The Untamed Moon

by Jenn Stark

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Card

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  A Note from Jenn

  The Moon

  Books By Jenn Stark

  Acknowledgments

  About Jenn Stark

  “Swear not by the Moon, the inconstant Moon…”

  Night is falling on the world of the Arcana Council, and the darkest corners of the psychic community are stirring, eager for war no matter the cost.

  * * *

  In a last-ditch effort to maintain the balance of magic, Justice Sara Wilde launches an all-out search for the Moon, one of the Council’s most powerful missing members. With a team that includes the darkly formidable Magician, the tech-savant Fool and the incomparable Nikki Dawes…Sara likes her odds for finding her quarry in time.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, she’s not alone in the hunt.

  * * *

  A cry for help from the depths of South America triggers Sara’s oldest enemies, the cutthroat artifact hunters of the arcane black market. In a race to find the deeply secretive, elusive Moon, the winner is promised power beyond their wildest imagination. Are these claims pure lies and moonlit fantasy? Or a sign that when the Moon is in play, nothing is ever as it seems?

  * * *

  The truth is deadlier than anyone expects.

  * * *

  Even your shadow will betray you when you hunt The Untamed Moon.

  The Untamed Moon

  Wilde Justice, Book 7

  Jenn Stark

  for Nikki

  and all those who choose to own their power

  1

  The devil was in the details—again. I still didn’t want him on my pizza.

  “They cut their pepperoni into horned devil faces?” I studied the steaming pie. “That seems…wrong.”

  Across from me, Sariah Pelter leaned back and propped her booted feet on the vinyl bench seat next to my legs. She moved aside the stack of napkins emblazoned with a devil and pitchforks, along with “Best Pizza in Pennsauken” inscribed in curly script. She pushed the pizza pan my way in tribute. “Justice first.”

  I reluctantly picked up a slice, glancing from it to her. Sariah wore what I was coming to acknowledge was her new uniform: a beat-up leather jacket with lots of pockets to hide weapons I didn’t much want to think about, a tank top, and low-slung jeans, usually accompanied by scuffed boots. It wasn’t all that different from my typical attire, but it seemed rougher, edgier. Sort of like Sariah herself.

  “I’m telling you, this place would be freaking amazing if it wasn’t run by devil worshippers,” she said, talking around a mouthful of pizza. “Or if they actually were talking about kissing up to the Council’s version. Kreios is a pain in the ass, but at least he’s easy on the eyes. The guy these people are following? He rocks it much older school, all the way down to his cloven hooves. And he’s bad, bad news.”

  Coming from Sariah, this observation hit a little harder than usual. As my not-so-better half, she’d spent an unreasonable portion of her life in Hell. Maybe not the Hell that Bible thumpers described so eloquently, filled with fire, brimstone, and pointy-tailed demons inflicting torture on any unfortunates who dared to violate their religious strictures. But a place of imprisonment, confusion, and lies nevertheless. A place you couldn’t leave when you wanted to. A place without coffee.

  It had been bad.

  Sariah had been a part of me at one point, our two spirits living as one when we were kids. At age seventeen, an inferno of epic proportions had split us off from each other. I’d run away from that fire, she’d run toward it. And that had marked the difference in our personalities ever since.

  I’d found Sariah in Hell while hunting down someone else for my number one client at the time. The Arcana Council were a group of Tarot sorcerers so strong, some of them were actual demigods, and they’d taken it upon themselves to keep the magic of the world in balance. I hadn’t so much cared about the group’s mission statement when I’d first started working with them. My goal had been to use the cash they paid me to help keep the most vulnerable members of the psychic community safe from the higher-level magical asshats who exploited them for personal gain. But one job had led to the next, and then the next. Eventually, I’d joined on as a bona fide Arcana Council member—Justice, no less. Brand-new title, same job description: to right the wrongs perpetrated against Connecteds by other Connecteds.

  Spoiler alert: there were a lot of wrongs to right.

  Sariah had taken on a new job recently too, one with an even sketchier job description than mine. As the Night Witch, she’d officially become my right-hand woman—as in the left-hand-not-knowing-what-the-right-hand-was-doing kind of woman. She’d been duly appointed to take out all the bad guys who needed taking out, no after-action review required. She was also supposed to work on her own.

  I pointed my pizza slice at her. “So explain why you asked me to come here. You have all the authority you need to make crooked things straight. I’m technically not supposed to be a part of that.”

  “You’re right.” She took a long swig of her beer, then settled the bottle back on the table. Even she knew enough not to order from the tap at a place called Demonico’s Pizza, where they served their pies hot and dangerous. “Trouble is, I’ve never done any of this before. I kind of thought it might be good for me to have some, you know, onboarding.”

