The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  “I command you,” a voice howled from inside the pentagram, and everyone in the room seemed jolted with electricity—except for Nikki and me. Even Iskra jerked as if she’d been electrocuted, and I drew closer to her.

  “Hang in there,” I said tightly, not knowing where to throw my magic. “We’ve got you.”

  “It’s her,” she said, her voice frozen. “It’s my daughter.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Nikki said from the other side. “Not your daughter. Your daughter’s dead. You checked that. I don’t know what kind of illusion you’re being fed, sweetheart, but it’s not your daughter.”

  Iskra nodded, but I could tell she didn’t believe Nikki. Or she didn’t want to believe. I moved in tight beside her, but I sensed the force field around her. Iskra—or someone else—was keeping us from reaching the older witch. Meanwhile, the wall of witches opened up between Iskra and the roiling ball of fire inside the pentagram.

  Iskra took a step forward.

  “No,” I gritted out, shooting one of the balls of flame I’d been forming toward the ceiling. It exploded against an electrical field, betraying the secrets of the coven. They weren’t relying on magic alone to draw in Myanya. There was some sort of radio frequency that was beaming up and away from this cavern beneath the Red Square, apparently broadcasting on Air Crazy Witch. All they’d needed was the appropriate programming to hook their audience, and Iskra was it.

  Iskra, who even now was taking another step closer to the pentagram.

  I tried again. “Think about this—you know what they’re trying to do.”

  “Do you know, Justice Wilde? Truly? Because the Justices of the past have not.” This mocking accusation came from Svetlana, who was now protected by three witches of her own, which was the only reason I didn’t smack her into the ground with my next ball of blue flame. “Because for all your knowledge of the practices of our world, I don’t think you do. When Iskra successfully fought off the glory of the prophecy of Myanya, she didn’t merely change the course of her own life direction and the course of her daughter’s. She changed the course of our entire coven. By selfishly not sacrificing herself for the greater good, despite knowing that she’d long been marked for such a privilege, she kept our covenant from achieving its highest level of glory. Glory that had been promised to us through the ages, if only we were prepared when the time came. That time came, and Iskra swept it from us.”

  “Yeah? I don’t see any of you asshats stepping forward to take the mantle of Myanya on now. If you feel so strongly about it, throw another hat in the ring.”

  “Myanya has already chosen her queen,” Svetlana retorted. “It is she who comes to us now. The only witch in our coven who can bend her to her will is Iskra.”

  I stared back at her with my own mocking look. Apparently, Iskra hadn’t shared with her the visions of watching her own heirs die.

  “Really,” I said. “A seventy-six-year-old college professor is the best you got to offer the lost queen. I’m surprised she’s giving you the time of day.” As I spoke, I moved forward. I didn’t know what would happen if I ended up inside Myanya’s pentagram, but the fact that I’d been pulled into Danae’s with little or no ill effect made me curious. If I stood inside the flames with Myanya’s mental outreach creature, could I track her back to her own lair? Would I be able to figure out where the lost queen resided?

  “Ariel,” Iskra murmured, and I flashed my gaze to her. Her face was completely rapt, but that was the first I’d heard that name. Still, Disney Princess alert. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Ariel was the name Iskra—a brazen eighteen-year-old determined to make a different life for herself and her child—had given to her baby girl.

  “She’s dead, honey,” Nikki tried again. “You did your best, but she’s passed on.”

  “She’s not dead!” There was an air of desperation in Svetlana’s voice, and as if in response, the roiling flame in the center of the pentagram twisted and sputtered, gaining in volume. “She seeks you, Iskra. She pleads for you. If you enter the pentagram and convince her to kneel—she will not suffer. She will not be broken. She will be made whole. The shattering of her mind will be erased, and you will both live in glory, claiming the power of Myanya for our coven the way it should have been all those long years ago.”

