The Cobra Queen, page 17
And now, holding a sabre from a second lieutenant in the Lincoln Cavalry, I summoned my own spirit guide. ‘Lieutenant Luke Thomas,’ I declared with purpose, and my obsidian ring warmed, along with my pendant, and the familiar misty cool descended. Soon Luke was holding my hands over his sword, and to my delight I found that he was flesh. Perhaps we had one more night of the moon’s strength to enjoy.
‘Luke.’
‘Miss Pandora.’ He took his sword and slid it into its sheath. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I am.’ I grinned at the sight of him.
‘You feel okay after …?’
‘I do,’ I told him and pressed my lips to his. He leaned into me and embraced me, feeling warm and alive, his leather boots creaking and clothes shifting in ways I did not notice when he was in spirit form. In his passionate embrace I was lifted slightly off the floor. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever felt better, actually,’ I whispered, stroking the warm skin on his neck and the barely detectable stubble at his clean-shaven jaw.
‘I am so pleased you are, uh, flesh tonight,’ I said, though my words made me blush a touch. Making him flesh the day after or before did not always work, as it depended on the strength of that particular full moon. While a ‘full’ moon really was only a moment in time, the moon’s strength and visible brightness lasted before and after that moment, sometimes for a day or so on either side. Some strength was evidently left.
I explained our task of checking on the portal beneath the mansion and, apprehensive, we took the small lift down to the lobby level. I used the skeleton key to open the hidden door beneath the curving mezzanine stairs and we walked the narrow, dark corridor that led to the secret side of the great mansion, the side where Dr Barrett’s laboratory was. Neither of us wanted to be there after what had played out on our previous visit, yet as we neared the portal I felt a kind of charge. Not just the adrenaline of fear, but something else. Power? Was I feeling a kind of power?
‘I can feel the Agitation,’ Luke told me, and I held his hand tightly.
‘What does it feel like?’ I asked. ‘I feel something too.’
‘It feels like I’m being … pulled,’ he said, and I felt a fresh stab of concern.
‘How do you mean, exactly?’ I asked. Would he be pulled two ways? In the Revolution, would he be the ally I expected, even though he was … dead? And I was alive?
‘Miss Pandora, I don’t think I can explain, exactly.’
I frowned. We stood in Dr Barrett’s lab for a moment, and I tried not to look at the steel table and the terrifying chair with its leather straps. This place made me uneasy. I knew my way around now, having been down more than once, and I wasted no time entering Barrett’s old study – a charred place chaotic with papers and books, and evidence of the fire that had consumed him in life. It had a dark feeling about it, possibly even worse than the fascinating but eerie lab it was attached to, but this was not my final destination. I walked up and paused near the last door, still holding Luke’s hand. It was a small door, secured with a bolt and lock I had put on it myself. There was some reassurance seeing that was locked, but of course that was a false reassurance.
‘I need to check the portal now,’ I told Luke, feeling excited and on edge as I unlocked the bolt. ‘Do you think you can accompany me? If you feel you can’t I will understand. I can go in alone.’
‘I will accompany you,’ my soldier told me, jaw clenched. ‘Miss Pandora, I will do anything I can to assist you. As your spirit guide I wish I could do more. If there is something wrong beyond this door, some fresh danger, I’ll not have you face it alone.’
Biting my lip, I opened the door and we carefully stepped through. The smell of sulphur hit my nose immediately, and despite having been in this place before, my eyes widened at the sight before me.
The vast space beyond the small door was awe-inspiring, both chilling and beautiful, and it was something few living mortals ever did or could see. The supernatural world preferred its secrets, and something of this magnitude would never be willingly offered up for view to the living, for seeing this space, seeing this, left little doubt of the existence of an Otherworld or a mighty world for the dead.
Before us were twenty-five broad stone steps leading down through a giant, echoing chamber of natural rock and disappearing into a pool of dark water. This was spectacular enough, but it was what was beyond it that really chilled the soul – some thirty feet in was an immense, flat rock wall, carved into which was a circular portal surrounded by some kind of runes. The entire chamber was lit by torches that seemed never to go out. Stalactites hung from the ceiling, stalagmites reaching up from the cavern floor, and on either side of the portal were stacks of bones – human bones it seemed, though I had never hung around long enough to check – and on either side were towering stone statues of muscled gods – one female, one male – each with fearsome death heads and a gold staff in their colossal hands. The sight of them chilled me to my core, and yet I felt a kind of power within me building.
