The Wayward Star

by Jenn Stark

  “Ah yes, now that was one of the missing entries,” Madame Beauchamp said, leaning forward slightly.

  I nodded, scanning quickly. It was May 1841, by all accounts a glorious spring. The Beauchamps had had their annual spring fête, and wonder of wonders, who should have come to greet them but the Magician of the Arcana Council, Armaeus Bertrand. It should’ve been the happiest day of young Angelique’s life, he was so dashing and bold. Everything she truly wanted in a man, for all that he was many years her senior. But she had a job to do, and she was dedicated to doing it. There was really only one way that she could be dissuaded from her course. One opportunity she would give the mysterious Magician. One test, if you would.

  I looked up at Madame Beauchamp, my gaze hardening. “What did you do, Angelique?”

  Beside me, Nikki went still.

  The old woman studied me with glittering eyes. “Don’t you see, that was the whole point. I did nothing at all. I kept my silence as a good woman of the South. I held my secrets close and I kept my family safe. I could have done things differently—I would’ve done things differently—if Armaeus Bertrand had given me the slightest encouragement to do so, if he’d offered to open his precious Council and put down roots that mattered. He did not. He was far too focused on his magic, on his studies and his equations and spells. He didn’t care about me, beyond the most surface of conversations about mathematics and conjuring. He didn’t care about anybody. He was as cold and heartless a man as you might ever encounter. You should remember that, Justice Wilde, for the brief period of time it’s going to matter. Nothing affects him that cannot be found in a book of spells.”

  “So why bring us here at all? If your charge was to keep secrets from Armaeus, why change now?”

  “Because I cannot control everything the way that it should be controlled!” Madame Beauchamp fairly screeched, as much as any woman of gentle Southern temperament would screech. “I cannot keep ninnies like my great-great-granddaughter Eloise from giving up our family secrets as if they are so much candy. I can only tell you that you are already far too late, and why. Because you really should understand why. This game you’re only now entering has been in play for a hundred and fifty years. Do you really think you can catch up in a matter of weeks? Do you really think there hasn’t been years’ worth of discussions on exactly what you might do, how you might do it, and how the Shadow Court might counter your best efforts? Because I can assure you those conversations have been taking place since long before you were born, Justice Wilde. Mark my words. There have been a hundred thousand calculations made, and in every one, you eventually lose.”

  I made a face. I could see what the Magician must have found interesting in Angelique all those years ago, if only temporarily.

  She huffed, straightening her shoulders, then glancing to the porch door. “Here she comes, nothing but laughter and foolishness, that woman. As I live and breathe, it’s simply more than one should have to bear.”

  Then she disappeared, and Nikki and I sat staring at the empty space.

  And staring.

  “Was that a ghost?” Nikki finally whispered, her voice a little high. “I’m not a hundred percent sure that I believe in ghosts. But that…that sort of seemed like a ghost.”

  “Unless we are both going certifiably insane, it was the ghost of Angelique Beauchamp,” I said with growing conviction. “The first Beauchamp woman to fall in love with Armaeus Bertrand, but apparently, not the last. She didn’t seem to handle it nearly as well as her great-great-granddaughter did.”

  “Agreed, but I don’t get it,” Nikki protested. “It seems kind of stupid, letting us know anything about the Shadow Court. We may not have pieced it together on our own.”

  “I think…I think her pride forced her hand,” I countered. “Eloise Beauchamp doesn’t know the Shadow Court. She only knew Armaeus, and that was only a long time ago. The Shadow Court was finished with the Beauchamps by then. The family simply isn’t that Connected anymore. The peak of their association ended with Angelique, possibly even before. She could’ve just been a stooge by the time she finally died. Her last shot at power is in ensuring that someone, anyone, knew that she was part of the betrayal of the Magician, that she and her family had taken part in the greatest deception in Arcana Council history.”

  “Bitter, party of two, your table is now ready,” Nikki muttered under her breath.

  A bold, sparkling laugh sounded from the corridor.

