Chapter 15

  Coffee first or strategy first?” Nina asked as Richard pulled away from the curb.

  “Coffee,” he said without hesitation. “We’ve got a pick-up point three minutes away—corner of Tremont and Parker, just before the hill rises. They’ll be waiting.”

  I blinked. “You have a coffee team?”

  Richard just gave me a sideways look, like of course.

  Sure enough, when the Defender rolled up to the corner, two SUVs were already idling hazard-light orange in the half-light. The air smelled of diesel and fresh bagels. A woman in a wool cap and another man in tactical black stepped forward, efficient and silent, and pressed steaming cups and foil-wrapped breakfast sandwiches through my window and Nina’s.

  “Latte, no sugar. Earl Grey with honey. Black coffee for the driver,” the woman rattled off like she’d known us for years.

  Nina raised her eyebrows. “I could get used to this.”

  I sat back, astonished. Not just by the precision—by the fact that someone had thought of breakfast while we were still running from shadows. It was like being scooped into the machinery of something vast, hidden, and terrifyingly competent.

  Meanwhile, Richard had slipped out, coat collar high, speaking low with two members of his team a few steps away. Their heads bent close together, the kind of quiet urgency that said the coffee drop was cover for a deeper exchange.

  Tudor pressed his paws against the window, fogging the glass with his nose as if to remind me: we were still very much in the middle of something dangerous, no matter how good the croissant smelled.

  “No, Strategy,” Richard said, eyes on the road as he slid back in behind the wheel.. His voice had that clipped, too-awake quality that meant he’d been up for hours. “Same plan we agreed on last night. We’ll cover more ground if we split up. Nina, you take the lake—”

  “Looking for the historian and those old folktale records,” Nina said, nodding. “If the Phoenix Queen really left footprints here, they’ll be in the local ghost stories. And I want to see if there are any lay lines that allowed Sadie to be more easily discovered..”

  Richard continued, “I’ll handle the Quebec consulate. There’s a file—sealed for decades— that might tell us who else has been tracking her and why.”

  “And me?” I asked.

  “You’ll be at the Athenaeum,” Richard said.

  “That’s my natural habitat,” I said. “So I’m digging through the rare archives to find any references to securing and release a supernation queen?

  “And anything else tied to the Gardner family that shouldn’t exist,” Richard added. Tudor agreed with a rumbling snore.

  For a while we just drove, Boston shrinking behind us in the rearview and Vermont’s frost- laced fields unrolling ahead. The trees were bare skeletons, the rivers edged with glass. I traced my fingertip over Tudor’s ears and tried not to think about how this felt like the first leg of something you couldn’t turn back from.

  In the mirror, Nina kept checking her phone. Not scrolling—checking. The kind of quick, furtive glances people give when they’re expecting bad news or a coded text from someone they don’t want you to know about.

  Richard’s hands rested light on the wheel, but every so often he’d tighten his grip just enough for the leather to creak. Controlled intensity. Like the Range Rover was the only thing keeping him from flying apart.

  “Question,” I said, breaking the silence. “Are we ever going to talk about the fact that you seem to have a bottomless Vatican file cabinet in your head?”

  That got me the faintest curve of a smile. “Some files are restricted. Sealed decades ago. The Phoenix Queen dossier is one of them. Only certain consulates can access it.”

  “Like the one in Quebec,” Nina said.

  He nodded once. “She was never meant to roam freely – and maybe sonone knows more about the last 30 years..”

  Tudor’s purr cut off mid-breath. His head came up, ears flattening, eyes fixed on Richard like he’d just insulted him personally.

  “Okay,” I said, scratching under his chin to calm him. “That was ominous. Even for you.”

  Richard glanced at me, then back to the road. “The Vatican believes—no, knows—that Elizabeth wasn’t born immortal. She became something else after drinking phoenix blood. It wasn’t a choice. The lore says it was forced on her by Thomas Seymour during an assault.

  Phoenix blood grants life… but it twists it. She burned and was reborn that night. A cycle without end. We know that at first the phoenix cycles were quite regular – she would need to retreat from court, often feigning illness.”

  “Then the records fit,” I said slowly. “October 1562 at Hampton Court—she almost dies of smallpox, vanishes from sight, and then reappears looking… restored. Everyone called it a miracle, but what if it was a cycle?”

