The Night Witch: Wilde Justice, Book 6

by Stark, Jenn

  “I know where you are.” Qadir sounded like he was moving. Good. “Never forget, I am wherever the sun’s bright rays caress the earth, whether in full day or in reflected moonlight.”

  I blinked at that, but needed to focus. Great. I still need her here. Get Armaeus to help.

  Qadir drew in a long, shuddering breath. “My queen,” he said, the words a tortured whisper, and I had to smile as I imagined Danae’s most likely reaction to his approach.

  She didn’t disappoint. Her sharp, cutting tones ripped across my mind. “Qadir. Stop. Exactly what do you think you’re—”

  A moment later, two figures burst onto the bright, sun-swept patio, forcing me to step back. The giant djinn Qadir, still bare-chested and sporting glittery gold pants and the heavy medallion of the Sun strung on its thick chain around his neck, immediately stepped back and opened his arms wide, releasing Danae. She spun toward him.

  “Doing!” she spluttered. “Get away from me.”

  “My queen,” Qadir said again. He brought his hands together in front of his mouth, as if in prayer. Never taking his adoring gaze from her face, he dissolved into light.

  Danae turned back to us, barely giving me time to wipe the smirk from my mouth. “What?” she demanded, and she glowered at Ma-Singh. “I’m busy.”

  Then she scanned the patio with sharp eyes, immediately seeing the crowd of warriors, who as one had lifted their right arms to their chests, their hands clenched into fists. “What is going on, Ma-Singh?”

  “A battle is at hand. The call has been put out, and you can believe that the houses of magic will answer it.”

  “A battle against whom?” Danae asked sharply. “The Shadow Court? We don’t know who they are. Jarvis is dead, but he wasn’t the head of their group. No one believed that.”

  Nikki put her hands on her hips. “We’ve got some data coming in on that. The woman that Jarvis had the hots for—she apparently belongs to some highly placed family, but she has no name, operated only under an alias. We can’t trace her. Yet. And we don’t need to trace her. We should fight the enemies we have already unmasked. According to Simon, we’ve already got a pile of them.”

  I sighed. “Speaking of Simon, we’re going to need to inform the Council of this battle cry. We would be better served if we had their weight behind us, but that’s not going to happen. The Council will have to maintain an air of plausible deniability.”

  “And they’d slow us down,” Ma-Singh put in.

  “That’s true enough,” Danae said, shrugging as I glanced at her. “But something is going on in the Connected world. It has been for a while . There are deeply embedded cells of activity in the arcane black market being funded by unknown sources. We’ve resisted acting, preferring to watch and prepare, but make no mistake, we have been preparing. And we’re not afraid to act. We don’t have the luxury of time like the Council does when the threats hit this close to home.”

  “If it’s war these bastards want, they’ll get it,” Ma-Singh said.

  Nikki crossed her legs, swinging her boot almost playfully. “If it’s war, then the Connecteds of this world will need to be given a reason to act on their own behalf. Singly, even in small groups, they can do a great deal of damage. With a champion, or two champions, willing to strike in the shadows, giving them hope…”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “You volunteering? Because I already have about three thousand years of backlog to work through.”

  “And we’re telling you that the Connecteds’ problems are now far beyond psychics harming other psychics,” Nikki countered. “It’s escalated to the brink of a systemic attack. That is the legacy of the Shadow Court. And we’ve got to fight it.”

  “She’s right,” Danae sighed. “Far more people know about us now, people in power, who are threatened by the existence of Connecteds. They don’t understand them, and they wish to control that which they don’t understand. Worse, they’re eager to act. The work you and the Council did at the Palais des Nations helps, but at best, it only buys us a short amount of time. The vacuum left by so many critical players in the Shadow Court is going to be filled, and soon. When it is, we must be ready to act.”

  We stared at each other a long moment, then Danae squared her shoulders. “I stand with you,” she said simply, though I hadn’t asked the question. “You fight—I’ll fight.”

