The Red King: Wilde Justice, Book 1

by Jenn Stark

  “You’re having a moment of triumph?”

  He leaned forward, as bulky as a pup tent. “I was targeted by the butcher of Venice and survived,” he said, his voice decidedly more gleeful than it had been in the palazzo. Getting out and about had been good for him. “I was taken in by the Arcana Council overnight—overnight! And nobody knew the nature of the conversations we had, nobody knew the plans we were making, the arrangements.”

  “Ah…we weren’t making any arrangements.”

  “I know!” He chortled. “But nobody else knows that. Even Alfonse is treating me better than he has in a decade, and I didn’t have to do anything but nearly die to get his attention. It’s wonderful.”

  He said this with a distinct lack of irony, and Nikki and I stared at him. “With respect, signore,” she finally said. “You could die all over again tonight. I don’t think that’s the kind of attention you really want.”

  “No, no, I’ve learned my lesson,” Budin said. “I’m wearing a high-necked cape for a reason, a skull cap, and a mask beneath this hat. Below my cape is full body armor.”

  “No wonder you’re sitting,” Nikki put in, but Budin waved off her sarcasm.

  “I don’t plan on making myself known, and I’ve been installed here since before the first guests arrived. Most don’t even look twice. Plus, as I said, I don’t need to keep the book this year. It’s more enjoyable than you can possibly imagine to know that I don’t need to keep track of the many alliances being struck tonight, because I’ve already been ushered into the grandest one of all. Armaeus Bertrand has agreed to meet with me after the close of Carnevale to further my studies!”

  I barely kept from spitting out my champagne as Nikki carefully held her own glass away from me. “He has?”

  “You can ask him yourself.” Budin waved excitedly toward the building at the far end of the gardens, and sure enough, a figure stood there, silhouetted against the bright lights of the entryway. Tall and regal, with a flowing black cape that seemed to shimmer in black and gold, it could only be Armaeus.

  “You go inside,” Budin ordered. “I’ll be along once it’s quiet again.”

  “No, we’ll be along,” Nikki said. “You’ve got a tendency to get into trouble.”

  “The bodyguard of the Council,” Budin breathed, his voice sounding enraptured. “Assigned to me!”

  “Right.” I shook my head, but couldn’t help but smile. “But hey, one more question,” I asked. “What does my costume look like to you?”

  “Gold and white, as it should,” Budin said, beaming. “You look like the Arcana Council member you are.”

  Which sounded good but wasn’t exactly a showstopper reaction. Then again, I was pretty sure Budin neither loved nor feared me, so maybe his take on my party outfit didn’t matter so much.

  I managed to down the rest of my champagne and grab another flute from the tray of a passing server, assuming that Armaeus would already be inside by the time I reached the ballroom building. I was wrong. The Magician waited for me patiently at the top of the steps as if we’d had a scheduled assignation.

  He watched me climb the stairs, his face hidden behind a mask patterned in black-and-gold diamonds. It suited him. “My compliments to Signora Visione,” he said, his voice rich with approval.

  “She isn’t half-bad,” I said. I glanced down at my own costume, still seeing what I’d seen when I’d first donned it—a shimmery gold-and-white cape, mask, and hat, almost austere in its simplicity. What I didn’t realize until later, after Nikki had picked up on my petty dismay over my attire compared to her flamboyant silhouette, was that in my case, beauty truly was in the eye of the beholder, at least if that beholder loved me. She’d marched me over to a mirror, and when I stood in front of it, with her looking at me—I could see what she saw.

  And what she saw was astounding. Gone was the simple golden outfit, replaced with a profusion of ebony and white feathers that coated my hat and cape and piled up at my shoulders. My mask was a falcon’s beak studded with sequins, and my shoes were blinged up as well.

