With its endless mountain vistas, crisp, clean air, and granola grunge vibe, Boulder, Colorado was considered the happiest place in America. Not for this guy, though.
“You can’t touch me! I’m protected!”
Ricky Berrit shouted this declaration over his shoulder as he darted away from me, which didn’t speak volumes for his faith in his own inalienable rights. The dude could move, though. I gritted my teeth and bolted after him.
My lungs burned. Mad dashes up snow-covered mountain paths were yet another aspect of my job as Sara Wilde, Justice of the Arcana Council that hadn’t been fully explained to me. Granted, there’d not been a lot of time for orientation. After agreeing to search out, apprehend, and deliver unto Judgment any magic-wielding criminals who crossed my path, I’d been given a couple of fancy bracelets, a quick primer on protocol, and a folder of starter jobs. Ricky was the second of my two newbie assignments, and he was already jumping on my last nerve.
But he also bore the mark of Justice across his temple, a telltale silver slash of energy that pegged him as a psychically gifted offender in desperate need of my particular services. Whether or not he wanted them.
Ricky twisted around to face me at the end of the trail, trapped between a rock and a hard place. Over the edge of the cliff was a bunch of rocks; I was blocking his way back down the trail. I wasn’t liking his odds in either direction.
“I have rights!” Ricky protested again, his eyes jacking everywhere but me. “I want my lawyer. A cop!”
I shrugged, doing my best not to gasp as I sucked in the bitterly cold and unreasonably thin air. “Funny thing about that, Ricky. They save the cops and lawyers for people who break ordinary laws. You didn’t.”
His eyes widened slightly. I wondered how much he knew about the product he was shuttling back and forth across the Rocky Mountain west. According to his file, Ricky had mostly made his name shilling low-level weed up until a few years ago. He certainly looked the part of low-key pot dealer, with his hipster beard, fast-drying pants, and cheerful fleece over a heavy-duty flannel shirt. Unfortunately, then the good voters of Colorado had gone and made pot legal.
Not to be deterred, Ricky had quickly come up with something new and illicit to push. It was his bad luck he’d stumbled into technoceuticals, the half-pharmacological, half-arcane drugs of choice favored by folks looking for the kind of high that came with enhanced psychic powers. The arcane part of the drugs could be inorganic—crystals, metals, nanobot energy conductors, you name it—or it could be organic. Sadly, technoceuticals with organic components were where the big money was.
And the biggest money of all was currently in a new drug called Black Elixir, which I happened to know was what Ricky was packing on this beautiful Colorado morning. I’d encountered the drug’s dark signature in a few hapless victims of Ricky’s on my way to finding him but unfortunately, once Black Elixir got into someone’s bloodstream, it dissipated fast. To get a real fix on it, I needed the source material. Ricky had it.
“Do you have any clue what you’re selling these days, Ricky? Or what effects it has?” I pushed. “Those buyers back at the trailhead looked like they were coming back for their third or fourth hit. You want to know why I think that? Because no one survives the fifth one.”
“That’s a lie.” Still, Ricky’s expression changed at my words, his eyes going craftier. “What happens after the fifth hit is transcendence. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Uh-huh.” I knew Ricky wasn’t manufacturing the drugs he pushed. He didn’t have the brains for that. Most likely, he was a low-level psychic, several miles downstream from the source of the poison he was witlessly dumping into the nervous systems of his equally witless customers. That didn’t mean he wasn’t accountable, though. “You ever see anyone hit transcendence and come back to tell the tale?”
“Lots of people…” Something shifted again in Ricky’s energy, a grifter seeing an easy mark, and I got my first glimpse of the drug dealer lurking beneath all the organic deodorant. Excellent.
“Wait a minute,” he continued, as if struck by a new, startling thought. “You’re curious, aren’t you? Want to try Black Elixir out for yourself?”
“And if I did?”
“I can be generous.”
Good man, Ricky. He was making this easier all the time. “First tell me what you think it is, exactly.”
“It’s magic,” he said, stepping toward me, away from certain death over the side of the cliff. If he knew where I planned to deliver him, he probably would’ve taken his chances on the mountain. But some sort of fever had taken hold of Ricky, and his eyes were alight. “The best stuff anyone’s ever seen. And it’s not what you think. It’s not heroin or something cut into heroin. That shit’s for children. This is the real deal. The kind of juice that the shamans used back in the day.”
“Shamans.” I kept my hands loose. “Medicine men.”
“Magic men, I’m telling you,” he said, sounding awestruck. “Women too. Lix is the real deal.”
“Lix?” I wrinkled my brow. “What the hell is Lix?”
His grin went lopsided. “Short for Black Elixir. I made it up myself.”
“Really.”
“You can tell your friends all about it, then you can tell them where to get it. Or, you want to work it a different way, you can be my contact, and they can only deal with you. You do that, I’ll hook you up royal.”
