The Untamed Moon

by Jenn Stark

  “I swear to God, I just contacted him this morning,” she protested. “He was coming down from Canada. What the hell kind of trouble can you get into in Canada, I ask you? None. The answer to that is there is none. There is no trouble that you can get into in Canada that leaves you with most of your blood on the outside of your body. None.”

  As she dashed down the hallway, the door opened at the far end. The bright, inquisitive face of Mrs. French poked through the entryway to Justice Hall, clearly surprised at all the commotion.

  “Well, I rather hoped—what on earth?”

  Mrs. French broke off as Nikki shouldered past her, then whirled around in her long gray bustled dress, with its high collar and double row of shiny black buttons, a fringe of white lace at her neck and cuffs. After a cursory glance to assess the situation, she burst into a flurry of activity, nodding me a quick greeting before directing Nikki—who needed no such direction—to put Nigel on the couch, to make him comfortable, to ring up Dr. Sells, and that she would fetch some tea right away.

  By the time I reached Nigel, Nikki had pulled open his shirt collar and spread it wide over his fair-skinned chest and stomach. Despite the gravity of the situation, she whistled. “Well, God save the Queen,” she drawled. “I need to get back to London, stat.”

  But it wasn’t Nigel’s ripped abs that preoccupied me. A mass of symbols had been etched into his skin with bloody brutality, ancient and arcane. Quechuan, maybe? Something about the symbols reminded me of the ancient language of Peru that had been in play long before the advent of the Incas and Spaniards. The symbols seemed to be inscribed in a repeating pattern, but I couldn’t find the starting sequence.

  “Nigel,” I tried to rouse him, as Mrs. French hustled back with a tea service. She held the steaming cup under his nose like smelling salts, and like any good Britisher, he stirred.

  And by stirred, I meant he shot to his feet, sending the cup crashing against the wall with a sweep of his hand. I winced despite myself, but the cup merely bounced off the wall and dropped to the floor.

  Mrs. French tossed her well-coiffed head at my surprise. “If you thought I used my best china in Justice Hall after all these years, you’re quite mistaken. I’ve learned well enough not to do that.”

  Nikki held a trembling Nigel in place, his mouth working furiously as he struggled to speak.

  “You bastard…” he seethed, though he seemed to be talking to himself more than anyone. His eyes slowly refocused, and he blinked and stared first at me, then Nikki, then Mrs. French, then down at his own chest, where the marks were still glowing.

  “Camera,” he managed, letting me help pull off his shirt and then use it to sop up the worst of the blood. “These—may not last.”

  “Roger that.” Nikki let him go long enough to whip a phone out of the lining of her chauffeur jacket, then she photographed Nigel from his cranium to his waistband. “You got these on your legs as well?”

  “I bloody well better not.” Nigel stepped away from us, then wrestled his pants down past the line of his boxer briefs. No further marks showed, and he yanked the material of his underwear out, then grunted with satisfaction before resetting his pants. He threaded his slightly shaking hands through his hair. “I would have killed him, flat out. Good to know that the bugger maintained some measure of decorum.”

  “Who?” I asked as Nigel turned back to me, though I suspected I knew the answer. I reached out to grip his forearm, wincing as I felt the measure of his discomfort. “What happened?”

  “Ahhhhhh,” Nigel half groaned, screwing his eyes shut in renewed pain. “Keep doing that. I think I feel them lifting.”

  Tightening my hold on his arm, I tentatively extended my mind toward him, feeling my way along the energy currents of Nigel’s body. My skills as a healer were much more on the nontraditional side of the process, as that generally was what was required when it came to working with the magically afflicted. In this particular instance, both blood and magic were in play.

  I could see the symbols and lines of language written on Nigel’s skin had burned themselves all the way down to his bones, and I swept across them one after the other, erasing them layer by layer, bringing the energy up out of his body until it no longer scorched his flesh or rent his skin. Nigel convulsed as I worked, his gaze locked on mine, his mouth set in a determined grimace. The man didn’t have much magic in him, though he’d picked up some over the past few years just by his proximity to us. What he lacked in supernatural ability, he more than made up for with British grit. As always, he didn’t breathe a sigh of protest.

