The Red King: Wilde Justice, Book 1

by Jenn Stark

  Taller than most ordinary humans, ridiculously attractive, and brimming over with power, Armaeus Bertrand had, in many ways, gotten me exactly where I was today, pneumatic tubes and all. Five years ago, I’d been a mercenary artifact hunter, arguably one of the best of the business since I was Connected and had a particular knack for using Tarot cards to find the items most coveted by my clients. The combination of psychic ability and crack search skills put me one step ahead of my competitors and kept me in high demand. At least until the Arcana Council had gotten wind of my abilities. The fact that the Council was made up of demigods who embodied the Major Arcana of the Tarot, my particular flavor of crazy, hadn’t been lost on me, and they’d paid me well for my artifact-finding services.

  As to their organizational hierarchy, I rolled with that, too. They weren’t the only super special society who liked to call their leaders funny names. The Elks had their Grand Exalted Ruler, the Templars had their National Bishop, the Freemasons had their Grand Master, and the Arcana Council had their Magician. So far, so good. It also hadn’t hurt that the Magician of the Arcana Council was a particularly delectable hunk of man meat.

  “Your mental barriers are down. You must know I can read your thoughts.”

  “Just checking.” I tossed my jacket onto the counter, then walked deeper into the room. It smelled of cinnamon and possibilities. I couldn’t deny the pull the Magician had on me, but wasn’t letting go of the fact that I had an axe to grind with him. “You held out on me.”

  He, of course, knew immediately what I was talking about. One of the benefits of being the Magician. Way better than a Grand Exalted Ruler, in my book. “You didn’t ask.”

  “How was I supposed to know what questions to ask about a job that hadn’t been filled in almost two centuries? I picked the role of Justice because it called to me, but it’s not like I had any idea what I was getting into. You did.”

  He turned, slanting me a look I chose not to interpret. “You were born to be Justice,” he said, his words an exotic mix of rolling syllables I’d come to love, even when the owner of the voice irritated me. Armaeus Bertrand was French by birth and Egyptian by lineage, his father a twelfth-century soldier in the Crusades and his mother a high priestess to Thoth, god of language and spiritual father of the Tarot, by many accounts. Armaeus, quite legitimately, had been born to be the Magician.

  My lineage was a little more problematic. My father was a member of the Arcana Council, which had a strict nonfraternization rule when it came to other celestial beings. My mother was most likely the reason for the rule.

  “No,” I replied gamely. “I was born because you guys couldn’t keep a collar on the Hermit, and he didn’t have the sense any of the gods could’ve given him to stay away from my mother. There was nothing in there about me becoming Justice as a result of that extremely screwed-up union, any more than there was anything ever written about Gamon becoming Judgment.”

  “She’s adjusting to her new role quite well,” Armaeus observed.

  “She’s looking forward to years of joy. And speaking of years…”

  “Twenty-four seventeen. Nikki told me.” He nodded, eyeing me over the rim of his wineglass. “You won’t lack for distractions as Justice. In fact, distractions will serve you well.”

  Right. I was beginning to notice a disturbing trend of nonanswers when it came to my questions regarding my new position. “And how long did the last Justice serve, exactly? Mrs. French was remarkably vague on the topic.”

  “Was she?”

  A trend that apparently was going to continue. “Yes, she was.”

  I watched the Magician as he took another long sip of his wine. Armaeus was many things, but straightforward was not one of them. However, he wasn’t the only one who’d learned how to play Reindeer Games. Since I’d ascended to the Council, I’d leveled up as well. It didn’t take special powers for me to realize he was avoiding the subject.

  “Tell me about her, or I’m going to go to the Devil. He’ll tell me.”

  “He would, yes.” Armaeus strolled over and sat on one of the deep wingback chairs, and only then did I notice the redecoration.

  “These weren’t here before,” I said, frowning at the deeply plush furniture.

  “I took the liberty.”

