The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  Danae began sorting through the papers. “Well, the prophecy is due to strike this year, but it hasn’t been fulfilled in two or three cycles. I honestly thought it had run its course. I researched it as part of my training to become high priestess of my coven, but there was no movement among the most powerful covens during the most relevant anniversary in 1990. No covens reported Myanya returning.”

  “They could have been lying.”

  She shrugged. “They could have. More likely, Myanya failed in her attempt to take over a witch and bend her to her will. It is not an easy prophecy to endure. Once the subjugation is complete and the prophecy of the scarred warrior fulfilled, the witch quite often turns on her oppressor, killing him if he’s not strong enough.”

  I stared at her. “She kills the guy who’s just put her through hell?”

  “It’s happened. It’s not talked about, but…it’s happened.”

  “Right.” I thought back to Vlad on the floor of the cave. He’d wanted to marry Myanya, demanded it as his right. Did he have any idea what kind of honeymoon he was setting himself up for? “So how does that work, exactly? Vlad summoned Myanya, but she was a spirit, not a person. How do you oppress a spirit?”

  “If he’d had time to complete the ritual, he would have entered the pentagram and traveled through it to wherever the vessel witch resides,” Danae explained. “The vessel witch is human and can be physically and psychically overpowered by the aggressor. Once broken, the Myanya spirit must submit to her consort and do whatever he asks. He owns her.”

  “But there are crimes against Connecteds in these files,” I said, pointing to the boxes. “Presumably Connecteds who aren’t either the witch who Myanya chooses as her vessel or the witch who goes all Lord and Master on her. These are innocent Connecteds filing a grievance. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have shown up in my library.”

  As it turned out, petitioning for the aid of Justice was easier than filing a police report. All any afflicted Connected had to do was verbally summon me—me, specifically, not a divine being of any stripe. Then, through a means I hadn’t yet had time to fully explore, the summoner’s request was translated into a written case file. That file was sent to my attention through a delivery system that hadn’t been updated since Abigail Strand had held the office, but which still worked impressively, and depressingly, well.

  “You have to understand,” Danae continued. “The energy of Myanya has not developed for the good of witches. It’s evolved to benefit Myanya. In her fury to escape her destiny or in the aftermath of her degradation, she kills, she destroys. Though she normally does not act on such a large scale, she’s capable of burning down entire cities or sending tsunami waves crashing down on the unsuspecting, if she believes one of them might chain her down. She knows she is doomed to die and rise again, smoking from the ashes of her last humiliation, but that humiliation is deep enough to be intolerable, so she fights with the fury of the damned.”

  “Well, I hate to break it to you, but I think she’s out there right now,” I said.

  “If what you’re telling me is true, she is,” Danae agreed. “Only this time, it’s worse.”

  Nikki leaned forward. “Worse how?”

  “Because the prophecy begins when Myanya is claimed by the male witch, her power is overmatched, and she is subdued, sent down into the long tumult of the soul before she emerges the scarred warrior. But she has not been claimed. The male witch you encountered in the cavern of Budapest failed, and Myanya returned to her vessel witch, now stronger. Worse, we don’t know if this Vlad is the first male witch who’s attempted to set the prophecy in motion.”

  We digested that along with another round of donuts, until Danae finished sorting through the containers and papers. “These case files date from the earliest in 1542, to the most recent in 1906. We’ve no idea when the Myanya prophecy began, but it didn’t generate a complaint before the fifteen hundreds, at least.”

  “They were dealing with the plagues.” Nikki snorted. “A crazy witch prophecy probably didn’t seem all that bad.” She picked up the topmost page that rested in a jeweled case and handed it to me. “What is that, Turkish?”

  “Yep.” I read down the document until I reached the relevant part. “In this complaint, Myanya took over the body of a young girl who was promised into…some sort of harem, it looks like. A dozen women were with her when her power was challenged, though it doesn’t go into detail as to challenged how.”

