by Jenn Stark
“Well, duty calls, so I’m workin’ it.”
Nikki grinned, flexing her impressive biceps. At six foot four not counting her heels, which today were heavy, thick-soled work boots, Nikki would be remarkable when she wasn’t even trying. But she’d never be known for not trying. She currently was rocking a Rosie the Riveter ensemble that had her springy dark brown curls tied up in a bright red-and-white polka-dotted hair scarf, her heavily mascaraed eyes flashing brightly as her glossy red lips parted in a generous smile. Her denim jumper’s sleeves were rolled high, but in a sartorial move that I suspected would’ve left Rosie aghast, the jumper itself terminated in a set of cuffed short shorts, exposing approximately eighteen miles of leg atop Nikki’s red socks and black boots.
“What is all this stuff?” I asked, gesturing to the cardboard box modern art sculpture surrounding me.
“Case files.” Nikki reached back inside the door and pulled out another long, slender box—no, not a box, I realized instantly. A very large scroll case. “And a whole bunch of these bowling pins.”
I stared as she leaned the case against the wall. “Those are our case files? No one in this office ever heard of a computer?”
“Apparently, when you don’t fill a position for nearly two hundred years, things pile up. New jobs would come in, but they’d…” She shrugged, jerking her thumb over her shoulder, “be sent here. For filing. All this stuff out here in the lobby was simply to give me room in the library to get the lay of the land.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve figured out how many backlogged cases we have?”
“Yes, sir, I have.” Nikki saluted. “First I had to remove all the jobs that had expired, due to, well, people expiring. I figured that would cut down the load considerably.”
“Makes sense.”
“You’d think so, but you would be wrong. As it turns out, the sins of the fathers had a nasty way of working themselves down Connected family trees. And as it further turns out, even if the perpetrators are long dead, in some cases there are still those crying out for justice, whose souls cannot rest until it is served.”
I wrinkled my brow. “I don’t think we need to worry about some outrage that occurred in the 1300s, no matter how many people are still frosty about it.”
“Well, look around you.” Nikki waved. “There’s a whole lot of sorrow on ice in this fridge, and even if you backlog these bad boys, some of them will eventually need to be dealt with. That’s the job.”
“That is the job.” Once again, I was reminded that I clearly hadn’t considered the fine print of said job when I’d agreed to become Justice a few short weeks ago. And my recruiter hadn’t exactly been forthcoming either. Something I planned to discuss with him. Later. “So, what are we looking at exactly? You’ve been through all of it?”
“I’ve been through a lot of it. Best I can figure, you should be done with your backlog of cases by right around…” Nikki cast her gaze skyward, pantomiming mental calculations. “The year 2417. Give or take a decade.”
“What?”
Her grin widened. “Good thing you’re immortal. I plan on retiring before you even get through the bowling pin room.”
“But there’s no way that’s—” I stopped and shook my head. “Never mind. There’s something else I want you to follow up on, a dark practitioner drug dealer apparently known as the Red King.”
“The Red King?” Nikki’s brows went up. “One of the Houses? There is no King of Cups that I know of, and that house was Gamon’s old stomping grounds.”
“She didn’t recognize the name either.” I blew out a breath. “I don’t know. It could be nothing.”
“I’m on it,” Nikki said, pulling out her phone. “Ma-Singh said if I ever needed intel, to give him a ring. He’ll be thrilled to help.”
I smiled and nodded as I thought of the general of the House of Swords, my gruff, protective partner in arms up until a very short while ago. “Good. If anyone knows, he’d be the one—”
“Incoming!” The squeak to my right was completely unexpected, emanating as it did through the open door of the other room leading off the lobby, which was my office. My private office, a fact which didn’t seem to have impressed the diminutive creature who rushed through the door and leapt up on the first box she encountered. At first I thought she was a little girl, then I realized she was a full-grown woman, barely four foot eight, as weathered as old bark, her white hair wound around her head in a kind of fluffy bun. She launched a long, slender glass canister at me with remarkable gusto. It flipped toward me end over end, and I jerked back as it hurtled through the air.
