The Night Witch: Wilde Justice, Book 6

by Stark, Jenn

  A thick, heavy force shoved into me from the side. I went sprawling to the stone walkway, landing hard before rolling several paces. My current pack of Hello Kitty Tarot cards spilled out of my pockets, but I ignored them for a second as my hands shot up instinctively.

  A second perk of my developing powers was being able to generate flaming projectiles in my palms. I’d never taken the time to fully master the rest of my magical abilities, but throwing fireballs always proved to be a good opening salvo.

  Only, it wasn’t happening this time. Like, not even remotely. It wasn’t that the spirit wasn’t willing, but the flesh barely sizzled along my fingertips, and nothing appeared in the palms of my hands but a puff of smoke. In fact, there was a whole lot of smoke happening along the base of the stone walkway, it seemed, only a small percentage generated by me. Worse, that smoke now seemed to be what was flattening me to the floor, my face driven hard into the stone surface. Ouch.

  I peered around, trying to see who’d hit me, but no one emerged from the billowing clouds. Anger spiked deep in my gut, but unfortunately, it didn’t fire up the ol’ hands. Instead, I focused at the pile of cards I’d sent flying, barely visible through the smoke from the…from what? Had Eshe turned up the stage torches to max or something?

  I needed to get down there, but right now, I could barely do more than squint at the cards. Three of them were faceup, only one fully visible in the mist. The rest remained facedown, a parade of white kittens in pink bows looking back at me accusingly. Since when did Hello Kitty get so judgy?

  The first card I could see was the Ten of Swords, betrayal, featuring a guy flattened on his stomach, swords pinning him to the ground. I could relate, but enough was enough. I struggled to push myself to my hands and knees. It was like shouldering up through wet concrete.

  Again, the problem wasn’t simply that my magic fireballs had been dampened. Something else was weighing on me, and not just existential angst. There was a dead zone in play here that hadn’t been moments before.

  “Who the hell is running this show,” I muttered, crawling to the wall again. If it was Jarvis, he’d definitely upped his game.

  Through a split in the rock, I watched Eshe. She stood in the center of the stage and lifted both her voice and her arms to the heavens, her exultant cries echoed by the white-clad minions surrounding her. The three young women in the center actually seemed to know what they were doing, but even the celebutantes were getting into the act, studying their neighbors and trying to mimic their actions like freshmen cheerleaders at the first home game. Around the High Priestess, a dozen torches flared with enthusiastic bursts, which explained the smoke, and the crowd in the mosh pit was starting to take notice. How was she doing all this when I couldn’t light a cigarette?

  I grunted as I pulled myself up to my feet, the mists finally clearing enough that I could make out the second visible card. The Devil. Somehow, I didn’t get the sense of the actual Arcana Council Devil in this mist, unfortunately. There was something else going on here.

  I saw it then, a new swirl of pink-and-blue smoke snaking over the far balcony of the stone walkway. I couldn’t see anyone in the smoke, yet the mist seemed to hold a curious sentience, as if there was something inside, watching me. Suppressing me.

  Who, dammit?

  I pushed on, glancing down as the third faceup card came into view. Only a corner was visible, a swirl of colors I couldn’t quite make out. I staggered forward another step and the card revealed itself—the Seven of Swords.

  Man, I hated that card. It could be read in far too many ways, the most obvious being the employment of strategy and deception. Well, the Shadow Court certainly was being strategic, given whatever was screwing with my mojo. Maybe it was time for me to turn the tables.

  I staggered a little as I widened my stance. The weight on my shoulders and legs felt like a lead blanket. It didn’t hurt, but I could definitely tell there was the potential for hurting a great deal. Hurting at a level that went far below the surface. What kind of magic was this? I shot another glance down to the stage, gratified to see that Eshe had drawn the three virgins closer to her. The High Priestess’s ways were subtle and elegant. I had no doubt she would carry off her role stupendously and protect the girls at the same time. I spared the briefest consideration for which of the girls was the daughter of the wizard who summoned me, but that hardly mattered in the end. None of them would be hurt on my watch. Or Eshe’s, better stated.

