by Stark, Jenn
“The dino bats,” Nikki put in helpfully. Armaeus continued.
“The explosion was intended to occur exactly when it did, and merely as a diversionary tactic. No sooner had the attack occurred than the casino and hotel guests would be disoriented by the explosion. Their accounts of ‘dino bats,’ as Miss Dawes would say, would easily be discounted.”
“But were the hellspawn looking for me or Sariah?”
“That is unknown,” Armaeus acknowledged. “Detective Rooks advised that they called Sariah out by name, but did they know it was her from the start, or…”
“Or did they recognize her,” I finished for him. I shuddered. I’d never asked Sariah about her time in Hell. God only knew what kind of neighbors she’d had there. “Okay, so we now have a direct strike from the Shadow Court. How do we respond?”
“The Devil has assembled a quorum of the Council to speak to you when you’re ready,” Armaeus said, and I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What do you mean, a quorum? Why isn’t the entire Council there?”
Something dark flashed across Armaeus’s face but was gone before I could fully identify it. He turned his cool eyes to meet mine. “Because the Council has already voted,” he said.
My eyes shot wide. “How could they vote? I wasn’t there. Eshe is out of commission. That’s two whole Council members who didn’t get to raise their hands.”
“And if the results had been close enough for two additional members’ input to matter, the vote would have been postponed. It was not close. The majority ruled to take no action.”
“What?”
I crackled out of existence before he could answer. I knew where I was going. I had spent more hours of my life in the Magician’s conference room than I’d ever cared to admit. When I appeared, a few embers hissing into ash around me, nobody in the Council seemed surprised. I swept the room with a glance.
“This is what you call a quorum?”
The room was only half full. The Devil, once more in his Mediterranean cool groove of a long white linen shirt and well-draped, frayed khakis, stood at the head of the table, his face stony, which caught me up short. I’d never seen him with any expression on his face other than a laconic smile or some level of private amusement. Beside him was the Council’s second-in-command, the Emperor. Tall, trim, and aristocratically blond, Viktor Dal stared at me with something approaching amusement, excitement lurking behind his pale blue eyes. He looked entirely too smug, but not in the cloying way he usually did. He was alert, eager. Ready for action, and yet I somehow didn’t think it was the kind of action I was going to support.
“Hello, Viktor. Good to see you,” I said.
“Justice Wilde,” he replied, with such obvious relish that I knew something was up.
The High Priestess was conspicuously absent, of course. Ordinarily, she didn’t miss a Council meeting, given that it was always right down the hall from her. But she was either tied up or kicking it Saudi-style with the Shadow Court, so unless she voted by text, her voice didn’t count.
The other present members of the Council stood around the room like gloomy sentinels. The Hierophant, his skin once more paper white, his pale ice-blue eyes inscrutable, fixed his gaze out the window at the reflected glory of the late-night Strip. Nikola Tesla, the Hanged Man, sat with his lips pressed tightly together and would not meet my eyes. His tailored steel-blue suit was neat and crisp, his black hair slicked back from his gaunt face, and his elegant, long-fingered hands clasped in front of him. He and I weren’t friends, exactly, but we’d come to have a certain grudging respect for each other. Nevertheless, I wasn’t shocked he hadn’t voted for action. He was the consummate analyst of the Arcana Council, more than ready to weigh all options and constantly tinkering with the solution based on new, incoming data. Fast action would deprive him of the sport of preparation.
Simon was there, of course, and he met my eyes fiercely, his face flushed, his hands gripped into fists as he balanced on his toes. In his orange knit cap covering his unruly hair, a red short-sleeved shirt over a white long-sleeved shirt, he looked like one very pissed-off Where’s Waldo. I gave him a reassuring grimace, but his expression only turned darker. Simon was good people.
Far less so were the couple to his right, Hera and Zeus, late of the attack of the gods. Gorgeously Greek, from Zeus’s curling white hair, chiseled features, and still-robust body to Hera’s lush goddess-in-residence curves, they were constantly at each other’s throats. Even now, they sat pointedly not looking at each other, lost in some private feud. I rolled my eyes.
