by Jenn Stark
Something in her voice tugged at me, and I narrowed my eyes. “Did you think I’d be bringing out more?” I asked as nonchalantly as possible.
“Oh! Well, no, not at all. Not precisely. It’s only that—there were so many. Cases, I mean. Involving, ah…”
Mrs. French stumbled to a halt as Danae shifted her cool gaze over. A strange energy skittered between the two women, and I frowned. “Do you two know each other?” I asked.
Mrs. French shook her head. “No, no, nothing like that.”
“Not precisely,” Danae agreed, and lifted her cup to her lips, taking an experimental sip. “Oh, that is lovely. I thank you for it.”
“Of course! Of course,” Mrs. French said. She stood for a moment more, nervously wringing her hands together, until I figured out she was waiting for me to say something.
“We’re good here,” I said, knowing it was the right thing when Mrs. French nodded several times, then bobbed a quick and nervous curtsey.
“Right-o, then. I’ll just pop back to the office and manage anything new that comes in, but do call on me if you need me. I’ll be here right away.”
“Of course,” I echoed as Mrs. French dropped another curtsey, this time to Danae, and scurried out of the room. I stared after her a moment before turning to Danae.
“What was that about?”
Danae’s response was sotto voce, low enough that even the most intrepid librarian couldn’t hear it. “Your Mrs. French is no stranger to my coven, though we haven’t had a reason to speak with her since the late 1800s.”
“Really?” I asked, equally quiet. “How do you know that you had interaction then?”
“I looked up any shared history between Justice and our coven after she contacted me this morning. She was so…nervous. But when she reached out to us then, we weren’t based in Chicago but London, and we were headed by a high priestess who was also a well-known medium.”
“Aren’t you all mediums to some extent?”
“To some extent, yes,” Danae agreed. “But our title as deathwalkers was affixed with our work in the late 1800s. It was that work that made clear the benefits of moving to another location. Eventually, we became too well known in London, too popular among people who could not suffer the dead to rest. We needed a city that wasn’t quite as aware of who and what we were.”
“Why Chicago?”
“Primarily because it wasn’t New York. There wasn’t quite the level of sophistication, nor especially the deep understanding of the old ways that sometimes led to an uncomfortable amount of scrutiny. But as I said, when Mrs. French called upon us, we were still based in London.” Her gaze shifted to me. “She wanted a session. A call beyond the grave.”
I grimaced. Every Revenant eventually had to face the dying of their non-Revenant friends and loved ones. It wasn’t surprising that Mrs. French had lost someone she loved who wasn’t as exceptionally long-lived as she was. “Well, what she asked of your coven is certainly none of my business—”
“There were two calls, actually,” Danae went on. “The second was for a child that she thought would have grown up by the time she requested it. The first was for Abigail Strand.”
I paused with the mug halfway to my mouth. “When?”
“According to our records, in 1857. Today I asked her when Justice Strand had passed, and she said 1853. I gave no indication that I had any record of her contacting the London coven to request our medium services, and immediately moved on to other topics. Her fluster left her shortly thereafter, but as you can see, it hovers barely below the surface, ready to come spilling out.”
“And do you have records of those services?” I asked, curious despite myself. “Was your coven able to summon Justice Strand?”
“Interesting you should ask. The records on the case stop abruptly after the record of the request.” Danae said, setting down her teacup. “And begin again shortly thereafter. It would seem that the exact details of our encounter on behalf of Mrs. French were purged from our files.”
My brows drifted up. “Why?”
“An answer I have yet to determine to my satisfaction,” Danae said. “But I suspect it is not the primary answer you want from me today anyway.” She nodded to the bag.
“First things first,” I said, settling back in my seat. I was willing to take a pause on the question of Mrs. French’s interaction with Danae’s coven, mainly because Mrs. French was in the next room. I didn’t want her to overhear anything that would cause her distress.
