Sea Breeze: Phantom Queen Book 8 - A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries) Read online

  Sea Breeze

  Phantom Queen Diaries Book 8

  Shayne Silvers

  Cameron O’Connell

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Shayne Silvers & Cameron O’Connell

  Sea Breeze

  The Phantom Queen Diaries Book 8

  A Temple Verse Series

  © 2019, Shayne Silvers / Argento Publishing, LLC / Cameron O’Connell

  [email protected]

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

  SHAYNE AND CAMERON

  Shayne Silvers, here.

  Cameron O’Connell is one helluva writer, and he’s worked tirelessly to merge a story into the Temple Verse that would provide a different and unique voice, but a complementary tone to my other novels. SOME people might say I’m hard to work with. But certainly, Cameron would never…

  Hey! Pipe down over there, author monkey! Get back to your writing cave and finish the next Phantom Queen Novel!

  Ahem. Now, where was I?

  This is book 8 in the Phantom Queen Diaries, which is a series that ties into the existing Temple Verse with Nate Temple and Callie Penrose. This series could also be read independently if one so chose. Then again, you, the reader, will get SO much more out of my existing books (and this series) by reading them all in tandem.

  But that’s not up to us. It’s up to you, the reader.

  You tell us…

  Remember when dead in the water was just an expression? Not anymore.

  Fresh from her unplanned stay in the Otherworld, Quinn MacKenna is forced to wait in Fae’s worst Air BnB—a grotesque gingerbread house in a forest full of breadcrumbs—for the captain who will guide her ship to the fabled Atlantis.

  But just as idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, idle minds are the Titans’ torture chamber.

  The last thing Quinn needs to do is climb down the rabbit hole of her own fears and self-doubts to confront her inner Beasts. She has enough on her mind as she struggles to rediscover her identity and frets over the whereabouts of an old friend bent on vengeance and mayhem. An old friend she may have to put in the grave, whether she wants to or not.

  Before she can worry about any of that, Quinn will first have to heal old wounds, enlist the aid of allies old and new, and somehow survive the turbulent tides of fate. Unfortunately, in order to stay afloat, she’ll have to sail into yet another unfamiliar world, a realm of monsters and men and gods so old they are known only as Titans.

  It’s all hands on deck—monsters, sea-dogs, and scallywags—as Quinn strives to save who can be saved and beat those who must be beaten. With new powers at her disposal and an ill-matched crew to manage, it will be up to her to navigate these troubled waters. Odysseus may as well have taken a leisure cruise back from Troy compared to Quinn’s fatally fateful voyage.

  Quinn will have to bring enough rum to get a Cyclops drunk. Or die trying. Because it’s awfully hard to steer when gods are rocking the boat.

  And the world desperately needs her to come back home.

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  1

  I straddled the line between darkness and light, lying on my back, body bisected—one half sun-kissed, the other bathed in starlight. The sensation was strange, but then so was my life; it hardly seemed fair to start throwing stones. The Twilight Valley, as I’d come to call this place, was one of many bizarre realms in Fae. Here the difference between day and night was a matter of distance, not time. I’d recently found I could walk from one side of the valley to the other and experience the passage of a day in a matter of minutes. Since finding the valley, I’d come here several times, fascinated by the strangeness of it, by the stark duality it represented. I supposed it had amused me, at first. Now, I felt like it embodied me, in a way. Caught between two extremes, trapped between two worlds, allegiances tugged in two directions.

  You get the gist.

  Fresh from a foray among the Otherworlders, I’d only recently come to terms with everything I’d gone through. Memories of my time there trickled in, often unbidden, like waking dreams...or nightmares. Some were pleasant things. Conversations. Embraces. Feelings of belonging. Some were less so, leaving bitterness and resentment in their wake. I recalled the face of a dead woman, the stickiness of dried blood between my fingers, the skin-blistering heat of a hateful atmosphere, the stench of rot. More often than not, these echoes led to thoughts of my mother. I dwelled on the legacy she’d passed on to me, wondering whether she’d known just how large a burden I’d be expected to carry.

  I also tried to access her power. Not so long ago, I’d felt it roiling inside me—the mind-boggling capacity of a goddess. Enraged and vengeful, I’d stepped onto Fae soil with all that latent potential, prepared to smite to my heart’s content, only to have it all stripped away from me in an instant—all my prodigious strength, my quickness, not to mention my newfound ability to bend shadows to my will. And yet, it was as though I could still sense the power lingering. As if it were merely hibernating within me; I held my hand up to the night sky and waved it into the light of day. It was like I could actually feel the darkness react, could feel it pressing against my flesh, clinging to me like cellophane.

  That, or I was imagining things.

  Of course, boredom can do that to you.

  2

  I think it’s funny what some people consider a business trip and others consider a vacation. For instance, until recently I’d have thought sailing into uncharted waters a wonderful, life-altering experience, complete with fresh air and adventure, maybe even a romantic fling or two—a whirlwind affair featuring sun, sex, and hopefully sangria. So, why wasn’t I more excited by the prospect? I could blame some of my reticence on homesickness; I’d been away for far too long. But the truth was I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was going to get screwed on this trip, and not in the fun way, if you know what I mean.