  From there, I’d made it a point to be seen by at least a half-dozen others while I was standing near mirrors or windows—I’d even let my picture be taken in a selfie by an awestruck tourist. Every time, it was different, though other than with Nikki, it wasn’t all that impressive. Once again, however, as the signora had told me: I wasn’t dressed to impress everyone…

  “So what is it you see?” I asked Armaeus as he held out his arm to me. He turned, and we walked into the building, crossing a relatively shallow hallway faced with a wall of open French doors that led into the ballroom beyond. That room, a gorgeous space lit with chandeliers, was already filled with a crowd of elegantly dressed figures of every description—as long as that description included a hat, boots, a mask, and a cape.

  “I see Justice of the Arcana Council, looking as beautiful as when I first met her as Sara Wilde the artifact hunter,” Armaeus said, his voice pitched low enough that I should have been the only one hearing him, though several masks around us turned our way. “I see you walking in a cape and hat of golden white, but you are not masked to me. I see your eyes, I see your smile, I see your fire. The same fire that builds me, destroys me, and recreates me again every time you walk into a room.”

  I stopped in my tracks, blinking rapidly behind my mask, trying to make sense of his words. “Are you…” I managed, narrowing my eyes at him, no matter how heavily my heart thumped its ungainly staccato. “Really?”

  “You are Justice, you are Vigilance, and you are—” Armaeus paused, cocking his head, though I couldn’t hear anything. “I believe they’re playing our song, Miss Wilde.”

  At that moment, the music swelled in the far corner of the room, and Armaeus pulled me forward, gathering me into his arms as if I knew the absolute first thing about dancing.

  “Act naturally,” he murmured. “Think of it as a very slow fight.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking advantage of my moment with the most powerful woman in the room.” He turned me again, his mask gazing serenely at the other couples on the dance floor, some pairings of what appeared to be two men, some two women, and others the mix that had been most common when the music wafting over the dance floor had first been played in European salons.

  And then, I saw something else—the barest glimpse between light and shadow, two dancers so ephemeral they might have been my imagination, but for their vivid, transcendent emotion. There, among all the masked magicians, a man and a woman danced together in that grand hall—one, in the simple tunic and breeches of a sixteenth-century painter, the other in a gorgeous gown, her hair piled high on her head. The woman—who seemed by far the more sophisticated of the pair—gazed at the older man with gentle, almost bemused affection. The painter stared back at her with unabashed adoration in his eyes, his soul-deep devotion palpable all the way across the room.

  My breath caught in my throat. It appeared that Luzzo the painter had finally won over the heart of his fair Cecilia, all these centuries later.

  Armaeus tightened his hold on my arms, in silent acknowledgment of what I was seeing. Then he turned me around again.

  “The Red King has arrived,” he murmured. “His magic is cloaked, even to me, but the signature of the Nul Magis he carries in his weapon responded to the echo of the drug still within you. That much was made clear the moment you arrived, though we cannot pinpoint where his kernel of Nul Magis is. You can rest assured that he knows the danger you represent, however. Fear is building with each passing moment. He’s looking for you now.”

  “He?” That made me straighten a little. “I was beginning to lay odds on Chiara being the one with her hands in the stew.”

  “Chiara Marchesi. It’s not a bad guess, but her family gained its favor well before the 1500s. The Marchesis didn’t need the boost of the butcher’s concoction to gain their position on the senate—they created the senate.”

  “Well, you could say
that about any of these guys.”

  “Not Alfonse,” the Magician said. “His family is old and storied, but most of those stories, you’ll find, are tied to the Church, not the cauldron. He has enjoyed great renown these past several years, but what is different now…”

  “Is the influx of magic,” I said. “But you can’t seriously think Alfonse has anything to do with this. He doesn’t seem…”

  “Connected enough?” Armaeus tilted his mask down to me. “It is but one calculation of hundreds, but based on the reception I’ve had from him these past few days, it has merit.”

  “The reception—Armaeus, he thinks you’re a god. And given his background, I don’t use those words lightly. He’s been waiting on you hand and foot and treating you like you’re the OG of magic, if that’s not redundant to even say.”

  Armaeus considered that. “I am the OG of magic,” he countered.

