The Red King
Page 28
It was Nigel’s turn to stare at me. “How is it we don’t know this?”
It was a fair question. The House of Swords, where Nigel was still an Ace bodyguard, had been set up in part to protect any mortal souls blessed or cursed enough to have significant psychic abilities. Those humans, known as Connecteds, typically lived in secret on the fringes of society, desperate not to be cast as expendables in a real life X-Men movie.
“You don’t know about it because the local constabulary here hasn’t put two and two together, that puncture wounds equal Vlad’s return,” I said. “Especially because the dead haven’t been respectable people. They’re—whatever the PC term is now for gypsies. And more to the point, they’re high-level Connecteds. And though five of them are missing, only two bodies have popped up in the Danube so far.”
“You’re Justice of the Arcana Council now. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. Explain to me why you’re in the caves of Budapest, handling such a low-level…” Nigel made a face, cutting off his own complaint. “They’re kids, aren’t they? The victims.”
I grimaced. Sometimes it didn’t pay for people to know you too well. “You could have asked Nikki what I was doing here. She’s ass-deep in old cases, trying to prioritize the backlog of dark practitioners I’m supposed to be icing. But bottom line, I’m here for Vlad, not looking for some stupid cup.”
“You really think it’s Vlad returned?” Nigel asked, looking around the cavern room as if it would yield any answers.
“No, I don’t. The original Vlad wasn’t Connected. He was merely morally depraved. That doesn’t get you a Get Out of Hell Free card. But the new guy—not the same story. The complaints about him have included illusions, magic spells, and hints of vampirism—once again, not the original Dracula, but the Bram Stoker made-up version. So this new guy is basically using every trick in the Buda Castle playbook and combining them all to lure his mark to him, all under the guise of Vlad the Impaler, which makes him a prick in the truest sense of the word. And he’s targeting kids.”
“You say there’s still three who could be alive.”
“As far as we know. But beyond that, I’ve also lost all patience for using reincarnation as an excuse for bad deeds. I don’t have time for that.”
I didn’t either. I’d just come off a case where a five-hundred-year-old murderous magician had apparently resurfaced in Venice, all set to butcher a whole new set of victims. So I was definitely tired of the reincarnation schtick. When I brought this once-and-present Vlad to Judgment, he wasn’t going to fare well. Everyone in the Connected community needed to know that I planned to treat opportunistic reincarnators with extreme prejudice. Gamon, Judgment of the Arcana Council, whose job it was to judge and then punish the criminals I brought to her, would be more than onboard with the plan. She preferred to treat everyone with extreme prejudice.
Nigel continued watching me. “So a modern-day Vlad… He’s operating in the labyrinth?”
“Not this part of the labyrinth.” I jerked my thumb behind me. “Way too crowded. My information is that he’s underneath the happy castle itself, which is no longer an actual home but a bunch of museums. I could have tried to get in that way, but it seemed too much trouble.”
“Why didn’t you just…” Nigel wiggled his fingers. “Go there with your mind to suss the guy out? A lot faster, I should think.”
I shrugged, in no mood to explain to him that some of my past abilities as Sara Wilde, mercenary artifact hunter, hadn’t exactly hung around now that I’d taken on the role of Justice. Especially the ability of astral travel, or the art of traveling with your mind without the inconvenience of your body tagging along. As much as it came with its own raft of side effects, I missed that ability. “That process isn’t working as well as it used to. So—your turn. Spill on this cup.”
He obliged. “Sultan Murad II, then leader of the Ottoman Empire, held Vlad as a hostage starting in 1442, when Vlad was just a boy. Vlad impressed him, but there was a lot more to the son of Dracul than met the eye. He apparently indulged himself with some of the sultan’s treasures, including a prized cup. Then, Murad’s son, Mehmed II, conspired to have Vlad imprisoned by the king of Hungary, after he’d already started his impaling ways. There are many legends about that imprisonment, but one was that he was held here in Budapest at some point.”
“Do not tell me you think Vlad was actually a vampire.” What was with this place and the Dracula legend? I could understand it in Transylvania—they needed it for tourism—but Buda Castle had been Vlad’s unwanted home for barely ten years, and he’d never once so much as bitten anyone here. Impaled them, yes. But not bitten them.
