The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  “There are always signs,” Danae admitted. “Nigel said the pentagram in the cave was girded by a circle, both of them filled with salt?”

  “Yep. Which is why my first thought was demon.”

  “But it was a female figure who came through, and human in nature, not animal-like, clawed, snouted?”

  I shook my head. “It looked like a woman—long hair, elongated body, arms with hands at the end, not paws or claws. She reacted to Vlad’s voice as if she knew him.”

  “The descendant of Vlad the Impaler,” Danae said thoughtfully. “As I said, he would have the lineage to declare his right to be her consort.”

  “Yeah, he was all sorts of full of himself. I don’t have the full, ah, report on his recovery either. But I think his wounds were self-inflicted—his own trap went south.”

  “Not necessarily his fault,” Danae said. “The trap could have been sprung by Myanya. Even within the pentagram, she wields great power. She couldn’t harm him directly, but if she knew the trap was there, ready to be sprung, she could weaken its restraints, prime it to drop.”

  “Doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of a pentagram?”

  Danae’s smile was cold. “Not for a male witch wise to the ways of a warrior queen. For an ignorant one? Well, he gets what he gets.”

  Another banging racket sounded from the office, and Nikki stood, brushing crumbs from her costume. “I think maybe we should—”

  “Justice Wilde!” Mrs. French appeared at the door, her arms full of containers that were carefully wrapped in the same linens she’d served with the donut and coffee. “We… I don’t think we need to worry too much about where to find Myanya.” She held the pneumatic canisters higher. “We’ve now four different unfortunate souls summoning you who’ve found her for us.”

  “Where?”

  Mrs. French’s expression faltered. “Well, that’s where it starts to get tricky. The first is Cairo, the second, London. The third is Bangkok, and the fourth…” She held up a canister. “Well, it’s here.”

  Nikki scowled. “That’s one hell of a remote this Myanya has a hold of.”

  “It’s more than that,” Danae said, sitting straighter. “These attacks are far too close together to be a mistake. This is no ingénue crippled by the power growing within her. It’s someone channeling that power to create as much destruction as possible before she’s sucked into the next stage of her journey. This lost queen isn’t trying to be found.”

  “Well, she’s throwing a party on the wrong turf,” I took the canister with the local case and cracked it open, then scanned the topmost page. “You want to tag along? Because it looks like someone’s luck just ran out in Vegas.”

  Chapter Eight

  “I always get to drive you to the nicest places,” Nikki said, cleaning her sunglasses on the hem of her shirt as she rested behind the wheel of the limo. When I’d first come to Vegas two years earlier as a mercenary artifact hunter for the Council, Nikki’d been assigned as my chauffeur. It remained her favorite way to travel with me. Probably because there were no flames involved.

  “This is nicer than most, I gotta admit.” I leaned forward in the back seat, peering at the sun-blasted 1970s-era sign announcing Mister Mephistopheles’s Magic Emporium of Mystery and Mayhem, and breathed in the smell of cheap alcohol and fast food. The brand-new complaint from the local male witch had led us deeper into downtown Vegas, away from the glitz and glamour of the Strip…but not quite as far as the worn-down nostalgia of the Golden Nugget and Fremont Hotel, which was where I expected we’d end up when I saw the address of this magic shop.

  No. Mister Mephistopheles’s emporium was located in the wasteland of cut-rate hotels and apartment complexes advertising the quality of their background checks, sandwiched between a youth hostel and a meat and grocery market that offered a permanent “you buy, we fry” offer for their returning clientele.

  “Ten to one the place isn’t even open,” Nikki hazarded as we finally emerged from the car into the warm, sunny day. There was no shade to be found in this area of town, and during the summer, the streets would be vibrating with heat. But it was March in the desert, which was ridiculously pleasant. In fact, almost a little too pleasant.

  “You picking that up?” I asked.