  “It usually doesn’t,” Danae said, her tone dark. She bit into a second donut. Sometimes your problems were too big for one donut.

  I ignored the siren call of sugar and fat for the moment, as well as Danae’s cryptic comment. “Apparently, the witch laid waste to the harem—the wives, the servants, I assume the guy in charge of the harem as well, whatever you want to call him. Husband doesn’t quite wash, given that these people were essentially slaves.”

  Nikki sat back. “So she blew up the entire house? Then what happened? She simply walked free?”

  Danae supplied this information. “The pattern is always the same in the end. The vessel carrying the Myanya spirit is enslaved by another more powerful opponent, her body and will broken in service to her oppressor. Then, after a period of subjugation, she emerges triumphant but scarred and takes up her mantle as a warrior for her coven. The coven with the warrior queen Myanya becomes the most powerful of its era, for either twenty-eight years, or as long as the queen lives after the challenge. Sometimes that isn’t very long.”

  “What do you mean?” I looked over my third donut. “I thought the whole point of this was that she wins the gold ring of awesome and rules for twenty-eight years. Lather, rinse out the blood, repeat.”

  “That’s true,” Danae said. “But some trials are harsher than others, and the scars can run more deeply in the mind than in the flesh. Far too many of the warrior queens go mad after the trauma they endure.”

  Nikki blew out a long breath. “That really doesn’t seem like a job I’d be trying all that hard to get.”

  “We have no record of Myanya taking form since 1934,” Danae said thoughtfully. She had set her donut down on the tray, only half-eaten. I didn’t know if I should admire her restraint or accuse her of anti-Americanism. “As to where she could be targeting now…we’d have to look to the strongest covens. We’ll need to make a list.”

  “Oh! A moment, please, a moment. I have just the thing for this.” Mrs. French sprang up and hustled into the next room, and a moment later, a tall, slender, flat object came wheeling out of my office, Mrs. French clucking along behind it. “Miss Dawes, you’ll be so pleased, I hope.”

  “Francesca! You’re a gem!” Nikki said, standing and striding over to pull the rolling whiteboard the rest of the way. She moved it around so it faced Danae and me. “You honestly can’t have an investigation without a whiteboard,” she announced. “I personally prefer a corkboard and pins, but Mrs. French overruled me.”

  “The boys would have a field day with acres of string and pushpins,” Mrs. French put in, with the world-weary tone of a woman who’d seen it all…and had cleaned up afterward. “Trust me on this one.”

  “But a whiteboard gives us most of what we need and get this.” Nikki picked up a small metallic-looking cube from the pen tray and tossed it toward the pristine white expanse. It stuck. “Magnetic,” she crowed.

  “Well, you did ask me to find you one,” Mrs. French said, bemused.

  “It’s so great.” Nikki sighed contentedly as she tossed three more cubes against the surface of the white board, chortling when they also stuck. Then she picked up a dry-erase marker and turned back to us.

  “So who’ve we got?” she asked, pen poised. “Who are the bigs in witch world?”

  Danae nodded. “The Dubai coven is very strong right now, but I can’t see Myanya trying to get a foothold there. It’s one of the few male-centric covens in the world. Bali is a possibility too, as well as Istanbul. And, of course
, the Moscow coven. Myanya targeted them in 1962. It was the last time I have record of her, because the prophecy was denied.”

  “Denied?” That was the first I’d heard that term applied to Myanya. “You mean someone died in the process?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Danae leaned forward and looked at the whiteboard. “I don’t think Myanya is that far from us, though. Again, the strongest coven right now in the northern hemisphere is mine, and we haven’t had any activity of this sort. I would know.”

  “You would? That’s how this works? As the head of the coven, you know everything going on? Because I was head of the House of Swords, and I wasn’t always as looped in as I wanted to be.”

  “Were you to become the head of a coven, you would know, yes. It would take a very powerful witch to keep such a thing hidden from you, and you would have had ample warning that one of your own was building such a power.”

