Queen of Volts Read online

  Return to the City of Sin, where the final game is about to begin...and winning will demand the ultimate sacrifice.

  Only days after a corrupt election and brutal street war, one last bloodthirsty game has begun. The players? The twenty-two most powerful, notorious people in New Reynes.

  After realizing they have no choice but to play, Enne Scordata and Levi Glaisyer are desperate to forge new alliances and bargain for their safety. But while Levi offers false smiles and an even falser peace to the city’s politicians, Enne must face a world where her true Mizer identity has been revealed...and any misstep could turn deadly.

  Meanwhile, a far more dangerous opponent has appeared on the board, one plucked right from the most gruesome legends of New Reynes. As the game takes its final, vicious turn, Levi and Enne must decide once and for all whether to be partners or enemies.

  Because in a game for survival, there are no winners...

  There are only monsters.

  Praise for Amanda Foody and Ace of Shades

  “Ace of Shades has it all—incredible worldbuilding, cinematic set-pieces, heart-pounding pacing and unpredictable, deliciously messy characters. An utter delight.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Claire Legrand

  “The relationship between Enne and Levi simmers, and dangers pile up to an exciting climax. Readers will eagerly wish for a sequel that will allow them to revisit New Reynes.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Foody’s novel is a magical tale of introspection, romance, and self-determination.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Thieves, rogues, and shady characters have always fascinated me, and so I enjoyed my dive into the morally ambiguous world of New Reynes.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Cinda Williams Chima

  “The world in this promising series debut is dark but enticing.”

  —School Library Journal

  Books by Amanda Foody

  available from Inkyard Press

  Daughter of the Burning City

  The Shadow Game Series

  Ace of Shades

  King of Fools

  Queen of Volts

  Queen of Volts

  AMANDA FOODY

  Amanda Foody has always considered imagination to be our best attempt at magic. After a double life as an accountant preparing taxes for multinational corporations, she now spends her free time brewing and fermenting foods much more easily obtained at her local grocery store. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

  Queen of Volts is her fourth novel and the third and final installment in The Shadow Game trilogy.

  To Mom, for showing me the magic of books

  Contents

  I

  HARVEY

  II

  LOLA

  ENNE

  LEVI

  SOPHIA

  HARVEY

  III

  LEVI

  ENNE

  IV

  LOLA

  LEVI

  ENNE

  V

  SOPHIA

  LOLA

  ENNE

  VI

  LEVI

  HARVEY

  LOLA

  HARVEY

  VII

  LEVI

  LOLA

  ENNE

  SOPHIA

  LOLA

  HARVEY

  VIII

  ENNE

  SOPHIA

  ENNE

  IX

  SOPHIA

  LEVI

  X

  LOLA

  LEVI

  ENNE

  HARVEY

  XI

  ENNE

  LEVI

  ENNE

  XII

  HARVEY

  ENNE

  SOPHIA

  XIII

  LOLA

  LEVI

  HARVEY

  XIV

  ENNE

  LOLA

  LEVI

  SOPHIA

  XV

  LEVI

  ENNE

  XVI

  HARVEY

  LEVI

  LOLA

  XVII

  SOPHIA

  ENNE

  XVIII

  LOLA

  XIX

  SOPHIA

  HARVEY

  XX

  LEVI

  XXI

  HARVEY

  ENNE

  XXII

  LEVI

  HARVEY

  LOLA

  SOPHIA

  ENNE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I

  STRENGTH

  “Some cities respect their history.

  New Reynes burned it.”

  Séance. “The Revolution Racket.”

  Her Forgotten Histories

  17 Aug YOR 19

  HARVEY

  It was early morning when Harvey Gabbiano dug the grave.

  Harvey didn’t like the cemeteries in the Deadman District, precisely because they were cemeteries. Most people didn’t know it, but there was a difference between a cemetery and a graveyard—graveyards were connected to a church. But the only place to find devotion in this neighborhood was at the bottom of a bottle.

  This cemetery was a bleak, soulless plot of land, made bleaker by the drizzle that had soaked through Harvey’s clothes. Rusted industrial plaques marked each of the graves. There were no flowers anywhere, not even weeds, and the unkept grass grew patchy and brown.

  “It would’ve been easier if you’d burned it,” Bryce told him. He’d watched Harvey work all morning, but not once had he offered to help...or even to share his umbrella. Bryce didn’t see the point in helping with tasks he disapproved of, even if this task was important to Harvey.

  “It’s holier to bury him,” Harvey repeated yet again. Even though Harvey was Faithful, he wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble had the deceased not been wearing a Creed of his own. He didn’t know many others who practiced the Faith anymore—it had been banned for so long now. “You don’t have to stay.”

  “I’m staying. You’re funny, you and those superstitions of yours. I could use a laugh.”

  Harvey didn’t know how Bryce could find humor in the situation. The November weather was cold. The cemetery was irreverent and depressing. The dead had not deserved to die.

  But Bryce had come with him, and so, no matter the circumstances, Harvey couldn’t help but feel a little bit pleased.

