Witch Queen (31 page)

“You won’t need those. If I wanted to kill
you, you’d already be dead.”

She smiled and her escort snorted.

I fought to remain still and to keep myself
from shaking under her icy stare. But there was something else in
her eyes that I didn’t understand. It was as if she was haunted by
some primal anger that was yet to be unleashed. Whatever she felt
towards me was beyond hate.

I swallowed hard and angled my body towards
the door in case I needed to escape really fast. I could feel my
sweat drip between my breasts.

“Elena, a half-breed from Anglia who claims
to be a steel maiden…what a ridiculous notion.”

The witch queen moved across the bedchamber
and then stopped. Her pendant flared, and with a snap of her
fingers, the dresser rose, hovered for a moment, and then sailed
across the room towards me, nicked my right shoulder, and smashed
into the wall.

So this was her show of strength. There was
no doubt in my mind that the witch queen could and would kill me if
she were given the chance.

Was this her chance?

Celeste had said that if I were mistreated
it would reflect badly on the king. I was sure the witch queen knew
this, too. I suspected that she just didn’t care.

“I hate half-breeds,” spat the queen. “Races
should
never
mix. It diminishes the line, the blood magic,
and the power. Your mother created a monster when she had you.”

“What do you know of my mother?” I asked
churlishly.

The queen’s expression turned sour.

“If you want to keep your tongue for the
duration of your stay—which will not be for very much longer—you
will address me as
witch queen
.”

I wanted to tell her off with a million cuss
words from the Pit, but I knew she was just waiting for an excuse
to kill me. There was too much on the line for me to take any
unnecessary risks.

“I apologize, witch queen,” I said. My voice
was steady, and I held my ground.

“A steel maiden, you say?” Her expression
darkened. “You’re nothing but a human bastard, a mistake that needs
to be rectified.”

The queen continued to inspect the room with
an expression that conveyed her distaste for the quality of the
furnishings. She looked as if it pained her to be here at all.

I wished she would leave. I wished they
would both leave, but I knew they wouldn’t. Not until they got what
they came for. Me.

The witch queen put her hands on her
hips.

“I’ve never understood the king’s
fascination with the steel maidens,” she laughed. “He’s been
fascinated for years, for generations…but why? So what if they can
handle a sword better than a male? What is that compared with
real
dark and terrifying power?”

Her magecraft flared with yellow power, and
I cringed.

“The steel maidens were a useless coven
anyway,” mocked the queen as she stood right in front of me.

“It’s no wonder they thinned out over time
and disappeared. And we certainly don’t need them anymore. The Dark
Witches clan controls the true power. All the powers of the other
witches originated with us…from the Dark Witches.”

She might be a witch, but she sounded just
like a priest.

I noticed then that the door had been left
open. I wished the prince would show up, anything would be better
than this bitch.

“Despite whatever promises the witch king
might have made to you,” said the queen, “steel maidens don’t
belong here. They never have. You’ve always been the lesser coven,
the ones without
real
magic.”

She looked away for a moment, and then she
added, more to herself than to me, “There’s only room for one.”

I looked at the witch queen’s accomplice to
see if I could get a clue about what she had just said, but her
scowl revealed nothing.

The witch queen turned back to me.

“You are nothing but a new toy for the king
to play with until he gets bored. Then he will forget that you even
exist.”

Her harsh expression changed, and something
like pain settled in its place. I had the unnerving feeling that
she was referring to herself.

“Soon the witch king will lose interest in
you,” continued the queen. “He always does. You are no threat to
me.”

“If I’m not a threat, as you say, then why
are you even here?” I half laughed.

The queen’s face flushed red, and her eyes
widened until I could see all the whites surrounding her
irises.

“Tomorrow, you make sure to
lose
,”
she ordered. “You will not defeat the last two witches. Even if you
feel you can win, you must make sure that you fail the last two
trials.”

I frowned.

“What? Why? I don’t
want
to lose. If
I can defeat the remaining trials, I will. Everything I hold dear
depends on—”

“You
make
sure you
lose
,”
hissed the queen impatiently. “I’m ordering you
not
to
defeat the remaining witches tomorrow.”

My face burned with anger. “No. I won’t do
it. Why should I listen to your orders?”

I didn’t understand why this was so
important to her. Why should she care if I finished the trials and
led a small army back to my world? What did that have to do with
her?

Her eyes blazed with hatred, and for a
moment I was sure she was going to turn me into dust.

“I know you’ve been feeding the
humans
,” said the witch queen. “That’s right. Nothing goes
on in my home without my knowledge.”

My heart leapt to my throat, and a wave of
nausea hit me.
Damn her.
Goddess help my friends.

The witch queen beamed at the fear on my
face, a small victory.

“Bring him in,” she ordered.

I heard a low cry from just outside the
bedchamber, and then Leo pitched into the room.

My breath caught as a new kind of terror
settled in the pit of my stomach.

A male witch whose face had been marred with
scars that only fire could have generated strolled in behind him.
His black robe swished at his heels, and a magecraft ring gleamed
on his index finger.

Leo fell to the ground. He looked thinner,
paler, so weak. His eyes were wild as he looked around the room,
and then they settled on me.

“Elena? What’s going on?” His face was
encrusted with dirt, and his voice sounded like he hadn’t used it
in years.