Nigel shook his head. “Not exactly. But the theft of the Sultan’s Cup from Murad’s palace was discovered a few years after Vlad left. It was never tied to him, that we could tell, but rumors sprang up years later that there was a connection. The cup was supposedly one that provided life-giving benefits to any who sipped from it—and, of course, it was also rumored to drive you crazy.”
“Kind of an awkward trade-off.” I looked around the cave. “So Vlad gets imprisoned, stripped, and the Sultan’s Cup is taken from him. Meanwhile, he may have drunk from it and believed he’d live forever. Big maybe. And…you’re thinking that the cup is here, after all this time? Why?”
“The war on magic,” he said.
“Right,” I sighed. “That.”
Not four months earlier, I’d helped stave off some unwanted party guests—the gods and goddesses of the ancients—who’d wanted to come back to Earth. We’d Ubered them back to the other side of the veil where they belonged, but the planet hadn’t quite been the same afterward. Demons had popped up in all sorts of unfortunate places, old magic had returned, and in some cases…old artifacts.
Nigel nodded. “Our intelligence at the House of Swords is that previously ransacked tombs are once more filled with gold and magical tools. We’re tracking down every rumor we receive, and the Sultan’s Cup is on that list. The cup was never found, but Vlad was rumored to carry it on his person, and remember, no one knew its significance at the time of his supposed imprisonment in Buda Castle. It’s reasonable that it would have been taken from him while he was here, stashed somewhere by someone who didn’t know its worth, and then lost.”
“Or it could’ve been put in the castle’s dishwasher and long since forgotten.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “There’s got to be more to this story than that, for you to be here.”
“Well, there is. You. When we realized you were in Budapest, we put two and two together and came up with an artifact we needed to secure.”
“How did you know I was here? I’ve been in Budapest exactly twelve hours.”
“You arrived in the Szimpla Kert bar with your hair on fire. Literally. It was noticed.”
Yet another part of my new job as Justice I hadn’t quite worked out yet. But something wasn’t adding up.
“What else am I missing?”
Once again, there was no hesitation. I liked that in my Brits. “You’re part of the Council now, and ergo your allegiances are to the Council. Anything they pick up, they get, not us.” He said this without any rancor or judgment, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. We’d both been mercenaries for too long; we both knew the game.
“You seriously think I’m here to recover an artifact, not a bad guy?”
“I now fully believe you’re here to recover a bad guy. I also happen to know that you won’t let an artifact pass you by should you happen to stumble across one. And you further have an uncanny ability to stumble across said artifacts.” He waved at me. “You draw cards on this yet? Because I have no idea where we go from here. My information stops with this chamber.”
“Really.” I looked around the room, which appeared to have three entrances, the way we came in plus two chambers that snaked off deeper into the caverns. “Where’d you learn about this room?”
“One of the monks who was imprisoned along wit
h Vlad wrote about it in his papers, which we have in our digitized archives. When we learned you were here, it was five minutes’ work to identify how that might…benefit us. Or harm us, depending. Besides, Ma-Singh wanted me to check in on you, though he hadn’t heard of the Impaler’s return. He worries.”
“Ma-Singh.” I blinked, sudden and completely unwarranted tears scratching at my eyes as I thought of the big, gruff Mongolian whose life I’d saved multiple times and who’d also attempted to save my life, before he realized I was singularly hard to kill. Ma-Singh had been my general at the House of Swords and was one of very few people I trusted. It was good to know you were loved.
Or it was good to know Nigel was upping his game of manipulation. I pulled out the deck of Tarot cards, one of my trustiest go-tos during my years as an artifact hunter…during my whole life, truth be told. I’d been reading cards since I was old enough to pick up a deck, and they’d never steered me wrong. I might not always understand the message they were trying to give me, but the message was there.
I waved the deck at Nigel. “If you’re lying to me, there will be hell to pay, and if you’re bringing Ma-Singh into it without his knowledge, I’m taking you straight to Gamon.”
“I’m not Connected enough to warrant Gamon’s attention.”
“She’ll make an exception for you.”
Nigel looked credibly concerned, and I shuffled the deck, pondering the stone walls around me. Once I’d landed in Budapest, it was the cards that had insisted that the tourist trap of the labyrinth was my fastest way into the Castle Hill cave system. They hadn’t told me my journey would involve an annoying Brit, though.
