Queen of Diamonds: An Amber Farrell Novel (Bite Back Book 7), page 33
She threw her head back and laughed. “It would have been worth it, if only to see how that worked out. You are alike, you two. You will connect. But which way will the connection flow, eh? Every moment tonight will be like a drop of rain in the headwaters of two rivers, seeking its path to the sea. Who has the greater pull? Which of you has the foundation to resist the pull of the other? Who would have benefited? Vega Martine or Altau?”
She turned away, but continued to speak over her shoulder.
“And all the while, my connection to you grows stronger. My foundation is as broad and wide as the river. I will benefit. So enjoy your night. Meet your challenges. Win your rewards. Prepare yourselves for my blessings to flow down to you.”
Blessings? More chills flowed through me.
She started to walk away and stopped to look down at herself. “Ah! I have been so distracted. This won’t work, will it?”
One hand pulled the tiara from her hair, loosening it. In the time it took for her hand to fall back to her side, she changed. She was suddenly a six-foot-tall, African-American man, dressed in an elegant charcoal gray suit with a silk tie. She now looked to be in her forties; laughter lines edging her bright eyes showed humor, but were balanced by a hint of gray in her hair. A man who’d seen life and gathered wisdom. A man you’d trust with the key to your safe deposit box.
“That’s better,” she said. Her voice was now deep and warm, giving off measured tones, and full of the sounds of an expensive East Coast education.
In her right hand she held a mahogany walking stick—a fashion accessory, because she moved like a dancer. She tapped Tucek on the breastbone.
“You, House Tucek, you’re a gambler, aren’t you? As brash and tasteful as Vegas.”
Tucek’s dress disappeared, to be replaced by the skintight black pants I’d seen earlier, along with a frilled white shirt under a shiny gold vest, topped off by a long black jacket with a yellow carnation in the buttonhole. The vest squeezed and pressed her breasts up.
A riverboat gambler as dreamed up by some Vegas show designer.
“And you, House Farrell.” The cane remained poised for a moment before descending to touch my collarbone gently. “Yes. That works. You’re a principled, capable person who finds yourself on the losing side.”
She whirled and strode away, disappearing into the fog as I looked down at a heavy, double-breasted jacket in gray. Gold buttons. Yellow cuffs with ornate, loopy insignia on the forearms. A yellow sash belt. I reached up and checked the upright collar. A star.
She’d made me a major in the Confederate cavalry.
“Very funny,” I said, but my voice sounded odd.
I felt odd, too. When I’d been reclothed in the Hecate’s substantiation, the clothes fitted me and felt familiar. These didn’t. The way the cloth seemed to stretch and press. The sensation...
Tucek laughed with a hint of hysterics, and then cut it off.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “In our situation, a woman in an outfit like mine shouldn’t find amusement in such an elegantly dressed companion.”
I looked down as the truth of it broke over me. I wasn’t over-endowed in the breast department, but I wasn’t that flat. And my hips weren’t that narrow. And I really didn’t have that in my pants.
Chapter 55
“Aboard! All aboard!”
The tall man in the top hat who’d held the signal lamps on the pier was ushering people up the gangplank.
The Queen of Diamonds was messing with my head again; the man had Top’s face and voice. How had she done that? Had she invaded my mind? Researched my history?
All it achieved was to make me angrier.
What made me angry, made Tara angry, but she had the advantage that her physical body hadn’t just been switched, so her thinking was cooler.
She’s doing it to unsettle you, weaken your defenses. There will be more of that before this is finished. Stay strong. For all her power, you can probably stop her from invading your mind if you keep cool.
Concentrating on Tara, I could share her perceptions of the effects of the queen’s magic. How much she could do, and maybe what she couldn’t. Tara couldn’t manifest. I couldn’t shapeshift. There was no pulse in my jaw at the thought of Blood, so I doubted my fangs would manifest. My Athanate healing was probably similarly blocked. My Athanate senses seemed undimmed—I saw and heard beyond a human ability. Despite being poured into a different body, I felt my Athanate strength and speed were unchanged. Strangely, my eukori seemed to slide past any barriers, but my aura that I’d use for spirit walking was caught; not erased but stunted.