  “And the white-lead mask everyone talks about—officially to hide scars—but what if it’s camouflage after the burn, not vanity?”

  “All those court whispers in 1560–61 about Dudley—secret marriage, a hidden baby—they always spike when she disappears. What if those absences weren’t pregnancies at all but phoenix retreats?”

  “Amy Robsart dies in September 1560 and the rumor mill catches fire, and suddenly any time Elizabeth withdraws it’s ‘she’s with child’—when maybe what people were seeing was the rhythm of her cycles.”

  “And at the end—1602 into 1603—she refuses to go to bed for days, like sleep would be surrender. That sounds less like an old queen avoiding a pillow and more like someone terrified of what the next fire would take.”

  I heard how I sounded and didn’t hate it. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it doesn’t read like crazy anymore. It reads like maintenance intervals.”

  Nina’s mouth curved, darkly pleased. “Men can’t explain a woman’s absence, so they invent a baby. Rivers can’t explain the burn, so they call it tide. Either way, the cycle doesn’t ask permission.”

  Nina leaned forward between the seats. “It’s why she’s not like other immortals. The blood changed her on a deeper level—tied her power to cycles of fire and ash. Every time she burns, she comes back… stronger. Meaner.”

  “And less human,” Richard added. “That’s why the Vatican had her under containment. The last confirmed sighting was in Boston—Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—during the heist in 1990. Then… nothing. She vanished. Everyone assumed she’d gone dormant, maybe forever.”

  I frowned. “Wait, you think she was there during the heist?”

  “She wasn’t just there,” Richard said. “We think she was the reason for it. Two of the stolen pieces match descriptions of bindings used to weaken her

  ” But if she’s in a box she can’t be killing people. So who is?” I asked.

  We all look ed a little thoughtful.I tightened my arms around Tudor. “So this trip isn’t just about looking for clues. You’re both assuming she’s already awake.”

  “Not fully,” Richard said. “But awake enough to move the pieces on the board. She’s found you now; we need to understand how”

  The Range Rover hummed along the curve of the highway, the mountains ahead catching the first pale edge of daylight.

  And I had the feeling that whatever waited for us in Vermont, we were already too close to it.

  The lake didn’t so much sit in the valley as haunt it. A sheet of steel-gray water stretched between cliffs dusted with snow, the surface veiled in a thin, shifting mist that curled and broke like something breathing beneath. Locals called it Bewitched Lake Willoughby in that way Vermonters did—half-joking, half-dead-serious.

  Nina zipped her coat higher and crunched down the shore path, her boots sinking into frozen sand. She’d already been warned the wind could knife straight through you here, but she hadn’t expected it to carry whispers, the kind you could almost mistake for reeds moving. Her siren blood was called to the water. She was pretty sure she saw a pale green form under the surface.

  A man was waiting at the end of the dock—a wiry figure in a wool cap, leaning on a cane carved with looping crow motifs. The local historical society’s “keeper of the winter records,” according to the librarian who’d set up the meeting.

  “You’re the one asking about… her,” he said before she’d even introduced herself. Nina held up her travel mug in greeting. “The red-haired woman in Renaissance dress?”

  He nodded once, eyes sharpening. “She walked here. Across the ice. Always on the winter solstice. The air goes still, the ice turned black under her feet, and the mist follows like it’s tethered.”

  Nina kept her voice level. “And people have seen this?”

  “More than seen.” He tapped his cane against the dock. “Some followed. Didn’t come back.”

  A shiver ran down Nina’s spine that had nothing to do with the cold. “What do the stories say she is?”

  The man’s gaze drifted over the lake. “Firebird. Ash woman. A thing that burns but does not die. The old folks called it ashes that breathe—like a hearth gone cold that still hides the coals.”

  Nina’s pen hovered over her notebook. “That matches something I’ve heard before.” She didn’t add Phoenix Queen, but it thrummed in her mind all the same.

  He jerked his chin toward the small, weathered boathouse on shore. “You want proof, you look in the archive box. Bottom shelf, locked. No one’s opened it in years.”

  The “locked” part was generous—one rusted latch gave way under a twist of her multitool.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Inside, layered between brittle folktale pamphlets and curling maps, she found it: a woodcut print.

  It showed the lake in midwinter, ice rippling black under the carved figure of a woman striding forward. Hair like carved flame, skirts stiff with frost, her eyes two dark hollows. Even in crude ink, Nina could see the unmistakable outline of Tudor dress.

