The Lost Queen

by Jenn Stark

  I straightened as well, but the effect wasn’t nearly as impressive when I did it.

  “You shouldn’t have the power to bring me here,” Myanya rumbled, her voice low and resonant. “You aren’t strong enough for that. You’ve never been strong enough.”

  What was with people and the lack of respect? It was no more than what I’d accused myself of, more times than I could count, but now, hearing it from Myanya, I flat-out rejected the idea. “Try again, sweetheart.”

  “You brought me here, didn’t you?” Myanya taunted. “You give another the right to pass Judgment upon me when you have the ability to make a choice as well.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to want to go with my choice for you.”

  “All the more reason for you to be the one to put the brand upon me, then, not Judgment. You seem to forget that she has also not been one to suffer fools gladly. How many has she killed because they threatened her? How many has she destroyed because if she did not, they would grind her beneath their boots, make her their slave?”

  I narrowed my eyes as we circled. My Justice tools lost their mojo when I was in Judgment’s fortress, allowing Gamon full rein, but that didn’t mean my powers diminished. If I wanted to end Myanya, I could.

  Should I? I wanted to end the cycle of her destructive prophecy, for sure, but something about the figure in front of me stayed my hand another moment.

  Myanya laughed, ratcheting up my irritation. “Your silence is most damning of all, Justice. You don’t dispense justice. You’re little more than a protector of the weak and the foolish who can’t protect themselves.”

  That pricked a nerve, as I knew was Myanya’s intention, but I couldn’t stop my immediate, almost visceral response. “Somebody needs to protect them.”

  “Truly? Or does someone need to give them the tools they need to protect themselves? That’s what my prophecy provides those who are willing to work for it.”

  “Your prophecy takes a gifted soul and attempts to drag her into the dirt. The survivor of your spirit isn’t herself, only better…she’s you. Your incarnation, your self once more made flesh. That’s not empowerment, Myanya, that’s simply a more socially acceptable form of slavery.”

  “You’re wrong. Over the centuries, the witches who have taken on the challenge of my spirit have gone on to lead their covens to mastery. That is not me. That is them.”

  “Uh-huh. And what about those women who end up with their minds broken and their hearts crushed? Whose success or failure is it then? Yours, for choosing poorly? Or theirs, for not being able to withstand the horrors that you visit upon them?”

  “They have to prove their strength before they can wield the power that I would give them,” Myanya scoffed. “I cannot always be expected to choose correctly.”

  “I’m getting the feeling you don’t choose correctly all that often,” I said. “I read the complaints brought to the attention of Justice. They go back hundreds of years.”

  “How many complaints? A handful, out of all the covens I have aided over the course of millennia?” She sniffed. “The strength of the witches has waned over the years, even as the abilities of other Connecteds have thrived. The witches have turned away from their true calling. But now there is no turning away. Now they must reach out and embrace the possibilities that the new horde of demons who overrun this world presents.”

  “They can do that without your help,” I said. “In fact, seems to me you’ve done more harm than good. Some of the male witches that you have removed from the equation could have done real work in the pursuit of managing the demon horde. Now they’re dead, or so damaged their magic may never be the same. How does that help the covens?”

  “There are many paths to success, I promise you,” Myanya said darkly. “That you are too weak to see that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “You know, I’m getting a little tired of you throwing shade.”

  “And I’m getting tired of baiting you into a true battle, Justice Wilde. I assure you, your predecessor was much quicker to be engaged.”

  A flare of anger and belated concern for a woman nearly two hundred years dead ripped through me. “What do you know about Justice Strand?”

  “I know that she had more guile in her little finger than you do in your entire body,” Myanya shot back. “You may outstrip her in power, but she was resilient. Resourceful. She did what she had to do to survive for as long as she could. I almost hated making her way darker, but then, that is my calling. The way of strength is not for the fainthearted.”

  “I studied Nietzsche too,” I snapped. “He had better quotes.”

