The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

Across the room, the doors slammed open. A flurry of excited, deep, male, and extremely Swiss voices erupted in outrage and shock.

  I didn’t need more of an invitation to get rolling. Spread-eagled on the ground beneath the bed, I extended both arms and both legs towards all four cubes, thinking very, very magnetic thoughts. Impossibly magnetic thoughts. Super-duper come-to-me-now thoughts.

  It only took a second. The entire space seemed to electrify at once, all four cubes popping out from beneath the base of the bed and shooting toward me, two of them snapping to my palms, two of them cracking into my ankles. Ouch.

  The bed fell four full inches as the metal casings formerly holding the cubes completely collapsed, and the contessa let out a bloodcurdling scream to add to the chaos.

  Nigel, for his part, scrambled off the bed and hit the floor, rolling underneath the bed with me. His eyes were wild, his hair disheveled, and lipstick was smeared along one side of his aristocratic face. “We go?” he pleaded.

  To be honest, that had been my plan. One of the other skills I’d developed during my tenure with the Arcana Council was high-speed transportation, allowing me to dissolve my body and anything touching me and reassemble it in any place I’d ever been to before. I had to have been there, granted, but most of the time, it worked pretty well.

  Only, this time when I attempted to crackle us out of existence…nothing happened.

  “Sara,” Nigel hissed.

  “I’m trying!” As I stared at Nigel with increasing desperation, I realized the flaw in my not so careful construct. The uranium cubes adhered to my body were doing a number on my psychic equilibrium. I couldn’t focus enough to think, let alone pull off my usual transport ability of crackling into nothingness, taking along anything that was wrapped around me. Instead, we had a screaming woman above us, pounding feet approaching from all sides, while Nigel and I were trapped beneath an honest-to-God bed like five-year-olds with candy. I barely managed to shake my head, and his eyes popped wide with alarm. He grabbed for one of the cubes—

  Fire erupted between us. Not just erupted, but shot out in all directions, a mixture of blue psychedelic flames and a full-on purple blaze. The contessa’s screams now mingled with those of her would-be saviors, and Nigel didn’t hesitate. He grabbed hold of my shoulder and hauled me out from underneath the bed, both of us rolling to our feet.

  The tableau we faced was breathtaking. The contessa on top of her bed, her mouth hanging open in a long scream, her hands spread wide. The men on all sides of her bed frozen with her… frozen completely, it appeared. The fire crackled all around…but nobody was moving but us.

  “What the hell is this?” Nigel demanded, but I couldn’t concentrate on that crazy. I had crazy of my own to solve.

  “Unstick me,” I gasped.

  He dropped down, pulling the magnetic cubes off my ankles, then cursing loudly as they adhered to his palms with the same energy that had stuck them to me. Nigel was only marginally Connected, enough to make him a great bounty hunter but not enough to get him a slot on Magical Jeopardy, but whatever energy he had inside him, the cubes seemed to like it too. He grunted with pain as he staggered back upright, and the two of us set off across the room, through the fire and smoke, through the frozen bodies of the contessa and her staff, all the way to the main doors. Working together to get the ends of our fingers around the door handle despite the giant cubes stuck to our palms, we flung the doors open and dashed into the corridor.

  The shift of energy behind us betrayed our mistake: if you took the magic out of the room, everything returned to normal.

  The contessa’s wail filled the entire wing. “What is happening?”

  Once again, Nigel didn’t hesitate. He shoved me into a run, and we raced past two doors, but at the third, he flopped his hands at the handle, and once again, between the two of us, we were able to open it and stumble inside.

  The room had clearly been given over to a madman’s version of a library. Books lined the space from floor to ceiling, all four walls, except the far wall, which had a graceful window seat cut into the bookcase, arranged with pretty pillows. The seat seemed completely unusable, but was picturesque nevertheless. Otherwise, the chairs scattered around the room appeared comfortable enough, but none of this afforded us much in the way of protection.

