The Shadow Court

by Stark, Jenn

  “Bingo.” She saluted me with her coffee cup. “Nobody will suspect Officer Ogleworthy of doing anything but his job, which is counseling a group that supposedly knows nothing about psychics or how to handle the loony people.”

  “But they know him. He’s been involved in several cases—cases where I also was involved.”

  “Tragedy of circumstance, my friend. The fact remains that Brody isn’t Connected. Much. He’s been amped a little due to his association with you and the Council, but what’s a guy going to do? He happens to be based in Vegas. He’s never betrayed a word of the Council’s existence, or yours beyond you being a psychic who actually makes money at the game and who also occasionally provides the LVMPD with intel. He’s shown up in some interesting places, sure, but he’s mostly been at home tending the hearth fires. He’s not on anyone’s radar.”

  “Interpol agents know him.”

  “Those agents are out in the field, not in the mother ship.” Nikki’s brow furrowed. “What are you worried about?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. And I didn’t. Brody didn’t need me to protect him, certainly. He was a cop, and a long-standing one. He had worked in worse situations than this. In all our shared challenges, he hadn’t been put in danger either. Not much, anyway.

  “He doesn’t seem happy about it,” I finally offered lamely.

  “Oh, give me a break. His buns wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they weren’t hot and crossed.” Nikki grinned and waved me off. “He’s just mad because he’s got cases to clear back home, and he doesn’t want them handed off to some numbwit, which, for the record, they probably won’t be because no one wants to handle his cases. Psychics may have hit the mainstream to us, but not to the common people, and certainly not to the bureaucracy of government or law enforcement.”

  “It’s coming, though.”

  “That may be.” Nikki shrugged. “But not today.”

  We stopped at the edge of the park, having finally reached what seemed to be the edge of Armaeus’s property. Nikki looked around, apparently satisfied, then eyed me again. “There’s more.”

  “I figured.”

  “Well, you should also figure you’re not going to like it, because you won’t. Armaeus tried to enter the library at Justice Hall and damned near set himself on fire in the process. He incinerated the front office as well.”

  “The front…” I stared at her. “When was this? He didn’t say anything.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t figure he would. It was yesterday, right before he split. I didn’t know about it when we talked. He got the mess cleaned up, but there was a hell of a noise, by all accounts, and he didn’t bother to wipe that from the memory of the hotel guests staying on the floors beneath Justice Hall. So they all heard a big boom with nothing to show for it.”

  I grimaced. “Airplane maneuvers?”

  “That’s what the Palazzo’s management decided, yup, and shared as an official announcement,” Nikki said. “Just a little broken sound barrier, nothing more. But the important part of this story is that Armaeus didn’t get in.”

  “Was anyone hurt?” I had a librarian on staff at Justice Hall at all times, and she had young assistants. If Mrs. French or any of the boys had been there when the Magician had detonated his Open Sesame bomb…

  “Okay, that’s an important part too,” Nikki allowed. “But the answer is no. Mrs. French told him he wouldn’t be able to enter the inner sanctum of the stacks, told him she couldn’t let him in physically without you being there. Abigail’s wards were that strong.”

  “Yeah.” This being the same Abigail who’d apparently managed to cut away the existence of an entire organization from Armaeus’s mind, she clearly was more than the Magician thought she was. “What was he looking for?”

  “Mrs. French asked him the same thing, which made him…laugh.”

  Nikki’s emphasis on the last word made me glance at her. “The Magician doesn’t laugh. He smiles sardonically and lifts an eyebrow. That’s about it.”

  “Honestly, I think his reaction startled Mrs. French more than the explosion, and the explosion did a number on her. But when she asked the Magician what he was looking for, he replied that he didn’t know. And that struck him as so funny, he doubled over, nearly choking with laughter.”

  “Choking with laughter? Or simply choking?”