  “You mock what you don’t understand.”

  “And you’re beginning to irritate me.” I lifted my hands, the blue power now shot through with the violent pink of Armaeus’s borrowed strength. “You want to make it until Judgment finally shows up, you should probably stop trying to deliberately pull my chain.”

  “Then perhaps I should be more direct.”

  Myanya turned to me and pulled her hand across her face, stripping off her mask. Her face was horrifically burned beneath it, the skin blanched and puckered.

  I stared at her, unflinching. “You’re a witch, Myanya. And if you don’t remember, you’ve already thrown me onto a pike that stuck out of my rib cage, so a scary face isn’t all that effective on me. Surely you can frighten me with a worse illusion than that—or heal yourself if what I’m seeing is real.”

  “I could,” she growled, the word sounding garbled now. “But if I were to heal myself, I would forget. And I cannot ever forget.” She smiled, an unsettling look with half her mouth eaten away, but as I lifted my gaze to hers, I flinched.

  “You want to know one of the reasons Abigail Strand faltered? Look close, Justice Wilde. Look close and understand.”

  This time, however, Myanya showed me nothing further of the horrors she’d experienced. She showed me the horrors of her own soul. She was a human, or she’d started that way, a witch with ordinary abilities, advancing along the sacred path as an initiate, then a full-fledged member of her coven. But she lived in a time when ignorance outweighed discernment, a balance we still had not mastered thousands of years later. And she was killed.

  I blinked.

  She was…killed.

  Suddenly, my mind leapt to Vlad the Impaler’s descendent, with his threats of dark arts, the twins, Mordechai and Malachi, with their gleeful interpretations of the dire grimoire, and finally, Richard Zachariah, a full-on Hollywood necromancer, the perfect plastic practitioner for the shock-talk era.

  “You’re not a bodiless spirit. You’re the spirit of a dead woman,” I breathed, feeling the tattoo on my arm flare to life. “You should have hooked up with the necromancer.”

  “I’ve always chosen a necromancer,” Myanya snarled back at me. “No coven would accept me in my true form, except those who knew too well the ways to control me. I couldn’t have that.”

  “That explains why you didn’t hit Danae’s coven, no matter how strong they are.”

  “The deathwalkers,” Myanya said, curling her lip. “They think they know so much. They know nothing, not about demons and not about the dead. I have more experience with the horde than they ever will. The path to the demons’ destruction is not one paved with control and temperance, but with might and blood. Demons don’t understand anything else. And now there are so many more of them, and their power could be turned along with that of the dead, with the right combination of strength. Strength not only to endure the worst, but to reach the greatest heights.”

  “It was you,” I realized aloud. “You were the one who reached out to the necromancers, not the LA coven, and not Lara Drake. They created the pentagram, they filled it with salt, they did everything you asked of them…but you were the one doing the asking. It wasn’t a mystical revelation or some treatise on a tattered grimoire page. It was you. You sought them out. And then you trapped and killed them. Up to and incl
uding Richard Zachariah.”

  “They weren’t supposed to die. No one is ever supposed to die—not even me. Yet I always, always do!” Myanya cried out this last, her voice ringing with a misery so profound, it rooted me in place. As I watched, she swayed, then fell to her knees, utterly exhausted.

  I held my ground. “Ah…they weren’t? Weren’t you trying to kill them?”

  “Of course,” she said, her shoulders slumping now. “I had to put them to the test, bathe them in fire and blood. I had to see if their minds had a deep enough capacity for darkness. None of them did. The darkest beings upon this planet, other than the demons themselves, have always been held within the Arcana Council. Only they would not meddle in the affairs of witches. It was a time-honored tradition. Not the males, anyway.” She looked at me with sunken eyes. “The females were more easily tempted.”

  “Justice Strand.”

