Moonshine: Phantom Queen Book 11—A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries)

by Shayne Silvers

  The brujo’s accent grew stronger with anger, slurring the hard consonants so that every word became somehow both sibilant and sinister. But there was a subtler emotion beneath all that rage. Fear. Max—for whatever reason—was afraid. But of what? Or of whom?

  “Max, it’s me. It’s Quinn.”

  “Who?”

  “Quinn. Quinn MacKenna.”

  “Am I supposed to know who that is?”

  For a moment, we stood in complete silence while the wheels in my head churned. At first, I asked myself whether I’d mistaken Max’s voice for someone else’s. But he’d already responded to the name, so my guess had been the correct one. Plus, he was asking about Maria—a mutual friend. Hell, now that I thought about it, Max was witch enough to have made her vanish before my very eyes. But that still didn’t explain why he was pretending not to know me. Were we being watched? Or had I really been gone so long that he’d forgotten all about me? I found myself hoping it was the former; no one hopes their absence will make the heart grow dimmer.

  “Answer me.”

  Max jabbed me with the muzzle a second time, generating a wince and a curse. Which told me—assuming he wasn’t faking it for someone else’s benefit—that he wasn’t going to pull any punches. Fine, then.

  Neither would I.

  “Do that again, and I swear I’ll take that gun from ye and break it over your head.”

  “You are in no position to threaten me. Now, I will ask you one more time, what do you want with Maria? Who do you work for?”

  “Jesus, Max, cut the act, would ye?” When Max said nothing, I cursed a second time. “I was followin’ Maria to see what she was up to. I wanted her help.”

  “Her help with what?”

  “Trackin’ ye and Camila down, for starters.”

  The gun withdrew, only to be repositioned—this time against the back of my head. I heard the hammer cock and felt the first stirrings of true fear; immortal or not, I wasn’t eager to find out how it felt to take a bullet to the brain. What’s worse, as armed threats went, putting a loaded gun to someone’s head was essentially playing one’s trump card. From that point on, you were promising your victim a guaranteed death, pure and simple. Which begged the question, what on earth was Max thinking?

  “Max, what the—”

  “Why are you hunting my sister and me?”

  “Huntin’?! I’m not huntin’ either of ye! I stopped by your shop and saw the eviction notice. I thought I might be able to help. Or at least make sure ye both were alright.”

  “Did we know each other? From before?” The pressure against my skull eased incrementally. “My sister says I have forgotten things. That I slept too long, and that there was...damage.”

  The coma. I fought not to shiver in alarm, worried it would spook Max. But something must have given me away, because suddenly his hand was yanking back my hood and snatching at my ball cap. He tore it free, sending my hair flying across my face—thick tendrils that tickled my cheeks and covered my eyes. Still, I hardly noticed; I was too busy thinking about what Max had said. About the possibility that he’d suffered brain damage from the coma I’d gone to Hell and back to wake him from. Was it possible? Could he really have forgotten me? I cleared my throat but found a lump waiting for me and had to do it again.

  “We knew each other,” I managed. “Not as well as I would have liked, perhaps. But aye, we were…”

  “Friends?”

  “Somethin’ like that.”

  What we’d been—or hadn’t been—was still up for debate. From the moment we met, a thread of attraction had bound us to each other, and the constant threat of danger had only intensified those feelings. Then, in the wake of our initial run-in with Frankenstein and his Faeling monster, I’d discovered that Max and I had forged a bond of sorts—a circuit of energy that coursed through us like a two-way battery. A symbiotic link which had sent Max into a coma shortly after I left the mortal realm. Of course, where that link originated and what it meant for us remained a mystery.

  In Helheim, for instance, our metaphysical connection had worked to our advantage; Max had snapped out of his fugue state the instant we touched, giving us the opportunity we needed to fight for our afterlives. And yet there had been an addictive quality to the experience, a constant underlying craving that sat like an itch beneath my skin, that I could neither explain nor truly appreciate even after returning from my sojourn in Hell. I preferred simpler addictions—the kind you could satisfy all on your own.

