Moonshine
Phantom Queen Diaries Book 11
Shayne Silvers
Cameron O’Connell
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Shayne Silvers & Cameron O’Connell
Moonshine
The Phantom Queen Diaries Book 11
A TempleVerse Series
© 2020, Shayne Silvers / Argento Publishing, LLC
[email protected]
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.
SHAYNE AND CAMERON
Shayne Silvers, here.
Cameron O’Connell is one helluva writer, and he’s worked tirelessly to merge a story into the Temple Verse that would provide a different and unique voice, but a complementary tone to my other novels. SOME people might say I’m hard to work with. But certainly, Cameron would never…
Hey! Pipe down over there, author monkey! Get back to your writing cave and finish the next Phantom Queen Novel!
Ahem. Now, where was I?
This is book 11 in the Phantom Queen Diaries, which is a series that ties into the existing TempleVerse with Nate Temple and Callie Penrose. This series could also be read independently if one so chose. Then again, you, the reader, will get SO much more out of my existing books (and this series) by reading them all in tandem.
But that’s not up to us. It’s up to you, the reader.
You tell us…
Witches and werewolves and rednecks, oh my!
After surviving one Hell of a journey, Quinn MacKenna—black magic arms dealer turned demigoddess—was really looking forward to spending some quality time with friends. And maybe a beer. Unfortunately time is the only thing Quinn doesn’t have, and all her friends are either missing, in hiding, or imprisoned—including her favorite bartender. Then again, after being gone a year and six months without sending so much as a postcard, what should she expect?
With the world having literally spun out of control since she last stepped foot in the mortal realm, Quinn finds herself wandering Boston, penniless and without a home. To make matters worse, it seems a very powerful, very mysterious someone has overthrown the powers that be and set something Wild loose in her city. Something determined to Hunt down every last soul Quinn cares about.
Unless she turns herself in before the next full moon.
Facing a decision she cannot afford to make and a deadline she cannot afford to miss, Quinn has no choice but to leave Boston in someone else’s capable hands. Fortunately, if her adventures have taught her nothing else, it’s that she can’t do everything herself. Which is why—when a pack of Missouri werewolves lead her to question the motives of a white witch—Quinn looks for an enchanting solution.
In the end, Quinn will be called upon to weigh the needs of her city against her own. But first, she will have to tap into a power she does not understand, reunite with some exceptionally Sick acquaintances, start a witch-hunt, and stop a massacre. And all before the next full moon—unless she wants to owe a certain goddess a debt that could take an eternity to repay.
Turns out being immortal isn’t as much fun as Quinn thought it would be. But then, nobody ever said moonlighting as a deity would be easy—though they probably should have mentioned the tremendous sacrifices she’d be asked to make.
Like having to wear a freaking dress.
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Chapter 1
I knew a philosophical drunk once who offered nuggets of what he called wisdom after tossing back his fourth cocktail, oblivious to the nuances of relevance or reception. Occasionally, that meant bastardizing dead celebrities like John Lennon or Oscar Wilde—insisting life was what happened when you were busy making plans, or that real friends stab you in the front. Usually it was more like listening to a grown man slur his way through a small batch of Hallmark cards. During one of his less inspired rants, he told me that home was a place you grew up wanting to leave and grew old wanting to get back to. It was a tidy, trite platitude that had stuck in my craw for years, if only because it lacked perspective. After all, shouldn’t that depend on what you were leaving behind—not to mention what you’d be going home to?
Take me, for instance: the last two times I’d left Boston, I’d done so of my own free will—first trading in a grey winter’s morning for a balmy Scottish coast, then again for a cottage made of candy in a storybook realm where gravity was negotiable, colors had a smell, and children were considered edible until proven otherwise. And yet, in neither instance had I thought to be gone for particularly long, or at least no longer than I had to be. Despite everything, Boston had always been my refuge, my sanctuary from a mad and callous world.
Indeed, I knew Boston so well it was like it belonged to me and me alone—as if the entire city was my sandbox and everyone else played in it at my leisure. Of course, a large part of that could be attributed to the hubris that comes with living anywhere long enough to call it home. But the rest was bloody well earned—a bevy of hard-won insights that I’d accumulated over decades. When I was younger, that meant knowing which venues had the laxest security, or which highways to avoid during rush hour, or which happy hours to take advantage of. In time, it meant knowing which logos to wear and when, which neighborhoods were heavily patrolled and why, and even which lowlifes to contact and how. For years now, I felt I knew Boston better than the back of my hand because the term “skin deep” simply didn’t apply; I could trace the city’s bones. Hell, I could map its very veins.
Or at least I used to be able to.
