I didn’t waste time parsing the particulars. With a dozen more strides, I was right up on the guy, jerking one of the bouncers out of the way. Said bouncer apparently hadn’t been expecting me to be so strong, because he crashed into several other staffers with a curse I couldn’t quite translate. Nikki stepped in right beside me, shoving another two men back. In my peripheral view, I noted that the revelers who’d been hardy enough to stick around were still sticking, all of them watching. There was something else wrong about this scene, and it hit me as I rolled the heavy man over to his back.
“Where’s the ambulance?” I snapped. “This guy’s been in trouble for at least ten minutes, probably more.”
“His personal physician is on the way.” The voice spoke from above me, sharp, worried, but firm. “There will be no ambulance.”
Freaking great. The big guy’s breathing was coming in short, shallow bursts, and his skin was pale and waxy. I reached down to rip the mask off him, but he struggled, his hands coming up to hold the mask on.
“Nooo,” he gasped. “No.”
“Everybody’s a drama queen.” Without waiting another beat, I stared down at the man, allowing my third eye to flick open.
Instantly, the world around me was no longer merely a construct of form and color, but dancing electrical circuits, weaving in and around and through the humans and plants and other life-forms that were occupying this space—and all of it was a life-form of some sort or another, none of the figures truly inert. Not even the guy passed out at the far edge of the bar. Somewhere deep inside me, I breathed a tiny sigh of relief that this was one skill I’d managed to retain. I should probably start a spreadsheet.
For now, however, I needed to focus on the soon-to-be-dead guy in front of me. With the vantage point of my electrical sight, I could see exactly where the problem was: everywhere. The man’s life force wasn’t so much shutting down, it was already well into ghost. His heart was pumping, his brain was firing, but both processes were operating at well below optimal levels. It was as if he were trying to push his body through a tub of Jell-O with his feet tied together. There were so many things going wrong at the same time, I didn’t know what to hit first, his withering heart, his darkening brain, his collapsing lungs, his sluggish blood, or his misfiring nerves.
So I went with option F and hit everything at once.
Focusing my own energy into a massive bolt, I released an electrical surge into the man’s body at chest level, the trailing ends of fire moving both up and down his form. I watched carefully to see where, if anywhere, the energy pooled, and I wasn’t disappointed. The point of entry for the poison wasn’t the guy’s stomach or, more appropriately, his mouth, as would’ve been reasonable, but an injection site directly below his left ear. He’d not only been drugged, he definitely hadn’t been the one doing the job.
I clapped my hand over the injection site, and the man jerked again. By this time, the onlookers had given us a wide berth. I got the sense of a man in a dark, subdued suit hustling up. But he made it no further than Nikki, because I wasn’t done here, not by a long shot. I’d immediately recognized the energy signature of this drug—sort of. It was Black Elixir, only a strain of the technoceutical that was a million times more potent than any I’d ever encountered before. Infused with powerful organic compounds I didn’t recognize, the drug hadn’t augmented the feathered man’s natural magical ability, which was fairly high, it’d turned that ability into a self-destructing weapon. I saw now that the man’s brain hadn’t gone dark, exactly. Instead, it had taken on a wasting energy that was billowing through his body like an insidious army of ants, eating everything in its wake. With a slash of my own energy, I halted the oncoming tide, and the man’s cells responded. His synapses began firing again, his heart started beating, and his nerve endings stopped their frantic dance. But something was still terribly wrong. Even as I pushed back the malevolent wave of energy, I realize I’d already lost the battle. At least the battle that would have meant anything to this man, if he was as Connected as I thought he was.
He’d lost his magic.
“Signore Balestri, no!” The slender man in the dark suit managed to duck beneath Nikki’s outstretched arms keeping everyone away. He dropped down beside me and started speaking in a rush of Italian. He was a doctor, Signore Balestri’s doctor, this was an overdose, and apparently not a surprise. This was something he understood and knew how to handle, and there was absolutely no need for alarm.
Beneath us, the feathered man had rolled over on his side and started throwing up, lending credence to the whole overdose concept. He was breathing more easily now, his heart pumping at a normal pace, his adrenaline level receding. His brain was even firing normally. But that was the problem. It was firing normally. The element of this man that had made him a psychic was no longer there.