Today the cavernous space seemed quiet, the giant wrought-iron torches glowing with their ever-lit red flames. Not green, but red like common flames. This was a relief. I’d seen these dark shallow waters filling with the dead, corpses risen from the graves of Manhattan, from the streets themselves. But for now the space was still. It appeared the portal was closed.
My shoulders dropped. So there was time yet.
‘Luke, we should –’ I began, but when I turned to my companion I stopped short. Lieutenant Luke had come over strange, his normally bright blue eyes black in the firelight of the cavern. On instinct I leaped away from him, my heart thumping in my chest. I’d seen his eyes change colour before and it had not been good. This, though, seemed different. He was not green-eyed as he’d been when the necromancer had controlled him and he’d been set on me. What did this mean exactly? ‘Luke?’ I ventured. ‘Luke, are you okay?’ I was backing up towards the door. Oh, I really should not have brought him into the cavern. It was too close to the portal. This had been a mistake …
‘Beware, Pandora English, The Seventh,’ he announced in a deep, formal tone, his voice sounding distant and warped. ‘The Cobra Queen has come. Tomorrow, she wakes.’
The Cobra Queen? I thought, and my mind hit upon fragments of my nightmares, the hissing snakes, the glowing green serpents I’d seen in the mist about the Met. ‘Who is she? Luke?’
At the sound of my voice Luke, my spirit guide, seemed to awaken from the trance. ‘What did I say?’ he asked me, frowning, face etched with concern. ‘I believe I conveyed a message. What was it I said, Miss Pandora?’
My shoulders slumped. ‘You do not recall?’ I stopped backing away and stood my ground. Searching his eyes, I found them blue once more. He was back. For now. ‘Well, Luke, you said the Cobra Queen wakes tomorrow.’
Tomorrow, the day of the Met launch. I thought of the exhibition my mother had cryptically warned me about. Hatshepsut had not primarily been queen but a king – a pharaoh. It was one of the most unique things about her. But she had been a queen also. And the cobra reference was not clear. What would she have to do with cobras?
‘Does the name mean anything to you?’ I asked. ‘A Cobra Queen?’
He shook his head and frowned. ‘I do not know the villain who comes.’
‘Well, that’s helpful,’ I snapped, my frustration peaking. I had already faced the worst creatures to come to Spektor and Manhattan and it wasn’t over yet. Vampires, thousands of spiders, the roaming dead. My mother can tell me that I am The Seventh but she can’t tell me what I need to do. The Revolution of the Dead is coming soon, but no one can say when. And now the Cobra Queen is here, or coming tomorrow, and we don’t know who she is or where? Come on!
I could see I’d hurt Lieutenant Luke’s feelings. He held his hands in front of his body, head bowed. ‘I am sorry,’ I said and embraced him. ‘I’m just under a lot of pressure and feeling pretty lost with all this. Perhaps we should leave here. I have seen what I needed to, and I feel … strange. The portal is closed. Let’s go.’
‘Miss Pandora, I am sorry I cannot tell you more,’ he said. ‘I feel strange here, also. If you are satisfied the portal is closed, perhaps you are right and we should make haste to leave this place. May I wait on you tonight? Perhaps provide you with some sustenance?’
His old-fashioned way of talking often amused me, and it was sweet. (Perhaps that was how my colleagues had regarded my small town way of speaking when I’d first arrived from Gretchenville?) I took his hand and we left the cavern and the late Dr Barrett’s study and laboratory. I was feeling unsettled and unsure of what I could do to prepare for the next day. Being The Seventh was very strange. I was the youngest of those in my circle, in some cases by several centuries, yet everyone was counting on me. It felt backwards, somehow. In so many ways they ultimately could not help me, either, or inform me. Not my mother. Not Celia. Not my spirit guide. It really was going to be up to me in the end. What had Deus said? That they would all rely on me? My mother had essentially mirrored the same words after a lifetime spent trying to deny the truth of what her daughter would need to do.