  “Exactly. And Alfonse has a particular passion for history and for everybody being in his proper place. Would the butcher have introduced you to a dozen aspiring magicians, people who reasonably might one day be stronger than you—certainly stronger than him?”

  “I doubt quite seriously that he thought any of those acolytes would surpass my abilities.”

  “But his own?” When Armaeus didn’t answer, I wanted to poke him. That was unfortunately difficult to do when both my hands were trapped in a dance I was only barely surviving. “Exactly. He wouldn’t have. And I can’t see him getting his hands messy with blow darts and poison, either—or hiring someone to do that for him. Neither can I see him killing, what are we up to—four people? Five, no six, if you count the attacks on Budin and Signora Visione. That’s an impressive body count for a cleric.”

  “Clerics have done far worse in the name of their popes, kings, and gods.”

  “Maybe. But not this cleric. Look.”

  Armaeus turned, and we both watched Alfonse approach a short, stocky man in a cape, recognizable only by his escort in her profusion of teal feathers. Nikki held herself like a cop, despite the over-the-top glamour of her ensemble, but there was nothing in her stance that made me think she was about to lay out Alfonse. If anything, the man’s genuine reaction to the blocky Budin, complete with an attempt at a European air kiss, made his intentions about the man eminently clear to me. Budin had been right. Alfonse had taken his vote of confidence from the Council to heart and was willing to elevate him to higher status in the senate of magicians, and doubtless was about to announce that very decision this evening, in the clustered heart of the core believers.

  Apparently, I wasn’t the only person who thought so.

  As Armaeus turned me around again in another graceful arc, my third eye flickered open almost of its own accord, and I swept the room, my heart beating more heavily as I saw the thriving, jumping, jittering bursts of Connected activity. The magical circuits of energy in the room were weaving together in a frenetic dance that had nothing to do with the swells of music from the musicians, the swirls and arcs of the dancers serving only to blend and weave the streams of power more tightly together. Everyone was caught up in the moment, the magic, the excitement, the splendor. Everyone except—

  Except one figure at the far end of the ballroom, his electrical current bursting as well, but not with excitement or joy. It shot up in elegant calligraphied lines—a short slash, then a longer one—short, then longer. I focused on that oddly familiar pattern, unable to penetrate it. The sorcerer was a fiercely powerful illusionist, and his fury seemed to snap in the air like a sheet caught in the wind as he lifted a silver wand in time to the music. Was that an illusion too? Was he really holding up a wand with a spark at its end that beat with a familiar dull black throb of energy?

  The same throb of energy that echoed within me, all the way down to the seat of my soul?

  “No,” I whispered as Armaeus turned me around again. In that moment, I knew I was truly seeing the Red King—perhaps for the first time since I’d come to Venice. Across the ballroom floor, I met the flat-eyed, fully insane glare of the once and future most powerful magician of the Venetian senate. He recognized me too, I realized with a start. He saw me as I truly was.

  But this was not the first night he’d seen me.

  Not at all.

  The energy flares burst up again, one short, one long, graceful calligraphied slashes of power…just like an insignia I’d seen first on a sign, and then in a recipe book of spells, and finally here, in the heart of the magician’s senate.

  Count Vittore Valetti. The Red King.

  With my third eye, I saw the wand quickly change trajectory, flattening out, pointing across the room—

  No!

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  As if propelled into motion by my thoughts, Armaeus burst into vapor and tore away from me, a profusion of smoke swirling in his wake. Time slowed to a standstill, but the dart containing the fell toxin shot across the room and straight into the smoke—then through it, its unerring trajectory still the two men at the far end of the chamber. I had some vague sense of Armaeus being not where he should be—which was stopping the dart—but all the way over where the perpetrator was even now turning away, but that was no good, no good, not when the—

  Budin made a noise I didn’t think was even possible coming out of such a small man, a shouted command so powerful that the very walls of the room shook. It wasn’t enough to change the trajectory of a magic dart, but he also moved with a speed I’d never seen in a human who wasn’t also an Arcana member and thrust Alfonse out of the way. The Nul Magis-laced dart struck the small magician square in the chest, instantly burrowing deep—but Budin didn’t stop there. With another thunderclap of an order, the barb froze into a block of ice, then shattered, the shards bursting back out of his chest plate and hitting the floor with a clatter.