  Her lips twisted. “Justice Strand. And others too, long since dead. If I had anything to do with that, I can hardly be blamed. It is the obligation of the Council to recruit members of sufficient strength. It is my obligation to seek out that strength. I found it too. In Armaeus. He was…so much more than I expected.”

  “Yeah, he gets that a lot.”

  “But even he deferred in the end to another. To you.” She gazed at me with her flat black eyes, the sunken side of her face seeming to leach farther across the unblemished skin as I watched. “He showed me that I had been wrong about you, even when you kept trying to prove me right.”

  She smiled at my silence. “You know what I’m talking about. You could have killed me when I threatened your lover. You could have killed me when I threatened poor, innocent Iskra. She’s dead now, you know. Burned to ash in the fire of her own granddaughter’s magic.”

  I grimaced. I’d feared the worst, but I wasn’t going to give Myanya the benefit of more of a reaction. I also couldn’t believe her. Iskra had surprised people before.

  “I can feel the dead as they gather close. You can too, with Death’s mark upon you. I never tried to run afoul of Death, of course. I was already dead, and she knew it. There is no more patient predator on this earth than Death.”

  That didn’t surprise me. “What will you do now? You’re here to be judged. Gamon is waiting for you.”

  “Oh, Gamon will not get her chance. And perhaps just as well. She would take my side.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again. Myanya was probably right.

  “That much I knew. And you knew it as well. You made that clear when you brought me here in chains, with so much fury burning through you that the doors were sealed from anyone’s entry beyond.”

  They were? I looked at the distant doors, which always had been open. They didn’t look sealed closed, though. They looked like doors. Shut doors, but doors.

  Before me, Myanya seemed to crumple farther into herself. “Before you judge me too hastily, though, Justice Wilde, understand that I came to none of this through my own power. The horrors you saw in your vision were truly those visited upon me. But not, as you think, because I was a witch. I was something far different from that.”

  I began to speak, but Myanya continued, riding the cresting wave of her memories. “The pain I suffered, the endless death, the desperate surge to life—all real. All deliberate. The necromancer who made me into what I am died a terrible death, but I could never undo the endless mortification of my flesh, nor the need for me to be reborn. Only you can do that.”

  My head was beginning to hurt. “Myanya, I’m going to summon Gamon. She’s going to—”

  “No,” she said again. “Gamon cannot judge me. Your time has come, as my time has come.”

  She clutched her throat with a pale and withered hand, silvering in the half-light, and I suddenly felt like crying. Myanya was slowly disappearing before my eyes, and for all her crimes, I couldn’t deny the deep and unrelenting sorrow I felt at seeing her go.

  I pushed out mentally, just in case Myanya was right and I’d been the one holding Gamon out. The doors opened with a subtle rush of air, and a moment later, a woman clad head to toe in black military gear strode toward us, her boots clicking in a harsh staccato against the stone floor.

  Myanya watched her approach. “You could have delivered her to her end with a moment’s thought. Her sins are many.”

  “She stood for me when I needed standing for. That mattered more.” I knelt now. Myanya seemed to be folding in on herself, concentrating her form into that of a small, slender girl. It was unnerving, and I didn’t understand what I was seeing. “If you’re pulling some trick…”

  “No—trick,” Myanya sighed. It was a sigh of resignation, but also relief. “The tools are in the hands of the artist, and they must be shaped into the proper form. But more than that, they must be used. The time has passed for me to use them. They are yours to wield. As for me, at last, a new day can dawn.”

  She sighed again, more deeply this time, and seemed to drop farther into herself, a huddled mass of robes. I watched her, dismayed, and Gamon stayed quiet for a long moment, both of us staring down at the disintegration of pure power into…something else.

  Finally, Gamon spoke. “You know who that is, right? I didn’t until you brought her here, but once you did, there was no hiding the truth. I assume you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said, my mouth tight. “Myanya.”

  Gamon gave me a startled look. “Not exactly. A closer translation of her name is Inanna.”