  When it was done, he grunted with satisfaction. “I preferred it when you were hunting artifacts, but that is a neat trick.”

  “You’re welcome.” I gave him a grim smile.

  “You want to tell me what tattoo parlor you fell into so I can avoid it?” Nikki asked.

  Nigel turned to her, then once again noticed Mrs. French there, waiting patiently with a fresh cup of tea. This time, he accepted it gratefully. “Roland Franklin sent me an encrypted email a few days ago, telling me he was in trouble.”

  “Roland Franklin?” I interjected sharply. “You two are still in touch?”

  “Not even remotely. I assumed it was a scam—he’s that kind of a fellow—then it came again. By the third time, I decided that maybe there was something to it. I’d planned to reach out to you when Nikki called, telling me you’d gotten a similar missive, along with an artifact. I hopped the first flight down from Quebec and didn’t think much more of it, landing just a few hours ago. I booked a room to stay up at the ARIA—none of you have a residence above there, right? A man prefers his privacy.”

  “No,” I snapped, giving him the move-it-along gesture. I couldn’t unsee the image of Nigel bleeding in the hallway, and my tension was winding tighter by the second.

  “Right, so, the minute I passed this place, the trouble started. It was as if I’d violated some ward. The runes or whatever the hell they were sliced into me, ripping me to shreds. Suspecting there was a connection, I turned right around to head here, but the damage was done. I managed to get through to the elevators before the message started burning through my shirt, but it bloody well hurt.”

  “Since when did Roland become a sorcerer?” I protested. “He was an artifact hunter. Not a very good artifact hunter at that. And he was old when we were young.”

  Nigel snorted. “Not as old as you might suspect. With artifact hunters, it’s not the age, it’s the mileage. But it wasn’t that long ago, even if it feels like it. Still, this isn’t Roland, not directly. He’s no sorcerer. Not back then, not now. It’s either whoever has him, or more likely a magician he bartered with to get help. My money’s on the latter, depending on what the message says. Needless to say, I didn’t take the time to try to read it.”

  Nikki scowled down at the screen. She handed the phone to me. “You fluent in stick lines and squiggles?”

  I did have a facility with languages, but this was unlike anything I’d ever seen. I couldn’t decipher it, even if my first suspicion was right as to its origin. I suspected if I’d heard it aloud, I would understand it, but the arcane scribbles could have been moving in any direction—up, down, or in circles, and until I knew the pattern…

  Stymied, I handed the phone over to Mrs. French. “You recognize any of this from anything we have here in the library?”

  “Well, I’m sure…” Mrs. French said, frowning. “I’ll have it transcribed over into the catalog system and see if we have any hits. There must be something. Hmmm….”

  Still murmuring, she turned away to reenter my private office, leaving Nigel, me, and Nikki alone. By now, the marks on his skin had faded to white and pink smudges, and he stretched out his hands, looking first at the palms, then the backs.

  “I never thought it was going to be Roland who’d give us trouble,” he said. “I mean you recall him, right? He was about as remarkable as toast.”

  I sighed. “Honestly, I can’t really rem
ember much of the man.”

  Nigel rolled his eyes. “Yes, well, it’s amazing what tequila will do to you. You don’t remember Valencia, eight years ago? The caves at the southern tip of Spain?”

  I widened my eyes ever so slightly. “That was Roland?”

  “In the flesh.” He glanced to Nikki. “He pinched the Star of Arabia out from beneath both of us, when we were practically sitting on top of it. And then fumbled the damned thing prior to getting it across the border. Sara here got the bright idea that we could win it back in a card game because it was being held by a bunch of Russian hunters who’d never been to Spain before. She figured they wouldn’t be familiar with the local alcohol.”

  “Wait a minute,” Nikki protested. “You said tequila. Tequila isn’t Spanish.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Everybody’s a critic.”

