As if propelled into motion by my thoughts, Armaeus burst into vapor and tore away from me, a profusion of smoke swirling in his wake. Time slowed to a standstill, but the dart containing the fell toxin shot across the room and straight into the smoke—then through it, its unerring trajectory still the two men at the far end of the chamber. I had some vague sense of Armaeus being not where he should be—which was stopping the dart—but all the way over where the perpetrator was even now turning away, but that was no good, no good, not when the—
Budin made a noise I didn’t think was even possible coming out of such a small man, a shouted command so powerful that the very walls of the room shook. It wasn’t enough to change the trajectory of a magic dart, but he also moved with a speed I’d never seen in a human who wasn’t also an Arcana member and thrust Alfonse out of the way. The Nul Magis-laced dart struck the small magician square in the chest, instantly burrowing deep—but Budin didn’t stop there. With another thunderclap of an order, the barb froze into a block of ice, then shattered, the shards bursting back out of his chest plate and hitting the floor with a clatter.
A clatter that everyone could hear, since the room had gone dead silent.
“No more!” Budin growled, the girth afforded him by his body armor making him seem like a fierce little tank. “Tonight is for joy, not death!”
I pulled the hat free of my hair and slid off the cape and mask, drawing in a rich lungful of oxygen. “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Turning away from Budin, I made my way over to where Armaeus held the upper arm of Count Valetti. Whether it was the sight of someone unmasked or merely the drama of the moment, no one spoke as I strode across the hall. Even the count merely glared at me, his back straight, his hands clenched.
“You have no jurisdiction here,” he said tightly as I approached. “The senate of magicians supersedes the Arcana Council. It has since the Middle Ages.”
I drew in a long breath. Up until I’d seen Valetti’s exploding magical signature, with energy that shot out in the same distinctive flares as his calligraphic style, Valetti had been third or fourth on my list of possible bad guys. But he had been on it. There’d been the faintest of echoes of his calligraphy in the recipe booklets too. This was a man who wanted to be caught, who wanted to be known for his diabolical crimes. Lucky for him, he’d now get his chance. “Your family has long been a well-respected part of that senate, Valetti. That didn’t have to change simply because the balance of magic did. Sorcery is a learned art.”
“It should be a learned art,” Valetti practically spat. “It should be, but it wasn’t. Not after you and your precious Council waded in and flailed around, trying to set a world to rights that you didn’t even understand. You have no appreciation for history, no appreciation for the worth of spending generations honing the position of your family, the respect, the honor. No. Instead you step in and change it all in the flash of a moment, taking away everything that mattered.”
Beyond Valetti, another man removed his hat, then slid his mask up and away from his face. Luca Stone, I realized, his expression unreadable as he stared at his colleague, the man for whom he’d entangled the Arcana Council in the affairs of magicians. The prelate, I realized. He was staring at the prelate, not Count Valetti.
Stone’s gaze shifted, and his eyes met mine. He smiled and nodded with appreciation.
I returned my attention to Valetti, whose glare hadn’t diminished. “You had no right to murder Balestri—” I began.
“Balestri!” The count threw up his hands, a man truly at the end of his rope. “That was my mistake. I know it was. But he was so annoying. His constant parties, his dirty little drug trade, his insufferable moaning about how his family used to be the most famous in all the land. He was nothing—he had no power, none! He could barely conjure candlelight, but to hear him talk, you would’ve thought he was the most powerful magician in the cosmos. And everybody put up with him. Why? Because of his family. When mine was so much more obviously the finer stock, and had been for hundreds of years.”
“You knew I saw him die,” I accused. “You created his final message about the Red King to—what? Taunt me? Why in the world would you do that?”
“Because I am the Red King,” Valetti said coldly. “I am the monarch who floats upon the open sea, benevolent and good, guiding all that know to follow me. As all the generations before me, the House of Valetti is the rightful ruler of the magicians of this city—and it always has been.”
“Not always, no.” I didn’t have the Valetti family slim leather volume on me, but I didn’t need it in my hands to recall its words, which I now saw in a different light. “You were one of the quietest families of the magicians’ senate from the moment it was formed until the late 1500s. Then another wave of plague struck, what everyone thought was plague, anyway, and only the Valettis and a few other families stayed strong. That was when your real power started to build. You became one of the most respected families of the senate, and your magic grew, and gradually, in time, you reached the position of respect you felt your family should be accorded.”