As if in response to my assessment, the man groaned, saying something in a low tone to his doctor, who stiffened at the request, alarm spreading through him.
“Signore—” the doctor began again, his face tight with alarm.
“Not on my watch, buddy.”
I flipped the man over again, scowling down at him as he looked up at me through the mask, his eyes finally discernible through the holes cut into the gleaming white surface. Balestri knew already, he knew what he’d lost. But I wasn’t going to let him administer the fatal dose of whatever toxin he’d requested from his doctor. I had enough deaths piling up at my door.
“You were supposed to save me,” Balestri said again in garbled Italian, his voice morose.
“Who did this to you?” I asked. “Who’d you let get close to you, close enough that they could stick you with a needle behind your left ear?”
But the man was shaking his head as if I had missed something terribly important. His next words confirmed it. “You don’t, cannot understand,” he muttered, his words half-coherent syllables, half groans. “He has agents—everywhere. The very breeze whispers his commands.”
“That’s beautiful, but let’s try this again. Who was close enough to you to stick you with a needle? Because unless it was delivered by blow dart, there’s no other way you could’ve been hit with this toxin.”
“Toxin,” said Balestri. He coughed up phlegm and spit to the side, patently disappointed that it wasn’t blood. He was going to survive all right. The shock of the drug in his system might have killed him if I hadn’t been here, but that hadn’t been its primary goal. In fact…
“What do you mean I was supposed to come?” I demanded. “What did you see about me? How long have you been taking Black Elixir?”
That brought his head around.
“I don’t need a potion to predict the future,” Balestri retorted, as if I’d delivered an unforgivable insult. By now his physician was helping him to a seated position, and one of the bouncers was bracing his back with a broad arm. “I’ve been doing that since childhood.”
His eyes widened even as he spoke the words, and I watched as realization hit him again, his face going positively gray.
“Stay with me, buddy. We’ll figure it out. So, okay, you saw me all on your own. Good for you. Why? What’d you see exactly?”
“That you were coming for me,” he said morosely, a self-mocking smile creasing his face. “That you would see me and judge me worthy.”
“Not my department,” I started, but the man wasn’t listening anymore.
“I moved up my timetable because I knew your arrival would throw everything into a panic. I needed to get the last market test completed, then prepare for Carnevale—but there was too much to do. I knew you’d been drawn here, and I knew why. Valetti and the others’ old-woman concerns about the return of the butcher. Foolishness.” He shook his head. “Still, you were supposed to protect me. To keep me in the game.”
“The game.”
“The senate has reached a point of power never before achieved.” A burst of animation infused Balestri for a moment, and he stared at me with mirror-bright eyes. “All the magicians in the world of any merit have gathered here, will gather here, and the competition for a guiding role of the senate will be the stuff of legends. I deserve to be one of those guides.”
I eyed him in disbelief. “This is about serving as a committee chair?”
Balestri sagged. “But you didn’t come in time,” he said dully. “He came first.”
My head was starting to pound. “You predicted I was coming. So you busted tail to get your last bit of drug data before closing up shop and partying, but you weren’t fast enough. One of your other enemies got you first.”
“Firrrst…” the feather man was overcome with another paroxysm of trembling, and the doctor shooed me away, opening his bag.
“He’s going to be okay,” I said, because I couldn’t help myself. I’d be damned if some doctor thought that his injection of goop was going to do anything to save his patient beyond what I had already done.
“He’s not going to be okay,” the doctor said in tight Italian. “You have restored the body, you may have even restored the brain, but you have not restored the mind. And what are we without our minds?”
I opened my mouth to protest, but the man rushed on. “He needs to be stabilized, you need to go, and then he needs to go deep inside himself and see what there is to be seen. After he does, with some luck, he will do everything he can to restore himself. That I can handle.” He shook his head, looking at the feathered man with something that was almost like affection as he slumped in the bouncer’s arms.
“Wait, you know what this drug is? How it works?” Because I didn’t. I couldn’t stop what I didn’t understand.
“I don’t, no,” the physician sighed, then bent down to rummage in his bag. “But I also cannot allow Signore Balestri to take his own life out of despair for what he has lost, until he has at least explored the possibilities of finding it again.”
Nikki clasped my shoulder. “Somebody will report this, dollface. I don’t think we should be here when that happens.”