Tucek looked rattled rather than angry, after the exchange with the queen. She was frowning, and I sensed she was catching some trailing sensations of my thoughts through eukori.
She tried to hide her own reaction. “Baron Samedi upsetting you?” she said, indicating the man in the top hat.
“The queen is using the appearance of people I know,” I said.
“Let it go. As she said, any emotion in this substantiation is an opportunity to get her hooks into us. We don’t want that.”
“We. Us. So, we’re both in this together, are we?”
“Yes.”
“Or is that another kind of hook for a connection? Between the two of us, like Vega Martine wanted?”
“Yes,” she said again, taking a deep breath. “Again, like she said, if we’re united in defense of each other, here in the spirit world, we’ll form a connection, a pathway of auras, between us.”
Which might favor Tucek.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, she slipped a hand through my arm. My body automatically responded, bending at the elbow.
She stepped closer to me, almost touching, and whispered so low I could barely make it out.
“We have to talk privately. Working together is our best chance of getting out of here. And as for spirit connections, who would you prefer, me or the queen?”
The touch of her hand on my arm was disconcerting. So was the closeness of her body and the intimacy of whispering.
Was that exactly as distracting as she meant it to be, or was she right? Did I need to use her as an ally to help me rescue Gabrielle and get out of this substantiation?
The thought of staying and being subjected to the queen’s ‘blessings’ was paralyzing.
I was thinking about the queen’s words and what they meant. Her ‘gifts freely given’. I started to connect things. The appearance of Remy on the pier. The discussions we’d had in Denver about the strange and powerful compulsions that had killed the real Remy and forced the Denver coven to obey Weaver. The pit in Astilla de Luna. The rougarou. The strange werewolves joining the Louisiana packs.
What if all of those were the queen’s gifts?
What if I ended up like Remy?
What if I ended up sent back to my House and friends with the seed of destruction inside me?
By now, the others who’d assembled on the pier had walked up the gangplank onto the steamer. Only Tucek and I remained.
Baron Samedi with Top’s face loomed over us, a leer twisting those otherwise familiar features. “Welcome,” he boomed. “Welcome to the unforgettable steamer, the riverboat of dreams, the Queen of Diamonds. Please, step aboard, Major, my lady.”
I hesitated, something making me not want to set foot on the gangplank. “Where are we going?” I asked.
He laughed. Whatever the queen had used to mold her servant into Top’s likeness, she got the laugh wrong. Top laughed from the belly up. Baron Samedi’s laugh was like a stone rattling down a long tin gutter in comparison.
“That very much depends on where you want to be,” he said.
“Tout dépend. Nowhere. Everywhere.” Remy was behind us, waving us on. “Where doesn’t really matter as much as here, when the good times are rolling.”
I moved, if only to get away from them.
My booted foot was an inch above the wooden gangplank when I noticed a stirring in the riverboat. An awareness.
My foot landed.
I could feel the river flow beneath the hull, like I could feel Tucek’s hand pressing on my arm, like I could feel my stranger’s masculine body, familiar and unfamiliar, moving, reacting. I could feel the wind press the tall sides of the riverboat. The tug of hawsers holding against the pier.
All of it mingled with my own senses, becoming a torrent. The scents of coal fire and kerosene and waxed wooden floors and brass polish drifted over me, blending with ladies’ perfumes and rich river mud. Murmurs of voices came from all over the riverboat.
I gasped. Hid it behind a cough.
We walked up the gangplank slowly.
Something of what I was feeling communicated itself to Tucek.
“Don’t say anything here,” she said quietly and urgently. “We can talk in the cabin.” She looked at the packet we’d been given. “Top floor. Shit. Next to the queen’s suite.”
