Hive Queen

by Sinclair, Grayson

  “It hurts.”

  “I know it does, but just hold on.”

  “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.” I wanted to scream; the pain was too much.

  Five points of fire flared across my stomach, and I gurgled a half groan. “Looks like her chitin is plugging the hole and keeping her spine from separating. it’s the only reason she’s still alive, but blood is pooling inside her. She needs a health potion, and quickly!” Evelyn said.

  “Looks like it,” a new voice said from somewhere outside of my line of sight. I couldn’t see them, could only stare at the too bright sky. “But she sustained the injury during the trial, and potions are forbidden.”

  “Reina! Damn you! She’ll die if we don’t do anything!” Gil shouted, his heavy footsteps thudding away from me.

  “Then she dies and proves she was unworthy of the mantle of Hive Queen.”

  “No. Fuck you, I’m not going to watch one of my friends die in front of me. You can go to hell!”

  Metal cleared leather, and everything got quiet fast. I’m so sleepy, but I need to stay awake. Gil told me I had to stay awake, and he wouldn’t lie to me. I fought the exhaustion and mana depletion and tried to summon my magic. I could heal my injury easily with a spell, but I only had drops left—not enough to control a single spider, let alone heal a grievous injury.

  I was dying, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  And the others were a second away from going to war with the Arachne to stop it.

  “Stop!” I yelled, spitting out a mouthful of blood. I wasn’t going to let them kill themselves to help me. If I was dying, so be it. I was already dragging Sam with me; I couldn’t bear anyone else. I’m sorry, my love. But you can come back, and that’s enough for me. I’m sorry I won’t get to see you again. I love you.

  I used the last of my dwindling magic to form a single blade of chitin down my finger, and I raised my hand to take my life so no one else would have to suffer for me.

  I plunged the blade toward my throat, only for resistance to stop my hand just before I pierced my skin.

  Evelyn let out a throaty chuckle, her iron grip wrapped around my arm. “None of that now, little queen. Don’t be so dramatic.”

  “I won’t let anyone else get hurt for me,” I said as I struggled like a mewling kitten against her grasp.

  “And you won’t,” she said, turning her head away from me. “No potions is the only rule, correct?”

  “Correct,” Reina replied, her voice smug, superior.

  “That’s all I need to know.” Evelyn knelt over me and pulled my head into her lap. I stared at her ethereal form though half-closed eyelids while the chill returned. Pins and needles crept up my fingers and toes, and once more, sleep called for me.

  Evelyn brought her hand back into view, and she clutched a thin knife in her hand. She brought it to her wrist and split her skin with a fluid slice. Blood welled from her pale skin, but the color was off. It was tinged with fire like a ripe blood orange. It dripped warmth over my cheek, and she lowered her wrist to my mouth.

  “What are you doing?” Reina asked.

  “Not using a potion.” Evelyn’s skin pressed against my teeth, and a drip of succulent blood slid down my mouth. It was warm, rich, and utterly delicious. It put even Sam’s tangy blood to shame, and I knew beyond anything else that I wanted more.

  I opened my mouth wide and dug my teeth into her flesh, breaking the skin to spill even more of her delicious blood over my lips. It invigorated me like nothing I’d experienced before, and I jolted awake, wrapping my hands over her forearm.

  Something shifted inside of me, and a warmth spread through my veins as my organs righted themselves and my spine fused back together. It was so wonderous to feel my body again that I didn’t question what was happening to me.

  And then my mind slipped into the past.

  The darkness that accompanied the Mnemosyne was too similar to the bleak, unending void, and like I had when I tasted of Sam, I froze, my heart stopping as unhinged terror threatened my sanity. I curled in on myself as the familiar loneliness crept from the furthest reaches of my mind. I opened my mouth to cry out, but before I could, I was falling.

  The memory slunk in with bright tones. I was back in the world Sam came from; that much I knew. It was too different from what I’d come to know as my reality.