I paused, startled. “Are you seriously running a pyramid scheme on me right now?”
“Ground floor,” he said, taking another step closer. “Premium product, reliable delivery, best word-of-mouth advertising you’ve ever seen.”
“You can’t see word of—never mind.”
“I know what you’re thinking.”
“I seriously doubt that.”
He bobbed his head, flush with sudden confidence. “Oh, I know. Rocky Mountain High guy doesn’t know shit from the real stuff, couldn’t get his hands on anything major if he tried. But you found me, didn’t you? You knew where to look. Who told you?”
“Someone gave me your card.” I didn’t bother explaining that the card in question was a Tarot card—the Fool, as it happened. I used the cards to find anything that needed finding, and right now, the top three on the deck tucked into my pocket were the ones that’d brought me to this impasse with Ricky. The Fool, the Eight of Swords, and the Seven of Swords. Not the clearest spread, but it’d gotten me to the Seven Forks Trailhead at eight a.m. sharp, early enough to catch the worm.
Once upon a time, I’d used Tarot cards to find arcane artifacts; the more ancient and arcane, the better. These days, I used them to find those gifted humans—known as Connecteds—who’d done very bad things, so that I could bring them to Judgment. It was a calling that’d already started looking like a twenty-four seven commitment. Lucky for me, Hotel Judgment was always open.
Since I’d upgraded from tracking down objets d’art to actual humans, however, my targets were a lot more prone to chatter. Which worked out, because I needed to keep Ricky talking long enough for me to get within cuffing range.
Fortunately, that didn’t seem to be a problem.
“The Black Elixir will give you visions, man, visions of the person you could be if you believe. If you transcend. But it doesn’t wait to give you its gifts at the end. First time I took it, it showed me my future.”
“Prison?”
“Gold,” he corrected me, with a fervency that made my skin crawl. “Everywhere around me. All of it mine for the taking. My second hit, it gave me the plan. Showed me the people I needed to meet, what I needed to say to them. And boom, they showed up. Like magic.”
I’d gone still by this time. “You could predict the future?” I asked carefully. I’d heard as much about Black Elixir, but every drug on the arcane black market promised that kind of thing. I got the feeling Ricky wasn’t quoting brochure copy.
“Give the lady a prize.” Ricky laughed delightedly, tapped his pocket. “I got some of the stuff right here, if you’ve got the cash. You can see for yourself. If you’re lucky, it’ll take you all the way to the Red King.”
My brows shot up. “The Red King? Is that your supplier?”
Ricky’s chortle rattled along the rocks. “Oh, man, you don’t know anything do you? While I know everything!”
Irritation riffled through me. “Uh-huh. If you’re so all-knowing, how come you didn’t see me coming?”
A gun cocked behind me.
“Because Ricky learned his lesson early about sampling the product,” said a new voice. High, thin, scornful. “Anything he sees under the influence of Black Elixir, he tells me.”
Crap.
Ricky’s face split into a broad grin. “You had your chance to cut in on the deal, babe. Mine was a legit offer. Leonardo, he’s not so good with the deals.”
Babe? Ignoring that, I turned slowly, my gaze sweeping over a wide swath of Colorado skyline before it fell on the newest arrival on the trail. Double Crap. This was the problem with Tarot cards. They usually made the most sense after the dust settled.
For tracking Ricky, I’d drawn the Fool, the Seven of Swords, and the Eight of Swords. The Fool pulled double duty serving as both Ricky and the whole concept of walking off a cliff, which was why I’d followed the idiot up this edge-of-the-abyss dirt track. The Seven of Swords seemed a shoo-in for the Seven Forks Trailhead. It was also, however, a card about strategy and being double-crossed. I’d discounted that interpretation because I’d only been given Ricky’s name, and I’d been sure he hadn’t known I was coming, so there was no double to be crossed.
I shrugged mentally. My mistake.
The Eight of Swords, finally, could have been eight a.m., and maybe still was, but the card’s predominant reading was all about feeling unreasonably restricted…or that you were facing an obstacle that wasn’t truly an obstacle, more a mere pain in the ass. So, all things being equal, I wasn’t particularly surprised to see someone else here.
I was surprised that it was a kid.
“Um,” I began helpfully.
“Looks like you were right, Ricky.” The boy—Leonardo, apparently—held his gun low and away from his body, but his stance meant business. He knew how to fire the weapon he held, or he thought he did. Leo looked barely fifteen years old and was maybe a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. But he also had a slash of spectral silver above his right ear, and his eyes were twitching with the fervor of a hard-core high. I didn’t need to use any psychic powers to see that he was juiced on something. But was it truly Black Elixir? All the intel I had was that upper-level Black dealers didn’t sample the stuff. Not the smart ones, anyway.
