Dark Queen

by Faith Hunter

  I was reminded of Leo’s power the one time I had been standing close to him when he was about to lose control or else he was funneling all the power of all the vamps in his vicinity. One or the other. Or both. It had been the opening moments of a feeding frenzy, something I had no desire to ever see.

  Titus’s power was like that but more. An exhibition. A demonstration. A painful shower of smoldering barbs that iced where they touched. I took a slow breath. Eli’s eyes narrowed at his own discomfort.

  Titus turned his head to scan the house. A gold chain glinted at his neck, dropping inside his collar. Gold on his fingers. At his wrists. A beach wind and the house lights caught his curls. I wanted to giggle but kept it in for fear it would sound like, well, like a titter of fear.

  We stayed put as the group approached, blocking the bottom of the stairs. Staring them all down. Staring down Titus’s Enforcer, a hulking female Viking vampire named Glacie, though I suspected she had originally been a Gertruda or a Hilda. Staring down Titus’s primo, Taviano, one of the human warriors who had challenged me. Him I looked over and then ignored as they got close enough for them to see us clearly. Our blocking the way was a pointed insult. Taviano put both hands on his swords as if ready to cut his way through once they reached us. We still didn’t move.

  The man who claimed to rule all the fangheads in the world was forced to come to a complete halt in front of us. Because this was Sangre Duello. Courtesy and vamp etiquette were distant rules that could be twisted and bent to intimidate or bewilder. Titus looked us over, giving the boob flesh a pointed and condemning glance. But his attitude declared that Eli and I were beneath his notice. We still didn’t move.

  Just before Taviano and his boss could react to the insult that the blocked stairs represented, Eli and I swiveled on our heels and stepped to the sides. From above us, Leo boomed, “Titus! Come on up, dude. We have beer.” I slid my eyes to Leo. He was standing there in the same jeans he’d been wearing when he landed, a brown bottle in one hand. And he was barefoot. Just like the Fifties Americana I had suggested.

  Katie was by his side, wearing a billowy dress and flops and an expression that tried hard to appear excited, despite her role as inelegant, unsophisticated, and vaguely vulgar. “We have an entire . . . keg . . . of beer.”

  I was sure Katie hadn’t had a beer in centuries. The whole sentence sounded strange in her usually sophisticated mouth.

  Titus’s face went paler than vamp-normal. His mouth opened. His eyes went human wide, not vamped-out wide. And his power stuttered and fell. “Beer?” Titus repeated. And then he barked a torrent of French and what might have been Italian to Taviano. Shock and anger in the tone. Insult. Confusion.

  “Come on up!” Leo shouted again. And the MOC and his heir turned and walked away from Titus, Katie’s flops flapping against the wood porch. The three cameras caught every word and gesture. If I survived the night I’d have to watch this someday. The MOC and Katie had succeeded in gaining the initial emotional upper hand. Point one to Leo.

  And then I caught a whiff of lemons and a glimpse of the woman closest to Titus. Julietta Tempeste, Blood Master of Clan Des Citrons. Behind her was Dominique.

  Beast leaped to the front of my brain. Enemy, she thought at me.

  Yeah. Enemies. All of them. I stared at Julietta and when she looked up, I grinned at her, showing too many teeth, my eyes glowing gold. She faltered. And I laughed, my voice a low growl.

  At the sound, the Europeans tightened around Titus, a group of men close to him, and the semicircle of women behind. The emperor stepped through the residue of hedge of thorns 3.0, his individual power signature sparking in Beast’s vision as a dotted line of energies.

  And then something happened. I wasn’t sure what. Just something different. Unexpected. Magic raked across me, familiar, gray and black with motes of red. The magics in my middle reacted, speeding up in the Vitruvian pattern of the star within me. And then it was gone and I wasn’t sure what had happened, except that Titus had done . . . something. And then . . . that thought slipped away.

  * * *

  • • •

  The front room was full of casually dressed humans, reading, speaking into their cells, thumbs flying as they sent texts. Two guys were stretched out on the rug on their stomachs, a spirited game of checkers between them. Not the dignified game of chess enjoyed by most older vamps, but gauche American games. Beer bottles were everywhere. The first two rows of a pyramid of beer cans had been built at the base of a window.