  “Yep.” Nikki scanned the street, shifting her stance to allow her easy access to her concealed gun. For this recon trip, she’d changed out of her steampunk costume and into something a little more understated—black tank, leather jacket, camo pants, heavy boots, and aviator shades beneath an eye-popping fall of cherry-red curls. As usual, Nikki put the special in special ops.

  “Temperature drop of about ten degrees.” I peered at the front door of the emporium. “No one seems to be taking advantage of it, though.”

  Nikki snorted. “It’s eleven a.m. on a Thursday morning. Anyone with a job is already at it, and those who don’t have it are still sleeping off discount night at the casinos. Add to that the fact that this particular cry for Justice came in less than an hour ago, this may be the queen of all fresh crime scenes.”

  “Noted.” Other than the milder temperature, the building didn’t seem to indicate that any sort of foul play had taken place, though the case in question had been succinct. “Guy knew I was in town, though.”

  “He knew Justice had an office here, definitely. Your personal location, maybe not.” Nikki recited the details of the complaint as we strolled up the street, but there was no way we were inconspicuous. We were the only foot traffic in a three-block area. “Vic reported the initial attack took place at oh-three-hundred in his basement magician man cave, part of his residence beneath his place of business. He should still be there.”

  “Wasn’t there a fire?”

  “He said there was.” Nikki side-eyed the building. “Though not so’s you’d notice it out here.”

  We reached the building and tried the front door—which was our first confirmation that something definitely wasn’t right at the emporium. It was unlocked, in an area of Vegas that never remained unlocked for longer than it took a customer to cross the threshold.

  “Cameras,” Nikki warned. I lifted a hand, my pulse of energy scrambling the circuits of electricity in the shop long enough to give us safe passage. The video equipment would keep recording. It simply wouldn’t see or hear us as more than murmurs of static and some unexplained smudges on the feed.

  We stepped into the cool, musty room, and I rubbed my arms. Despite my long-sleeved shirt, gooseflesh prickled my skin at the intense chill in the small space.

  Mister Mephistopheles’s Emporium looked exactly as expected, a low-end Party City for all things magical. There was an entire row of shelves given over to costumes and accessories, two more that held the equipment for common magic tricks, and another one devoted to trick card sets. Positioned in permanent displays against the wall were boxes with saws sticking out of them, dry ice, and lighting sets, and even a Prestige-style water box, fortunately empty at the moment.

  “How’d this guy stay in business?” Nikki muttered, poking at a can of silly string. “He’s got way more crap in here than he can possibly sell.”

  “Register.” I pointed to the back wall, where a large countertop fronted a wall full of screens, all of them showing vantage points of every corner of the store. The sign “Smile, You’re on Camera” surmounted this impressive digital display, and the cameras were definitely still recording. Two of the screens at the lower end of the display, however, were blank.

  “You think there’s anything worthwhile on the feed?” I asked.

  “Probably only on those two—they’re unlabeled.” Nikki gestured to the blank screens. “Gotta be basement access.”

  “Yup.” We moved around the counter and tried the door into what I suspected would be a standard office—but it was locked. I frowned at the doorknob. “Why keep the access door locked if you’re going to leave the front of the building wide open?”

 
“Looking to create an attractive nuisance?” Nikki suggested. “If you’ve got a lot of lookie-loos in the area, especially with that hostel up the street, you might want to encourage walk-in business, even when the store isn’t manned.”

  “That seems a little dangerous.”

  “Or a little too comfortable,” Nikki agreed, turning around to scan the room again. “We got nothing here but magic trinkets, nothing really for sale of any use, even for a reseller looking to feed a drug habit. There’s just not a lot of market for exploding dice.”

  I tapped the screens. “This system doesn’t suck. The electronics would go for something.”

  “Cameras are too high up for easy access.” Nikki shook her head. “Plus, anyone trying to nick the screens would be recorded. I get the feeling Mr. Mephistopheles isn’t a guy who deletes his vids. I think we’ll find thirty years of footage in that basement of his, going all the way back to when video cameras were first made.”

  “Maybe.”

  The two right screens flickered on, cutting off the conversation.