  I blinked at her, instantly on alert. “Why? What did you do?”

  Sariah lifted one shoulder, dropped it. “Let’s just say you may be getting another call for Justice across the transom in oh, say, a couple of days. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take them to dig out.”

  “Take who?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” she countered, setting her boots back on the floor so she could hunch over her beer toward me. “It was a dig in Madagascar, a diamond mine that had been part of this indigenous people’s religion forever. They’re good, simple people. They sell one of their sacred diamonds a year, and that diamond finds its way back to Hell in due course. Once I started noticing the pattern, I got into the habit of returning the rock to their mine so the cycle could start again. No big deal. But I haven’t been down to Hell in a while, so when I saw a complaint from the tribe, I poked around to see what was going on. Come to find out, a bunch of assholes from the arcane black market had discovered the tribe’s mine. They killed half the miners, and were going to town digging the shit out of this hole in the ground themselves without a single damned clue of what they were doing. Those bigger sacred diamonds are bad news, intended only to keep that tribe rolling along. Too many of them hit the market at once, a whole lot of people die.”

  I studied her skeptically. “I don’t suppose you explained that to the assholes in careful, measured tones?”

  “See? There you go. A tactic I never would have considered.” Saria
h grinned. “My way was a lot faster.”

  “I bet.” I set down my pizza slice and settled back, sliding only a little on the shiny vinyl. “Is the tribe going to be okay? The ones who are left, anyway?”

  “Yeah.” She rolled the beer bottle in her hand. It was already half-empty. “They’re the innocents in all this. They should never have been forced to defend themselves from a bunch of Connected assholes trying to horn in on their territory. Not their battle to fight, not their day to die. Anyway, now they’ve gotta track down some rogue diamonds, but that shouldn’t be too much trouble. Those rocks tend to make themselves known. It was easier when they just fell down at my feet, usually clutched in the hand of someone who really wished they’d never found it. But God love greed, it does keep things interesting.”

  I grimaced, but she wasn’t wrong. “Well, I don’t have a problem with what you did, for what it’s worth.” I tipped my bottle toward her. “Consider yourself onboarded.”

  Sariah snorted. “Excellent.”

  I watched a thick-lashed waitress walk by and serve the family on the other side of us, her gaze darting quickly to us, then around the room as she passed. Her lacquered nails were so long, I couldn’t see how she held the glasses of dark soda, but she handled her delivery like a pro. Her customers were a couple of grandparent types with their grandkids, all of them enjoying an enormous pepperoni pie. Despite Sariah’s comment about wanting some training, she’d brought me here for a different reason.

  I refocused on her. “So other than the name and the unfortunate advertising strategy, what’s the story on this place? I gotta assume you’ve been here before, yeah?”

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “So, Demonico’s is a gateway to Hell, right? I mean, obviously. Back in the day, I got bored and decided to make a project out of checking portals. This happened to be one of the places I hit. I couldn’t come through, but I could see who they were sending down to their infernal reward, and who was doing the sending. At the time, I didn’t think that much of it. Bunch of low-level necromancers, usually marshaling the worst of the demon horde to do their bidding, the spawn, that sort of thing. No big deal. But when I saw the plea from Demonico’s at Justice Hall, something didn’t sound right. It was sent from one of the waitstaff here, some chick who’s psychic enough to keep herself safe while she rakes in great tips. To paraphrase the complaint, she’s worried that her boss, a guy named Barry, is about to catch a whole lot of heat from the arcane black market syndicate types, and then there’d be a whole lot of dead bodies to explain.”

  “Dead bodies?” I asked, eyeballing what was left of the pizza. “Please do not tell me…”

  Sariah chuckled. “You’re good. So far as I can tell, cannibalism is not part of Demonico’s secret sauce. But here’s the thing.” She leaned forward, her lips twisting into a smirk. “Our man Barry, he’s making a lot of dough.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “If you’re just going to hit me with stupid jokes—”

  “No, I’m serious. He’s making dough into actual people. Like golems. He fashions them in the back of his bakery, where the big ovens are, and he’s swapping them out for people, with the help of demons.”

  “Oh.” I blinked. “Why?”

  “That’s where things get interesting. It started out as a low-level secondary workforce. The models for the golems are homeless people mostly, folks he paid to lie low until their doppelgängers did the dirty work he needed done. Demonico’s has a program where they feed anyone who wants leftover pizza out the back of the house, no questions asked. Been doing it for a couple of decades, apparently, with no problem. But something shifted after the old man died and his son Barry took over a few years ago. The jobs he needed done became more complex.”

  “Transition of authority,” I said. “Escalation of business.”

