King Of Fools (The Shadow Game series, Book 2)

by Amanda Foody

  “Did any of you feed Roy yet?” Enne asked.

  “Why can’t we just get rid of him? He barely eats his food, and he still refuses to talk,” Grace grumbled. Her eyes—like Enne’s—were only half-open, and she slid her plate away to lay her head against the table. The lockdown had cost the Spirits thousands of volts in a matter of weeks, and both Grace and Enne had stayed awake through the night discussing possible solutions. Without success.

  “Because until the occupation of the North Side is lifted, Jonas suspended our meeting indefinitely.” Enne poured herself a mug of sugar with a side of coffee. She desperately needed caffeine, but she couldn’t tolerate the drink’s bitterness any other way. “Marcy, why don’t you take something up for him to eat?”

  Marcy’s face had been permanently flushed since Roy arrived, and Enne’s suggestion made her choke on her toast. “Me?”

  “He only eats if Grace brings him his meals,” Charlotte said.

  Enne furrowed her eyebrows. “Why?”

  Grace stabbed her butter knife into the table. “He has a death wish, probably.”

  In the hall outside the dining room, there was a giggle. All of the girls looked up groggily, eyes squinting at who could possibly be in such a good mood at this hour. Enne counted heads and noticed one was missing.

  A figure darted past the archway, but not fast enough for Enne to miss the bluntly cut black hair and a pair of leather combat boots...and someone who looked an awful lot like Tock. Lola turned the corner into the dining room wearing a lopsided grin. She stopped abruptly when she saw them all. “You’re all up early.”

  “It’s not that early,” Enne pointed out.

  “Oh, well...” She cleared her throat and sat down in the last empty seat at the table.

  Grace shot Lola a coy glance. “Aren’t you always complaining about the Iron boys?”

  Lola poured herself a cup of coffee, very carefully avoiding their stares. “The boys, yes.” She smirked as she took a sip, and her comment was met by several snickers. Then she examined Enne and Grace with narrowed eyes. “You both look terrible.”

  Enne downed her coffee and forced a half smile. “We’ve never been better—”

  “You’re both going upstairs and taking the day off,” Lola declared. “Charlotte can handle the numbers today.”

  Charlotte’s eyes widened. “So can Marcy.”

  “Either way,” Lola grunted, “you’re both useless like this. Go sleep.”

  Grace needed little encouragement. She staggered up and wordlessly left the room, her eyes fluttering closed as though she were already drifting off.

  Enne, however, hesitated. If they were communicating with other lords or with investors, she needed to be available.

  “Go,” Lola told her sharply, and Enne, both defeated and grateful, climbed up the stairs and collapsed into her bed.

  * * *

  Enne roamed the black-and-white hallway in her dreams, and the first door she opened led into a classroom. Unlike those at Madame Fausting’s, these girls carried schoolbooks rather than firearms.

  The teacher at the front of the classroom read down the roster. “Erienne Salta?” she asked. Her neatly plucked eyebrows furrowed at the name, and she looked up, scanning the students with confusion. Her gaze fell on an empty desk in the back of the room.

  “Who?” one of the girls asked. The others around her shrugged in equal bewilderment.

  The teacher crossed off the name and moved on.

  Enne closed the door with an acute feeling of distance. Only one summer had passed since she’d last seen those girls, but a scene that would’ve once brought her to tears now only left her empty. Erienne Salta no longer existed.

  The next door proved far more painful—it was always painful to look at Lourdes Alfero, especially in New Reynes. Whether or not the visions of the hallway could be believed, this was the side of her mother Enne had never known, that Lourdes had purposefully concealed from her.

  It was daytime. Lourdes perched on a couch in a parlor that, judging from the lavish decorations, was located in the South Side.

  Sitting across from her was Josephine Fenice. Unlike Malcolm Semper, who’d started his career as a famous revolutionary, Fenice had a law degree from one of the most esteemed universities in the world. Amid all the articles and radio shows Enne followed about the new talent registrations and curfews, the senator-turned-chancellor made few statements and no appearances. But it was she who’d initiated the street war, she who’d signed the order for the lockdown of the North Side, she—Enne suspected—who pulled the strings of the First Party.