  “Motion sensors,” Nikki said, shifting to the right. “Not sure what triggered it. Though for reals, dude’s man cave is hard core.”

  She wasn’t kidding. The first camera view showed a basement rec room, its concrete floor painted with several different sections of symbols. The most dramatic symbol was a large pentagram slightly off the center of the space, bright white against the dull gray of the concrete. In exactly the same manner as the pentagram in Budapest, the five-pointed star was bordered by a white circle of what looked to be salt. Unlike the circle in Budapest, however, this circle had already been broken in several places before we got here.

  Most notably by the man sprawled across its edge, desperately trying to crawl away.

  “Door,” Nikki snapped. I didn’t hesitate.

  A blue ball of fire coalesced between my fingers and immediately shot out as I lifted my hand, hitting the doorknob and blasting the door backward. A bevy of red lights sprang to life above the door, and an urgent high-pitched alarm sounded. Fantastic.

  There was nothing for it, however. Nikki and I bolted through the door. It opened not into an office but a short corridor with two additional doors. The one to the right yielded a small utilitarian office, completely empty. The one at the back of the corridor, also unlocked, opened onto a set of steep stairs—too steep for ordinary building codes by far.

  “Bunker,” Nikki called back as she led the way down the stairs, answering my unasked question. Understanding zipped through me. This place had been built in the 1950s, I was pretty sure, during the era of nuclear bomb testing not all that far away. It wasn’t unreasonable that an underground bomb shelter had been built back in the day, maybe even one that’d been expanded as the building above took shape.

  We reached the bottom floor a few seconds later, then raced past a bedroom, kitchen, and storage closets until we reached a final door that led into a remarkably wide space of about twenty square feet. These people meant serious business with their bunkers.

  The room opened up to exactly the same scene we’d seen on the screens upstairs. Various sections of arcane script, dominated by the pentagram in the center of the room. Not to mention the near-dead male witch sprawled out on the floor.

  “Help me,” he managed.

  I stared down at him hard, surprised to see not the slash of silver across his temple that I expected, which would indicate that he was marked for Justice, but a corona of purple-white light radiating around his entire body. This was also an indication that someone needed Justice, but of an entirely different sort. This man needed my help.

  He didn’t have to ask me twice. I moved forward, my third eye snapping open, and immediately saw a problem. In the center of the pentagram spun a vortex of energy that served as the equivalent of a sucking hole of quicksand. The mage, a slight man of no more than a hundred and forty pounds, including his voluminous velour robe dusted with silver stars, was losing the battle. Though not visible to the regular eye, the quicksand held another horror too. More spikes waited at the bottom of the pit the vortex was sucking the man toward. If he got pulled into that, he would have a future as Swiss cheese and little else.

  As Nikki lurched to my right, grabbing for the man’s shoulders, I reached down as well. Together we hauled him away from the sucking maw of death. This was harder than I would have expected, at least at the beginning. The magic of the vortex redoubled with an impressive fury as we attempted to save Mr. Wizard. With a final heave, we broke free of the clinging magic.

  We sprawled on the floor, the man immediately scrabbling away from us, his eyes wild with…fury?

  “Who are you?” he demanded. “You’re not my consort! How dare you interrupt my spell!”

  I stared at him as Nikki snorted. “This job keeps getting better and better,” she said.

  “Mordechai Jones, birth name Harold, one of two owners of the shop,” she continued, meeting my gaze above the magician’s sputtering as she reported what she’d learned in the flash of time she’d had hold of Mr. Wizard’s body. Nikki’s most advanced Connected ability wasn’t that of reading minds so much as memories. It had proven more than useful during her years on the police force. Memories weren’t always as reliable as fact, but they yielded far more interesting information about their subjects than dry details alone. “He considers himself the more successful one, the white magician, whose patient and caring execution of the Wiccan Rede has allowed him to become the supreme magician in the family. Long estranged from the local coven along with his brother, Robert.”

  At the sound of his brother’s name, Harold glared at Nikki, then up. “Malachi,” he roared, his thin white face apoplectic. “Show yourself.”

