The Night Witch: Wilde Justice, Book 6 Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Card

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Another Note from Jenn

  The Sun

  Books By Jenn Stark

  Acknowledgments

  About Jenn Stark

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Tarot-reading Justice of the Arcana Council Sara Wilde has an avalanche of oppressed psychics crying out for her aid. How can she help them all? Despite the support of the formidable Magician, she’s only one woman.

  Worse, the Council’s biggest rival, the Shadow Court, taunts her at every turn, defying her efforts to discover the power behind their elite operation.

  Frustrated by the Council’s unwillingness to act, Sara is tempted to take matters into her own hands. Especially when she uncovers ancient, mysterious references to a vigilante-style enforcer, the night witch, who does what Justice can’t…or won’t.

  Then a new, mysterious ally emerges, a reclusive sheikh with tales of captured genies and impossible wishes who offers Sara his assistance—for a price. A price that may prove to be more than Sara ever expected to pay…

  Shadows dance and demons howl when The Night Witch comes to call.

  The Night Witch

  Wilde Justice, Book 6

  Jenn Stark

  For Sabra

  You are more magical than a djinn could ever be!

  1

  Virgins never seemed to catch a break.

  I leaned over the edge of the stone wall, peering down at the gyrating crowd that filled the amphitheater below. While music thundered from two-story-high speakers, some unintelligible mash-up of house rock and New Age hokum, the dancing revelers flashed enough glitz to be seen from space. Above and around them, a multimillion-dollar light show cut through the star-filled night sky.

  Here in the ruins of Pompeii, Italy, a city overwhelmed by the eruption of its most famous volcano, Mount Vesuvius, the amphitheater had been restored to serve as the perfect party palace for some of the richest and most entitled magicians, sorcerers, occultists, and wanna-be wizards in the world. And if you were going to have all that mysterium together at once, it wouldn’t be a party without a few virgins.

  Beside me, the High Priestess of the Arcana Council stood with her characteristic regal hauteur, for once dressed totally on point in her deep-red toga and Cleopatra Barbie jewels. To me, Eshe always looked like she belonged on stage in Vegas, not occupying one of the soaring shadow residences of the Council far above the city, but even she wrinkled her nose as she studied the line of white-clad young women being marched up to the stage at one end of the party pit. Except the reason for her disdain wasn’t what I expected.

  “There would’ve been two dozen virgins in my day.” She sniffed. “I don’t know who is running this operation, but it’s decidedly bare bones.”

  “What, not enough blood and circuses for you?”

  She shot me a withering glance. “It’s bread and circuses.”

  “Give it time.” I tracked the progress of the young women. “Why so many of them? What’s their purpose tonight?”

  “Traditionally, the members of the priestess’s court are selected to serve as vessels for divine magic based on their Connected ability and their virginal status. I seriously doubt most of these attendants qualify on either count. Simon has provided facial recognition for all but three. Most of the identified participants are daughters of famous politicians, government notables, and a few random celebrities chosen mostly, I suspect, for notoriety. The research he’s completed indicates that their current locations are actually known, at least in general. They are all the guests of Stratosfaire.”

  I grimaced at her mention of the official title of this get-together. I hadn’t been willing to believe it when word first came to us of the potential danger this exclusive celebrity music fest posed, beyond that of good taste. But Stratosfaire was billed as the first-ever techno-psychic music festival for the highly evolved. It wasn’t exactly clear whether that evolution implied mental or supernatural abilities, or simply the flexibility of one’s bank account, but it didn’t seem to matter. To the rich and the bored, a new festival to show off their importance was the nectar of the finest flower. Celebrities had clamored for the exclusive invitations, paparazzi had swarmed the outskirts of Pompeii until a military presence had been required to shut them down, and the entire event was being live-streamed for the hefty price tag of fifty thousand dollars.

  That’s right. Fifty thousand dollars to see a video feed of a party you weren’t cool enough to attend.

  I couldn’t imagine anyone shelling out that kind of cash, until Simon, the Fool of the Arcana Council and our head tech geek, had shown me the numbers. The conference had sold out within minutes. Everything was, to all appearances, top-drawer—from the light show that lit up the amphitheater with a retina-searing glare, to the temporary scaffolding that created eco-friendly seating areas above the original ruins. Even the catering that had brought the finest booze and food to the revelers all damned day and into the night, was top of the line.

  All that was well and good, but we weren’t here to give the show a Yelp rating. Several days earlier, back in Las Vegas, distressing calls for help had started to come through my office at Justice Hall. I hadn’t even been aware of the upcoming festival when the first complaint had landed quite literally on my desk.

  As Justice of the Arcana Council, I was sort of the cosmic cop of the Connected world. Not even a police officer, really, more like a one-woman United Nations peacekeeping force. If someone with psychic ability was harming another Connected, the call went up, and I came in to see what was what. Sorcerers, witches, occultists, and magicians generally tended to stay on the side of angels in their inter-Connected dealings, at least in full daylight. But when the makers of magic turned on each other, I got involved. Or that was the theory, anyway. In truth, there were so many calls for Justice that my office had cold cases dating back to the Bronze Age.