The sound of the distant sirens finally broke across the quiet night. But I couldn’t help staring at the doctor. I took a gamble.
“How much do you know about the Red King?”
“The Red…” The man frowned in what seemed to be genuine confusion, then he shook his head again. “If that’s some new drug on the market, I’ve not encountered it yet, and to my knowledge, Signore Balestri was not under its influence. He prided himself on being a producer, not a taker of technoceuticals.”
“What a champ,” Nikki said drily.
“Not true,” I objected. “He was under the influence of more than just a healthy self-image, even before this new toxin was injected into his system.”
“You mean wine, you mean cocaine, of course. I suspect when I check, I’ll also find the fentanyl patch supply has dropped since last time I was here as well.”
“But you said he didn’t take drugs.”
“He didn’t take technoceutical drugs. He was—is—pure-blooded. A magician of the highest order, who has never fallen prey to the siren song of any augmentation he hadn’t earned through his own strength and study, even though his natural power was not nearly as strong as he wished it to be. There are very few true magicians in the world that can claim to be truly pure-blooded, and Fabrizio Balestri is one of them. He is also an honorable man.”
The doctor straightened, turning to me. In his hand was a small red leather-bound journal, wrapped tight with black leather cords.
My eyes popped wide. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Signore Balestri received this two weeks ago, but he knew his history. He was no fool. And as for the drugs he made…” The doctor shoved the book at me. I took it. “No one died. He did not deal in Black Elixir or anything like it. He was an alchemist, and devoted to the cause of augmenting Connecteds safely.”
“And making money from it,” I pointed out.
“There is no crime in that,” the doctor said severely. “He was pure-blooded. Magic to him was life. Everyone knew it, and they were all coming here, to Carnevale, where he would finally make his stand.”
“Well, not anymore,” I said grimly, looking down at Balestri’s crumpled form. “So what’s next for him?”
“Next you will leave, and Signore Balestri will heal. And then I suspect he will break his vow of pure-bloodedness and rely on the augmentation drugs so favored by the weakest of his kind. His pride will take a hit, but better that than living even a day without the powers and psychic abilities that have defined his whole life. Unless, of course, you could restore him?”
I considered that. I honestly didn’t know if I could, given the destruction I’d seen along his neural circuits. And the man still was a drug dealer. Then again, if he could be of greater help to me later… “You know his crimes?”
The doctor’s face shut down, and he glanced away. “We all have our crimes. Yours is that you came too late to be of any use to us, Signorina Justice.”
Yet someone else who knew who I was. “I’ll add that to my performance review.”
“Dollface,” Nikki said again more urgently.
“Yeah, yeah.” I stood up and stepped back from the doctor and his patient, pulling off my feathered cape. By now, the sound of sirens had chased away most of Balestri’s employees, and the ones that remained didn’t look too happy. I moved with Nikki across the courtyard to a shadowy alcove, and she removed her cape as well. We dumped them by the wall. Both of us still wore masks, as did most of the people left in the courtyard. It was an odd sensation of feeling completely hidden and protected while still being exposed in a crowd. Maybe that was why the masks had become so popular.
“You got a fix on Valetti’s balcony?” Nikki asked. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to head back down the alley. Somebody will definitely be watching at this point.”
“Agreed.” I’d no sooner placed my hand on her arm when a sudden commotion behind us drew our attention once again. A half-choked scream broke off as Balestri lurched to his feet again, wheeling around toward me. He had a gun in his hand.
“Gun!” Nikki shouted, shifting in front of me to block the bullet. Never mind the fact that I was the one who could heal myself.
When Balestri saw me, however, he stilled, his mouth gaping open beneath his mask. He tried to speak, but his mouth seemed to have difficulty forming the words.
And then it didn’t.
“The Red King will be the strongest in all of Venice!” Balestri intoned in a terrible voice that was nowhere near his own. Beneath his half-mask, his face seemed to morph as well, as if a hive of bees swarmed beneath the skin, and his lips parted in a terrible grimace as he groaned his next words. He looked for all the world like a man possessed, but how? “And as it goes in Venice, so goes the world. If you seek the path of the Red King, follow the bodies of the greatest magicians in the city—until you reach the one who is greater than them all. I look forward to your hunt.”
He put the gun into his mouth, and fired.