  “That is utter bullshit,” I spat, but the combined power of the witches deflected my anger back to me. It wasn’t that they were stronger than me, I recognized instantly. It was that they were differently stronger, and I didn’t know enough about their culture, their source of magic, to effectively work my way around it. I could—I would, I knew it in my heart. But I didn’t think that was going to happen in time for me to help Iskra.

  “All you have to do is reach out for her,” Svetlana kept wheedling. “Let her touch you, hear you, know that you are waiting and ready to bring her into the coven, as the controller of the vessel witch. She will listen to you. She wants nothing more than to feel your touch and know that she is home.”

  No, no, no. This wasn’t at all how Danae said the prophecy was supposed to go. Myanya wasn’t interested in cruising in and setting up house with a controlling witch who wasn’t a consort at all, but a mother. She needed her host to suffer, to bleed—and she needed a ruling force who was a witch on wheels to make that suffering happen. I might not like it, but I wasn’t the one who’d come up with the prophecy. I didn’t get a vote.

  From the looks of things, however, Iskra was drinking the Kool-Aid. She took three long strides forward, her face now glowing in the reflected fire from the pentagram bonfire. “Ariel,” she whispered, and my heart about broke for her. She lifted her hands, reaching out. “My beautiful Ariel.”

  “No.” Nikki’s roar sounded above the inferno inside the pentagram, and, abandoning all hope of a magical intervention, she lowered her shoulder and body-tackled the three witches nearest Svetlana. The blonde witch screamed, and a rush of energy shot around the room in all directions—clearly, Svetlana was the most powerful witch in the room, not Iskra. The circle of witches around the pentagram faltered and nearly fell apart, even as Iskra stepped foot across the thick charcoaled line.

  The wall of magic snapped shut behind her, but not before I barreled forward too, pushing in beside Iskra. I’d been riding elevators from way back. I knew this trick.

  Inside the pentagram, it was—hot. Like pits of hell, surface of the sun, Vegas in mid-July hot, my skin immediately attempting to melt off my bones and the air in my throat turning to pure sulfur before I even took my first full breath.

  “Iskra!” I screamed, or tried to scream, turning toward her. I could make out her face, her eyes, her lined visage somehow unaffected by the whirling torrent of pain—and I saw what I needed to.

  She’d been wrong after all. Whoever she was staring at, dead in the face, it wasn’t her daughter Ariel.

  “You dare!” A voice as old as time lashed out, and twin rushes of fire caught up the small woman in its embrace, circling around her face, her torso, her legs and squeezing tight. Iskra glowed mirror bright for one long, breathtaking moment, then her body began to sputter and crackle, a battery shorting out. I reached her in another step and plunged my hands through the fire that enveloped her, and for just a moment, the two of us became one being, one witch…

  One target.

  “You dare!” the fire spirit howled again, and I whirled around, clutching Iskra tightly as I stared into the face of the vessel witch who currently harbored the spirit of Myanya.

  Definitely a woman, medium build, medium height, a little taller than I was with long, dark hair, but the face on the woman was every face. It wasn’t that it was nondistinct. It was literally every face that had ever served Myanya’s prophecy, I suspected, most of them beautiful, most of them young, but some defying what I knew of the prophecy. Those faces were as old and wizened as Iskra’s, their eyes shining bright from a sea of wrinkled skin. The woman stood in an open space but—not an ou
tdoor space, I decided, some room that had large windows with a bright blue sky outside, indistinguishable from a million other bright blue vistas in the world. There may have been…palm trees? But I wasn’t sure. Myanya was dressed in a long, black robe, its cowl shrouding her face, and as she narrowed her focus on me, her eyes went milk white.

  “You dare!” she screeched again, and I tried to figure out the tonality of her cry. It wasn’t high-pitched like a young girl’s, or scratchy and frail like Iskra’s. That only narrowed my quarry down to about a fifty-year spread. Not helpful.

  The vessel witch refocused on the old woman in my arms, and a new spear of energy flew from her, piercing my hold and burying itself in Iskra’s heart. I didn’t even feel it pass through me, and I scowled as I focused on it quickly. With a surge of energy, I cracked its hold on the failing doctor, and the spear shattered and fell away. The vessel witch jerked back, her eyes wild with fury.

