The Red King: Wilde Justice, Book 1

by Jenn Stark

  “How?” It was the woman who spoke now, and as she did, she moved sinuously around the room for all that she wore a blank mask and a shapeless smock of feathers. She passed Valetti, who steadfastly refused to look at her, and stopped by the prelate. My eyes narrowed behind my mask as I observed the room react to this rearrangement of players—because there definitely was a reaction. It seemed everything that was done in this room had a timing and purpose to it, and I grimaced. I hadn’t spent much time in high school when I’d been growing up, but it’d felt a hell of a lot like this. And right now, I was looking at the council’s self-appointed Homecoming King and Queen.

  But the female magician knew that she’d captured the room’s attention, and she wasn’t about to let it go.

  “I have learned a little about you, Justice Wilde,” she said, shifting forward slightly. As she did, her back did a weird arching thing that positioned her closer to the prelate without her technically moving. I never knew how women did that. Maybe they taught that move in magician school. “I understand you use Tarot cards to find your marks. No one knows Venice better than we do, however. We can help you.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again, a move made infinitely easier by the fact that I was wearing a mask. Despite how sensually she made the observation, the femme magicale had a point. And I did have my cards on me, under all these feathers.

  “I can do a reading now,” I said, and I could feel the tremor of anticipation in the room. Rolling my eyes was also much easier from behind a mask.

  “You could do that,” drawled the caped man I suspected was the Devil. “But what if the perpetrator is someone in this room? Surely that would be…inconvenient.”

  “I’m afraid you have us at a disadvantage, sir.” It was the prelate who spoke, which surprised me. His tone was laced with ice, though, and I amended my opinion of him. “I am eager to ensure that each of our members is accorded the proper respect, but you, sir…I don’t remember welcoming you at the front door.”

  “Nor do I,” said Valetti gravely, almost apologetically.

  “You didn’t welcome me,” the man said. He raised a hand, and the lights in the electric sconces flickered—as if they were actual candlelight. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not a favored guest here. The Palazzo D’Aria has long been a favorite haunt of mine, for all that I have very little occasion to occupy it when you do.”

  “What sort of devilry is this?” muttered the diminutive man across the table, costumed as a jester complete with the floppy harlequin hat, despite the admonition that we were all supposed to wear tricorn headgear. Even the female magician tilted her head, her mask doing a credible job of looking perplexed.

  The lion’s mask turned in a lazy arc as the man I suspected was the Devil focused on the jester. “There are only so many meetings that I can keep up with, and these simply don’t rate—except, of course the Magicians’ Ball. But as to this bit of, well, cloak and dagger, the charm of it is already wearing thin.”

  The room of magicians shifted with indignation.

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t need to listen to your watercooler fights. I’ll find your butcher or, more likely, whoever is styling himself as your butcher.” I couldn’t help but remember the words that had tumbled out of Balestri’s mouth, taunting me about the Red King. That hadn’t been an illusion by an untrained hand. Someone with real strength was behind the butcher’s attack, and someone knowledgeable enough to transform garden-variety Black Elixir—deadly enough in its own right—into the instantly lethal Nul Magis toxin. That took a pretty impressive magician. Was it one of the ones assembled here? “And I’m going to start that search now.”

  They all watched as I reached into the slitted pocket carefully concealed in the seam of my cloak and felt along my body for my cards. Without preamble, still focusing far too much on the tension in the room, I drew three cards. I stepped quickly toward the table as I drew them out and flipped them on the table.

  Everyone froze.

  Except Nikki. Who snickered.

  “Oh, for the love of Christmas,” I grumbled.

  “What?” the jester half shouted, moving forward. “What is it?”

  “The cards pick up your energy, and believe it or not, your energy isn’t on the murderer who may or may not be in your midst, it’s on the chess match you’re all playing to one-up each other.” I pointed to the Five of Wands. “You don’t want to work together, that’s your problem, so this is the last reading I’m going to be doing anywhere near you people. Second is the Hermit—which is the search for knowledge. It could have been the Moon, but there’s no mystery here.” I reached down to gather my cards. “I’m wasting my time.”

