Nikki Dawes swept into the reception area of Justice Hall, holding aloft a distinctive white-and-orange pastry box. As usual, the food took second chair to her virtuoso clothing performance. Nikki was my right-hand everything and had been almost since the moment I’d first stepped foot in Vegas, all six-foot-four fabulous inches of her, the truest friend you could ever meet from the tip of her varying shades of hair to the heels of her size-thirteen stiletto pumps. She was also a woman whose entrances defied the laws of physics, and today was no exception.
“I come bearing manna from heaven,” she announced.
Mrs. French burst through the door from my private office and hurried across the room, her keen eyes not missing the chaos of the coffee table.
“Oh my, oh my, oh my,” she murmured, the words almost a mantra as she opened the main door wide. “Oh!” she said, stepping back. “My.”
Nikki grinned. “Francine, your face makes this corset worthwhile, and let me tell you, that is saying something.”
Nikki sashayed forward in a gown that looked like it could have been bought in the London shops of Bond Street back in the eighties—the 1880s. With a high frilled collar that plunged down her neckline, the gown was essentially two pieces in one, a dark cream satin underdress bordered by a black and tan striped jacket of sorts. The jacket extended from collar to hem of the gown and was cinched at the back by a corset tied with heavy black cord. The wide skirt was ruched up at the knees to reveal a black crinoline beneath, the style allowing easy viewing of the heavy buckled platform boots that graced Nikki’s glorious feet.
“Nikki,” Danae greeted warmly.
“Danae! I did not know we would be seeing you today, but thank God I got extra cream-filled,” Nikki chortled, her laughter sending her piled-up hair—today a mass of jet-black ringlets—bouncing in jovial delight. Her coiffure added a good eight inches to her height, and it was pierced with what looked like knitting needles holding clocks, gears, and even a small owl. She swept across the room and eyed the mess on the table with interest, then set the box on the side table. She opened it. Immediately, the delicious smell of overprocessed carbohydrates flooded my senses.
“Those are all for us?” Danae asked dubiously, flipping a few strands of her braids over her shoulder.
“All of them, and I’m praying that our French connection has…Oh! excellent.” Nikki grinned as she saw the pot of coffee. “I figured if I was going to go steampunk, the least you all could do was provide the steam.”
Despite her ongoing delight at Mrs. French’s name, I knew that Nikki had already fallen for the diminutive librarian and her unceasingly fussy ways. Mrs. French, for her part, never knew exactly what to do with Nikki. Which wasn’t at all unusual.
Now Mrs. French stepped forward, mesmerized by Nikki’s outfit. “I’ve never seen anything quite like that. What is that material?”
“None of it as authentic as yours, I can tell you that.” Nikki sighed. She reached out to Mrs. French’s tiny form, her long fingers catching the puffed shoulders of Mrs. French’s gown. “I don’t even know how that was made. The costumer had nothing like it, at least not in my size. I was devastated.”
“Hmpf,” Mrs. French managed, but Nikki took her thin-lipped disapproval in stride with a broad wink and turned back to us. Her gaze zipped to the open library door, the containers on the table and all their scattered papers, Danae, and a twittering Mrs. French in rapid succession, taking it all in. Prior to coming to Vegas to ply her trade as a psychic, Nikki had served as a beat cop for years, facing punks and thugs and the kind of violence she never really talked about, but which had marked her all the same. Her Connected intuition had served her well in that role, and it had only gotten keener in the years since she’d hung up her shield and begun advancing her own psychic skills. She’d also been fully briefed on my dustup in Budapest, so she was up to speed.
“I take it that’s the new case?” she asked, pointing to the mess on the table.
“Cases,” I amended. Danae had already begun picking through the pages, matching them up by their style and paper. “Five different crimes over the past…I don’t know how many years, all of them dealing with the witch prophecy Myanya.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Nikki held up a hand. “She sounds like a bubblegum pop singer. Who’s Myanya?”
“Not a who, a what,” Danae corrected, shaking her head. She stretched out her hands, palms forward, as if she was going to catch the swirl of papers like a big bouncing volleyball of energy. “A prophesied spirit who returns every twenty-eight years, usually to a coven that’s positioned in a place where witches most need to command magic at the highest level. Her energy is entirely female, but her curse is that she is chained to the male energy that coexists and balances the female. That male energy does not have to be housed within a male, of course, but it usually is, and he’s usually a Connected of impressive ability.”
“That word ‘chained’ doesn’t sound like it’s a real positive connection for this Myanya,” Nikki observed.