  The buildings were tall, lifeless gray masses that rose higher than the birds could fly. It unsettled me to have them looming overhead as soft moonlight reflected off shattered glass in the broken windows above me.

  The smooth, black street I stood on came to a crossroads where three people stood, their heads darting around as they scanned the darkness for something I couldn’t see. Two of them were male, one taller than the other by just a few inches. The tall one was cute, bordering on handsome, but still had too much youthfulness in his face. His dark hair hung past his gray eyes, and he brushed a tanned, muscular hand across his bangs.

  I didn’t know him, but I felt like I did, something about him was incredibly familiar.

  The shorter one was someone I knew I’d never met before.

  He was thin, wiry, with shaggy blond hair only a shade or so lighter than mine that framed his sharp face. His green eyes were hidden behind a pair of square glasses, and the beginnings of stubble sprouted from his jawline.

  They pointed to a building and shuffled across the road, their movements slowed by their armor. It was obviously armor, but not like I’d seen before. It was sleek, muted black that covered their chests and left most of their upper arms bare. Strapped to each forearm was more of the material, but I had no clue what it was.

  In their hands were weapons, that much I knew, but they were blocky, a glossy gray, and they hefted them with respect.

  As they crossed the street, the final member of the party checked behind them and followed after.

  She was tall, almost the same height as the tall boy, but off by an inch. She had the same dark hair, but hers fell past her chest. Familial resemblance reflected in her features that she shared with the boy, but her eyes were shot through with jade rather than the muted gray of the boy’s.

  I knew who she was, who they both were then. Because I was seeing Evelyn’s memories, the girl had to be Evelyn, and the boy Adam. Gone was the pale skin, the silver hair and golden eyes that I’d come to associate the twins with, but as I stared, it was undoubtably them.

  The blond boy shouted in alarm. “Over there!”

  The group raised their weapons as a pale, monstrous creature leapt onto a broken, red machine with metallic wheels. It crumpled the metal and let out a piercing howl from its too-wide jaws. Its needle teeth sparkled from the light of the moon down its throat.

  It was a ghoul, one of the creatures that destroyed Sam’s world and took the person he loved most from him.

  A shrill blast of pain rang through my ears as fire bloomed from the weapon Adam carried. A heavy gout of flames shot faster than I could follow and stuck the ghoul. It hissed a wretched scream as the fire blistered and blackened its skin as it spread up its shoulder to the side of its face. In a second, half of its body was a mess of oozing black skin that burst open with vile white blood as it spilled down its legs.

  “We’re too far away,” Evelyn said, her voice taking away any doubt that it was her.

  “Retreat?” the blond boy asked.

  “Nick, that’s a goddamn great plan, but we’ve got company,” Adam replied, motioning with his weapon to the shadows near a decrepit building that sold something called “pizza.”

  Four or five new creatures appeared, covered in darkness.

  They resembled the ghouls only in their hideousness. They looked human, but like walking skeletons. Their pallid, emaciated gray skin stretched tightly over their pronounced bones. Lanky arms ended in five wickedly sharp ivory claws while they stared at the three with soulless, pitch-black eyes.

  A low hiss rolled from their mouths as they shambled out into the light.

/>   “Shit. We’ve already got a ghoul to deal with—I really didn’t want to add the fucking grim on top of it.”

  “Run?” Nick asked.

  “Run,” the twins agreed.

  They turned as one and sprinted to the nearest building, a towering giant with the words Windigo Industries written in giant white letters. They hopped through a broken window and ran down a white-tiled hallway with a lamp overhead that shone with bright light.

  Adam stopped, turned, and tossed a small, cylindrical canister down the hallway as the monsters burst into the room.

  The canister exploded with a raging inferno. A torrential fire filled the hallway and started eating through the walls and ceiling. The charging ghouls stopped in their tracks, petrified by the flames, but the skeletal grim kept their pace as they dashed through the flames after their prey.

  Evelyn and the others rounded a corner as the monsters chased after them.

  The room they entered was long and thin with an equally long and thin wooden table surrounded by plush chairs attached to little balls that rolled out of the way as the three of them shoved the table towards the door.