“What’re you staring at?” Leonardo demanded.
“I guess I’m staring at Ricky’s boss.” I settled my weight on my heels. “You guys out here for a convention or something? Maybe a doubleheader with Mary Kay?”
“The Black Elixir advised you’d be coming. Said you’d be strong.” The boy sneered. He was well made, with dark skin and big dark eyes, black hair catching the breeze. Everything he was wearing and carrying looked straight out of Eddie Bauer, except the gun part. I was pretty sure Eddie Bauer didn’t sell guns. Then again, I’d read you could 3-D-print the damned things in plastic these days, so any idiot could get their hands on one. “You don’t look all that strong.”
“I get that a lot.” I wasn’t wearing hiking clothes so much as catch-you-and-throat-punch-you clothes—sleek, black, and minimalist. “Who else you have back down the trail, Leo?”
“The Black Elixir said we should come with weapons, backup.” He rolled his eyes. “But I know these trails, and I know Ricky. He’s lived here his whole life. No one understands the trail system better. I wasn’t worried.”
I heard the clatter of stones and gritted my teeth. Freaking great. If Ricky had truly been climbing up and down these trails his whole life, chances were good he knew a way down. This job was beginning to seriously suck.
I refocused on the kid. “Sounds like you might have gotten pretty close to your fifth hit if the drug said all that.”
Leonardo grinned. “Holding steady at three. Three keeps you tight, keeps you close. Three gives you what you need without taking anything away.”
“Congratulations. You’re a model of restraint.” Irritation sawed away at my good humor. “Did Three say anything else while it was turning your brain to soup?”
“It said I should kill you before I listened to your lies.”
Without any more fanfare, the boy raised the gun and shot.
There are few things more alarming than being shot at by a kid, especially one who knows how to shoot and who doesn’t flap his gun around for show. But Leo managed to take it one step further. The movement of the boy’s arm and the tightening of his finger on the trigger was accomplished in one motion, as if he was either some sort of superhero or a high-level Connected juiced to the gills. Which was it?
I indulged in that question during the split second it took for Leonardo’s arm to lift, then got busy. I was not going down to a kid, no matter how Connected he was.
I thrust out my hands, and a web of power burst into life, a ball of magic as blue as the Colorado sky and a hell of a lot more useful. But before I could direct it to do more than eat Leo’s bullet, I was pounded into a snowbank by a hundred and eighty pounds of flannel and neoprene.
“Oof!” The sudden burst of cold startled me almost as much as Ricky’s impressive ninja moves. The dealer flipped me over in the snow and jerked my arms back, pinning them behind me. A tumble of cards fell out of my pocket, Eight of Swords right on top, the quintessential picture of a woman bound.
But I was the one supposed to do the binding, dammit.
“Stay down,” Leonardo growled. “Ricky, get away from her, or I’m going to shoot you too.”
“What the hell, man, you don’t have to be an ass—” A single shot cracked, and Ricky yelped, then skittered away from me. I was alone, defenseless, and sunk in a snowdrift. I’m sure I looked pathetic.
“This isn’t going to end well,” I offered, but Leonardo wasn’t having any of it.
“Shut up! I don’t care about your lies.”
He leveled the gun at me again, but this time, I was ready. I crossed my hands so my fingers snagged my cute little cuff bracelets, ripped both of them free, and flung them at the Wonder Twins before Leo could get the shot off.
The cuffs hurtled through the air. Not as flashy as a golden lasso, maybe, but a girl had to use what she had. And what I had was a designer set of Justice-themed jewelry that’d come with the job title.
Ricky reacted first, his wrists locking together as he flopped around in the soft powder like a demented snow angel. “What in the—”
“Can it!” I growled, hauling myself out of the snow and staggering forward a few steps to get my bearings.
I headed his way, and his eyes widened. “Seriously, who are you? What are you?”
“Not the ATF.” With more force than I expected, I cracked Ricky on the side of the head, enough to knock him out. Then I grabbed him by the shoulder of his jacket and dragged him over to Leo, who’d apparently been cold-cocked by my bracelet before it’d snapped around his wrists.
Excellent. I’d essentially bagged two bad guys for the price of one and hadn’t had to listen to their explanations as to why I’d gotten it all wrong about them. That was for other ears.
Ears I now had to go bend.
I sighed, but there was nothing for it. These bozos weren’t going to perp-walk themselves to Judgment. Unfortunately, this next part was yet something else that hadn’t been fully disclosed regarding my new job title: covert transportation of my quarry was a requirement. Painfully covert transportation.
I collected my cards and stuffed them back in my jacket, then pulled Leonardo and Ricky together in a jumble of limbs. Securing each of their upper arms with a hand, I squared my shoulders. Then I drew a long, steadying breath. This…was gonna hurt.
I burst into flames.