“What in the—”
“Catch it!” The shrill command was issued with so much force, I reacted instinctively, reaching out for the tube—and missing it entirely. There was a reason I hadn’t played sports as a kid.
The heavy glass canister smashed into my chest, toppling me backward over a large open box. I managed to get my hands around the thing before it slid off me, then winced at its extreme heat, and I fumbled the canister like a hot potato as its clasp flipped open to reveal its contents. A sheaf of papers lay nestled inside.
“Freaked me out the first time too,” Nikki offered from the sidelines. “It’s apparently how new cases show up. Pneumatic tube system, right behind your desk.” She grinned and pointed at the case. “That must be a hot one.”
I blinked from the canister to her. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“The system’s never been upgraded,” interrupted the woman on the box. “How could it be, I ask you, with no Justice to oversee it? We’ve been keeping up as best we can, but it’s not for the likes of me to change a system I didn’t put in place, and that’s the truth.”
I glanced up to see the woman looking down at me severely, and for the first time, I noticed her dress. It was something out of a time capsule itself, a dark gray Victorian-era gown with a skirt that showed white ruffles sticking out of the bottom, an old-time crinoline. The bodice of the dress was buttoned all the way up to a high neck, also edged in white lace, the whole thing as crisply pressed as if it had been delivered that very morning from the costume shop.
“And you are…?”
The woman straightened. “Mrs. French. Not Frenchie, French Kiss, the French Lieutenant’s woman or French Fry,” she added severely, cutting a glance at Nikki. Who winked, thoroughly delighted with herself. “I am the caretaker of the library of Justice. This disarray you see has nothing to do with me.”
“That’s for sure,” Nikki allowed. “Mrs. Frenemy here had the shelves as neat as a pin when I opened the door to the library, but there was no way I could fit into the narrow walkways she’d allowed between the shelves. So I improvised.”
“With cardboard boxes.” Mrs. French could do aghast better than anyone I’d ever heard. “The case files strewn about as if these weren’t the outcries of the wronged and the afflicted.”
“Yep. So anyway, here we are,” Nikki said. “Until 2417.”
“But how…” I poked at the contents of the pneumatic tube, the papers now cool enough to touch. They were still barely more than parchment, and the information on them had been hand-lettered with an ink pen. I slid the documents out, squinting at the first page. Then I stiffened. “This is written in Hindi.”
“Hindi?” Mrs. French hopped off her box and bustled over, a movement I’d never seen performed by someone actually wearing a bustle. It suddenly made a great deal more sense. She set a pair of tiny glasses to the bridge of her nose and squinted at the paper. “Nepali, actually. They’re very close. You can read it, I assume?”
“Well enough.” I shrugged. One of the perks of my evolving status was my ability to translate. Most of the time it was a boon; sometimes I mourned the bliss of ignorance. “It’s a complaint against spirits roaming the countryside, whispering tales of enlightenment to lure children from their beds and the elderly from their fires. Apparently, there’ve been some villagers going missing.”
�
�Dark days, dark days indeed,” Mrs. French tutted. “Now that this has cooled off right proper, I’ll be about filing it.” She took the papers from my unresisting fingers and cast a baleful eye around the room. “And about cleaning up this mess.”
“I…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. All I could think about was dark spirits roaming the streets of Nepal. Spirits that could be anything from true demons to the dark practitioners of the Connected community, constantly on the hunt for the newest source material for their dark potions. I’d thought becoming Justice would make me feel more capable of addressing this issue, not less.
“Take a breath, dollface.” Nikki had made her way to my side. “You gotta go at this slow, get used to it.”
“That’s quite right.” Mrs. French turned with a rustle of skirts, eyeing me more closely. “The last Justice broke down several times with hysteria before she accepted her first case. And more than a few times after that, I’m sorry to say.”
