The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  And now she was on the big stage.

  “Long have I waited for a Master who will help me make the most of the powers of Myanya, only to be disappointed at every turn. Their powers have fueled me though, helped me grow, until I was the one doing the searching, I was the one seeking my rightful consort. But the waiting is done—now I can elevate the prophecy of Myanya to an entirely different level. One that will take us into the next level of power for witches, commanding the scourge of demons that has plagued the earth.”

  I rocked forward on my toes, wishing I had popcorn. I found myself not really hating Heather as much as I wanted to. She’d had a hard run of it, and beyond her unfortunate lineage, I suspected she’d been treated badly, and she was just trying to scrape together a living. It wasn’t a living I could support, because there were all those dead people to account for, but it was one I could understand.

  Then she wailed with a cry of utter exultation and joy.

  “I have found the true path of power for myself, my coven, and Myanya…and you will be my consort!”

  Armaeus Bertrand appeared in the center of the pentagram.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Everything exploded into chaos.

  I wasn’t sure exactly when I started moving, whether it was the second I saw Armaeus appear in the flames of the pentagram, his body growing bright violet with the strength of his newfound magic. It could also have been the moment that Heather turned to him, her face alight with joy and power. And possession.

  Yeah. It was pretty much the possession that got me.

  The closer I got to Armaeus, however, I realized that something was terribly wrong with him. He’d left me a bare hour before to deposit Lara Drake somewhere safe, but now he looked like he’d been fed through a sausage grinder. His skin was flayed open, blood seeping from a dozen different wounds, and his face looked haggard in profile.

  How had he had enough time to get himself into such dire straits?

  Armaeus!

  The Magician looked up at the sound of my voice in his mind, wild eyes swinging toward me, and I caught the expression on his face, almost skidding to a stop to stare. Armaeus wasn’t in agony, he was caught up in some sort of thrall, the pain apparently hitting some receptors that went well past mortal norms. He was in legitimately dire straits, but he was…sort of glorying in it, reveling in the process.

  “What in the hell—” I seethed.

  As if on command, a voice whispered in my mind. But it wasn’t Armaeus speaking. “There is a certain pleasure being summoned, Sara Wilde, as I know from personal experience,” Aleksander Kreios said, his voice thick with fascination and undisputed interest. “But I counsel you to keep going. I’ll explain all of it when there’s more time. For now, however, assume that the Magician, through a curious coincidence that bears further study, has found himself in exactly the right spot for the prophecy of Myanya to use his power.”

  But he doesn’t want to subjugate anyone. That’s not his jam.

  “He doesn’t, which makes him exactly the right choice for this young witch—she knows she’s in good hands, but at the same time, Myanya will be appeased by his strength. Only trouble is, there’s a reason why you haven’t heard of the male witches who have taken part in the ritual once it’s completed, only the female witch who is the target of Myanya’s power.”

  Show me. I turned my attention back to the smaller scrying circle. Heather still stood within it, swallowed whole by bright yellow-white flame.

  “Certainly.”

  The images that Kreios swamped me with had me staggering back. Magician after male witch after warlock followed the same path to their destruction. Swayed by the promise of Myanya’s power, they were seduced into demanding the witch vessel as their consort. They took that power on, most of them getting sucked into vile acts of debasement from the darker undertones of Myanya’s prophecy. They were ruthless to their consorts, subjecting them to physical, mental, and emotional cruelties, and my lip curled back in revulsion as I took in the tide of their heinous acts.

  Then, however, the tables turned. The witch rose anew, sometimes covered in her own blood, sometimes covered in the blood of those she’d destroyed at the behest of her consort, and the first person she killed was—the witch who’d defiled her. Then she turned her rage on select members of her coven, the body count growing higher with each pass. Finally, the remaining coven members were smote with some kind of spell that knocked them out cold. When they came to, the Myanya-afflicted witch was a hero, no one seeming to assign any of the deaths to her…but to her consort. The bodies were cleared away, and the witch was bathed in the light of success.