  More smoke billowed up from the amphitheater floor, spilling over the wall, swirling toward me. I squinted down, trying to keep my focus on Eshe and the girls, fixing on their position so I could bolt over the wall and wink out of this location, then onto the stage below—

  A shriek right out of the Jurassic age exploded from the smoke, followed by a rush of wings. Not just wings, but beaks and claws and beady little eyes and leathery squawking maws. They lunged for me, a horde of squawking…pterodactyls?

  With nowhere else to go, I hurtled over the edge of the stone walkway, the horde hot on my heels, both jaws and claws straining for me. They swarmed around me and, like some Technicolor Hollywood movie from the 1950s, I found myself stepping, jumping, and lurching from body to body, racing down the stairway to hell as I tried to clear the mass of creatures before they ripped me to shreds. Fire boiled inside me, but my hands remained encased in their gloves of magic-suck, so my flames had nowhere to go. I’d never thrown fire out my ass, but I was seriously considering it—

  “Caw!” screeched the nearest creature right in my ear, and I used my distinctly unmagical hands to crack the leathery lizard bird in the jaw, sending it hurtling end over end into its fellows as three more latched onto my back—

  Looking like a one-woman pterodactyl clown car, I crashed into a swarm of drunken, screaming revelers, their designer-decorated bodies providing a million-dollar bouncy house for me to land on and stagger back up to my feet.

  As soon as I hit the floor of the amphitheater, though, I felt the restriction lift from me. I was no longer in a dead zone, no longer repressed. How could I be? Eshe was standing on the stage not thirty feet away, sending a ring of fire from the torches straight up into the heavens, the women around her practically levitating in their oracular thrall. There was way more magic here than I needed, so I flung my hands wide.

  “Get back,” I snarled. Instantly, the air was filled no longer just with lizard birds, but a hundred bands of silver. They exploded out from me in all directions, wrapping themselves around beaks, talons, legs, wings.

  I grinned. Typically, when Justice used her fancy faux friendship bracelets to bind some misbehaving Connected, it was to expedite transport of the bad guys straight to Judgment. I saw no reason to break that tradition now. A second later, every manacled creature disappeared, leaving me spinning and disoriented, all the flying monkeys off my back.

  I plunged toward Eshe, struggling through flailing, writhing bodies that were still caught up in the dance. Eventually, I hoisted myself up on someone’s shoulder, trying to push myself out of the throng. Around me, screams of surprise turned into alcohol-soaked howls of delight and pleasure as the glitterati lifted me up and shoved me forward, my first and hopefully last experience of crowd surfing. I wiggled out of my duster to move faster, and a second later, I reached the stage.

  Even as I vaulted toward it, though, another curtain of smoke bloomed in front of me, multicolored and smelling suddenly of…sulfur?

  I plunged into the murk, half expecting round two of the bad birds. But this was different. Far different. These were demons standing in a thick line, complete with pointy-toothed muzzles stretched wide, eyes glowing red, and trails of saliva dripping from their jaws and streaming from their snouts. Their breathing was labored, almost frantic with excitement, like dogs held back at the leash. The moment I entered the roiling smoke, they burst forward.

  This time, I didn’t hesitate. I whipped my arms wide, sending a swath of fire out in both directions. The howls of the cre
atures were gratifying as they lurched back, black goop flying.

  Little known fact: no human can kill a demon. Your best shot, your only shot, was to send them back where they came from, and generally only witches could do that. That meant that I had no way of terminating these bastards for good, and that bothered me more than I wanted it to. It was time for new rules against demons. There surely had to be a better way, even if the Council hadn’t been in the demon-blasting business for the past thousand years.

  Well, I might not be able to kill these bastards, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t hurt them. And as with most demons, even those under someone else’s control, hurting was enough. The moment they were wounded, they disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving behind their thick black demon blood that would be visible to everyone once the smoke cleared.