  “Staircase,” Nigel asserted, running for the far wall. I immediately had images of the bookcase swinging open, revealing a curving staircase down into the bowels of the mansion. But we didn’t have that kind of time.

  “Nigel,” I shouted.

  He whirled back to me, his eyes wild, and I did the only thing I could think of. As the door burst open behind me I flung my hands wide, putting all my energy into reversing the polarity of the two uranium cubes that were stuck to my palms, enjoining them instead to return to their mates.

  Nigel’s eyes registered patent alarm as the energy built within me and the cubes finally released. A second later, they hit his body with the force of a battering ram and he flipped backward toward the window seat, crashing to the floor even as I leapt after him.

  I vaulted the low couch separating us more or less smoothly, then sprawled on top of Nigel, flattening him the rest of the way as shouts sounded behind us. He’d gone positively white and his hair was smoking, but, free of the cubes’ electrical pull, I could at least do my job.

  I wrapped my arms around Nigel and crackled us out of existence.

  3

  “Dollface.”

  The words were real and present, spoken directly in front of me, but they still didn’t make sense. Nikki Dawes couldn’t be hovering that close, because I was curled up in my own bed in the Palazzo Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, a bed I’d seen far too little of in recent months. And no matter how good friends Nikki and I were, she didn’t tuck me in at night. At least I was pretty sure she didn’t. It’d been barely a week since Nigel and I had finished our round-the-world cube-collecting tour and I was still playing psychic Jenga in my sleep. Maybe I’d officially gone on supervised bed rest.

  “Yo, dollface.”

  The words came again, more insistently this time. And there were more of them. “You’ve got to get up. Or get down, but get off that pile of glass, however you can manage it.”

  That statement was so odd that I slid open one eye and realized I wasn’t actually in my bedroom. Or on my bed. Instead, I had somehow managed to stretch out over the top of my desk in my office at Justice Hall. I’d arranged myself amid a short pile of canisters, thick glass tubes that apparently made reasonable bedfellows, at least when covered by the velvet cushion I’d dragged out from the trough that usually collected them. I glanced over worriedly only to find that a new velvet lining had been installed at the base of the nineteenth-century pneumatic tube assembly constructed behind my desk. More canisters filled the wide tray as well, each of them containing a new message for me. Parcel post at its steampunk finest.

  “Are you running a sweepstakes or something?” Nikki asked, picking up the nearest canister and waving it at me as I slid back into my chair. I blearily took in her dark red hair and crisp business attire. “Because this is an awful lot of mail for a Tuesday.”

  She shook the canister and popped open the top, slipping out the curl of paper inside. “This one’s about the Dolmen of Guadalperal—some kind of Spanish stone circle gone bad. Stones recently revealed by drought and falling sea levels caused a lot of excitement, blah, blah, blah, but the stones, which should have had unusual powers of healing, are now being blamed for people getting sick. They want you to take them away.”

  She furrowed her brow, glancing up at me. “Seriously?”

  I sighed, gesturing at the pile of canisters to the right of the desk. “All problem artifacts go into that pile. Psychics behaving badly go in front of the desk, and responses to my recent request for information on magical artifacts that can either augment or diminish magic, I’m keeping separate. Artifacts of magical enhancement to the left, and this pile,” I pointed to the
desktop, “is for artifacts of nullifying magic.”

  There were only a few canisters on the desk, and I’d been using them as pillows, apparently. You had to take your comfort where you could.

  Nikki issued a soft whistle. “I wouldn’t have expected there to be so few of the nullifying-magic ones,” she said, confirming my own reaction. “I mean, I guess it makes sense that people don’t necessarily recognize magic-destroying properties as easily as they would magic-enhancing properties in an item, but…”

  I straightened the half dozen canisters. “But there should be more of them. The fact that there’s not could mean anything. It could mean that nobody’s searching for magic-nullifying artifacts, or it could mean they’ve all been taken off the market already, or at least a significant pile of them, and are being hoarded somewhere off the grid.”

