The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  That was news. I turned to her. “What do you mean? Who’ve they pissed off?”

  “Lara is politically active enough to protect her interests as a landowner, and she still owns a great deal of the land in and around the city. She sold some, bought some back, then realized she’d make a lot more money renting than selling. So that’s part of it. She also can raise rents or terminate contracts at will, which gives her more power than many are comfortable with. Aside from that, she was an outspoken proponent of many of the movements for women’s, writers’, artists’, and actors’ rights over the years, and because of her position, people have to be polite to her.”

  “But all that’s narrowed in on her, and she’s not our guy,” I said. I glanced again to the board, eyeing the women of the LA coven. “Any of these witches coupled up with power players in the city?”

  “Off and on over the years, but there are no current alliances in play,” Nikki said. “Gail Fredericks is the last to have an alliance of any interest, and that’s her now ex-husband, who was also romantically linked with victim number two, Judith Granger, though before Gail and he were wed. I’ve done some digging on that, but Gail has an alibi for the time of Granger’s death and by all accounts, there was no ill will between her and the victim.”

  “Still, bears a conversation,” I said.

  “That it does. If you have time to investigate.” I didn’t miss the change of pronouns, and I turned to Danae with raised brows.

  “You’re not coming with?”

  “I shouldn’t even be in the city,” she said with a dark chuckle. “Lara is not a fan of mine, as I’m one of the few witches in the northern hemisphere richer than she is.”

  This wasn’t exactly news to me—I knew Danae was loaded—but still good information.

  Danae continued. “Add to that the issue with the Myanya prophecy, and it makes for some tricky business. Technically speaking, if the LA coven is elevated by a successfully fulfilled prophecy, Lara or this new witch could make a run at my base of power. My attention has been split with my recent adoption of the role of Mistress of Swords, and there are some who distrust an alliance of any stripe with the Council.”

  I pursed my lips. “Then you’re in danger being here. That was never my intention.”

  “It’s a danger I happily sought out. And unlike you, I don’t shrink from the assistance of others. A perceived alliance with the Council puts me in a power position, regardless of any distrust I may sow,” Danae said, her smile icy. “You may not wish to use the leverage your position allows you, Sara, but I’m not quite so delicate.”

  “Fair enough.” The Eye of Horus tattoo on my arm flared with heat, and I rubbed it absently.

  “Bottom line, if I’m perceived as trying to interfere in the rightful business of the LA coven, especially if they are on the cusp for challenging my authority, it would undermine the eventuality of me stomping Lara on the neck when she does attempt to usurp my rule.”

  “Burn,” Nikki offered from the corner.

  Danae nodded. “I look forward to her attempt, because such challenges are watched keenly by the other covens. New York and New Orleans have been eyeing the brass ring as well, and there’s always Sedona to contend with.”

  That surprised me. “Sedona? That’s the first I’ve heard of them. Why weren’t they listed among the possibilities of attracting Myanya’s prophecies?”

  “Because their witches are…particularly not receptive to subjugation of any kind, no matter what the cause. But don’t let the pink jeeps and vortex tours mislead you,” Danae said. “There’s powerful magic in those canyons, and there always has been. And that’s merely in the US. There are several midlist covens who wouldn’t be likely to be targeted by Myanya, but who remain eager to get into the dance, and a host of cities in other countries who would like to expand. As I think you found in Moscow.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, thinking of Svetlana’s expression as I introduced her to Gamon. “Moscow’s gonna be a little busy for a while.”

  “Something else to consider,” Kreios said into the ensuing silence. “What will you do when you find the witch that Myanya has chosen as her vessel? Whether it’s one of these women or someone else? Would you challenge the spirit of Myanya for control?”

  I made a face. “I may not like the prophecy—and I don’t—but that’s not the immediate problem here. The immediate problem is that a witch is using the prophecy as an excuse to ice her enemies.”

  “Who all seem to richly deserve it,” Kreios said, amiably enough.