“I was happy to work within the construct of the senate of magicians,” Valetti said, his voice low and malevolent through his mask. “It was an honor to be a part of that senate, and my family believes in honor more than anything. Honor and the rightful place of those who have done all they could for this city, this senate, these people.”
“And then it all fell apart,” I said. “You weren’t augmented in the rush of magic that swept over the planet.”
“I was,” he countered. “But not enough. Not to the same degree as Greaves and Marrow, of all people.” He curled his lip. “Or even ridiculous Budin.”
The disdain with which he said the magician’s name was as chilling as it was loud, but the diminutive man didn’t step forward to defend himself. I glanced his way, startled to see he’d stepped out of his mask and hat, that he’d even stripped away his body armor. He stood next to Nikki wearing the ordinary clothes of an ordinary man, but still shimmering with power. And he stared at Valetti with an expression I wouldn’t have expected.
Pity.
Valetti, fortunately, couldn’t see him. “None of them had done the work to move their family into the proper position in the senate. I had! I and all those who had come before me.”
“You discovered the butcher’s secret,” I said. “Your family did, anyway. You knew he’d created the Nul Magis toxin by mistake.”
“He wanted to be one of us,” Valetti mocked, drawing himself up to his full height. “A simple butcher, with blood on his hands and gore on his feet. We did not kill him. His ambition killed him.”
“He didn’t know what he was doing.”
“He didn’t,” Valetti said, disgusted. “Until we helped him along with that, whispering the truth that we had discovered, planting the severed fingers, then we destroyed him and his filthy shop. Because we had learned something else too, something the dark practitioners would not use…but we would. We would and we did.”
“The plague years.” A new voice spoke now, gray with horror. The prelate Alfonse stood, still masked and cloaked, staring at Valetti with his expressionless face. “All those magicians who died. How many of them were helped along by the Valetti family?”
“You wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the Valetti family,” the count retorted. “Your family should have been burned for heresy for even having the sorcerer’s gene, let alone acting on it. It’s only through the efforts of families like my own that you were spared.”
The prelate dipped his head, acknowledging the truth.
I made a face. “I’d ease back on the self-congratulation, Valetti.”
“You don’t have the strength within you to know what I know—do what I’ve done,” he seethed. “Back in the 1500s, it was the roughest beginning. The very first iteration of Nul Magis…and of Black Elixir, five hundred years before we would be graced with enough of a supply of demon blood to change the world.”
“You killed three people—more if you were behind the deaths of the assassins. I assume your man Alessandro wasn’t harmed after all.” Valetti made no response to that, and I pushed on. “You attacked us at the site of the butcher’s shop, and could have killed our gondolier instead of merely destroying his livelihood. Then there was Signora Visione and your attempts on Budin. Who else?”
“I do not answer to you.” With a jerk, Valetti wrenched himself away from Armaeus, who let him go. I caught the look in Armaeus’s eye as he did so—it was pure fascination. The Magician was going to be the death of me.
Valetti threw his hands in the air, and I could feel the pulse of magic in the room, my right hand stinging with the recognition of the demon blood coursing through the count’s system. “I command you—” he began in stentorian tones
“You command nothing,” I countered in my mildest tone.
Or what I thought was my mildest tone.
The walls around me seemed to bow out and snap back again, but I held Valetti’s gaze. “You are marked for Justice,” I said, and I saw it now—the flash of silver at his temple he’d managed to hide from me for days. “I couldn’t see it. Didn’t want to see it. But that makes it no less true. Speak your crimes.”
“You have no—”
I lifted my hands slightly, and Valetti convulsed, his eyes flashing wide as he spoke the truth I compelled.
“It had taken years,” he cried, glaring at me. “Nul Magis wasn’t possible, but Black Elixir—that I could create, cobbled together from the most depraved souls who made their way to Venice. Years. Decades. And then…then you and your Council paved the path for me, when I thought it would take yet more time. I could strike! And I would strike. There would be no mercy. I had only to ensure that there was a quorum in the senate to see my triumph.”
“The Arcana Council in Venice would assure that no magicians would stay away,” Armaeus said, almost thoughtfully. “You could take your pick of targets, ensuring your place. We’ve stayed away from Venice too long.”