  “Yep. Apparently, Barry got the idea that he can have a whole army of golems spread out across New Jersey to act as some sort of enforcer mob, and he’s been doing a pretty good job at building a Gumby army. Very under the table. And it worked. Crime’s ticked up, but there’s a fair amount of crime here to begin with, so nobody much noticed, especially since Barry funnels a lot of the proceeds back into the community. Also, nobody noticed a few more homeless people apparently going dead, though the dead were mostly the golems, from what I gathered. Either way, it’s not ideal. Worse, Barry’s branching out, and apparently, a friend of a cousin of a neighbor got hit by a doughboy with a decided whiff of Italian seasoning. She came here looking for information, and she’s known for flapping her gums. Barry’s nervous as hell the whole thing’s about to fall apart. Even if our psychic waitress is sweet on the guy, she’s no idiot. She’s worried he’s in over his head, and she thinks some serious shit is about to go down.”

  I lifted a brow. Barry sounded like a weasel at best, and a killer at worst. I didn’t know why Sariah wanted to save the guy, but she obviously did. Which was…interesting. “Go down, you mean like something specific? Urgent?”

  “Well, I didn’t just bring you here because of the fabulous pizza.” Sariah shrugged. “There’s some sort of deal that’s going to be happening tonight. Figured we should be a part of it.”

  “Sariah…”

  “What? I’m trying to be responsible. I even brought along my big sister to make sure I did everything by the book this time.” Her eyes brightened as she took another drink of her beer, focusing on something over my shoulder. “Here we go,” she murmured. “It may be a good idea for you to pull out your cards.”

  I squinted at her. “You want me to give you a card reading?”

  “Not me,” she said, tilting the amber bottle toward the back of the dining room. “Maria Romano. Our complainant.”

  I half turned to see the waitress who’d served the table next to ours pull off her apron and drape it over a barstool.

  “I’m going on break,” she called through the kitchen door, and a throaty shout from the back acknowledged her announcement. Apparently, the rules for waitstaff were pretty lax at Demonico’s. The waitress marched right over to our table, her gaze flicking between Sariah and me. Maria Romano knew who we were and why we were here, no question.

  “I didn’t think you’d come,” she said as Sariah scooted over in the booth, letting the woman sit down. With the high-backed wooden barriers separating us from the next table, the space was admittedly cozy, private. I could imagine all sorts of deals being made here, on the up-and-up or otherwise.

  “Yeah, well, you won the lottery,” Sariah said. She’d put down her beer and was now fiddling with a strip of gleaming metal. She’d pulled it out of one of her pockets and started twirling it in her fingers despite the fact that it was razor-sharp. I recognized one of the cuffs of Justice that Sariah had whittled into her own tailor-made knife, but Maria didn’t seem alarmed as Sariah used the blade to gesture toward me. “I’ve given Justice Wilde the basics, but has anything happened since you and I last spoke?”

  “Not really,” Maria said, hunching toward me over the table, her thick, dark hair falling forward over her brow before she curled it behind her ear again. “Barry, he’s the boss now. His dad, Joe, passed away five years ago. Joe was a good man, mostly—and Barry tries real hard to do the right thing.”

  I grimaced. Not a ringing endorsement of Joe or Barry, but Maria continued. “Barry doesn’t have the discipline of his father, you know? First I thought he was just pushing harder on the homeless people we helped out, getting them to run his side deals. You’d hear about someone doing stupid things, dangerous things, though nobody ever seemed to get in trouble with the police. I didn’t notice so much back then. You don’t see what you’re not looking for, you know? I mean, sure, the place was flush with cash, maybe more cash than made sense for our customer flow, but it wasn’t crazy out of line. But then, things got worse. More money started coming in, and I started to see the people who came around back for free pie in places they totally shouldn’t be. Half the time, it was like, they weren’t even themsel
ves. They’d become sort of…I mean…”

  Sariah leaned in. “Gingerbread men,” she supplied, and the waitress winced. She looked to me.

  “Some important people have figured out the truth about Barry’s army, and they want to know more. There’s a meeting tonight in the family event room, right after closing. I’m supposed to work it, but I’m scared.”

  “Will Barry be there?”

  She nodded quickly, her amber-colored eyes wide with concern. “He’s nervous too, I think. He’s been drinking himself stupid. He knows better, but it gives him courage. Swagger. He needs it with these guys, you know? I think they’re pretty high up on the food chain, maybe even from New York. Barry wants to look good in front of them, and I think that’s a bad thing.”

  “I suspect you’re right.” I reached into my hoodie pocket and pulled out my Hello Kitty deck of Tarot cards. Maria sucked in a quick breath as I slid a card out from the middle of the deck and dropped it on the table, but I wasn’t surprised to see it. The Moon was all about that which was hidden coming to light, darkness clearing, and people finding their way. The card had other meanings too, of course, but I was pretty sure I understood what it represented here.