  “Oh, Malcom, really. You say the most scandalous things,” a woman’s voice rang out. A moment later, a smiling Malcom rolled in an elegant chair through the wide doors of the back porch. “Madame Eloise Beauchamp,” he announced with warm affection.

  From her wheelchair, Eloise clapped her hands together with unfettered delight.

  “I see you found my book, with all its newly revealed entries!” she said. “You must tell me what they all mean. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

  25

  “I don’t care what anyone says, the South is flat-out creepy,” Nikki said as we made our way back through the French Quarter toward our hotel. “And not for nothing, but these stilettos have reached critical mass. I vote we get an—oh!”

  A second later, she disappeared from behind me in a whoosh of smoke. A second after that and the Magician was back, remarkably relaxed for somebody who had apparently devastated two entirely different generations of Beauchamp women.

  “We do have an Uber account, you know,” I informed him. “That’s not the way Nikki prefers to get swept off her feet.”

  Armaeus shrugged, his smile ever so slightly smug. “I rather suspect she would have preferred to be transported by the Devil, but I left her in the spa next to the hotel. She was…quickly assuaged, I assure you.”

  I imagined Nikki swathed in terry cloth from head to toe, getting her nails done. “Okay, you’re forgiven. Did Simon tell you about what we learned at the Beauchamp’s? I assume the transmission from my barrette came through okay?”

  “It most certainly did.” The Magician inclined his head. “I can say without question that I remember Eloise, of course. A beautiful woman. Very sweet, very loving. Not terribly Connected, and too proud to augment artificially, but graceful about it. Angelique, on the other hand, I remember very little of. The party that she references in 1841, I recall, of course. I further recall conversing with her at length, even dancing. But she gave no indication that she had any real sort of interest in me. She certainly didn’t strike me as a criminal mastermind in any way attached to the Shadow Court. Even with the benefit of my returned memories, I have a hard time picturing that.”

  “So what are we really looking at here? We’ve got a very old New Orleans family who has recently discovered information about the Shadow Court—more information than they realized, actually. Angelique wanted us to know about her betrayal of you, but the real coup was the list of names her predecessor provided us, names Angelique didn’t recognize as important.”

  “An entire roster of Shadow Court members,” Armaeus said, confirming the suspicion I’d begun to form back at the Beauchamp house, but couldn’t be certain of. “Twenty families whose bloodlines we can track, each a potential link to the current Court. Couple that with Angelique’s emphasis on the importance of family ties to the Shadow Court’s operation, and it is a useful tip indeed. She could not have known what she gave you—unless it’s another trap.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “We’re not going to know until we explore a few of those threads. Regardless, there may be other accounts out there with similar information that’s now come back to light, giving us hints as to what the Shadow Court is doing.”

  Armaeus nodded. “The Beauchamp ledger is interesting in that there are several early mentions of the Shadow Court that were deleted, which implies it was somehow important they be kept from me after the Shadow Court had been erased from my mind—or at least in 1853, they were considered to be important. It would have taken quite a powerful spell to remove those me
ntions. More powerful than necessary. Remember, the Shadow Court was not a major concern of mine in 1853. They had but recently come to my attention again. I had not done anything to harm them directly.”

  “But you were about to, right?” I countered. “Otherwise, there would’ve been no reason to take you out of the game.”

  “It would seem so. So back to your original question, we have the discovery of information pertaining to the Shadow Court hidden not only from me but from any parties who might have been in a position to help me then, and by extension…”

  The Magician’s voice faded as he cocked his head, a new thought obviously arresting him.

  I didn’t need a green light to keep rolling down this particular road. “Anyone who could help you now. When you restored your own memories, you also broke the power of the spell that had kept anyone from helping you back in 1853. For any of the old families who were keeping track of such things, the information they knew prior to 1853 would be revealed. There might be more clues to be had.”

  “And several of those families may be on hand at the summit this weekend. Those families who believe they have a chance to confront Dr. Rindon and challenge him about his vaccination protocols… They’re the ones being lured into a trap.”

