The Red King: Wilde Justice, Book 1

by Jenn Stark

  I walked forward, my eyes cast down like the despondent man pictured on the card. In this room, the books were shelved from floor to ceiling, several more stacked in boxes on small tables scattered throughout. But the books on the first level were all hoary with dust, clearly tomes read long ago and forgotten. Was my answer in one of those arcane volumes? I felt almost unnaturally compelled to plant myself on the floor and lose myself in their mysteries.

  But no—that wouldn’t help me. Stopping, I stared at the mysterious books for a long second, then, without moving my feet, straightened my body and leveled my eyes up, exactly where I would have been looking if I were the young man in the card glancing up to see the castle on the far shore.

  One book stood out, a slim volume, its spine etched in gold, with a familiar, friendly name: La Casa di Valetti. Without thinking, I pulled the book from the shelf and tucked it into my jacket. As I turned, I felt the entire library sigh with long-held relief.

  I stepped out of the room, noting that the sun had crept out of the shadow of clouds, and was now fully shining down on the library reading room, brightening the entire space.

  A sound from the corridor made me jump. Someone coming to check on me, undoubtedly. Securing the book in my jacket, I hurried forward to sweep up the cards—and noticed something else as well.

  With a trick of the newest rays of light through the stained-glass window, both the King and Five of Cups were now stained the color of blood.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Nikki met me at Signora Visione’s, where we had what I dearly hoped was our last fitting of Carnevale. If I never wore another cape again, it’d be too soon.

  “Since when do you check out library books without a card?” Nikki asked me, raising an eyebrow as I handed over the volume. “And where’s the Magic Man?”

  “Presumably, still with the prelate.” I peered up at Signora Visione’s sign. Her shop looked closed up tight, but as I watched the windows, a tiny twitch in one of them gave me the information I needed. She’d seen us, and she’d be down shortly. “One of Alfonse’s flunkies was sent to make sure I wasn’t going into withdrawal without access to so many magicians at once, and when I told him I’d see myself home, he almost collapsed with relief. I got the feeling they wanted Armaeus all to themselves.”

  “They wouldn’t be the first ones,” Nikki paged through the slender leather volume. “I don’t read Italian, and there’s no pictures. What am I missing?”

  “Not much, except that the House of Valetti is one of the oldest and most favored in all of Venice, probably all of Italy, at least when it comes to magic. The family tree has gotten a little less impressive of late, but back in the day, these guys were the real deal. They were full-on conjurers, illusionists, healers, and mediums at various points throughout history. It’s kind of impressive.”

  “Makes more sense why Valetti gives off the whole benign condescension vibe,” Nikki said. Now she was staring at the windows as well. “Dude was one step shy of extolling the value of eugenics, you ask me. He must be thrilled at the influx of real magic in the world, for all that it was an unintended side effect. Oh—that reminds me.” Nikki continued to scan the signora’s shop front. “Mrs. French finally found the cases you were talking about—the dark practitioners from the sixteenth century. Sad to say, there were no Red Kings among them. He either wasn’t a bad enough dude, or—”

  “Or he never got caught. Him or anyone in his family.” I shuffled a few steps away from the building, unease spidering across my nape as I looked at the design surmounting the shop’s heavy door, but I focused on the design above it—a cup overflowing with abundance. A cup to mark the signora’s shop. A cup…

  “Pretty much.” Nikki scowled at the locked door. “Are we ever gonna be let in?”

  Cups. Suddenly, the reading at Ca Daria flashed in front of my eyes, including the one card that hadn’t made sense to me, the Queen of Cups. Had it not been about Chiara, but instead about Signora Visione? A clue not about the Red King, but about someone I needed to protect from him?

  Oh, crap.

  The high-pitched sound of a child’s scream, muffled under several layers of dress shop, rang out from the shop.

  We bolted forward. Not bothering to waste time with the picklocks, I jerked my hands up, a ball of spectral fire playing over my fingers before pouring into the locking mechanism of the door. Metal melted, circuits fried, and a second later, the door sprang open—still largely intact, so we could close it behind us, but nowhere near the barrier it’d been. The inside of Signora Visione’s shop was the same as it had been the last time, which was to say, dark. I lifted my hands, and the fire burst into four separate directions, hovering in the air like miniature disco balls. Now that we were inside, we could hear better—and what we heard was desperate crying. We darted through another set of sound-damping doors and entered Visione’s dressing room, where the old woman lay on the ground surrounded by sobbing children, some of them clutching bolts of fabric to their small bodies.

  “What happened?” Nikki barked as I lurched forward. Signora Visione’s body was little more than skin hung over bones. My third eye flicked open as I reached her—and then I wheeled back.

  “Poison,” I hissed, noticing the telltale breakdown of circuitry. “Just happened. What’d she touch? What’d she drink?”

  “Nothing—she drank nothing! She was coming to open the door, and she fell!” The children flung themselves at Nikki, clamoring in Italian, which she didn’t know, but I didn’t have time to play translator. There was no denying what Visione had been struck with, and I was more than ready for the job. I hadn’t been able to heal myself under the influence of Nul Magis, true—but I was no longer under its influence.

