by Jenn Stark
Not all who wander are lost.
As Justice of the Arcana Council and an experienced artifact hunter, Tarot-reading Sara Wilde prefers to track down the missing on her own. With her latest case, unfortunately, everyone's dying to help her out.
Determined to locate the Lost Queen, a witch destined to fulfill a dark and twisted prophecy, Sara finds herself corpse-blocked at every turn. Not even the electric, provocative, and deeply powerful Magician of the Arcana Council--whose newest arcane pursuits test Sara's emotional and sensual boundaries--can help her find her mark.
Worse, Sara isn't the only hunter on the case. From the shadowy labyrinths of Budapest to the ancient churches of Moscow to the glittering lights of Los Angeles, the world's most powerful male witches are gunning for the Lost Queen, demanding her as their rightful consort. Right before they end up dead, each more gruesomely than the last. There's definitely a pattern here...and one Sara needs to break, before her own mercurial Magician becomes the prophecy's next target.
Better hope you don't find what you're looking for when you hunt The Lost Queen.
THE
LOST QUEEN
WILDE JUSTICE, BOOK 2
Jenn Stark
Copyright © 2018 by Jenn Stark
ISBN-13: 978-1-943768-43-1
Cover design and formatting by Spark Creative Partners
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in encouraging piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase/Download only authorized editions.
Sara moves pretty fast, and she's always up for company! To subscribe to my mailing list and receive sneak peeks, updates and special giveaways, sign up here. Thanks so much for reading!
For Monica
May you achieve your wildest dreams.
Chapter One
Huddling in my parka on the relentlessly well-kept sidewalk in the heart of Budapest, next to a building painted the color of buttercream, I questioned my life choices. I was Justice of the Arcana Council, wielder of magic great and small…and I was about to be fleeced of seven dollars and at least a good hour of my time weaving through a tourist trap so stupid, my teeth were grinding.
A hipster about three groups ahead of me elbowed one of his friends, apparently in indignation. “Blade was the best,” he insisted. “Christopher Lee was a joke.” He was a thin, reedy American twenty-something, his skin pale as chalk.
“And you’re an idiot,” his friend assured him, barely looking up from his phone. The other two guys muttered something about Bela Lugosi. At least their discussion explained why they were here, standing in front of an attraction that promised a peek into the dark history of the original Dracula, Vlad the Impaler. They were doomed to be disappointed. No matter what the placard beneath the ornamental archway said, Vlad had been imprisoned more than a half mile away in the caves below Buda Castle—nowhere near here.
Unfortunately, those caves were now playing host to some creepoid illusionist trying to resurrect the glory days of the Castle Hill labyrinth, in all its bloody detail. There’d been two deaths so far, and I wasn’t about to allow a third. From my intel, the illusionist had holed up in the warren of caves below Castle Buda, readying himself for his next kill.
In order to get there, however, I had to start here.
“Dude, Herm Lannister bit it. There goes the next Fantastic Four reboot.”
A coarse round of snickers and wisecracks followed this touching obituary, and I watched as the other three members of the Gen Z coalition whipped out their cell phones to pay their final respects to whoever Herm Lannister was. Then the four of them crowded inside the door of the attraction, screens glowing, ignoring the glares of the Australian family directly behind them.
“Lantern?” A portly man in an eighteenth-century powdered wig held up a small electric lantern, its bulb casting a cheerful glow. I’d heard him repeat the same spiel five times already. “There are signs below…but do be careful,” he intoned as he took my cash. Then he handed over the lamp.
I muttered my thanks and stepped into the darkened doorway, feeling dumber by the second. The cave system started almost immediately, right after we were treated with the most hysterically useless wall map—a diagram of the maze so bad, it wasn’t even handed out. Well-lit arrows apparently would show folks the way around below, but I wasn’t interested in the main attractions of the labyrinth. I simply had to get far enough into it to take a detour to the deeper cavern system.
Setting down the lamp at my first opportunity, I followed the group right in front of me for a good five minutes until they stopped, all of them gawping at what looked like the headpiece of a column that had apparently been wrested from the local history museum and transferred here. We hadn’t yet come to the weirder elements of the place—wax figures dressed like the Phantom of the Opera, with canned music floating through the mist—but that was up ahead, I could sense it. If anyone had seen me entering this ridiculous, outrageous, idiotic—
“You always manage to end up in the most interesting locations.”
The voice was British, slightly mocking, and so obnoxiously familiar, I pivoted in instinctive reaction, my right hand coming up to deliver a throat punch that’d leave the man choking on his Weetabix for days. Unfortunately, I wasn’t fast enough. Nigel Friedman ducked out of the way, pulling me by my parka deeper into the mouth of the next corridor before almost immediately taking a hard right into a section blocked off by a velvet barricade.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed, ignoring Nigel’s obvious attempts to be silent. Nigel had been my top bodyguard in my most recent position prior to Justice, when I’d been, albeit briefly, the head of a clandestine quasi-military, quasi-magical syndicate known as the House of Swords. Before that, he’d been one of my top competitors in the artifact hunting trade. So we had history. A lot of history. Which was the only reason I suffered him to be gripping my puffy, down-filled elbow as he felt along the wall with his other hand. He stopped about five yards up as something old and musty gave way.