Besides that, I had bigger problems than a distraught young woman seeking solace in a connection with the spirit of her former boss. In many ways, I trusted Danae implicitly. I’d tapped her as head of the House of Swords, and I knew her dedication to the Connected community was paramount.
That said, none of us always stuck to the high road when it came to managing the mysterious and the arcane in this world. And I suspected Danae kept an E-ZPass to the dark side close at hand.
I launched right in. “What happened with the Sultan’s Cup in Budapest? Don’t think I didn’t miss the fact that Nigel spirited it off with the children from that cave.”
Danae was watching me carefully, no doubt reading the play of emotions across my face.
“It’s safe,” she said. “The cup of Murad II is authentic, insofar as carbon dating shows that it was constructed around the time of the sultan’s rule during the Ottoman empire, and we are now gathering any information we can, anecdotal or otherwise, to identify the exact properties of the chalice.” She smiled thinly. “The Magician of the Arcana Council was generous enough to offer to examine the cup himself and give us whatever information we might need.”
“In exchange for?” I’d been one of Armaeus Bertrand’s top artifact hunters when I’d first come to Vegas. I knew how the Magician worked.
So, apparently, did Danae. “In exchange for his unlimited access to the piece, as well as a guiding say in its eventual disposition. It would appear that the Magician is not terribly keen on this particular chalice being exposed to rank-and-file Connecteds, but we don’t know why. Is it mere snobbery, or is there something more to his reticence?”
With Armaeus, it was hard to say. Once upon a time, he’d been all about “that balance of magic,” which had translated to the Arcana Council hoarding magical artifacts. Since the war on magic, however, he’d paid less attention to the world outside his spectral fortress. I wasn’t sure that was such a good thing, now that I thought about it.
Danae’s gaze flashed to meet mine. “It would perhaps be very useful if we could divine what the Magician is thinking, without having to accede to his demands.”
“That’s…potentially doable,” I said, grateful that I’d become used to keeping my mental barriers up against the Magician. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the man. Demigod. Whatever he was. It was more that I had a healthier appreciation than most of exactly how duplicitous his ways were. And to this day, a part of me felt he was running a dangerously long game that I needed to understand more fully, to better interact with him. If not on an emotional level, then on a professional one.
“And are you the one to potentially do it?” Danae prodded.
“Maybe.” I redirected her. “What else did Nigel tell you about the male witch Vlad?”
“Not nearly enough,” she acknowledged ruefully. “Nigel is uniquely capable in many ways, but he does not have your grasp of Romanian, it would seem. He was unable to decipher most of what the male witch said. Plus, he was notably absent when you went back to interview Vlad yourself.”
“Yeah, well, he had more important things to do at the time. But bottom line, Vlad was summoning a witch—a witch queen, specifically. Know anyone using that title?”
“There are many coven heads who style themselves as queen,” Danae allowed cautiously. “It’s an older practice, though, and a largely hidden one.”
As she spoke, I pulled open the mouth of the nearest bag and removed the
case files, continuing the process until all five containers were positioned on the table. Instead of leaning forward with interest as I expected, Danae carefully sat back in her seat. She set her teacup down on the table beside her and positioned her hands in her lap, her fingers lightly touching as her lips twitched with a prayer I could not discern.
“You know what these case files hold?” I asked.
“Two of them,” she said, her position remaining defensive, protective. “The black box and the jeweled case bear the seal of my coven.”
I blinked down in surprise. Mrs. French had said none of the cases could be laid at the feet of the deathwalkers, yet out of the top five finalists, there were two? “They do?”
Danae waved a hand, and an inscription appeared in the top corner of both boxes.
I scowled at the containers. I could see energy signatures, perceive 3D maps of booby-trapped labyrinths, and envision the atomic composition of human beings. Yet rudimentary glamours fooled me? Seriously?
“You know, I’m kind of a big deal. I would’ve thought I could see past a basic locking illusion.”
“Perhaps, something else to ask your Magician,” Danae said mildly. “But the wrongs my coven surreptitiously sought to have Justice address remain locked within those files, and happened well before my time. One of them is even before the time of the last Justice.” She pointed to the jeweled case. “I’m not sure how much that helps you.”