  She brushed snow from the frame and slid it into her satchel, heart pounding. This wasn’t just a story.

  The mist over the lake shifted again, as if the water had been listening.

  Nina hugged her coat tighter and started across the gravel toward her car. The air had that brittle pre-dawn bite, the kind that pinched your nose and made your breath look like smoke. She clicked the fob, headlights blinking, and that was when it happened—

  A sudden splash from the shoreline, hard enough to send a spray of ice-cold droplets stinging her cheek. It wasn’t the clean sound of a rock thrown in, but something deliberate, heavier, almost playful. Then came the giggle—wet, bubbling, gargling, like a child laughing underwater.

  Nina froze, hand on her keys, pulse hammering. “Not funny,” she muttered into the fog, but her voice didn’t carry.

  On instinct, she pulled out her phone, thumb trembling as she scrolled to Mom. The call clicked through on the second ring.

  “Sweetheart? It’s early.”

  “Yeah, I know. Sorry. I—” Nina turned back to the mist. It was curling tighter now, the giggle dissolving into ripples. “I need to ask you something. About the family. About… the Queen.”

  A pause, then her mother’s tone dropped, serious in a way Nina rarely heard. “You’ve found something.”

  “I found someone, maybe. Or at least a sign. Did we—did our line ever serve her directly?”

  Her mom sighed, not annoyed but heavy, like this was a story she’d been waiting to tell. “There’s a record of your tenth-great-aunt. They called her Johanna. She was among the last to sing for Elizabeth before she crossed the ocean. When the Queen’s circle made its way north—through Champlain, through hidden passages under the mountains—it was Johanna who stayed behind.”

  “Stayed behind where?” Nina whispered.

  “At the lake. Cartographers swore, even then, there were channels under the water. They said you could slip through to Champlain, even the St. Lawrence, if you knew the song. The Vatican dismissed it as folklore. But your aunt never returned. Some said she drowned. Others said she chose the water, bound herself to it, guarding the way.”

  Nina’s throat tightened. “So she could still be here.”

  Her mother hesitated. “The bloodline remembers. If the Queen calls again, Johanna would not ignore it. Look for her pearls. She always wore a necklace of river pearls, strung rough, from the shallows. She swore they hummed when the tide was right.”

  The call clicked silent as the signal faded.

  Nina lowered the phone, heart in her mouth. The mist parted just enough to show a figure at the shoreline—a woman rising waist-deep from the black water, hair streaming like riverweed, eyes pale fire. Around her throat gleamed a strand of uneven river pearls, each bead slick with lake water, each glowing faintly as though alive.

  She lifted a dripping hand and beckoned, slow and deliberate. The gurgling laugh softened into words that weren’t words, an underwater syllable Nina felt in her ribs more than heard. She took a step closer, gravel crunching under her boot.

  “Do you see her?” the voice seemed to say. “Do you carry her message?”

  Nina shivered, every instinct screaming to run, but she held her ground. The figure’s lips shaped the words with aching clarity this time:

  “Tell the Queen: the river still remembers her fire.”

  Then the woman’s form scattered with the mist, the pearls glinting last before the lake smoothed itself as if nothing had ever broken its surface.

  Nina stood there a long time, breath sharp in the cold air, before she finally turned the key in her car door. She had something now—a thread knotted into blood, water, and pearls. Something she would return to.

  Richard had lied, and it bothered him. There was no Consulate visit, but there was an old acquaintance to meet.

  The convent sat low against the edge of Lake Memphremagog, its limestone walls pale in the thin dawn light. No sign announced it, no bell, no flag—just a weathered wooden door marked with a cross so worn it seemed more scar than symbol. The lake behind it lapped cold and gray, the kind of water that could swallow whole centuries without a ripple.

  Richard parked the Defender on the gravel drive and pulled his coat tighter. He crossed the walkway like a man returning to a grave.

  Inside, the air smelled of beeswax and cedar. A narrow chapel opened off the entryway—plain pews, no ornament, a single candle flickering beneath a crucifix. A woman in her sixties stood by the altar rail, her habit simple, gray hair bound tightly, eyes like cut glass.

  “Margaret Green,” Richard said. His voice softened on her name.

  She inclined her head. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  “I had to,” he answered.

  Her gaze flicked to the folder under her arm. “This request is irregular.”