  I blew out a long sigh. “Fair enough,” I said, shifting my gaze back to Ma-Singh. “When?

  “Sooner than any of us would wish,” the general replied. “Be ready.”

  28

  This meeting of the Arcana Council was decidedly exclusive. Kreios stood at the head of the room, gazing out, not over the expanse of the Las Vegas Strip, but the people he had assembled. The Fool, the High Priestess, the Magician, and me. Gamon had returned to her lair to more fully interrogate the members of the Shadow Court who had survived the “terrorist attack,” and we were left to sort through the rest of our infiltration of their organization.

  A glint of gold caught my eye, and I blinked, squinting into the bright daylight. A new domain now stretched high above the Sahara Las Vegas casino, looking like a mirage in the radiating heat that shimmered above the sunbaked streets. An enormous collection of white and dusky-tan tents, topped by poles as thin as lightning rods, from which flew narrow, pennant-style flags of every color, flapping stiffly in an unseen wind. The entire setup looked like, well, a mirage. I glanced down at the Mirage Casino, but the airspace above it was empty.

  Simon caught the angle of my gaze. “Too crowded,” he explained. “Qadir decided he needed a little more space, and that the end of the Strip has it.”

  I couldn’t argue with the logic. With a residence over Sahara Las Vegas, the closest Council member to the Sun would be the Hanged Man, and Tesla wasn’t likely to show up with pie. “I take it Qadir is settling into his new role?”

  Armaeus fielded that one. “He is, and we have started the process of tracking down the Moon and the Star. The energy signatures that accompanied their votes for the Council disappeared as quickly as the Sun’s had. But with the memories that Ahmad provided to Qadir, and with the Sun taking up such a visible role again on the Council, it’s possible they’ll take note. It’s equally possible it will drive them further underground.”

  “We do have some anomalous information, though, that could prove useful,” Kreios put in, nodding to me as I glanced his way. “For which we have you to thank.”

  That sounded promising. “What kind of information?”

  “The cuffs you sent out to tag the members of the Shadow Court did not always find their marks,” Kreios said. “They also targeted the highest-level Connecteds on the planet, who were most assuredly not in the Court, namely other members of the Arcana Council. The only difference being as soon as the cuffs skimmed those worthy souls, they sheared off just as quickly, as no Shadow Court affiliation could be established. But they still tagged them. It was only for a moment, but it was a moment we took note of.”

  He gestured to Simon, who swiveled on his chair, a wide, satisfied grin on his face. “I had energy signatures popping out all over the place,” he said. “Basically, anyone with any intense amount of magic in them, whether or not they were trying to keep it hidden, got pinged. Totally better than Google.”

  “Without the tedious concern for privacy rights,” the Devil agreed.

  “So we do know where they are,” I pressed

  “More correctly, we know where they were,” Kreios said. “Most of these high-level Connecteds were tagged and dropped so quickly that in most cases, they weren’t aware it was happening. They simply didn’t notice. The members of the Arcana Council who were fully aware of your actions understood the touch of your cuffs for what they were and continued on with their business. It certainly helped, of course, that the connection was so brief. The cuffs bound them only briefly, then left for other marks.”

  I snorted, conjuring up an image of any of the Council members suddenly finding them
selves locked by the cuffs of Justice, even for the barest second.

  “Trust me, I’m putting together a video montage.” Simon grinned at me. “It’ll be epic.”

  “But there are certain sets of cuffs, it would appear, that were annihilated almost immediately upon reaching their targets,” Kreios continued. “They didn’t shear away, but took off like bottle rockets and were destroyed.”

  I grimaced. Poor little cuffs. “And that helps us how?”

  “It helps us in the same way that the last known location of a precious artifact helps us,” Armaeus answered with an amused smile. “We don’t know where the cuffs of Justice are, but we know where they were, and whether they brushed up against Connecteds of unexpected depth or hidden members of the Arcana Council, given the nature of the challenge that lies before us, we need to find them. Especially if they found hidden members of the Arcana Council who are also the hidden leaders of the Shadow Court. That, as you’ll appreciate, changes everything.”

