The office was quiet. I picked up the case and turned it around in my hands, flicking my third eye open to see the locking mechanism when my regular eyes didn’t catch it. With a quick turn of a lever, the case opened with a hiss, the scent of musty papers filling the room.
I carefully spread open the rolled-up sheaf of parchment, weighting the edges down with small bean bags, and leaned closer to peer at the tightly crabbed handwriting. Another complaint against a long-ago male witch, who might or might not be the village blacksmith. Sorrow wafted from the pages as it detailed the death of the complainants’ beloved pets, and a suspicion of other affronts in the small town—a farm going bankrupt, a baby dying in childbirth, a husband forced into a war not of his choosing. So many crimes over the past millennia had been laid at the feet of Connecteds, it was easy to dismiss the cases out of hand.
But I couldn’t do that. Each crime deserved its review, and my experience in the library of Justice at the start of this case, with some of the crimes in witchdom jostling for position while others leered down from on high, made me realize that there was more than a little malice lurking in the huddled stacks. It was odd to think of the cases themselves harboring ill will for their investigators, but such was the contradiction of being a Connected.
I closed my eyes and flattened my hands on the pages, unable to read its energy, exactly, but, as of very recently, able to do the next best thing.
“Speak,” I murmured.
“It wasn’t my fault.” The voice was low, tortured, and ineffably sad, and I raised my gaze across the room, where a man in a long leather apron stood, gripping a pair of long, metal tongs. He looked like a man who’d once been broad-shouldered, robust, but who’d shrunken to a shadow of his former self.
And then there was the fact that he was dead.
Death’s Eye of Horus tattoo on my arm burned hot as I regarded the man, taking in his pleading eyes. I didn’t speak, and, like so many others, he rushed to fill the vacuum of silence. “The children died. The animals too. But I had no quarrel with my neighbors, and they none with me. But I was a witch. Everyone knew it, accepted it. And when things went wrong, well…they needed someone to blame. They ran me out of town, forcing me to barely make a living as a traveling smith, but when that wasn’t enough, they—” He looked around. “They contacted you. You never came, though.” His hangdog expression deepened. “I prayed you would. I wanted my name cleared.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. There were two sides to every cold case. The criminals who got away—and the wrongly accused who never got a chance to breathe freely again, who lived their lives with the weight of the allegations against them pressing them down, inescapable. But I could see the blacksmith clearly, and there was no silver mark at his temple, only the faint, purplish corona of the wronged around his slumped shoulders. “Rest in peace, Herr Smith. May your soul be light as you take the next step in the journey.”
The spirit before me smiled in genuine relief, for all that the smile was rueful. “I’m grateful for your time, Justice. I am. But there’s no more journeying for me, I’m afraid. For me, all that’s left is…”
I pursed my lips as the spirit’s eyes lifted and fixed on something over my left shoulder. His eyes widened, surprise and wonder lightening his whole face, and then—
And then he disappeared.
I leaned my elbows on the table, watching the pages of the case before me crackle with energy until they too faded out of existence. Only the case itself remained, destined for some utility closet deep in the heart of the library that only Mrs. French knew the location of. I sighed, weary to the bone, but satisfied as I blew the remaining parchment dust across my desk. “That’s never gonna get old.”
A sharp, irritated rap sounded in the reception area, and I smiled as I heard Mrs. French call out her reassurance that she would greet the caller. Still, it was past nine on a Thursday night. Nothing good ever happened after nine p.m. on a Thursday except football. And the season was over for the year.
For a moment, I thought it could be Nikki, but Nikki had made several new friends with the burly, brusque, highly skilled security team the Devil had handpicked to guard Lara’s house in LA. Nikki was on indefinite leave at the moment.
“Oh! Well, my goodness, what a surprise, ah, miss, ah…ma’am. You make yourself comfortable, and I’ll—oh! Please, there’s no need for—”
A second later, a slender form filled the doorway to the inner sanctum, the woman’s silhouette instantly recognizable in her black combat gear. Gamon, Judgment of the Arcana Council, gazed around my office with clear derision before flicking her gaze to me.
“Nice place,” she said sarcastically. “Are you ever going to upgrade from Mid-Nineteenth Century?”
“I’ve discovered quite a fondness for Mid-Nineteenth Century.”
Gamon snorted, but she didn’t move from the doorway. Because my third eye was already open, I didn’t miss the agitation in her energy field, the desperate humming of her circuits. Gamon had been a stone-cold killer in her day. She didn’t get agitated, and she didn’t do desperate.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Nothing happened. No, that’s not true. You happened.” She strode a few steps into the office, then pivoted as Mrs. French bobbed into the doorway behind her. “I’m not going to eat her. You can stop hovering.”
“Well!” Mrs. French’s huffy response made me smile as she straightened indignantly. “I was going to put on a pot of tea for you, but I will simply leave you to your conversation. Good night, Justice.” She bobbed a curtsey, then spun on her heel.
I watched Gamon drop her body into one of my client chairs, her tension still wound tight, and waited for her to continue. It didn’t take long.
“Something shifted in the Connecteds’ energy field when you dropped that thingamajig off the precipice,” she began. “I’ve looked for it, and it’s gone. Do you have it?”
“The star of Myanya?”