  She was also a member of the Phoenix Club.

  “When will it be?” Lourdes asked.

  “Tonight,” Fenice answered. Her voice had an eerie flatness. “But it wouldn’t have to be, if you gave it up.”

  Lourdes crossed her arms with an expression of indifference. “He’ll have to kill me.”

  “You really are that cold.”

  “I just know the truth of it. More of it than you do, even. Because you think that the story is over.”

  Fenice frowned. “All these years, you dug up these secrets. But even if you know the story, you’ve done nothing to change it. You are inconsequential. And come midnight, you will be dead.”

  It’d been several months since her mother’s death, but still the words dug into Enne. She recalled the scene of Lourdes at the Shadow Game, another vision from the hallway. She’d worn these same clothes.

  This was the day she died.

  The scene changed around her. The walls of the parlor fell away, revealing a crowded public square and a wooden platform raised at its center. A woman walked upon it. She wore tattered clothes, so torn they barely covered her, and her body looked bruised and scarred even from a distance. Her eyes burned violet.

  Enne stood on her tiptoes to peer over the crowd. It was too far, and she could hear nothing over the disjointed chatter and chanting. Until she heard the slam of the axe.

  The scene changed. It was another face, another set of violet eyes.

  Another axe.

  Enne pushed her way to the front of the crowd, so close to the platform that the cobblestones had flooded red. It was a gruesome display. Of nakedness. Of bodies that had already suffered enough. Of the young and the old, made a spectacle for an increasingly boisterous audience.

  Soon the executioner was replaced with a noose. Enne winced at the sound of every snapped neck. Even though she understood the tyranny of these kings, she also knew that not every person was a king. Some were guilty by association. Guilty by birth. And when Enne looked into their eyes, she saw her own staring back.

  Years flew by as she stood witness to death after death. A man approached the gallows, this one with a mask covering his face. It wasn’t until he reached the platform that Enne realized it was actually layers of black gauze wrapped tightly around his head, exposing not even a stray hair. He was hauntingly faceless, as though he could’ve been anyone.

  But Enne knew who he was. He was Veil, the most notorious street lord of New Reynes history. And he was about to die.

  At the snap of the rope, she was transported once more. Her own weight creaked on the wooden platform, and her wrists were bound behind her back, blistered and raw. She winced as the whiteboot pushed her forward, but she didn’t stumble.

  Not even when he slipped a noose around her neck.

  * * *

  Later that evening, Enne awoke gasping and clawing at sweat-soaked sheets. She could still hear her mother in her head, discussing secrets that Enne would never understand. She could still feel the roughness of the noose around her throat.

  She held back a sob and instead took the glass of water on her nightstand and smashed it on the floor. It shattered like the Shadow Game’s timer. The water seeped across the carpet like Semper’s blood.

  Before the lockdown, the Spirits had made Enne one of the richest people in the North Side. For months, she’d claimed she wanted power,
and she’d had it.

  But now it was gone, and she’d spent so many weeks kissing Levi and dreaming of destiny that she hadn’t noticed. Not until she woke with her rage rekindled and burning inside her, a reminder that—like before—everything in her life could be taken away.

  Fallen or not, she was done waiting.

  Enne stormed out of her bedroom and down the hallway, then threw open Grace’s door. Both Grace and Roy jolted awake—Grace in her bed, a knife jutting out from beneath her pillow, and Roy on the floor handcuffed to the radiator.

  Enne pressed her gun to his head and clicked off the safety.

  “In less than a month, Aldrich Owain will attend the election’s first debate,” she told Roy. “You’re going to tell me how to kill him.”

  Grace flung off her covers. “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  Enne barely recognized the growl in her voice when she answered, “I’m finally doing something.”

  “By threatening to kill him?” Roy shot Grace an appreciative glance, which Grace didn’t return. “Don’t look so grateful, whiteboot. If I had my way, you would’ve been dead weeks ago. You think I like hearing you snore all night?”

