The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  “You know, I think that’s gotta hurt,” Nikki observed. We’d been in LA only about three hours, and she had elected to go full Marilyn for our first day, from her platinum-blonde wig to her beauty mark to her trademark white dress and platinum pumps. She wasn’t the only Marilyn in the crowd, but she was by far the best.

  “Has to be a reason Death picked her,” I said. “And the location—on her wrist. It’s not like she’s not going to be able to see it every time she looks down, unless she covers it up with jewelry.”

  “Yeah, I’m not thinking you’re going to cover up Death’s work,” Nikki said. She looked up at the display on the ceiling, tracking the silent auction for exclusive art from “Blue.” It was already up to $100,000, and it was the first day of the convention. “That’d better be some impressive art.”

  “You almost hope you don’t end up winning it,” I agreed. This close to Death, my own ink I’d received at her hands always stung, and today was no different. I absently rubbed the spot on my right arm where she’d inked an intertwined path that at the time had been a roadmap back from a very dark place, and later had been altered to allow me yet another escape. A separate patch of real estate on my left arm was given over to a tattoo that I’d gotten to ensure I could always find my way to Nikki. Because…Nikki.

  “There’s our boy,” Nikki said, interrupting my thoughts. She nodded to the collection of men in suits at the other end of the line of artists. One of them, clearly the central star around which the others rotated, removed his jacket, revealing a tight leather vest beneath. Visible on every inch of skin around the leather was a plethora of tattoos.

  Nikki filled in the details. “RZ to his rap fans, Richard Zachariah to his cult followers, and dickhead to you and me, this guy is some serious bad news to anyone paying attention. He uses a combination of synth pop and designer drugs to convey his message of domination and oppression, and he actually has churches dedicated to his name. All of it unofficial, and he makes a big deal about not taking donations from his followers except in the form of anyone who wants to come listen to his shows or buy his music.”

  “And this is the guy who survived Myanya’s hit?” I asked, seriously impressed. “How’d he manage that?”

  “Safety in numbers is all I can tell,” Nikki said. “When he travels, it’s always in sets of three—three different caravans of three vehicles each, no way to tell who’s in what until the very beginning or end of the journey. The accident, which is how it’s officially being described, was a semi barreling into one of the caravans at a crossroads, and though one of the vehicles was banged up pretty well, it wasn’t the one he was in. That was three vehicles back, same make and model. So Myanya was close, and the pileup that ensued still sent everyone to the hospital. But that was a few days ago, and they clearly weren’t banged up enough to keep them away from inkmageddon here.”

  “Good to know.” I eyed RZ’s entourage as they shooed off a line of potential clients and took over one of the inkslingers’ stations, a curvy blonde whose billboard announced her as Taz. “How do we get close to him?”

  “We don’t,” Nikki said, fluffing her Marilyn hair. “Apparently, he’s a wannabe male witch, and I mean that in the truest negative sense of the word. Knows nothing about true magic, but once you get close, you’ll notice that he’s inked himself with a lot of necromancy symbols, and he’s got a real hard-on for Satan and all his minions. He’s also a voracious womanizer and believes that women were made to be the vessels for his seed. That kind of guy.”

  “I begin to understand why Myanya isn’t a fan.” I narrowed my eyes at Nikki. “You think he’ll look at me as a potential threat?”

  “Hopefully not. Because I think that, despite his asshattery, he does have Connected ability. And if that’s the case, he might actually know something about the Myanya prophecy. If he does, and if he reached out to her, then that can only help us.”

  “That doesn’t track, though,” I said. “If he reached out, he’d be dead. Not just run-off-the-road dead, but dead dead.”

  “All the more reason we need to get close to him. And for that we need some bait.”

  “Bait,” I said, smiling. One of my newer abilities was that of summoning members of the Council while I was under extreme duress, but I hadn’t tried it when I wasn’t in the midst of a dire emergency. Now seemed a good time to try. I knew what Nikki wanted, who she wanted. In fact, I could see him clearly, completely, perfectly formed as if he was actually…here.