  Indeed, since receiving my mother’s power, not to mention her final directive, I’d felt as though a cloud were following me. Something—a nondescript, and yet altogether foreboding apprehension—loomed on the peripheries, waiting in the wings to swoop down and ruin my Fae-cation. This nagging paranoia had stuck with me for several days now, getting progressively worse the longer I waited for the Goblin King to arrive with our guide in tow; Oberon had left us swearing he’d return as soon as he was able with someone qualified to lead us along Odysseus' Path. Though time moved differen
tly in Fae, the ordinarily fixed law measured here in unfamiliar increments, it felt like several days, perhaps more, had passed since then.

  Of course, it didn’t help that my sole companions—an aggrieved sapling and a scathing, sarcastic mutt—had grown equally anxious; Eve, the budding Tree of Knowledge I’d been tasked with plant-sitting in perpetuity, stood firmly rooted on the far side of the room, limbs curled around her trunk as though she were hugging herself while Cathal, a faerie hound the size of a horse, gnawed on a long bone that might have belonged to a dinosaur. I’d spoken to neither in what felt like days, content to let Eve stew and Cathal be...well, Cathal. Unfortunately, aside from my trips to the Twilight Valley, proximity had become a bit of an issue; the safehouse Oberon had chosen for us—a cottage deep in the woods, surrounded by trees with glass leaves and stone trunks—was not exactly spacious.

  I watched them both from the corner of my eyes as I rocked back and forth on a rickety chair, careful not to accidentally touch the rusty cages which hung from the rafters of the dilapidated gingerbread house we occupied; we’d found the clear sugar window panes shattered, the gumdrop shingles sunken with age, the brick oven fireplace coated with the ashes of a dead witch. Hansel and Gretel’s handiwork, apparently. The two had even carved their names into the gingerbread walls. In German, of course.

  Eve twitched, her roots writhing, restless. She did that a lot lately; ever since I’d pried her from her planter, it was like she had difficulty standing still. Ironic, given she had no legs. Unlike the Ents from Tolkien’s imagination, Eve’s root system refused to conveniently parse themselves into two functional limbs. If anything, she reminded me of an octopus in the way she slithered across the ground, roots coiling and uncoiling, cruising along with nary a bob or weave. Of course, the tic might also have been my fault: while it turned out only a few days had passed in the mortal realm since I’d traveled to the Otherworld, Eve still hadn’t forgiven me for breaking my vow and stepping foot on Fae soil without her. My defense—that I’d had no say in any of it, not to mention the fact that I’d had plenty of other things to worry about at the time—had earned me nothing but a sullen silence.

  Cathal, on the other side of the room, had given up on the bone and lay sprawled out on his side, snoring so loudly that you might have confused his breathing for the surf at high tide, his massive chest riddled with faint markings that flared to life whenever his dreams took a dark turn. The faerie hound had a bad habit of passing out whenever things got dull, which meant he’d gotten plenty of rest since we’d arrived.

  Oddly enough, neither had questioned my motives when I relayed my plan to enlist the aid of pirates, sail across foreign seas, find the lost city of Atlantis, and quite possibly confront the new Jack Frost—a murderous thief who happened to be one of my oldest friends. All of which, I might add, seemed less and less plausible with every passing day. Indeed, life in Fae had taken on such a surreal quality I wasn’t entirely sure about anything; I found myself repeating my names and titles whenever I visited the valley, trying to determine which were masks and which were real. Was I Quinn MacKenna, heiress to the power of the Phantom Queen? Or was I Ceara Light-Bringer, cherished daughter of the Curaitl? Was I the woman who loathed bloodsuckers, who bought and sold magical goods, who practically bled silver, red, and nautical blue on football Sundays? Or was I the woman who’d survived the Blighted Lands, who’d sailed on the Jolly Roger, who’d reduced Balor One-Eye to dust? Only days before, I was certain I’d solved this particular riddle, that I’d found the solution to my identity crisis—the disparate voices in my head had merged, harmonizing like baying wolves. Now, I wasn’t so sure. Had we really fused? And, if so, had they become me, or I become them? Lately, it was all I could do to wrestle with that question, to determine who—and what—I was supposed to be.

  I stopped rocking abruptly, prepared to leave the gingerbread house and return to the Twilight Valley for more soul-searching. I wasn’t sure I’d find any answers, but it beat the alternative; the gingerbread house smelled vaguely of pumpkin spice and white chocolate mixed with the odor of burnt meat and dog. Not a great combination. Before I could rise, however, Cathal’s ears flicked up like antennae. A moment later, a knock sounded at the door. Cathal—who was apparently unable to deviate from the compulsions of his species—started barking his freaking head off.