  “You’re a blasted fool!”

  Dumbfounded, Nikki and I turned to see another man burst into the room. He was shockingly pale, which made all the blood covering him that much more startling.

  “She wasn’t yours! She was mine, you know she was mine, that you hadn’t the strength or the power to hold her, yet you wouldn’t leave it alone.” He whirled as Nikki started forward.

  “Don’t you touch me.” The mage apparently named Malachi straightened to his full height, and my eyes narrowed on him. This guy was yin to Harold’s yang, without question, complete with the slash of silver at his temple instead of the purple glow of the brother in need of aid. I didn’t know what Malachi’s crimes were, but he had them. In spades.

  He also seemed to be a glutton for punishment. “You interrupted my spell,” he accused me, echoing his brother. “I had her exactly where I wanted, the sniveling cow.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa—” Nikki’s hands flew up, and my own hackles rose. What was with the disrespect being shown to Myanya, a witch spirit of clearly superior powers? This didn’t make any sense.

  From the floor, Harold-slash-Mordechai began to sputter again. “You know nothing about her, Malachi. That’s why you failed. She is pure light and formless energy. She deserves to be ruled by a master who will treat her with respect!” Mordechai’s face was now mottled red, and spit flew from his mouth as he screamed. My head swiveled from one to the other, and I was getting more confused by the second. Malachi might have been a bastard in his own right, but Mordechai was clearly no prize.

  My gaze went back to the gnashing maw of spikes in the center of the pentagram, beyond the vortex of quicksand. Maybe I should’ve let them both be eaten.

  “First things first,” Nikki snapped, her cop voice penetrating the outrage of both men. “Which one of you summoned Justice?”

  “You summoned Justice?” The blood-soaked Malachi turned on his brother, who promptly curled up in a ball like a pill bug, huddling in his own robes. “You know you are giving me a death sentence, you fool.”

  “You were dying,” Mordechai wailed, scooting behind Nikki and me. “You were covered in blood.”

  “Her blood.” Malachi spread his hands wide. “The witc
h spirit has grown lax in all the years since last she suffered. She’s no longer as vigilant as she once was. I knew her weaknesses, studied them. As the city’s most knowledgeable magician, I know all, and I see all.”

  “Most knowledgeable.” I couldn’t help the skepticism in my voice. “I think there’s maybe another Magician in the city you’re forgetting.”

  “You! You of all people should respect a magician’s might.” Malachi turned on me, his face now a fetching shade of purple. “I warned Armaeus he was a fool to allow you to ascend to any of the seats of the Council, but would he listen? No, he would not. And Justice. That was the biggest mistake of all.”

  Anger is a funny thing. Sometimes it can creep up on you, slowly build until you find yourself all wound up in its grasp.

  Sometimes it moves a lot faster than that.

  Mordechai wailed in fright as Malachi’s robes lit up with spectral fire, burning straight off him until he was dressed in nothing but his baggy trousers and faded white T-shirt.

  “Um, Sara—” Nikki’s voice was drowned out by the pounding in my brain. I advanced on Malachi.

  “You’ve got a date with Judgment, Malachi, and if you’ve been doing your careful reading of the Mystere Arcanum, I think you know what that means. You can go now, or you can go later, or you might get lucky and not go at all, but you will owe me big for that. You understand that?”

  “Sara,” Nikki said, more urgently this time.

  “You have no right,” the two-bit magician cried. His face looked pale beneath all the blood. I didn’t care. I’d had it up to here.

  “You get one chance,” I offered him, but I could tell he wasn’t going to take it. I was almost glad. Gamon could sprinkle hot sauce on this Cheez-It and tell me later what she found out from him. I reached out and grabbed the wailing Malachi by the shoulder, feeling my fury kindle along my nerves as fire licked to life around me and my cells began to destabilize—

  “Sara!” It wasn’t Nikki’s voice that roared behind me this time, but one even more familiar. “What in the fuck is going on here?”