The Lost Queen Read online

  “Well, there is. You. When we realized you were in Budapest, we put two and two together and came up with an artifact we needed to secure.”

  “How did you know I was here? I’ve been in Budapest exactly twelve hours.”

  “You arrived in the Szimpla Kert bar with your hair on fire. Literally. It was noticed.”

  Yet another part of my new job as Justice I hadn’t quite worked out yet. But something wasn’t adding up.

  “What else am I missing?”

  Once again, there was no hesitation. I liked that in my Brits. “You’re part of the Council now, and ergo your allegiances are to the Council. Anything they pick up, they get, not us.” He said this without any rancor or judgment, and I couldn’t help but chuckle. We’d both been mercenaries for too long; we both knew the game.

  “You seriously think I’m here to recover an artifact, not a bad guy?”

  “I now fully believe you’re here to recover a bad guy. I also happen to know that you won’t let an artifact pass you by should you happen to stumble across one. And you further have an uncanny ability to stumble across said artifacts.” He waved at me. “You draw cards on this yet? Because I have no idea where we go from here. My information stops with this chamber.”

  “Really.” I looked around the room, which appeared to have three entrances, the way we came in plus two chambers that snaked off deeper into the caverns. “Where’d you learn about this room?”

  “One of the monks who was imprisoned along with Vlad wrote about it in his papers, which we have in our digitized archives. When we learned you were here, it was five minutes’ work to identify how that might…benefit us. Or harm us, depending. Besides, Ma-Singh wanted me to check in on you, though he hadn’t heard of the Impaler’s return. He worries.”

  “Ma-Singh.” I blinked, sudden and completely unwarranted tears scratching at my eyes as I thought of the big, gruff Mongolian whose life I’d saved multiple times and who’d also attempted to save my life, before he realized I was singularly hard to kill. Ma-Singh had been my general at the House of Swords and was one of very few people I trusted. It was good to know you were loved.

  Or it was good to know Nigel was upping his game of manipulation. I pulled out the deck of Tarot cards, one of my trustiest go-tos during my years as an artifact hunter…during my whole life, truth be told. I’d been reading cards since I was old enough to pick up a deck, and they’d never steered me wrong. I might not always understand the message they were trying to give me, but the message was there.

  I waved the deck at Nigel. “If you’re lying to me, there will be hell to pay, and if you’re bringing Ma-Singh into it without his knowledge, I’m taking you straight to Gamon.”

  “I’m not Connected enough to warrant Gamon’s attention.”

  “She’ll make an exception for you.”

  Nigel looked credibly concerned, and I shuffled the deck, pondering the stone walls around me. Once I’d landed in Budapest, it was the cards that had insisted that the tourist trap of the labyrinth was my fastest way into the Castle Hill cave system. They hadn’t told me my journey would involve an annoying Brit, though.

  I drew three cards out of the deck and held them out for Nigel to see. Despite him knowing me all these years, he’d never tried to learn Tarot. “King of Swords, Two of Wands, Ace of Cups,” he recited. He narrowed his eyes at me. “And you expect me to believe you’re not going after the Sultan’s Cup?”

  “Well, I am now,” I cracked, though I really didn’t care about the missing artifact. But I was more than a little concerned. Up to this point, I’d been pretty consistently pulling the King of Swords to represent the nouveau Vlad the Impaler. But if what Nigel was saying about the cup was true…maybe I really could kill two birds with one stone. Maybe wannabe Vlad had the real Vlad’s cup on him and was siphoning power from it. An interesting possibility…

  Either way, I had to find him. “We head left,” I said, pocketing the cards and pointing to a door. As Nigel turned away, however, I fished out three more cards.

  Queen of Swords, Ten of Swords, Ace of Swords.

  I stared hard at Nigel’s retreating form. I had no idea what the Queen of Swords meant yet in the context of this search, but Nigel was the Ace of Swords, and Ten of Swords almost always meant…betrayal.

