Dark Queen’s Quest

by I. T. Lucas

  “Is he a model?” Josephine asked.

  “He said that he is retired, but I’ve never seen photos of him anywhere. I would’ve remembered that gorgeous face and those unique eyes.”

  “Maybe he worked in Europe,” Valerie suggested.

  “That’s possible. Arielle, that’s the name of the new girl, is from Slovenia. But Yamanu didn’t have an accent.”

  And neither had Arielle’s boyfriend.

  Things didn’t add up with their story, but it had already occurred to Mey that Ari might be faking her accent to make herself seem more interesting.

  Tatiana got up. “Next time you see him, snap a selfie with your guy and send it to me.” She rinsed her mug in the sink. “I need to finish packing.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Josephine took her coffee mug with her. “Hopefully, the dryer is done. I need my nightshirt.”

  “Did you hear anything from Jin?” Valerie asked as she pushed away from the table.

  “Just those two text messages.”

  “It’s better than nothing, right? At least you know that she’s okay.”

  Mey sighed. “At this point, I don’t know anything. The texts might have been sent by someone else pretending to be Jin.” She didn’t really believe that, but it was possible. Anyone could send a text using Jin’s phone.

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  Mey shrugged. “Who knows? I won’t relax until I hear her voice on the phone.”

  Valerie patted her shoulder. “I hope you hear from her soon.” She walked out.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Alone in the kitchen, Mey cradled the teacup in her palms and considered her options.

  Jin had been so secretive about her new job that she hadn’t even told Mey how she was getting there, only that her new employer was taking care of all the travel arrangements.

  They’d said their goodbyes the day before.

  But that didn’t mean that Mey couldn’t find out what mode of transportation Jin had used, and where she’d gone, provided that the ticket had been bought in her name and that her employer hadn’t given her fake documents.

  But that was taking it too far.

  Was it, though?

  The whole thing was so cloak and dagger that she wouldn’t be surprised if Jin had traveled under an assumed name. In any case, there was only one thing she could do while sitting at her kitchen table, and that was to call her old boyfriend from her Mossad days.

  They’d remained friends after their breakup, so he might be inclined to help her. Off the record, of course.

  Shimon had been her first love and her first lover, but that had ended after their assignment had been done.

  Mossad had no more use for Mey, and she’d been decommissioned. Shimon, however, had continued on to better and grander things.

  Or so she imagined.

  She checked the time, making sure she wasn’t calling in the middle of the night, and then selected his number from her list of contacts.

  “Mey,” he answered right away. “What’s wrong?”

  She smiled. There was no beating around the bush with Shimi.

  “Why do you assume that something is wrong?”

  “It’s seven in the morning over here. You wouldn’t have called this early unless you needed something from me.”

  “I do. Jin got this new job, and I’m worried.” She proceeded to tell him the story. “Can you find out where she traveled to?”

  “I’ll do what I can. With the level of secrecy you are describing, my bet is that she is working for your government.”

  “It has crossed my mind. But I can’t imagine what possibly they would want her for. She’s a business major, not a rocket scientist.”

  “Maybe they need her for a spying job in China.”

  A shiver ran through Mey. She’d never told Shimon about Jin and her special abilities, but his shot in the dark was too close to home.

  “She doesn’t even speak Mandarin.” Mey chuckled. “And a six-foot-tall girl can’t blend in.”

  “Give me her phone number.”

  “I told you. I tried to call and text, and she doesn't answer.”

  “That’s not what I need it for. I’m going to check who she talked to recently and trace the calls.”

  “You can do that?”

  He chuckled. “Are you seriously asking that? Not me personally, but I have friends in high places.”

  “Thanks, Shimon. You’re the best.”

  14

  Annani

  “It is seven forty-five, Clan Mother.” Oridu handed Annani her second cup of coffee of the day. “You wished to be reminded.”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  In fifteen minutes Areana’s call would come in like it had every day since her sister had been given the communication device, and they would spend ten minutes talking and reminiscing about the past. It wasn’t much, and after three weeks of nearly daily calls they were still in the stage of reacquainting themselves with each other, but there was no rush.

  Hopefully.

  If Navuh found out, all hell was going to break loose, and Annani worried that he would retaliate against Areana. Perhaps not physically, but he might further restrict the already limited freedoms she was allowed.

  She rose to her feet and walked out onto the small backyard. Her house in the village was modest, and some days Annani missed the sanctuary, but she had established a pleasant routine here, and the thought of leaving was becoming just as hard as staying.

  Besides, she did not feel like going back without Alena. Up north, her eldest daughter was her only real companion, the only one she could be herself with. Annani loved her people, but she had an image to uphold, and being the Clan Mother twenty-four seven, as the young generation liked to say, was exhausting.

  Down here, she could at least let go of the queenly persona with Amanda and Kian, and even Syssi.

  So, until Alena’s return, Annani was most likely going to stay in the village.