And then, to my surprise, there was the Hermit. The guardian of the veil between the worlds, he stood at the farthest edge of the room as if eager to be the first to leave. Today, he was rocking the knock-off Gandalf look, all gray beard, gray robes, and scuffed, dusty boots. All he needed was a gnarled staff and a peaked hat. I didn’t know whether I should be impressed or annoyed.
“Hey, Dad,” I muttered. I could tell from the look on his face that he hadn’t voted for action. The Hermit never did.
Gamon, notably, wasn’t there. Neither was Death. At this point, I honestly didn’t know how either of them would swing, and for the first time, I appreciated the complexity of this vote to act. The Council had a balance to keep in the world, whereas I wanted nothing more than to salt the earth wherever the Shadow Court stood.
“So which of you assholes was the deciding vote?” I started in. “And where is the rest of the team?” Just that quickly, I was back on Team Action. This was the Shadow Court we were talking about here. They legitimately were bad news!
Viktor spoke first. “The votes of the Arcana Council are private. Surely you know that.”
“What I know is that there’s something seriously wrong with the Council if you legit expect me to believe that more than half of you prefer to sit on your hands and do nothing as opposed to hold the Shadow Court responsible for attacking a member of the Council. Even one by proxy.”
“The attack on Sariah is regrettable, but also highly instructive,” Viktor countered. “And there is much we can learn by studying the Shadow Court’s strategy. We will do well to watch and learn what they do next, not wage an all-out war.”
“Who even are you?” I demanded. “Since when are you the watch-and-learn type?”
As soon as I’d spoken the words, of course, I knew the answer. Viktor had nothing to gain from action. This attack had been against me personally, more than the true Council. Hell, I’d barely been on the Council longer than a minute by their standards. Only Gamon was newer than I was, and then only by a hair’s breadth. I suspected that the Emperor would not mind all that much if I proved to be the victim of an overeager rival council. Going to war might upset the careful balance he was trying to strike in the world, or could even run counter to some secret arrangement he had in place already with the Shadow Court. Before I could fully build up a head of steam about that, however, he lifted a lazy hand.
“You forget, we also had a member of the Arcana Council embedded in the heart of the Shadow Court. Do you really think it would have been advisable to do anything that might cause her harm?”
That stopped me. I didn’t want to admit it, but of course, Viktor was right. Viktor was also speaking in the past tense. I shot a look at Simon.
“You’ve found her?” I asked, not missing the way he flinched at my tone. Well, too bad. I was in the mood to make them all flinch.
“We have,” Simon said. He planted one knee on a chair and leaned toward the laptop screen open on the table in front of him, his gaze dropping to it as he typed. “She’s in Dubai—and she’s safe. Her communication with Kreios this morning was brief, coded, but definitely on the up and up. She appears to be the honored guest of Sheikh Alsain Ahmad now.”
I stared at him, my breath strangling in my throat. “Ahmad is with the Shadow Court?” Was that why he’d reached out to me, as some sort of very obvious trap?
“Not at all,” Kreios broke in smoothly.
“It would appear that Ahmad encountered Eshe while she was shopping in Dubai and promptly left the retail district with her. They weren’t stopped. Her communication to me was that the Shadow Court operatives involved in Stratosfaire were all low level. The celebutantes were allowed to leave immediately, but the three virgins remained behind in Pompeii, ostensibly unharmed. Eshe remains linked to them mentally, but hasn’t attempted to reach out to them because she’s being constantly monitored. In fact, she believes that the young women are being held specifically to keep a link open to her, and she is loath to break that connection until their rescue is imminent.”
“She’s still being monitored? Even though she’s with Ahmad?” I asked.
“She believes so,” Kreios said. “I know nothing more than that. There’s been no sighting of Jarvis Fuggeren, either. At this point, we don’t know if he is involved in any of this.”