“I was nearby,” he finally answered me.
“Nearby. To Budapest.”
“Near enough.” I could hear the grin in his voice. “I got word your newest case involved Vlad the Impaler, and I thought it was a good time for a holiday.”
“You don’t need to protect me anymore,” I said, but in the darkness, I couldn’t help but smile. It was kind of nice, inspiring Nigel’s higher instincts.
“I’m not protecting you,” he said, his tone still genial. “I’m making sure you don’t steal something for the Council that should be in the hands of the House of Swords.”
My smile faltered. What?
Nigel didn’t respond, so I tried the same question out loud. “What?”
He let go of my elbow and waved at me. “A little light would be useful. Just a little.”
Scowling, I lifted a hand, and a sputtering marble of fire appeared between my fingers. Way better than a crappy electric lantern, but I’d needed to grab one to keep up appearances. This was one of the many bits of magical ability I’d cobbled together over the past year, most notably when I’d started working with the Arcana Council, a group of powerful Connecteds with a mission to keep Earth’s magic in balance. Those abilities were currently in flux, but I could still be counted on to
produce a fantastic glow ball.
With its assistance, I could see the Brit more easily. Medium, blonde, and deceptively wiry, Nigel Friedman was an ex-special forces operative of varied and highly useful talents. Now he was grinning at me as he turned sideways and half disappeared into a crack in the cave wall.
Through it, I could hear the haunting melodies of an eighteenth-century concerto starting up, tinny over distant speakers. “You’re taking us to the Phantom room?” I asked derisively. “I could’ve made it there on my own.”
“Behind it. The exit to this corridor isn’t well marked.”
I shrugged, patting my quilted pocket. “That’s why I have the cards.”
“Oh, we’ll be using those soon enough. One more turn, and my intel runs out.”
“And here I thought it ran out several years ago.”
Still, I followed Nigel into the seam of the wall. The cavern system here was markedly warmer and smelled faintly of sulfur. I was pretty sure I’d read somewhere that the entirety of Castle Hill was riddled with caves that extended all the way down to the Danube River, a subterranean system that had been created by the relentless flow of underground hot springs, and I could believe it. I tugged on my parka, rethinking its usefulness.
“I wondered why you dressed like the Michelin Man,” Nigel observed quietly. “We’ll go along through here…”
His voice trailed off as we slid through the narrow confines of the corridor, the music on the other side of the wall growing louder, then fainter again as we passed by. I thought about the American boy and his friends, could almost hear his mocking derision. “This place is a joke,” I muttered.
“A joke with a very specific purpose.” Nigel pulled up short beside me, then made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Ditch the coat. You’ll get stuck in some of the narrower passages.”
Frowning, I pulled the jacket off. “I’m not going to leave it here. It’s cold outside.”
“It’s not that cold. But no, you’re not going to leave it here. Incinerate it.”
“You know, I’m not a butane lighter you can activate on demand.”
“Sara—”
“Fine.” With a silent sigh of apology for the perfectly serviceable jacket. I touched my glow marble to it and pulsed the energy to fever pitch. The coat combusted to ash, and the plastic fastenings melted. Nigel kicked the debris aside, spreading it across the floor and beneath a stone ledge.
“Good.” He was about to keep moving when I held out a hand. Conveniently, the one pulsing with magic.
“Spill it, Nigel. Why are you really here?”
“We don’t really have time—”
“I think we do. I don’t know where you got your information, but I’m not here to steal an artifact. I don’t do that anymore. You may have missed the memo.”
Something in my voice caught him up short, and he turned back to me. His face was wary but curious. “You really expect me to believe you’re not here for the Sultan’s Cup?”
“I’m not.” That said, what the hell was the Sultan’s Cup? It sounded way more interesting than the jackwit I was after, for all that he was a particularly deadly jackwit. “I look for people now, Nigel. Not things. Vlad the Impaler is rumored to have returned to this hellhole, using it as a base of operations where he drags unwitting Connecteds into the deep, drains them of their blood, then skewers them. They’ve been ending up in the Danube with spike holes.”
It was Nigel’s turn to stare at me. “How is it we don’t know this?”
It was a fair question. The House of Swords, where Nigel was still an Ace bodyguard, had been set up in part to protect any mortal souls blessed or cursed enough to have significant psychic abilities. Those humans, known as Connecteds, typically lived in secret on the fringes of society, desperate not to be cast as expendables in a real life X-Men movie.
“You don’t know about it because the local constabulary here hasn’t put two and two together, that puncture wounds equal Vlad’s return,” I said. “Especially because the dead haven’t been respectable people. They’re—whatever the PC term is now for gypsies. And more to the point, they’re high-level Connecteds. And though five of them are missing, only two bodies have popped up in the Danube so far.”