I was terrified of what was to come. Absolutely terrified. And this Cobra Queen? Whatever or whoever she was, she was sure to be unaffected by rice. I was going to need to learn some new tricks.
The second night we made love was somehow more magical than the first.
We’d returned from the cavern unsettled, but once I had Luke in Celia’s penthouse I found myself wanting to draw him into my room. I’d near leaped on the poor soldier once I’d closed the door, and our lovemaking had been unbridled, utterly instinctual, our initial caution tossed aside. Now, in the aftermath, I lay flat on my back on top of the bed covers, body warm and tingling, one arm reaching over to touch Luke’s naked form, which was dewy with light perspiration. His warm chest rose and fell, heart still beating fast. So hurried had I been, that I’d not even pulled the bed covers back, and our clothes were strewn across the hardwood floor. My lover was without a stitch of clothing – I’d seen to that – and somehow my bra had remained on, though only just. I sat up slightly to pull it the rest of the way off, and lay back dreamily, opening my body to the night air coming in through the open window. What a deeply satisfying feeling of sensuality this was. Foreign. Exciting. Free.
Luke turned his head to look at me once more, his wonderfully human face alight with passion, cheeks rosy, blue eyes soft and admiring, and I raised my hand to caress his lightly stubbled cheek. If this was it, if the Revolution started tomorrow, at least I’d had this moment. At least I knew the love of this man, this ghost, this soldier, this spirit guide. Wherever Luke’s allegiances would ultimately be, when pushed by these forces we faced, at least I knew this. There was no lie in his touch, his passion. His heart was true.
‘Luke … thank you for coming with me into the cavern,’ I said then, my mind turning back inevitably to the issues at hand.
Luke remained still, his gaze turning to the ceiling as he spoke. ‘It is good that the portal remains closed, Miss Pandora, though I feel a strong pull down there. And the house is beginning to speak once more.’
The rumblings from below the basement. Yes, I’d heard it too.
‘It troubles me when you change like that … like you did down in the cavern,’ I said, rolling on to one unclothed hip. He had done it before. That last time we’d been in the cavern and Luke had not been himself was still something of a sore spot. He’d tried to kill me. ‘You scared me.’
At this Luke sat up abruptly and slid his legs over the opposite side of the bed. ‘I am so sorry,’ he said. ‘I shall leave you, Miss Pandora. I am sorry to have troubled you.’ He began gathering his things, sliding his breeches on and pulling on his socks and boots.
‘Hold it right there,’ I replied, sitting up and taking him by his still firm and human waist, just as he finished buckling his leather belt. ‘I’m not asking you to leave, I am just telling you I find it troubling when you aren’t quite yourself. Though this time it seemed it was a warning you were delivering.’ I curled my body around him. ‘Don’t go, please. I didn’t mean it like that.’
‘I did not harm you?’ Lieutenant Luke said, turning to look at me, his strong jaw tense and his eyes wide with concern. ‘I could not live with myself, Miss Pandora, if I found I had harmed you.’ He ran a gentle finger over my face, and down the delicate skin of my neck to the clavicle. I shivered.
‘Just now? No, you did not hurt me. Far from it. And down in the cavern you only spoke. Your eyes weren’t … green.’ But perhaps still a little terrifying.
‘I wish I could control these things,’ he said, casting his gaze to the floor, his magnificent shoulders slumping forward.
A sound at the window distracted me, and I turned. ‘Oh!’ I exclaimed suddenly and moved so fast I was a blur. In seconds I was standing at the end of the bed, wearing Luke’s Union soldier frock coat to cover my nakedness, having buttoned it hastily at the waist so it wouldn’t open too far. I held it around myself with both arms crossed over my chest. I could move fast when I needed to. Supernaturally fast.
It was Deus, the ancient Sanguine. He was hanging upside down at my open window, pale face seeming almost to glow in the low light.
‘I am so sorry to surprise you, Pandora English, The Seventh,’ he said. ‘You called me to you.’