  “I’m not doing this to be funny,” Harvey responded, forcing his voice into a grumble. He pressed his bulky leather boot against the step of the shovel. The mud he lifted glinted with green shards of broken bottles.

  “My mistake,” Bryce said dryly. “You’re doing this to be decent.”

  Harvey absolutely was doing it to be decent. To be good. Because Harvey might not have been the person who killed this man or any of the other hundred who’d perished two nights ago at the party in St. Morse Casino, but as long as he remained hopelessly in love with Bryce Balfour, he would always have blood on his hands.

  It was hard not to glance at his friend as he worked. Harvey hated to look at him. But he didn’t need to—he had long ago memorized every agonizing detail of his face, his figure, his posture. Bryce could be absent and still be Harvey’s distraction.

  Harvey hated himself for it.

  The body made a thump when he pushed it into th e hole.

  Harvey straightened, his back aching from the exertion, his fingers blistered even through his gloves. The hours of rain had made the dried blood on the body and clothes run again, and the flattened brown grass it had been lying on moments before was now flooded with red. Harvey watched as the puddles washed the blood away, and he murmured a silent prayer that the rain would do the same for his immortal soul.

  “Harvey,” Bryce said sharply.

  Harvey’s gaze shot toward him, and he flinched. Bryce hadn’t worn his brown-colored contacts since that night at St. Morse, when he revealed himself to be a malison, someone with the talent to create curses known as shades, a talent the world feared but hadn’t believed to truly exist. And despite always knowing what Bryce was, Harvey wasn’t used to this adjustment.

  Bryce’s malison scarlet eyes were a reminder of how low Harvey had fallen.

  But Harvey’s gaze didn’t stop there—of course it didn’t. It traveled across Bryce’s face, down concave cheekbones and lips chapped from kissing someone who wasn’t him. Down bony shoulders and a tall, skinny frame, over threadbare clothes and a black wool coat that draped shapelessly over him. Harvey lingered on the places he had kissed, on slender fingers and narrow hips and the smooth pale skin between. Those memories haunted him.

  Bryce didn’t pay Harvey’s staring any attention. He never did. His concentration was focused on the card in his hand. He ran his thumb over its foiled gold back.

  It was a Shadow Card, one of the cursed cards the Phoenix Club used to play the Shadow Game. Except it wasn’t. Shadow Cards were silver. This one belonged to a different game, one Bryce and his girlfriend, Rebecca, had devised themselves, one they had set in motion at St. Morse two nights prior. Harvey had helped them deliver golden cards to every designated “player” across New Reynes, and now all that remained was to wait for the star player to make a move.

  “They’re here. I can feel it,” Bryce said hoarsely, squeezing the card so hard it bent.

  By “they,” he meant the Bargainer. The City of Sin treated all of its legends with a hallowed reverence, and this one was the oldest, most famous of them all: the wandering Devil who would bargain for anything. Bryce had been obsessed with the tale for a year, ever since Rebecca had fallen sick. Despite every effort—ethical or otherwise—Rebecca wasn’t improving, and Bryce had convinced himself that her last hope for a cure was the Bargainer’s power. It was why he’d murdered all those people at St. Morse—a desperate, ruthless attempt for the Bargainer’s attention.

  I’ll sell my soul, if that’s what it takes, Bryce had once confided in Harvey, back when his smiles weren’t so much like sneers, when he looked more like the boy Harvey used to love—the kinder version of himself, the one Harvey couldn’t manage to let go of. Though Harvey had never voiced his opinion, Bryce had lost his soul the moment he’d formulated this despicable plan.

  They all had.

  Harvey tried to ignore Bryce’s words. In the legend, the Bargainer approached people of their own choosing. The only way to summon them directly was through chaos.

  Surely Bryce wouldn’t attempt such evil, Harvey had once told himself.

  But he had, and since that night at St. Morse, all of New Reynes seemed ablaze. The Scarhands, the largest gang in the seedy North Side, had crumbled, their lord executed. Séance, the notorious assassin of Chancellor Malcolm Semper, had been unmasked as both the last surviving Mizer and, to the city’s shock, a seventeen-year-old girl from finishing school. Mafia donna Vianca Augustine had been shot dead, and her son had won his election. Luckluster Casino had burned, and the Torren Family empire along with it.

  Thanks to Bryce, the City of Sin was in a state worse than chaos—it was in hell.

  And now the Devil had returned home.

  Even though Harvey was an accomplice in Bryce’s plans, the thought of all that had transpired—and all that was still left to unfold—filled him with dread. He tried to focus on the shovel and the dirt and the grave, on this one good thing, but his sins weighed heavy on his soul.

  “Harvey,” Bryce snapped again. He never tolerated being ignored.

  Harvey sighed. “How can you be certain the Bargainer is in New Reynes now?”

  “I told you. I can feel it.”

  At that moment, the rain began to fall harder, shifting from a drizzle into a downpour. Harvey’s brown corkscrew curls stuck against his fair skin, and he wiped the water from his eyes.

  “Why haven’t they come to me yet?” Bryce rasped, his hands trembling while he clutched his umbrella. “I’m the one who summoned them. I deserve my bargain.”