“Oh, he’s involved all right. He spoke to me in Hell. Explain how he was able to do that without the help of one of you guys—or Eshe?” I scowled. “He said he’d set a trap for the High Priestess—that he’d set the trap, not her. How convinced are we she’s okay? Or that she even knows what they did to her?”
Kreios tilted his head, his cool eyes studying me. If he asked me to tell him my truth, he wasn’t going to like what I had to say. “Eshe does not have the ability to serve as a conduit to Hell,” he murmured. He glanced to the Hierophant, who had finally turned toward us, his interest apparently snagged with the mention of Hell.
“A strong enough demon could,” the Hierophant said.
“Yeah? “ I pressed. “What about a djinn? Because given where they’re all hanging out now…”
“No,” he said, surprising me. “Djinn are an entirely different type of creature, not linked to Hell. And they do not mix in the affairs of mortals willingly.”
“Well, someone sure is,” I snapped back. “And that someone handed their cell phone to Jarvis with a direct line to down under. He knew I was there, and he knew I shouldn’t have been able to do that. So either he’s got more power than we think he does, or there’s someone big and bad leaning over his shoulder, calling the shots. Either way, we need to stop playing games here. We’ve got to figure out who’s behind the Shadow Court. And while Eshe is on her shopping spree in Dubai and you guys are all sitting around smug in your little vote to once again do nothing at all, there are at least three young Connecteds who remain unaccounted for after the Pompeii throwdown and Sariah was nearly killed. You may not give a shit about that, but I do. Because believe me, the Shadow Court isn’t going to stop with these opening shots. They’ll only get cockier once we show our indifference. We need to act, and we need to act now.”
“No.” The voice that spoke was the last I would have expected, and everyone in the room swiveled again toward the Devil. His face had grown even darker, as if he was wrestling with his own internal demons, but his words were absolute. “The vote has been cast, Sara. The Council will not be acting at this time on the matter of the Shadow Court. We wait, we watch, and we remain in the shadows. The decision is final. This is not war, and we will not fight. Not yet. Potentially, not ever.”
“Even though people will die?”
The Devil’s smile was barely a flicker, but his eyes remained curiously flat. “People die. That’s what they do.”
It was there again, the surge of unexpected white-hot fury from deep in my core, propelling me to action. I stared at Kreios, a thousand comebacks racing through my mind. I mostly wanted to punch him right in his beautiful face.
“Fine,” I said instead. “Nice chat.”
With that, I caught myself on fire. For the first time ever, I looked forward to the burn.
12
Mrs. French was alone in Justice Hall when I stalked back into the outer office, sipping tea at the reception desk like a proper library matron. I frowned at her. “You okay?”
“Quite,” she said primly. “Yourself?”
“I’ve been better.” I rubbed my hands through my hair, half pulling it out of its ponytail. I ruthlessly lashed it back into place.
“Nikki gave me the full accounting,” Mrs. French said. “You should probably not be up and around at all, Justice Wilde. I understand that you must be, but…I do worry.” She set her cup down carefully. It shook a little in the saucer. “The Council should provide you with more security.”
I snorted. “Well, you can count that idea out. We’ve got no support from the Council. Zero. I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that they’d turn into a bunch of weasels. They want to identify who’s behind the Shadow Court, but they don’t want to take direct action. I want to keep those assholes from taking pot shots at me, Sariah, and anyone else on the Council, let alone keep them from jacking up the entire Connected world, but I’m the only one with any sense of urgency about it.”
“Surely they can’t want the Shadow Court to—”
“They voted against me.” There. It was out in the open, stark and unassailable, and I scowled at how frail my voice suddenly sounded.
Mrs. French raised her hands, as if in denial. “Oh, Justice Wilde, surely not. You have several staunch allies on the Council.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t about me. They voted against the Connecteds. And that’s way worse.”
