Page 20 of Queen Takes Sunfires 1
The skeleton let out a deafening bellow that drowned out the alarms. Calling for more reinforcements. His entire legion was probably between us and the car, smoldering with eager sunfires bursting with all the power of the noonday sun.
Whirling, I ran back into the smoke, holding the other shard aloft in my right hand as I charged forward.
"You can't get out that way!” Eivind called after me. “Not if the fire has reached the front of the building."
I didn't heed his warning. They didn't want us to go this way—so it was our only hope. Trying to breathe shallowly, I slipped down the darkened hall. Black acrid smoke burned my lungs. I had a feeling the fire had escalated, spreading quickly beyond their control. They wouldn't like this much darkness and smoke either. If I could get to the front desk, I could make the creepy human get us a car. Or maybe he'd have another room to hide us in? A safe place down the road? Something.
A hard, bony hand slithered around my wrist and wrenched my arm up high between my shoulders. Dropping the shard, I cried out and tried to pull away, but his iron grip didn’t budge. He dragged me through the smoke, ignoring my pitiful attempts to escape. I knew I was no match for him, but I couldn't stop trying. Fighting. I wouldn't go back.Goddess, please. I can't.
"Eivind!" I screamed.
I heard his snarled response down the hall, his choking cough and wheeze. The chemical smell worsened. I wasn't even sure if his wolf could endure the burning odor in the air.
A door slammed shut, blocking most of the smoke outside in the hallway. This room had a window. Enough to illuminate the horrible skeletal features of his face.
I swallowed down the bile threatening to burn its way up my throat. I recognized him. I knew his face. His voice.
"You can stop this,” Aurelian Sol Invictus, the commander of the Roman Legion, said. “All you have to do is call your power."
He was one of the most famous warriors ever to walk this earth, which was exactly why Ra had made him a Soldier of Light, one of the elite skeleton guardians of his realm. Aurelian was Ra's favorite. His most trusted enforcer.
Naturally, that meant he'd been the one to torture me the most.
The scars on my back had been his.
For a moment, I was back in hell. I stared into the molten gold shining in his eye sockets and knew my own gaze had gone blank. Dead. Cold. His mouth moved into a grimace that probably would have been a smug smile if he actually had lips. He leaned closer, watching the battle in my eyes as I fought not to flinch or cower away from him. "Good. You remember me. That makes this easier, my queen."
I closed my eyes a moment, hiding my thoughts. He'd never called me a queen before. Let alonehis.
He'd called me God's Wife, my title in Ra's realm that I'd been given as a child when I'd accepted his dominion over me. Sometimes Aurelian and his soldiers had called me princess, but always with a sneer in their voices. They'd hated me. They'd hated all the women in Ra's domain, especially the ones who managed to survive any length of time. Aurelian had taken it upon himself to break me. Ruin me. And ultimately, kill me.
Evidently a task he'd relished—even as he failed. Because I was still fucking here. Still alive. Still fighting.
Though, yeah, I wasscared, too. So scared that my heart jumped around frantically like a terrified bird battering its wings against my ribcage.
He jerked my arm so hard that he nearly dislocated my shoulder. Nerves zinged all the way down to my hand, and my numb fingers dropped the other mirror shard. "Call your power. Then the sunfires will submit to your will. They're here for you."
His words made no sense. The sun demons would never submit to my will. They only submitted to Ra, and even he had been forced to bargain with them on occasion. Thousands of years ago, he'd needed them to conquer and absorb the other solar gods, but their power had grown, while his had waned as the old gods slipped into oblivion. On the rare occasion when he'd wanted a compassionate ear, he'd confided to me that it took all his power to hold them. That someday, his hold might loosen. They would escape his realm and his control.
Not that he'd actually cared. He'd already planned to open the gates and allow them to ravage and plunder the other realms once he had what he sought above all. The only reason he hadn't already let them escape was his own gigantic ego. The Supreme and Almighty God of Light couldn't be seen as weak. Let alone failing to hold onto what was his and his alone.
"Ra's dead," Aurelian said. "They escaped Heliopolis and most of them abandoned their carriers. We have to get them back."
My brain latched onto Heliopolis, relieved to finally remember the name of the place I'd been. The rest of his words were too extraordinary to even comprehend. Ra was dead? How could one kill a god? Let alonehim.
Aurelian squeezed my shoulders, shaking me so hard my teeth slammed together. "Do you hear me? Light, what's wrong with you?"
"Karmen!" Eivind bellowed somewhere, unable to find me in the smoke. "What the fuck is going on? Where are you?"
A broken sound escaped my lips, though it was mostly a giggle. This was all too much to take in. He still didn't quite believe me. He thought a bullet would stop the greatest warriors of the ages. Meanwhile, Aurelian Sol Invictus actually thought I would go with him. Help him. One of my greatest tormentors.
Help him tame and command the sunfires that even Ra had struggled to contain.
The demons that had dripped acid on me and tormented me as much as him during all those years of captivity.
Not all of the sunfires had been involved in my pain. Only the ones carried by Aurelian's soldiers, theSol Invictus Legion, had ever hurt me. Even then, probably only a handful had ever actively tortured me. Ra had become too jealous of me in the later years. Not because he cared about me. At all. He merely couldn't get a new wife to replace me if something happened to me.
Now he was dead. I was alive. And his surviving enforcer wantedmyhelp.