  “It’s going to be an ambush,” I said. “They’ll be slaughtered.”

  “But who is ambushing whom?” Armaeus countered. “We don’t know if Rindon is working for the Shadow Court. We haven’t wanted to tip our hand and take him, plus, he is a private citizen. We don’t want to draw the attention of the authorities who, up until now, have managed to look the other way. In addition, he is a Nobel Prize winner and world-revered philanthropist. So his profile is high enough that we can’t simply take him out of hand. We will have to wait and see what plays out at the summit.”

  “You think he’ll show his cards? Or do you think he’ll simply say the wrong thing at the wrong time and get accused of all these crimes against the Connected? And how could anyone even make such a charge with a straight face? It’s not like there’s any test to determine levels of Connectedness. There’s nothing to say that these indigenous peoples had any measure of psychic ability prior to Rindon’s vaccination party. They’ll sound like lunatics or anarchists, and they’ll be doing it in public. It will get noticed.”

  “The Shadow Court is playing a very subtle game, it would seem. Rindon may be their brightest star, but he may also be their fall guy. If they’re merely using him to draw out these embedded societies so they can then go in and strike them once the world is not watching…”

  “It would be very easy to do.” I sighed. “Probably the fastest way to do it, actually, as long as you didn’t mind shedding a little of your own blood in the process.”

  “And there has been no indication the Shadow Court has ever had a problem with that.”

  None of this was sounding very good. “There’s not going to be enough security on-site at the summit to stop an attack of any kind. Could they possibly stage some sort of disaster? Could we?”

  Armaeus actually chuckled. “The short answer to your question is yes, of course. How do you think we managed to bury the gods who’d chosen Atlantis as their seat of power? The problem with staging a natural disaster, however, is that magic can guide nature only so far. Eventually, nature will continue her cycle to its inevitable conclusion. With Atlantis, we lifted the seas in mighty defiance against the dragon king, but the seas did not retract and the rains that followed did not cease simply because we expected them to do so. Instead, floods swept over all of Earth and changed the very nature of magic, rebalancing the networks of energy that crisscrossed the globe. The forces we had railed against were devastated, yes, but so were we. So were mortal Connecteds. Never again, we vowed, would we take such matters into our own hands when we could not predict the outcome. And we haven’t. Mortals have, of course. Slowly, over time, they have gained the strength they need to achieve such goals. But they do so at their peril. Nature eventually will continue the cycle, no matter who starts it.”

  “And we can’t stop it? All the great and powerful magic of the world, and we can’t stop the seas from rising, the glaciers from melting? Because…that sort of sucks, honestly. A lot of humans are going to die if we don’t intercede.”

  “And other humans will die if we do. Who are we to choose? We do that, and we’re no better than the Shadow Court.”

  “They yearn for chaos,” I muttered. “As far as the Shadow Court is concerned, bring on the devastation. Help it along, if you can. But no matter what, be there to catch the survivors and sort them into their proper squares. The ones who come out on top are the ones who are supposed to. The ones who die are merely fulfilling their role in the natural order.”

  “I believe you have it exactly right,” the Magician said.

  “And we’re not going to do anything about it. You realize that makes us accessories to the murder the Shadow Court is seeking to commit. We know what they’re going to do, and we aren’t stopping them.”

  “We are not,” Armaeus said, and then after a long pause, conceded, “…yet.”

  A chill ran through me, a whisper of future battles to be fought, of new paths to be taken.

  The Magician and I walked on, arguing back and forth. There would be no official representation of the Arcana Council at the Global Disaster Recovery Summit other than him, me, Eshe, Kreios and Simon. That was enough to show that we cared about the outcome of the event, but it wouldn’t equate to a show of force. Granted, if the Shadow Court wanted to attack us, they would be taking out a sizable chunk of our arsenal, so there a risk remained. But it was a manageable risk.

  I barely noticed when Armaeus left the main street and turned into a side alley. There were so many small streets in this area, much of them overhung with vegetation, I had no idea where we were. Despite the devastation of the hurricane that had assaulted the city years ago, nature had, in fact, returned to New Orleans to begin her cycle of life and death anew.