  “But the last card,” the jester all but moaned. “What does it mean?”

  The tawny caped figure stepped forward and reached across the table, his elegant fingers picking up the card to study it before I could sweep it away.

  “Old man Waite never could take a joke.” The Devil of the Arcana Council sighed, surveying the claw-footed, goat-headed, fat-bellied image on the card. “If my predecessor hadn’t upset the pompous fool so much, my life would have been so much easier.”

  Kreios’s cloak and mask disappeared into curls of smoke, and the senate exploded into a fury of sound and magic.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I snatched the card out of Kreios’s hand and then swept up the rest cards, stepping out of the way the rest of the room converged on the Devil—who, if I was understanding his veiled, heh, comments correctly, was the Council’s official emissary to this group. Perhaps not surprising, since the Devil was a master of illusion.

  Aleksander Kreios had ascended to the Arcana Council in the early 1930s, taking the place of his predecessor in a handoff which had been much more up close and personal than mine and Abigail’s passing of the baton.

  The female magician appeared beside me. “While they all fawn over the newest stallion in the stable, do you want to get a real reading done? I’m Chiara, if you didn’t know. Chiara Marchesi.” I looked beyond her to see Valetti walking up quickly behind her, wringing his hands.

  “If you don’t mind, Justice Wilde, we should at least try a reading in more quiet surrounds,” he said. “I do feel responsible for ensuring the safety of the senate…”

  “Of course, of course.” I let them lead me into another room, Nikki by my side. I’d already pulled three cards and scanned them quickly, then dipped back into my pocket for the full deck.

  We stepped into the library. It was a sumptuously appointed room, a chamber that looked like people had actually lived in it. The artwork on the walls was both original and European, of course. And there was a lot of it. The chairs were plushly upholstered, and the coffee table was thick and sturdy, the kind of table you could put your feet up on or argue world politics over with equal aplomb.

  I spread the deck in an arc and drew three cards in quick succession. “Hermit again. He’s popular tonight,” I said quickly. “Not surprising for people who seek the truth. Then we’ve got the Six of Wands.”

  “Victory?” murmured Chiara, and I gave her an approving smile she couldn’t see.

  “Definitely could be that, but when you shift the focus of the cards over to the physical search side of the equation, they can be read more literally. That picture most clearly represents—”

  “The parade!” she said, looking up at me. The effect of the movement of her beaked mask was almost comical. “You mean the parade of Carnevale tomorrow. That’s where you’ll find him.”

  “That’s where I’ll start looking, yes,” I said. “And the third card is the Four of Swords.”

  “Four of Swords…” Chiara considered, now sounding perplexed. Even Valetti leaned forward, though I couldn’t see his expression, of course. I felt a little twinge of remorse at how I was about to mislead him. He’d brought me here on Luca Stone’s recommendation. But he wasn’t the only magician in the room, and I didn’t know this Chiara at all.

  So I
spun a line of credible bullshit.

  “The Four of Swords in a search capacity could mean a number of things, some that might not become clear until I see them in the context of the second card, so in this case, at the parade. But there are some clues to look for. If there are any reclining figures, whether sleeping or dead, that’s a possibility. Or, it could be more specific—a hospital or a hotel. A place of recovery.”

  “That’s it?” Chiara’s voice conveyed the derision that the placid expression on her mask could not. “That’s all you have to go on?”

  “I find that once I get close, the rest tends to fall into place.”

  Valetti patted Chiara on the shoulder. “She did ascend to the Council on the merits of these skills, Chiara.”

  Once again, I was grateful for the covering of the mask. My ascendance to the Council as Justice was based on a lot of things, but my Tarot card reading skills were likely not at the top of the list.