  Something very bad was about to happen in the labyrinth of Buda Castle.

  Chapter Two

  “Quiet.”

  Nigel was a master of subvocalization, but I didn’t need the reminder. We’d already traversed a good half mile of the cave system, me leading the way after we changed positions at a wide point in the tunnels. Now he was right on my heels, his breath soft behind me, both of us straining to see what lay around the next corner.

  Because something was there. A light flickered in the darkness, making me blink hard as my eyes adjusted. Had to be some kind of fire. I could smell the scent of burning wood over the heavy odor of sulfur, so it wasn’t a small fire either.

  “He alone?” Nigel whispered into my ear, which from any other guy on the planet would have been at least a mild turn-on. But I’d worked too many jobs with Nigel and seen the man naked more times than I cared to remember. Between us, it was all business. And on cases like these, business was good.

  I was about to reply when a sob broke through the still air, causing us both to stiffen. That was more than answer enough. The whimper was high-pitched, terrified, and immediately stifled. Whoever had built the fire in the next chamber definitely wasn’t alone. A kid was with him, probably more than one of them.

  Another childlike whisper sounded quietly over the crackling of wood. “The queen.”

  I blinked at Nigel, but he was staring ahead, his jaw tight and his body ready to spring forward. Had he not heard it? But I hadn’t imagined the slurred words, I knew I hadn’t.

  “The queen comes. She will save us. The queen comes. The queen, the queen.” Same voice. No, correction. Voices. There were multiple kids in there.

  “What the hell is that?” I growled, and it was Nigel’s turn to glance at me, the question clear in his pale blue eyes. He hadn’t heard it. The voices weren’t in my head, however, and my ears weren’t that sharp. The kids were talking on a frequency that Nigel couldn’t tap in to so well, which meant only one thing. They were Connecteds.

  Nigel had some level of ability—more than he let on, for sure—but I’d leveled up several times over the past year. There was no mistaking that the kids in the cavern chamber were praying…but praying to whom? The queen of England? Mother Mary? Some ancient goddess?

  We moved forward as quietly as we could, freezing every few feet whenever the fire ahead of us spit and crackled. As we approached, I could feel the level of magic in the next room pulsing like a living thing. These captured kids were throwing off some of the most powerful energy signatures I’d ever encountered, even for kids, who were known to have purer magic in them than most of their adult counterparts. According to the dossier, the Romani kids had come from a group of travelers making their way through Hungary after a particularly brutal year, so clearly, they were survivors, but that didn’t explain the strength I was sensing.

  I tried to get a fix on Vlad himself, but I got nothing back through the thick stone.

  “The queen lives. She comes, she comes.” Again with the children’s whispers only I could hear, yet this prayer was more urgent than the last.

  “It is ready.” A new voice sounded now, unmistakably adult, and one Nigel could hear, if his tensing body language was any indication. We inched closer. The break in the stone was barely a yard away. Light spilled forth into the corridor from the fire beyond, obscuring anything of any relevance dancing in the shadows. Something heavy and metallic scraped across the floor. At intervals, there would be a startled childish yelp, an involuntary gasp. My hands tightened into fists, the fire that burned within me barely banked. Whoever this jackwit was, he was hurting the children every time he passed the
m in the cave. Five kids had been taken, I recalled. Two had surfaced in the Danube, their wounds consistent with…

  I gritted my teeth, not wanting to think of it. The water had blurred any other mortifications of the flesh these children had endured, but I had a feeling the three remaining children in the chamber beyond would have their tale of horror etched into their flesh. I could work with that, though. I could heal them. Their bodies, at least.

  But first I had to get to them.

  “Slow.” Nigel’s command was barely audible in my ear. I grimaced, but he was right. It would do us no good if we burst into the room without our bearings. The killer could escape or, worse, the children could be damaged more than they already were. I could heal a broken person. I couldn’t bring one back to life.

  We crouched down to where the rock jutted at an odd angle and created a slight overhang and a blank space beneath. I was in front, and there was only room for one head at a time, so I wriggled forward until my eyes cleared the rock and the room beyond was visible to me.