  “You talk in your sleep,” he muttered.

  Grace’s eyes widened. “You haven’t said a word since the night you got here, and now you decide to talk?” Grace kicked the radiator he was handcuffed to. “You don’t smile. You don’t frown. You knock on the floor when you need to piss, like I’m not even worth your words, and now you speak?”

  Roy turned his head to the side and didn’t say anything.

  Grace scowled, grabbed Enne by the arm, and dragged her to the other side of the room. “Who is Aldrich Owain?”

  Enne hadn’t told anyone about her plan, because she wasn’t going to be talked out of it. She knew revenge would do nothing to heal the painful hole in her heart, but she didn’t care. It would still feel good to put a hole in his.

  And so she answered, “He’s one of the people who killed my mother.”

  Grace eyed Enne carefully. “There are times for blood, but this isn’t one of them.”

  “He deserves to die,” Enne snapped.

  “I’m not talking about Owain—I’m talking about him, and whatever it is you stormed in here to do.” Grace gestured to the whiteboot, who glared at them. “Tell me why you need him.”

  Enne’s eyes widened in surprise. She hadn’t expected Grace’s support—she hadn’t expected anyone’s.

  “There will be whiteboots guarding the debate,” Enne answered, “and Roy was a whiteboot. He’ll know what sort of weapons they’d carry, how many they’d station.”

  “But why there? You’ll be more at risk for getting caught.”

  Because Enne wasn’t Ivory. She wouldn’t kill Aldrich Owain in the quiet seclusion of his home, leaving his body and a murderer’s calling card for a neighbor to find. She didn’t want to send the Phoenix Club that blatant a message—not yet.

  She wanted to make them look over their shoulders. She wanted them to fear the creak of floorboards in the middle of the night, to mistake the shadows in their bedroom for doom. She wanted them to know, deep in their cruel, eternal hearts, that death was coming for them. She wanted them paranoid. She wanted them weak.

  And so she’d decided that her first murder would look like an accident.

  Owain, a newspaper mogul, would undoubtedly attend the upcoming debate. And if he was shot amid the chaos of a crowd turned violent, no one would suspect foul play.

  But rather than explaining all that, Enne only answered, “Because it feels right. It has to be there.”

  Grace narrowed her eyes and paused. “Fine. Then I’ll talk to him.”

  “But—”

  “Put your gun away. I can do this.”

  Roy hadn’t cooperated with them since he’d arrived, so Enne had no idea why Grace thought she could convince him. In her nightdress and without her eyeliner, she was far less fearsome than usual. But still, Enne trusted her third, so she did as she was told.

  Grace sat down in front of Roy. “I just want to talk,” she said. “Do you know why I used to work as an assassin?”

  Roy said nothing.

  “I did it for the volts. I bet you hate that, right? A lot of whiteboots just want to wave their guns around, but not you. You’re the noble type. I can tell.” Grace lay down and propped her head on her elbow. “I probably could’ve been a Dove, but creepy cults aren’t really my style. So I let Séance make an honest woman out of me.”

  Roy snorted, but still said nothing.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked. “Go on. You’ve been watching me so closely these past few days—I see you looking. I bet you have a lot to say.”

  He pursed his lips. “Nothing about what you all do here is honest.”

  Grace grinned. “You like it? It was my idea.”

  Enne crossed her arms. She realized she couldn’t paint Owain’s murder as noble if she tortured Roy to make it happen. But at least torture would’ve been quicker.

  “You know what else isn’t honest?” Grace reached up and grabbed his badge off her bureau. “Don’t they take your badge after you’re fired? But you were fired, otherwise people would’ve come looking for you a long time ago. Did you steal this?”

  “I didn’t steal it,” he gritted through his teeth.

  “You didn’t steal this, but you’re also not a whiteboot.” Grace leaned against the wall beside him, pondering this. He inched away from her, as though disturbed at the thought of them touching. “I know you are who you say you are. I’ve seen your picture in the papers. You led the attack on the Orphan Guild. You killed a nine-year-old, you know. He wasn’t a Guildworker. He was just somebody’s brother.”

