“Goodie,” Koun repeated with something like delight. He didn’t smile but his eyes did glint happily as he turned on his mic. “In my experience queens do not saygoodie.”
“I’m not a regular queen, dude.” I put on and activated my specially constructed comms earbuds and headgear, adjusted the shape for my high-placed, rounded cat ears, and toggled my channel to private. I said, “Alex. Address and floor plan on screen.”
“No updated floor plan on file with the city since 1967, but we know work was done when the house became the prison. We have to assume they handled any construction stuff under the table. Old floor plan and address to follow.” He texted the address, which was near the Garden District, near the corner of Philip and Constance Streets.
I had been inside when Tau, asenza onore, had been imprisoned, but it had been a while, so I pulled the location up on my tablet and studied the layout. Yeah. The floor plan had been totally different from the city’s original. For a house on the outskirts of the Garden District, this one was pretty fancy: two stories with a wide, L-shaped porch with a matching second-floor gallery, an atelier with livable space, and a private alley-driveway. The house had upscale landscaping in a postage-stamp-sized yard, was painted gray with lots of white trim, and looked to be about five thousand square feet. Maybe more.
Alex also sent me video feed from a camera in the prison’s security system, one in the yard that hadn’t been hit with a witch bomb intended to kill electronics. This camera was a low-light model and there was enough ambient light for me to see the front of the house and part of the street. Three witches were standing in a circle that had ripped up the roadway. As poor as New Orleans was these days, it would never get fixed. Which was a stupid thought but the only thing I could focus on while my eyes and brain tried to figure out what was happening on the cam.
“Alex?” I said into my comms. “Have the witches at the prison called us for help?”
“Negative. Not yet. They’re arguing about calling for backup right now.”
“Crap.” I shook my head. Alex was listening in on the witch’s internal electronic security system. It was one of the brands with a trademarked name, a rudimentary AI, and the ability to make phone calls or give orders to the house system with a verbal request. Those things were a piece of cake for someone like Alex to hack into, which he had clearly done a long time ago.
My cell rang just as we turned down St. Charles Avenue. The name on the face said “Lachish Dutillett.” I hadn’t known she was in my contacts, and I certainly hadn’t known she had my official Dark Queen number. I also thought Lachish was an inmate at the null prison, and therefore unable to make calls. I slid my eyes and the cell sideways to Koun so he could see her name.
“Interesting,” my Enforcer said.
I tapped the face, put it on speaker, and answered casually, “Yellowrock here. What can I do for you, Lachish?”
In my earbud, Alex said, “Lachish?” sounding as surprised as I felt.
Lachish said, “We’re under attack. Can you help?”
“The Dark Queen has sworn to protect her city and the sentient beings in it,” I said, which was the proper protocol for my political position, but also wasn’t exactly a yes. Because I wasn’t supposed to know anything about their danger, I asked, “Who is the ‘we’ under attack, who is attacking, and where is the attack taking place?”
“Vampires and humans are attacking the null prison. An unknown number of unidentified black magic witches are assisting. They’ve broken through the outer ward. We’re taking heavy magical fire.”
“Location,” I said, already knowing but keeping up the pretense.
She gave me the address, and I said, “Koun. How long to that address?”
“Two minutes, considering the traffic, My Queen.”
“We’re close by,” I said to the witch. “Two minutes.”
“We’ll hold on.”
Through the cell’s speaker, I heard a low-pitched boom, and the cell vibrated in my hand. It was so deep and heavy, it was as if the Earth itself had been hit by a sonic weapon. Lachish gasped, a strangled sound. The connection ended.
Koun tapped his headgear and informed the others in the team that we needed to “progress with all speed.”
Moments later, Eli’s vehicle, which had ended up in front of us, pulled onto the street and slowed. Koun matched his vehicle’s speed.
Our SUVs’ positions provided us with an excellent field of view. Clearly visible were three witches standing inside a circle.
With Beast’s vision, I could see the witches and the magics that entwined to make the circle and a protective ward over and around them. The energies were unfamiliar and sickly toned, a glowing yellow-green. The attacking witches weren’t the kind pictured in fiction, neither old crones nor buxom beauties, but rather, they were strongly built, sturdy women wearing dresses, sweaters against the chill, and stout leather walking shoes. If I had passed them in a grocery store, I’d have pegged them as upper-class grandmothers who loved to bake, had huge gardens, taught Sunday school in the local Baptist church, wore pearls, and kept cats. None of them were familiar to me.
Some energies screwed with pixels, but I set my cell to take close-up pics and sent them to Alex. “If you can get anything through the magical energies, start facial rec,” I ordered.
“Roger that.”
“For now, left to right, we’ll call them Ursula, Fiona, and Endora.” All the names were witches from TV and movies and Alex chuckled as he passed along the designations to team Koppa and to Bruiser’s teams, with the close-ups, so their designations would be consistent. I tapped my mic, went to the general channel, and noted Koun did the same.
Redheaded Ursula turned her attention to our vehicles, reached down to the broken pavement, and gathered a ballof power between her hands. She was handling raw energy, which was dangerous, sometimes deadly, for even the most powerful of witches. The threat was unmistakable. Eli’s vehicle slammed on brakes and only Koun’s vampire reflexes saved us from rear-ending them.
I felt Eli’s battle-readiness settle over and through him. “Drones are in flight,” he said. Our connection snapped into place inside me and I took a deep, calm, cold breath.