  The grim ran headlong into the table and toppled over it. Adam, Nick, and Evelyn raised their weapons, and my hearing failed me.

  Rapid explosions punished my ears as I fought to keep my eyes open. Bursts of blood splattered from the grim as chunks of gray flesh disappeared in seconds as whatever weapons they wielded ended the monsters’ lives.

  Five shredded corpses lay strewn in pieces with muddy blood coating the doorframe and wall.

  “Damn, James. These new guns of yours are something else,” Nick said, turning to Adam.

  “Thanks, though I couldn’t have made them without your help.”

  “Enough standing around, guys. We need to get out of this death trap. That ghoul is still outside, and if there’s one, there’s a dozen more nearby. We need to grab what we came for and get back to the lab. Sunrise is too far off for us to be out right now.”

  “You’re right,” Adam said, looking down at his wrist. A circular silver object wrapped around and lit up in a bright orange color as he held it close to his face. “Edna, scan the building and show us how to get to the vault.”

  “Of course, Master Bell. The door behind you leads to the elevators. The room you seek is fifteen floors down. I’ve already hacked into the system and opened the doors,” a soft-spoken woman’s voice replied.

  The light from the device at his wrist faded away, and he shouldered his gun. “You heard the lady. Let’s get our asses in gear.”

  My vision distorted as they left the room and the darkness crept back in.

  I didn’t know what to make of what I’d seen. I didn’t understand most of it; Earth was a strange and chaotic place filled with danger and horrors beyond my understanding, but its technology was truly beyond my comprehension. I was lost in the implications of talking guide spirits and weapons that could obliterate anything in their path. It made my head spin.

  And that was just the first memory. There would be two more, and I didn’t know if my mind could take it.

  The second memory came slowly. I found myself in a gray room with nearly a dozen tables strewn with bits of things I had no names for, huge hunks of metal and thin copper wires wrapped in bright colors and hundreds of other similar things that piled up on the tables as they stretched around the room. Adam was seated at a chair in the middle, hunched over the only table that was remotely clean. His hands and clothes were stained with grease as he held a tube with a spout that sparked with blinding white fire.

  There was a knock on the door, and Evelyn walked in. She wore a long white coat over dark pants and a thin purple shirt. She strutted across the workshop and leaned heavily on Adam as she peeked at whatever he was working on.

  “No luck?” she asked.

  “Not even a scratch,” he said, setting down the fire-making device and picking up a pair of metal tongs. “I even poured thermite over it, and it didn’t even get hot, so I don’t know what to make of them, but watch this.”

  The tongs clacked together as he picked something up and held it away from him. Clutched at the center of the tongs was a small orange crystal. It was a deep, rich amber, rough cut, and it glowed even in the dim light of the room.

  He took the amber shard over to a separate table where a nearly identical crystal sat on the bare table, waiting.

  He placed the new crystal next to the one lying on the table, and before he could even move the tongs, the amber shards pulled closer to each other and melded together like liquid glass, leaving only a single larger crystal in their place.

  “The hell?” Evelyn asked, taking a step back.

  “Yeah, beats the hell out of me. That shouldn’t be possible, and I don’t understand how, but that’s not all that I discovered.”

  “More surprises?”

  Adam leaned over in his chair and grabbed a large mallet off the table next to him and whacked the large crystal. It shattered with a resounding crack, and slivers of the gem went over the table as it broke in half.

  The two halves and the countless minuscule pieces shuddered, and the slivers pulled toward the larger shards. And like nothing had happened, the two crystals sat whole and unbroken.

  “This is impossible,” Evelyn said, staring wide-eyed at the gems on the table.

  “Yesterday I’d have said as much, but I can’t deny what’s staring me in the face.”

  “What do we do with them?”

  “Nothing,” Adam said, picking them up with the tongs and placing them into individual cloth bags he pulled from his pocket. “I don’t trust the Narghuul, and I’m damn sure not just going to follow along with their plans for us.

