Page 4 of Queens Will Play

“Mama Camey—Camey!” Maggie suddenly woke from her nap and began babbling away. She would be a toddler for decades still, but she was going through her first growth spurt and had begun to form sentences. Now, she babbled on nonstop when she was awake. “Home now?”

“We’re almost home, yes,” I said, turning around to give her a smile. “Are you hungry?”

She nodded. “Hung’gy. Ceeam drink?”

She still ate the supplemental food we’d started giving her since I first found her. I’d been fighting a demon on top of the Space Needle, and I managed to steal his lunch bag. Inside, I found Maggie, thankfully still alive. So, she’d come home to live with us.

All gargoyles took several hundred years to reach the point where they were ready to go off on their own, so taking her on had been a commitment. But her mother was dead, and we couldn’t give her back to her own people back in Otherworld. The woodland calico gargoyles wouldn’t have been kind to her, as far as we could tell.

“We’re almost there,” Trillian said.

I sighed. That meant bodyguards and handmaidens and all the trappings that had become an albatross around my shoulders. Maybe someday I’d adjust to them, but the whole entourage thing still felt foreign to me and weighed heavily on my shoulders. I just wanted to breathe sometimes, to run through a grassy field, with no one to oversee my every move.

“All right, back to reality,” I said as we pulled into the driveway. “Let’s go find out what Vanzir wants.”

As we entered my quarters, I tossed my cloak to Vine, my personal maid. I’d gone through four before I found one who fully clicked with my nature. Vine understood me, and she loved her job so she did everything she could to make royal life easier on me.

“Vanzir here yet?” I asked.

She nodded. “He’s in the living room,” she said. “Do you want to change first, and do you want some coffee?”

I shook my head. “Nope and nope, but send Miki in anyway. Vanzir might be hungry.”

“Right,” Vine said, turning away as the four of us headed into the living room.

Vanzir was there, looking even more like a David Bowie goblin-king lookalike. His platinum hair hung in a long shag, and his eyes still spun like a kaleidoscope, never landing on any one color. He let out a sigh when he saw us.

I was about to ask him what the hell was going on—the man looked wrecked—but my phone buzzed at that moment. I glanced at it to see a text from Aeval.

Frowning—Aeval and Titania seldom ever texted me—I scanned her message.

vanzir should be at your barrow by now. i’m warning you now: do not take his side, or you and i are going to have words. i know he’s your friend, but i’m warning you now: you know better than to make an enemy of me.

My breath caught in my chest. Aeval never made a threat on which she wasn’t willing to follow through. With a sinking feeling, I turned to Vanzir and asked him, “Dude, what the fuck did you do?”

CHAPTER TWO

The others stared at me, but Vanzir’s expression showed me he knew exactly what I was talking about. I sat down next to him. “What happened?”

“The bitch texted you, didn’t she?” Vanzir asked, his voice bitter.

“Yeah. She sent me an ultimatum without any explanation. Tell me now,” I said. The Keraastar diamond hung heavy around my neck, throbbing. Usually, it pulsed with a low beat, continually feeding me energy and strength, but now it reverberated through my body. I shivered. It had been doing that a lot over the past few weeks.

The diamond hadn’t brought me to the throne, but it had paved the way. I hadn’t been born to rule, and the last thing I needed was to get embroiled in a beef with my fellow Fae Queens. They were born to greatness. My powers were a bare blip on the radar compared to theirs. I felt like an interloper as it was. I didn’t need my friends causing rifts. And I didn’t need Titania and Aeval policing who I was friends with.

Vanzir flopped onto the sofa, leaning back as he crossed his left leg across his right knee. He was snazzier than he used to be, but even a couple of years living with the queen of Darkness & Night hadn’t dampened his nature. A dream chaser demon, Vanzir could fuck you up in the head if he wanted to. He fed on life energy of dreaming humans. He didn’t have to—he wasn’t a vampire who needed the energy to survive—but if he wanted to, he could drain a person dry. And he was charming—too charming for his own good.

“She kicked me out,” he said, playing with one of his boot buckles. “I didn’t do anything. She’s threatening to keep me away from Lahi,” he added. “Or she thinks she is. I’ll be damned if I let her keep me from visiting my daughter.”

“Oh, good gods,” I said, sinking into my chair. “This is bad. Tell us everything.” I knew Aeval—and I knew Vanzir even better. They were both vengeful, and they weren’t above playing dirty to get what they wanted.

He muttered something under his breath. “Apparently, she’s decided she needs a true consort, not some ragtag demon. Honestly, I don’t know what went down. Two weeks ago, things seemed fine between us, but today, she told me she had something she needed to talk to me about. She told me her advisors are starting to clamor against their queen having a demon for a consort, and she needs to take a real consort who can give her a royal heir. We got into it, and I said a few things that weren’t very nice, but only after she called me a ragtag demon who needs to stand on his own two feet.”

I groaned. That sounded precisely like something Aeval would say. She wouldn’t even think to consider the feelings of others—not unless it benefited her in some way.

Smoky cleared his throat, his eyes narrowing. “Are you sure you didn’t do something to cause this?” He folded his arms across his chest, eyeing Vanzir with a suspicious look.

Oh great. I wasn’t going to have to play peacemaker again, was I? Smoky and Vanzir had a strained past, when it came to me, and I thought that was water under the bridge but Smoky’s tone told me that maybe he hadn’t swept it into the past like I had.