For Nevermore Season 1

a mean shade of crimson, about as human looking as the skin of a snake. Like always, the Queen wore a long black dress, covering most of her body. Dante could see the faint red glow through the thin gauze of her dress, just above the right side of her chest.
    “Hello Dante,” she said, her voice smooth and wintry.
    “Why am I here?” Dante glared at her.
    “Ah, Dante. Always right to the point of business. So pragmatic. Just one of the many reasons I’ve missed you.” She smiled. “It’s been too long.”
    “So I’m here because you missed me?” Dante smiled, daring the devil to care.
    “You’re here because you know where she is, Dante.” The Queen leaned forward. “You’ve found her, haven’t you?”
    “I have no idea who you are talking about,” Dante said, the smirk still on his face.
    “Your dedication to your masters is amusing,” the Queen said, leaning even closer, so close Dante could hear the mechanical hum beneath her breathing.
    He let the slight pass, sealing his lips as the Queen circled him, continuing to talk. Each time she went behind him, Dante braced for a blade to the back, or worse.
    “Why do you continue to serve them, following their orders? Do you really think they’re acting in her, or your, interests?”
    “As if you are?”
    “I don’t know what the Elders have told you, Dante, but I can guarantee that the words from their mouths are as far from the truth as dusk is from dawn. We want her to take her rightful place in the kingdom. She is one of us, not one of them.”
    “Peddle your lies elsewhere,” Dante said. “I know full well what you want her for. You want to control her, to use her.”
    The Queen shook her head. Her black plastic pelt moved stiffly back and forth, a pale imitation of natural hair. “My, my, the things they’ve drilled into your sweet head.”
    The Queen moved closer, then raised her metal hand, bringing it up and extending a finger, tracing it along his right cheekbone and then to his skull, tapping twice – just hard enough to hint at the damage she could do to Dante if she wanted.
    But Dante wasn’t easily intimidated. He met her gaze, neither flinching nor breaking.
    “I assure you, Dante, we only want what’s best for her. It’s your precious Elders who wish her harm. Who wish to harm you as well, I might add.”
    Dante held his curiosity in check, choosing to let the Queen continue, rather than showing interest.
    “What would you say if I told you that the Elders have already ordered your death?”
    Dante kept his anger inside. Behind the grit of his teeth he said, “I’d say you’re lying.”
    The Queen shook her head, then lightly laughed. The whir of her motor whined from behind her cackle. “No, it’s quite true,” she said. “They ordered William to find her and erase her in their next pathetic attempt to keep her hidden. And rather than deal with your inevitable resistance, they ordered your death.”
    Dante stared at her. He didn’t bother to ask how she knew. It wasn’t as if she’d tell him. He and William had both long suspected that the Queen had spies in King’s Point, though he would not of guessed them so well placed to intercept messages to or from the Elders. If she wasn’t lying, which many lifetimes told him she wasn’t, their suspicions were now confirmed.
    The Queen was inches from Dante’s face, her blue eye piercing him with sorrow for his eternal grief, as the red one scraped the inner walls of his soul. “Have you ever asked yourself why the Elders are so opposed to your being with her?” she whispered. “Have you ever wondered that, Dante?”
    Dante said nothing. Of course he’d wondered, more times than he could count across more years than he could remember, but the Elders’ ways were layered in mystery and their secrecy was beyond him. They dealt in dimensions to which he could not go and in things he could not see.
    “Of course, you’ve wondered. How could you not? You and she are bonded, after all. Do the Elders no longer respect the bonds? Are they now somehow above the old ways?”
    “Funny,” Dante said. “You, of all people, talking about the old ways.”
    The Queen looked down for a moment, as if hiding her initial flare of anger on the cold, concrete floor.
    She lifted her head and fixed her gaze on Dante again, her blue eye injured and her red eye redder. “While I may not of been raised in the old ways, that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my respect for them,