  “That’s completely not the point,” I shot back. “A few days ago, we had four witches or their associates who came in as cases for Justice. Mrs. French has reported a dozen more since. And that’s only the ones who petitioned for retribution. How many others have been trying to win the Myanya lottery and ending up with more than they bargained for?”

  “They know the risk,” Kreios demurred.

  “See, I don’t think they do.” I looked at Danae, and she shrugged.

  “The prophecy has been playing out once a generation as long as records have been kept. It’s well known among true believers.”

  “The prophecy, yes, but the part about the witch taking it into her own hands and using it as a dark-magic super soaker? How often has that happened?”

  A heavy silence followed my question. “I didn’t think so. It hasn’t happened because through time immemorial, the subjugated witch has allowed herself to be subjugated first, then ask questions later. So there hasn’t been any precedent for this. Not even Iskra—and I’m sure Iskra’s not the first witch to balk at being ground under someone else’s heel—not even she sought to annihilate the male witch who stood waiting to subjugate her, before he did anything wrong. All her focus was on rejecting Myanya.”

  I shook my head, looking at the board again. “I don’t get the impression that whoever the vessel is this time around is resisting Myanya so much as she’s using her.”

  “Successfully,” Nikki agreed.

  “Which makes her arguably more powerful than any of the witches who have come before.” Now Danae was looking at the board as well, her eyes narrowing. “I hadn’t considered it in that light.”

  I glanced at her, then went still. The smallest streak of silver had now appeared at Danae’s temple, a streak that hadn’t been there before. Was I now able to see potential danger in a Connected before they ever did anything wrong, like some sort of Minority Report precog, minus the lottery balls? Was this a bonus of my new Eye of Horus add-on?

  The very thought made my head hurt. I knew Death should’ve given me a manual.

  We argued for another hour, back and forth, but until we met with the witches in person, there was nothing more we could do. Kreios assured Nikki he’d be her plus one for introduction to the LA coven, and Danae announced she was heading to the local House of Swords enclave, where she was assembling the highest-level members of her coven to monitor the ley lines of the city.

  Part of me knew that wouldn’t be all she was monitoring, but eventually, everyone left, and I was once more alone in the room.

  “You’ve been listening to all this, haven’t you?” I asked aloud. No response from Armaeus, and I scowled, turning to the window. “I know you’re there, I can feel you. And I need a date, Armaeus. I need cred. You provide both.”

  Still no response. Annoyed, I padded over to the liquor cabinet. No pay-by-the-shot mini fridge here; it was a fully stocked setup. I poured myself a glass of Glenmorangie, eyeing the amber liquid as it sloshed in the glass.

  I wasn’t a fan of Armaeus ignoring me, or maybe monitoring me on remote to stream when he got around to it. I was even less a fan of going to tomorrow’s party alone, particularly when plus-ones were a status symbol.

  My arm flared again with heat, and I scowled down at it, flexing my bicep. The Eye of Horus stared back.

  “You know, you would be a lot more useful if you were the mouth of
Horus and could simply tell me what to do.”

  The smallest current of energy seemed to ripple across Death’s design, and my brows perked. I had successfully summoned Kreios, after all. Summoning Armaeus was worth a shot.

  “Well, now that you put it that way….”

  I set down the scotch and focused all my attention on Death’s newly inscribed design…and on a particularly stubborn Magician, more than two hundred miles and a Fortress of Solitude away.

  I just wasn’t expecting all the blood.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Armaeus!”

  I reared back from the body that came crashing at me, arms flailing, mouth open in a rictus of one part horror, two parts misery, and five or six parts sheer unmitigated agony. I wasn’t fast enough, of course, and a second later, the long, powerful, naked, and irretrievably gory body of the Magician flattened me to the floor, splaying my arms and legs wide. Before I even hit the Turkish rug, I’d created an intense blue force field of magic around us. A breath after my head smacked the thick piled carpet, I pushed Armaeus’s body off me and scrambled out from beneath him, rolling my makeshift electric blue energy gurney out of the conference room and into my suite’s enormous bedchamber. Eyeing his body, I wasn’t sure if a shower would help or if he was too perforated for it. Talk about A River Runs Through It.