“It’s not,” Danae agreed. “The female witch who hosts Myanya’s spirit becomes extraordinarily powerful once the prophecy is fulfilled. But the path to that power is an exceedingly dark one. In most cases, she must first be betrayed or suppressed, stripped of her magic by her consort, and ground down almost to nothing.”
I grimaced. “And she lets that happen?”
“The spirit embodied in the prophecy does, yes. Myanya flies in the face of the traditional balance of power in the covens. She emerges on this earth in the body of a witch who is in the full flower of her abilities. But, as the legend goes, as Myanya builds toward her incarnation of ultimate strength, she renders her vessel witch vulnerable to attack from an aggressive outside force, usually in the form of a male witch. It’s in this conflict that the sacred energy of the world is reborn, and it is a conflict Myanya cannot avoid. The fire is ready to be lit, and all her rage, all her strength, all her outcry of the oppressed is the sacrifice. And so she goes to war with those who would claim her, loses, and rises again as the scarred warrior. She then leads her coven for twenty-eight years, and their strength increases tenfold under her influence. Then the cycle starts again.”
I studied the papers, thinking about that. “Twenty-eight years,” I muttered. “What are the odds she’d strike again right after the war on magic? Will that make her even more powerful?” A witch on a rampage was never a good thing, but now? If the psychic abilities of whatever vessel witch Myanya chose had been recently amped by the war, this newly reborn Myanya could be seriously bad news.
Danae began sorting through the papers. “Well, the prophecy is due to strike this year, but it hasn’t been fulfilled in two or three cycles. I honestly thought it had run its course. I researched it as part of my training to become high priestess of my coven, but there was no movement among the most powerful covens during the most relevant anniversary in 1990. No covens reported Myanya returning.”
“They could have been lying.”
She shrugged. “They could have. More likely, Myanya failed in her attempt to take over a witch and bend her to her will. It is not an easy prophecy to endure. Once the subjugation is complete and the prophecy of the scarred warrior fulfilled, the witch quite often turns on her oppressor, killing him if he’s not strong enough.”
I stared at her. “She kills the guy who’s just put her through hell?”
“It’s happened. It’s not talked about, but…it’s happened.”
“Right.” I thought back to Vlad on the floor of the cave. He’d wanted to marry Myanya, demanded it as his right. Did he have any idea what kind of honeymoon he was setting himself up for? “So how does that work, exactly? Vlad summoned Myanya, but she was a spirit, not a person. How do you oppress a spirit?”
“If he’d had time to complete the ritual, he would have entered the pentagram and traveled through it to wherever the vessel witch resides,” Danae explained. “The vessel witch is human and can be physically and psychically overpowered by the aggressor. Once broken, the Myanya spirit must submit to her consort and do whatever he asks. He owns her.”
“But there are crimes against Connecteds in these files,” I said, pointing to the boxes. “Presumably Connecteds who aren’t either the witch who Myanya chooses as her vessel or the witch who goes all Lord and Master on her. These are innocent Connecteds filing a grievance. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have shown up in my library.”
As it turned out, petitioning for the aid of Justice was easier than filing a police report. All any afflicted Connected had to do was verbally summon me—me, specifically, not a divine being of any stripe. Then, through a means I hadn’t yet had time to fully explore, the summoner’s request was translated into a written case file. That file was sent to my attention through a delivery system that hadn’t been updated since Abigail Strand had held the office, but which still worked impressively, and depressingly, well.
“You have to understand,” Danae continued. “The energy of Myanya has not developed for the good of witches. It’s evolved to benefit Myanya. In her fury to escape her destiny or in the aftermath of her degradation, she kills, she destroys. Though she normally does not act on such a large scale, she’s capable of burning down entire cities or sending tsunami waves crashing down on the unsuspecting, if she believes one of them might chain her down. She knows she is doomed to die and rise again, smoking from the ashes of her last humiliation, but that humiliation is deep enough to be intolerable, so she fights with the fury of the damned.”
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but I think she’s out there right now,” I said.
“If what you’re telling me is true, she is,” Danae agreed. “Only this time, it’s worse.”
Nikki leaned forward. “Worse how?”
“Because the prophecy begins when Myanya is claimed by the male witch, her power is overmatched, and she is subdued, sent down into the long tumult of the soul before she emerges the scarred warrior. But she has not been claimed. The male witch you encountered in the cavern of Budapest failed, and Myanya returned to her vessel witch, now stronger. Worse, we don’t know if this Vlad is the first male witch who’s attempted to set the prophecy in motion.”