  Deon shouted from the kitchen, his island enunciation like honey and whiskey, “Titus, honey, come and get you’self a corn dog. We got us three kind of mustard to Dip. It. In!” Deon demonstrated dipping a corn dog into a small container of Grey Poupon and biting off the end. It was a decidedly sexual act, Deon at his most amazing, putting on a show, the kind he had performed at Katie’s Ladies when he chose to participate in the evening entertainment. Chewing, he pranced out from behind the Carrara marble–topped island while waving the emperor and his peeps over. The chef was dressed in feathers, spangles, and rhinestones from head to toe, an outfit that looked like the love child of Bollywood and Brazilian Rio Carnival.

  I thought Titus—the homophobe that history had never gotten right—might stumble.

  In Rome, sexuality and sexual expression had been far more open and varied than in modern times, but Titus had never participated, more pope than playboy. Judging from his expression, the emperor was still a straight, conservative man.

  “Grab your corn dog and beer and come on up, hoss.” Tex stood at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, Brute beside him. The white werewolf was staring at Titus, panting, salivating, as if he might want a little taste. “We got us some fightin’ to do.”

  Deon held out a carnival treat on a stick. Daring Titus.

  Titus reached to accept the corn dog and Taviano stepped between them. Deon smacked the dog down onto a paper plate on the island and put both hands to his hips. “Sugar, if I wanted to poison the kink-ly sort, I’d do it in Earl Grey tea, not in a corn dog. That would be downright sacrilegious.” Deon picked up the paper plate and slapped it against Taviano’s chest. “Now you take that food and you eat it.” Ziggy slid a hand around the stunned primo to whack a bottle of beer into Titus’s hands.

  Titus’s secundo leaned in and whispered something in that foreign, Italian, Frenchy talk to the king, then led him up the stairs. Deon grinned evilly. He’d been having fun. From behind me Ziggy said, “Honey, if I’d known you were going to play I’d have put on Queen Bitch and helped. That looked like fun.”

  “It was,” Deon said, “what that old dude deserved.”

  Titus’s shoulders went back and he stepped up the stairs, straight toward the lens of a camera and into the view of the world. Leo, with a faintly pleased smile on his face, followed. Katie winked at me as they passed. Winked. At me.

  Point two to Leo. And to Shakespeare. Leo’s opening salvo had been stolen from Petruchio, his own Kate by his side. I grinned suddenly, showing a lot of teeth. I couldn’t have been prouder. This was the stolen theme from Taming of the Shrew. Ro and Brenda, wearing jeans and sweatshirts, followed Katie and Leo. And then the rest of the NOLA retinue.

  This little show was surely my fault from way back when. Go, me.

  CHAPTER 17

  Stuck His Nose into My Crotch

  We were standing on the third floor, the windows open to the cool night breeze, the corroded fans turning overhead. The air smelled of salt, smoke, and vamp, a weird mixture of herbs and blood and sex, poorly hidden beneath the wonderful aroma of food.

  On the table set aside for heavy hors d’oeuvres were more corn dogs; a slow cooker full of beanie weenies with Louisiana hot sauce; pigs in a blanket; and three plates of deviled eggs, each a bit different, and one made with that green horseradish-like stuff they use in sushi. There were two kinds of slaw, one made with g
inger and soy, and lots of fixin’s, including pickled okra, pickled beet, pickled pickles, and corn on the cob. Buns. And a massive, monstrous bowl of boudin, big enough to bathe in, sitting atop a platter of crackers. On the platter beside it there was a whole barbecued pig and at least ten bottles of various kinds of hot sauce, from all over the South, including two featuring the Carolina Reaper, the hottest pepper in the world, created by PuckerButt, in South Carolina. I picked up the bottles to see I DARE YOU STUPIT and REAPER RACHA SAUCE. It might have been my imagination, but my hands tingled from the peppers, even through the glass. If the table didn’t catch on fire from the sauces, it might die from the weight of the food. Pretty sure I heard it groaning as I stepped away.

