Riven (2 page)

“Oh shut up,” Jessica spat, all traces of humor vanished. Under the mask of illness and exhaustion, a burning fire of rage and anger flared. “When are you going to admit it? That this, all of this hiding and stalling was for nothing?” She waved a pale hand around the room with a jerk. “It’s time you face facts, and let me go. I need to find Essallie,
we
need to find Essallie-”

“No!”
Lorena screamed, then quickly clamped a hand tightly over her mouth. When she lowered it, her voice had returned to the silence, shaking noise it was before. “I will not allow you to put yourself in the Queen’s hands like that. What’s done is done.”

A growing irritation colored Jessica’s sigh. “We can’t keep doing this, Mama.”

Lorena forced her gaze down to the edge of the bed, staring at the off-white sheets with increasing interest. “I’m not quite sure what you mean, dear.”

“Liar,” her daughter retorted, breathing labored. Pinches of pink colored her cheeks. “You think she doesn’t already know where we are? As if she isn’t keeping tabs on us. The Queen will find us eventually. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but she will come.”

“She will not!”
Fear brought a high-pitched quiver to Lorena’s voice.

“She will!” Jessica shouted back with fever. “Unless you choose to forget the day she branded me.” When Lorena didn’t answer, Jessica yanked the thin sheets back, exposing her pencil thin legs. Black shadows ensnared them, caressing the skin as gently as a twisted vice could. With each tremble of Jessica’s skin, the shadows moved, re-grouping over her feet and lower legs exactly as they had been on the Queen’s. “Do you remember now?”

For a split second, Lorena could feel it all slipping away, her life and world no longer in her hands. Unsteady eyes found her daughter’s, and she stared bleakly at the child she had brought into this world with the hopes of seeing her thrive, not struggle like she had. And now it was too late for them, too late to find the sun within the shadows, to savor the breaths of life they had left. “I will not her have you, used like some toy in her pretty treasure chest. I refuse to let her use you until-”

“Until what, Mama?” Jessica’s voice remained low, an eerie tone of calm making her words carry more weight than her mother’s screams. “Until I give her exactly what she wants? Until I tell her where her incubator half-angel has ran off to, where the last piece of her puzzle rests?”

“She will not have those things.” Lorena hissed in fear, eyes wide and brimming with tears. “We’ll keep moving you, stay low as long as we need-”

“When are you going to learn?” Jessica said with growing exasperation, hands relaxed and no longer white knuckled. Her eyes had opened, two beautiful orbs of color brimming with the vitality one as young as her should have had everywhere. But her eyes were the only source of her youth, the rest of her body having fallen prey to the crippling effect of her growing supernatural power. “All of this is going to happen, no matter what you do or say. The prophet warned me, warned
you,
that keeping us from Essallie would only bring about the end to us all. Now look where we are, exactly as she predicted. I am servitude to the Queen, our last hope is running in the unknown, unaware of what will befall her, and yet you continue to believe in the madness that if you hide me from it all, that it will vanish.” Her words turned sharp as ice, bitterly cold with truth. “Is that what you desire?”

Jessica’s words acted like a loaded gun placed over her mother’s heart, safety off and all. Lorena turned her watery gaze to the glass behind her, staring unseeing at the brewing storm, its violent mauve and oil black clouds a classic painting of warning to an oncoming disaster.

Minutes ticked into the silence, Lorena’s eyes still watching the twisted braids of clouds and shuddering trees outside. “She will use you until you break,” her voice sounded faint. “Use you and throw you away like she has everyone else. You mean
nothing
to her.”

“I mean more to her than I do to you.”

Lorena whirled back to face her daughter, and in one swift move, struck her daughter across the face.

The effect was instantaneous.

Jessica’s eyes flew open wider than possible, irises melting to a clouded white. Her hands slammed against her mother’s chest, fingers digging into the slippery silk of her clothes in a grasp of violent desperation. A wild, uncontrollable scream tore from her throat as the flashes of red, white, and black burning into her mind, forcing her to watch the newest way her mother was set up to die.