  The energy in the room practically buzzed with excitement as beside me, Nikki grinned. “I was so hoping you would go that route.”

  At the end of the long corridor, striding toward us with a broad grin, walked Aleksander Kreios, the Devil of the Arcana Council. Today he looked slightly less Mediterranean and more Hollywood chic, with his hair dark and slicked back from his beautiful face, his long, lanky body encased in an elegantly cut suit that hugged his body in all the right places. His white shirt was open at the neck, displaying the slightest brush of hair along with a heavy gold chain, and I’d bet serious money there was a ram’s horn pendant hanging from that chain.

  As he walked, he created his own wake of murmuring people, the clamor eventually reaching RZ’s entourage. They turned and looked, then one of them leaned over to where RZ was chatting up his tattoo artist. The rapper stood up abruptly and snapped something, right at the moment when Kreios walked by their booth, Kreios lazily turning his head to meet the rapper’s stare.

  I saw Kreios’s face change the same time RZ saw it. Not simply an expression change either, but a full-on, man-in-a-devil mask, glistening red skin, horns close to his head, DayGlo-red eyes, and a long forked tongue that flicked out to whisk over Kreios’s lips as he grinned at the rapper.

  RZ shouted and fell back, and in that same instant, Kreios was back to looking all playboy cool, sweeping past the rapper’s churning entourage and walking up to me. “My dear Sara Wilde, you really should summon me more often. I find it so…invigorating,” he said, holding up my hand and kissing my knuckles. I felt my entire body warming, but not with sexual response so much as the reaction to the incredible level of power that was rolling off the demigod.

  “Well, you do seem invigorated,” I murmured.

  “I’ll say,” Nikki cracked. “Get me a fan.”

  “And Nikki Dawes.” Apparently not needing anywhere near the same restraint with Nikki, Kreios turned to her and enveloped her Marilyn magnificence in a full-on, back-arching swoon kiss, his hand sliding along her back and down her thigh to hike her leg high up against his own. I was standing right there, and knew it was for show, and my eyes still halfway popped out of my head.

  “He’s watching,” I said happily.

  “So don’t care,” Nikki sighed, still in Kreios’s arms. He chuckled, then gracefully returned her to her upright and locked position.

  “It is always a pleasure working with you both. I think I may need to apply for an official position in your office. You’ll find I have excellent filing skil—”

  “Yes. Absolutely. You’re hired,” Nikki interjected, and I straightened as RZ approached us, his long, swaggering gait telegraphing his nerves. “And I’m outtie. Nothing like a big strong girl to make the hands of dudes like that sweat.”

  To cover her departure, Kreios reached down and gathered me in another embrace, looking deeply into my eyes.

  Very…very deeply.

  “Is there something wrong with my retinas?” I asked, sensing RZ’s approach, though I was totally fine with Kreios’s inspection. He did this far better than Armaeus did, I decided. I only felt a little like a bug when Kreios stared at me.

  “You’ve changed,” he purred. “In quite the most delicious of ways. I suspect this is what is driving Danae’s concerns and pushing Armaeus to such levels of self-torture. I daresay he hasn’t fully recognized how much you have been altered by your ascension to—”

  “Excuse me.”

&n
bsp; I was so entranced by Kreios’s analysis of me that I legitimately jumped at the sound of RZ’s smooth-as-buttercream voice, and I turned in Kreios’s arms to stare at him. To my surprise, RZ was watching me back, his mouth curving into a smile that had predator written all over it. It was only Kreios’s sudden tightening of his arms around me that made me keep my flutter on.

  “Oh!” That seemed to be the right word to utter breathlessly around RZ, never mind that it was mostly due to Kreios crushing my lungs. A second later, the Devil released me, allowing me to stand on my own two feet. A real gentleman, Kreios.

  “I couldn’t help but notice you as you walked by,” RZ said, his attention once more on Kreios. “Which I’m sure was your intention. It seems we have quite a lot in common.”