  With both her and Alena gone so long, her people were probably feeling neglected, but they were safe in the sanctuary, so unless an emergency came up, there was no real need for her to hurry back.

  “You forgot your sunglasses, Clan Mother.” Oridu rushed after her.

  “Thank you.” She took them from him. “But as you can see, the sky is overcast, so I can manage without.”

  He bowed. “The clouds may part without warning, Clan Mother.”

  “Yes, you are right. Thank you for your concern.”

  Oridu bowed again and smiled, then turned on his heel and went back inside.

  Annani frowned. Something had changed about her Odus lately. It was subtle, and she could not put her finger on exactly what it was that made them suddenly appear more real, more human-like. She wondered whether it had anything to do with Okidu’s reboot.

  Since she had received them more than five thousand years ago, none of the seven had suffered an injury severe enough to necessitate a shutdown and then a restart. Could it be that they had been operating on less than their optimal performance level?

  Was there a reason to worry?

  After all, they had an immense capacity for violence and were indestructible. If something went astray in their programming, they could become incredibly dangerous.

  The only way to eliminate them was to eject them into space, or perhaps dismantle them and scatter the pieces around the world.

  Annani had no idea what their capacity for self-repair was, and she did not want to test it. She had not even allowed anyone to tinker with them to discover how they worked.

  The Odus had become part of her family, and Annani refused to chance losing any of them for the sake of experimentation.

  Her phone rang precisely at eight, and as usual, it was William on the line. “Good morning, Clan Mother. I’m patching Lady Areana through.”

  “Thank you, William.”

  “How are you this morning, Annani?” Areana opened their conversation with the same greeti
ng she used every day.

  “Except for missing Alena, I am fantastic.”

  “Do you have any news from her?”

  “She has not started the advertising campaign yet, so naturally, there is nothing to report.”

  “I’m not sure your idea is going to work. Kalugal was a little boy the last time he saw me. He might not even remember what I look like.”

  “I am sure he does. He went to great lengths to see you. I am sure that seeing someone who looks like your twin will pique his curiosity.” Annani sighed. “If I saw a picture of someone who looked exactly like Khiann, I would do everything in my power to find him and meet him in person.”

  “But Kalugal did not lose me. He knows that I am alive and well.”

  “Perhaps. But I have a good feeling about this.”

  “I thought about another thing that might be helpful in the search. Kalugal disappeared together with his entire company. That’s about seventy warriors. If they stayed together, that’s a lot of immortal males in one place. I don’t know if it’s significant, but perhaps you can come up with another idea that takes that into account.”

  Annani chuckled. “With so many warriors, he could have established a base somewhere in South America.” She stopped herself before adding that he could have had a successful career as a drug lord.

  There was no reason to upset Areana by suggesting such a thing, but it was a possibility.

  It was much easier to hide and operate in places where the law had little muscle, especially when illegal activity posed no moral dilemma.

  As someone who had grown up in the Doomers’ base, Kalugal’s idea of right and wrong could certainly be distorted. Even if he did not pursue his father’s agenda and did not agree with his methods, his moral compass could have easily been mislaid.

  Still, Lokan had undergone essentially the same upbringing as Kalugal and lived with continued exposure to that environment to the present day, and he was a decent man, or as decent as he could be under the circumstances. So, there was really no reason to doubt that Kalugal could be living a perfectly normal life as a stockbroker in New York City.

  “You said that your daughter-in-law saw in her vision that Kalugal was in New York. So, he is not in South America.”

  “That is why we started the search there. I will inform the parties involved that they should open their eyes and ears and look for more than one immortal.”

  “I really hope you can find him. Talking with Lokan means so much to me. I just wish I could do it more often. Once a week is not enough.”

  That was a hint the size of an elephant.

  “If you wish, I can give up another day for Lokan. Would you like to call him on Wednesdays as well as on Mondays?”

  “That would be wonderful. I’m just getting to know him, and it’s hard to do in ten-minute conversations once a week.”

  Annani teared up. Poor Areana. She had so much catching up to do with everyone. And then there were Tula and Wonder. They wanted to talk too, and once a week on Saturday was not enough.

  She really should not hog the communication.

  “I understand. And if you wish, I can give up another day for Lokan.”

  Areana chuckled. “No, that’s okay. I don’t want to overwhelm him. Small steps are better. And besides, you’re already giving up three days out of seven.”

  Annani glanced at her watch and grimaced. “I am afraid that our time is up. I will inform Lokan that he should expect calls from you on Mondays and Wednesdays.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You are most welcome, my dear sister. Goodbye until Thursday.”

  15

  Mey

  Derek lowered the camera and shook his head. “Mey, sweetheart, you were frowning.”

  She’d been hoping to hear back from Shimon this morning, but it was taking him longer than she’d expected. It was three in the afternoon in New York, which meant ten at night in Israel, so he might still call.

  “Sorry about that. I guess I’m getting tired.”