  “No, we take them to the bunker. We lock them up and keep them safe until we decide to use them─if we decide to use them.”

  “All right, brother. I’ll trust your gut on this.”

  The bags disappeared into Adam’s pocket as the memory faded away.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but even though I’d never seen them before, I knew whatever those gems were, they were important.

  The final memory came in quickly.

  The whitewashed walls of the room shook. Dust rained from the cracks in the ceiling as it buckled. Desks and chairs toppled to the ground as a low pounding thrummed with each pulse of my heart.

  Evelyn and Adam were in the center of the room, their guns in their hands as they stood back to back.

  “Why the hell did I let you talk me into following you?” Evelyn asked as something flashed by the cracked, grimy window that looked out to midnight sky.

  “Because it was this or death. Edna said this building had the best bet of keeping us safe.”

  “Actually, I said that this location offered a thirty-two percent chance of survival, which was marginally higher than any of the surrounding buildings,” Edna chimed in from the device at Adam’s wrist.

  “Fucking perfect,” Evelyn said, her gun booming as another flash crawled over the window. There was a spurt of blood, a long howl of pain, and then a bone-crunching thud a second later. “They’re going to swarm us in the next five minutes if we don’t get out of here!”

  “And go where? The street’s crawling with dozens of them!”

  Adam pressed a button on the side of his gun, and it changed with whine. A ghoul I hadn’t seen crawled into the room, and Adam jammed the front of his gun into its mouth and pulled the trigger.

  It exploded into a cloud of ash and fire.

  “Damn it, you know what we have to do.”

  Evelyn nodded, ejecting a slim block from the bottom of her gun and replacing it with an identical one. “I don’t like it, don’t know what it’ll mean for our future, but it’s this or not having a future at all.”

  Adam let out a heavy sigh, sounding ancient as he pulled the bags holding the gems from his pocket. He tossed one to Evelyn and held the other in his palm. “You ready for this?”

  “Nop
e,” she said and tipped the bag over, letting the bright amber gemstone rest in her hand.

  As soon as it touched her bare skin, it began to glow. A bright orange light radiated from the center of the crystal, and the same light pulsed from Adam’s hand as well.

  “Shit!” Evelyn hissed as the shard began smoldering and seared her flesh as it burrowed into her palm. With one last grunt of pain, the gems was gone, leaving behind a single thick scar in each of their palms.

  “By the nine kings of hell, that hurt like a bitch,” Adam said, clutching his hand.

  “Agreed, but is that it?”

  “I don’t kn─“ Adam began but let out a low groan of pain.

  “James!” Evelyn shouted and took a step toward Adam, but she sunk to her knees in pain.

  They both stared at each other, and for a split second, their eyes light up a bright gold, the golden tint I’d come to know them by.

  Before they could speak again, bright orange light spilt from their chests and illuminated through their veins. They both doubled over, whimpering as the light grew until even I had to avert my eyes.

  The light built and built until it became a blazing white and obliterated my entire view.

  It threw me out of the Mnemosyne, and I bolted upright, gasping, holding back a scream.

  I was in a room that I’d never been in before. The natural wood walls and iron chandelier that hung above my head reminded me of Reina’s palace; the hand-carved furniture matched as well.

  “You’re finally awake,” Reina said from beside me. She was sitting in a chair with a hand-sewn green cushion, reading a book bound in smooth bark. She looked up and put down the book as I sat up properly. “You’ve been out for a while.”

  Before I could even form a reply, an itch crept from the back of my head. It was panic, an overwhelming amount of panic. I smiled despite the worry my bonded was feeling. Sam. I’m all right. I promise, my love. I poured as much love and reassurance I could to him, and when his sweeping relief swept over me, I knew he knew I was okay.

  Reina noted my smile and drew her lips up to mirror me. “Your human lover was quite worried about you. He kept ‘calling’ the big, ebony human, trying to make sure you were okay. Though from what I heard, he has much bigger problems to worry about right now than you.”