  “Miss Wilde. This is…not really the time for humor.”

  “Yeah?” I used my outside voice, because my inside voice was too busy screaming as my magic guided him to the bed. “Well, it’s also not the time for you showing up like Swiss cheese. Tell me what to fix first.”

  He did a full-body flinch as I shifted the magical field around him, so I kept it in place, sort of a flexible superglue. Whatever worked in a pinch.

  Then I laid my hands on him…

  And it was all I could do not to rear back.

  I’d seen the Magician injured before, I’d seen portions of his body gone dark, his electrical circuits ravaged by magical attacks. But this—I’d never seen anything like this before.

  “What the hell are you doing to yourself, Armaeus?”

  “It is part of the evolutionary process,” Armaeus groaned, but apparently, he wasn’t so far evolved that he minded my cooling hands on his body. And cooling was the operative term here, as every single one of his magical circuits glowed with the white-hot intensity of a supernovaing star.

  “You’ve overloaded all your circuits,” I hissed, feeling the energy radiate off him.

  “It is the power of the gods,” he said simply. “Available and accessible to any who would take part in it.”

  “Yeah, well, heroin is available and accessible too. Doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to shoot up,” I growled, trying to cajole his nerve endings back to a nonnuclear status. “You may be immortal, Armaeus, but you’re still sort of human. Your body wasn’t meant to handle this level of radiation. As evidenced by the fact that your bones are weeping marrow.”

  “Must—gain strength,” Armaeus muttered, but his voice sounded a little stronger now, so I pressed closer with my cooling hands, grimacing as I encountered the first superheated circuit. With all my focus, I grabbed it, and remarkably didn’t howl with agony. Much.

  “Gain strength for what?” I gasped, though at this point, I didn’t so much care about his answer. I moved slowly through his body, hand over fist, dousing the internal flames he had set within himself on purpose. In my wake, what looked at first like crackling ashes remained, but—as I continued working, I could see that it was more complicated than that. New filaments were twining through the wreckage of Armaeus’s neural networks, filaments I couldn’t readily identify as the typical magical currents. It was like all the slender branches that had once stretched through Armaeus’s body had been replaced by rolls of spiderwebs—an interconnected mass of compounding energy. Still frail and weak, but definitely, distinctly different.

  “What did you do this for?” I practically moaned, and Armaeus’s laughter was low, rumbling, and heartfelt.

  “Would you believe I did it for you?”

  I lifted my head to look at him, and the expression on his face tightened. With a wince, he lifted a hand and brushed it across my cheek. His attempt to remove something from my face failed miserably as I felt the slide of gore across my skin.

  “I…” He looked down at his hand as if he was seeing his own body for the first time. “I didn’t feel most of this.”

  “Well, you maybe didn’t, but what’s left of your body sure did. This isn’t what they mean by a crash diet.” I ignored his grunts of pain as I returned to my work, cooling down one bundle of nerves after another, watching with a mixture of dismay and curiosity as the spinning whirr of new connectors moved into place behind me, glowing bright pink from the charred remains of what came before. Intuitively, I knew that what I was seeing wasn’t technically possible, that Armaeus wasn’t some kind of hollowed-out shell, a receptacle for magic that could be filled up with new transistors and chips and circuitry. He was flesh and blood and sinew and bone and human.

  At least he had been. Once.

  “How is this even possible?”

  I didn’t realize I’d asked the question out loud until Armaeus shifted beneath me, opening one eyelid with a decidedly icky clicking noise. Eyelids shouldn’t click, I knew from personal experience. “What are you asking about specifically?”