  At the time, Frankenstein had intimated the two of us were somehow cursed. That Max and I weren’t so much tethered as shackled. The mad scientist had also called the brujo my familiar—a title bestowed upon a witch’s servant, or pet. Unfortunately, there was very little familiar about Max; aside from our mutual attraction and despite our frequent brushes with death, I realized I barely knew the man.

  And now it seemed he didn’t know me, at all.

  “Why didn’t you greet Maria when she first left the store, if you knew her?” Max demanded. “Why hide your face and follow?”

  “Can I turn around?”

  “No. Not until I am sure you are not lying to me.”

  “I wanted to wait and see what she did with that jar she got from the guy...” I groaned inwardly, realizing at last who the hooded man had been. “From ye. The jar ye gave her.”

  “Why not just ask her directly?”

  “Because I’ve been...away.” I shook my head, aware how guilty I sounded. “Look, the truth is I wanted to see what she’d do because I need to ask her a favor and I want her to say yes. If I caught her doin’ somethin’ she was embarrassed about, I figured she’d be more willin’.”

  Max grunted. “How did you know where to find her?”

  “Pardon?”

  “You could have simply called Maria and asked for her help. But instead you came here, and you followed her. You could not have known what she was doing or with whom, and yet you came. This does not seem like a plausible story.” The muzzle brushed the back of my head again. “So, how did you know she was here?”

  “Someone told me,” I confessed, making a mental note not to underestimate Max’s intelligence in the future. “A mutual acquaintance gave me the address.”

  “Please, I am tired of the lies. Just tell me the truth.”

  “Ye can’t handle the truth!” I spat, screwing up my face to improve the admittedly terrible impression.

  “Is that really your best Jack Nicholson?”

  “I do a better Demi,” I admitted, “but her lines aren’t as good in that one, and quotin’ G.I. Jane would probably get me shot on principle. Besides, ye told me once that A Few Good Men was one of your favorite movies. Somethin’ about lovin’ Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue. Figured it would ease the tension.”

  “When did I tell you that?”

  “On a…” I grimaced, wishing I had a less loaded term for what had been our first, and last, official outing. “We were on a date.”

  “A date? So, not just friends.”

  “It was complicated.”

  “Turn around, slowly. But do not do anything foolish.”

  I did as the brujo asked, though my shoulders were beginning to burn from the effort of holding my arms up for so long. At first, I could hardly make out anything beyond the curtain of my own hair, but then a calloused hand brushed my bangs back to reveal the man who held me at gunpoint.

  Maximiliano Velez towered over me. Part of that was his height—he’d always stood several inches taller than me—but mostly it was sheer size; though baggy around the middle, the hoodie Max wore hugged his shoulders and chest like a second skin, the fabric straining to contain the breadth of him. Which meant not only had he gained the weight back that he’d lost while in the coma, but he’d actually gotten bigger, somehow. Oddly, however, that wasn’t the change I cared about most.

  “What’d ye do to your hair?” I asked, breathlessly.

  Max’s expression betrayed nothing, leaving me to st
udy a face that was so achingly masculine it was almost painful to look at. I started with his lips. Large and softer than they looked, they turned what would have been a hulking jawline and sweeping cheekbones into something gentler, something you could actually touch without fear it would cut you. His eyes were next. A shade of brown so dark they seemed to melt into the depths of his pitch black pupils, they looked uncertain, uneasy. But it was the absence of the dark locks which had once spilled across his forehead and along the nape of his neck that drew my eye; he’d shaved it to the scalp—the result so severe that I might not have immediately recognized him had we passed on the street.

  “It did not feel like me, anymore,” Max replied, shrugging. “Plus, it’s getting hot. This is easier.”

  I don’t know what I would have said to that, or even what I would have done about the gun still pointed at my chest, because—at that precise moment—something happened. A shift in temperature, perhaps, or an odd scent wafting through the air. Either way, Max and I both turned to look, caught by surprise as a mass of hooded figures materialized out of thin air and began shambling towards us from the far end of the block. There were at least a dozen, spread across the street in a straight line as though no car would dare mow them down.