“She did?” I asked, frowning. “Why?”
“Such a mess we have here,” Mrs. French said briskly, picking up one of the smaller boxes and carrying it to the side of the room. “But she soldiered on, lasted longer than any of them before her too. She was a good and sturdy sort, that one. I’m sure you’ll do her proud, her and all those who came before.”
“Hold on there, French Dip.” Nikki lifted a hand. “You didn’t mention anything to me about the other Justices that came before the last one. Or about any breakdowns.”
“Well, it’s not as if we had a lot of time for idle chitchat.” Mrs. French sniffed. “And I don’t recall you asking about any of the ones before. Goodness knows we had a lot to do to make room for your, ah, substantial presence in the library.”
“Was that a body slam? Because that’s some sizeist crap right there—”
“Enough,” I interrupted. I didn’t know what had gotten the two of them off on the wrong foot, but I wasn’t about to start sorting out stilettos right now. I focused on Mrs. French. “You’ve been tending the library for the past two hundred years, then, since the last Justice served?”
“Since 1855, dear. I was her intern, bless her soul, and kept on. It’s been a satisfying life.”
“You’re…two hundred years old.”
“Oh, go on. I’m not as old as that.” Mrs. French flapped her hands at me. “And I’ve done my job right good and well. Justice Abigail and I got on famously, and I suspect you and I will be no different, and Mistress Dawes, of course.” She ignored Nikki’s snort. “As difficult as her parting was, it did my heart good to know that Justice Abigail never lived to see the death of dear Prince Albert or the failing of the queen. They were all fast friends, you see.”
I’d never really given much thought to the previous Justice. Looking at the lobby, I realized yet again how much I’d not considered about this new role.
“Eighteen fifty-five,” I repeated. “But there are documents and files from well before then.”
“You got that right,” Nikki put in. “That scroll I showed you was definitely not from Victorian England.”
Mrs. French tsked. “Same as you, Justice Abigail couldn’t handle every cold case on the shelves when she came into her station. She did what she could, but her attention was much more heavily fixed on the issues of the present moment than on righting past wrongs. And, too, there was the issue with formal versus ad hoc cases. Still and all, she made quite a name for herself during her tenure, as I’m sure you will too.”
I tried to follow everything Mrs. French said, but something was niggling at me, pricking my senses. “How long did Justice Abigail serve, exactly?”
“Oh, well then.” For the first time, Mrs. French seemed a bit nonplussed. “Where are my manners and protocol? You deserve a rightful introduction all around.” She patted her skirts abruptly, then stuck her hand in the folds and drew out a small whistle, which she blew into, three shrill, staccato blasts. I shot my gaze to Nikki, who looked as mystified as I felt.
We didn’t have long to wait. A patter of feet sounded from deep inside the library, and Nikki barely had time to get out of the way before several figures emerged from the dimly lit room—a group of boys who looked like nothing more than cleaned-up Victorian chimney sweeps, down to their snap-brim caps, which to a one they snatched off and held in their small hands, looking up at me with large, soulful eyes as they canted their heads down respectfully.
“There, there we all are, the six of you. Well, look smart, then. It’s our new Justice here to see you, and you can be proud of all you’ve done.”
I stared as a scattering of mums, ma’ams, and m’ladys rippled through the group. “But…those are children.”
“That they are, Justice,” Mrs. French said, seeming to consider my title the proper form of address for me. “All of them scamps, mark my words, but they work hard at being respectful and doing their jobs.”
“But—how—?”
“How is it they’re all still living, never aging a day?” Mrs. French beamed at the boys, who were openly staring at Nikki as if they’d never seen anything like her. Which, I supposed, they probably hadn’t. Nikki, for her part, merely looked more and more dismayed. “Well, now, that’s a story in itself, but suffice to say they were some of the afflicted that Justice Abigail encountered even before she entered her service, and though she handled their tormentor as quickly as she could, the damage to the boys had already been done. She couldn’t very well leave them running about, never growing up. So she offered them lodging and work in the library, where there are plenty of doorways to the outside world. They weren’t fools, our boys, even back at the beginning,” she said. “They’d lived a good ten years under the heel of their captors before Abigail learned of their plight. They knew a good bargain when they saw one.”