  His gaze once more slid to me, and I didn’t have to fake my startled blink. Was RZ trying to put the moves on me?

  “And I knew you had excellent taste,” Kreios said, drawing RZ’s attention back to him. “But I sense more than simply a kindred spirit.” He sniffed the air, the move so surprising, I had to forcibly restrain myself from a grimace. “You have been indulging in the darkest of magics, Richard Zachariah, meddling with coven business.”

  “My business, you mean.” RZ’s lips stretched over his teeth, and he practically preened beneath the Devil’s approving stare. “There is a prophecy about to be fulfilled. I reached out and touched its essence two weeks ago. But it was not ripe enough—it was too bold, too flashy. It needed to be wearied by the touch of other magic. Soon, though.” He turned to me, his eyes alight. “Soon I will have the power of all the covens flowing through me. For the prophecy will be fulfilled here.”

  I straightened. This was what I wanted to know. “Here, here?” I asked. “In LA?”

  “Yes, my little witch,” he said, his smile turning into a full-on leer. “But don’t you fret. You are not the vessel of power for that spell, but your time with Richard Zachariah will come. And you will glory in the wonder of it, I promise you that.”

  I stared at him, Kreios’s hand on my shoulder quickly dousing the balls of flame that were bubbling up from my hands.

  “Um…thank you,” I said, as humbly as I could without throwing up. “I, ah, look forward to that.”

  “Not nearly as much as I do.” RZ straightened, and he fixed on Kreios again. “But allow me to let you in on a little secret.”

  “Ohhh, secrets,” Kreios said indulgently. “They are absolutely my most favorite thing.”

  RZ nodded. “The coven of LA is completely upside-down with confusion and chaos over the prophecy that will be fulfilled with my assistance. They don’t much care for me.”

  “No,” I protested, credibly aghast.

  “It’s true.”

  Because I couldn’t stand it anymore, I widened my eyes and asked breathlessly, “But aren’t you scared? I mean, you’re the star who was in that terrible accident the other day, aren’t you? You could have been killed!”

  “I could have, little one, but I wasn’t.” RZ preened. “It was the barest taste of Myanya’s power in its first flowering, which I lapped up with delight and cunning. An attempt to dissuade me that amounted to little more than a tease. And I am far better at such seduction than the vessel who sought to tempt me.”

  “Gosh, who could possibly try that? Do you know her name?” I sensed Kreios going for my rib cage again and shifted out of the way. I needed this information, dammit.

  But RZ wouldn’t bite. At least not on that question. “I don’t need to know who—the who is irrelevant when I will mold her with my hands into something far more than she could ever hope to be herself. She is fated to be mine, my slave and my consort, into whom I will pour the seed of my dominant strength.”

  “Ah.” I was truly at a loss over this. Flames erupted again over my fingertips as Kreios moved smoothly into the conversational gap.

  “And when will this transformation take place?” he purred, his interest fetching a broad smile from RZ.

  “Soon,” the aspiring necromancer promised. “The prophecy has not fully ripened yet, but we are on the very cusp of it. I will glory in the devotion of the flesh and the submission of the soul when the time is perfectly right.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was another fifteen minutes of me struggling not to set RZ on fire before he and Kreios ambled off down the corridor, two old chums discussing the art of dead-guy magic. Ordinarily, I would have paid good money to continue to listen to the Devil squeeze the rapper for information, but I didn’t think I had it in me to keep my cool or my hands to myself. RZ had seriously started to shuck my corn.

  “Got your six,” Nikki said behind me. I turned, and she brushed hair away from my face, her long fingers grazing my cheek.

  “You had your mental gates clamped down so hard, I couldn’t read you, and that’s saying something,” she said.

  “You have no idea,” I said, drawing in an unsteady breath. “But the salient points are these: He, like everyone else we’ve encountered, thinks he’s God’s gift to Myanya or, more specifically, the vessel she’s inhabiting. He’s convinced that vessel is here in LA. He is further convinced he can overpower any display of strength that Myanya puts out because he’s encountered her once, lapping up a taste of her power as she was in her first flowering, as he described it. There’s something to that, I think.”