  “So is the subject.”

  She weighed that for a beat before handing it over. “You have twenty minutes. No photographs.”

  He took it to a desk near the chapel light, loosening the ribbon around the thick stack of parchment and vellum. The pages breathed dust and secrets.

  On the first was an emblem burned into the corner: fire curling into the shape of a crown. Beneath it, an inked line in Latin he didn’t need to translate—Regina quae non morietur. The Queen who would not die.

  Another page held a witness account dated 1643, penned in a slanted French hand:

  “In the deep snows of New France, we saw her pass—an English queen in scarlet, her skin pale as frost. She moved through the forest as if the branches bent away for her. No beast would approach. No man could follow.”

  The later records read like a hunt. Mentions in Quebec City, whispers in Montreal, then long silences—decades at a time—before she surfaced again.

  One entry from the 19th century mentioned “anchors,” always paired with the symbol of a crow. He knew the term: crow-line anchors. Bloodline tethers, used to keep dangerous immortals grounded in a place or body.

  Sadie’s lineage.

  The final document stopped him cold: a Vatican internal note from 1990. No signature, no crest, just a single typed line—Gardner assets compromised. Containment breach probable.

  He stared at it, every instinct telling him the breach wasn’t an accident.

  When he returned the folder, Margaret’s eyes searched his. “You think she was freed,” she said, not quite a question.

  “I think someone wants her to be.”

  Her frown deepened. “Then you are already too late.”

  She lowered herself onto a bench, folding her hands as though in prayer. “You need to understand—once, I believed I was saving the world. The Vatican said Elizabeth’s fire had to be bound, that humanity could not endure her cycles forever. I sang the words, made the circle, helped trick her into her prison beneath Boston. I thought it was mercy.” She shook her head slowly. “I thought it was right.” The light caught the silver necklace at her throat, a crow in flight.

  Richard’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t speak.

  Her voice thinned. “But when my child was born—when Sadie came into the world—the Church changed. They turned on me. Said the anchor line should be severed, cut clean. They tried to kill me before I could place her. I barely escaped with my life.”

  Margaret’s gaze flicked toward the dark lake beyond the chapel window. “I chose the Warrens. Kind, steady, faithful. I believed if she grew hidden in Conncticut, far from Elizabeth’s reach, she would never be found. That she could live as a girl, not as a tether.”

  Her eyes glittered. “But the fire always remembers its blood. And Elizabeth always finds what is hers.”

  Silence hung between them, the only sound the faint lap of water against the shore.

  Margaret reached for Richard’s hand across the worn wood of the pew. Her grip was surprisingly firm. “You must put this to rights. Do what I could not. Don’t give my existence away—if the Vatican learns I still breathe, they will finish what they started. But know this: the Queen is stirring, and she will not forgive the one who chained her She will come for me, she will come for number 46.”

  Then, with a resolve that looked decades old, she reached beneath the bench and withdrew a long bundle wrapped in oilcloth. She laid it across Richard’s arms. “This was used in the binding. A relic older than the Vatican itself, forged for the House of the Crow. I kept it when they tried to burn me.”

  Richard unwrapped the cloth and stared. A dagger, dark iron, its hilt capped with a crow’s head. The blade was etched with sigils so worn they looked like veins of shadow. It hummed faintly, as if remembering old blood.

  Margaret’s voice was steady. “If Sadie is the anchor, this may be the only weapon that can sever—or save—what’s coming. Guard it well. It will want to be used.”

  She let go, shoulders sagging as though the words and the gift had cost her years she didn’t have to spare.

  The Athenaeum had that particular winter-morning quiet that made every footstep sound guilty. Outside, the streets were glazed in frost; inside, golden light pooled under the tall arched windows, turning the dust motes into slow-falling sparks.

  Edna was at the front desk in a cardigan the color of dried roses, sipping something out of a mug shaped like a cat’s face. “You’re here early,” she said without looking up.

  “It’s my natural state,” I said, shaking the cold from my coat. Tudor was probably curled up back at my apartment, living his best life. Candy had repaired most things and the landlord had added new locks. Richard and Nina had grabbed an Airbnb down the road. I still didn’t quite know where his crew was staying. I planned on staying with Nina tonight while Richard’s team swept my place for stray curses. “Need a little help with the archives.”

  Edna’s eyes flicked up, sly as a cat. “Lucky for you, I just happen to have the keys.”