  I scowled down at the gyrating crowd. “You got any line yet on who’s behind all this?”

  “For approximately the fifty-seventh time in the last three hours, no.” Eshe breathed out a gust of haughty disdain. She must have lungfuls of the stuff. “I’m not a trained seal.”

  “You’d be a hell of a lot better company if you were. It’s gotta be the Shadow Court, though. Has to be. Nobody else would be this tacky.”

  “Tacky, perhaps, but Jarvis isn’t this sophisticated,” Eshe pointed out. She gestured to the lights, the security, the state-of-the-art sound system. “And his family didn’t amass the largest fortune in Europe by staging grandiose displays of largesse for no reason.”

  “Yeah, well. He also sucks at his job, and no one has stopped us from getting this far. That kind of incompetence has Jarvis Fuggeren written all over it.” I’d pitched my voice slightly louder, hoping this area of the amphitheater was wired for soun
d. I needed the Shadow Court to make a move. The slightest push would do it—anything to justify the Arcana Council stepping in to ensure the balance of magic in the world was maintained. That was our reason for being, after all, and we’d been pretty good at it for the past few millennia.

  Then the Shadow Court had slunk onto the scene, an organization dedicated to pushing the envelope on magic and using arcane powers to advance their position in society. The Council had been trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to kill the Court in the face for the past few months, and tempers were wearing thin. Particularly my temper. So when the Shadow Court’s name had become attached to Stratosfaire, I’d been more than ready to check it out. Plus, apparently beyond the rich and gullible, some of the most powerful members of the arcane world had been tapped to attend the shindig. It wouldn’t have been neighborly if I hadn’t stopped by.

  I’d been surprised and intrigued to discover that out of the entire Arcana Council, Eshe alone had received a formal invitation to attend. She didn’t cut a very high profile when it came to the Connected community, and beyond her general disdain for pretty much everyone on the planet, she had no affiliation with the Shadow Court. To her, they were the consummate nouveau riche—broad, boorish, and well beneath her notice—especially Jarvis Fuggeren, the blond-haired, blue-eyed poster child for louche excess, who was supposedly the organization’s leader. She wasn’t wrong that this entire operation seemed above Jarvis’s Mensa score, up to and including her invitation. Still, there was no denying her amusement at having been chosen out of all of us for her golden ticket. Figuring out why Eshe had been targeted was part of my reason for being here.

  The other part was more straightforward. One of the calls for help that had rattled into my office this past week had been a desperate summons by a low-level wizard whose daughter had been gulled into attending the event. She was an innocent, unaware of the power within her, and one day, she had simply left a note that she’d found new friends. The wizard had used his scrying abilities to locate her, but dared not go further. The faire, he warned, was guarded by forces too dark and powerful for him to breach.

  I didn’t have a problem with dark and powerful. What was good for coffee was equally good for enemies. Besides, when a member of the Connected called out for Justice to help them, Justice was obligated to act. And this time around, Justice got to wear cool clothes.

  “How long did it take Nikki to pick that out for you?” Eshe asked now, her gaze raking over my party attire. Her heavily painted lips curled with amusement. “You look like John Wick.”

  “I feel like John Wick,” I agreed, adjusting the collar of my knee-length black leather duster, the perfect accompaniment to the black silk tank top and black leather pants I had underneath, finished off with boots meant for kicking Shadow Court minions in the face. She was right, of course. My attire had been selected by my right-hand woman and best friend, on the Council or off it, Nikki Dawes. Nikki had been sorely put out that she couldn’t attend the gig with us, but we didn’t want to draw too much attention, and attention was Nikki’s stock-in-trade. Besides, she had her hands full with a private gig back in Vegas, and I was technically here as Eshe’s muscle, her one-woman bodyguard to make sure the Shadow Court didn’t pull anything stupid…and secondarily, well, as bait. Because the Shadow Court seemed compelled to pull something stupid whenever I was around.

  So far, however, no one had given me much notice. Simon’s facial recognition wards were being put to good use, which had allowed me to pass through the basic security around the event as Eshe’s burly male sidekick, but this was the Shadow Court we were talking about here. I had to believe they’d be able to identify me, no matter how good the Fool’s particular combination of magic and tech was.

  No one had so much as blinked. After some initial fawning over Eshe by the coordinators of the event—conspicuously not any members of the Shadow Court that we’d identified—we’d been left pretty much to our own devices. We’d made our way to the high walls surrounding the amphitheater, which allowed us a bird’s-eye view of the circular structure, lit up with a pulsating technicolor light show.

  Beyond the pretty lights, however, the party itself had proven to be kind of lame. A lot of loud music and flashing glitterati, not much in the way of real magic or magicians. There was a fair amount of money changing hands, but for what, we couldn’t exactly tell. At least not until twelve young women in white had been led out into the crowd.