  “Iskra wants no part of your prophecy,” I shouted. “She was trapped into this. She’s not your consort.”

  “She will pay for what she did,” howled the spirit of Myanya, and it was all I could do not to roll my eyes.

  “You killed her daughter,” I snapped back. “I think she’s paid enough.”

  And, just that quickly, the fire winked out.

  I stood in the center of the pentagram, holding the slumped body of Iskra in my arms, and turned suddenly to find Nikki gripping Svetlana in a headlock.

  “Did you—” I asked even as she barked the same question.

  “Let go of me!”

  The trouble past, Nikki let Svetlana break free, but the witch merely turned, then turned again.

  “There is no power here,” she wailed, her eyes going wide. “We—we’ve been stripped of all our power!”

  I immediately produced a ball of blue flame, illuminating the room around us. “I’m still good.”

  “You!” Svetlana turned on me and held up her hands, though there was none of the force field I’d felt before. Either way, I wasn’t in the mood to deal.

  “We must try again,” Svetlana said, her entire body trembling with the effort. “The ancient texts were clear. The path is plain. We only need our chance at the spirit of Myanya again for us to succeed. We will succeed!”

  She sounded eerily like the Jones brothers, I realized. As I focused on her, I saw the long line of silver gleam at her temple, and a surge of violent vindication coursed through me. “Oh, you’ll succeed, all right. Nikki?”

  Without batting an eye at the order in my voice, Nikki strode toward me, leaning in as if to take Iskra from me. When she did, her eyes widened to the size of saucers, right before the edge of her blonde hair caught fire—

  And Nikki, Iskra and I rematerialized a half breath later inside the coffee shop where we’d breakfasted that morning.

  “Couldn’t you at least poof us someplace tropical next time?” Nikki grumbled, pushing a few tables away from a bench as she slowly and carefully laid Iskra down. The other three people in the coffee shop, who clearly realized that we hadn’t been there a second earlier, sat staring at us, their hands still on their mugs. They weren’t leaving, though. Because: coffee.

  “We’ve got you, we’ve got you,” I murmured to Iskra as the woman started convulsing, more relieved than I thought possible as I flicked my third eye into action, surveying the damage. I’d more than halfway thought Iskra was already dead. I could fix broken. I couldn’t fix dead.

  “Here you go.” Taking a deep breath, I laid my hand on her shoulder, willing myself to see her body not as flesh and blood and bone, but as a maze of circuitry, some of it still crackling bright, some of it dead, lifeless. The spear of Myanya that’d pierced her heart hadn’t done the damage I’d thought it had, but the energy around her throat chakra was feeble at best, and her sacral center was nothing but ash.

  Only…it’d been that way for a long time.

  “Oh, Iskra,” I murmured, moving my hand to a point right above her abdomen, the seat of her personal power. “What did Myanya do to you?”

  “My daughter, my poor daughter,” Iskra sobbed. Beside me, I could feel Nikki’s strength, her solidity supporting my energy as I worked on restoring connections that had been dead for more than fifty years. There was nothing I could say to Iskra that would make her feel any better, but she would, at least in some small part, be healed.

  “Hey,” Nikki said, and I blinked back into partial awareness as she pointed to the TV screen. It was silent, but a scroll of English and Russian subtitles ran beneath it, letting those about to caffeinate have something to watch while they waited in line. It was a CNN Entertainment report, but the blonde talking head was grim, her mouth turning down as she mouthed words in sync to the subtitles. Some celebrity dead, it looked like. There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

  “You know the guy? Or girl? Or whoever it is?” I asked distractedly. Beneath my hands, I could feel Iskra’s sobs even out, her breathing regulate. She would sleep, I thought. Longer and more deeply than she probably had since Myanya had exploded her personal power center, she would sleep.