  “To hear Mrs. French tell the tale, he was thoroughly amused. And not terribly concerned either, more intrigued by the fact that he couldn’t get inside the library. To him, it’s proof positive that there’s something important in there that he needs to get his hands on. But it’s a big place, and if he doesn’t know what he’s looking for…”

  “It’s the perfect hiding place,” I agreed. “But for what? Justice Hall has some books and manuscripts deemed too dangerous for public consumption, but those are all accounted for, I thought. Other than that, it’s filled with information related to crimes against fellow Connecteds. The complaints, criticisms, accusations, wails and lamentations of the victims, that sort of thing. All the cases I haven’t gotten to yet, in short. How can that help Armaeus?”

  “Miss Wilde. Miss Dawes.”

  We turned to see Armaeus standing at the edge of the clearing, Kreios and Simon beside him, but only Kreios and Simon. “Where’s Brody?” I asked.

  “Off to his onboarding interview, I suspect,” Kreios said. He had returned to his usual appearance, looking far more comfortable for it.

  “Wired to the gills with the latest tech too,” Simon interjected excitedly, clearly unable to contain himself. “If all goes right, we’ll be able to find this interior cell pretty quickly. The ground agents know nothing about it, the cops know nothing about it, governments know nothing about it. Except for those who were in on the game. But we will. Soon.”

  “And we don’t have any intel so far on what the goals of the Shadow Court are?”

  Armaeus interjected, “There are two likely options. One is that they’re looking to suppress those who make magic, similar to organizations that have existed for thousands of years. The other option is more intriguing.”

  I rolled my eyes. “If by intriguing you mean more of a pain in the ass, fantastic. We already solved the problem of a bunch of Connecteds wanting to fly their freak flag too soon. We can’t be doing this every time we turn around.”

  “That’s why I find it intriguing,” the Magician countered. “If this group has been in existence for hundreds of years, then even if we don’t understand how it’s happening, why haven’t we already seen them manifest in the form of more Connecteds reaching their pinnacle of ability or acting out in a more aggressive way? Why are they suddenly acting now? What’s changed?”

  “In the last few months? Try just about everything,” Nikki deadpanned. “We have new members on the Council, waterspouts of unrest among the Connecteds, an uptick in activity on the arcane black market, and a surge of megalomaniacs who are making their bid for power. Take your pick.”

  “Wait…that’s it,” I said, turning to Nikki. “That last one. That’s important.”

  “Megalomaniacs?”

  “Exactly. What’s the job of Justice? To answer the call of the oppressed. Since I’ve come on board, that’s what I’ve done. I’ve stopped individuals who were taking it upon themselves to change the destiny of other Connecteds against their will. I mean, granted, this is a little different. This is a faceless organization, not a person.”

  “Behind every organization, you’ll eventually find a face,” Kreios said.

  “Then there you go.” Unexpectedly, I found myself thinking of Emma Fearon walking through the streets of Paris, wearing my face and body to reassure those coming to the city seeking help. My help. Help I wasn’t giving.

  “There’s only one way to figure out who that face is,” Simon put in. When we all turned to him, he grinned. “I mean, it’s a game, man. You gotta play the game. Armaeus has forgotten four things: something in 1478, something in 1571, these Shadow
Court people in 1852 or ’53 or whatever, and his memory of Sara. Am I right? You haven’t forgotten anything else?”

  He asked this last question of Armaeus, who grimaced.

  “I don’t believe so, but you see the issue with relying on me to make that assertion.”

  “But now that you’ve got the dates, you’ve already started making connections,” Simon said. “You gotta assume 1478 is important because of the Spanish Inquisition. So we start there. Or you start there. The year 1571 could mean anything, but if you do a search on the most important monarch in that year, you get Elizabeth the First. So, we start there.”

  That tallied with Mercault’s comments, but I still eyed Simon, a little aghast. “You’re relying on a random Google search to start this investigation?”

  “You could as easily flip a coin, I’m telling you,” Simon insisted. “All it took was one glance at a symbol and Armaeus was on to the Shadow Court. I’m thinking it won’t take much more than that for the other two dates. His memories are gone, but he’s the Magician—nothing can stay hidden forever from him.”

