The Rebel Queen (Outlaw 1)

“Marcus Vorenus,” Evan said with a sigh. “She was Marcus’s mate. The prophecy wasn’t about me.”

“Not you.” I had so many thoughts on how the universe would do its will, and nothing we do could thwart it. Myrddin had tried so hard, but someone had tricked him. “So someone from the outer planes found a way to get their Day Queen the king she needed. Summer couldn’t take her place without Marcus at her side, and Myrddin gave them a perfect way to tempt him through.”

What I didn’t say was I doubted Summer took her place at all unless things had gone the way they had. Daniel had been the one to convince her to unleash her power. Without meeting us, I don’t know if she would have found the peace she needed to finally come into her destiny.

And if we hadn’t gone through, we wouldn’t have been able to bring back Dean, who Kelsey now thought was absolutely essential to taking down Myrddin.

“Perhaps the painting went blank because it had done its job. The outer planes were saved when Summer and Marcus took their crowns,” Evan mused. “But the academics came to believe that the object itself wouldn’t close until someone came back through. They thought it was a fail-safe in case someone got trapped by accident. A way to keep the portal open so Marcus could still go through. Even though it went blank, we still believed you could return.”

“Why didn’t Myrddin destroy it?” I asked.

“Because I stole it, of course,” my father admitted. “Well, I tried to. I wasn’t good at the ghost thing at that point, so I convinced someone else to steal it. It wasn’t hard. She was looking for a way to kill the man. I convinced her to be a spy instead. Turns out my little love is pretty good with death magic. She was trying to contact me shortly after I died, and she didn’t stop until she called me to her circle. She’s the one who found Shahidi for me.”

“Christine?” Was he talking about Christine? Christine was my father’s girlfriend for years. She was a witch of medium power, and she was roughly my age. My father might have gotten older over the years, but his taste in twenty-year-olds had never changed. Christine would be almost fifty now. Was she still loyal to my dad even after he’d died? I’d kind of always thought she’d go to the dark side in a heartbeat. Way before I would have said Liv would go all Dark Willow on us.

“Yes. I know you never liked her much, but she was a good woman. She still is. She’s been in the Council headquarters for years now, quietly working with the rebellion,” my father announced with obvious pride. “She’s the one who saved the canvas from being stored on the Hell plane when they couldn’t destroy it. She worked with a Planeswalker, who smuggled it back out.”

“A Planeswalker?” I asked the question, startled that they even knew that name.

Evan frowned. “Those are creepy dudes.”

The fact that my daughter knew what a Planeswalker looked like scared the crap out of me. I’d never seen one until I went to the outer planes. What had Evan and the boys been exposed to? What had they been forced to survive?

Shy’s head nodded. “Yes. He said he owed the royals and that we should tell you his debt is now paid.”

We’d encountered those specialized demons when we were in the outer planes. They were like the bees of those far-flung worlds. They helped spread the energy by walking the planes in regular rotations. When the old queen’s magic had started to fail, so had the Planeswalkers’ magic. We had protected them, and then Summer had taken her place. Now it appeared they’d returned the favor or we might have come through the canvas and straight onto the Hell plane.

“We’ve been trying to figure out when you would come back for years.” Evan reached out and grabbed a cookie. “Trent’s consulted with all kinds of psychics, and Christine gave us the dates the dark coven came up with. As we approached this first date—today—we realized how much magic it would take to get through all the wards and into the building. We stored magic for years.”

“We also tried to take the canvas out of the building, but that didn’t work. It wouldn’t make it through the wards. The best we could do was store it, and then when we thought you might come through, put it someplace you would recognize and we would be able to get to.” Evan sat back. “We knew we would likely get one shot. There was some disagreement on which date to try.”

“I knew it was today,” my father said. “Shy did, too. We felt it deep in our bones. Her bones. Rhys did, too. He’d seen some signs that convinced him it was time. Sasha is a good male but a bloody stubborn ass. Russians. Trent is honestly every bit as bad.”