If She's Wicked

by Amelia Hutchins

  “You’re really the one who was promised by the seers,” he said as he covered his mouth with his hand, watching me. “You’re the Queen of fucking Darkness.”

  “I’m so much more than that, more than you and your minions will ever fully understand. In less than five minutes, that beast is going to come through those doors, drawn by the music and the scent I left on purpose before I abandoned you here to secure the thread needed to put you back together. Into the tomb you go, Asmodeus. I can’t have you fucking this up now. Through the tomb is your Hell Gate; take it, and wait for your orders. Tick-tock, Fred.”

  “If you planned all of this, then why the fuck were we in their goddamn compound at all, woman,” he demanded with his mouth opening and closing as he watched me.

  “I needed to check their defenses and figure out where Arthur is hiding. He and I have unfinished business to discuss. I also needed to know a few other things, which I learned in my time there. I know a way to kill him, finally.”

  Chapter 32

  I slipped from the cover of the darkness and shadows smiling. I slowly walked up the stairs to the Guild, feeling the beast as his magic reached for me. I turned calmly, staring at him over my shoulder, I slipped through the wards I’d placed that not even he could pass through. Meeting the Fae hadn’t been an accident either, however, them being present as I’d slaughtered demons had been, but shit happened for a reason. Plus, I had never counted on the desperation of the Templar race that had created the pesky necklace. Not every plan could be foreseen, and yet I hadn’t minded the pleasure that was delivered because of them.

  I turned, sitting down and watched him with the other Knights as they slipped from the darkened alleyways and stood around the edge of the barrier. My heart sped up as I took in the glowing blue eyes that made butterflies explode within me. I felt him deep inside of me, his endless pacing as he realized he was locked out and couldn’t reach me.

  He paced right in front of me, staring me down as I smiled up at him with victory shining in my eyes. I’d known the Fae had slipped back into Faery, just as I knew there was a portal in the catacombs that led into the harem inside the Horde stronghold, even if they didn’t. Once upon a time, before Alazander, the previous Horde King had discovered it; the druids used the portal to save a woman from his clutches. I stood up, dusting off my ass as I stepped close enough to inhale his masculinity, which I craved. I didn’t crave him; I wanted this beast to devour me. To give me the silence inside my mind that only he could.

  “You want me, woman, I can smell it on you,” he growled angrily as he tried to beckon me to him with the shared lust we felt.

  “I do, I want to ride you so badly that I ache with it,” I whispered huskily. “I want to slide down your cock slowly and let you fill me until I burn from how full you make me. Do you want that too?” I asked huskily. I smirked, watching those ancient eyes narrowing as he smelled the desire my sex put off.

  “You do know that when I catch you—and I will catch you, wife—I’m going to fucking destroy you. I’ll make you so fucking weak with need that you will beg me to come, but you won’t come, not unless I allow you to. I’ll show you an entirely new meaning of torture,” he uttered as his claws lengthened, and those beside him followed his cue as they struggled against the monsters they held.

  “I’m counting on it,” I said as I remained in place.

  “They won’t protect you from me,” he whispered. “They can’t interfere; no one can.”

  “They’re not,” I said with a shrug. “Not that they are aware of, anyway. Plausible deniability is something that not even the Gods can charge another with interference if they had no knowledge of committing a crime.”

  “Smart, but the Gods won’t think twice about hurting them should they prevent me from reaching you. That womb belongs to me. It aches to be filled. You know it, and I know it.”

  “Does it? It may crave your child, but I do not. I do not crave being made into a slave again. I will never be a slave to you or anyone else. I am done being hurt by your people and mine. I am your wife, one you have failed to protect over and over again because no matter what happens, you refuse to look around you. Ask your father why my spine was broken, and who wielded the whip that severed it. Ask him who allowed my face to be painted and my mind to be punished for disobeying him as he craved the woman I would become. Ask your father, Callaghan. Ask that bastard who touched my innocent flesh first and defiled me, or how I knew what fucking was. Yes, I threw myself on you, but only because I watched your father fuck his whores while I was tied to the same bed, forced to watch him as he took them again and again. Practice, he said, so that I would know how to please him when the time came. Only he became impotent, didn’t he?” I smiled coldly as Callaghan shook his head. “You never wondered how you were called away every time I was hurt, you never even questioned it. Who sent you away from me? Who sent you on errands that any simple Knight could have done and then off to wars that weren’t yours to fight? You and your men are and always have been the strongest of your kind, housing beasts that can kill with a mere thought of their mind, and yet he sent you. He sent you away from me because our bond was unnatural. He craved what you had become, and then he craved the one thing in the entire world that held your attention. I have never been real to him, merely a cure.”

  “He would never cross me,” he hissed as anger pulsed from him. “You want me to murder my father? That’s low, Erie, even for you.”