“Inanna.”
“Whatever. No, I haven’t found it,” I said. “And for the record, I wasn’t the one who wanted to drop it. You practically shook it out of my hand.”
“Well, ever since I did, things have—gotten weird. I don’t like it, and I want to—” She flapped her hand. “Undo it. Somehow.”
“Is there trouble?”
“No, no…nothing like that.” Aggravated, Gamon pushed herself back out of her chair and stalked around the room, peering with distaste at the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century oil paintings adorning the walls in ornate frames, the delicate side tables and the reupholstered coach. “Where’d you get all this crap?” she muttered.
Her problem wasn’t with my sense of décor, however, so I waited her out. One of the benefits of immortality, time was always on your side.
Finally, she turned back to me, her arms folded. “I’ve been forgiven,” she snapped.
Wasn’t expecting that.
“Um—what?”
“You know something about my past. Not a lot. Not anywhere near everything. But I’ve done some things I do not regret. They needed to be done, and I did them.”
She spoke with such a mix of conviction, pride, and self-loathing that all I could do was stare. Gamon wasn’t looking at me, however; she was looking at the line of pneumatic tubes behind me, and she wasn’t really seeing those either.
Gamon continued. “I’ve long since come to terms with my crimes. I’ll be judged—or I won’t—I really don’t give a damn. But this…” She grimaced. “This is just weird.”
“You say you were forgiven. By whom?”
“I don’t know, exactly. But when I left my mark on a place, it was deep and wide. The energy shifted, and stayed shifted. Bleak, soulless, lost. For years and, in some cases, decades.” She shifted her gaze to me, and her eyes were hard and cutting, as if daring me to defy her. “That’s the way it needed to be.”
“And now?”
“It’s shifted back. I’m not saying it’s healed. I did too much damage for that. But the collateral deaths and injuries, the innocents I harmed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, that energy should still be there. It’s not. In its place is something new and different. Something…almost hopeful.” She flexed her hands into fists. “I don’t like it.”
I bit my lip, struggling to keep a straight face. Only Gamon would decry the day when enough time had passed for some poor soul to pray for her forgiveness instead of her cruel and painful death. “What would you like me to do about it?” I asked evenly.
“Find that chunk of metal, wherever it got to, and destroy it,” she said without hesitation. “It’s clearly dangerous. It needs to go.”
“I dropped it into space,” I protested. “It probably burned up in the atmosphere.”
“It didn’t,” she said darkly. “It’s out there somewhere, and I worry it won’t stop doing—” She flapped her hands. “Whatever it’s doing. You’re the great artifact hunter. You need to find it.”
“I—I’ll try,” I said, forcing myself not to shade my voice too gently. There was something else going on with the star of Myanya, something Gamon was concerned about…something reborn? I didn’t know, but I had no desire to poke what was obviously an open wound. “I’ll look for it wherever I go. If it’s causing that much disturbance, I suspect it’ll turn up sooner rather than later.”
“It needs to be destroyed,” she said again, but her voice wavered slightly, and she glanced away. “I didn’t realize what its powers were before I had you throw it. I just wanted it away from me. That was clearly stupid.”
She stood then, nodding sharply at me. “Justice,” she said, and for the first time since she entered my office, her mouth slid into a half grin.
“Judgment.” I stood as well. I walked around the desk and accompanied her out to the lobby, not missing her continued disapproval of my décor. For a woman who preferred her environment cold, utilitarian, and a million miles up in the sky, I didn’t think she had any room to talk.
Mrs. French had apparently left for the night, and after I closed the door on Gamon, I turned back to my office. No matter how judgy Judgment was, I liked the place. It made me feel connected to past Justices, particularly Abigail Strand, whose life I needed to look into more deeply anyway.
I headed toward the library to do exactly that when I heard the familiar shuddering noise from my inner office, the sound of an incoming case—one arriving from some distance, from the sound of it. No matter how silly it felt, I truly enjoyed actually seeing a case land, so I changed direction and returned to my office. My desk was clear, but sure enough, the third tube to the right was vibrating in earnest now, preparing to receive a new canister—
Shhhhh-thunk!
But there was nothing there.
Frowning, I moved toward the wall of tubes, then peered into the velvet-lined trough that served as a landing pad for the more well-behaved canisters—as opposed to those that simply shot out into the room, clanging against the desk, the chairs, or the far walls. There was something there, but—it wasn’t a canister.
My brows shot up.
I reached out and picked up a small silver pendant, no bigger than a nickel, swinging from a long metal chain. It was a fiery ball of flame, a shooting star, and as I held it in my hand, it warmed to the heat of my palm. Something light and buoyant danced across its surface, and I found myself grinning despite myself, my heart filled with unexpected joy.
Where it’d come from, who’d strung it on a chain, and why it had landed in my office, I couldn’t begin to guess, but as to what I’d do with it…
I closed my hand around it and held it to my heart.
“I’ve got you, Inanna,” I whispered. “A new day has dawned, and I’ve got you.”
Then I turned out the lights of Justice Hall, and headed home.
~ ~ ~
Thank you so much for reading THE LOST QUEEN! I sincerely hope you enjoyed the book. If so, I welcome any and all reviews on the book retail site of your choice!
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