  I started for the sitting area, then detoured for the refrigerator. I opened it, taking a moment to register its contents. It’d never been so full of food. “It looks like you took a lot of liberties.”

  “Since you insist on living somewhere that relies on the laws of physics, it was—quite literally—the least I could do.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” I grabbed a plastic container of some vaguely dip-like substance that looked like it had been made with a pound of cheese and snagged a box of crackers from the counter. I blinked at the shiny metal surface. “What was wrong with the granite?”

  “Mm.” Armaeus watched me as I moved across the floor toward him, his dark eyes hooded and more mysterious than usual. I could barely make out the faint lining of gold around the pupils as I sat and braced myself. The deeper the Magician was into his magic, the blacker his eyes. Given the depths of dark his pupils were currently rocking, I expected him to poof into an alternate reality at any minute.

  “Okay. Hit me,” I said, adding a liberal scoop of cheese to my cracker. Cheese made everything better.

  He lifted a hand, stalling my progress. “Before you lose all capacity for speech by eating that in one bite, perhaps you could clarify your question. What specifically do you want to know about the previous Justice?”

  I paused. It was a fair question. And I wanted to enjoy my food, which meant I needed a long-winded response. “How about you give me the full run-down on Justice Abigail. Where she came from, what she did, why she stepped down from the Council, and where she is now.”

  Armaeus watched as I shoved the cracker into my mouth, his lips twitching with amusement as the concoction hit my taste buds. It…was ambrosia. On steroids. I also couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten, which certainly helped.

  “Mmflggh,” I groaned. I slapped my hand over my mouth to ensure none of the miracle escaped.

  “I’ll convey your compliments to the chef,” he said drily as I reached for the wine.

  “Abigail,” I finally managed.

  “Abigail,” he agreed. “Justice Abigail Strand ascended to her role at the age of twenty-seven, not much younger than yourself. Prior to her work on the Council, she’d been employed as governess to the children of a very reclusive psychiatrist, whom she revered far longer than she should have. One day, she discovered that the doctor’s particular brand of psychiatry was far less circumspect than she had at first imagined.”

  I tried to ask a question but couldn’t form words around the cheese, and Armaeus elaborated. “Her employer was Connected, of course, and an experimenter of high reputation, as well as quite pious in his outward appearance. He brought Miss Strand on as a governess to several wayward street urchins, and as the months passed, she began to notice something…peculiar about the boys.”

  “Oh.” I knew this part, and Armaeus nodded.

  “Sadly, before she could satisfy her curiosity, her situation took a drastic turn. The boys, who had come to care for her by this time, revealed that she had also become the subject of her employer’s experimentation. He’d secretly begun augmenting Abigail’s abilities without her realizing it through tinctures she consumed in her evening tea. She was aghast, then distraught, then outraged.”

  “Which was when you showed up.”

  “Merely to intervene to ensure that the abilities of her employer did not grow too far, too fast. Balance was essential in the mid-1800s. The world was reeling from political and scientific revolutions, and in times of great chaos, magic can proliferate unchecked. Unfortunately, I arrived on the scene too late.”

  “Too late?” That surprised me. “What do you mean?”

  “Abigail Strand had already confronted her employer,
surprising him in the midst of an experiment that was both depraved and breathtaking in its savagery. She wrested the machine from him, freed the young woman who was being subjected to his torture, then turned the machine on him.”

  “She did?” I stared at him. “I mean, go her, but how was she able to do all that, exactly? I thought she barely understood her own abilities.”

  “She didn’t. Her employer did, but he believed he could direct her. Miss Strand was a victim of sleepwalking. When she slipped into her trance state, she would—and did—perform atrocities of appreciable ferocity. She’d entered such a condition before I arrived, and by the time I reached her, Randolph was dead. However, because I was present, Miss Strand came to her senses most abruptly, fully cognizant of what she had done. While she had no particular love of Randolph, her horror at how he’d been using her knew no bounds. She demanded to know of the crimes she had committed and, once we determined what they were, how she could make amends.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “And you were exactly the guy to give her a suggestion.”

