Queen of Diamonds: An Amber Farrell Novel (Bite Back Book 7) Read online

  Queen of Diamonds

  An Amber Farrell Novel

  Book 7 of the Bite Back series

  by

  Mark Henwick

  Published by Marque

  Series schedule, reviews & news on

  www.athanate.com

  Bite Back 7 : Queen of Diamonds

  ISBN: 978-1-912499-23-6

  Published in January 2021 by Marque

  Mark Henwick asserts the right to be identified as the author of this work.

  © 2021 Mark Henwick

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and events portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, legal entities, incidents or localities is entirely coincidental. The laws of physics, chemistry, biology and psychology may not work as depicted.

  Author’s Notes

  Asian names:

  Throughout this series, I use the Western sequence (First, Middle, Last Name) to depict names, so as to match with the majority of characters in the books. Most Asian societies would use Last, First, Middle Name.

  Continuity:

  The Bite Back series is a continuous story rather than a string of episodes. It’s not advised to start anywhere but at the beginning, with Book 1, Sleight of Hand, and read through in order.

  There are three novellas between Bite Back 5 (Angel Stakes) and Bite Back 6 (Inside Straight). Two are set in Michigan and explain the background to House Lloyd (The Biting Cold & Winter’s Kiss), and one is set in New York (Change of Regime). It’s not essential to read them before Inside Straight, but they do provide much more information on the side stories that feed into Bite Back at this point.

  Acknowledgments

  Joe, who talked to me about how to really take out a whole fortified building.

  Alejandro, who corrected some of my Spanish. Any errors are mine.

  Mayumi-san, who provided the names of the swords.

  My alpha/beta readers.

  My editor.

  Contents

  Denver

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  El Paso

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Louisiana

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Denver

  Chapter 1

  The setting sun is too big, too red, and it paints the streaming clouds with the color of drying blood. Long shadows creep along the boulevards of the city, dark and thick as crude oil. There are things moving in those shadows.

  We didn’t have much time.

  It was coming nightfall in the City of Lost Gods—the heart of the spirit world, a place spilling over with uncontrolled and unpredictable power harvested from every religion, myth and cult ever to have existed on Earth. It also housed every deity we’d ever worshiped, including ones I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, here or anywhere.

  My Adept team and I had stayed too long; hell, we shouldn’t have been here at all. Spirit walking—‘projecting’, in the new language of the Adepts—into the City was crazy dangerous.

  But it was also a place that touched every part of the human world. Anywhere people were using spirit power, there was a reflection of it here.

  That knowledge lay over the City like a fallen spiderweb. It took the form of connections. It could be physical appearance, patterns, proximity, paths.

  If you had the ability to see—and the experience to interpret what you saw—you could gather all kinds of intelligence about who was using large amounts of power, and where, and sometimes even what they were doing with it.

  What my House and my coven had learned over the last seven weeks painted a chilling picture of an evil power that grew more dangerous by the day—much more than anyone had realized.

  If what we were seeing was right, then Luc Matlal, the leader of the Basilikos Athanate, was getting ready to make a move that could destabilize the entire paranormal community throughout North America, and threaten the delicate negotiations towards a peaceful Emergence of paranormals into human society.

  We’d known he had his own plans for Emergence, which including ruling over paranormals and subjugating humans, whom he considered to be marai—human cattle.

  We’d known he attempted to seize power wherever he could find it, first trying to subvert the Athanate Assembly, and then engineering the kidnapping of Tullah to snare her dragon spirit guide Kaothos, and use her potentially world-breaking magic for his own ends.

  We’d known he was using ancient Aztec rituals to raise power, in blood-soaked workings designed to spread his influence like a cancer through Athanate, Adept and Were, from his base in Yucatán, up through the rest of Mexico and into North America.

  What we hadn’t known was how close he was to success. It was only today that we’d found the last pieces of evidence linking a large, powerful set of workings, with tentacles spreading through Mexico and up into El Paso, where my husband and co-alpha, Alex, was working for the Were’s Southern League.

  Even more worrying, it reached all the way into Louisiana, where the co-alphas of that League, Felix and Cameron, were stalled in their attempts to convince the local Were packs to join us.

  Now we knew why that was.

  We didn’t have all the details—not enough to take to the Athanate Assembly as proof. But together with our on-the-ground, real-world intelligence about the activities of the Mexican Were and their ties to Matlal, we had enough.

  We’d had our str
ong suspicions for weeks, and had used that time to lay plans to break the reach of Matlal’s network. Now, we had to move.