  Nikki wrinkled her nose. “You mean beyond me needing to shower with bleach?”

  “Beyond that. I got the sense that it wasn’t RZ demanding Myanya through a magic pentagram, but encountering her in some other situation. In person. We should look up any sort of costume ball or other major event that’s taken place recently, someplace where he could encounter Myanya’s proxy without knowing her identity and nobody would think that’s weird.”

  Nikki snorted. “That’s half the bars in LA.”

  “And he was all over the LA coven being upset about him about to rule them, so clearly, he believes the witch is part of that organization.”

  “Danae has already cleared our introduction there, though she’s insisting we have to dress for the part.”

  “Like that’s ever a problem with you.”

  “Both of us, dollface, and by dress, she means we need to have a man on our arm. Or a woman. The witches of LA show their power not only in the kind of power they wield, but who they have in attendance. I offered to be your date, but she said no, that we needed to both ante up, and the easiest way for me to do that was with an appropriate dose of man candy. I voted for Kreios, so you can’t have him, but she thinks Armaeus would come out of his pointy-tipped penthouse for a visit to Lara Drake, the high priestess of the LA coven. They’ve never met.”

  “Oh?” I thought of Armaeus hanging from the Olympic rings, streaming with sweat and blood. “Any chance Drake is our vessel?”

  “It’s always possible, but unlikely, according to Danae,” Nikki said. “Lara Drake is no blushing violet, and though Myanya does occasionally go for older witches, her norm is the ingénue. Plus, Drake’s about sixty years old and on her third husband. I think if anyone like RZ came calling to crush her under his heel, she’d roast his face off.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “And that’s not your only issue,” Nikki said. She pointed to where Death was working. “According to Danae, you need to access your inner power a little more completely, and for that, you’ve apparently gotta go talk to Death. Your reactions in the Moscow coven were quick, but not quick enough, she’s decided, now that you’re this close to Myanya.”

  “And how exactly would Danae—” I stopped and put my hand to the necklace around my neck, jerking it off. The chain snapped easily, and I handed it to Nikki. “No. This has to stop. I can heal myself spontaneously, but Danae can’t—especially if I don’t know she’s been hurt while she’s peeking over my shoulder. I don’t need her watching over me just because I’m working inside the covens.”

  Nikki took the ankh, b
ut frowned at me. “Well, actually, you kind of do,” she said. “You don’t know witch magic.”

  “I didn’t know witch magic,” I corrected her. “As of this week, I’ve been on the inside of more pentagrams than most witches in the western hemisphere have in their entire lives. I don’t want to drag Danae into danger unexpectedly, and I might if she’s watching me that closely.”

  “Okay, then keep this. Just not around your neck, maybe,” Nikki said, unstringing the ankh and handing it back to me. “Because I’ve also got no clue about witch magic, and I would feel much better knowing that you have someone in your corner who does.” She scowled, rubbing her chin. “We probably should have looked at ascending Danae to the Council, not merely to the House of Swords.”

  I shook my head. “I think Ma-Singh would have something to say if I started making the House of Swords a feeder system for the Council.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think the big lug likes to keep tabs on what’s going on with them. Having you in place qualifies as an exceptional coup among all the generals. He’s working it.”

  By this time, we’d made our way over to where Death was set up. The middle-aged woman was gone, and though an entire wall of people were standing around, staring at Death in utter adoration, there was nobody sitting in her chair.

  She looked up when I approached and gestured to the seat. “About time,” she said.

  “Um, you wanted to see me?”

  “What was your first clue?” She waved again to her inking chair. “Sit.”

  “Really?” I said, eyeing the crowd. “You don’t think we couldn’t find a private room, maybe have dinner first?”

  “What’s your issue? Relax. They don’t know it’s you.” I stepped up on the dais, and could feel the net of magic close around me.

  “Who do they think I am?”