“Jessica!” Lorena shrieked, clamping onto her daughter with fear. Arms wrapped about Jessica’s writhing frame. “Oh god, Jessica stop, please stop!”

“Let me go!”
She cried out between screams, the images coming faster as her mother continued to hold onto her. Flashes of Lorena holding a knife, pressing the sharp blade against the soft flesh of her wrist. Lorena standing outside the Queen’s castle, chanting in defiance of her while a guard takes aim with a bullet of black fire from a castle window. Claws, crossbows, swords, poison, fire, glass, water; they all blended into one, crowding Jessica’s mind as she screamed in unrelenting agony, the visions beginning to split her levels of consciousness into different realities.

Jessica jerked back in a jolt of pain, Lorena’s hands flying off her as she rocked back into her chair with a sharp thud. She watched, knowing in horror that she had broken the very rules she had set in place to protect the fragile relationship she had with Jessica. For a moment, the frail girl sat upright and frozen, screams pouring from her throat. It was all Lorena could do but hug her daughter and cause more pain.

Minutes pass as the frozen, soul screaming madness continues. Then, just as suddenly as it had started, Jessica collapsed back onto the bed, whiter than the sheets surrounding her, barely breathing.

Her mother barely spoke. “Jess-”

“Don’t,” her daughter cut her off, exhaustion running deep in her veins. She no longer sounded like the bright, jittery teenager having awoken from a nap, but of a woman fractured by the stretch of time. “Please, don’t.”

Lorena ignored her, pressing on. “Don’t you see? She has done this to you, done this to us. Jessica, my baby, my only daughter, you’re mean everything in this world to me. Please, don’t let her take you away.”

“You mean like how Rinae is all Essallie has? All she will ever have in the end?” Jessica lamented with sorrow, the weight of her knowledge insurmountable. “But she’ll never know just how important Rinae will be to her, not with you continuing this useless play against fate and destiny.”

A voice drawled softly. “Now, I wouldn’t say that.”

Something colder than ice froze in Lorena's veins, the breath extinguished from her lungs. Her eyes swiveled around the room, landing on the darkest corner that seemed to rebuff any light. She knew the voice from anywhere, and knew that it would only be a matter of time before the owner of the voice would try and come for her daughter.

Shapes formed from the dark, stretching out in a flowing river on the ground before rising to the ceiling to take shape. A body, with lean shoulders and a sleek black dress, formed from the darkness. Waves of midnight black hair framed a petite, sweetheart shaped face, two eyes black as coal standing alien against pale skin.

Blinking her dark almond eyes, the Queen gave a rich, malicious smile of sharp teeth. "Lorena, what a lovely surprise. Counseling your child to do right to save her skin?"

Lorena froze, all sense of what to do vanished. Before she could think, she reached for her daughter with a cry, hands flinging out at the cotton sheets with a fevered desperation.

With a flick of the Queen's hand, Lorena stopped, shuddering in mid-grasp. Lucretia let her dangle for a moment before tossing her against the wall, listening to her body collide against the plaster with a sickening smack before dropping to the ground, unconscious.

Jessica raised a hand. "Mom!"

A stilled silence settled upon the room, only broken by that of Jessica's continuing gasp for breath. The Queen turned to face the frail child lying in bed, a mask of expressionless quiet perfectly in place. Slowly she came closer, closing the gap between them until the shadows swirling in her skirts licked the edge of the bed frame.

"I had planned to make this trip short," she said with a sneer. "But complications have risen in my faults. No matter." The Queen extended her arm, black satin covering her bone-thin fingers and hand, stretching all the way up to her elbows. "Tell me where she is."

This was it, Jessica knew; the moment of her personal fork in the road. To give the Queen what she wanted would bring her life to an end with a sharp suddenness, and yet if she didn’t give it she would be equally damned to an early death. Options tumbled in her mind, like a deer standing in the middle of a dark road on a foggy night, and she knew she had to make the choice to jump into the woods and save her skin, or admire the glow of oncoming headlights and meet a brilliant demise.