  The bar had been set up near the back of the room. There were five huge buckets full of ice and beer bottles, the aluminum leaking condensation onto newspapers placed on the floor. No colas. No water. No juice. No fancy wines.

  On a table beside the bar was a churn of homemade ice cream, double chocolate brownies, and the fixings for s’mores to take outside to the fire pit, which was blowing on the wind and smoking up the joint. To my right, I heard the werewolf pack leader/commentator describing the food as “regular ol’ American picnic in the moonlight.” Champ had a way with words.

  “Deon,” I muttered, “you are a-mazing. A Wonder-Chef. You need your own cape.”

  “Only if I can get a magic wand too,” Deon said from behind me. “Oh, wait.” He put a finger to his lips. “I have a magic wand.” He gamboled away, his buttocks bouncing.

  “I may have to stab out my eyes,” Eli whispered.

  I gestured with my head to the emperor. He was eating a corn dog. On international paid TV. On his plate was a wasabi deviled egg. And a mound of boudin. A squirt of hot sauce was curled atop it. I had a moment to wonder if that was the PuckerButt sauce and if the fanghead king would go up in flames if he ate some. I could wish.

  Vamps didn’t eat human food often. I had a feeling Titus wasn’t prepared for modern spices, and that Deon had prepared for that lack of familiarity with as much care as he had prepared his costume and attitude to irritate a homophobe. Titus scraped a mess of boudin onto a cracker and took a bite. There was a funny sound, a sort of an inhale/groan/gasp.

  A dozen of the king’s humans surrounded him, hiding him from view. Leo saw it and slipped to the side, giving someone a tiny finger wave, his index finger lifting and falling. A warning. My eyes followed the MOC for a moment as he stepped behind the dessert table and picked up something. The tips of his swords appeared below the table, one on each side, mostly out of sight. The film crew stepped back.

  The EV emperor’s humans were all traditionally gorgeous. The males all wore tuxedoes; the women were dressed in conservative black dresses, hems to the floor. Yeah. Titus was still hung up on sexual expression, lifestyles, and activities. Leo knew Titus’s sexual proclivities. Of course he did. And Leo, with Deon, had set all this up, maybe months ago, as part of whatever other strategies he had percolating in his multilevel, long-view, three-D-chess-game-of-politics, devious mind.

  A wave scent of humanish blood washed through the room and out on the salty wind. The magic in the fighting chamber changed. Leo, weapons still out of sight, began to slowly vamp out. Katie, in her sundress, appeared at Leo’s side, her bastard sword in a two-hand grip. Edmund appeared beside me, close enough for me to hear the soft pop of displaced air. Gee stepped to my other side. I could smell Eli somewhere close but didn’t turn to look.

  His humans backed away from Titus, then the vamps, forming groups, females and males. The emperor stood there, cold and unamused, his mouth burned red at the corners where he had bitten into the PuckerButt sauce and it had scalded him. He was armed with two swords, just like Leo. “You parley with your ruler without respect,” he said in stilted English. At the words, all his vamps drew their blades.

  I tried to figure out why, and realized Titus was using treaty-making wording, not Sangre Duello terminology.

  Brandon—wearing a tux, unlike the rest of us—stepped forward. Calmly he said, “There has been no parley called. Parley was made null and void when the scions of Titus Flavius Vespasianus, Emporer of the European Mithrans, came ashore, on the territory of Leo Pellissier, without legal writ from the Master of the City of New Orleans and the Greater Southeast, in violation of immigration laws of the United States of America. Said scions acted without proper honor and outside of the Vampira Carta in leading attack on the scions and humans of New Orleans.”

  My eyebrows went up. That was a mouthful of legal mumbo jumbo.

  Brandon finished with, “There is no treating. There is no parley. This is Sangre Duello.” Brandon stepped back.

  “You play silly games,” Titus said to Leo. He lifted his arms high, the steel edges of his longswords glinting in the overhead light, the silver plating on the rest of the blades flashing. He was wearing armor imbued with so much magic that it glowed in Beast-sight. “You have challenged the emperor of the Mithrans and the Naturaleza. En garde.”

  Our vamps darted in. Our humans scrambled away.