  Our gazes met, and I didn’t miss the gleam in his eyes. “Well, finding stuff is always fun,” I allowed.

  “I agree. It would appear your skills remain in high demand, Miss Wilde.”

  The conversation turned to tactics and potential targets, but Simon insisted there remained far too much data to crunch to set any initial course. He’d need at least a few days. I suspected I’d need every bit of that time to sort through the newest round of complaints thudding into Justice Hall. I’d also be spending some considerable time in the library, tracking down more information about the actions of the houses of magic over time. There was something I was missing in all this. Something deeply rooted in the Connected communities far away from the soaring towers of the Arcana Council. Then too, there was the elegant woman who had so captured Jarvis’s attention.

  Speaking of…

  “What about the woman we saw in the gallery?” I asked. “The one who seemed to run the show, this supposed representative for the leaders of the Shadow Court. Do we have a line on her?”

  “Madame X. We’re working on that,” Simon said. “Interestingly enough, the data is all over the place. She was known by thirty different names, a true cipher. Nobody ever met any members of her family, though she referenced them by that term in most of her conversations as her source of information and financial support. Given that she was a high-level Connected, she could and probably is effecting a disguise. I’m tracking standard surveillance as well as those put in place by the houses of magic, but I’m not getting anywhere fast. I can tell you this, though. That army of mercenary soldiers she promised? The biggest, meanest bad guys in the land?”

  “Oh yeah.” I nodded. “What happened to—”

  “Dead. All of them. Slaughtered in their cars.”

  That…wasn’t what I’d been expecting. “Seriously?”

  “Straight up,” Simon said, leaning forward again to type on his laptop. “I’d show you what was left, but it isn’t pretty. All of them knifed in their cars, heads taken clean off in some cases. No weapons, no survivors, no witnesses. Cars were found stopped in traffic not three blocks from the Palais des Nations. Switzerland is a polite place—most people just drove around them. But someone finally looked and…the shit hit the fan.”

  “They were knifed to death. In their vehicles. And no one saw.”

  “So far as we can tell, yep.” Simon grinned. “So either they all spontaneously decided to shuffle off this mortal coil, or we’ve got a friend in high places. Something else we need to investigate.”

  “No doubt,” I said, the same chill sweeping through me that I’d felt in the Palais des Nations when Jarvis’s girlfriend had mentioned the soldiers. Had I known then they were marked for death? And if so, how? “Maybe put that at the top of your list.”

  More discussion ensued, but the reality was—we needed more information. Until we understood what lurked in the shadows, we couldn’t strike. The only difference now was…I wanted to strike. It was a swelling need within me, sharp and hot. Was that the desire of Justice, of the night witch…or both? I couldn’t say. But I was finally ready to find out.

  We broke up shortly thereafter, and despite the fact I knew my way to Justice Hall without the benefit of walking, I left the Arcana Council conference room on foot, needing the heat of the unforgiving sun to sear some of the unease out of me. Armaeus fell into step beside me the moment I reached the sizzling concrete of the boulevard. We moved along the sunbaked sidewalk beneath the looming, iconic casinos, passing doorways that beckoned with the whoosh and clatter of slot machines and fanning cards.

  “You know what the House of Swords is planning, right?” I hadn’t kept my line of communication open when I’d spoken with Ma-Singh, given that I didn’t know how to mute my feed from Qadir yet, but the Magician had his own unique set of skills. He probably had tapped into Danae’s mind when he saw she was being whisked away. “They believe a war is coming. They may be right.”

  “Now you know why the Council never embroiled itself in the maintenance and direction of the houses of magic,” he said. “Those houses are made up of mortals, and therefore, they face the challenges to their power and their very survival with a uniquely mortal viewpoint, the immediacy of which is not always effective or prudent. As a result, their solutions are born of emotion more so than strategy. They react and do not think of the long-term impact of their actions.”

  “To be fair, they weren’t exactly put in this position of their own volition,” I countered. “Their hand was forced by us.”