  “Mierda!” Max spat.

  “What's wrong? Who are they?”

  “The slaugh.”

  “Seriously?” I squinted, trying to find the faces hidden behind the shadows of their cowls. According to legend, the slaugh was another name for the spirits of the restless dead called by Fae magic to join a soul-snatching chase—what some people called the Wild Hunt. But, as far as I knew, the Hunt hadn’t ridden out from Fae in centuries. If they had, I doubted even mankind’s ability to shove their heads in the sand could prevent them from acknowledging their existence.

  Nothing screams we are not alone like spotting a horde of otherworldly creatures as they carouse past your window in the wee hours of the night looking to shoplift some souls.

  “I thought there’d be more of ‘em,” I admitted.

  “There are.”

  I shivered at the brujo’s ominous tone. “What do they want?”

  “Not what,” Max corrected as he backed towards the opposite end of the street, scanning the sky as though there were more threats approaching from above. “Who. They want me.”

  “Why?”

  The brujo gave me a long, considering look even as the hooded figures drew closer, their approach accompanied by the sounds of clawed feet scraping along the pavement. I met his weighing gaze with one of my own, trying to decide how much of the man I’d known was still in there. I felt a sudden urge to reach out and touch his face, to trace my fingers along the stubble that rode his cheeks. I wanted him to know me if nothing else—to remember our time together. To recall what we’d survived, and how. But what happened if that reignited our bond, somehow? Was I prepared to take that chance? Was he?

  “I really hope you are what you say you are, Quinn MacKenna,” Max said before I could make my decision. “Because we are out of time.”

  “Time to do what, exactly?”

  “To talk,” Max said as he shoved his gun into the waistband of his pants, his expression rueful. “I wish I could explain. But, if you really were my friend, then you will know to trust me when I say that if we stay out in the open like this, we will not stand a chance. Not against them all. Which means we have to run. Now.”

  Chapter 5

  We ran together, moving as quickly as our loping strides would allow. Max took the lead as if he hadn’t put a gun to my head only minutes before, weaving across a quiet street and bolting through an abandoned alleyway coated in posters and propaganda describing some sort of once-in-a-lifetime lunar event. Several minutes and at least a dozen blocks later, it finally occurred to me that we’d seen not a single soul since the appearance of those hooded figures—an improbability that bordered on the impossible.

  “Where the hell is everyone?” I asked as we cut across a neighborhood park, angling towards a jungle gym.

  “It is the flavor of their magic,” Max explained, his own breathing only slightly labored. “Whenever they are near, even ordinary people sense it and stay away.”

  “Does that mean they’re close by?” A quick glance over one shoulder assured me that no one followed. “We left the others behind a while back.”

  “Those were night hags. They do not move as quickly as the others.”

  “Night hags?” I made it a question, but I already knew what they were from some of the more horrifying stories my Aunt Dez had told me as I was growing up; she’d told me all about the Fae who stood at the foot of the bed of bad children when they slept, waiting to catch the dreamer’s soul in bags sewn from multi-colored flesh. In fact, Dez had once tormented me and my mouthy teenage girlfriends by throwing a blanket over herself and standing over us after an impromptu slumber party, her face made up to look as hideous as possible until someone woke up, saw her, and started screaming. Dez thought it was hilarious.

  I didn’t have many sleepovers after that.

  “Sí. They are dangerous if they get close, but they do not care for daylight. I am more worried about the Hobs. If the night hags are here, the goblins won’t be far behind.”

  “Hobs? As in hobgoblins?” I shook my head as we passed the playground and headed for the tree line that bordered the south side of the park, struggling to make sense of what was really going on. “But they wouldn’t be part of the slaugh, and neither would the night hags. If anythin’, they’d be with the Chancery.”