  “No, not murder him. I want you to open your eyes. You are his sword, his greatest accomplishment. You, who he wished to protect from my poisonous cunt. If he loses you to me, he loses you all. He knows that, he’s always known that. He told me as he bent a whore over and took her before me, staring at me the entire time. I was nine, Mason. You were on a crusade to protect Knights who had come into a precarious position, but when you reached them, they weren’t even there anymore, were they? He has a cross on his chest with the Templar Knights motto beneath it instead of around it as is custom. I’m guessing that he couldn’t stand that pain of his clavicle being tattooed, which was why there were only a few dots placed where it should have been. I know, because I stared at that tattoo instead of into his heartless gaze where he wished me to. He also has three scars above his right hip; one was sewn incorrectly and left a gash wider than it should have. On his cock is a nick from a blade, which I know because he came on my face to make sure I knew that when the time came, he’d put it into my untried body.”

  Callaghan shook his head, but he knew. I could see it burning in his eyes as he stared at me with horror glowing within them. He knew the only way I could speak with the knowledge of those scars was if I’d seen his father naked.

  “Erie, fuck!” he shouted as he looked away and then stared back at me with pain in his eyes. “You were mine to protect.”

  “You failed, not because you didn’t try, but because everyone around us made sure that you did. You failed to see the snakes in the grass that never wanted us together. I threw myself at you to stop it, to stop the abuse that I knew would continue the moment you left me again, and it did. Because time after time, your father sent you away so that he could watch me be tortured. He craved it as if punishing me brought him joy. Probably because the one time you disobeyed him was because you were with me. He didn’t want you with me, and he knew that if and when he broke me, someone would still be called to use my womb. He promised me that I would carry his seed and that you would never want me. He told me you couldn’t stand the sight of my face or what he had told them to do to it. When you denied me, when you looked at me with disdain, I knew what he said was the truth. He reminded me often of what he would do to me. Then he just stopped, because you told him that I was your mate, but that I wasn’t just your mate, Mason, I was the mate to the monster within you. See, I could never piece together why he had so suddenly backed off of me until your beast mounted me. I then knew what had scared him s
o much that now he just wanted me dead. He is currently working with the druids on a plan to kill me after I have given birth to your son. Our son,” I hissed. “It is his goal to get the cure and end my life before I can taint you or his grandson. Frasier is aware and has been your father’s best friend since long before you were born, which is why you have not killed him yet. Don’t worry, right now they’re making peace with their Gods. I don’t need you to save me. I just need you to stay the fuck off me long enough that I can save myself.”

  “What the fuck did you do, Erie?” he demanded as an explosion erupted from a few blocks away. Everyone moved, ducking against the attack, except me.

  “I set their world on fire,” I smiled softly. “Just as I will continue to do until every last druid is dead. Next, I begin hunting witches. Don’t worry, your Templars and Masonries are safe from me, well, most of them. My list is growing smaller lately, which is good I guess, since y’know, you and that beast have been removed from it. I do like that cock,” I smirked as I turned away from the anger burning in his eyes and sauntered up the stairs of the Guild. “Fuck you later, Callaghan.”

  “Where the fuck do you think you’re going, woman? You just blew up an entire fucking building of innocent people!” he shouted.

  I turned and stared at him. “Innocent? Innocent! They beat me; they put things into me so they could track me. They touched me just because they could. I was the dirty little secret that they used and abused when they decided to. I was sent out to murder women and children, Callaghan. To slaughter entire families just so the druids didn’t have to pay them what they were due. I have spent years accumulating an underground railroad so fucking deep and protected that no one has or will ever find it. You and your Knights were supposed to protect the innocent, not the guilty. You have protected the rich and privileged at your father’s behest since the start of the Order. Me? I’ve collected those who needed me, those who held their loyalty above all else. Every single person I was ordered to murder at the behest of the druids or your father, I saved. They are not innocent; they tried to put that blood on my hands because to them, I didn’t matter. According to them, I have no soul. I have a soul, Mason. I have a fucking soul. I feel it with you. I know who I am. I know I’m yours and that you are my home. I can’t be what you want me to be because they broke me. I have so many fucking cracks that I can’t hold myself together, and when I try, I just end up with more.”

  “Erie, come with me.”

  “I can’t,” I whispered as a single tear slipped free. “I’m not done yet.”

  I turned, walking away from the one thing in this world that I craved. The one man who turned me inside-out and made me want more. He was dangerous to the monster inside of me, that craved to play with his, to the woman I wished to be. I wasn’t able to become what he wanted or needed. I never would be. Life had thrown me into the flames and watched as I’d burned to ashes. What had come from those ashes was deadly, precise, and yes, a little crazy. My entire world had been created to bring me to where I needed to be. I paused on the stairs, and I turned my eyes to the Druid’s Den as more explosions rocked through it, moving the maze of floors beneath it. Several other buildings in downtown Spokane joined it, and I smiled while I looked away, pushing into the Guild as I started making my way to the portal. I prayed that the Gods chose me to punish, and not the Fae. They had extended a branch, and I’d been afraid to reach for it, but now, now I needed them to start the next step of my plan.