How awkward. ‘You are mistaken,’ I said, blushing like a beet.
Deus turned himself in the air, a thoroughly odd movement, and came to rest, right way up, on my windowsill. He wore his neat black suit, hair slicked down. ‘You must feed, to prepare for what is to come tomorrow,’ he said sensibly. ‘You will need your strength.’
I flicked my eyes to my lover, and found him on his feet, hands balled into fists. His blue eyes blazed with anger and protectiveness. The sight of him shirtless was arousing, the proximity of Deus and his magnetic blood, confusing. Oh, this was not good. The timing was terrible. Luke was not good with vampires, not good at all. He deeply distrusted them, and not without reason.
‘This isn’t a convenient time,’ I managed in a voice that sounded much smaller than intended. Dear me, I did feel confused. My body was pulled two ways, and my mind in many others – I want to stay here with Luke, but I probably should feed? Though I couldn’t do that in front of Luke, yet I don’t want him to leave. And I have never been conscious of drinking Deus’s blood, so could I even do it now, consciously? But if I was already doing it in the night and I needed to do it for everyone’s good then what was the harm in doing it again? …
‘You are not welcome here, vampire,’ Lieutenant Luke said in a low voice brimming with anger that shocked me out of my tangle of thoughts. ‘Miss Pandora told you it is not a convenient time. She does not want you here.’ He almost seemed to growl.
Oh, I had said that, hadn’t I? I bit my lip.
‘I see you are a man tonight,’ Deus said, putting emphasis on the word in his deep, ancient accent, grinning as always. That bloody grin. He was by now standing on the hardwood floor of my room, about a foot inside from the window, not far from where my clothes lay, and the tensions were rising between these two men in my room, one undead, one dead (though temporarily not deceased?). Deus had moved closer, somehow imperceptibly. It was so curious how he was able to do that.
‘Yes, I am a man and Miss Pandora does not want you here,’ Luke told him, and walked towards him, spine straight with a military bearing, ready to fight for me.
Oh hell.
‘You have consummated your human form,’ Deus said impassively, still smiling that eternal Kathakano smile and standing the ground he had gained.
At this reference to our consummation, Lieutenant Luke, usually so gentle, took his sword from the floor and flew threateningly at the grinning vampire, blue eyes ablaze.
‘Luke, stop!’ I shouted, and at my words he stopped just short of Deus, who had not so much as flinched, and his sword dropped to the ground with a loud clang.
He had … disappeared? I flitted my eyes around the room. Luke had vanished. No!
‘My goddess! What happened? Where did he go?’ I cried, running forward in a panic, Luke’s still solid frock coat flying behind me. I stood next to Deus and looked around me, wide-eyed. ‘Luke! Luke, where are you?’ I said. I lifted the heavy sword from the ground and held it by the hilt. ‘Luke?’
The air grew cool around us and a nebulous shape emerged a few feet away, misty and then more solid until Second Lieutenant Luke Thomas returned to us, again in human form. Only he wasn’t holding his hand over mine this time. The obsidian ring on my finger had not grown hot. We weren’t holding the sword together. I stood holding it and he appeared again in his uniform, his discarded clothing on my floor fading until it vanished. We exchanged a look, both appearing confused.
‘Oh goddess!’ I yelped and sprinted to the ensuite bathroom, suddenly finding myself naked. Luke’s Union frock coat no longer covered me, it was back on him, just as it always was when he first appeared.
Still blushing vigorously but somewhat more composed, I emerged from the bathroom a few minutes later, wearing a carefully wrapped towel for lack of clothing options. I’d moved so fast I’d not even realised I was still holding the sword, and I approached them, with sword and towel, wearing as even an expression as I could muster. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ I said, slowly approaching my uniformed soldier and my Sanguine blood supplier. ‘Can someone please explain just what is going on?’ I placed Luke’s sword carefully on the ground, out of the immediate reach of both of them, not wanting to hand it to its owner while he was still giving Deus the side-eye.
‘He has consummated his human form,’ Deus repeated calmly. He was grinning of course, though this time I detected some genuine amusement.
