I snatched the card out of Kreios’s hand and then swept up the rest cards, stepping out of the way the rest of the room converged on the Devil—who, if I was understanding his veiled, heh, comments correctly, was the Council’s official emissary to this group. Perhaps not surprising, since the Devil was a master of illusion.
Aleksander Kreios had ascended to the Arcana Council in the early 1930s, taking the place of his predecessor in a handoff which had been much more up close and personal than mine and Abigail’s passing of the baton.
The female magician appeared beside me. “While they all fawn over the newest stallion in the stable, do you want to get a real reading done? I’m Chiara, if you didn’t know. Chiara Marchesi.” I looked beyond her to see Valetti walking up quickly behind her, wringing his hands.
“If you don’t mind, Justice Wilde, we should at least try a reading in more quiet surrounds,” he said. “I do feel responsible for ensuring the safety of the senate…”
“Of course, of course.” I let them lead me into another room, Nikki by my side. I’d already pulled three cards and scanned them quickly, then dipped back into my pocket for the full deck.
We stepped into the library. It was a sumptuously appointed room, a chamber that looked like people had actually lived in it. The artwork on the walls was both original and European, of course. And there was a lot of it. The chairs were plushly upholstered, and the coffee table was thick and sturdy, the kind of table you could put your feet up on or argue world politics over with equal aplomb.
I spread the deck in an arc and drew three cards in quick succession. “Hermit again. He’s popular tonight,” I said quickly. “Not surprising for people who seek the truth. Then we’ve got the Six of Wands.”
“Victory?” murmured Chiara, and I gave her an approving smile she couldn’t see.
“Definitely could be that, but when you shift the focus of the cards over to the physical search side of the equation, they can be read more literally. That picture most clearly represents—”
“The parade!” she said, looking up at me. The effect of the movement of her beaked mask was almost comical. “You mean the parade of Carnevale tomorrow. That’s where you’ll find him.”
“That’s where I’ll start looking, yes,” I said. “And the third card is the Four of Swords.”
“Four of Swords…” Chiara considered, now sounding perplexed. Even Valetti leaned forward, though I couldn’t see his expression, of course. I felt a little twinge of remorse at how I was about to mislead him. He’d brought me here on Luca Stone’s recommendation. But he wasn’t the only magician in the room, and I didn’t know this Chiara at all.
So I spun a line of credible bullshit.
“The Four of Swords in a search capacity could mean a number of things, some that might not become clear until I see them in the context of the second card, so in this case, at the parade. But there are some clues to look for. If there are any reclining figures, whether sleeping or dead, that’s a possibility. Or, it could be more specific—a hospital or a hotel. A place of recovery.”
“That’s it?” Chiara’s voice conveyed the derision that the placid expression on her mask could not. “That’s all you have to go on?”
“I find that once I get close, the rest tends to fall into place.”
Valetti patted Chiara on the shoulder. “She did ascend to the Council on the merits of these skills, Chiara.”
Once again, I was grateful for the covering of the mask. My ascendance to the Council as Justice was based on a lot of things, but my Tarot card reading skills were likely not at the top of the list.
Still, those were the skills I was working now. With Valetti’s assistance, and under cover of the senate continued fangirling over Kreios down the hall, Nikki and I exited the front door of Ca Daria a few minutes later. The moment I stepped away from the ancient palazzo, I breathed a sigh of relief.
Nikki followed my gaze back to the gorgeous building. “You think it was Kreios’s doing, all those dancing lights?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him.” Kreios excelled at distractions, the more upsetting, the better.
“True.”
We moved farther down the street, twisting around until I was sure we weren’t being followed.
“So,” Nikki said, drawing out the word. “You want to tell me what that card trick was you pulled back there? Because that was some prime bullshit about the Four of Swords. What I would’ve given to see your face through all that.”
“Keep those cards in mind,” I said. “Even if they were my second draw, they could become important.”
“And your first draw? Enlighten me on those cards.”
We were walking down a quiet residential street, God only knew where, but I was coming to understand that the glory of Venice was that there wasn’t all that far you could go and remain truly lost. You’d either run into a lagoon or a canal. We pulled off our masks and enjoyed the soft night air on our faces.