At these words, Valetti’s fury seemed to renew itself. “Your Council is on the verge of being overtaken by the real magicians of this world,” he seethed. “You have no jurisdiction over—”
Another wave of my hand and Valetti got back on track.
“The recipe books?” I pressed.
“To stoke fear. Fear is necessary, right, true. Only fear made the senate work together, you see?” He whirled, but a sea of faceless masks stared back at him. “You see. You must see.”
“They see,” I said. “And they’re not the only ones who do.”
I stepped forward and grabbed Valetti by the hand as another man broke free of the crowd, lifting off his mask with one hand as he clipped a restraint on Valetti’s wrists with the other.
Detective Tall, Dark, and Doin’ His Job. Good man.
However, Valetti was one of the most powerful magicians in Venice, if not all of Europe. So for good measure, I slid my own cuff around one of Valetti’s wrists too. It’d keep him under control while the local police dealt with him, and then would be there when he was ready for his date with Judgment.
Valetti jerked as he felt the touch of magic, whipping around to growl at me. I lifted a casual hand, and the cuff delivered a jolt of electricity all the way to his toes, leaving him gasping.
The detective eyed Valetti, then me. “I trust you’ll be leaving Venice soon?” he asked me. “I don’t know how long we’ll be able to hold him.”
“I wouldn’t worry so much about that,” I assured him. “He’s got a date with Judgment, no matter what.”
The detective nodded, but it was Valetti’s reaction I was looking for. The count stared at me, bug-eyed with understanding.
I felt good about that.
As the two of them left the ballroom, a new surge of music swelled and eddied through the suddenly electrified space. Around me, another dance began, this one with steps so ancient, I had no hope of trying to mimic it—nor did I want to try. It was over, finally. The moment passed, the case closed. It was over.
And, I realized…that felt—really good.
“Miss Wilde.”
I glanced up to find Armaeus Bertrand standing over me, his mask and cape gone, his riveting black-gold eyes now entirely focused on me. He took my hands and lifted them to his heart. “You’ve won, it would seem,” he murmured.
I grimaced. “I wouldn’t go that far. Valetti was a grenade waiting to explode. All I did was pull the pin.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He shook his head. “You have succeeded where Justice Abigail, and the distant Justices before her could not. What do you see around you?”
I looked where he gestured. There were the magicians talking and laughing, several of them in knots around the High Priestess and the Devil, who were masked and caped but easily recognizable by their golden circuitry. Some of the magicians were now gathered around Budin, still others around Alfonse.
“I…see a lot of really uncomfortable clothes?”
“You see the Arcana Council interacting with the Connecteds,” Armaeus corrected me. “Arguably with the most relevant group of Connecteds on this earth, albeit one which we have barely acknowledged for generations. Yet you simply reached out and took on your first case…and here we are. Communicating. Teaching. Listening.”
His voice seemed to wobble a bit, and its unnatural tenor was doing odd things to my heart.
“Well, you knew I was in trouble,” I said. “Of course you would come.”
“To help you, of course. But there is more happening here than simple help. What is begun this night will not end this night, but will continue, a pathway for magic to grow and thrive. The Connecteds of this world and the Council, working together, in a way that no one has been able to accomplish in longer than any of us can remember…” He smiled ruefully. “Especially me. And thus you are Justice, and Vigilance, and even more than that. You are the Grace that balances the scales. The Supreme Triad in one.”
“Supreme Triad,” I repeated, remembering Signora Visione’s slip of the tongue. Nikki was going to be stoked to have the mystery of my new moniker solved, but… “That seems like kind of a mouthful.”
“I concur.” Armaeus tilted his head, his golden-black gaze once more threatening to swallow me whole. “For me, it’s more than enough that you are Justice. And, now and ever more…my Justice.”
I stared back at him, lost in the inexorable pull of his magic, unable to fully process the emotions rolling through me, but desperately wanting whatever was happening to last for a very long time.
Armaeus, of course, could easily read my thoughts. Something sharp and intense flashed in his eyes, and he lifted my hands to his lips and brushed a kiss over my fingertips.
“Then I suggest we start with eternity, Sara,” he murmured, as a new whisper of power swirled around us, “and see where life takes us from there.”