“Leo!” I made to dash towards him, but the
queen’s hands lashed out and something hit me in the stomach. I
sailed backwards across the room and crashed into the wall, right
next to the smashed dresser. A familiar vinegar tang welled up
around me like a heavy drape. I was pinned against the wall, and I
could hardly breathe.

“So—” I gasped. “Is this how you’re going to
kill me?”

The queen’s swollen lips spread into a
smile. “Not yet. Let me show you what real power looks like.”

The queen’s magecraft flared, and a thread
of gold and black magic shot out of her fingers towards Leo.

“Leo!” I screamed.

Leo tried to move, but he was too weak and
too slow.

The magic hit him. He rose into the air and
began to convulse, flailing his arms and legs like a puppet without
strings. He cried out in excruciating pain, and I turned to attack
the queen. I growled like an animal, but I had been enchanted. My
body wouldn’t move. I watched helplessly.

And then I heard the loud popping of bones
snapping, and Leo’s head snapped around unnaturally and faced
towards me. It happened so fast I thought I had imagined it. The
light in his eyes left him, and he slumped to the floor. My friend
was dead.

“NO! I’ll kill you! You monster! You bitch!”
I wailed.

“He was my friend,” I cried. “He didn’t
deserve to die.”

Tears and mucus ran down my cheeks, and I
tried to break free of the queen’s hold. But her magic was too
strong, and it held me like iron shackles against the wall.

Oh, Leo…I’m so sorry…

“You dare call me a
bitch
?” the
queen’s hateful smile was still fixed on her red lips. “I am a
queen,
and you are nothing but a mistake.”

She gestured with her hands, and I winced as
another surge of magic hit me and ripped
all
my clothes and
underclothes from my body and left me completely naked.

I cried as the queen and her escorts laughed
at me. I had been shamed, disgraced, and humiliated. I blinked
through my tears at Leo’s lifeless body.

What would Jon think of me now?

“There,” said the queen. “An animal doesn’t
need clothes.”

My face burned, but I was still enchanted
and couldn’t even move my arms to cover myself.

The queen snorted and flipped back a strand
of her hair that had come lose. She moved closer until I could
smell the rose water on her. Her eyes gleamed with madness.

“Let me be perfectly clear, half-breed. If
you
don’t
lose the trials tomorrow, all your precious little
humans will die. If you don’t lose, I swear on my crown, on my
throne, and on magic, that I will peel the pretty skin off your
bones and bathe in your blood.”

The witch queen and her entourage
disappeared through the door and left me naked and fastened to the
wall.

And then there was a release, and I fell to
the cold ground.

CHAPTER 27

T
HE NEXT MORNING, I stood in the
center of the arena once again. This time fewer witches had come to
see me get my ass kicked again. It seemed that the higher witches
had lost interest. Perhaps they figured I should have been dead by
now. Perhaps they just didn’t care.

The ring of trial witches surrounded me,
just as they had yesterday. They appeared to be the same witches,
too, except for one. A new augur witch stood in the place of the
one I’d beaten to a pulp. She had the same shaved head and mystical
silver eyes that I couldn’t look at for more than half a
second.

But it didn’t matter how unnerving the eyes
of the augur were because only the white-haired male witch from the
Shifters clan and the long, blue-haired female from the Dark
Witches clan mattered now. They watched me
calmly with a mixture of curiosity and
irritation.

I looked up at the queen witch. She was
draped in a black silk gown and lounged in her seat laughing at
something the king had said to her. Last night she had come to my
bedchamber for one reason alone—to break me. And she’d
succeeded.

I had Leo’s blood on my hands, and now the
lives of the rest of the rebels depended upon my actions. My body
had healed, but my spirit was broken.

My hopes of saving Jon had disappeared like
a puff of smoke. I knew that a love that strong, that
unconditional, would not come my way again. I knew that I could
never love another as I had loved him. It was love that was worth
dying for.

I wondered what he would have done in my
place.

Would he sacrifice the lives of a few men to
save hundreds of thousands?

I knew what his answer would be, I just
didn’t know if
I
could do it.

I was spiraling down into my own darkness,
and no magic could heal me from that.

Unlike the queen, I
had
a heart. I
felt for the pain of others, especially for those who’d grown up in
the same dilapidated slum as I had. Leo’s screams kept sounding in
my head. The images of his death kept flashing in my mind’s eye.
Leo…

It was Celeste who had found me hours later,
naked on the floor, and holding on to Leo’s arm. What a sight I
must have been. I was a naked, beaten down skinny female. I knew my
ribs and my hipbones were showing. They could see
everything.
I had sobbed openly at my humiliation. I was
mortified. In an attempt to hide some of my exposed skin, I had
pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my free arm around
them.

“Oh, Elena,” Celeste had said. Moving fast,
she had draped me with a blanket from the bed. “I’m so sorry.”

And I’d held on to Leo, like my life
depended on it, as though if I’d let go it would have made his
death real. It wasn’t until Celeste finally pried my fingers apart
and promised that she and the other servants would take care of his
body that I truly let him go. But his death would always be with
me.

The two older female witch maids and the
older male witch who had seen me sprawled naked had kept their
heads down. Their features had been softened in sorrow, but in
their eyes I saw a spark of resentment and anger directed at the
witch queen, and it had given me hope.

Although I had come to understand that
Witchdom was an angry world, there was also kindness in the lesser
witches. Even though I wasn’t a real witch by the standards of
Witchdom,
they
didn’t judge me. They
helped
me.