal for the organization. If the senate is ever to have a chance at establishing their own base of strength to rival both the Council as well as their Unconnected opponents, they have to act now, both for themselves and for the Connected community as a whole. But the senate can’t move forward if their members are too afraid to meet. With rumors of the Red King and/or the butcher returned to Venice, and possibly stalking magicians, it is entirely possible that they will miss their chance. With your intervention, however…”

  I nodded. Truth was, I didn’t mind taking on Stone’s job. First off, I liked the guy, and he’d already proven to be helpful to me. Doing him a favor was only to my benefit.

  Secondly, I was already annoyed by the Red King, whoever he was—especially if he had something to do with Black Elixir. Taking him out would be a personal pleasure.

  Thirdly, after tonight, I didn’t have much interest in poking around the library until after it was cleared of miscellaneous weaponry…and until I figured out how to open up cases without going crazy.

  Considering how much my head still throbbed from my altercation with Mak’rep the Magnificent, working anywhere that wasn’t here sounded good.

  But I still wasn’t clear on why Stone was dancing around the timing issue. And I’d never been very good at dancing. “What are you worried about in all this?” I asked Stone directly. “What am I missing?”

  He leveled his gaze at me. “I don’t want to give too much weight to something that is only a theory, but it’s a theory that I’m beginning to see play out all over the world: the world of the Connecteds didn’t merely shift with the influx of this new magic, it was reborn. And with the gathering of the magicians in Venice—especially if they’re being hunted by the Red King—we will be able to take our first measure of exactly how powerful this new infant community is, and how dangerous it may become. We could be on the precipice of the most extraordinary era for magic that this world has ever known…or we could be an eyewitness to the annihilation of all things Connected.”

  “Oh,” I said. Suddenly his reticence about laying the blame for the shift in magic at my feet made more sense. “Is that all.”

  “There’s no way of knowing yet which way it will go, until you see what’s actually happening in Venice.” He grimaced, and raised his glass. “So here’s to you, Justice Wilde.”

  Our gazes locked, and in his eyes I saw an ally, a supporter. Maybe even a friend. And friendship from someone like Luca Stone was a high honor indeed.

  Nodding, I lifted my own glass to return his salute. “And here’s to Carnevale.”

  Chapter Eight

  Nikki and I landed in Venice in the late afternoon on a cloudless day. The City of Bridges stretched out before us in startling splendor, a jewel perched on the water’s edge. I’d been to the city only once before, traveling by boat in the dark of night—and I’d been gone by the following morning. My memories of the floating city centered on dank, grimy gondolas, heavy-browed thugs, and the reek of seawater.

  Not surprisingly, I’d never returned.

  But now, seeing the city laid out before me, I better understood the breathless passages in the travel blogs I’d read on the flight over. The city seemed on the verge of sinking into the lagoon that surrounded it—more of a threat than it used to be, arguably—yet it was a place teeming with light and color. Color had been the operative word in the travel guides, the anchor for the art world to categorize the unique flair of the city. Florence focused on the linear beauty of artwork, Rome was all about form, but Venice insisted that it was the celebration of color that created true beauty in art.

  “Is that our ride?” Nikki asked dubiously.

  I glanced over. We were fairly well hidden by a profusion of potted bougainvillea plants that had been placed near the windows of the baggage claim area, offering us convenient cover to squint at the small man who hustled up to the line of chauffeurs, holding a sign that simply said “Wilde” on it.

  He was dressed like a boat captain, but we were in Venice. Everyone was dressed like a boat captain, it seemed. “Seems likely. Didn’t Stone say that the Palazzo Gioia was off the main canal, down some waterway or other?” The palazzo, owned by Venice native and senate of magicians member Count Vitorre Valetti, was to serve as our base of operations in the city. Luca Stone had arranged everything within minutes of me agreeing to take on the job.

  “Right, but…I don’t know about this. The guy bugs me.” Nikki looked around, blowing out a short breath. “Too many people with masks already. We should’ve waited for backup.”

  I hiked my shoulder bag higher on my shoulder, reconsidering our hasty flight path. Armaeus had insisted he’d arrange for bodyguards to meet us at Palazzo Gioia, and I hadn’t wanted to wait around for another canister of crazy to shoot out from the Justice intake system. Brody couldn’t break away from Vegas, not with the newest issues in the drug trade, and I didn’t want him along on this adventure anyway. He tended to hover. Maybe it was a holdover from his time serving as my chaperone when I’d been “Psychic Teen Sariah,” but that’d been over ten long years ago and several lifetimes of pain. I didn’t need hovering.

  A bodyguard, however…

  “Miss Wilde?” I blinked up, then up still farther, as a man strode quickly toward us. Lean and tan, the guy was wearing a crisp white shirt, open at the neck, above tailored black pants, but I was more impressed with his sculpted cheekbones, his generous mouth, and his sensually dark eyes, the combined effect of which was…distracting, to say the least. Now this was my kind of Italian.

  I didn’t need to mask my reaction, of course. Not with Nikki beside me.