  The Magician only smiled. “Was it, though? Actions have consequences, even those we feel we have no choice but to make. The Houses will take actions that will bring the Connecteds into the full glare of awareness—exactly what the Shadow Court wanted, in the end. And of course, they are not my only concern, Miss Wilde.”

  I looked at him, surprised. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “Oh, do not misunderstand. I don’t worry at all. In fact, I couldn’t be happier. With each new act I’m able to undertake free of the strictures of the Council, I recognize what can be done. But we will both be watched.”

  “By Kreios?” I protested. “I have a hard time believing that.”

  Armaeus laughed softly. “You’ll note I didn’t say we’d be stopped. But the wheels of government are already moving, and some of those Connected with the highest level of power even if they are not tacitly members of the Shadow Court, are moving and acting. Whether they seek to draw us out by attacking the weak and the vulnerable, or whether they come at us more directly, through official or unofficial channels, remains to be seen. But what we are approaching is a battle not with the gods, but with a far less predictable foe. It’s a war that’s been waged against Connecteds in secrecy up to now, but…no longer, I suspect.”

  “Great,” I muttered. “And where do the other outlying members of the Council play into this?”

  “An excellent question,” Armaeus said, excitement edging his words. “If the Sun can be moved to join us, who’s to say what the Star might do, if she—or he—is not already guiding the Shadow Court? The Moon, by its nature, will prefer to remain hidden…but working for us or for another, darker force? It’s impossible yet to say. There will be much research to be done, shadows to pierce, and many long, dark nights to search for them.”

  I looked up at him, feeling a now-familiar flutter of excitement rising within me. A sudden, unquenchable yearning to stretch the fiery wings that simmered against my shoulder blades even now, to fly into that night at Armaeus’s side. A deep and powerful need to confront whatever evil awaited us in the dark and shifting gloom…and drag it screaming into the light.

  Fire crackled along my nerve endings and made my fingers twitch. “I look forward to the hunt.”

  Armaeus smiled and reached for my hand, drawing it to his lips. Then together, we walked onward, beneath the bright and burning sun.

  Epilogue

  I found Sariah sitting on the wall beside Bella
gio’s famous fountain, watching the play of water in the shimmering lights. It was a bright, star-filled evening, and the crowd oohed and ahhed at all the appropriate places as gusts of water arced and twirled in perfect time to the familiar strains of a Frank Sinatra standard.

  She didn’t glance over to me when I settled beside her, merely took a long pull on her bottle of beer. I was pretty sure there was a strict glass container law in force on the Strip, and was equally sure Sariah didn’t give a shit.

  “Does Sells still think you’re asleep in your bed?” I began. She laughed, the sound low and raspy. I suspected it would be some time before she lost the gravel of the pits of Hell from her voice.

  “Nah, she gave me the all clear. Probably knew she couldn’t hold on to me anyway.”

  “Probably.” I doubted, really, that anyone could. Not anymore.

  A long silence stretched between us, and I watched the water dance. I’d once fought a battle with a fiery dragon beside this fountain, at almost this exact spot. I figured Sariah knew that too. We had a habit of knowing a little too much about each other’s battles, it seemed.

  “I couldn’t do it,” I finally said, the words coming out far sadder than I intended. “I couldn’t outright kill those people in Geneva. Even though they deserved it.”

  She took another long drink, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I know,” she said.

  “It’s not who I’m supposed to be, in the end. As much as I sometimes want it to be. The night witch…it’s not who I am.”

  She’d stopped drinking now, staring at the gusts of water shooting up. “I know,” she said again. There was no judgment in her tone, or even resignation. She was simply stating a fact.

  I thought about the faces that had flashed by me at the Palais des Nations, hatred in their eyes. The same faces I’d seen in the horrific images that Qadir had projected for all to see. Murderers. Anarchists. Oppressors. I had to fight them, without question, but I had to do more than fight. I had to protect. I had to bring hope to a people who had long ago forgotten what hope meant. I had to lead.