Unfortunately, without a watch to account for hopping between such obscenely different time zones over a span that I’d barely been able to track, it seemed my late arrival had bypassed fashionable and gone straight to dickish. Metaphorically speaking, I wasn’t the girl showing up as the appetizers hit the table so much as the girl banging on the door of a dark, empty restaurant begging to be let in. Actually, it was worse than that; I was the shellshocked girl gaping at the newly erected bowling alley where the restaurant used to be.
Because that’s what happens when you’re gone for eighteen freaking months.
A year and a half, that’s how long I’d been away—a fact I’d discovered perhaps an hour after Charon, the boatman of the river Styx, dropped me off along an abandoned stretch of dock outside Boston Harbor just after sunrise. Of course, the hoary bastard was long gone by then; he’d zipped away in the fancy, magical ship I’d procured for him in exchange for t
he ride and my contraband goods, saluting me with a beer as though he knew precisely what fresh hell awaited me. But then, I supposed he was the expert.
Still, I’d have to pick a bone with him later.
On that note, do you have any idea what all gets taken away from you when you’ve been essentially missing for a year and six months—especially if you have no immediate family to speak of? Spoiler alert: it’s shit you’ll want back. Like your apartment, for example, or all your worldly possessions, or your freaking life. I had to admit, though, none of that bothered me as much as the fact that the Tobin Bridge had finally been fixed, or that they’d added two new metro stops to the orange line, or that we’d lost several dynastic football players to bullshit free agency. Basically, the fact that my city had somehow survived my absence.
Of course, you know what they say about reality.
She can be a real bitch, sometimes.
Take my choice of accessories, for example. In the afterlife, toting around a spear with enough juice to redefine a landscape would have earned me some respect. In Boston, it was far more likely to earn me a deadly weapons charge. Mercifully, I’d had enough wherewithal to shove Areadbhar into the collapsible guitar gig bag I’d stolen from under the nose of a leering store clerk not long after arriving. Not my proudest moment, obviously, but I could handle a little shame. Getting stopped by Boston PD for walking around with a glorified javelin in hand and not a single form of identification on me? Not so much.
In hindsight, of course, I should have known better than to pop back into the mortal realm without an ID, not to mention at least one working credit card. But then, after surviving the combined perils of the Otherworld, the Fae realm, the Eighth Sea, and the godsdamned afterlife, it hadn't occurred to me to worry about anything as insignificant as money or credentials. After all, I was Quinn MacKenna, part-time goddess, full-time badass—rightful wearer of Brynhildr’s legendary Valkyrie armor, wielder of the mighty and terrible Areadbhar, and defender of the not-so-innocent.
Who needed your freaking driver’s license when you could take out a city block on a whim?
The short answer? My bank. My mortgage lender. My cell phone provider. The storage facility holding all my shit hostage, the new owner of my beloved apartment, and the unfamiliar building manager who threatened to call the cops on me for losing my shit on said owner. In essence, the list included anyone who’d never actually met or talked to me before...and even that was beginning to feel generous.
In the end, without a phone and with increasingly limited options, I’d begun a pilgrimage from one local haunt to another in search of familiar faces. First, I’d thought to visit Christoff, my longtime friend and bartender, at his popular pop-up bar. Once there, I figured I could at least beg for a drink to take the edge off and maybe even enough money to see me through the next few days. Unfortunately, I found the bar closed indefinitely for renovations. I’d briefly considered going by his house, but—assuming he was even home—the Russian werebear lived out in the suburbs and was therefore too far to reach on foot before dusk. Besides, he had two cubs at home; unsupervised, my nocturnal neighbor was a liability I was loath to force on anyone, much less a single father and his children.
Indeed, with that contingency in mind, I’d tried a trendy boutique next; the witches who owned it were survivors by nature and owed me a favor. Plus, they’d been in the process of refurbishing their magical supply shop when I’d disappeared, including an upstairs living space I could potentially take advantage of. Unfortunately, when I arrived the storefront remained only half-finished, the murky glass of its unpainted basement door dominated by a single sheet of pink paper I didn’t need to read to know what it heralded.
For a long moment, I’d lingered outside, fretting over the fate of Camila and her brother, Max—the brujo I’d helped rescue from the clutches of a mad scientist back in Helheim—before rebuking myself for wasting precious time. Even if the Velez siblings were in some kind of financial trouble, it wasn’t like I could do anything about it. If I wanted to help them, my best bet was to get up to speed and back on my feet as quickly as inhumanly possible.
Which, of course, was what had brought me here—to quite possibly the last place on Earth anyone would want to approach like a beggar with their hand out. Why? Because some hosts are better than others, for one thing, and because some favors cost a hell of a lot more depending on to whom they are owed. And so I lingered on a familiar stoop, shifting from one foot to the other as I studied the nameplate which represented my last hope in the world of finding a legitimate place to sleep that wasn’t a park bench or one of the shelters downtown—assuming my inner goddess would even let that happen, or that the volunteers at the shelter would sign off on a homeless redhead in designer threads carrying a bejeweled spear that occasionally followed me about like a poltergeist.