  “I do not,” Nikki said, regarding the TV thoughtfully. “But I will say this. That’s the third luminary in Hollywood to get her star knocked out of orbit in the past week. There’re simply way too many dead bodies showing up. One dead guy who was caught up in the #MeToo movement for all the wrong reasons, this woman who apparently stranded her assistant at a seedy bar while she went and partied and the woman was attacked, and a third that was a near miss—a rapper and his entourage who all should’ve died in the mother of all car wrecks. I don’t know which one of them was the asshat getting targeted, but I’ve got my suspicions.”

  “That’s…odd,” I said. I had reached more deeply into Iskra now, probing at the shattered circuits around her throat. How long had it been since she’d last spoken her truth? Too long, far too long. She’d carried the curse of Myanya with her for decades, the pain overwhelming her.

  “It’s more than odd. It’s a freaking epidemic of dead or nearly dead dickheads in a very narrow geographic space.”

  Suddenly, it all came together for me. My eyes widened as I stared at Nikki. “You think she’s in LA? But Myanya is a spectral entity when she’s in the pentagram, not a person. Presumably, the LA victims are human and were killed by a human.”

  Nikki nodded. “Thought about that. What if the vessel witch isn’t simply sitting around painting her nails while she waits for her consorts to text their digits? What if she’s using her Myanya energy to settle some scores?”

  “Or…since the bodies are showing up now but none of them are fresh kills, she could have been trying to get Myanya’s attention. The spirit needed to choose a vessel. Maybe this was one witch who wanted to be chosen.”

  “That too.”

  I thought of the vision I had of the vessel witch, where she stood in front of a window, framed by bright blue sky. I thought of the palm trees I’d barely glimpsed. “It’s possible…” I allowed. “More than possible. It’s also possible that Svetlana knows something about where the vessel witch was coming from.”

  “I wondered about that too.”

  Iskra shifted beneath us, and I nodded to Nikki. “You got her?”

  “I got her,” Nikki said. “You go get Svetlana.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It took Gamon only a half hour to get Svetlana to give up everything she ever had the misfortune of knowing about the location of the vessel witch, and even then, we didn’t have a name, only the confirmation of what we already suspected.

  Where else would a prophecy look to make one unknown, hardworking witch a superstar but Los Angeles, California?

  While Danae got to work securing our introduction in to the LA coven, Nikki and I needed to track down another person of interest, the rapper who’d nearly died within the last week, whom we suspected had been targeted by the vessel witch. There was no guarantee that Richard Zachariah
knew how close he’d come to a date with Myanya’s darker side, but if he could help us identify his attacker in any way, it was worth having a chat with him.

  The LA Ink Emporium Tattoo Convention had drawn a record crowd this year, with more than two hundred tattoo artists lined up in booths throughout the convention center perched just a few miles away from open ocean. It drew an eclectic crowd, featuring some of the hottest artists in the world, and drawing everyone from the virginally skinned to those covered in ink from head to toe. There was a straight-up tattoo contest, a pin-up contest, and a Miss Ink contest, with the winner getting a tattoo from the hottest designer at the convention.

  Death.

  Nikki and I loitered three aisles over from where the artist most people knew as Blue was bent over a first-timer whom she’d apparently picked out of the crowd, a middle-aged woman with light brown hair and a long, lithe figure. The woman, who’d clearly never gotten a tattoo in her life, was blushing bright red as one of the oldest members of the Arcana Council pressed a needle gun into her arm.

  Death cut a decidedly recognizable image as well. Slender and muscular, her hair bleached white and spiked on one side of her head, shaved on the other, today she was wearing her usual working outfit of ripped jeans, shit-kicker boots, and a muscle shirt that bared her cut biceps. One arm was untouched by ink, the other was completely covered in a sleeve of intertwining tattoos. At this very convention, there was an entire coffee table book dedicated to the artwork on Death’s arm, captured with surreptitious video, found footage, and a few rare up-close and personal photos. The book was being sold by a third party, with the most popular rumor implying that the original chronicler was spending an extended stay in rehab after finally publishing the book. Needless to say, Death had offered no comments on the work, and most were afraid to ask her about it.