  Until another twenty-eight years went by. No one ever revealed the true cost of the prophecy, so all that remained behind was its allure.

  She’s not going to kill Armaeus.

  “She may not have an alternative,” Kreios offered up, as if he was discussing a hotdog contest. “If Myanya doesn’t kill the consort, then the only witch left to blame for the deaths is her vessel. It wouldn’t take long for the prophecy to be eradicated completely, if only to preserve the covens who had been subjected to its power. In that event, Myanya would permanently die, never to rise again.”

  I stared at the flickering flame. Did Iskra know that? Did she guess what was happening?

  The Devil didn’t respond to that. The heat from Heather’s fire wall blanketed me, and I extended my own force field out farther, trapping all the witches in the solarium where they stood. There would be hell to pay after this was over with, I knew already. The covens weren’t going to be happy that I could keep them so easily subdued. I had a feeling there’d be a lot of folks going to remedial witch school after I was done.

  But first I had to stop Myanya.

  Inside the pentagram, Armaeus flung his arms wide, bursting forth with a shout of agony that sounded eerily happy. At a loss for what to do, I reached inside my jacket and pulled out three cards. Two of Wands, Temperance, Tower.

  So, no matter what, it looked like things were going to go kersplodie. I could work with that. The Two of Wands wasn’t impossible to figure out either in this case—though his interpretation was different from the last time I’d pulled him. Depicting a young man standing between two staffs planted in the ground, he typically implied the start of a long journey, one that was sure to lead to a positive end. It also sometimes meant that the querent had a choice to make, that one of two paths were open to them, and they mainly needed to choose. He also sometimes merely indicated “go left.”

  In this case, though, the card’s meaning was a little clearer. Taken in the most straightforward way possible, this was a seeker standing before a makeshift gateway. All he had to do was step into that gateway, and the cycle of the reading would begin.

  It was the middle part of the reading that was a little more difficult to figure out.

  Temperance was one of those cards that most people like to gloss over. It could mean any number of things, espousing the virtues of patient action over wild, uncontrolled effort. It could mean the careful blending of disparate materials, to create something entirely new. And it could mean an alchemist, an angel, a mediator, or a mentor. But no matter what, the face of Temperance meant that still waters ran deep, and that the querent should proceed with caution and care.

  Then again, screw that. I hated pulling Temperance.

  I stubbornly reached back into the deck and pulled another card free, immediately rolling my eyes. The Six of Cups, the card of childhood nostalgia, showing a couple of children in the foreground of some cute little town, playing in a field of flowers.

  Hello, Captain Useless. I should’ve known better than to try to recast my future mid-draw.

  Reinforcing the thrall that held the LA coven in place, I pushed my way through the coven to the edge of the pentagram. Armaeus was close enough to touch, but I slanted away from him and plunged inside the tiny scrying circle holding Myanya and her appointed ve
ssel, Heather.

  They’d done an amazing redecorating job.

  Instead of a triangle and circle no more than three feet in diameter, Heather was operating on an empty plane that took up the whole length of the solarium. The witches standing guard and the curious onlookers were all gone, while Armaeus stood frozen in his pentagram, his hands up as if to create magic, his face relaxed, almost serene.

  For some reason, that bothered me even more than the Magician’s flashes of agony that I’d glimpsed when I’d been outside Heather’s scrying circle. A passionate Armaeus I knew how to handle. A stone-faced one…not so much.

  “You cannot have him anymore.”

  I turned to see Heather regarding me with fierce determination.

  Ignoring her assertion, I smirked at her and asked the question I’d been dying to voice since I’d met her. “Are you a Heather?”

  She stared at me blankly, apparently unfamiliar with the movie. Kids today. Instead, she held her hands up higher as I approached, as if to ward me off. There was something definitely different about her, and with a quick peek through my third eye, I confirmed that the power of the witch initiate had amped several times over. Her body writhed with sensuality and power, filled with equal parts Heather and Myanya now.