There were steps to the next level on our right, and we moved up them without speaking.
My body handled itself well. It just felt odd, especially overlaid with the sensations from the boat itself.
Most of the passengers had reached their cabins already. As the walkways became emptier, I could see the red eyes of rougarou watching us as we moved up the steps to the top level. There weren’t any more passengers up here.
“Stop,” I said.
As we halted, I felt the sway of the riverboat coming away from the pier. I sensed the change from being partly attached to the land to being entirely a creature of the river. I felt the churn of the paddle and the swiftness of the water, the way the wind veered.
I anticipated the movement of the boat, swayed with it. Tucek stumbled against me.
She wasn’t feeling the boat the way I did. Or maybe she did, but she was using exactly the sort of technique I would have used if our positions were reversed. Distract with flirting and misdirection. The way I’d distracted Zane at the poker game in Albuquerque, and cleaned him out with a cool hand.
Having stumbled against me, she hadn’t moved away. In the same disturbing way I felt the riverboat, I was acutely aware of the weight and warmth of her body. And the reaction my body was having.
“Cabin,” Tucek whispered. “Now. We have a problem.”
The cabin would be a good place. I could sense rougarou all over the ship, and I wanted to get out of their sight, but I needed to understand what I was also sensing about the ship itself.
I shook my head and reached out a hand to the walkway’s ornamentation. From the pier, I’d assumed it was ironwork, the same as the decoration on the galleries of the French Quarter.
I touched it.
“This is wood,” I said.
“How fascinating.”
She didn’t get it.
“No. Living wood. The entire riverboat is made of wood that’s alive. Floor, walls, ceilings. It’s formed of living trees magically trained into shape, it’s...”
“Weird, but not important. The cabin...”
I let it go, and we walked toward the bow.
There were three cabins on their own at the front. The queen’s in the middle, and one to either side. The walkway cut in behind them, so these cabins would have uninterrupted views of the river in daylight.
A large brass key from the packet we’d been given opened the door, and we slipped inside the cabin with relief.
It was quiet in here, sealed off from the rest of the boat in the embrace of a luxurious cabin.
The shutters were closed and locked. There were three gently hissing hurricane lamps, making everything gleam with a buttery light. A stick of mild incense burned in a vase, sitting in a niche by the door. It had a strange scent, familiar, but I couldn’t place it, though the scent stirred something deep my body.
The cabin was split into day and night. A bed took up most of the width of the night cabin to my right, separated from the day cabin by an arch of rosewood. I walked over and touched the arch. It was living wood—all one with the floor, walls and ceiling—almost the whole boat. The tables and chairs in the day cabin were rattan, with soft cushions for the chairs, and glass for the tabletops. At least the rattan furniture wasn’t alive.
I trailed my fingers over the wall of the cabin, where it blended seamlessly with the rosewood arch. I could feel the boat, and touching the wooden structure made that sensation a hundred times more vivid.
Back in Denver at Christmastime, the Lost Boys and I had spirit-walked in trees. I’d shared minds with the soultree of the Threefold Spiral Coven. Did this mean I had some affinity for trees?
Or was this all a trick in the queen’s substantiation?
Why make a boat this way? To show that she could bend things to her will?
The tickle of incense intensified. I felt restless, seeking an outlet I couldn’t name yet. My clothes felt too tight. It was too warm in the cabin.
My body, moving of its own accord, shed my jacket.
Tucek did as well. She opened her vest.
And I had bigger problems than thinking about how or why the Queen of Diamonds was constructed the way it was.
Chapter 56
We were in each other’s arms without any conscious thought on either side. Her lips softened beneath my urgent kiss.
What?
Nothing else mattered. Nothing.
She was a monster. I’d seen this woman casually kill an innocent bystander: Frank, a teenage store clerk in Taos who’d had the bad luck to work in a shop I’d visited. Tucek had killed him in front of me, grunting with pleasure as she drained his blood.