  I frowned at him, but it was a fair question. Part of me wanted to know the how of what had happened to Armaeus’s body. How his magical networks could be so completely replaced, albeit with severe damage to what remained of his corporeal form. But an even greater part of me wanted to know why he’d done it.

  And that part won out.

  “You’ve lived for nine hundred years, and I don’t know everything you’ve done to evolve over that time. But it seems like this is a somewhat extreme evolution, if that’s what you want to call it. When I saw you last, you were in a fair amount of pain, all of which seemed self-inflicted. And I’m willing to bet that nobody was holding your feet to the fire to replace your normal circuitry with a bunch of pink flamingos. Why did you do it?” I bit my lip, half knowing, half dreading the answer. “Was it something I did?”

  I knew the truth of my guess in the silence that followed, and I bent again to what I could do now instead, which was healing Armaeus’s body. As always, with my assistance, his own natural healing abilities gained strength rapidly, and while I focused on the interior issues, the exterior shored up as well. In only a few minutes, Armaeus’s skin was no longer riddled with oozing gashes and blackened rents, but was pure, untouched. Pristine.

  The interior circuitry was taking a fair amount longer to resolve, but even it eventually shook off the trauma of what had been written upon it and surged with new, pinkish purple light.

  I sat back on the bed, my gaze sweeping Armaeus’s body as our hands found each other’s, and held. Somewhere along the line, his clothes had fallen off him or been burned away. Now he lay half-covered in the sheets, looking at me from hooded, intense eyes.

  “Your assessment?” he asked, and I shrugged, more upset than I wanted to be.

  “You’re back in one piece, which is saying something. But you look like you’ve been filled with alien DNA.”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, there are things we need to do,” I said, my tone deliberately flippant to mask my churning hysteria. “We have a party to get to tomorrow, which I know you’re aware of, and I don’t know if you’ll be my plus-one or plus-fourteen. You’ve got that kind of energy bouncing around inside you.”

  “You seek to impress the LA coven.” Armaeus was now breathing more or less steadily, but he didn’t let me go. “You want me on your arm to do so, but you give yourself far less credit than you should.”

  “I don’t need you to look pretty, Armaeus, I need you as a shield.” Not exactly true—I did need him to look pretty. But he could do that without even t
rying, now that he’d been all Humpty-Dumptied back together again. It was the shield part of the equation I still needed to work out.

  The Magician’s brows lifted and his eyes drifted shut, presumably to do some interior scope work of his own. When I would have moved away, however, he shifted his hand to curve his elegant fingers around mine. Without knowing quite why, I covered our joined hands with my other hand, willing him to feel me next to him, no matter how deeply he went inside his own body.

  A minute passed by, then several more, then eventually, Armaeus exhaled. He squeezed my hand, and I thought: maybe that was why he’d reached for me. He needed to remember the touch of a human, the touch of his own race. Or at least what I hoped was still his race.

  Armaeus chuckled low and deep in his throat, though his eyes remained closed. “Are you really that worried?”

  I looked at him tangled in the sheets and my lips twisted. I thought of Myanya and the power and promise that she carried in her terrible gift of a prophecy. How different was what she was offering to her chosen witch from what Armaeus was doing to himself? Other than the whole choice part, anyway?

  “Yes, I’m that worried,” I said. Without thinking, I leaned forward and laid my head on Armaeus’s chest, mainly to hear his heart beating. Because he did still have a heart, right? I didn’t miss that on my cruise through his nervous system?

  I’d barely skimmed his chest when Armaeus’s chuckle rolled over me and his hands circled my shoulders, hauling me higher on his body, then turning me until I faced him. My legs parted, and I straddled his torso, bracing my hands on his chest. I inched my left hand across his pec, and he closed his hand over it, bringing my fingers to his lips.

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen you actually worried, Miss Wilde,” Armaeus said, and the insinuation in his voice made me snap my gaze to his. His eyes were dark, swirling with power, but I didn’t know how much that had to do with his near-magic experience or the simple fact that he was alone, naked, with a woman in bed.