  “As it happened, those gits weren’t terribly familiar with tequila, so that was to our advantage,” Nigel continued, with a ghost of a smile. “What I didn’t know was, in addition to a somewhat questionable understanding of international liquor, Sara didn’t understand her own cards.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” I countered. “I knew exactly what I was doing. The cards had already told me where things were headed.”

  “A fight,” said Nigel. “Five of wands, a fight. But there are lots of ways you can get into a fight. They didn’t have to involve drinking yourself under the table first.”

  “It worked,” I reasoned.

  “It worked because I was the only one in the room with the sense to nick the stone back and haul ass out of there before we all got killed.”

  “So what are you saying?” Nikki asked. “There was no fight?”

  “Oh, there was a fight,” Nigel said. “It was just in the streets outside the bar, when Roland showed up with a half dozen mercs he’d hired to get back the blasted rock he’d just lost. One thing about Roland, he wasn’t a quitter.”

  “Did he get it back from you, then?” Nikki asked.

  Nigel looked at me with one elegant brow raised. I shrugged.

  “He didn’t get it back,” I muttered. “That rock was worth way too much to the right people, and I had kids to save.”

  “Then how—”

  “She swallowed it.” Nigel grinned. “And then we ran like hell. It took maybe twelve hours and a fair amount more alcohol to recover that particular bauble, but at least we made it through customs without any issues.”

  “And what happened to Roland after that?” Nikki asked, doing an admirable job of trying not to laugh.

  Nigel tilted his head. “I lost track of him after that for a few years,” he admitted. “The rock wasn’t his original job, so it’s not like he lost a client in losing the bauble, but he was a bit of an ass about the whole thing. Word got out that we’d bested him, and that didn’t sit well. I came across him again a few years later. Had me ambushed, and that time, he was successful in making off with the goods. Too bad for him I knew he was coming, and I didn’t want to fuss with the man.”

  “You set him up,” I said. “You had him steal the wrong piece?”

  “A very well-made fake,” Nigel agreed. “So well made that Roland was able to pass it off to a buyer. I hadn’t expected him to do that quite so quickly. When the amulet finally got to its new owner, who was a wizard of some repute, Roland was sunk. He’s had it in for me ever since, but time passes. Life goes on.”

  “Well, if he has it in for you, why in the world would he choose you to be the recipient of his message, whatever the hell the message is?” Nikki asked reasonably enough. “You guys are enemies.”

  “Even enemies know who can help them. Most likely, I was Roland’s best chance. And not only me.” Nigel glanced my way meaningfully. “Those marks hit me about twenty minutes ago. What were you up to about then?”

  Nikki blew out a long whistle. “Nigel’s little message is tied to the ring, I bet. This Roland guy wanted you to receive the messages together.”

  With my gaze firmly fixed on Nigel, I held the ring closer to my finger. As it neared the tip, Nigel looked up, jolting as his skin glowed, the arcane runes flaring to life—this time across his forehead, which hadn’t been marked before. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, a bead of sweat appearing at his hairline. I jerked the ring away from my hand before the runes caught fire.

  “The two go together,” I said. “But why? Why would he want us to get the message at the same time?”

  “Justice Wilde,” Mrs. French interrupted from the doorway to the inner office. “I think you’ll want to see this.”

  11

  We gathered in the interior office, where Mrs. French perched in front of a standing desk, commandeering a laptop that was attached to a large screen on the wall opposite our complaint-intake system. I blinked at all the electronics.

  “When did we get those?” I asked, but Mrs. French waved me off.

  “We’ve always had access to all the fancy technology we need, and setting it up is no great matter,” she said as I peered at the glittering combination, sparing only the barest glance for the Victorian-era pneumatic tube system that served as the main communications hub for Justice Hall. Then the screen in front of me changed, and my attention sharply refocused on it. A series of lines, glyphs, and letters, all from different languages, gleamed from its surface, jumbled together like alphabet soup.