  “Sweet Mother Mary on a gondola,” she declared with a broad smile, drawing the young man’s attention. “I do believe I’ll faint.”

  “Miss Dawes. I am so glad you have both landed safely. Monsieur Bertrand advised that you’d be landing, but that your travel arrangements have been disrupted. I’m to take you to the city center by a circuitous route, if you would. From there, we’ll secure additional transportation to your accommodations.”

  I frowned at him. Apparently, Brody wasn’t the only one who hovered. “What’s wrong with the guy sent by Palazzo Gioia?”

  “Nothing at all,” the young Adonis said with a smile. “But that gentleman waiting over there, he is not from Palazzo Gioia. The water taxi driver who originally was to pick you up was…assaulted, it appears. He could not make his appointment. When we learned of this, we decided to see who did.”

  “And it was that guy.” I didn’t bother glancing over to the squat Italian.

  “That guy,” the bodyguard agreed. “So that, of course, led to our second decision…”

  I blinked as I followed his relaxed gesture. Emerging from the airport gates was a woman who—well, she could have been Nikki’s twin.

  “Oh, who is that gorgeous girl?” Nikki breathed, and she wasn’t wrong. The w
oman towered well over six feet and was dressed in an outfit that defied every airport convention: platform pumps, a skintight mini, and a soccer jersey that looked like it’d been painted on. She had a pile of red curls that trailed down her neck, and she waved in utter delight as she saw the man with the placard. Only then did I notice the young woman beside her. My doppelgänger was decidedly more…drab.

  “Yoo-hoo! Yes, you!” the fake Nikki announced as she marched up to the water taxi driver. “Oh, I’m so delighted to see you, I cannot even tell you how my feet are absolutely killing me—”

  The man moved with a speed I wouldn’t have been able to track if I didn’t have enhanced abilities of perception. One second he was holding the placard, another and he’d dropped the card and both hands came up, each with a gun. Before I could gasp out an alarm, he’d shot—and fake Nikki and fake Sara burst into a puff of smoke as the glass behind the apparitions shattered. Then everyone was screaming and running. I gaped, struggling to see as Nikki swore beside me, but our bodyguard was already on point, pivoting with us both on either side of him and walking briskly forward. He spoke, but in an Italian so low and rapid, I couldn’t quite follow it.

  “That was an illusion?” demanded Nikki. “You just wasted an illusion in broad daylight and you didn’t even try to get the guy? We were right there! We could have grabbed him.”

  “He’s being tracked now. To him, the two women merely fell, mortally wounded—to everyone else, he shot at random and no one was hit. It’s a difficult illusion to maintain, but we’re quite happy with it.”

  “Armaeus sent you?”

  “Well…not exactly.”

  The man grinned and winked at me. When he spoke next, though he still looked like the hunky Italian, it was a very different voice that came out—rich, rolling, and eminently self-satisfied. “They do say the Devil is in the details. I always did like that phrase.”

  I tried to stop as Nikki squealed in surprise, but Aleksander Kreios’s long strides carried us forward, out of the airport and onto the walkway that led to water transport. He walked past several viable options, slowing his gait to an amiable stroll toward the end. “You’ll be going to Gioia as planned, but the diversion was quite necessary, I assure you, for your own protection.”

  “Apparently.”

  Kreios reached into the pocket of his long white linen shirt and extracted a photo. It was our assailant, surveying the baggage claim crowd, holding his little sign.

  “All this and Polaroids too?”

  “My services know no bounds.” Kreios winked. “However, this man believes his assignment to be complete, and he has departed. There’s some additional information you need to know.”

  I lifted my brows. Since I’d rescued him from a very confined location in the bowels of the Vatican necropolis nearly a year ago, the Devil of the Arcana Council had become one of my closest confidants. And unlike some of his peers on the Council, I could always trust him to tell the truth, albeit for his own dastardly reasons.

  “Information Armaeus couldn’t tell me?” I asked.

  “For reasons he hasn’t shared, the Magician has chosen to distance himself from you on this task. He seems to think you would not appreciate his intervention on your behalf.”

  “But you don’t have a problem with it?”

  “I’d never let you out of my sight, as a matter of course.” Kreios turned to Nikki. “And any hour with you is an hour well spent, my beautiful Nikki. However, I can’t stay. I’m merely the messenger.”

  That caught my attention. “What’s the message?”

  “Simply this: In a city filled to the brim with sorcerers, you’ve now proven yourself as magicians of worth with this distraction.” Kreios gestured airily. “You must continue to distract and divert, making everything a sleight of hand until you understand the truth of what’s happening here.”

  “Luca Stone didn’t give us the truth?”

  “The truth as he knew it, yes. But that’s a far different thing from the truth that truly is.”

  “Roger, that,” Nikki said, scanning the dock. There were dozens of water taxis gently bobbing against the pier, waiting their turn. “Can we get to the Palazzo Gioia by water?”

  “You can get anywhere in Venice by water.”

  I turned abruptly as a new man spoke on the other side of Nikki. He bowed as I glanced back to confirm that, of course, the Devil had disappeared.