  Chapter 33

  Callaghan

  I stood on the rooftop of the high-rise building, watching as the fires she’d lit continued to burn around the city. The bottle pressed against my lips and I drank deeply of the amber liquid before I passed it to Uther, who snorted as another building exploded. Hours had passed since I’d felt her leaving this world, and still, buildings continued to detonate all around us. She’d set the entire city ablaze right beneath our fucking noses. We’d rushed back here and searched for anything that could explode within the compound, unsure how she had brought this city and the druids to their knees.

  “I think she’s made her fucking point,” Uther hissed as he tipped up the bottle, chugging it.

  “It isn’t a point. This isn’t a statement. This is her revenge for what she’s endured, and it’s terrifyingly beautiful, just as she once was.”

  Rhett cleared his throat, and I knew what he was about to say. He said it anyway. “I’ve seen the scars she told us about.”

  “We all have,” I admitted through anger that burned at what we knew to be the truth. It didn’t lessen the blow or the knowledge that we’d been blinded by our trust in Douglas, and the orders we had never failed to obey.

  “And, what do we do about that?” he countered.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. I felt bile pushing against the back of my throat as her words played out on repeat in my head. “Rip his fucking spine out, let her do it? I don’t know. If she wanted him dead, he’d already be dead.”

  “I found this,” Lance said as he set a recorder on the ledge of the building and pushed play.

  We listened while she recanted her tale, the blow after blow that hit me hurt more as I listened, forced to take in everything she’d hidden. The coldness in her tone, and utter lack of pain with each description of those she’d murdered as a mere child, to the assaults she had survived. She’d skipped telling the demon of my father and his lusting over her, which I knew had been to protect me. This woman who had survived enough pain to last fifty lifetimes had left out things about me, about the Templars that she hadn’t had to. Erie’s only fucking crime was being born, created from the one thing that could save us. That didn’t mean what slept within her was innocent, but the girl who had been born of the cauldron…she was.

  “And we thought she was broken, she’s a fucking serial killer,” Uther snorted as he lifted the bottle before handing it back to me. “One with premeditated methods that she has perfected in the last century,” he uttered as he turned, watching another group of buildings as they crumbled to more blasts and eruptions.

  “She is very broken,” I whispered. “Broken and hurt so deeply that she doesn’t feel anything anymore, and worse, she’s pissed. Life holds no value or meaning to her anymore, just like before. She cracked today, though, speaking to me. She called me Mason. She used my name and said she had a soul. She wants to be saved, but she doesn’t think she can be anymore. We fucking did that to her, our people and hers. We made that girl think she is a monster who doesn’t matter. My own father violated her. I don’t know if she can be saved, but I have to try before it is too late. Already the witches seek her out, and if they find her before she’s returned to her true form, they will destroy her, and we will lose everything.”

  “And you think she can be saved? She’s murdered hundreds of people today alone, and we are still watching them die. She smiled as they lost their lives. She’s madness, maybe beautiful madness, but there’s just some madness that can never be stopped. How many people are on that fucking list of hers? There may not be anyone to save by the time she finishes completing it.” Rhett tipped the bottle, downing the last of it before he reached down and grabbed another. “Of all the fucking things I miss about being mortal, it’s getting piss-drunk and forgetting the problems we have.”

  “You realize the buildings that just went down were the druid’s living quarters, with their families in them,” Uther growled as the flames reflected in his eyes.

  “Their mates were moved last week, they were relocated because of a gas leak,” I uttered as my eyes narrowed. “Erie was here with us when that happened.”

  “You think she spoke truthfully about her underground railroad?” Lance asked as he tipped a bottle of vodka upside down, chugging it. I watched as he polished it off, unable to gain more than a simple buzz no matter how much we drank and knowing that bothered him the most. He’d sacrificed the love of his life, the one woman
who he’d cherished above everything.

  “I think I wouldn’t put shit past her anymore. She’s planned everything down the last detail. She slit her flesh to drain the meds that were constantly being injected into her, while using her own poison to keep them open. She knew what type of nulling medication we used, knowing it combined with the mix of toxins she used, would keep her from healing. She used electrocution to keep me from knowing her mind as she formulated her escape, but also knew it would keep me from learning her position; everything she’s done has been of her own free will. I think she has orchestrated everything to where she needed it to be and used us all to make it so. I didn’t see it coming. I thought I could save her, but this entire time, she wouldn’t let me.”

  “Erie isn’t the type of woman who needs to be protected. She’s the type of woman you need protection from,” Uther chuckled. “She’s a wild card, a fucking Celtic woman who set the world ablaze just to show us she could.”