“You’re here…by choice?” I managed.
“We are, mum,” one of the boys said, a skinny kid with light blond hair. “It’s not so bad. We can go anywhere and come right back, so long as we’re careful. We tend the library, file the papers. And we can all read, of course.”
“Every language!” another one piped up, his gray eyes wide as he nodded several times.
“That they can, and they’re quite circumspect when they go out into the world. They’ve only put their foot in it one or two times.” Mrs. French continued. “That poor Mr. Barrie, he never did recover from seeing them, but one can only do so much.”
“Ah—right. Hey, have we got any cases that center on someone called the Red King? Maybe technoceuticals, or…” I looked around the shambles of the room. “It’d be recent.”
“We haven’t, I can tell you without looking,” Mrs. French said crisply.
“Good thing, since there’s no way you could have found it if it was here,” Nikki cracked.
“Now, that’s exactly the kind of attitude that isn’t helpful, Mistress Dawes, I’ll thank you to understand. It—”
Mrs. French looked like she was about to hold forth in a surprisingly epic rant, but a sudden rumble that seemed to shake the very foundations of the Palazzo Hotel had the diminutive woman gasping and turning around. She raced back into my office. Unable to stop myself, I wove around the boxes, then stuck my head for the first time inside what was supposed to be my private sanctuary.
The place was perfectly spotless, a masterpiece of Victorian architecture, gilded and curved and carved. What drew my attention, however, was a series of glass tubes that stretched from the ceiling to about waist high, with openings at the bottom. A velvet-lined trough extended along the bottom of the tubes. For overflow, I assumed.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” Mrs. French murmured, her gaze on the visibly trembling ceiling, as if that was the origin of all our difficulties. “I was afraid of this.”
“What is it?” I asked. Nikki crowded in behind me, surveying the room, and took several steps forward as the noise increased.
Mrs. French wrung her hands. “It’s been two hundred years, nearly, since the last J
ustice served. Now you’re here, though no one should have known quite yet. Word travels fast, of course, it always has. It was bound to cause some commotion, couldn’t be helped. But I’d hoped…well, I’d rather thought—”
“Watch out!” Nikki lurched forward and swept Mrs. French out of the way as a half-dozen of the pneumatic tubes began clanging and rattling. Fat cylinders pounded down their lengths and burst into the room, completely bypassing the padded trough. Nikki caught the first, then the second, but another four more blasted down the tubes and were violently ejected into thin air, clanging against the opposite wall as I ducked.
Then…silence.
I stood shakily, my eyes on the rolling canisters. At the door to the lobby, six faces poked in, all of them pale as chalk.
“We might need to adjust our intake procedures, Justice,” Mrs. French said faintly. “It would seem you’ve been announced.”
Chapter Four
It was another several hours before I staggered to my suite at the Palazzo—a totally ordinary suite, not like my office on the penthouse floor of the casino hotel, where the library of Justice Hall started in the Palazzo proper but then extended up dozens of floors beyond it, soaring far up into the sky. I could have created a palace in the heavens for my personal residence as well, like the other members of the Arcana Council, but I hadn’t wanted that in the end. I never wanted to forget where I’d come from, no matter who I’d become.
I didn’t want my old life back, truly. I did want my old room back, though.
Waving the card at the door, I heard an entire series of locks disengage. So far as I knew, I was the only one who lived on this floor anymore—at least, I’d never seen anyone else. But you couldn’t be too careful.
And as it turned out, the suite wasn’t empty.
My heart did a weird sort of sideways samba as the door swung shut behind me and I took in the other occupant of the beautifully appointed living area, who was currently sipping from a glass of wine. If this was what coming home meant, I’d have to do it more often.