  “When you start at the very top row, then read all the way through to the bottom, you end up with a tangle of glyphs,” Mrs. French said before highlighting one of the symbols with a red laser pointer. “However, this sign here appeared at such regular intervals that I decided it was some sort of break in the pattern. When you use that as a focal point, then you get the exact same set of letters between the two symbols every time, just in different order. So the message itself is quite brief, I suspect, for all that I cannot specifically decipher it. But the symbol bracketing the message is, I think, quite appropriate, given all the fuss of late.”

  I nodded. It was a simple crescent, heavily outlined. The ancient symbol for the moon.

  “Can you make heads or tails of it?” Nikki asked.

  “Um—actually, I can,” I said, squinting at the glyphs with some surprise. “It’s Quechuan, sort of, plus some other influences, but the message is coming through clear enough. All variations of ‘Come save me, you cunt.’”

  Nigel choked on a laugh, and I glanced at him. “You know Roland better than I do. Does that sound like him?”

  “It sounds very much like him,” Nigel said. “The question is, where is he?”

  “He’s Australian, right?” I hefted the ring. “Opals are mostly mined in Australia. It would make sense to start there, except for the Quechuan inscriptions on the band. I have no idea how you end up with opals in South America, but I think it’s far more likely that’s where the ring came from. I bet that’s where Roland found it, anyway.”

  “Quechuan?” Nigel asked. “Who speaks that language?”

  “Originally? Tribes indigenous to the area who were the precursors to the Incas by several thousand years, which doesn’t narrow it down much,” I said. “The language is still in use today, to some extent. So maybe this ring was part of that civilization? It’s heavy, but it’s meant for a woman’s hand. Not for everyday use, I can’t imagine.”

  Nigel reached for it, and I handed it over with only slight trepidation. Fortunately, he had no reaction to it. Either the inscribed symbols had already done their job, or he wasn’t a trigger for the ring. He weighed the ring and grimaced.

  “Definitely not an everyday ring. It weighs about two pounds, I would guess. Not something you’d want to have hanging out on your hand all day.”

  He held it up to me, and didn’t stiffen when I passed my ring finger over the opening of it.

  “You feel anything?” I prompted.

  He shrugged. “Perhaps I’m all better.”

  “Or the message has been received,” Nikki put in, echoing my own thoughts. “All right, so let’s tak
e this from the top. We’ve got a beaten-down bad actor of an artifact hunter lost and potentially in distress, probably, though not definitely, in South America, who had enough gumption, mojo, or connections to get a message to Sara and, by extension, you, Nigel. What else do we need to be thinking about here?”

  Nigel sat back in his chair, considering. “He didn’t offer anything to sweeten the deal. A hint of treasure to be found, a reason for us to have skin in the game. That’s unusual.”

  “You guys usually have to provide incentives to get you to go help a friend?” Nikki asked drily.

  Nigel cocked a finger at her. “Remember, we are not friends. Roland and I, in particular, have been on opposite sides of an artifact hunt more often than not, dating back to before Sara got into the game and continuing after she left. He knows that. So why me—why both of us? And why now?”

  “Could there be more to the message?” Mrs. French asked. “Nigel is only one man, one contact. Perhaps he only has part of the message that Roland was sending. Who else do you know in common?”

  I frowned. “I didn’t make a lot of friends back in the day. We didn’t even share that many clients, since Roland tended to dive into the murkier end of the pool. It should have been someone obvious, but there really isn’t anyone I can think of. What about you, Nigel?”

  He shrugged. “As much as it pains me, I’m forced to agree with you. More than that, Sara was always known for operating on her own. My association with her was competitive back when Roland and I were working….” He narrowed his gaze at me. “Is there anyone else you would consider your competition?”

  I made a face. “I’m telling you, I didn’t work like that. Most of the time, the artifacts I sought weren’t on any official radar until the job started. There were only a couple of highly coveted items that drew the attention of multiple hunters.”

  “Okay, then, what about the money behind the clients?” Nikki hazarded. “Your buddy Mercault funded a lot of searches. Could he be a connection?”