  I reached out with my mind, cradling the frail body of the woman in front of me with a web of energy that picked up the still weakly firing circuits of her neural system. I didn’t focus on her physical reactions to the drug—it wasn’t the physical part of the old woman I was worried about. It was her mind, her soul, the very heart of her magic. Reaching deep within her, I found myself sucked into the very earliest memories of her history, when she first became a magician. Signora Visione was seriously old. But those kernels of her magic were the root of the power of Nul Magis, I realized suddenly, and probably why children had been the preferred organic suppliers in the butcher’s era. It was the newness of their magic that was important, that provided the leverage for the fell concoction to do its work—which had to be why Greaves and Marrow had been targeted now. They’d been Connected, certainly, and magicians of some renown…but their true birth into the arcane had taken place only a few weeks earlier, when they’d been exposed to the influx of magic as the world had nearly been broken.

  My mind flashed to Budin as I held Signora Visione’s core magic in the palm of my own power, breathing it back to life. The poor man had every right to be petrified, I thought. He’d also been reborn recently, and to far greater effect than Greaves and Marrow. He would be the prime candidate to provide source material for the nouveau butcher’s dark concoction.

  Signora Visione convulsed beneath me, which sent the children into a new paroxysm of squeals and bleats, Nikki’s strident voice ordering them to chill out having a surprisingly galvanizing effect. I glanced up to see her drawing the kids over to the side of the room, half of them still hugging her and the others kneeling at her feet, huddled around her like a human crinoline, their fists to their chins as they watched me labor over the old woman.

  I redoubled my efforts. The signora was now responding, the magic at her core opening up again from a tight, withered husk to a new-forming bud as I breathed fresh energy into her, sending it along her circuits like sand scattered across the floor. She shivered, and another layer of power built around the first, then a second, then a third, her body finally beginning to warm as she regained strength and began to slowly fight toward consciousness.

  When she surged upward, however, her arms flailing, I barely a
voided getting cracked in the face.

  “Vattene!” she howled, and, failing to connect with my face, she took another swipe, only this time, her bony fist jammed into my solar plexus. With a grunt, I fell back from her, taking another crack upside the head as she changed directions yet again before I could grab hold of her wrists. “Vattene, vattene!” she railed some more, even as the children started once more to cry.

  “Dollface,” Nikki protested, clearly not impressed with my fighting skills.

  “She’s an old lady!”

  I ducked a solid kick from said old lady and managed to fling my body onto her, holding her to the ground as the final round of her magical circuits fired and rejoined themselves. Signora Visione still kept screaming at the top of her lungs, but she was old, her screams were faint, and eventually, her lungs gave out. When she drew in a deep breath, I flattened myself on her until I was relatively sure she was close to passing out, then risked letting go of her hands.

  “You’re very strong. And very heavy,” she said, her voice thick with the irritation I remembered so well from the first time we met. “Get off me before you kill me all over again.”

  I slid back from her, resting my weight on my heels. The kids surrounding Nikki seemed desperate to lunge toward the old woman, but Nikki held them tight in a thrall of magic that had nothing to do with her Connected abilities and everything to do with the fact that she had children of her own, once upon a time.

  “You know what happened to you?” I asked as Signora Visione lay on the floor staring at me.

  “Do you know what happened to your hair? I don’t think so. That we will need to fix.” She waved at me weakly as I leaned forward, scanning her body for any other issues now that the Nul Magis had been neutralized. There were none. For being on the cusp of death, the old woman held up pretty well.

  “There was nothing,” she said, shifting her gaze from me to the ceiling. “I go to the marketplace, I pick up the day’s needs, I stop at the cloth makers, I come here. No one follows me, no one looks at me. They know better.”

  She sat up then, cackling a raspy breath when she saw Nikki stationed with her charges. “My hearts,” she said, and as if they were a released rubber band, the kids burst forth and rushed her, somehow managing to stop in time so that they didn’t break any bones. They lifted her off the floor and stabilized her, engulfing her in a group hug, though she was barely taller than they were. She sighed as she rested her hands on each of their heads, one after the other. This time, there was no fierceness to her expression, only enduring love. “We have work to do, yes?” she murmured.

  The kids didn’t move.

  I tried again. “What was it like when you got to the shop? Anything different here?”

  “No. There were the day’s costumes to be picked up, and I met with a carrier, and then—”

  “No, Nonna.” A thin, muffled voice spoke at the edge of the scrum, and a child’s curly headed mop popped up. She gazed at the old woman with large, dark eyes. “No one came to pick up costumes. They’re all still here.”

  “What are you saying? Of course they are not.” The pile moved with startling speed back through the dressing room and into the front of the shop, and sure enough, several large bags hung on the hooks lining the walls. Signora Visione scowled. “That cannot be. The men, they came! They all came!”

  “Who did?” I asked, exchanging a glance with Nikki. “Were these costumes for the Magicians’ Ball tomorrow night? Like for Valetti or Alfonse or Budin—”

  “Them? No!” Signora Visione scoffed, throwing up her hands. “Those fools do not know from good design. Signora Chiara, yes, she works with me, but she is the only one.”