  “It merely takes some ingenuity.” The young man bowed. “I am Gino, and I work for Monsieur Bertrand. I’m at your service.”

  Gray chinos, mock-neck sweater, peacoat, and aviator sunglasses held no candle to Gino’s rakish grin. A faint tickle of Connected ability rolled off him as well. Nikki shook the young man’s hand and gave me a subtle nod. Gino really was on our side. Good.

  Armaeus had an impressive network of assistants, and Gino proved more than up to his task as water chauffeur. With efficiency and easy banter, he loaded us into a gondola taxi and set off for the canal house of Luca Stone’s colleague. Though we kept careful watch on both the quays and waterways we passed, no one seemed to be following us. Whoever the squat man in the Venetian airport had been, he hadn’t gone to a plan B, but simply disappeared. Which meant our intended demise hadn’t been very well thought out.

  Nikki and I studied the photo Kreios had left with us, but it didn’t offer us much help. The man looked harried and intense, but not particularly Connected. “A magician?” Nikki asked, doubt in her voice.

  “If so, not a very high-ranking one. I can’t imagine he’ll be difficult for Kreios to find.”

  “He did seem enthused about the search,” she observed.

  “Everyone needs a hobby.”

  We stepped out of the water taxi onto a tidy pier, and a short man in a linen suit hurried down the walkway, his face florid underneath the midday sun. As he approached, a flash of sunshine seemed to surround him with warmth, and I was struck by the man’s broad smile, bright eyes, and boisterous energy. “Signorina Wilde! Signorina Dawes, welcome, welcome. I am Count Valetti, and I am so very glad to meet you. But what is this? You take your own transportation to reach me? Where is my man?” He looked to the canal. “More importantly, where is my boat?”

  “Was this your taxi captain?” I asked, showing him the photo I had of the imposter holding up the Wilde sign.

  “Him? No! I mean, the sign is correct, but I thought, well, I thought…” Valetti frowned again. “Why is that man carrying a sign with my insignia? A moment, I beg you.”

  While he pulled out a phone and spoke in rapid Italian, I glanced at the photo. There was no insignia on the sign that I could see, just WILDE written in stylized letters, the I and L slightly longer than the others, one bar of the W slightly shorter. Was that what he meant?

  “Alessandro left an hour ago, and he has not returned. My crew tells me you have not appeared at the airport, but there was a shooting, a frightening shooting. No one hurt, thank God, but no one caught either.” Valetti’s expression of overwhelming good humor had been replaced with one of grim resignation as he pocketed his phone. “It is already beginning, this cloud the dark practitioners would put over my Carnevale. It is not to be borne. You will fix it, though. You will fix it.”

  He spoke these last two lines as a mantra, and I wondered how many times he’d said it to himself in the last few weeks.

  “Maybe you could fill us in on what’s going on?” I asked.

  “Of course, of course.” Rallying, Count Valetti led the way up the pier. I tried not to stare at the sumptuous three-story canal house that rose majestically from the waterway, but it was impossible not to be impressed. Made of white-painted stone with the faintest yellow trim, the building caught the light of the late afternoon sun and seemed to glow with an internal flame.

  “I wish I could welcome you to Palazzo Gioia under more relaxing circumstances,” Valetti sighed. “Venice is a place of magic and joy, not the site of a potentially dead
ly assassin come back from the dead to haunt the living.”

  I shot a look to Nikki, who appeared equally startled. “That’s what you think is happening here?”

  “Ah, my manners. I’m too distracted, forgive me.” The man strode ahead, calling out to an unseen steward. The door opened, and we were herded inside. The interior of the palace was, if possible, more breathtaking than the exterior, with what seemed like miles of marble and gilded edges stretching off in all directions.

  “I had such a lovely dinner planned, and it is all ready for you. You haven’t eaten, no? Of course you haven’t eaten. You should eat! We will eat.”

  “You need to find your man, and your boat,” I said. “We’re happy to wait, or start without you if that will be less stressful, but what’s most important is that you make sure your people are safe.”

  Valetti spent the rest of the walk through the sumptuous mansion alternately apologizing and thanking us for our understanding, so that by the time we were left alone at a beautiful table on a veranda overlooking the water, I was nearly mute with exhaustion. He left, taking his frantic apprehension with him.

  Nikki waited until the servers had deposited our food and swept back out before picking up her glass of wine. She eyed me over the glass. “I can’t decide if this is a promising beginning or not.”

  “Remember, so far, it’s all been an illusion. This looks good, though,” I said, poking at something I was pretty sure should be called a crostino.

  Everything on the table looked and especially smelled extraordinary, and the sun was warm on my shoulders. I looked out over the water and spied the gondolas far below. Not counting my midnight excursion in the city’s backwaters, what I knew about Venice was solely from guide books and postcards, but so far, the city was surpassing my expectations. Aside from today’s attempted shooting, anyway.

  “What do you think was the point of that?” I asked, and as usual, Nikki had followed my thoughts. She and I had been together in such close quarters for long enough that she didn’t need to touch me to piece together my memories. As long as I wasn’t blocking her, we might as well be sharing the same brain.