  A new shout emerged behind me, a rising cry not of fear, which was what it should’ve been, but of unabashed delight. The Stratosfairians were apparently happy for any expression of magic rolled out in front of them, no matter the danger to themselves. Freaks.

  I burst through the last line of demons, rushing into the center of the stage as the music built to another crescendo, then crashed over the amphitheater, sweeping the frenzied crowd along with it. Then I staggered to a stop, gaping as I finally registered what I was seeing.

  The stage was empty. No celebutantes, no kidnapped virgins, no Eshe. Instead, the dozen torches spouting blue-white flame belched a new blaze of fire all around me, making me whirl. Eshe was no longer the target of the roaring cheer that erupted behind me. I was. I had become the show.

  As wild-eyed, terrified, and ultimately furious security guards rushed at me from every corner of the stage, I drew in a shaky breath.

  “They bought it,” I said into my mic, hoping like hell Simon could still hear me. “Eshe is in.”

  Then I started running.

  3

  I stood in the middle of the Arcana Council’s conference chamber fully eighteen hours later, aghast at the news I’d just been given. I pointed a slightly wobbly finger at Simon, who sat at the far end of the table. “What do you mean you still can’t find her? How is that even an option?”

  We were assembled in a chamber far above the Luxor casino in Las Vegas on a brilliant sunny morning. Far beneath us, the Strip stretched to the north, the glittering casinos somehow managing not to look out of place and tawdry without the backdrop of night. Even under the harsh light of the desert, they beckoned with their siren song of clacking and ringing slot machines, the fan of shuffling cards, and the tinny canned music celebrations that indicated that someone had just gotten seriously lucky. I wasn’t interested in that kind of luck.

  “It’s already evening in Pompeii now,” I continued. “How could the tracker have failed so badly? She should be up by now, moving again.” After I’d crashed back into my own bed in my private rooms at the Palazzo Casino Hotel, it had taken me most of the night and well into this morning to feel remotely human, but come on. I’d been attacked by mini pterodactyls. Eshe hadn’t been doing more than serving as the life of a very exclusive party, feted and fawned over. Or at least that had been the plan. “What happened?”

  Simon sat back, looking equally perturbed. Lean to the point of being almost gaunt, the Fool still possessed a remarkably youthful baby face, his light blue eyes serious beneath pinched dark brows. The pale glow of the computer screen reflected on his even paler face as he rotated his chair back and forth in front of the table. Today, his curly black hair was stuffed under a Minions knit skullcap, and his thin body was draped in a long-sleeved orange T-shirt and worn blue jeans. His version of business casual, all the way down to the neon-green Chucks that were shoved, untied, onto his rapidly bouncing feet. He looked like he was about one and a half Red Bulls shy of levitation. “Honestly? There’s only one reason that tracker isn’t working. And that’s if she took it off.”

  I scowled. That idea had occurred to me, but surely Eshe wouldn’t be so stupid. “She did? Or somebody helped her out of it?”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that kind of tracker. And Eshe isn’t exactly a slouch when it comes to protecting herself. If she wanted to take the thing off, it would go; otherwise, nobody could get near her. Her power lies in prophecy, for sure, but also in illusion and persuasion. Nobody would’ve ever seen it if she didn’t want them to. She’s that good.”

  I nodded. I’d only seen the High Priestess in action a few times, but then again, I’d watched her appear in the center of a dozen white-clad virgins and disappear again with the entire lot of them, leaving behind a wide open stage with only glowing torches to mark their passage. Given how angry the security guards had been when they’d pounded onto the stage, they hadn’t been in on the joke, at least not then. That meant that Eshe had succeeded in disappearing behind the Shadow Court’s glittering curtain, a sorceress apparently ready to be tempted.

  When the High Priestess hadn’t shown up on any of our radar screens, and had, in fact, gone completely dark, I’d at first celebrated—at least I had early this morning, when I’d finally awakened out of the stupor that had cocooned me post bird fight and gotten my first update from Simon. To all appearances, Eshe had successfully infiltrated the Shadow Court’s lair, acting as a spy. That’d been the plan all along.