Jessica shook her head. "I refuse." Defiance gave her a delicious glow, lighting her eyes brighter than she had in weeks. "We finally stand a chance to be free. Three hundred years of your scorn has been more than enough. The time has come to watch you fall and lose your crown."

The Queen’s knowing smirk twitched, a crack showing in her perfect facade. Just as quickly as it was seen, her face smoothed out, an expressionless vacancy in her eyes standing out against her forming mask of demonic blood. "Is that so?" They narrowed to slits, her lips pursed as she weighed her next words. "Perhaps you have forgotten your place, Seer."

Jessica had not forgotten. "I would rather die,” she whispered with a giddy malevolence. “Than give you anything."

Lucretia pulled her hand back, fingers curling to form a fist. For a second she stood there, glowering in the scorn from a frail half-human. Her words stirred the potions of vengeance deep within Lucretia's heart, echoing with sharp precision in her ears. The girl really thought it would be so easy to defy the Queen of their world.

When her mouth opened to speak, no trace of discontent was to be found. "I had hoped," she began in a lilting tone. "That it would not come to this." Reaching into one of her sleeves, she drew a long, auburn needle the length of her forearm. The needle glowed, swirls of blood red and burnt orange warring within it. "But you leave me no choice." She drew the needle back, as if in slow motion, and plunged it into one of Jessica's legs.

The frail girl cried out, screaming louder than ever before. Lorena, listening to her daughter's unbridled cries of pain rattling the room, stirred on the floor, raising her head. Pain lanced above her left eye as something sticky and wet clung to her skin and hair. Reaching a hand into her hair, she pulled back fingers stained with blood, just as the glass panes behind her spiderwebbed into fragments before exploding. A rush of the violent storm rain and wind poured into the room, drenching the monitors and equipment until the burst in puffs of choking smoke and wild sparks of electricity.

Between the frightful screams of her daughter, malevolent grinning of the Queen, and the collapsing scene around her, something snapped in Lorena's mind. Her fingers fumbled for the small, silver dagger tucked under her shirt at her waist, unsheathing the blade and gripping it tightly in her quivering hand. With a wild scream she lunged forward, thrusting the blade deep into the back of the Queen's shoulder.

For a moment, time seemed to pause, silence echoing in Lorena's ears. All eyes in the room transfixed on the hilt of the blade. Lorena's gaze flickered up to the Queen's, bottomless black eyes meeting her fearful gaze with a twisted delight. The Queen reached up, wrapping her fingers around Lorena's hand as it still held the blade. She gave it a twist, continuing to smile as the blade dug deeper into her flesh, then pulled it free. Dark blood, black as ink and thick as tar, bubbled from the small yet deep wound. She rolled her shoulder with barely a wince, the wound vanishing to a thin white scar before blending seamlessly into her skin, as if she had never beeb stabbed at all.

Holding the dagger in her outstretched hand, she examined it with mild interest, tilting the blade back and forth as she ignored the screams from the bed behind her. "Curious, what did you plan to do once I had died? Take the throne for yourself? Or perhaps you thought that by killing me, maybe somehow your daughter would be spared an early grave?"

Lorena barely had opened her mouth to speak when the Queen fastened her hands onto Lorena's face, the dagger clattering to the ground. Her palms pressed against Lorena's face, nails scratching the skin of her temples with each increase of pressure. With a jerk of her hands, she made sure the mother's eyes met hers before she spoke.

"Shame, you will never know such pity from me."

The Queen's nail grew, tips sharpening to jagged edges and cutting deeper into the skin. Needle-thin, startling white teeth filled her mouth as she gave a sickening smile that stretched from ear to ear. The unmistakable crunch of bone echoed within the room as the Queen flicked her wrists, breaking the protective mother's neck in one fell swoop.

Jessica screamed even louder, wailing in agony as her mother’s corpse collapsed to the ground with finality. Bitten-down fingernails clawed at the needle steeped deep into her leg, frantic to pull it free. Lucretia came closer, storm winds whipping her hair in snake-like streaks across the room. With a single move she secured both of Jessica’s hands, pressing them firmly against her wounded leg, driving the needle home.