“Maybe a little, maybe a lot,” I hedged. “I need to know about a witch queen who apparently is fated to serve a stronger male.”
Danae’s lips twitched. “There’s not a lot of that in our practice. It’s a large reason why our practice exists.”
“Well, this one did, and she’s apparently a big deal. The children were praying to her to show up and save them. And she did. More interestingly, Vlad with the pointy spikes was pretty sure she owed him the favor of hooking up with him. In fact, he was pretty rude about it.”
“Did he have a name?”
I nodded. “He called her Myanya.”
With an audible crack, all five of the containers flew open and the door to my office slammed shut, the pressure in the lobby almost overwhelming. In an instant, Danae was flung backward and pinned against the far wall, her eyes bugging out, her arms outspread.
“Danae!” I gasped. I jumped up and turned to face her fully, ignoring the maelstrom of energy behind me, fury lighting my nerve endings. This is my office, dammit. No one overrules me here.
I brought my hands together, and a ball of blue flame crackled for only a moment before bursting forth toward Danae. My eyes widened with surprise as for half a second, the barrier pinning Danae seemed merely to absorb the energy, neutralizing it, until I focused harder and the barrier shattered in a million crystalline shards. My own energy pulled those shards away from Danae, keeping her safe, and as she stumbled to the floor, rage radiating off her, I turned back to the case files.
The energy surrounding the files was fraught, intense, but it wasn’t shaped into a figure like I’d immediately supposed it would be, the white-hot witch in the pentagram in the Buda Castle caves. Instead, the pages of all the cases were caught up in a cyclone about three inches above the table, shifting and tumbling as if they were caught in a wind machine. I stared in wonder at the self-contained twister as Danae stepped up beside me, breathing hard.
“Who the hell is this chick?” I demanded.
We both flinched as a loud pounding sounded at the door to Justice Hall. The pages all collapsed to the table.
“Yo! What’s a girl gotta do to deliver donuts these days?”
Chapter Six
Nikki Dawes swept into the reception area of Justice Hall, holding aloft a distinctive white-and-orange pastry box. As usual, the food took second chair to her virtuoso clothing performance. Nikki was my right-hand everything and had been almost since the moment I’d first stepped foot in Vegas, all six-foot-four fabulous inches of her, the truest friend you could ever meet from the tip of her varying shades of hair to the heels of her size-thirteen stiletto pumps. She was also a woman whose entrances defied the laws of physics, and today was no exception.
“I come bearing manna from heaven,” she announced.
Mrs. French burst through the door from my private office and hurried across the room, her keen eyes not missing the chaos of the coffee table.
“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” she murmured, the words almost a mantra as she opened the main door wide. “Oh!” she said, stepping back. “My.”
Nikki grinned. “Francine, your face makes this corset worthwhile, and let me tell you, that is saying something.”
Nikki sashayed forward in a gown that looked like it could have been bought in the London shops of Bond Street back in the eighties—the 1880s. With a high frilled collar that plunged down her neckline, the gown was essentially two pieces in one, a dark cream satin underdress bordered by a black and tan striped jacket of sorts. The jacket extended from collar to hem of the gown and was cinched at the back by a corset tied with heavy black cord. The wide skirt was ruched up at the knees to reveal a black crinoline beneath, the style allowing easy viewing of the heavy buckled platform boots that graced Nikki’s glorious feet.
“Nikki,” Danae greeted warmly.
“Danae! I did not know we would be seeing you today, but thank God I got extra cream-filled,” Nikki chortled, her laughter sending her piled-up hair—today a mass of jet-black ringlets—bouncing in jovial delight. Her coiffure added a good eight inches to her height, and it was pierced with what looked like knitting needles holding clocks, gears, and even a small owl. She swept across the room and eyed the mess on the table with interest, then set the box on the side table. She opened it. Immediately, the delicious smell of overprocessed carbohydrates flooded my senses.