“The first card was the Five of Swords, which I hate on general principle in a search reading.”
“You win, but you’re not happy about it.”
“Exactly. Which could mean just about anything. I could discover the identity of the butcher too late, I could discover it as he’s or she’s about to kill me, or I could never discover who the butcher is at all, but my mere interest in the case stifles his little spree.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be satisfying.”
“No, it wouldn’t. Alternatively, the card could literally mean that I should look for the man on the battlefield or cemetery. So, two things to keep in mind. Next up is the Three of Cups, which to me says party.”
“I like the way that sounds a lot more.”
“Agreed. And we’re about to launch into a week of balls that are going to get bigger and grander as time goes on, so something to look for. I think I agree with Valetti to some extent. This isn’t a wide strike, despite the fact that Balestri and the other two sorcerers supposedly were scrubs. The butcher is targeting magicians, so those are the parties we should count on.”
“I’m going to need a new cape,” Nikki said, looking down at her flame-red feathers.
“I have a feeling that won’t be a problem. The third card, though, can go anywhere. The Queen of Cups.”
“Wife to the Red King,” Nikki offered. “Maybe a relative?”
“Could be. Or a mistress, a daughter, a muse.”
“Well, that narrows it down.”
I sighed. “Court cards. I’ve never been a fan of them in a search reading. They tend to make the most sense after you’ve already independently verified your choice.”
“It gives us a place to start anyway,” Nikki said. “Which is more than we had going into Ca Daria. It doesn’t solve who might have wanted us to be kept away, though.”
“No, it doesn’t. But I’ve got a feeling once we know who the Butcher is, we won’t so much need to worry about the rest.” I blew out a sigh. “So, the Five of Swords, Three of Cups, and Queen of Cups.” I frowned. “The Queen of Cups… What women do we know so far in the city? Chiara and Signora Visione?”
Nikki scoffed a laugh. “I’m not thinking it’s the signora.”
“I’m not either. But she is surrounded by children.”
“Her own children—or grandchildren, anyway.” Nikki hesitated. “As far as we know. But though she’s a wizard with a needle, she doesn’t strike me as the kind of Connected we’re looking for, if this reading is about helping us identify the Red King.”
“Right. So, Chiara.”
“Much more the kind of Queen of Cups we’re needing, but we don’t know her at all.” She pulled out her phone from a pocket in her cape. “Simon will. Might as well use team resources.”
I nodded. It was odd to think of the Arcana Council as teammates; they hadn’t always felt like that. And I had traditionally not been a great team player. Something else to learn in my new job.
“What do you think of the senate we’ve met so far?” I looked over at her typing on her phone. “Fill Simon in on the others, and maybe Kreios is doing the same thing. We need names and locations, particularly where they were last night, though…”
She glanced up at me, grimaced. “Though if Balestri went down with a blow dart, that could have been from anywhere. And we still don’t know the disposition of Marrow and Greaves, the two missing magicians. I’ll ask Simon if he’s heard anything about them too.”
I nodded, my gaze going out over the Grand Canal. Across the water and deeper into the city, the festivities of the opening ceremony were still going strong. I checked my watch. It was almost midnight, and Venice typically rolled up the sidewalks long before nine p.m. But this was Carnevale, and anything was possible.
Anything.
“So we’ve got a group of magicians who meet every year for two weeks of parties and catching up.”
“And maybe undergo completely whack ceremonies to amp up their mojo,” Nikki put in, still typing. “Otherwise, why do it every year? There has to be a draw.”
“Agreed. And this year, right before their meet-up, there was an event that potentially already supercharged some or all of their magic. No one knows how much any one magician was affected, if at all, but everyone assumes the others got a disproportionate impact.”
“Kind of makes you want to get a job in corporate to get out of the rat race, huh?”
I smiled, resettling my feathers as the cool breeze picked up. “We’ve got at least one female, but most of the magicians are male, most are legacy, and at least in the group we saw tonight, most are entitled Europeans. Maybe all of them with ties to Venice?”
She waved her phone at me. “Definitely all of them with ties to Venice, or at least to Carnevale. Which takes us to another Venetian magician, the butcher Biasio. Who is either a tragic dupe or a sinister madman, depending on how you learned the story.”