“You’re Justice of the Arcana Council now. You’ve got bigger fish to fry. Explain to me why you’re in the caves of Budapest, handling such a low-level…” Nigel made a face, cutting off his own complaint. “They’re kids, aren’t they? The victims.”
I grimaced. Sometimes it didn’t pay for people to know you too well. “You could have asked Nikki what I was doing here. She’s ass-deep in old cases, trying to prioritize the backlog of dark practitioners I’m supposed to be icing. But bottom line, I’m here for Vlad, not looking for some stupid cup.”
“You really think it’s Vlad returned?” Nigel asked, looking around the cavern room as if it would yield any answers.
“No, I don’t. The original Vlad wasn’t Connected. He was merely morally depraved. That doesn’t get you a Get Out of Hell Free card. But the new guy—not the same story. The complaints about him have included illusions, magic spells, and hints of vampirism—once again, not the original Dracula, but the Bram Stoker made-up version. So this new guy is basically using every trick in the Buda Castle playbook and combining them all to lure his mark to him, all under the guise of Vlad the Impaler, which makes him a prick in the truest sense of the word. And he’s targeting kids.”
“You say there’s still three who could be alive.”
“As far as we know. But beyond that, I’ve also lost all patience for using reincarnation as an excuse for bad deeds. I don’t have time for that.”
I didn’t either. I’d just come off a case where a five-hundred-year-old murderous magician had apparently resurfaced in Venice, all set to butcher a whole new set of victims. So I was definitely tired of the reincarnation schtick. When I brought this once-and-present Vlad to Judgment, he wasn’t going to fare well. Everyone in the Connected community needed to know that I planned to treat opportunistic reincarnators with extreme prejudice. Gamon, Judgment of the Arcana Council, whose job it was to judge and then punish the criminals I brought to her, would be more than onboard with the plan. She preferred to treat everyone with extreme prejudice.
Nigel continued watching me. “So a modern-day Vlad… He’s operating in the labyrinth?”
“Not this part of the labyrinth.” I jerked my thumb behind me. “Way too crowded. My information is that he’s underneath the happy castle itself, which is no longer an actual home but a bunch of museums. I could have tried to get in that way, but it seemed too much trouble.”
“Why didn’t you just…” Nigel wiggled his fingers. “Go there with your mind to suss the guy out? A lot faster, I should think.”
I shrugged, in no mood to explain to him that some of my past abilities as Sara Wilde, mercenary artifact hunter, hadn’t exactly hung around now that I’d taken on the role of Justice. Especially the ability of astral travel, or the art of traveling with your mind without the inconvenience of your body tagging along. As much as it came with its own raft of side effects, I missed that ability. “That process isn’t working as well as it used to. So—your turn. Spill on this cup.”
He obliged. “Sultan Murad II, then leader of the Ottoman Empire, held Vlad as a hostage starting in 1442, when Vlad was just a boy. Vlad impressed him, but there was a lot more to the son of Dracul than met the eye. He apparently indulged himself with some of the sultan’s treasures, including a prized cup. Then, Murad’s son, Mehmed II, conspired to have Vlad imprisoned by the king of Hungary, after he’d already started his impaling ways. There are many legends about that imprisonment, but one was that he was held here in Budapest at some point.”
“Do not tell me you think Vlad was actually a vampire.” What was with this place and the Dracula legend? I could understand it in Transylvania—they needed it for tourism—but Buda Castle had been Vlad
’s unwanted home for barely ten years, and he’d never once so much as bitten anyone here. Impaled them, yes. But not bitten them.
Nigel shook his head. “Not exactly. But the theft of the Sultan’s Cup from Murad’s palace was discovered a few years after Vlad left. It was never tied to him, that we could tell, but rumors sprang up years later that there was a connection. The cup was supposedly one that provided life-giving benefits to any who sipped from it—and, of course, it was also rumored to drive you crazy.”
“Kind of an awkward trade-off.” I looked around the cave. “So Vlad gets imprisoned, stripped, and the Sultan’s Cup is taken from him. Meanwhile, he may have drunk from it and believed he’d live forever. Big maybe. And…you’re thinking that the cup is here, after all this time? Why?”
“The war on magic,” he said.
“Right,” I sighed. “That.”
Not four months earlier, I’d helped stave off some unwanted party guests—the gods and goddesses of the ancients—who’d wanted to come back to Earth. We’d Ubered them back to the other side of the veil where they belonged, but the planet hadn’t quite been the same afterward. Demons had popped up in all sorts of unfortunate places, old magic had returned, and in some cases…old artifacts.
Nigel nodded. “Our intelligence at the House of Swords is that previously ransacked tombs are once more filled with gold and magical tools. We’re tracking down every rumor we receive, and the Sultan’s Cup is on that list. The cup was never found, but Vlad was rumored to carry it on his person, and remember, no one knew its significance at the time of his supposed imprisonment in Buda Castle. It’s reasonable that it would have been taken from him while he was here, stashed somewhere by someone who didn’t know its worth, and then lost.”
“Or it could’ve been put in the castle’s dishwasher and long since forgotten.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “There’s got to be more to this story than that, for you to be here.”