“Those are all for us?” Danae asked dubiously, flipping a few strands of her braids over her shoulder.
“All of them, and I’m praying that our French connection has…Oh! excellent.” Nikki grinned as she saw the pot of coffee. “I figured if I was going to go steampunk, the least you all could do was provide the steam.”
Despite her ongoing delight at Mrs. French’s name, I knew that Nikki had already fallen for the diminutive librarian and her unceasingly fussy ways. Mrs. French, for her part, never knew exactly what to do with Nikki. Which wasn’t at all unusual.
Now Mrs. French stepped forward, mesmerized by Nikki’s outfit. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that. What is that material?”
“None of it as authentic as yours, I can tell you that.” Nikki sighed. She reached out to Mrs. French’s tiny form, her long fingers catching the puffed shoulders of Mrs. French’s gown. “I don’t even know how that was made. The costumer had nothing like it, at least not in my size. I was devastated.”
“Hmpf,” Mrs. French managed, but Nikki took her thin-lipped disapproval in stride with a broad wink and turned back to us. Her gaze zipped to the open library door, the containers on the table and all their scattered papers, Danae, and a twittering Mrs. French in rapid succession, taking it all in. Prior to coming to Vegas to ply her trade as a psychic, Nikki had served as a beat cop for years, facing punks and thugs and the kind of violence she never really talked about, but which had marked her all the same. Her Connected intuition had served her well in that role, and it had only gotten keener in the years since she’d hung up her shield and begun advancing her own psychic skills. She’d also been fully briefed on my dustup in Budapest, so she was up to speed.
“I take it that’s the new case?” she asked, pointing to the mess on the table.
“Cases,” I amended. Danae had already begun picking through the pages, matching them up by their style and paper. “Five different crimes over the past…I don’t know how many years, all of them dealing with the witch prophecy Myanya.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Nikki held up a hand. “She sounds like a bubblegum pop singer. Who’s Myanya?”
“Not a who, a what,” Danae corrected, shaking her head. She stretched out her hands, palms forward, as if she was going to catch the swirl of papers like a big bouncing volleyball of energy. “A prophesied spirit who returns every twenty-eight years, usually to a coven that’s positioned in a place where witches most need to command magic at the highest level. Her energy is entirely female, but her curse is that she is chained to the male energy that coexists and balances the female. That male energy does not have to be housed within a male, of course, but it usually is, and he’s usually a Connected of impressive ability.”
“That word ‘chained’ doesn’t sound like it’s a real positive connection for this Myanya,” Nikki observed.
“It’s not,” Danae agreed. “The female witch who hosts Myanya’s spirit becomes extraordinarily powerful once the prophecy is fulfilled. But the path to that power is an exceedingly dark one. In most cases, she must first be betrayed or suppressed, stripped of her magic by her consort, and ground down almost to nothing.”
I grimaced. “And she lets that happen?”
“The spirit embodied in the prophecy does, yes. Myanya flies in the face of the traditional balance of power in the covens. She emerges on this earth in the body of a witch who is in the full flower of her abilities. But, as the legend goes, as Myanya builds toward her incarnation of ultimate strength, she renders her vessel witch vulnerable to attack from an aggressive outside force, usually in the form of a male witch. It’s in this conflict that the sacred energy of the world is reborn, and it is a conflict Myanya cannot avoid. The fire is ready to be lit, and all her rage, all her strength, all her outcry of the oppressed is the sacrifice. And so she goes to war with those who would claim her, loses, and rises again as the scarred warrior. She then leads her coven for twenty-eight years, and their strength increases tenfold under her influence. Then the cycle starts again.”
I studied the papers, thinking about that. “Twenty-eight years,” I muttered. “What are the odds she’d strike again right after the war on magic? Will that make her even more powerful?” A witch on a rampage was never a good thing, but now? If the psychic abilities of whatever vessel witch Myanya chose had been recently amped by the war, this newly reborn Myanya could be seriously bad news.