  “They’re spelled,” Eshe murmured, and I shot a look at her. She’d noticeably stiffened, her dark eyes narrowing as she stared down at the stage, her perfectly arched brows drawing together across a smooth expanse of creamy skin. Eshe had once been an oracle in residence at Delphi, and she retained her lush, ethereal beauty all these millennia later. “The women. Spelled and drugged. And I was right. There are only three with abilities, the three Simon could not identify. They’ve been placed in the middle of the line, as pretty as the rest, but not as pampered. Their hands will be careworn, even at their young age, and their bodies will have known hunger.”

  She spoke with a strange resonance to her voice that made my skin prickle. The High Priestess of the Arcana Council didn’t speak much of her own youth. I’d never really thought that it’d been all that bad, but then again, she had willingly ascended to the Council rather than stay an oracle. She’d given up worldwide fame, something she seemed uniquely positioned to crave, for relative anonymity. There was probably a good reason why.

  “You think they’re Connected?” I asked. “Here against their will?”

  Eshe nodded. “The Shadow Court needs to make a show of power. Ergo, they need people of power, Connecteds. But any Connected who actually had money wouldn’t be a willing vessel for the kind of magic they’re going to want to display tonight. For that, they need somebody who can’t complain and who can’t say no. And who doesn’t have anyone to look out for them.”

  She said this last without rancor, but I picked up the accusation all the same. As Justice of the Arcana Council, looking out for the most vulnerable members of the Connected community was literally my only job.

  “Look, I’m here, all right?” I huffed. “You’re here. And unless I miss my guess, the real heads of the Shadow Court are here. So let’s get this rolling.”

  “Or what?” She turned to me, her expression hardening unexpectedly. “Or you’ll actually do something on your own? Serve the Connected of this world the way you were supposed to all these long centuries?”

  I blinked. “I haven’t had the job all that long, Eshe. Don’t flake out on me here.”

  But there was something wrong with High Priestess’s eyes. They were turning milky white, and the skin of her face had grown paler beneath the sheen of her makeup, her stance now unnaturally rigid. Her lips parted and her words, when they came, were low, sonorous, and damning.

  “You have been summoned and summoned again, and you do not listen. You do not care. You are so certain that Justice walks only in the light, but it wasn’t always so. It cannot always be so. Darkness draws down, and the night witch stirs.”

  “Well, of course she does….” I dropped my voice to a murmur. “Simon?”

  The Fool’s hi-tech communications bud crackled in my ear. “I didn’t catch that,” he said. “Can you repeat?”

  “Not a chance.” Eshe’s words slipped away from me as I lifted my hands and edged carefully toward her. “But turn up your speakers in case it happens again.”

  The High Priestess’s quick hop onto the crazy train was not supposed to be part of tonight’s festivities, and I couldn’t tell if the show was for me or for whoever might be watching us. I had a sinking suspicion it was for me, and as her milk-white eyes widened, her breathing growing harsh, almost guttural, a whisper of fear curled through my gut. I’d never dealt with a Council member in full-on meltdown. This wasn’t especially a good time.

  “Hang tight with me, Eshe,” I tried, reaching out to touch her bare arm. “Snap out of—whatever
it is you’re doing. We can chat.”

  She jerked back from me, twisting toward the crowd again.

  “It’s starting,” she cooed, drawing in a deep, satisfied breath as the music leapt and toga-wearing bodybuilders lit torches surrounding the young women, now arranged in a semicircle on the stage. Her smile curled, and a level of profound pleasure creased her lips. “Oh, it has been too long.”

  Okay, this wasn’t necessarily an improvement. There was something new in Eshe’s voice, something new and unhinged. In my ear, Simon hummed with concern. “Remember, Eshe, you’ve gotta—”

  I didn’t get a chance to finish my warning. With a grace that would have been breathtaking if it wasn’t so insane, Eshe stepped up onto the stone barrier and swan-dived off the edge of the wall, straight into the roaring, chanting crowd.

  “Eshe! Dammit, no!” I shouted, dashing forward to throw myself after her.

  Smoke and fire exploded in my face.

  2

  “Eshe!” I staggered back as the billowing cloud shot skyward, pushing me away from the wall. A scream, loud and long, rent the air around me, but it didn’t seem to be coming from the crowd. If anything, it only added to the frenzied excitement.

  I lurched forward once more, my mind focusing sharply on the chaos in front of me. I’d never been to Pompeii before, certainly never to this amphitheater, but it was a wide open bowl that I could easily take in at one glance, despite the knot of dancing people and the jittering lights. My ability to hop from place to place, one of the perks of being a member of the Arcana Council, didn’t need much more nav support than that. Unfortunately, there was an element of combustibility required, so I flipped on my burners, then focused on the process of shifting the atoms in my body slightly apart from each other just enough—