Dark Queen (Jane Yellowrock #12)

He chuffed in agreement.

Lucrezia was a pretty woman with golden hair and blue-green eyes. She looked way younger than her stated age when turned, and I figured she had been changed a decade or so prior to her reported death and her human self had been replaced with another woman. It was likely that replacement human was the woman recorded by history as having gained a huge amount of weight while supposedly grieving a dead husband, and died young.

Brute’s head on my leg, I stood to the side and watched the combatants, standing back-to-back. Snatches of instructions came to me on the wind. Eli and Lucrezia shook hands. Tex shook Lucrezia’s second’s hand, a human who had been fed on and had been sipping vamp blood for over two hundred years. She was currently known as Whimsical Lou. Stupid name, but that was what the second called herself. Whimsical Lou, No Last Name. The seconds walked out to the positions where their firsts would likely stand, and waited. Eli and Lucrezia stood back-to-back.

The moonlight was a long streak across the choppy water, ahead of the storm. I heard a distant bell-tone and Eli and Lucrezia strode away from one another, Shiloh counting off the paces. On his last pace, Eli stepped quickly to the side. They turned and fired, but Eli was a foot to the side of where he should have been. Lucrezia’s shot missed. Eli’s hit her chest, just left of midcenter. She screamed in that sound of a vamp dying, though it was all drama queen.

They had used standard ammo so the shot would fly true over the distance. She’d live.

I laughed in relief, the sound billowing on the wind and out to sea. The smell of Lucrezia’s blood sharp on the air.

Eli had survived and won his bout. Except that this was supposed to be to the death. He strode toward the downed vamp.

And then time broke in slow motion.

Time in battle is subjective, thick and viscous like taffy. An avalanche of images.

Brute snarled.

Beast leaped into the forefront of my brain, screaming challenge.

In agonizing, protracted fragments of time, Lucrezia’s second, Whimsical Lou, took two long steps into the dueling space, drew a long-barreled handgun. Aimed. Fired.

The round hit Eli. Midcenter. I could see it as it pierced his leather jacket.

Beast screamed. I/we leaped, raced down the sand. Grew claws with my right hand. Drew a blade with my left. The blade took the Whimsical second through the right eye. The claws tore out her throat. All while in midair. She fell. Rolled into the low waves, dark in the moonlight. A shot rang in the night, taking Lou in the chest. Tex, holding his six-shooter, fired again. Lucrezia fell. Tex stood over her. Firing until the chamber was empty. Time snapped back.

I rose from the landing crouch and sprinted to Eli, my combat boots crunching, throwing sand. Eli wasn’t moving, lying on the shore, facedown, head to the side. One arm twisted, outstretched in the slight surf, clear salty bubbles pooling in his palm. My body was so cold it felt like a shard of iceberg. Tears filled my lids and clung there as if holding on to the rims of frozen cliff faces.

I heard Shiloh ask calmly, “Have the deceased signed papers to be turned?”

Bruiser’s voice, sounding cool and distant, said, “Lucrezia is true-dead, as is Whimsical Lou. The judges await status of Eli Younger.”

I knelt, rolled Eli over, placed a hand on his chest, and . . . felt a heartbeat. Didn’t smell blood. I leaned in and sniffed, a long cat-scree of sound, pulling in air over my tongue. No blood. I pressed down on his chest, feeling the kind of armor Uncle Sam’s men wore to war, not just armor against blades, but against bullets. My tears spilled onto his face. I put my mouth at his ear and hissed, “If you’re not dead, I may kill you for scaring me to death.”

“Sorry, Babe.” The words were a breath against my cheek, his lips scarcely moving. “Just remembering how to breathe.”

I thought I might pass out from the relief that rammed through me. I shouted to the wind, “He’s alive. Eli will not be turned.”

“Never wanted to drink blood,” he gasped.

“Are you hit?” I whispered back, asking if the round penetrated the armor.

“Not,” he whispered, the sound creaking with tight breath. I dropped my head to his, forehead to forehead. “But I’m going to kill Lucrezia Borgia.”

“My mistress. Lucrezia Borgia is true-dead,” Tex said. “I took her conniving, snake-belly-low life and her head.”

“Good. I think she broke my rib,” Eli said. “Sucker hurts.”

I rolled Eli up into my arms. He grunted with pain, tightening up to protect the hurt rib. “Babe,” he wheezed. “Next time? We’ve got a backboard.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” I tucked his head against my shoulder and carried him up the stairs and into the house as if he was the most valuable thing in the universe.

“Results of this duel are acceptable to the Onorios.”





CHAPTER 18


    Rainbow-Colored Baby Bunnies and Lollipops





The body of Lucrezia Borgia disappeared, probably back to the EVs’ ship in deeper water. I spared a single thought that the Carusos might be aboard, forced into making the dead into revenants. But I just, flat-out, didn’t care.

Instead, after I deposited Eli in the vamps’ sleeping lair for a hit of Tex’s healing vamp blood, Sabina called me to the third floor. She stood in the center of the middle fighting octagonal and said, “The challenges to Jane Yellowrock have been met, all but one. This latest is for dominance over Clan Yellowrock, and that by Dominique Quessaire, formerly of Clan Arceneau, now secundo heir of Clan Des Citrons.”

Beast growled.

I snarled. Dominance duel. Holy crap. Time again did that battlefield slowdown, where everything happened in overlays of understanding and images. Dominique moved up the stairs and through the scions and blood-servants like a snake through tall grass. I put my hands in my pockets, slouched as if irked by inconsequentials, and looked the challenger over with jaded eyes.

Dominique stank of lemons and fresh human blood. She was dressed in fighting leathers dyed the color of her blond hair, which she wore long and down. On her neck was a necklace of small gray moonstones the same shade as her pale eyes. On the necklace was a pendant, a ruby wired with gold.

I pulled on Beast’s sight and saw the tracery of old, faint magics in the moonstones, empty of power now, but once likely used by a moon witch. The ruby, however, was something more powerful. Intense red motes flashed through it, motes that seemed to call to my own magics. I felt a pull in my midsection, as if I’d swallowed a bag of iron filings, as if a magnet drew on them. Pain slithered through my belly. I almost stepped back. I’d seen a ruby like that before. In fact, I had a ruby like it in my box of magical trinkets.

And if there were two of them, what did they do?

What could they do together? Ahhh. Dominique might know or guess that I had the other ruby.

I had been challenged by Dominique Quessaire. Dominique was a traitor. She had waited to try for my head until after I had something she wanted—my clan and my people. My ruby? Had she been looking for it in Leo’s office when she beat holes in the wall? And Adrianna—her lover whom I had finally killed true-dead—had been after le breloque, the crown of the Dark Queen, when I took her head. Dominique wanted the most important objets de magie. Dominique had visions of grandeur.

She had seen me fight, knew what I could do. She was good with two swords, even better with one. Better than me by far with any weapon.

My mind circled back to Adan. Adan had been playing with time. The last moments of the battle that had freed Adan flashed through my memory. There was something there, something important about using magic. Time slapped back to full speed.