  “You can’t stop me,” Heather said. “The prophecy must be fulfilled. And now, finally, it can do some real good.”

  “That’s not your call,” I said, knowing where this was going.

  “You’re wrong,” she insisted. “How many oppressors are still out there, male and female alike, pushing down those who dare try to oppose them? That was Myanya’s gift to me. I can smell them, feel them, taste them. I’m driven nearly mad with my need to consume their energy and drain them of their life essence.”

  “Yeah? What about Tammy Butler? She wasn’t trying to oppose anyone.”

  “She got in my way,” Heather snapped. “She wasn’t strong enough to take on the prophecy herself, but she was too strong not to know that something was going on. She believed it was Gail’s initiate who was being groomed by Myanya, because she knew that it required a certain level of edge to attract the eye of the prophecy. And she…” Heather’s voice quavered, then steadied again. “She didn’t believe me. About them. Not once.”

  I didn’t have to ask her what she was talking about. All those Hollywood parties, all those predators with fancy clothes and bright white teeth.

  “So you did your best to keep up your innocent little girl act,” I surmised. “I’m surprised Lara didn’t catch on to it.

  “Her,” Heather scoffed. “She’s no leader. She can’t even control her own witches. There were several who were discussing the possibility of a coup. I think part of her welcomed the energy of Myanya to see who would be left standing when it was all done, but she assumed that it was the consort who would be causing any deaths. So she pressed the consorts of her choosing forward, challenging them to engage with Myanya’s power.” Heather’s smile was icy. “She fed my power without even realizing it.”

  I lifted my brows. “All those witches were Lara’s ideas? Because there were a lot of them.”

  “Not all of them. But enough,” Heather said, her disgust plain. “She tried to manipulate the system, not understanding the true depth of the game she was playing. Everyone underestimates the power of Myanya, to their detriment.”

  “But not you,” I said. I was moving closer to her. The power on this plane was very different, but not completely alien to me. It was as if I was pushing through the murk and the mire of a dream, and I pursed my lips, trying to hold on to a shred of memory that thought inspired. It was something…something in one of the case files? Something that Armaeus said? I couldn’t recall, but it felt like it was the right thing to do to push forward—so I did.

  One more step, then another. Heather allowed me to continue approaching, but while her body held firm, her face seemed to morph with each step I took. First she was a withered old crone, then a fresh-faced girl of maybe sixteen, then a young woman with a deep port wine stain that spread down one side of her face, then an older woman with eyes like a fawn’s and snow-white hair. I was seeing the many faces of Myanya over the years, but to a one, they looked innocent, pristine. These were the faces of the witches before they had endured her curse.

  “Show me the truth,” I ordered, and Heather stiffened, finally taking a step back.

  “You have no power over me,” she declared, and I rolled my eyes. I’d already had enough labyrinths for one week.

  “Yeah, I kinda do.” I lifted my hand. It was still like trying to move through Jell-O, but my energy flared to life in the palm of my hand as I spoke directly to Myanya. “Your minion talks a good game, but she’s a child, and you know it. In fact, that’s the only reason you’ve gotten as far as you have, isn’t it? Show me the truth, Myanya.”

  Heather’s lips curled back from her teeth, but a second later, her face shifted again. The old woman was ashen, clearly dead. The fresh-faced young girl had deep bags under her eyes, her skin patchy and gray beneath. The old woman with the eyes of a fawn had been blinded; the girl with a port wine stain was now fully cowled, her gaze shifting away from me as soon as her face manifested. These women were all broken, I realized, but even that wasn’t the full story.

  “The truth,” I whispered again, and Heather staggered back, her arms flinging wide.