  “Right,” I said. “Good thing I’m not a witch.”

  “Well…” Danae sighed. “About that.”

  Chapter Seven

  I looked at her sharply. “That sigh sounded less than ideal.”

  “Well, there’s a lot about you that’s less than ideal,” Danae replied, “and by that I mean—dangerous. You’ve escalated in your abilities every time you’ve faced a new and different challenge—the Council, the gods and goddesses you encountered in the war on magic—”

  “Mommy Dearest,” Nikki put in.

  “And then the senate of magicians in Venice. Nikki told me about how your body assimilated the toxin of Nul Magis.”

  I shot Nikki a dirty look. “Seriously?”

  “I worry,” she protested. “Magic and spells are not really my thing, but they are Danae’s.”

  “And if Armaeus hasn’t already told you this, you shouldn’t have been able to hold the Nul Magis within you as a living toxin. It should have either withered to nothing within you or been forcibly removed by one of the members of the Council.”

  I pulled my right hand into a fist, the Nul Magis a tiny speck in my palm, but not an inanimate one. It pulsed in indignation at Danae’s words. “I tried to heal myself,” I grumbled. “It wouldn’t take.”

  “It didn’t take because you were meant to keep that power. You leveled up to accommodate it, and you don’t even understand what you have accepted into your energy field.”

  “Is there a point to this?”

  “The point is this: I am concerned that any confrontation you have with Myanya will result in a similar power crisis.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think I’m the one having the crisis here.”

  “You know what I mean,” Danae said coldly. “You rush into situations without any preparation. You make decisions on the fly based on little more than how you feel in the moment or, worse, the turn of a Tarot card—”

  “I’ll have you know I trust my cards more than I trust most people,” I shot back. “I’m not getting the underlying concern here. Are you worried about me? Because if I haven’t proven it ably enough, I can take care of myself.”

  I didn’t speak the words calmly, though I wanted to. But the truth was, Danae was seriously cheddaring my cheese. I hadn’t asked for the abilities I was manifesting and developing. Nevertheless, they were mine. Still, I was getting doubters. I’d had my abilities dismissed when I’d been an artifact hunter, when I’d unexpectedly become the head of the House of Swords, and when I’d commanded a team of the other heads of the Houses—who would never have come together except for me. Now, I was Justice of the Arcana Council, and I still had my doubters.

  Danae was watching me closely, and I didn’t like the look in her eyes. She lifted a hand as another surge of irritation rippled through me.

  “I am not one of your doubters, Sara.”

  My brows lifted. Could Danae read my mind? Or was I that transparent? Probably the latter.

  She kept going. “The respect you crave is closer than you think, but it doesn’t start in the world around you.”

  “That’s beautiful,” I said drily. “Since taking this job, I’ve had enough self-improvement mumbo jumbo to fill a dozen Tony Robbins seminars. I’ve got it. Think positively, manifest what you want, be the you that you most want to become. I’ve got all that.”

  “I’m afraid my warning is a little more specific than that,” Danae said, not losing her calm demeanor. “You need to be more cognizant not only of the abilities you can currently manifest, but of your propensity to sponge up the abilities of those around you.”

  “Except my exceptional sense of style,” Nikki pointed out.

  Danae inclined her head gracefully. “Except for that. Otherwise, you are at risk of absorbing more magic than you can completely process in a given moment.”

  “And that’s bad why?”

  She shrugged. “I said you’re not exactly like a witch, yet you display many of the same characteristics of a witch coming into the full flush of her powers. A witch in that state who becomes overwhelmed, goes into stasis. She freezes, in a sense, until she can absorb the spell being cast or the influx of power. If you find yourself opposite Myanya, know that she has been working with witches since the dawn of recorded history. You cannot afford that sort of stasis.”

  I considered her words, then glanced at Nikki. “I’m not asking this out of cockiness but genuine curiosity. Have you ever seen me freeze up?”

