Page 74 of Queen Takes Checkmate
I nodded, already numb.
He locked his mouth over the wound and drank. At first, I only felt minor discomfort. I’d forgotten what it was like to bleed from an injury and feel nothing from it. He wasn’t my Blood. I felt no enjoyment or pleasure in his mouth on my wrist. His human teeth dug into my skin, tearing and gnawing at the wound impatiently. My breath hissed out. Pain, yes. But nothing I couldn’t manage. Certainly not worse than the aching hole in my heart where my bonds belonged.
As he drank, his power rose. He warmed, as I chilled. He leeched my power from me, and yes, that hurt. Terribly. It felt like he was stripping off my skin, layer by layer, stealing my energy with every drop of blood. My queen instincts screamed with alarm, demanding I fight back. My bonds were there. If I commanded the fog to dispel, I could find Rik. I could tap my reserves. I could save myself.
It took everything I had to surrender and allow Huitzilopochtli to drain me. Exactly why this would make a convincing story for Ra. No queen wanted to be drained to death. Especially a queen as strong as me.
I thought of my Blood, one by one. The way they smelled. Tasted.
Mayte. Her daughter. For Xochitl, I could do this. I could let myself die.I must.
He ripped tendons and muscles from my bones. Smashed my organs. My lungs. My chest caved in and my heart throbbed with agony. Burning. I couldn’t breathe.
Something moved in my line of vision, making me blink to focus. I’d fallen across Huitzilopochtli’s lap. Xin hovered at his shoulder, silver eyes burning ice cold. A blade in his hand rose toward Huitzilopochtli’s throat. I tried to reach for Xin’s bond, but his bond was gone.
All my Blood were gone.
I concentrated fiercely, commanding my lips to move. “No. Xin.”
I wasn’t sure that I made any sense at all, until he lowered the blade. The last thing I saw as darkness claimed me was the red track of tears down his cheeks.
30
Guillaume
Ihad found myself in some shitholes over the years, but never a place as bad as this.
With the phoenix’s blood still burning in my stomach, I’d easily passed through a portal that wasn’t apparent to the mortal eye, directly into Heliopolis.
A mockery of lavish luxury.
It was the kind of place where slaves shit on golden toilets and wiped with gold-leafed paper and died for a twisted god’s amusement.
Goddess preserve me, I will never again admire anything that glitters like gold.
Empty hovels the size of prison cells still stank of misery and pain despite the grandeur. Golden walls were streaked with old blood stains. Rotted corpses lay where they’d fallen. Delicate skeletons. The size of which told me they were women. Children.
Queens.
Tortured and dead. The sheer waste of such power and blessings from long-gone goddesses appalled me at a level deeper than even Desideria had ever been able to do. The thought that my queen had come to this place…
Deliberately weak.
Captive.
My blood boiled, and I galloped down golden streets filled with refuse and death. Even my burning hooves couldn’t leave a mark on the streets of gold, but centuries of bodies stacked and tossed carelessly like garbage marred my soul for all time.
There was no honor here. No hope. No love.
This wasn’t a place that my queen could survive unscathed.
In the distance, two shining obelisks stabbed the sky. Ra’s primary temple lay beyond. As I neared, I worried that the clatter of my hooves would alert the sentries to my presence, so I shifted back to my human form. I’d rather creep quietly through the streets naked and silent than gallop into a squad of armed skeletons. Surely Ra would have his Soldiers of Light guarding the temple. I’d battled them in Kansas City shortly after hearing my queen’s call, and they weren’t easy to fight.
They were already dead, the best of the best warriors over thousands of years.
I could make out a line of golden columns marking the temple entrance, when a geyser of fire shot up into the sky on the opposite side of the city. A high-pitched shriek made me duck down against a low wall. Hopefully that was the dragon’s fire blasting the sunfires’ lair, and not the demons roasting a dragon on a spit.
Without my queen’s bond in my head, I had no way of telling where the rest of her Blood were. Rik was supposed to be approaching from my left. Vivian was going to search the breeding grounds to the east. I shuddered at the thought. Could those buildings be any worse than what I’d already seen? I didn’t want to know.