  I pointed to the pile of magic-enhancing artifacts some of the faithful had actually sent along on loan—totems, icons, amulets, or chips, splinters and flakes of larger pieces. “The problem with these is that a good forty percent of them are total fakes. Their nominating parties believe in them, but…there’s nothing there.”

  “The placebo effect is alive and well.” Nikki sighed. “Why do you get the sense that they’re fakes? No mojo in the notes themselves, or are the totems simply duds?”

  I frowned, considering the question. Some of these artifacts had come to me from very high-level Connecteds—psychics of true worth, if my intuition was at all accurate. But there was something about the way they put forth their offerings, a little too breathless, a little too certain. That was it.

  “There’s no doubt,” I said. “I think that’s what nags at me. Most of the time, even among Connecteds, there’s a healthy level of skepticism about something they believe could be helping them. They know all about the placebo effect, all about the capabilities of the human mind and heart, even if they don’t fully understand how to access those capabilities. They want to believe that something external can assist them, but unless it’s a drug that can actually be tested over and over again in an isolated environment, most high-level Connecteds give ancient artifacts the side-eye. We are what we believe we are and all that. There’s another problem too.”

  She lifted her brows. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. We’re getting complaints from Connecteds getting hit by natural disasters—storms, floods, that sort of thing. Could be a coincidence, but…” I shook my head, running my conversation with Jarvis Fuggeren through my mind, the videos of the storm devastation. “We could also be looking at the Shadow Court screwing with the weather.”

  “Or, you know, it could be climate change,” Nikki pointed out. “Everybody’s hurting. Makes sense that Connecteds would be too.”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Maybe. But the Shadow Court is going to strike again, and soon. I need to get ahead of them, instead of constantly following one step behind.”

  Nikki cast another glance around the room, then exited briefly into the lobby, returning a second later with a chair. She nudged a pile of canisters out of the way and sat down, leaning forward with her arms on her knees. She looked even more serious that way, and for the first time, I took in her full appearance.

  At six foot four with a penchant for towering platform heels and micro miniskirts, Nikki Dawes was the Rosetta Stone of the fashion language—perfectly styled no matter where she found herself in the world. Today, my best friend wasn’t simply dressed for business, she was dressed for a hostile takeover. She wore four-inch-high stiletto pumps, black tights, a black skirt, and a white Barney’s business shirt rolled up at the sleeves. Complementing her attire was her mane of cascading red curls locked in place with a heavy metal clip at the nape of her neck. Her next stop could’ve just as easily been one of Vegas’s finest law offices…or a strip club. It was a total toss-up. And, I belatedly realized, she practically vibrated with excitement.

  “What?” I asked warily.

  “You got something in your regular mail too.” She held up an envelope. “No canisters required.”

  “Since when are you the post office?”

  “Since you got something in your regular mail that is clearly an invitation.” She waved the creamy linen envelope at me, bouncing a little in her chair. “It’s for a party. You totally know it’s for a party. You’ve been invited to a party. You’re going to have to go, and I’m going to dress you, and it’s going to be amazing.”

  I made a face. “First off, I haven’t been invited to a party. It’s probably an invitation to discuss the importance of funeral insurance. Secondly, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a little busy here. I don’t have time to go to a party.”

  As if to punctuate my words, the pneumatic tube assembly behind me started to rattle, and a second later, three new canisters shot from the portals in the ceiling down the tubes and out into the velvet-lined trough. Automatically, I turned and pulled them from the bay, situating them on the desk in a neat line. “You want to be helpful, you can help me get through these messages. Because that’s what we’re really here for today. Or at least that’s what I’m here for today. I’m still not sure what you’re here for.”

  Nikki waved the envelope, her brightly painted dark red lips pouting with convincing dismay. “Oh, come on. You never let me open anything. Let me open this.”

  “How about you open this, instead.” I picked up one of the newest canisters to arrive and tossed it at her. She caught it easily and frowned down at it.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you could open it and let me know.”