  Roy stiffened, but remained silent.

  “So why is the golden boy of Humphrey Yard no longer a sergeant? Why didn’t you go back to give them your badge? That’s procedure, and you’re all about procedure.” She tossed his badge across the floor. “Because you couldn’t. You’re running from them. Captain Hector wants you dead.”

  Roy still said nothing.

  “Because it wasn’t the whiteboots who attacked the Orphan Guild. They’ve been telling a lie on every radio station for weeks, and you just can’t live with it.”

  Roy’s eyes widened. “How did you know that?”

  Grace gave him a wicked grin. “I didn’t. But now I do.”

  Enne’s mind reeled. The whiteboots had claimed credit for the attack. If they didn’t do it, who did?

  Roy glared at the floor as he spoke. “The captain thought it would be better for the city if everyone believed we’d done it. And when I wanted to find out who was really responsible, the captain forbade me from following the case. I did anyway. I left after my partner tried to kill me, probably on Hector’s orders, but if I find out the truth...I can expose them. I can go back.”

  “So you think I did it?” Enne blurted, horrified.

  Roy startled, as though he’d forgotten Enne was there. “No. I think the Guildmaster or one of his associates planned it, but when I saw you leave that day, I knew it was an opportunity. So I followed you.”

  “Bryce would never hurt the Guild. And Rebecca and Harvey are too loyal to him to do so, either,” Enne said. “Why do you even suspect them?”

  “Because of how quickly they moved, how few people were hurt. It was like they knew it was coming. Like they tried to limit casualties.”

  “That’s not evidence,” Grace pointed out. “That’s coincidence.”

  “At the time, only the Families had those sort of weapons,” he admitted. “But I still trust my instincts.”

  “I trust logic,” she countered.

  “You asked, and I’m telling the truth. But I’m not helping you kill a man.”

  “He’s not an innocent man. He killed her mother. Think of it this way—you would be helping bring him to justice. You love justice.”

  “Stop doing that. Stop talking about me like I’m so
me comic strip character.”

  “I can’t help it when you look like one. I bet you’d look great in tights.”

  He flushed and inched as far away from her as his handcuffs would allow. “If my precinct knew that the headquarters of the Spirits was like this... The whole damn building smells of nail polish. There are cats everywhere named after murderers. And all you eat are sweets.”

  “Roy,” Grace cooed, and Roy scowled at the raspy, provocative way she said his name. Enne suspected she knew why Roy insisted on staying with Grace, and it was far from a death wish. “Who does have a motive for starting a street war? Who does want to see the North Side fall?”

  When Roy didn’t speak, Enne took it upon herself to answer. “The Phoenix Club.”

  “The Phoenix Club hasn’t been active since the Revolution,” he said.

  “Troops in the North Side. Talent registrations. Curfews. It’s starting to feel an awful lot like the Revolution repeating itself.” Enne got up and walked closer to Roy. This was the first time he’d actually looked at her—not at Grace or at the floor—since she’d entered the room, and his eyes widened as she approached.

  “Yes, it is,” he croaked. “You’re a Mizer.”

  Enne realized that she wasn’t wearing her contacts.

  “Oh, good,” Grace said cheerily. “Now we have to kill him.”

  Enne wouldn’t panic. Not yet. After all, Roy had already been a captive who knew too much information. “I guess now we’re all being honest.” She knelt in front of him. “If my mother hadn’t protected me, the Phoenix Club would’ve killed me when I was born, eight years after the Revolution, and called it justice. My mother wasn’t a Mizer, yet they called it justice when they killed her. You were going to tell the truth, and so Hector tried to kill you. If you want justice in this city, you have to take it.” She held out her hand to shake Roy’s free one. “I think we could help each other.”

  Roy’s glare slowly faded into reluctance. “You could’ve tortured me.”

  Grace shrugged. “That would’ve been easier, since you already hate me. But I realized, for you, the alternative would be worse.”