  I had to move.

  That was, assuming I could talk the head of Panethus, Skylur Altau—or his Diakon—into allowing me to leave Denver.

  “We need to go.” That was Flint, one of the two young, handsome, Native American shaman-Adepts that had recently joined my House, and were, with me, part of the new Denver coven.

  I was running point for Flint and Kane on this spirit walk, because we worked well together like this. My projection into the City was a hummingbird: small, vibrant, moving quicker than the eye could follow. Kane was Coyote, Flint was Raven: their spirit animals.

  Flint was right, time was of the essence—both in leaving the City of Lost Gods, and moving on the intel we’d gathered.

  And yet I hesitated.

  Partly, because we were sure we didn’t just happen to find all the information we’d gathered today. Like everything else we’d learned about Matlal here in the spirit world, we felt we’d been led to it. And that eerie yet familiar sensation was crawling over me again, making my neck prickle and my scalp itch. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a shadow slinking through the ruins of the City, dark and sinuous as a jungle cat.

  Of course, when I turned to look, there was nothing there but empty, derelict buildings.

  More and more often in the last weeks, I would think I saw the shadowy cat—a panther, maybe, or a leopard. Or I’d get a half-imagined glimpse of a man watching me from afar, his cloak stirring in an invisible wind—but when I looked for him straight on, I saw nothing.

  Whenever I was here, I could feel something watching. Waiting. Giving us—giving me—hints of where to look and how to view it. Feeding me enough crumbs to form that horrifying picture of what Matlal was up to.

  It was true knowledge, as far as we could tell, and it was desperately needed, but I couldn’t help but feel that those precious crumbs were also leading me, like a mouse following cheese, straight into a trap.

  “Let’s go,” Kane—Coyote—said now. “This place is freaky enough in the daylight. No way do I want to be here after dark.”

  He was right, and yet there was something…

  Amidst the ruins, when I’d turned to look for that shadowy cat, I’d half-glimpsed a building in a sort of park that had decayed into a swampy jungle. From what I could see above the trees, the design of the building looked Nahuatl. Aztec. A typical stepped pyramid with a temple on top.

  “Over there,” I said. “See the pyramid? Maybe it’s something else to do with Matlal.”

  “Last one,” the Coyote snapped. He was obviously antsy, but I’d stopped paying attention. The temple pulled at me; it wanted to be found.

  I darted through the trees, dodging trailers of parasitic moss and always flying from cover to cover; there were predators in this City, above and below. The Raven kept watch looking up, and the Coyote looking down.

  Closer, I saw the ziggurat was damaged. Swamp trees were locked in a contest with the lowest steps, root and branch winning slowly against hard rock. Foliage was creeping up the sides. At the top, the stones of the temple had once been rich with carved detail, but time had eaten them away until they looked pockmarked.

  The City could somehow repair buildings, but this one looked as if it had been forgotten.

  “There’s nothing here,” Raven said.

  “Just a quick look inside,” I replied. I could see the same ruin he saw, but I definitely felt something here. Like a sound below audible range, like an unexpected bump under a searching fingertip, like a feeling of something familiar that refused to surface.

  Huitzilin, the temple breezes whispered. Huitzilin. Hummingbird in Nahuatl. It was calling to me. It wanted me, and not the Coyote or the Raven.

  That low sun was shining straight in through the gaping mouth that formed the door of the summit temple, and that light was so bright I couldn’t see clearly into all the shadowed parts.

  It made them alluring. Mysterious.

  I slipped inside in a blur of iridescent wings.

  The carved designs in there were better preserved. Beautiful stone jaguars twisted around each other on the walls, slinking between representations of the Nahuatl gods, who in turn seemed to writhe up all the way to the ceiling.

  There was a huge statue of a god on the floor, posed as if resting cross-legged against the west-facing wall. The upper half was a monstrous shadow, hinting at a huge, ornate headdress. The lower part was aflame with the light of the setting sun.

  “Enough,” Raven called out, voice as harsh as his spirit animal.

  “We’re here, we might as well see some more,” Coyote countered. “Get an ID on this one. See if there’s any connection to Matlal.”

  As the sun was floating down into the cloudy tumult of the western horizon, its light was inching up the statue’s body, revealing exquisite workmanship. A patterned cloak draped from the shoulders. A jaguar pelt crossed the hips, its rosette markings exquisitely inlaid with matte stone. A hand almost seemed to move, as if reaching out toward the light. The wrist was encased in an ornate bangle which dripped feathers.