  My breath died in my throat.

  The chamber looked like something out of a horror movie. Bones lined the walls, stuffed into niches carved into the rock, a macabre Motel 6 of the dead. I’d heard of the bones when it came to Buda Castle, of course. There was every indication that the castle had been used by the Ottomans for long stretches during their occupation of the area. The discovery of female bones in the pits and wells had given rise to talk that they’d tossed members of their harem into these dark spaces when they were done with them, or had simply walled them up and walked away. There was no way to tell who was stashed in this cavern, whether male or female, but it was the center of the room that riveted my attention.

  A pentagram had been carved into the rock floor. Not merely with chalk, though a thick white substance filled the ruts in the stone, but with a spiked tool that could easily have been one of Vlad’s execution tools of choice. Now that tool was being wielded by a man hunched over in a long, flowing black robe, only he was drawing a circle with it around the pentagram. At two points of the pentagram stood earthenware jars filled to the brim with a dark liquid I didn’t want to guess at. The other three points were manned by kneeling children.

  The kids were filthy, their bare hands and feet clearly bound, their eyes screwed shut. Their foreheads were crossed with a long, wicked cut, which caused blood to spill down their cheeks and drip onto the floor. The wounds looked fresh and doubtless were the cause of the cries Nigel and I had heard moments before. But they weren’t the only injuries I could pick out. Similar barely healed cuts marked the children’s hands and feet.

  My stomach turned, and it was only Nigel’s hand snaking out to grab my wrist that kept me in check. I focused on the robed man. He was tall and thin, and I couldn’t see anything of his face since it was shadowed by his heavy cowl. There was no doubt this was our guy. If the kids weren’t indication enough, the harsh slash of silver at his temple damned him as a marked man. In my role of Justice of the Arcana Council, my mission was to seek out the worst criminal offenders in the world’s psychic community. Normally, other than the fact that he was targeting kids, Vlad wouldn’t have piqued my interest. But now that I was here, I was beginning to reassess his candidacy for Justice’s Most Wanted.

  Because next to the pentagram, on a stone column beyond the third kneeling child, stood a golden chalice.

  The Sultan’s Cup.

  “The queen will save us, she comes, she comes.”

  Now that I had eyeballs on the kiddos, I realized they weren’t moving their mouths, but the strength of their prayer was hitting me on such a high level, there was no doubt it was coming from them. But what queen were they searching for?

  I stared harder, trying to understand what I was seeing, first with my regular eyes, then with my third, which flicked open to take the measure of the energy signatures in the chamber. Everything on this earth emitted energy of one type or another, from the inanimate to the divine, and that held true deep underground as well. It was merely a matter of understanding the nature of that energy.

  Plain sight revealed three girls ranged out in a triangle, with the two flanking wings of the pentagram occupied by the pots. Was that on purpose? I searched my memory for the gender of the two children who’d been slain, but couldn’t fix on it. It hadn’t mattered, at the time—the outrage was the same no matter who the children had been. But now…

  My third eye revealed more of the story. The energy currents that ricocheted around this room, along the lines of the pentagram and the newly formed circle, as well as the more tightly drawn triangle of the three children, were completely engorged with power. Another wellspring of energy bubbled from the cup that stood on the stand, and yet more leapt within the man himself. He was no two-bit practitioner, dabbling in powers beyond his ken. He was an extremely strong Connected, a sorcerer in his own right.

  The man stood, and the edges of his robe fell open, revealing a heavy belt from which hung a knife and a thick gold coin. My gaze shot to the stand where the cup rested, and sure enough, it wasn’t alone. Lying beside it was a long slender wand, the four tools representing the four elements of the arcana as well as the tools of the magician. Not only magicians either, if the pentagram and circle were any indication—but witches.