Anger lit along my nerves. I turned on my heel and walked the length of the room. As usual, the door to my office stood open, and I could see the cases piled up on my desk and stacked on the floor next to a scattered pile of silver cuffs. The cries of the Connecteds seeking Justice. And I wasn’t giving them that. I wasn’t giving them anything. “We have to do something, and now. The Shadow Court has been operating behind the smoke screen of Jarvis Fuggeren for way too long, and before that, some other patsy, another rich, entitled figurehead who was their mouth and their face, but not their heart. Not their mind. That goes deeper. It’s got to go deeper.”
I turned again, my gaze raking across the closed door at the other end of the room, the gateway to the library and its hundreds—thousands of years of cold cases. Cries that had long ago gone silent, unanswered. Another lick of fire bolstered my rage. “But Jarvis is the one pushing me now. He’s getting greedy, stupid. He’s going to make a mistake, I know he is. Hell, he already has.”
I shot Mrs. French a hard look, freezing her midsip. “He sent a demon to Hell to taunt me. Did Nikki tell you that? I don’t know how he got there. He doesn’t have enough magic in him to bend a spoon, but it was definitely Jarvis’s voice. Laughing at me while I was trying to find the pieces of Sariah after she’d been ripped apart.”
“She did,” murmured Mrs. French, but I was on a roll. Another turn, another shot of the canisters piled in my office.
“And I’m supposed to just sit around and wait for the Council to do something? They have all the magic in the world, all the resources, but they won’t act. They won’t do anything but watch and wait. Hell, they won’t even go after Eshe.”
“Nikki said she was no longer with the Shadow Court—”
“But she’s still there,” I said. “In Dubai. Why? She’s still hanging out with whatever the hell his name is, Sheikh Ahmad. If she’s safe, why doesn’t she come back?”
I turned again to Mrs. French. “What’d Nikki and Gamon figure out about him, anyway?”
“That discussion was briefer than I would have expected,” Mrs. French said. She’d abandoned the cup entirely now, her hands clasped tightly on her lap. “Gamon did not, in point of fact, remember much about the sheikh, other than he had been instrumental in stopping her establishment of a supply chain through Saudi Arabia for a drug syndicate early in her career, when she was working with a wholly unsavory organization Nikki didn’t recognize. Gamon assured us that she had dismantled said organization herself a short while later, while working for another client, and I must say, I believe her. She’s a…somewhat frightening individual.”
“She has her moments,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t hel
p us.”
“It doesn’t…but this might.” She rapped her knuckles against a tall stack of books and papers sitting beside her on the desk. “I’ve found more information on the night witch—documents, cases. She apparently took on cases in situations of dire need when Justice was otherwise engaged, only she was far more brutal in resolving them. Quite a bit of bloodshed, I must say.”
“Yeah?” I grimaced. The way I felt right now, I could see the allure of shedding a little blood for a good cause. “When was the last time she showed up?”
“Oh, not for a thousand years. Here—” Mrs. French lifted the topmost book, peeked beneath it, then frowned. “Well, bless me. It was right here earlier this morning, I swear it was. Those boys.”
She said this last with a disgusted sniff, and I hid a smile. She loved her junior librarians with a stalwart affection, even when they did act like the children they still were. They’d had a hard life prior to coming into her employ, and she couldn’t help but dote on them.
Now she turned back to me, lifting her chin. “Well, never mind the actual pages. I’ll find those for you later, but this about sums it up—the night witch was a killer who went out to assist Justice when she was most needed, then she’d vanish like a wraith. She could kill anything, viciously and efficiently, with a set of blades she crafted from Justice’s own silver cuffs. That’s what gave her the power of a Council member, you see.”
“Got it. And we’re sure she wasn’t actually Justice in disguise?”
Mrs. French pursed her lips, turning again to rummage through her papers. “Well, I suppose that’s possible, but the notes seemed quite adamant that Justice was…somewhere else. That she and the night witch were operating at the same time, if you will, fighting the same battle from different directions—oh, I will box their ears if they hid that file from me…”
She sighed, shoving the papers back into a tidy square, then picking up a heavy note card beside the stack. “Enough of that for now. We’ve received another summons from Sheikh Ahmad this morning, this one a bit more forthcoming.”