Page 23 of Queen Takes Blood
At last, she began to scream.
12
MEHEN
If you sleep long enough, and dream hard enough, eventually you can’t tell when you’re awake. Let alone fucking dead.
Until something tugged ever so faintly on a gossamer thread that had never been there before.
I didn’t know what it meant. Only that something had changed. Grains of sand began draining away in my mind. A subtle urgency began to tighten inside me.
Time’s up, bitch.
Thank fucking goddess. Finally. An end to this misery. If I couldn’t be free, then I couldn’t fucking wait to die. Though I knew all too fucking well that it wouldn’t be an easy death. Not for me.
I sure the fuck wouldn’t go down easily.
My instrument of death—or escape—started talking to me in the mists. Another fucking queen. Whispering the same bullshit as all the others.
“It’s alright. I’m here to free you.”
She stood on the other side of a rusted iron gate locked with thick chains, and I felt that visceral tug again. Even thousands of miles away, I could have flown straight to her and charred her flesh down to the bone.
If I wasn’t fucking trapped. Buried in a mountain outside of time and space.
Snarling and snapping, I shook my head, trying to wake myself the fuck up. Enduring never-ending thirst would be better than this. Even in a dream, she bled for me—yet bound me in chains. Sweetest torment, her blood blazing like droplets of liquid rubies scattered on the snow. Such power.
She might be the one. The one to free me.
After thousands of years, she might carry enough power to break me the fuck out.
If I drain every last fucking drop of blood in her body.
She probably wouldn’t be the last queen that I killed, unless she managed to kill me first. Impossible, surely. Though I had to reconsider that likelihood when she managed to penetrate my dreams to stand before me without physically entering my prison at all. Misty fog swirled around her, but I could see her face. So fucking regal. Shining eyes that brimmed with ridiculous hope and naivety.
Too fucking young. Wearing her fucking heart on her sleeve for me to devour.
Woo her. Lure her to my trap. It’s the only way to break free.
She still believes in love.
I fucking hate her.
Though I knew it was a lie.
“It’s you again.” I put rumbling menace into each syllable. “What do you want with me this time? Did you come to torment me with what I cannot have, while I lie chained another thousand years?”
She held out her hand with a gleaming ball of golden light. “I have a gift for you.”
I scanned my lair to see if the necklace the Avalon queen had tried to use sparked in response to solar magic, but I must have buried it beneath bones over the centuries since she’d tried to bond me. “You stink of Ra. Get the fuck away from me before I eat you.”
“Ra tried to kill me.”
If the God of Light had taken notice of her power, then I was even more keen to taste her. Though I couldn’t help but chuckle. Did this fledgling queen honestly expect me to believe that she’d managed to escape from Ra’s clutches? “Yet you’re still here. Either you’re very good, or the stick-up-his-butt sun god is getting lazy in his old age.”
“I prefer the first,” she said with a sultry lilt in her voice.
Of fucking course she’d be cocky. Too young to know any better. A blink of my fucking eye. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