  Nikki tilted her head, her gaze scanning the ceiling. “You’ve been hurt bad. You’ve been legit frozen,” she said, as if she was ticking off a To-Do list. “You’ve caught fire more times than I can count. Oh—there was that time when the Gods’ Nails pierced your hands. Whatever happened to them?”

  “Focus, Nikki.”

  “Right…okay, you’ve been electrocuted, skewered by the weapons of Atlantis… That sucked. Nearly drowned on a couple of occasions, and you kind of exploded that one time. But—no. I don’t actually remember you not being able to function when magic hit you. You always seemed to, I don’t know, already have the magic there. It was simply sort of flipped on.”

  “Flipped on,” Danae murmured. “I can see that.”

  “So is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Nikki pressed, but Danae shook her head.

  “It’s neither and both. It’s merely something to be aware of. If you freeze, she is a powerful spirit, and she will use that weakness to take you.”

  “Yeah?” I cracked. “I’d like to see her try.”

  Danae remained serious. “You may well get your chance.”

  “Back to the issue at hand.” Nikki rapped the whiteboard. “What covens do we have in the Americas we should be worried about?”

  “The Peruvian and Guatemalan covens are currently at war with each other, or they’d be more of a concern,” Danae said thoughtfully, “although the energy of war might well attract Myanya.”

  “But war doesn’t allow you a lot of downtime.” I made a mental note to do some research on the South American covens. Witches at war didn’t seem like a really great idea, ancient prophecy or no.

  “What about closer to home?” Nikki asked. “Mexico? The US? Um… Are there covens in Canada?”

  “There are,” Danae said. “And they get healthcare.”

  A clattering noise sounded from the inner office, the sound of a case about to shoot through one of the pneumatic tubes no doubt, and Mrs. French perked up. The woman was truly never happier than when she could do her job. I admired that in her. I admired that in anyone, honestly, which might explain my issues with interpersonal relationships.

  “I’ll get that,” she said cheerfully, picking up a stray plate and extra napkins. I didn’t miss the fact that the plate contained a completely untouched bear claw. Mrs. French might not eat a donut in front of us, but even she was not proof against their magic.

  “In the US, there are fewer covens of power than you’d expect. Many of them are underground, especially in the Midwest and South, while those in
the major cities must walk the line between who they truly are and who the media makes them out to be. Most of the time, the media treatment is a lot more exciting than reality, though not always. Nevertheless, far too many witches today are more easily found clubbing than paying attention to the ancient rites.”

  “Do you tell them to get off your lawn too?” Nikki deadpanned. When Danae flicked an irritated glance in her direction, Nikki rapped the board. “Coven locations, Danae. In the US.”

  “Los Angeles, Memphis, New York. Chicago, of course, but we haven’t been targeted.”

  “As far as you know,” I said, which earned me a stink eye from Danae. She gave excellent stink eye.

  “As far as I know,” she conceded. “The New Orleans coven went dark with Katrina, and by dark, I don’t mean radio silent. If they’re the target of Myanya’s prophecy…that would be bad.”

  “Right,” Nikki said. She wrote down the name and underlined it. “I always did like New Orleans. Maybe we head there first.”

  “One more thought, it can’t hurt to check the Istanbul covens,” Danae said. “The 1906 crime indicated among your cases would be a matter of record, though I’m sure no one would have laid it at the feet of a witch. There are two primary covens currently remaining in Istanbul, but again, this was over a hundred years ago. Whoever is in power now is not necessarily from the coven who was in power then. I’ll need to do the research to see what covens were in existence when Myanya last arose.” She shrugged, gazing at the whiteboard. “But it honestly could be any of them.”

  “So that leaves us where?” I asked. “I mean, do we know for sure that this current energy spike truly is Myanya? Wouldn’t there be other indications?”

  A second rumbling sounded in the inner office, and Mrs. French squeaked. I hid my smile. When it rained in pneumatic tube land, it usually poured.