  The power that bloomed forth rose not only from her throat but from the throat of every woman who had come before her, and it was my turn to fall back as the full force of it blew into the space between us. There was rage, and there was horror, and there was strength—but in the end, there was something so powerful, I had to bend my will against it, forcing it to retreat.

  “You cannot,” I gritted out. “This is not the way.”

  As a new and unexpected pressure call began battering against my mind, demanding to be heard, I finally understood the meaning of the Six of Cups. Two young children in a field of flowers, playing, their world full of hope and possibility. A fairy-tale image, steeped in nostalgia, depicting not whatever was, but what one person truly wished could be, truly hoped would be, if only her actions were enough.

  They weren’t, all those years ago. But life’s a funny place.

  “You have no say in the prophecy of Myanya!” Heather cried as I fixed on the distant caller, creating her likeness in my mind’s eye, using exactly the same technique I’d employed to bring Armaeus and Kreios to me. I’d never tried it with an ordinary human before. “You don’t know anything about the way!”

  “She doesn’t, not really. But I do.”

  Then again, Iskra Mikhailova wasn’t your ordinary human.

  The slender Russian doctor appeared on the plane between existences, leaning on an elegant staff, her hair carefully swept into a chignon, her deep blue business suit professional and luxurious at once. She didn’t wear her granddaughter’s wild patterns, but then, she didn’t have to. She conveyed her power differently, internally. Power I’d helped restore. Now all her focus was on her granddaughter.

  “I tried, child,” she sighed, her smile fracturing a bit as she took in Heather’s disheveled appearance. “The Blessed Virgin knows I tried. But I underestimated Myanya’s darker side. Hard to imagine that’s possible, but it’s what happened. She was not content to choose a worthy witch after I defeated her. She had to return to my family. I’d thought once was enough. The prophecy was fulfilled in your mother, and that she died after it was done was not a precedent. It was finished. I never imagined that Myanya would come back to disturb a third generation…or even that there was a third generation for her to target.”

  Iskra sighed, gazing at her granddaughter, her eyes filled with love. I thought about how many witches Heather had killed, and how many Iskra had killed in her day. Maybe there was a good reason Myanya chose this family.

  “You lie,” Heather snarled. “You didn’t try to save me, even when you could. You left you
r daughter in the hands of fools. She wasn’t strong enough when I eventually came to claim her. You did not protect her from me.” Heather’s voice was different now, stronger and richly inflected—not Heather at all, but Myanya. I could see the fight the girl was waging to try to hold on to the spirit of Myanya, but I also thought she would fail. Did Myanya know that too?

  “I sometimes wonder if you knew I would break her,” Myanya continued. “Because I did break her. Soundly.”

  I gritted my teeth. Myanya was definitely not winning points for Miss Congeniality, but Iskra seemed unmoved.

  “The human spirit is too strong to be broken by an outside force unless there is a desire to be broken,” she said quietly. “You among all spirits should know that. How many women have you dragged through mud and blood before you decided they had suffered enough?”

  “That is not my doing.”

  “And that is where you lie,” Iskra countered. “I know better than most what powers you bring, and I could see the doors that opened ahead of and behind me. The witch who stood forward as my consort was a despicable fool, yet his was the only bid you entertained. You knew he would be destroyed, but you also know that he would make me suffer. You relished that.”

  “I would make you strong,” Myanya seethed through Heather’s mouth.

  “You would make me bitter,” Iskra shot back. “The prophecy of the scarred warrior was no longer enough for you. You weren’t satisfied with merely venting the rage of our generation, you added to it, twisting it. I had to stop you. I have to stop you now.”

  I looked at Iskra askance, but she believed her own words. I knew better, however, and so did Myanya.

  “Oh, please. I am too strong for you now. I knew that you were still out there, hiding in your protected church, and I reached out to your coven. They knew the power that could come with allowing me to complete what I tried to so many years ago. When they suggested you as my consort, not my vessel, I agreed. I wanted you to see. To know.”