  Sighing dramatically, she unscrewed the top and dropped the contents of the canister onto her lap. “We’ve got a parking ticket from Jacksonville, Florida, looks like from seven years ago. And a second parking ticket from Amarillo, Texas, this one from this year. Handwriting on both, block letters. ‘I’m sorry’ is on the J-ville ticket, and simply ‘Sorry’ on the Texas citation. Vehicle make and model marked out with a Sharpie.”

  She squinted up at me. “You’re going after Connecteds with parking violations now?”

  “I am not.” I waved my hand at a small stack of tickets on the desk. “Those have been coming in for the past few weeks, no clue why. Tickets from mostly Southern states, only one with a legible make and model vehicle, an oversized conversion van. Nothing I recognized. I’d thought…”

  I trailed off as I opened another canister and scanned it, dropping a rose quartz pendulum into the magic-positive artifact pile. It was fake, but it was pretty. It deserved some points for trying.

  “You thought what?” Nikki prompted.

  “Nothing.” I shrugged, shaking off the memory. “Woman I knew a while back collected parking tickets like trophies, but she drove an RV, not a van.”

  “She could have downsized?”

  I snorted. “Not likely.” I waved off the snatch of memory. Carole Reavers had been a bold, blousy, motor-mouthed grandmother of eight who’d been there to give me a ride in her RV when I’d been a seventeen year old runaway with a blown-up house and a shattered life. As far as I could tell, she’d never apologized for anything in her life. Whoever was sending me their guilt-ridden traffic tickets, it wasn’t her. “I should probably brace myself for more weird like this, though. Word’s getting out that I exist.”

  “It certainly has,” Nikki agreed triumphantly, and up came the envelope again.

  “Nikki…”

  “Plus, I’ve got scoo-oop…” She said enticingly, and there was just enough edge of seriousness in her voice that I glanced at her more sharply.

  “What scoop?”

  “While you’ve been holed up here on Mount Canister, Simon has been going about the same task of assembling magical enhancers from the digital world and putting out feelers along the way for anything that smacks of the Shadow Court. He’s been coming up with some interesting finds.”

  I nodded. I expected Simon would probably be able to uncover artifacts that the old guard I’d been contacting simply
wouldn’t know. A member of the Arcana Council since the mid-eighties, the Fool understood the world of cyber psychics like no one else. “Did he find something good?”

  She lifted one well-muscled shoulder. “It’s more like what he didn’t find, exactly the same kind of not finding that you did.” She pointed to the stack of canisters in the nullifying-magic pile, her French-manicured fingernail filed to the perfect squared oval…and tipped with a platinum spike. “Lots of weapons, plenty of stuff with supposed healing properties, but not a lot of tech that shuts magic off. We’re definitely underrepresented there.”

  As interesting as this was, it didn’t really merit the level of excitement I was still picking up from her. “And…?”

  She waved the envelope again. “First, you have to let me open this.”

  I rolled my eyes and nodded. Using one of her razor-sharp nails, she sliced the envelope open and slid out the contents.

  “Handwritten card, feminine hand, educated but not artistic,” she reported. “Linen stock, available at any stationery store, pricey without being super special, smells faintly of…”

  “Teen Spirit?” I offered, but Nikki was no longer paying attention to me, her expertly threaded brows now arched together as her eyes went wide and her hands straight-up started to tremble.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my gawd.” She sighed deeply, fanning herself with the invitation. “Sweet Mother Mary on a pogo stick, this is totally epic. Yes, yes, yes, and yes.”

  “What?” I asked sharply, enough of my outside voice breaking through Nikki’s trance that she blinked up at me sharply, as if startled I was still there. Then her mouth stretched into a wide smile.

  “You are going to love this,” she practically squealed.

  “Somehow, I doubt that. What is it?”

  “It is a party invitation. The most perfect party invitation ever. A reunion party.” As she made this pronouncement, she dropped the card to her knees and covered it with both hands as if to protect it, a newborn kitten in a field of wolves. Not a bad comparison given my attitude about parties.