  A low buzz of panic whirred to life in my stomach at Simon’s words, but he kept going.

  “So, you guys go to Spain, and we’ll go to England, and maybe by the time we reconvene, we’ll know what the hell is going on. If we do, great. If we don’t, we’re probably dead anyway and the world is in chaos and game over.”

  I winced. “Game over doesn’t sound really good. How long do we have?”

  “Not long,” Simon said. “The Shadow Court knows about the other two lapses, I bet. The minute they see Armaeus is tracking those down, they’ll start worrying about what else he’s remembering, especially now that you’ve been attacked once.”

  “Twice,” I corrected. “There was a punk at the train station trying to snatch a Connected, and I stopped him. His eyes went white, and he welcomed me to Paris. The young woman at the church who was providing refuge for the Connecteds told me they called these white-eyed kidnappers ‘ghosts’ and said they’re coming out of the woodwork. I don’t know if that’s relevant.”

  Simon sighed and tilted his head, his eyes getting the distracted look of a gamer making deep, strategic connections. “I don’t either, but I’ll check into it. And either way—we’ve now got less time than I thought. So we better start playing this game to win, and fast.”

  Chapter Twelve

  It was two a.m. in Barcelona, Spain, so of course, the entire Gothic Quarter was hopping. But even if the people of the city didn’t sleep, apparently museum curators did.

  “There’s no way the synagogue will be open,” I murmured as Armaeus and I moved through the tight, winding streets off the Plaça de Sant Jaume. The music and laughter of the busy square faded behind us as we approached the darker, older buildings of El Call, where our destination lay.

  “Agreed,” Armaeus said, his voice equally quiet but startling me nevertheless. He’d been deep in a meditative trance since we’d arrived in Spain hours earlier, and this was the first he’d spoken in hours.

  “Oh, hey, you’re back. Welcome to Spain.”

  He nodded. “Our destination remains the same regardless of the hour, Miss Wilde. Every mental trail I’ve attempted to follow in this country ends in those two rooms, and until I see them myself, I won’t understand where to go next.”

  I peered down the ominous-looking alley. “Are you sure we’re even in the right city?”

  He shot a look at me, clearly startled. “Do you always doubt me so openly?”

  “I do, actually. It’s kind of one of my charms.” My gaze shifted to the dark buildings encroaching on our walkway. At this point, we were one of only a few couples walking the quarter, the streets barely wide enough to allow two pedestrians to squeeze past each other. There would be no way any vehicle larger than a roller skate would be able to get back here.

  Armaeus’s low, rich voice rolled on beside me. “I have determined that the nature of the memories excised by my own hand has been markedly consistent. Arcana. Lore. Knowledge. The repository for such information is almost always a book.”

  “Or a scroll,” I pointed out helpfully. “Or a fortune cookie.”

  “In fifteenth-century Spain, it would have been a book. The most well-known book of arcane lore that emerged from the country in the preceding centuries would have been the Zohar, the Book of Radiance.”

  “Ahhh…” I tried to call up my knowledge of the tome, but it was scant. “That’s Jewish mysticism, right? The Kabbalah?”

  “The Book of Radiance is extreme even for kabbalists. Some consider it pure apocrypha, and still others maintain its greatest teachings have been willfully withheld, a lost chapter secreted away to protect the masses.”

  That caught my attention. “Well, that’s starting to sound more like it.”

  We stopped in front of a completely nondescript building fronted by our narrow alley. It looked…exactly like nothing at all. “Uhh…this is it?”

  Armaeus reached out and laid a hand on the bricks, releasing a long, satisfied breath. “The Sinagoga Mayor is considered one of the oldest synagogues in Europe and was the center for Jewish life in Barcelona up until the purge of the Spanish Inquisition forced so many Jews to leave the city in the 1490s. According to most documentation, the synagogue was used as a storeroom in the intervening centuries.”

  “Yeah, but a storeroom for the lost chapter of a book that most traditional Jews would consider at a minimum goofy, and at an extreme heretical? That’s kind of an interesting leap.”