  Armaeus spread his hands. “There was no question that her abilities had grown beyond those an ordinary mortal could handle. She’d been augmented within an inch of her life, and she had no training to control it. Raising her to the Council allowed her that control, and becoming Justice afforded her some solace for the lives she had unknowingly taken. She was, at heart, a good person.”

  “Okay, fine.” I stared at the empty box of crackers “Some man came in here and stole all my food.”

  “It’s so difficult keeping out the riffraff,” Armaeus sighed.

  “So, how long did she serve? I don’t believe you mentioned it.”

  Armaeus sat forward, his gaze suddenly intent. “That’s not truly what’s bothering you,” he said mildly. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I glared back at him. “Pretty sure I don’t.”

  “Miss Wilde.”

  “Don’t you Miss Wilde me. You didn’t tell me about the backlog of cases in ye olde Hall of Justice. You also didn’t tell me I’d be chaperoning the Lost Boys.”

  “Mrs. French keeps them well in line.”

  “That’s not the point. What else haven’t you told me? Because I’m starting to think it’s quite a lot.” I straightened. “And speaking of, who’s the Red King?”

  If I thought I was going to surprise Armaeus, I failed. His expression didn’t change. “Where did you hear that title?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, just the second of the two jobs that showed up with my cool bracelets and decoder ring.”

  His elegantly arched brows lifted. “You didn’t get a—”

  “Focus. You know the title, who is it?”

  “I know the title.” Armaeus inclined his head. “But much like the role of Justice, it’s not one that anyone’s claimed in centuries. It was an accolade that originally implied a powerful sorcerer, the greatest among his peers.”

  “Originally,” I repeated. “And now?”

  He shrugged. “Now it’s no longer in use, unless you’re about to correct me.”

  “I…I don’t know.” I sat back in my chair. “A guy used it today, one of the drug dealers, but he was half out of his mind on Black Elixir.”

  “The new drug of choice for the dark practitioners.” Armaeus considered that. “Tied to the Red King? That’s…interesting.”

  “I asked Nikki to look into it, but she’s gotten nothing yet, and it’s been over twelve hours. The guy’s a ghost. If he exists at all.”

  “It was definitely a title of some renown in the Middle Ages, but…” Armaeus got that faraway look he assumed when his mind started running through his internal Encyclopedia Arcania. His voice was ever so slightly dazed when he continued. “Gamon advised that she recovered enough of the unspent drug to analyze. We’re doing that now.”

  “She did? You are?” I straightened. “Did she get anything else out of Ricky?”

  “He’s the older of the two.” The Magician blinked, refocusing on me. “He has not awakened yet. From her preliminary assessment, he’s deteriorating quickly.”

  That…didn’t sound good. “Aww, man.”

  “He was a drug dealer, Miss Wilde.”

  “Yeah, well. I know,” I grumbled. “But I didn’t take this job to sweep up bodies. The point was to give people a path to rehabilitation. Kind of hard to do that if they’re dead.”

  “Your tasks will not always end happily,” Armaeus reminded me, not unkindly.

  “Well, once again, that was something I didn’t think through all that clearly. You knew better than I did what was entailed. You could have warned me.”

  “And why ever would I have done that? We’ve needed a Justice to sit on the Council since Abigail—left.”

  I didn’t miss the slight hesitation at the end of that sentence, but Armaeus recovered quickly.

  “I admit I didn’t know how you would handle the criminals you encountered,” he continued. “But you solved that in short order with the recruitment of Gamon.”

  “Which also saved me from making her my first collar.”

  He nodded in agreement. “The fact remains, the world is more in need of your skills as Justice than ever before. Magic isn’t merely proliferating, it’s exploding. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going to return on its own.”

  He seemed strangely…ambivalent about that. Which was odd, since for as long as I’d known him, Armaeus had been the most vocal opponent of the world becoming more magical.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m going to put it back in.”