  “Close enough.” I crouched and moved my hand through the smoking pile of robes. There was nothing left of the dead witch but a flattened metal star, not shaped like a pentagram, but more a ball of flame, its rays streaming to the side as if it was being hurled through the skies. I picked it up gingerly, cradling it in my hands. Sorrow pulsed from it, the last remnants of a dying energy force. “She lived a long time. I can see how her name got changed over the years.

  “I don’t think you get it,” Gamon said as I stood. She pointed at the star. “That’s a gift from an ancient Sumerian goddess, Sara, the gift of herself. She’s surrendering her light to you.”

  I winced. “You really don’t need to make me feel any worse than I already do.”

  “No, you idiot,” Gamon said. “You’re still not getting it.”

  “Okay, I’m not getting it. Just—give me a minute.”

  I held my hands close to my body. Myanya’s star—that was who she would always be to me—lay in my palms, glimmering. But even with my third eye, I could detect no trapped life force in it. Myanya wasn’t trying to break free anymore. She had become the final incarnation of herself.

  Gamon’s voice, several shades softer now, sounded beside me. “Why are you so sad?”

  I waved the star at her. “Because even though she was a really bad person—and she was—she’s now a lump of metal, Gamon. Forgive me for caring about that.”

  “A lump of…no, Sara. No. That’s not what she is at all.”

  Without giving me time to respond, Gamon wheeled me around to the entryway to her domain. Beneath lay nothing but stars and clouds.

  “Throw it.” Gamon instructed. I looked at her in horror.

  “What?” Instinctively, I curled the fingers of my right hand around the star, holding it away from Gamon. “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, for gods’ sakes—” Moving more quickly than I’d ever seen her, Gamon reached out and yanked my arm abruptly, so hard the star fell from my fingers.

  I let it go, my heart lurching, and I cried out as it dropped like a stone for a long, sickening moment. But the moment the beautiful soaring star left my hand, I knew that Gamon had been right. I had to let Myanya go—once and for all.

  “This is so Titanic,” I said as we looked over the side of the precipice.

  “I hate you,” Gamon muttered.

  And then we were flung back with a flash of light bright enough to fill the universe.

  “What the—!” I
spluttered, staggering back. Gamon grinned at me. I’d never before seen that expression on her face, and I struggled to understand. It was proud, and it was fierce, and it was—directed entirely at me, her eyes shining with wonder, and something else too. Respect, I realized belatedly. Respect.

  “Inanna,” she said simply. “Is now reborn.”

  And across the cosmos, the rich and rolling voice reached me, at once intimately familiar and powerfully foreign. “That was…very well done, Miss Wilde.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  I didn’t even try to resist Armaeus’s pull, and instead leaned into it, slipping through the millions of starbursts that lit up the night sky beneath Gamon’s fortress, until I found myself in the familiar haze of neon that marked the Las Vegas Strip. A moment later, I slipped between the spires and turrets of Armaeus’s Hall of Magician-ness and landed in a room that…surprised me.

  Because I didn’t recognize it.

  Which shouldn’t have been possible.

  The room mostly resembled a medieval hut or hunting cabin, a simple chamber with a small fire burning in its center, the smoke escaping through a flue in the ceiling. Several blankets were spread out on the floor by the fire, and one was balled up beside them. I didn’t miss the fact that the balled-up blanket was streaked with blood. I struggled to remember how many pieces I’d left Armaeus in and whether any of them were bloody, but that oddly wasn’t my biggest concern in this moment.

  “You know, I’d appreciate it if my abilities as Justice of the Arcana Council would settle the crap down,” I muttered, peering into the darkness of the chamber. I could barely see the walls, given the smoke from the fire. “Because there’s nothing that pisses people off more than changing magic rules, and I don’t know this place. I shouldn’t have been able to poof here. Beyond that, this whole setup is seriously not OSHA approved. You know that, right?”