  She led me down the narrow aisle to a glass-front cabinet that looked like it had been locked since Vermont’s statehood. The key turned with a satisfying clink, and she stepped aside.

  Inside: spines so faded they were practically rumors, folders tied in string, boxes that still smelled faintly of cedar. I pulled a stack of folios to the reading table and started working through them.

  Half an hour later, I found it—a handwritten diary bound in cracked leather, dated 1903. The author, a Gardner cousin nobody had bothered to Wikipedia, rambled about Boston society gossip and the weather… until one entry stopped me cold:

  . The paper had yellowed like old teeth, and the ink had feathered in places, but the hand was steady, elegant, upper-class Bostonian. m

  “April 14. Isabella has opened her doors again. Her delight is in welcoming the European strays—‘guests,’ she calls them—who arrive with odd manners and odder hours. Pale, most of them. So pale the servants whisper they are consumptives. Yet they do not cough. They do not sweat. They merely glide about the halls as if night is their chosen hour.”

  The letter was folded into the diary, tucked like a confession never meant to be mailed. Addressed in curling script to a “Mrs. T. Cabot of Beacon Hill,” it described Isabella with a fondness edged in unease:

  “She insists her museum shall be their home, a gathering place of every breed—painters and princes, witches and wanderers. She claims Boston shall be elevated thereby. But in truth it seems to me less salon, more hostel of monstrosities. The rooms are arranged like cages dressed in velvet.”

  I pressed my fingers to the paper, the texture rough under the pads. I could see Isabella in my mind’s eye—dark eyes, sharp nose, silks draped like armor—beaming as she led her pale, feverless guests into rooms glittering with Venetian glass and Flemish panels. A hostess to immortals. A patroness to nightmares.

  The thought slid through me, sharp as ice: Isabella had built her museum like a monster hostel. Vampires slipping down the stairwells at midnight. Were-beasts caged in rooms large enough to pace. Witches clutching charms while pretending to admire Rembrandts. And at the center, the Phoenix Queen herself, Elizabeth, given her own chamber in the Dutch Room.

  It made too much sense. Every chamber—Moorish, Gothic, Venetian—was a habitat. A disguise. And the Dutch Room, with its tapestries and portraits and that impossible light, must have been Elizabeth’s safe space. Until it wasn’t.

  The ink on the page blurred as if my eyes didn’t want to focus, but I forced myself to keep reading, heart pounding, because for the first time I wasn’t sure if I was holding gossip, or proof.

  There was a sketch in the margin—rough, but enough. Red hair coiled high. Gown with a square neckline. Definitely Tudor.

  I glanced at my tote. The journal—the warm, wrong, impossible one—was practically humming against my notebook. I pulled it out and flipped to a blank page.

  The warmth spread into my palms. And then, in looping, unfamiliar script, words began to write themselves:

  “We were never apart. We were the closest of friends.”

  My mouth went dry. “That’s… not creepy at all,” I whispered, closing it fast.

  Edna, from across the room: “Find something good?”

  “Just history being weird,” I said, shoving both books into my bag before she could wander over.

  ---

  By the time the three of us regrouped at a little Air BNB off Main Street, the sun was down and the windows steamed with heat from the woodstove. Nina nursed a glass of wine. Richard stuck to black coffee.

  We each offered the safe version of our day: Nina mentioned “a few old stories” from the lake, Richard claimed “a quick consult” in Quebec, and I talked about “some interesting diary entries.”

  None of us mentioned the part that would keep us awake tonight. We may have to release a dangerous entity back into the world.

  As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about the day, , flipping through dusty folios that smelled like mold and candle soot, I saw them. Not words this time, not even the crow. But an illustration in the margin of a forgotten travel diary—an oval of rough beads, lopsided, almost crude, drawn in ink the color of silt. Pearls. Not perfect, not polished. The kind that come from river mussels, not ocean oysters.

  My stomach clenched.

  Because I’d seen those before. I couldn’t say how, only that the sight made something inside me ache with recognition—like a shadow brushing past my shoulder. The margin note beneath the sketch read only: “strung in Vermont waters.”

  I had touched the page and the pearls seemed to ripple, as though the ink itself remembered being worn.

  For a moment, I swore I heard a laugh—low and bubbling, like water over stone—and the faintest whisper, slipping between the shelves:

  “Tell the Queen.”