  But when Armaeus stopped abruptly, I glanced up. We stood in front of an old, ornate and weathered gate, hung with vines that clearly hadn’t been pruned in over a hundred years. I squinted.

  “This isn’t another one of your forgotten houses, is it?”

  “Not exactly.” Armaeus reached out and, with a gentle push, opened the gate. It swung into the shadows with a faint groan of protest, the vines giving way. He stepped inside, peered around, then turned back to me.

  “I sense an understandable frustration in you, a cloak of despair, Miss Wilde. Admittedly, there is much we cannot do to change the course of fate. But there remains much we can do.”

  When he gestured again, I followed him through the gate, only to find the property on the other side of the wall equally uninspiring. It was an overgrown jungle of trees and bushes and long grass, its once-manicured beauty now gone completely to seed. The house that stood in the distance was almost completely taken over by vines and thick, woody saplings, as if the jungle itself was trying to reclaim dominion.

  “This looks like something out of a fairy tale,” I murmured. “And not one of the ones that end well.”

  Armaeus huffed a short laugh. “The home is one of my laboratories.”

  “Oh, of course. What was I thinking?” Nevertheless, I followed the Magician as he climbed through the brambles and up the front stairs to the home. Without the benefit of a key, he pulled open the door and stepped inside, this time reaching back to take my hand as I crossed over the moldering threshold as well—

  And into utter darkness.

  Not simply the darkness of a broken-down home, but the emptiness of space itself. There was no oxygen, but my body no longer seemed to need to breathe. There was no light, no heat, no cold, but my body could no longer feel. There was only Armaeus’s hand holding mine for a long, fraught moment…and then a spark of fire winking into life above Armaeus’s other, outstretched palm, flickering above it with yellow-white flames. Before I could react, the flick
ering light formed into a single globe, that orb expanding into a thousand globes a heartbeat later, each of them holding a constellation of stars within their transparent surfaces. All of them surrounding us, a solar system of possibilities.

  “Every living creature, every living thing, is a conduit for energy,” Armaeus murmured. “I have tested it over and over again. With the right nutrients, any life can be reborn. With the right spark, any life can change into a form that survives whatever environment it finds itself in, no matter how harsh or unforgiving.”

  “So how do you cause that spark?”

  He turned to me, his mouth quirking into an amused smile in the reflected glow of the orbs. “You have known me quite some time, Miss Wilde. You know my weaknesses, certainly, and you know my strengths. You have long since understood the basis of my abilities.”

  I flushed. The Magician’s magic was fueled by sex. I’d walked right into that one. “Ummm…okay, but what does that mean? You brought me here to hook up in the middle of Space Kingdom?”

  Armaeus’s grin widened. “I wouldn’t say no, but that’s not what I meant. Not entirely. But I confess, I have wondered something about the nature of our mutual attraction. And with you so near to this particular laboratory, if you wouldn’t mind me trying this one thing…”

  He lifted his hand to my face. As it had when we were in the vineyard in France, a bright and buzzy flurry of energy bloomed between us, electrifying the space and turning it into yet another miniature constellation of stars. My heart started fluttering and my breath hitched, and there was no denying that my body was reacting as surely as if he’d drifted his hand down the line of my neck. “You can feel that?” he murmured. “That quickening of energy?”

  “I think it would be safe to say, yes,” I managed.

  “Hold on to that feeling. Explore it. Keep it close.”

  There was something different about the timbre of his voice that kicked my internal reactions up another notch. At this point, he had lifted his right hand and had begun skimming the edge of my hair, barely touching me. The entire right side of my body lit up with pulsing energy. In this strange space, that electricity leapt off me and soared in and around the crystalline globes, passing some without any impact, but setting others awash in glittering lights. The energy all around us seemed to escalate, and I found I was having trouble breathing. My body was warm, almost languid, and I couldn’t figure out how I was still upright.