“No one in the magicians’ senate was airing the second version, though. For all we know, our gondolier made it up to improve tips. Certainly a nicer story than a guy deliberately hacking up kids for malicious profit.”
“Fair enough,” Nikki said. “We can track down our boy at the canal later, if he’s found himself a new gondola. With the scratch I’ll be wiring into his account once we verify his identity, he shouldn’t have too much trouble.”
“Or he could pack up his gondola pole and leave the city.”
“Or that…” She finished her text and also looked out over the water. “I don’t get the impression that a lot of these people leave, though. At least not for good. Hell, even the ghosts want to stick around.”
“Which takes us to the Casino of Spirits and Ca Daria.”
“Two of the most haunted locations in Venice and happily under the control of the magicians. And if you noticed—we got no actual hauntings. I feel cheated.”
I snorted. “I suspect a lot of that is staged to keep out the riffraff, unless there are kid ghosts from Biasio’s reign of terror still floating about.”
“That’s an interesting idea.” She eyed me. “I don’t suppose you can talk to the dead?”
“I think I would have noticed that. But…” I frowned. There was teamwork, and there was taking teamwork too far. Still, if I was going to begin working full-time with the Council, they needed to make themselves available to me. And there was one major Arcana card that was represented on the Council in a particularly vibrant and relevant way. “Death could, I’d assume.”
Nikki nodded. “I’d think that would be part of the job. Or maybe she was on hand for the butcher the first time through.”
“You know, we kind of crab-stepped our way into this job. Going forward, it might make more sense to ask more questions up front. Like questions of people who’ve lived for hundreds or thousands of years on this planet and might have been around when this crap actually went down.”
“It’s not too late to do that now,” Nikki said reasonably. “You’re Justice of the Arcana Council. Who all would you need?”
“I have no idea. I didn’t know I’d need any of them at the beginning. We picked up a job, we went out on the job—”
“We got mired down in a bog of crazy on said job. But it seems to me the Arcana Council would appreciate knowing the deets or at least revel in the chance to dish the dirt on this magicians’ senate, especially if there’s a new player who wants to elevate the profile of the magicians to Arcana level…or, arguably, turn them all into walking zombies, their magic burned out.”
“Why in the world would that be an advantage?” I wondered aloud. “They’re killing their own people.”
“Or they’re pruning the bushes in advance of the big flower show. What’s better, a dozen magicians with a few hangers-on who are little more than glitter tossers, or a highly motivated set of eight or nine sorcerers with a firmer grasp on their own powers and an up-close-and-personal performance enhancer?”
“Win or die,” I muttered.
“Pretty much.”
We carried on like that around the gentle curve of the Grand Canal, the lights growing brighter and the houses more palatial as we neared Valetti’s residence.
“First order of business, we need to get into the police files, find out what happened to Marrow and Greaves, specifically. I assume they died the same way Balestri did if they were at his house, but we need that nailed down. If it’s poison, source the poison. If it’s a technoceutical, source the manufacturer. We should be able to get that tracked if we can get a blood sample—assuming we can find the bodies.”
“On it,” Nikki said. “There may have been trace evidence at the scene if they were able to get skin cells, hair, anything like that. It’ll take time, though.”
“Except we’re the Arcana Council. It shouldn’t take time. Should it?”
“Ah…is there a CSI: Supernatural division of the Council I wasn’t aware of?”
“Maybe when Justice still walked the earth, but now? I think I would’ve run into it. From everything I’ve seen, the Council’s never been too big on getting involved with the Connected community.
“Well, maybe it’s time for that to change.”
“Maybe…” I looked again at the flowing waters of the Grand Canal, then stopped, my heart squeezing tight, as if it could take back its last several heartbeats. But it was too late for that. It was too late for a lot of things.
Oh no.
“And maybe it’ll need to change now,” I sighed. Nikki turned as well, her curse low and brutal in the evening breeze.
Floating in the canal amidst several curved strips of wood were two bodies, their matching Union Jack capes flowing out around them. Twin coronas of purple light surrounded their heads. Purple, not silver, and the meaning of that illumination was finally clear to me.
These men weren’t marked for Justice—they were owed it.
“Hello, Marrow and Greaves,” Nikki said.