  He glanced at me, his eyes somehow managing to gleam in the heavy darkness. “I have been reliably informed that I am kind of an interesting guy.”

  Once again, the strange, almost lighthearted humor of Armaeus 2.0 caught me off guard. Actually, I needed to amend that moniker. I didn’t even know if this was Armaeus 2.0 I was experiencing, or if the Magician’s sudden good-naturedness was part of the effect of having forgotten me.

  Had I brought the man down somehow simply by existing in his memory? Was he better off without me? Happier?

  My mouth tightened as I resolutely turned my gaze from Armaeus and stared at the wall. It was 2:00 a.m. in a snarl of dark, narrow streets that smelled like old stone and anguish. I was allowed to be neurotic.

  “The door, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured.

  I squinted where he pointed, but there was absolutely no lighting on this street. I fumbled in my pocket for my phone and directed the beam onto the heavy sealed door. There was nothing to indicate it was the opening to a famous synagogue.

  “They’re not all that big on signage, are they?”

  “You can see the ancient letters here—and here,” Armaeus said, pointing to chiseled indentations that arguably could have been letters at one point. “We’re in the right place. Now we’ll need to get inside. Which I cannot do, because I specifically warded myself against entering.”

  The certainty in his voice made me look at him curiously. “And you expect me to get us in? Because let me remind you, I’m no good as a Woober driver if I haven’t been someplace before. I can assure you, I’ve never been here.”

  “You are Justice of the Arcana Council, and your call is to serve those who have been harmed by Connecteds.” He rocked back on his heels and looked at me. “I intensely dislike involving you. I can sense you are not prepared for this challenge. But it must be done.”

  The rueful apology in Armaeus’s tone knocked me off my pedestal of pain and back onto the field of annoyance. I tried to stuff down my impatience at his assessment of my apparently limited skillset, but the problem remained: I couldn’t get into this place. Maybe the cards could offer a hint—

  “Not the cards, Miss Wilde.” Armaeus’s voice stopped my hand as I edged it toward my pocket. “You don’t need them.”

  “I do need them,” I countered. “Because you’re not giving me enough to work with, here. Granted, maybe you haven’t seen the Justice process recently, but it hasn’t changed so much sin
ce the process that Abigail used. You remember Justice Strand, right? The one who caused all this mess?”

  His expression hardened, the look in his eyes going flat.

  “I thought you did,” I continued. “The way it goes, people have a problem, and they send that problem to me in my office at Justice Hall. It appears as a canister of information in a pneumatic tube, lots of whooshing and thumping. Very progressive for its time, and I haven’t gotten around to changing it. But that’s how it’s done. No one whispers the lamentations of the damned to me out of creepy old stones in the middle of the night, giving me the secret door knock.”

  “That’s only because you’re not listening.”

  Armaeus raised his hand, and the world turned suddenly silent. There was no longer the sound of echoing footsteps or of faraway music and laughter. It was as if a shroud had been dropped over the Jewish quarter—or, not exactly that. It was more like the shroud of modern sound had been taken away. The silence was deep, echoing, and more than a little unnerving.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered harshly. Every hair on my body was standing at attention, and I could only draw in the shortest of breaths. “This isn’t exactly a good time for a teaching moment.”

  “Justice hears the cries of the people,” Armaeus murmured again. “The Magician does not. I’m looking to find a man oppressed by those around him, an acolyte, a man who wants more than anything to share the truth, but who fears that truth might bring the ruination of his people. He’s been damned by the very book his master wrote in a fugue of metaphysical passion, convinced it was delivered by God himself. The master rests, unaware of what he has wrought. The servant runs, not knowing what to believe.”

  As Armaeus spoke in a low, mesmerizing voice, I swayed toward the old stone wall, the heavy door fit into the stones. In my mind’s, ah, ear, I could almost hear the mutterings of a man bent over, pale and worn, his arms clutching a sack he held against his body as if it held all the riches in Europe. “He is wrong, he is wrong, he must be wrong. Please save me, Father, he is wrong.”