  Still, those were the skills I was working now. With Valetti’s assistance, and under cover of the senate continued fangirling over Kreios down the hall, Nikki and I exited the front door of Ca Daria a few minutes later. The moment I stepped away from the ancient palazzo, I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Nikki followed my gaze back to the gorgeous building. “You think it was Kreios’s doing, all those dancing lights?”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Kreios excelled at distractions, the more upsetting, the better.

  “True.”

  We moved farther down the street, twisting around until I was sure we weren’t being followed.

  “So,” Nikki said, drawing out the word. “You want to tell me what that card trick was you pulled back there? Because that was some prime bullshit about the Four of Swords. What I would’ve given to see your face through all that.”

  “Keep those cards in mind,” I said. “Even if they were my second draw, they could become important.”

  “And your first draw? Enlighten me on those cards.”

  We were walking down a quiet residential street, God only knew where, but I was coming to understand that the glory of Venice was that there wasn’t all that far you could go and remain truly lost. You’d either run into a lagoon or a canal. We pulled off our masks and enjoyed the soft night air on our faces.

  “The first card was the Five of Swords, which I hate on general principle in a search reading.”

  “You win, but you’re not happy about it.”

  “Exactly. Which could mean just about anything. I could discover the identity of the butcher too late, I could discover it as he’s or she’s about to kill me, or I could never discover who the butcher is at all, but my mere interest in the case stifles his little spree.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be satisfying.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. Alternatively, the card could literally mean that I should look for the man on the battlefield or cemetery. So, two things to keep in mind. Next up is the Three of Cups, which to me says party.”

  “I like the way that sounds a lot more.”

  “Agreed. And we’re about to launch into a week of balls that are going to get bigger and grander as time goes on, so something to look for. I think I agree with Valetti to some extent. This isn’t a wide strike, despite the fact that Balestri and the other two sorcerers supposedly were scrubs. The butcher is targeting magicians, so those are the parties we should count on.”

  “I’m going to need a new cape,” Nikki said, looking down at her flame-red feathers.

  “I have a feeling that won’t be a problem. The third card, though, can go anywhere. The Queen of Cups.”

  “Wife to the Red King,” Nikki offered. “Maybe a relative?”

  “Could be. Or a mistress, a daughter, a muse.”

  “Well, that narrows it down.”

  I sighed. “Court cards. I’ve never been a fan of them in a search reading. They tend to make the most sense after you’ve already independently verified your choice.”

  “It gives us a place to start anyway,” Nikki said. “Which is more than we had going into Ca Daria. It doesn’t solve who might have wanted us to be kept away, though.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But I’ve got a feeling once we know who the Butcher is, we won’t so much need to worry about the rest.” I blew out a sigh. “So, the Five of Swords, Three of Cups, and Queen of Cups.” I frowned. “The Queen of Cups… What women do we know so far in the city? Chiara and Signora Visione?”

  Nikki scoffed a laugh. “I’m not thinking it’s the signora.”

  “I’m not either. But she is surrounded by children.”

  “Her own children—or grandchildren, anyway.” Nikki hesitated. “As far as we know. But though she’s a wizard with a needle, she doesn’t strike me as the kind of Connected we’re looking for, if this reading is about helping us identify the Red King.”

  “Right. So, Chiara.”

  “Much more the kind of Queen of Cups we’re needing, but we don’t know her at all.” She pulled out her phone from a pocket in her cape. “Simon will. Might as well use team resources.”

  I nodded. It was odd to think of the Arcana Council as teammates; they hadn’t always felt like that. And I had traditionally not been a great team player. Something else to learn in my new job.

  “What do you think of the senate we’ve met so far?” I looked over at her typing on her phone. “Fill Simon in on the others, and maybe Kreios is doing the same thing. We need names and locations, particularly where they were last night, though…”

  She glanced up at me, grimaced. “Though if Balestri went down with a blow dart, that could have been from anywhere. And we still don’t know the disposition of Marrow and Greaves, the two missing magicians. I’ll ask Simon if he’s heard anything about them too.”