  The statue’s bare stomach emerged from shadow, rippled with muscle, stone flesh made red as blood by the setting sun. Above that, the beginnings of a chest plate appeared, ornamented, also edged with feathers.

  There was a sound outside, a raw noise as if the City groaned, followed by a rattling like dry bones. We’d heard it before, but we had no idea where it came from or what it meant, other than it was time to bug out.

  Raven and Coyote had had enough. I could feel them pulling at me, but the design in the center of the statue’s chest plate was just becoming visible. Yet it remained dark, sucking in the light and giving nothing back. A circle of night, the surface as deep and insubstantial as space. A stirring, movement beyond, a call—

  “Back! Now!”

  But I’m falling, falling forward into that eternal circle of darkness, because something calls to me from its depths...

  “Amber!”

  I struggled to open my eyes, feeling like I was swimming up through murky water. When I finally surfaced, I saw a face inches from mine.

  It was Gabrielle, a young and gifted Canadian Adept, trusted lieutenant of Gwendolyn Enkeliekki, who was both Hecate of the Northern Adept League, and leader of the new Denver coven.

  Gwen and Gabrielle had become allies and friends as well as teachers of my wayward, newly discovered Adept powers.

  I suspected they also wanted to keep an eye on my equally wayward, newly discovered Shaman-Adepts, Flint and Kane. Shaman-Adepts were viewed with suspicion by traditional Adepts—meaning, considered to be rogue. Gwen had softened her stance toward them after they helped save her life, but I still suspected she thought they’d teach me their wicked, lawless ways if she didn’t keep a close eye on them.

  I also called them rogues, but usually while I was struggling not to laugh at what they told me they thought of the Northern Adept League’s rules.

  Right now, Gabrielle was looking worried. So were Diana, Tullah, and Gwen, who were pressed in behind her.

  Even my irrepressible rogues looked a little worried. Apparently, unlike me, they had popped right out of the spirit world without a problem.

  “It was difficult pulling you out,” Gwen said. “What happened?”

  I blinked, unsure. “Nothing, really. We’d finished our intelligence mission and were coming back when I saw an Aztec ziggurat we hadn’t mapped yet. It… pulled at me, like some of the other things our little helper has shown us.”

  Gwen’s lips tightened at that. She and Gabrielle both strongly disapproved of putting any trust in our unknown information source, however good the intel turned out to be.

  I went on, “There wasn’t anything in there, though—just a statue of an ancient god. The carving was amazing—it looked almost real. And the way the setting sun lit up the carvings was spectacular.”

&n
bsp; I frowned, trying to bring details to mind. There was something… The chest plate. “It was the chest plate that really struck me, though,” I said. “The ornamentation seemed familiar, somehow.”

  I shook my head. It was already fading, beginning to feel unreal.

  “I thought I heard it call me,” I added. “Huitzilin. Hummingbird. Didn’t even know I knew the word.”

  The others looked at Flint and Kane, who shrugged.

  “We didn’t feel anything,” Kane said.

  “Or hear anything, apart from the usual rattle,” Flint said.

  “Just the usual feeling about wanting to know about these places,” Kane added.

  “And wanting to get the hell out because it was getting dark,” Flint finished.

  “Interesting,” Gwen said.

  Kane began to write up notes on the whiteboard that covered one wall. The building would be called ‘Temple 132’ until we could identify the god it had been dedicated to. He scribbled a brief description, and that it had seemed to single me out.

  “It was odd. That statue. Out of place.” Flint was rubbing his face, probably feeling disoriented, as we all did after a spirit walk. “A stepped ziggurat with a temple on top is classic Aztec. The outer carvings are Aztec. The outside looks weathered and worn. But inside the temple it looks new, and that statue isn’t Aztec. Those patterns—diamonds, lines and triangles like that—are more recent. It’s like an artist’s reinterpretation of an Aztec subject.”

  “That is odd,” Gwen said. The others nodded agreement. We were becoming experts on the City of Lost Gods, and anything new we treated as a warning that some gods were not as forgotten as others.

  But that was an issue for another day. I said, “This is all very interesting, and I’m sure it warrants further investigation, but it’s not what we need to be focusing on right now. We found what we were looking for on our mission today, and it’s not good.”

  That silenced everyone. Kane wrote a big question mark next to Temple 132, and then everyone looked at the second wall, where we had several white boards containing everything we’d learned about Matlal and his operations, through the spirit world and through our own real-world intelligence efforts.