  Derek shook his head. “Give me twenty more minutes and we will call it a day. Find the happy place in your mind and give me that signature mysterious smile of yours. That’s what the clients are paying top dollar for.”

  He called it her Mona Lisa smile, and Mey had seen it in the pictures Derek had taken of her. But whenever she tried to recreate it in front of the mirror, all she got was a crooked thing that was far from attractive.

  Which meant that she couldn’t produce it on demand, and the only way to get it was to bring up happy memories that she wasn’t allowed to share with anyone.

  Not even Jin or her parents had known what her international modeling tour had been all about, and why she'd gotten an exemption from the mandatory service to do that. She couldn't tell them that the Mossad had asked for her, and that she'd been basically on loan to the secret service, her time there counting toward the completion of her military obligation.

  She’d been merely the prop. The real undercover work had been done by the group of Mossad agents posing as her crew.

  During the days they'd shot on location, but during the nights the guys had gone out to do their spying, or at least that was what she’d imagined they had been doing. They might have been assassinating evildoers, but Mey preferred not to know.

  Not that she had much choice in the matter. The guys couldn’t share details with her because she hadn’t had the necessary security clearance.

  Mey had been the pretty face, the cover. Still, she’d gone through intense expedited training, and the skills she’d learned were nothing to sneer at. At nineteen, she could shoot a gun with an impressive degree of accuracy and throw an opponent twice her weight over her shoulder.

  The guys had been older, but not by much. Shimon had been twenty-three when they’d become an item, and at the time she’d thought he was so much more mature and experienced than her.

  A fighter. A real man.

  Now that she was older than he had been at the time, her perspective on that had changed, but not by much.

  She still respected the hell out of him as well as the other guys on the crew. They had been forced to grow up so much faster than men their age that she was now meeting in the States.

  Oliver was almost thirty, and he didn’t have half the maturity that Shimi had at twenty-three.

  Derek sighed. “And the smile is gone again. But I got a few great shots.” He walked over to her. “See that? That’s the gold.”

  “If you say so. I look like I’m plotting something.”

  He grinned. “And every guy that sees that wants to believe that you have hot kinky sex on your mind.”

  “Mey the dominatrix,” Julie said. “I can totally see that.”

  “You are both twisted.”

  She wondered if anyone would have imagined that about her if she was a small woman. Probably not. Because of her size, people assumed she was assertive and dominant.

  Assertive, yes, but it had nothing to do with her size. It was just her personality. And dominant? Certainly not.

  In fact, Mey often berated herself for being too accommodating, too understanding, and cutting the men in her life too much slack. If she were bitchier, perhaps Oliver would have thought twice about cheating on her.

  That betrayal had cut deep, and not because she’d been so in love with him but because of the blatant disrespect.

  She’d been good to him, and she hadn’t deserved to be treated that way.

  “Relax, girl. You look like you’re about to kill someone,” Julie whispered. “Thinking of Oliver again?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Most of the time you’re nice and mellow. You only shoot daggers from your eyes when you think about him.”

  “Cheating hurts. If he didn’t want to be with me, he should have broken up with me before I left for that shoot. Imagine coming home and discovering that while you were gone, your boyfriend slept with someone else in your bed. That’s the worst kind of insult.�
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  “Are you sure he did that? You said that he denied it.”

  “I smelled another woman all over the bedding that I personally bought and put on that bed.”

  That wasn’t how she’d found out, but it was the only explanation Mey could give without revealing her abilities.

  The moment she’d returned home and entered her bedroom, Mey had felt the echoes of what had gone on in there during her absence. And when she’d closed her eyes and meditated for a few moments, she’d gotten way more than she’d wanted to know.

  Oliver had denied it, calling her a crazy, paranoid bitch, and that had made it even worse.

  Mey had walked out of there without taking a single thing with her and crashed at Tatiana’s place. She’d slept on the living room couch until two of Tatiana’s other roommates moved out.

  Ignoring all of Oliver’s phone calls, Mey had gone to collect her stuff when he’d been at work.

  A month later she was still fuming every time she thought about it.

  Julie patted her arm. “You know how to forget about him, right? Start dating again. I’m sure you have a long list of guys who are just waiting to jump at a crook of your finger.”

  “Not really, but thank you for saying that.”

  Most men found her intimidating, and those who didn’t were usually too full of themselves and thought that they deserved to be worshiped by the lucky women who they’d bestowed their charms on.

  Not Yamanu, though.

  He was too tall and good-looking to be intimidated by her, but he wasn’t cocky. He’d been polite, respectful, and she’d gotten a good vibe from him, which didn’t happen often.

  In short, he fascinated her, and she wanted to find out more about him.

  “Ready to go home?” Derek asked. “I can drop you off.”

  “Thanks, but I want to stop by Jin’s old dorm room again.” She pulled out a moist towelette from her purse and wiped the bright red lipstick off.

  “I can take you there,” Derek offered.

  “That would be awesome, thank you.”