I drew three cards out of the deck and held them out for Nigel to see. Despite him knowing me all these years, he’d never tried to learn Tarot. “King of Swords, Two of Wands, Ace of Cups,” he recited. He narrowed his eyes at me. “And you expect me to believe you’re not going after the Sultan’s Cup?”
“Well, I am now,” I cracked, though I really didn’t care about the missing artifact. But I was more than a little concerned. Up to this point, I’d been pretty consistently pulling the King of Swords to represent the nouveau Vlad the Impaler. But if what Nigel was saying about the cup was true…maybe I really could kill two birds with one stone. Maybe wannabe Vlad had the real Vlad’s cup on him and was siphoning power from it. An interesting possibility…
Either way, I had to find him. “We head left,” I said, pocketing the cards and pointing to a door. As Nigel turned away, however, I fished out three more cards.
Queen of Swords, Ten of Swords, Ace of Swords.
I stared hard at Nigel’s retreating form. I had no idea what the Queen of Swords meant yet in the context of this search, but Nigel was the Ace of Swords, and Ten of Swords almost always meant…betrayal.
Something very bad was about to happen in the labyrinth of Buda Castle.
~ ~ ~
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Books by Jenn Stark
Immortal Vegas Series
~complete~
Getting Wilde
Wilde Card
Born To Be Wilde
Wicked And Wilde
Aces Wilde
Forever Wilde
Wilde Child
Call of the Wilde
Running Wilde
Wilde Fire
One Wilde Night (prequel novella)
Wilde Justice Series
The Red King
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A Note From Jenn
Sara’s adventures in THE RED KING brought her face to face with the King of Cups, who definitely wouldn’t thank me for making him a villain in this tale! In truth, drawing the King of Cups is almost always a very positive experience.
The King of Cups
Court cards are generally about people—the ones you know, the ones you’ll meet, or possibly even yourself—and the King of Cups is someone you definitely want to associate with. Emotionally balanced and truly caring, he sits atop his throne surrounded by the flow of energy, in tune with the world around him. When this card represents a person, look for someone who is jovial, caring, sincere, artistic and creative…with potentially intense feelings, authentic sensitivity and powerful emotions (no matter how balanced he is, this King’s emotions run deep!). When this card does not represent a person, you are most likely involved with a spiritual, creative, or artistic project, something that speaks to your deepest emotions. It’s considered a card of abundance, flow and good luck! In fact, in some readings it’s called the god card, signifying that a higher being is blessing your endeavors. So, when you see the Red King, celebrate! Unless he’s a dark practitioner. In that case, you should probably run away.
Acknowledgments
Wow—THE RED KING launches a whole new series of books for Sara Wilde, with a slightly different spin. Thank you to all my readers who have stayed with me on my journey so far, and to those who are joining me for the first time! I hope you enjoy the ride. As always, my deep and abiding thanks to Elizabeth Bemis for her beautiful work on my books and my site—especially my fantastic cover. My editorial team of Linda Ingmanson and Toni Lee went above and beyond the call of duty with The Red King, as I introduced a mystery into the story that kept us all on our toes. Any mistakes in the manuscript are most definitely my own. I am deeply grateful to Edeena Cross and Sabra Harp for their brilliant beta reads, and to Kristine Krantz, whose careful eye (and skeptical side-eye) kept me on the right track, as always. And, of course, sincere thanks go to Geoffrey, who helped bring this series to life. It’s been a Wilde ride.
About Jenn Stark
Jenn Stark is an award-winning author of paranormal romance and urban fantasy. She lives and writes in Ohio. . . and she definitely loves to write. In addition to her Immortal Vegas and Wilde Justice urban fantasy series and her Demon Enforcers paranormal romance series, she is also author Jennifer McGowan, whose Maids of Honor series of Young Adult Elizabethan spy romances are published by Simon & Schuster, and author Jennifer Chance, whose Rule Breakers series of New Adult contemporary romances are published by Random House/LoveSwept and whose modern royals series, Gowns & Crowns, is available wherever ebooks are sold.
You can find her online, follow her on Twitter, and visit her on Facebook!