But this balls-for-brains body the queen had given me decided all that didn’t matter. I was being swept along, and so was Tucek.
My mind filled with a kind of muscle memory I didn’t have. I gripped her butt as she wound powerful arms around my shoulders. She broke the kiss to lift her body up and offer me her breasts while her legs climbed me and fastened around my hips.
The steamer slipped across a deep eddy, seeking the central channel of the river to thrust against the current there.
We swayed with the boat.
I shoved her against the door.
Touched the rosewood.
Felt the shock of that tree awareness all the way down my body. Leaked some of it into Tucek.
Just enough to break the headlong rush for both of us.
“Fucking magically enhanced Athanate pheromones,” Tucek hissed. “It’s a trap. You can make them. You can counter them. Concentrate.”
She pinched out the incense stick with her fingers, even though her body was still pressing and grinding against me in ways that threatened to short-circuit all thought.
I let go of her butt and placed both my hands against the door; leaned past her and rested my forehead there as well. Skin contact seemed to work better. It let me borrow some of the stillness of the living wood.
The queen’s magic was working to stop me from projecting my aura, so I couldn’t spirit jump away, but I could just about spirit walk into the trees that made up the boat. Trying that gave me something to concentrate on instead of that brain-stunning, overwhelming lust. Gave me enough breathing space that my Athanate responses could start working, suppressing the pheromones.
The sensation the boat returned wasn’t exactly calming. It wasn’t like spirit jumping into the trees in Denver. I didn’t get the feel of roots and branches, of reaching down and up, of soil and air. Instead, I got a feeling of bands tight around me, of being imprisoned and squeezed and crushed. Not a good feeling for trees, but maybe exactly what I needed at that moment. I needed to crush these sensations and desires that were threatening to derail me.
And seeing how the queen had forced her will on the trees gave me some insight into how she’d done the same to me.
“Okay?” Tucek’s breath on my ear threatened to undo the restraints all over again. At least she’d stopped moving against me and the incense stick wasn’t releasing any more aphrodisiac pheromone scents into the air.
“Sort of,” I said. “She played us from the first, didn’t she? We were being compelled as soon as the fog came up the river.”
“Not exactly, but you’re on the right track.”
I suddenly had a thought. “Can she hear us?”
“I don’t think she eavesdrops. Not her style. Still could be someone in the crew listening. Keep it down.”
So we’re going to keep whispering in each other’s ears. Wonderful.
She had quit climbing up me like an ivy plant, but my body was still crushing hers against the door.
The thought of how close I’d come to having sex with her was sickening, and yet my body remained unconvinced of my change of mind.
That made me angry. Anger was good. Anger was strong.
I forced my muscles to relax and my mind to think about the situation.
Anger might give the queen’s magic a small opportunity to hook into my mind, but it was nothing compared to the opportunity that would have been available for the queen to invade our auras while we were having sex. I could still remember Alice Emerson, speaking primly and warning me about physical intimacy opening pathways into my aura. Whatever the dangers had been back then, they were made a hundred times worse in the spirit world.
In the damn City of Lost Gods.
If anger helped me, I should make Tucek angry as well, but I didn’t trust my eukori, not with the pressure of her body still against me, so I tried words.
“Should I trust what the queen said? For instance, that Vega Martine didn’t actually tell you what your true mission was tonight?”
Tucek huffed. “Altau explains everything he’s planning to you? In which parallel universe?”
I managed a smirk. “You’re right, he doesn’t, but just now and then, I get to tell him what I’ve done after I’ve done it.”
That felt better. I eased my body back, although it was reluctant to let those sensations go. The hot pressure of her body against mine was replaced by cool air and a regretful ache.
Think of Frank dying. Think of the pit at Astilla de Luna. Think about Rosa, the kidnapped girl thrown into that pit.