  “The legends never mentioned whether the Bargainer was prompt,” Harvey pointed out. He dumped another pile of mud into the hole.

  Bryce’s lips formed a thin line. He trudged over to the grave. The body was now entirely covered with earth, but the plot was only half-filled. “That’s good enough. We should go back.”

  “You can go. I’ll finish,” Harvey told him.

  Bryce nodded and fiddled with his card anxiously. It was moments like these, when he looked so young and vulnerable, that made Harvey weak. Because even if Bryce Balfour had lost his soul, Harvey still kindled a hope that it could be found. That he could be the one to find it.

  “Never mind,” Harvey murmured. “I’ll go with you.”

  Harvey heaved his shovel over his shoulder, said a final prayer for Jac Mardlin and his unfinished, unmarked grave, and followed his friend home.

  II

  THE MAGICIAN

  “Call the Faith’s superstitions fear-mongering,

  if that’s what you like. But don’t pretend they aren’t true.”

  Shade. “Liberty, Equality, and Faith.”

  The Treasonist’s Tribunal

  26 Feb YOR 8

  LOLA

  Lola Sanguick strode down the Street of the Holy Tombs carrying a leather briefcase crammed full of newspapers. Dark circles sagged beneath her eyes, a souvenir from sleepless nights spent with her ear tethered to the radio. For the past week, everyone in her life had boarded themselves indoors. They’d chattered and drank and mourned and cried, but no one—no one—had stopped their noise to pay attention to the omens really gathering in the City of Sin.

  Sometimes Lola felt she was the only one who did.

  The Street of the Holy Tombs was the unsettling heart of Olde Town, a historic North Side neighborhood of spindly streets and church towers casting it in perpetual skin-creeping shadow. The superstitions of New Reynes thrived here: the haunted tinkling of Faith bells, the wrought iron gates and gothic spires reaching teeth-like toward the sky. As though this street was designed to coerce a frightened prayer from even the lips of nonbelievers.

  A tinny bell chimed as Lola shook away her goosebumps and opened the door to an office.

  Despite the welcome mat by the door, the place must not have received many visitors. Dust clung to every surface, and the air smelled stale, all of the windows boarded, curtains drawn. Lola would’ve thought it abandoned, if not for the woman hunched over her work.

  The woman was fair and middle-aged, with a waist-length braid of brown hair and a massive wooden Creed dangling from her neck—a Faith symbol that resembled a T with a circle at its base. When she blinked, Lola noticed black tattoos of eyes inked on the back of her eyelids, as though, even with her eyes closed, she could always see.

  Lola had never met the woman before, and a shiver crept up her spine at the woman’s cold, fixed stare.

  “Why are you here?” the woman asked, by way of a greeting.

  Because no one else will listen, Lola thought bitterly.

  Lola didn’t tell her that, in case that made her sound paranoid. More than anything, Lola hated being called paranoid, and it was that word—spoken groggily that very morning by her half-asleep girlfriend when Lola tried to explain her worries—that had prompted Lola to yank her briefcase out from the secret nook in the closet and storm her way here.

  Lola liked to consider herself clever for the way she noticed details others overlooked. Like when she’d spotted bloodied handkerchiefs buried at the bottom of her family’s waste bins, and her father had succumbed to pneumonia less than a week later. Like when her eldest brother had stopped buying more paper for his typewriter, and the month afterward, Lola had discovered he’d been expelled from university. Or when her other brother’s mood swings and rages turned to silence, and then he’d abandoned their family altogether.

  There were warning signs now, too, but her friends romanticized the city’s tragic legends too much to understand where their story was truly heading.

  Twenty-six years after the tryannical ruling class had been slaughtered, a Mizer had been discovered alive.

  A Mizer in known partnership with an orb-maker, both of whose ancestors had governed the world side by side.

  Partners who’d assassinated the man who’d started the Revolution.

  Partners who’d committed countless other crimes against the Republic, and who kept company of the seediest sort.

  And meanwhile, an election even the public regarded as corrupt. A massacre committed by a malison who possessed the very talent the Mizer kings had once vilified. And the victims—so many, too many—dead.

  A reckoning was coming for the City of Sin—and if not revolution, if not war, then it would bring violence all the same. Lola wasn’t paranoid for heeding its warning signs; she was merely clever enough to pay attention.

  But there were still mysteries left unsolved, which was why Lola had wandered so deep into Olde Town for answers. Her friends dismissed her concerns now, but they might need these answers, once the reckoning arrived. They would need every weapon they could find.

  Rather than telling the woman why she was here, Lola decided it would be better to show her. Lola slammed her briefcase atop her desk and unlatched it. She pulled out stacks of newspapers and clippings. Many came from The Crimes & The Times, including editorials comparing the most recent turmoil in New Reynes to the so-called Great Street War nineteen years ago, the golden age of North Side crime. Others dated from the Great Street War, historic pieces which Lola had stolen from the National Library. Scattered through were copies of Her Forgotten Histories, the very newspaper printed in this office. Lola’s simple and neat handwriting wove between the indents and margins of everything in violently red ink.