  “Signora Chiara,” I said flatly. “You’ve worked with her a long time?”

  “Her and her family before. She’s the first female Marchesi on the magician’s senate, but her father and her father’s father was before, and on down the line, since the very first Carnevale. She will have to have children of her own, yes? Or perhaps her nieces or nephews, if she wants the line to continue. But she is very strong. And her costume is there.” Signora Visione pointed to a bag that took up a good four square feet. Nikki hissed with interest, and even I fought the urge to peek under the cover. “She will come for it today at three, not before. She sleeps during the day before the Magicians’ Ball, as should you.” She said these words to Nikki quite sternly. Then she slid her glance to me. “You, eh. There is not so much need.”

  I snorted. “I appreciate the vote of confidence. But what are we looking at here? You saw someone enter, and no one did? And when you came to open the door for us, you blacked out?”

  “Or someone entered, and I assumed it was for a costume. And it wasn’t.” She frowned. “But entering, it is not so easy. I would not have let anyone in.”

  “And you don’t know who—?”

  “I don’t remember. My hearts?”

  The children merely stared at her, and she shook her head. “They do not see the customers usually. You are an exception.” She looked at Nikki. “You make them smile.”

  Nikki nodded. “It’s what I do.”

  “I’m going to need the names of whoever these costumes are going to,” I said. “Whoever entered did so because you were expecting them. One of those has to be the lead we’re looking for.”

  With grumbling agreement, Signora Visione promised she would give us the list, then hustled us back into the dressing room for another round of fitting. When she was done, she stood back, her scowl once more in place. “You are ready,” she announced.

  “You got that right, sister,” Nikki said, sounding awestruck. She stood in front of a mirror, a vision in a shimmering coat of teal green, a profusion of peacock feathers swirling around her head. Her deep blue boots caught the light. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything more beautiful.” She glanced back to the old woman. “Do you do special orders?”

  But Signora Visione was looking at me.

  “And you! You are a masterpiece.”

  I smoothed down my golden cape, shot through with bolts of white. It was pretty, without question, though it was nowhere near the showstopper that Nikki’s costume was. The tiniest kernel of envy lay in my most hidden heart over that, but I was the one who needed to be circumspect, I reminded myself. I was the one who needed to blend.

  “You are wrong, Justice Wilde, you will see,” Signora Visione said, and when I glanced back at her, I could see in her eyes that she knew what I was thinking. I supposed you didn’t work as a costumer for decades without being able to read your clients. “In this costume, in the Casino degli Spiriti, you will be truly seen by those who love and fear you most. Pay careful attention and know their reaction is both pure and right.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The grand ballroom of the Casino of Spirits wasn’t even in the casino proper but in an adjacent building across a wide, formally landscaped lawn. By the time we arrived, night had fallen, and the place was lit with torchieres and at least a million tiny white Christmas lights decorating every tree and shrub. From the water, it looked like a fairy wonderland, and I was absolutely certain that at least half the motivation behind these decorations had been for what distant passersby might think rather than actual attendees.

  Which was not to say the attendees weren’t arriving in suitable numbers to pay their respects.

  I’d had a vague sense of the crowd two nights earlier at the Spectacle, but I’d been pretty quickly distracted, first with Budin and then with the little dart of joy that’d been intended for him. Even now, strolling beside Nikki with our requisite glasses of champagne, I felt the touch of the Nul Magis within me. Not harming me, not anymore, but not entirely leaving me either. If this was the magical version of an STD, I wasn’t a fan.

  The crowd tonight had a totally different feel to it too. Where the evening before last, they’d come to be entertained, to chatter and mingle and reconnect with friends old and new, tonight they came for more serious matt
ers. Count Valetti, who’d spent most of the afternoon asleep in preparation for the event, was now totally in his element, blissfully mumbling about alliances and connections, referencing a decidedly analog little black book. Upside, said book was virtually hackproof; downside, the search function was decidedly labor intensive.

  “He’s still at it,” Nikki said, angling her headdress of blue feathers to the right. I looked and caught Valetti looking back. He nodded rapidly as I raised a hand to him, then returned to his notations.

  He wasn’t alone either. Fully two dozen of the men and women milling through the manicured grounds were carrying some version of the small book, some gilded in silver or gold, some leather-bound, a few consigned to tablets—but only a few. All the magicians wielding these little compendiums of the arcane would glance around the nearest knot of people, check a few pages in their book, perhaps write a note or two, then move on. I didn’t know if I was at a party or a show dog competition.

  “What notes are they keeping in there?”

  “It’s for the alliances.” The voice was all the more unexpected because it came at my elbow, and I stepped back sharply to once again avoid bumping into a man at knee level. The hat and thick cape rendered the masked figure a particularly shapeless lump, especially sitting on the low garden bench. The voice, however, was pure Budin. Once again emulating a potted plant. He really needed a new gig.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were going to sit this out.” My tone was severe, but only because the last time I’d seen Budin, he’d been surrounded with security personnel at each of the cardinal points surrounding him, a virtual compass of protection as he’d dined on a late lunch at Palazzo Mystere.

  Budin waved around him. “And miss this? My moment of triumph?”