  “I don’t,” he said, his words suddenly far softer. I blinked up at him, startled to see Armaeus regarding me with an affection that should have put me on edge.

  It didn’t, but it should have.

  “I’m relying on you to help bring the world to a different place than I could ever have imagined on my own, Miss Wilde.” He watched me with his hooded, black-gold eyes. “A different light is shining on this earth, and I can’t capture it, I can’t mold it. I can’t walk with one foot in the stars and one on solid ground. You can.”

  That…sounded suspect. “Since when?”

  “Since you became Justice of the Arcana Council…” His mouth twitched into a smile. “With enough cases to last you until the year 2417.”

  My phone buzzed, and I fished it out of my pocket. I froze when I glanced at the screen, then bolted out of my chair. “Mrs. French!”

  “What?” Armaeus demanded, also rising as I turned to race back up the short stairs toward the door, leaning over to snag my jacket and stuff my arms into it.

  “The office—there’s someone—an attack—”

  I’d made it to the door, glaring at the eighty-seven padlocks, all of them installed for my protection. “Oh, for the love of—”

  Instantly turning incorporeal without even a hint of fireworks, Armaeus blew into me with a rush of smoke, wrapping me close, and we were gone.

  Chapter Five

  We poofed back into existence on the penthouse floor, but there was nothing to be seen. The hallway was quiet.

  “Let’s go,” I snapped as Armaeus held out a hand to stop me. “And how do you do that? Because lighting myself on fire sucks.”

  “Who texted you?” He began walking toward the door after another moment, his gaze hard on it. As we approached, the faintest amount of industry could be heard at the other side of the door.

  I scanned the hallway. It was an ordinary hallway. An ordinary, nonpsychic hallway, accessible to anyone who could punch the right button on the elevator panel. Maybe my office location hadn’t been such a good idea after all. “Mrs. French.”

  “Are you sure?” he glanced at me. “She didn’t strike me as very technologically savvy.”

  “I—” I grunted in exasperation as I pulled out my phone. “Unknown number. But who else would—I mean there’s somebody in there. I can hear them.” I frowned. “Why aren’t we in there, for that matter? Why didn’t we show up
inside?”

  “Your wards, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus murmured.

  “Oh. Right.” Like the locks on my suite door, those had seemed like such a good idea at the time. I’d wanted the office secure for ordinary access, a safe haven for anyone who should come to see me. So, I’d barred forced magical access of any kind. Including, perhaps most especially, anyone on the Council besides me. Yet something else that I needed to rethink. Maybe. “Well, that’s kind of obnoxious.”

  “Shh.” Armaeus raised a hand as we drew within five feet of the door. The disturbance was more pronounced now, but there was nothing to indicate that the door had been forced. “There are five, maybe six intruders inside.”

  “But…” Something wasn’t adding up. “How is that even possible? The door is even more heavily warded than the walls and ceiling. There’s no access.”

  “It must have been—”

  “The canisters. Son of a bitch.”

  Springing past Armaeus, I burst through my own door with a fireball of magic strong enough to send the barrier flying into the center of the room, then I raced in behind it. The chaos of earlier in the day had been replaced by an apparently different type of disruption. Two of the junior librarians were out cold on the floor, lying in their own blood, though not a lot of it, thank heavens. The remaining four were barely visible, mere blurs of waist-high movement around a knot of men who were attacking the door to the library with something that looked like a battering ram.

  A battering ram that was working.

  The last of the intruders turned and looked at me, but rather than expressing the fear and panic he should have, he grinned and jostled the man beside him, who also turned, his eyes alight with eagerness. That…didn’t seem right.

  And what else didn’t seem right? These guys weren’t human, I’d bet my life on it. They were too…smooth, too perfect. I couldn’t quite explain it, but something was definitely off.

  Armaeus murmured behind me, “I fear there are certain elements I should have already disclosed to you about Abigail’s life—and her death.”