  Leo, still in jeans, moved around the table, blades bared, his two besties at his sides. Katie vamped out. Grégoire moved with a dancer’s grace, lending balletic beauty to the three of them. The expression on Leo’s face said he was ready to fight, the agreements as to the order of duels be damned. His swords started to spin. Grégoire’s blue eyes narrowed. The three looked deadly. But Titus’s people spread out. Blocking the stairs. Others faced our humans, ready to engage, a barroom brawl to the death. More weapons were readied on both sides. The EVs had been looking for an opportunity to attack and end it all quickly.

  The filming continued, and the camera crew were speaking to one another through their short-range headsets. One tripped. Hit the floor with an echoing thump. Titus whirled on him, sword up.

  What did Titus benefit by pushing this to the finish right now? And then a tingle of magic brushed across my skin. Was Titus wearing an amulet treated with a mind spell? I didn’t know and couldn’t take a chance.

  I drew on Beast’s scream and shouted, “Hold!” Everything went still as the word echoed in the rafters. Leo blinked, his face startled, though he didn’t looked ticked off at me so that was good. But I had no idea what to do now that I had their attention, a skinny girl, holding a ceremonial sword that would be useless in any real battle. Flying by the seat of my pants. Again. But at least the ratcheting up of aggression had stopped. “I demand . . .” The word came to me only a beat too late. “Redress. This human”—I spoke the word as if it were an insult, and pointed my Mughal blade at Titus’s primo—“little Tavi, has challenged the Enforcer of the Master of the City of New Orleans. I have accepted his challenge and I will not be denied.” All my weapons sheathed except the curved Mughal blade, I advanced on Taviano.

  My Enforcer stepped between us. “This challenge by this human child is mine to take, my mistress,” Gee said, enunciating like an actor in a pre-sound-system play. At his statement, the camera wolfman rolled out of the way, to his feet, and out of danger. Gee drew his swords. “I would not have you sully your blade with the weak, watered-down blood of this human creature.”

  Beast chuffed. Sully. Is good word. But humans like meat with watered-down blood.

  “Sully? You dare!” Taviano ground out, swords bare, advancing on Gee and me.

  “Enough!” The word shook the rafters and made the overhead fans sway. Sabina elbowed a vamp and two humans aside as if they weighed nothing and stepped between us, her magic hot and frozen all at once, making the space we occupied seem too small, too tight, airless. The place fell so quiet that I could hear her white, starched clothing swish. Her hands were hidden in the skirt’s copious pockets. “The outclan priestess signed the final agreements. Thus I am both final witness and judge.” Sabina pulled her gloved hands from her pockets. In one was a seven-inch-long sliver of wood, sha
rp as a stake on one end and worn smooth on the other. The energies in the room went sideways: hot/cold/smoky/sour, with magical glints of pale gold and motes of fearful black. The stench of the undead increased, the sickeningly sweet smell of funeral flowers and dried herbs and lemons.

  The weapon Sabina held up was a big sliver of the Blood Cross, the historical, cursed, magical origination element of the vamps. This one was smaller than the cross-shaped section that had charred the priestess’s hand to the bone, but was still larger than any other piece I had seen. Where had she gotten it? I’d once peeked into her hiding place, inside the sepulcher where she might—or might not—sleep by day. I hadn’t seen this one. And I had kinda ruined the tiny one she had loaned me when it had been absorbed into the Glob. Sabina held the holy-cursed wood over her head and people backed away, leaving only the main challengers, the TV crew, and Sabina in the center of the room.

  “Vespasianus,” she said. “So speaks the outclan priestess. You raised weapons against the titular challenger out of order. Pellissier, you raised weapons as well, though in what might have been defense. The primary contenders will both take places on either side of the room. You will not speak unless I give you leave.” Her hawk-sharp gaze pierced the room’s occupants, and I had a flash memory of my high school librarian, a stern-faced woman who had carried a ruler to smack tables with, if not students’ hands. “Your people will separate and sit. Vespasianus’s people there.” She pointed to her left. “Pellissier’s people there.” She pointed to her right.

  No one moved. Sabina dropped her hand and pointed the splinter of the Blood Cross at Titus Flavius Vespasianus, holding it like a wand in a Harry Potter movie. “Now!”