After parsing through every alternative option—and with a very heavy sigh—I knocked on the door of the law office of Hansel, Hansel, and Gretel. I held my breath, wary of any Faeling shenanigans that might ensue. As a front for the Faerie Chancery, this quaint, unassuming townhome tended to ward off even the most ardent of evangelists and savviest of sales folk.
Of course, there was being cautious, and then there was being prepared.
Before I could knock a second time, the door swung open and a hand the size of a baseball mitt latched onto my sleeve, yanking me into the office’s gloomy interior hard enough to pull my damned arm nearly out of its socket. Frustratingly, the Valkyrie armor I’d retrieved from Charon—locked in its current, far more casual state until I said otherwise—did nothing to ease the painful sensation. Sadly, I’d had to forego the armor’s substantial fringe benefits in order to avoid walking around Boston looking like I’d robbed the Renaissance Faire.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Irishman. No, wait, that’s not right...” The voice was deep and inhuman, so gravelly it might as well have come from a talking rock. It was also achingly familiar. Three gurgling sniffs sounded before I could say as much, however, each inhale like the crank of a diesel engine. “A woman. An Irish woman. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of—”
“Paul?” I interrupted, squinting to make out my old friend’s hulking shape in the dim, windowless room. “Paul, is that ye?”
“Who asks my name?”
“It’s me, Quinn!”
“Quinn?” Paul fumbled about in the dark, sending at least two urns crashing to the floor, followed by what sounded eerily like a brass gong being struck so hard it shattered in two. The noise was both deafening and cringeworthy. By the time Paul finally found a candle and lit it, my eyes had already adjusted enough to see the bridge troll in all his hairy, hulking glory.
Standing several feet taller than me and as broad through the shoulders as I was long, Paul was one of the very few Faeling friends I had here in Boston who made me feel tiny. Of course, at six feet without so much as a kitten heel to prop me up, being dwarfed by anyone was a rather rare occurrence. Once, I’d have given anything to be smaller. More petite. The sort of girl who could scan a room full of men without having to clock the ones whose heads cleared the fray. The sort of girl who could tolerate sitting in the backseat of a cramped car or could fly coach without wanting to stab everyone in sight. These days, however, I appreciated the perks more than I despised the drawbacks. There were merits in having a longer reach, after all—not to mention being able to intimidate people without speaking.
In that respect, Paul was a master.
The bridge troll stared down at me with his filmy, jaundiced eyes, his protruding tusks gyrating as though he were chewing bubblegum, looming like a terrifying statue made of sinew and green skin. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to read his expression; most trolls were notoriously dim-witted, mercantile creatures who had trouble expressing themselves outside the context of tax collection, and Paul was hardly an exception. His understanding of the world was frustratingly childlike. When he lost, he got angry. When he won, he
became insufferable. And, when you refused to pay his toll, he had a habit of bashing away at whatever happened to be nearby.
Like a brand-new car, for example.
That was how we’d met. Since then, he’d become the sort of companion every girl can appreciate: a bestial shadow capable of unimaginable violence if provoked. In fact, back when I was first starting out on my own as an antiquities dealer and working out of some of Boston’s less gentrified neighborhoods, I used to have him follow me around at night as a precaution. I could still recall how his musk saturated the air in those days; I called it the world’s most effective rape repellant. In time, we became something like friends. It was Paul who first told me of the Chancery, long before I could coax the truth out of Ryan—my only other Faeling acquaintance at the time. The bridge troll had confided a great deal to me over the years, going so far as to describe an alien world. A world I’d ached to know more about.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, breaking the silence. “Kelpie got your tongue?”
A gasp of surprise sounded over my shoulder before Paul could answer, and I turned to find the infamous Gretel of storybook fame ogling me from across the room. The German woman was dressed in a flimsy nightie that made her look impossibly waifish and more than a little frail; with her long grey hair and puckered skin, I’d have put the fairytale heroine north of seventy if I didn’t already know she had to be hundreds of years older than that.
“Surprised to see me?” I asked, grinning like a madwoman to be greeted by yet another familiar face, even if that face did belong to the Chancery’s chief litigator.
“Well, yes, I—” she began, her face pale in the lamplight.
“Oy! Guess what?” I interjected, cheerily. “I stayed in that old gingerbread house of yours not too long ago. Well, not yours, obviously. The one where ye murdered that witch. The creepy place with all the candy and chains.” I shook my head at the memory. “Hated every minute of it. Smelled like roasted marshmallows and barbecue.”
Moonshine: Phantom Queen Book 11—A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries) Page 1