We digested that along with another round of donuts, until Danae finished sorting through the containers and papers. “These case files date from the earliest in 1542, to the most recent in 1906. We’ve no idea when the Myanya prophecy began, but it didn’t generate a complaint before the fifteen hundreds, at least.”
“They were dealing with the plagues.” Nikki snorted. “A crazy witch prophecy probably didn’t seem all that bad.” She picked up the topmost page that rested in a jeweled case and handed it to me. “What is that, Turkish?”
“Yep.” I read down the document until I reached the relevant part. “In this complaint, Myanya took over the body of a young girl who was promised into…some sort of harem, it looks like. A dozen women were with her when her power was challenged, though it doesn’t go into detail as to challenged how.”
“It usually doesn’t,” Danae said, her tone dark. She bit into a second donut. Sometimes your problems were too big for one donut.
I ignored the siren call of sugar and fat for the moment, as well as Danae’s cryptic comment. “Apparently, the witch laid waste to the harem—the wives, the servants, I assume the guy in charge of the harem as well, whatever you want to call him. Husband doesn’t quite wash, given that these people were essentially slaves.”
Nikki sat back. “So she blew up the entire house? Then what happened? She simply walked free?”
Danae supplied this information. “The pattern is always the same in the end. The vessel carrying the Myanya spirit is enslaved by another more powerful opponent, her body and will broken in service to her oppressor. Then, after a period of subjugation, she emerges triumphant but scarred and takes up her mantle as a warrior for her coven. The coven with the warrior queen Myanya becomes the most powerful of its era, for either twenty-eight years, or as long as the queen lives after the challenge. Sometimes that isn’t very long.”
“What do you mean?” I looked over my third donut. “I thought the whole point of this was that she wins the gold ring of awesome and rules for twenty-eight years. Lather, rinse out the blood, repeat.”
“That’s true,” Danae said. “But some trials are harsher than others, and the scars can run more deeply in the mind than in the flesh. Far too many of the warrior queens go mad after the trauma they endure.”
Nikki blew out a long breath. “That really doesn’t seem like a job I’d be trying all that hard to get.”
“We have no record of Myanya taking form since 1934,” Danae said thoughtfully. She had set her donut down on the tray, only half-eaten. I didn’t know if I should admire her restraint or accuse her of anti-Americanism. “As to where she could be targeting now…we’d have to look to the strongest covens. We’ll need to make a list.”
“Oh! A moment, please, a moment. I have just the thing for this.” Mrs. French sprang up and hustled into the next room, and a moment later, a tall, slender, flat object came wheeling out of my office, Mrs. French clucking along behind it. “Miss Dawes, you’ll be so pleased, I hope.”
“Francesca! You’re a gem!” Nikki said, standing and striding over to pull the rolling whiteboard the rest of the way. She moved it around so it faced Danae and me. “You honestly can’t have an investigation without a whiteboard,” she announced. “I personally prefer a corkboard and pins, but Mrs. French overruled me.”
“The boys would have a field day with acres of string and pushpins,” Mrs. French put in, with the world-weary tone of a woman who’d seen it all…and had cleaned up afterward. “Trust me on this one.”
“But a whiteboard gives us most of what we need and get this.” Nikki picked up a small metallic-looking cube from the pen tray and tossed it toward the pristine white expanse. It stuck. “Magnetic,” she crowed.
“Well, you did ask me to find you one,” Mrs. French said, bemused.
“It’s so great.” Nikki sighed contentedly as she tossed three more cubes against the surface of the white board, chortling when they also stuck. Then she picked up a dry-erase marker and turned back to us.
“So who’ve we got?” she asked, pen poised. “Who are the bigs in witch world?”
Danae nodded. “The Dubai coven is very strong right now, but I can’t see Myanya trying to get a foothold there. It’s one of the few male-centric covens in the world. Bali is a possibility too, as well as Istanbul. And, of course, the Moscow coven. Myanya targeted them in 1962. It was the last time I have record of her, because the prophecy was denied.”
“Denied?” That was the first I’d heard that term applied to Myanya. “You mean someone died in the process?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Danae leaned forward and looked at the whiteboard. “I don’t think Myanya is that far from us, though. Again, the strongest coven right now in the northern hemisphere is mine, and we haven’t had any activity of this sort. I would know.”
“You would? That’s how this works? As the head of the coven, you know everything going on? Because I was head of the House of Swords, and I wasn’t always as looped in as I wanted to be.”
“Were you to become the head of a coven, you would know, yes. It would take a very powerful witch to keep such a thing hidden from you, and you would have had ample warning that one of your own was building such a power.”
“Right,” I said. “Good thing I’m not a witch.”
“Well…” Danae sighed. “About that.”