  The Court had already tried to get the Emperor to play their game. He hadn’t, as far as we knew, but we couldn’t trust him not to cave going forward. Eshe, however, had been ready, willing, and able to step up, and had seemed more than a little flattered when we’d asked her to volunteer for Shadow Court duty.

  Now I was beginning to rethink that idea.

  “Sooo…you’re thinking she’s deliberately blocking your ability to track her? Is there any reason why she would be doing that? At least a reason that’s not bad news?”

  A knowing chuckle slipped through the room, oddly intimate, a second before its owner appeared in the doorway. Aleksander Kreios stood framed with sunlight from the room beyond, looking like a fallen angel. The truth was slightly more complicated.

  Kreios was the Devil of the Arcana Council, the ultimate deceiver ready to beguile the truth out of the unsuspecting with a glance. He was also, as of very recently, the Council’s leader. Today, he wore his typical work outfit, which served as his typical day-off outfit as well—a long, tunic-style white cotton shirt, ragged khakis, and open-toed sandals that would have looked out of place in a business meeting on anyone but him. His long, tawny hair fell to his shoulders, framing a face made for sin, and his green eyes flashed above an easy smile. His long lean body seemed to shift forward sensually, even when he stood still.

  “Eshe has never been one to fall strictly within the lines of black and white,” he said now, sauntering into the room. “She is, first and foremost, accountable only to herself. She wishes never to serve another again.”

  That caught me up short. “Wait a minute, you’re saying she took off the tracker simply to give us the message that we’re not the boss of her? Didn’t somebody think maybe that might be a problem before we assigned her as a spy?”

  Kreios shrugged. “It was a risk, but a risk we were more than happy to take. The leaders of the Shadow Court have nothing that Eshe truly wants. She has no need of money, no need of adulation from a group such as they are, and no need for any supplier of delight. These are all already at her fingertips. The only need the Shadow Court could fill was to assuage her curiosity. I guarantee you, they will not be able to hold her interest for long.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “So if I have this straight, your plan is that we’re simply going to wait until she gets bored enough to make a report.”

  Kreios spread his hands. “Exactly.”

  Simon spun in his seat, a flash of uncharacteristic annoyance crossing his face. “You think maybe you might’ve let me know that up front? I’ve been losing my mind trying to track her down. The best I could do was confirm that the entire cavalcade of Shadow Court members stayed put the rest of the
night in Pompeii partying their asses off, then took off for points farther east and south. I have no idea if she’s with them, though.”

  He looked genuinely upset, and Kreios lifted his brows. The curiosity in the Devil’s expression was enough to send Simon spinning back to his computer station, his irritation morphing into wariness. He scooted forward while Kreios glanced out over the Strip and lifted one long, elegant finger to tap his lips.

  “Southeast,” the Devil murmured. “Excellent. We have no idea where the Shadow Court’s new base of operations lies. We’d thought Hamburg, of course, as they had been based there in the past, but that’s what they wanted us to think. They are nowhere in the United States, to be sure, not with the Council based here. But that leaves quite a bit of territory to explore.”

  I nodded, though I still wasn’t happy. Eshe’s entire purpose in this little charade was to get us more information on the Shadow Court. There was too much about them we didn’t know, including who funded them, who they were funding, and where they put their heads down at night. It was maddening. “So we wait.”

  “We wait,” Kreios agreed.

  “But we do not remain idle, surely.” Another smooth-toned elite chimed in with this protest, one whose voice I knew as well as my own. I turned, trying to hold on to my entirely justified mad as Armaeus Bertrand stepped into the room. As usual, I was not up to the task. The Magician and former leader of the Arcana Council was as devastatingly gorgeous to me today as he’d been when I’d first encountered him back when I’d been an artifact hunter and he’d been my rich, eccentric client.