  “Would you tell that thing to shut up?” Eve hissed. That’s what she’d taken to calling Cathal—that thing. Mostly, I think, because she had no idea what he was; despite our limited interactions, I’d discovered Eve’s all-encompassing knowledge didn’t extend to the Fae realm, nor its Otherworldly inhabitants. She’d nearly gone into hysterics yesterday when a flower she’d inadvertently stepped on had cursed her out and demanded an apology. I supposed that when you’re the self-appointed Tree of Knowledge, ignorance isn’t exactly blissful.

  “Cathal!” I snapped, my Irish brogue cutting through the room like a butter knife for all the good it did; Cathal kept right on woofing until I finally reached up to cuff him on the ear, my hand comically small compared to his shaggy, blockish dome.

  Cathal flinched, ear twitching, glaring at me side-eyed. “Don’t do that.”

  I matched his fierce stare with one of my own. “Then at least pretend to be house trained, ye mongrel.”

  “Should have told him that before he set fire to the house,” Eve muttered, one of her many branches angling awkwardly to gesture at a scorched stretch of gingerbread wall. A section of the crown molding, made entirely of frosting, had melted—the result of Cathal losing his temper and having what I liked to call a “flare up.” Ever since then, Eve had avoided the hound out of self-preservation.

  “Are any of you going to let me in?” the visitor called. I recognized Oberon’s imperious rasp; the Goblin King had a distinct voice, even for one of the Fae. I sighed, marched to the door, and bent so close I could smell the sweet, mouth-watering aroma that wafted off the chocolate varnish.

  “What’s the password?” I called back.

  “The...wait, what password?”

  “Correct.” I gripped the handle and eyed Cathal, trusting him to be prepared for anything. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t trust Oberon but that I’d learned to be cautious; one look around told me all I needed to know about Faeling hospitality. Besides, between pottymouth flowers and falling leaves that could impale you, the possibility of encountering an impostor hardly seemed much of a stretch. “What was the last t’ing ye said to me before ye left?”

  “I told you to stay here and try to keep out of sight,” Oberon replied.

  Too general.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because there had been talk of Mordred’s knights roaming the land. And we believed it possible that some of our people sided with him in opposition to Master Temple.”

  I nodded, though the mention of Master Temple—Nate Temple to be exact—twisted my gut. Nate was an integral player in the Fae realm’s latest drama: a battle for the fate of the world. Both worlds, actually; according to Oberon, the scales that upheld the Fae and mortal realms would tip precariously depending on the outcome. Unfortunately, and as a result of what I could only imagine was some sort of karmic backlash, I’d inadvertently sided with the wizard by pitting myself against Mordred—King Arthur’s son and would-be overlord.

  “Welcome to Candy Castle,” I said as I opened the door, shuffling to the right in a fighting stance, just in case it turned out I was wrong.

  Oberon—in his diminutive, goblinoid form—eyed us all disdainfully, but raised both hands in a gesture of unconditional surrender. “I come in peace,” he said, voice deadpan.

  “Good thing, or you’d be leaving in pieces,” Cathal growled.

  Oberon grunted. “Is he always this grumpy?”

  “Yes,” Eve replied. “You should put him out of his misery,” she suggested, her uppermost branches weaving in delight, her golden leaves shimmering. “Or perhaps remove his testicles. Did you know that aggress
ion, roaming, and hard-headed behavior all tend to decrease in male dogs post-operation?”

  Cathal’s sides flared for a moment, the druidic markings that swirled along his body glowing orange before fading to a dull, ashen shade of grey. “I hate talking trees.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at the hound. “How many talkin’ trees do ye know?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Been a long few days, I take it?” Oberon interjected, wryly.

  “This isn’t exactly the Ritz,” I replied, waving my hand about. “And none of us are exactly designed to lay low.” I’d already decided not to mention my trips to the Twilight Valley; I’d been careful to stay out of sight and had come across no one coming or going.

  Oberon surveyed the three of us, noting the truth of that assertion. “My apologies. Hunting down your guides took more effort than I’d anticipated. The realms are somewhat...tumultuous, at the moment.”

  “Did ye say guides?” I asked, emphasizing the plural.

  As if on cue, two cloaked figures stepped into the doorway behind Oberon. The first was about my height—a respectable six feet that I’d long ago embraced—while the second stood at a much shorter, much slimmer five-foot-nothing. The taller of the two removed his hood to reveal the startlingly attractive face of a young heartthrob, his skin tan and silky smooth, his eyes large and remarkably expressive, his bowed lips curving upward. He flashed me a megawatt smile which would have sent teenage girls everywhere squealing into their pillows. “Nice to see you again, Quinn MacKenna,” Narcissus said, bowing slightly. “Not as nice as it must be to see me, of course, but there’s nothing you can do about that.”

  “No, I suppose there isn’t,” I replied, immediately recognizing the world’s most infamous egomaniac from my time aboard a cruise ship co-captained by the stunningly perverse Dorian Grey, though that had happened so long ago now that it felt like another lifetime. “You’re our guide?”