  A clatter that everyone could hear, since the room had gone dead silent.

  “No more!” Budin growled, the girth afforded him by his body armor making him seem like a fierce little tank. “Tonight is for joy, not death!”

  I pulled the hat free of my hair and slid off the cape and mask, drawing in a rich lungful of oxygen. “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  Turning away from Budin, I made my way over to where Armaeus held the upper arm of Count Valetti. Whether it was the sight of someone unmasked or merely the drama of the moment, no one spoke as I strode across the hall. Even the count merely glared at me, his back straight, his hands clenched.

  “You have no jurisdiction here,” he said tightly as I approached. “The senate of magicians supersedes the Arcana Council. It has since the Middle Ages.”

  I drew in a long breath. Up until I’d seen Valetti’s exploding magical signature, with energy that shot out in the same distinctive flares as his calligraphic style, Valetti had been third or fourth on my list of possible bad guys. But he had been on it. There’d been the faintest of echoes of his calligraphy in the recipe booklets too. This was a man who wanted to be caught, who wanted to be known for his diabolical crimes. Lucky for him, he’d now get his chance. “Your family has long been a well-respected part of that senate, Valetti. That didn’t have to change simply because the balance of magic did. Sorcery is a learned art.”

  “It should be a learned art,” Valetti practically spat. “It should be, but it wasn’t. Not after you and your precious Council waded in and flailed around, trying to set a world to rights that you didn’t even understand. You have no appreciation for history, no appreciation for the worth of spending generations honing the position of your family, the respect, the honor. No. Instead you step in and change it all in the flash of a moment, taking away everything that mattered.”

  Beyond Valetti, another man removed his hat, then slid his mask up and away from his face. Luca Stone, I realized, his expression unreadable as he stared at his colleague, the man for whom he’d entangled the Arcana Council in the affairs of magicians. The prelate, I realized. He was staring at the prelate, not Count Valetti
.

  Stone’s gaze shifted, and his eyes met mine. He smiled and nodded with appreciation.

  I returned my attention to Valetti, whose glare hadn’t diminished. “You had no right to murder Balestri—” I began.

  “Balestri!” The count threw up his hands, a man truly at the end of his rope. “That was my mistake. I know it was. But he was so annoying. His constant parties, his dirty little drug trade, his insufferable moaning about how his family used to be the most famous in all the land. He was nothing—he had no power, none! He could barely conjure candlelight, but to hear him talk, you would’ve thought he was the most powerful magician in the cosmos. And everybody put up with him. Why? Because of his family. When mine was so much more obviously the finer stock, and had been for hundreds of years.”

  “You knew I saw him die,” I accused. “You created his final message about the Red King to—what? Taunt me? Why in the world would you do that?”

  “Because I am the Red King,” Valetti said coldly. “I am the monarch who floats upon the open sea, benevolent and good, guiding all that know to follow me. As all the generations before me, the House of Valetti is the rightful ruler of the magicians of this city—and it always has been.”

  “Not always, no.” I didn’t have the Valetti family slim leather volume on me, but I didn’t need it in my hands to recall its words, which I now saw in a different light. “You were one of the quietest families of the magicians’ senate from the moment it was formed until the late 1500s. Then another wave of plague struck, what everyone thought was plague, anyway, and only the Valettis and a few other families stayed strong. That was when your real power started to build. You became one of the most respected families of the senate, and your magic grew, and gradually, in time, you reached the position of respect you felt your family should be accorded.”

  “I was happy to work within the construct of the senate of magicians,” Valetti said, his voice low and malevolent through his mask. “It was an honor to be a part of that senate, and my family believes in honor more than anything. Honor and the rightful place of those who have done all they could for this city, this senate, these people.”