  Max halted so suddenly that I had to skid to a stop not to leave him behind. I gulped down air, wishing I’d have thought to change into my armor before we’d fled. If I had, I wouldn’t have needed to put nearly so much effort into keeping up with the brujo. Of course, then I’d have to explain why I suddenly looked like I was going to slay a dragon, and we didn’t have that kind of time.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You know about the Chancery?” Max ignored my question, his hand disappearing behind his back. “Are you connected to them?”

  “Define ‘connected’.”

  “Did you come to take me in?” The brujo’s eyes widened before I could respond as if another thought had just occurred to him. “You planned to follow Maria to the safehouse. To find out where the others are hiding.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about,” I admitted, truthfully. “But I t’ink we have more important t’ings to worry about.”

  I pointed, and the brujo tracked the gesture until he saw what I’d seen; across the park came dozens of what looked like children, but were most certainly not—because, last I checked, children didn’t have muddy green skin and razor-sharp teeth or wield weapons fashioned from carved bone. And yet, there was something admittedly childlike in the way they moved; unlike the goblins I’d encountered in Fae, the hobgoblins were diminutive and awkward, their proportions disrupted by swollen joints and mossy patches of viridescent body hair.

  “Mierda!”

  “Ye must really like that word,” I quipped.

  “Stay away from me,” Max hissed. The brujo drew his gun and fired haphazardly into the sea of incoming goblins, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we were in a public park. Or perhaps he simply didn’t care.

  “Are ye talkin’ to me, or to the Hobs?”

  “You! The Chancery cannot be trusted, which means neither can you!”

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes as the brujo continued firing. A few of the hobgoblins fell away clutching at their sides or their legs, but there were simply too many. Max must have realized the same thing; he emptied his clip, cursed, and took off towards the trees. I did the same, acutely aware of the incoming wave of hobgoblins on our heels. They were close enough that I could make out their gleeful shrieks and the eerie pitter-patter of their bare feet in the grass.

  “What are you doing?” Max asked, glancing over his shoulder. “I said stay away from me!”<
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  “I can’t help it if you’re runnin’ in the same direction as me.” I sighed, swung the gig bag off my shoulder, and hunted for the zipper as we ran.

  “I mean it!”

  “Hold that thought.” I turned on my heel and pried the bag open. Within, Areadbhar thrummed. I withdrew her, marveling at the terrible beauty of the legendary weapon. The spear—listed as one of the Four Jewels of the Tuatha de Danann and adorned with a light-sucking devourer that had once belonged to a Norse giant—glowed with power.

  Behind me, Max gasped.

  “Dios mío…”

  “Areadbhar,” I whispered, brushing my free hand along the shaft. I felt her quiver with anticipation—with her desire to be unleashed. For hers was the power to slay armies, the desire to spill blood. “Sick ‘em, girl.”

  Areadbhar leapt from my hand, soared high into the air, and then came swooping down upon the Hobs like a vicious bird of prey. Where she descended, the hobgoblins broke ranks, their charge completely disrupted by the threat of her biting blade. Their war cries quickly became screams.

  “But no killin’!” I shouted through cupped hands.

  “No killing? So, you are with them.”

  I turned to meet Max’s accusatory gaze and sighed, forced to raise my voice to be heard over the howling Hobs as they scrambled over one another to escape Areadbhar’s assault. “I am not with the Chancery. If I were, I’d have at least some idea what the slaugh is doin’ here in the mortal realm, not to mention why they are attackin’ us in broad daylight. Look, the truth is I have no idea what I’ve stumbled into. But until that changes, I don’t plan on killin’ anyone. Not if I can avoid it.”

  Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth. The reality of the situation was that—no matter the context—the Fae were my people. My mother was a goddess of the Tuatha De Danann, which meant I was descended from the original rulers of Fae. And with that lineage, came certain responsibilities—obligations the old me would have avoided at all costs. But that was before. Before I’d traveled to the Otherworld and had become someone who knew what it meant to be part of a tribe. Before I’d stood toe to toe with the current rulers of Fae and found them capricious and shortsighted. Before I’d thought to ask myself what I could be if I was willing to forsake my independence, if it meant keeping everyone I cared about safe.