  I nodded, my gaze going out over the Grand Canal. Across the water and deeper into the city, the festivities of the opening ceremony were still going strong. I checked my watch. It was almost midnight, and Venice typically rolled up the sidewalks long before nine p.m. But this was Carnevale, and anything was possible.

  Anything.

  “So we’ve got a group of magicians who meet every year for two weeks of parties and catching up.”

  “And maybe undergo completely whack ceremonies to amp up their mojo,” Nikki put in, still typing. “Otherwise, why do it every year? There has to be a draw.”

  “Agreed. And this year, right before their meet-up, there was an event that potentially already supercharged some or all of their magic. No one knows how much any one magician was affected, if at all, but everyone assumes the others got a disproportionate impact.”

  “Kind of makes you want to get a job in corporate to get out of the rat race, huh?”

  I smiled, resettling my feathers as the cool breeze picked up. “We’ve got at least one female, but most of the magicians are male, most are legacy, and at least in the group we saw tonight, most are entitled Europeans. Maybe all of them with ties to Venice?”

  She waved her phone at me. “Definitely all of them with ties to Venice, or at least to Carnevale. Which takes us to another Venetian magician, the butcher Biasio. Who is either a tragic dupe or a sinister madman, depending on how you learned the story.”

  “No one in the magicians’ senate was airing the second version, though. For all we know, our gondolier made it up to improve tips. Certainly a nicer story than a guy deliberately hacking up kids for malicious profit.”

  “Fair enough,” Nikki said. “We can track down our boy at the canal later, if he’s found himself a new gondola. With the scratch I’ll be wiring into his account once we verify his identity, he shouldn’t have too much trouble.”

  “Or he could pack up his gondola pole and leave the city.”

  “Or that…” She finished her text and also looked out over the water. “I don’t get the impression that a lot of these people leave, though. At least not for good. Hell, even the ghosts want to stick around.”

  “Which takes us to the Casino of
Spirits and Ca Daria.”

  “Two of the most haunted locations in Venice and happily under the control of the magicians. And if you noticed—we got no actual hauntings. I feel cheated.”

  I snorted. “I suspect a lot of that is staged to keep out the riffraff, unless there are kid ghosts from Biasio’s reign of terror still floating about.”

  “That’s an interesting idea.” She eyed me. “I don’t suppose you can talk to the dead?”

  “I think I would have noticed that. But…” I frowned. There was teamwork, and there was taking teamwork too far. Still, if I was going to begin working full-time with the Council, they needed to make themselves available to me. And there was one major Arcana card that was represented on the Council in a particularly vibrant and relevant way. “Death could, I’d assume.”

  Nikki nodded. “I’d think that would be part of the job. Or maybe she was on hand for the butcher the first time through.”

  “You know, we kind of crab-stepped our way into this job. Going forward, it might make more sense to ask more questions up front. Like questions of people who’ve lived for hundreds or thousands of years on this planet and might have been around when this crap actually went down.”

  “It’s not too late to do that now,” Nikki said reasonably. “You’re Justice of the Arcana Council. Who all would you need?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t know I’d need any of them at the beginning. We picked up a job, we went out on the job—”

  “We got mired down in a bog of crazy on said job. But it seems to me the Arcana Council would appreciate knowing the deets or at least revel in the chance to dish the dirt on this magicians’ senate, especially if there’s a new player who wants to elevate the profile of the magicians to Arcana level…or, arguably, turn them all into walking zombies, their magic burned out.”

  “Why in the world would that be an advantage?” I wondered aloud. “They’re killing their own people.”

  “Or they’re pruning the bushes in advance of the big flower show. What’s better, a dozen magicians with a few hangers-on who are little more than glitter tossers, or a highly motivated set of eight or nine sorcerers with a firmer grasp on their own powers and an up-close-and-personal performance enhancer?”