  I knew only one witch reasonably well, but there were many covens that were gradually gaining strength after centuries, even millennia in the shadows. Danae and her coven of deathwalkers had helped me more than once during the war on magic, and now she had taken my place as the head of the House of Swords. The fact did not escape me that here was Nigel, Danae’s bodyguard, literally at my back as I witnessed what looked like a summoning where a witch or a queen or a witch queen was being called. Was this some sort of ritual that involved Danae? Or was there another witch in one of the covens of Europe who was being summoned? And regardless, who was the man doing the summoning?

  While male witches were not unheard of, covens traditionally were run by women. At least the most powerful ones. Maybe my wannabe Vlad was looking to change that.

  Today was not going to be his day.

  I rolled to the side and scooted out of the way to give Nigel a look so he would know firsthand what we were running into. The children, though clearly traumatized and suffering from blood loss, looked to be in fairly good shape. Nevertheless, I didn’t miss the dark reddish stains on the long spike the male witch had wielded. There was a special place in hell for anyone who harmed children, but there wouldn’t be much left of Vlad to experience it by the time Gamon got done with him.

  Turning away from the opening to the cave, the man approached the circle, which allowed Nigel and me to cross farther into the opening. At this point, anyone looking our way would notice us. I prayed the children wouldn’t see us, or at least would give no indication that we were here.

  The man held open his hands, and his voice was rich and full of self-satisfaction as he began to chant. One of the perks of my own recent increase in abilities was that I could easily translate any language. But this wasn’t any language I knew. He spoke with more sound than words, a haunting melody of tones that created a reaction in the energy circuits around him. They leapt and whirled, and in the center of the pentagram, a light burst into being.

  “The queen will come, the queen, the queen. She will save us. The queen will come!”

  The desperate prayers of the children rose up with such power that the man temporarily faltered, and the image in the pentagram roared to life. It was definitely a feminine form, taller than even the man, slender, hair flying in an unseen wind, but the image was completely made of fire. There was no way I could discern the facial features or even anything she was wearing. But I could tell one thing clearly.

  The fire spirit’s temple was marked with a mirror-bright silver slash.

  Oh…crap.

  The male witch regained his equilibrium and started chanting again, this time in Romanian.
r />   “Your time has come to stand forth and be counted, Myanya! No more can you hide from your destiny. You must rise as my consort and my slave as is your birthright.”

  The figure’s focus shifted from the children back to him.

  I stared at the male witch as he repeated his summons, impressed with his sac for all that his ruthless air of possession and entitlement sickened me. If this Myanya was looking to avoid this douchebag, I gave her mad props, even if the slash of silver at her temple marked her as every bit as dangerous as her summoner was. But there were the children to be considered, and for the first time, I realized their point.

  In their blind fear, they were summoning Myanya with every bit as much fervor as the male witch. Even now, she was gradually growing stronger and more real, a scream wrenching from her as her features filled in the barest bit, not enough for identification except for all the wild hair—then dissolved back into white-hot fury, the slash of silver barely recognizable now.

  “No,” she roared back.

  The sorcerer didn’t hesitate. He leaned over and yanked up the spike from the ground, turning to the child hunched over nearest to him. He reared back—

  “No!”

  My voice comingled with Myanya’s as Nigel and I rushed into the opening to the chamber. My hands came together to form a ball of blue magic that instantly exploded outward, catching the male witch in its field. I flung him across the chamber, where he clattered into the far wall, sending ancient bones flying out into the room—and the sudden rush of something sharp and metallic shooting down from the ceiling.

  The male witch screamed in unholy agony as iron spikes set upon a rail impaled him, pinning him to the floor. The feminine fire spirit laughed in delight, then both she and her damning silver slash winked out of existence.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Nigel breaking the line of the circle. Before I could shout a warning, the entire magical construct erupted in a blaze. Nigel shoved one child, then another away from the fire, rolling them across the floor as they flopped and writhed, helpless in their restraints, and I scooped up the third one. I turned and sent another ball of magic to douse the flames, then prepared to get Vlad off to part two of his very bad day, and—