by S. A. Parker
Thwack.
Thwack.
Thwack.
I let out a fractured scream and squeeze my eyes shut, pressing my face against the ground, inhaling the stench of this rotten world. I cover my ears, try to block out the terrible sound of my flapping wings as they thump against the filthy ground becoming thick and heavy with vomit, blood, and piss.
It doesn’t work.
I haul myself onto my hands and knees, try to crawl away …
“Stay fucking still,” he snarls, hacking at a different spot, bellowing his toxic rage as he heaves his assaults.
My limbs give way, body crumbling beneath the weight of the agony and deep sadness. Tortured feathers rain down around me.
Through the fog I register the scent of male fear, thick and musky, easily discernible from the scent of my own terror.
The bastard’s terrified. Frightened of a woman splayed helpless on the ground.
Thwack.
Thwack.
Thwack.
He starts on my other wing, slashing away in a torrent of panicked frenzy. Feathers fall, blows continue to land, and my soul continues to seep from my body.
Am I dying? It’s hard to kill an immortal who still has their wings intact, but I think these fucks have almost done it.
The blows cease and I scan the floor for my discarded wings, seeing nothing but a blanket of dirty, matted feathers drenched in blood. Perhaps he’s accessing a different way to finish the job, like sawing them off at the nub as my mother did.
I hear the sound of a man being tossed around, then angry, frightened voices all yelling at once … “Stay the fuck down, Drue!”
I can’t move, I can barely breathe. Even my wings have given up the fight—laying limply along the back of my body, not even a tremor to tell me they’re still alive back there.
“We have to kill her!” Drue bellows.
“We need to talk this through, man! Fuck!”
“What have you done? You just hacked at the fucking Princess!”
I cringe. I’m not a fucking Princess, because I refuse to be second to the man who spawned me. If they want to call me anything it better be ‘Queen’, or else I’m going to lose my cool and bite some cocks off. Even though I can’t move, and I’m potentially dying.
I can feel blood draining from my wings, hear it dribbling onto the cold floor. I dare not take a peek. Seeing them broken, solidifying it in my mind, would probably break my heart even further.
I don’t deserve wings; I’m so terrible at taking care of them.
“What do you think is going to happen, eh? That he’s going to thank us for bringing her to him like this? You know he’s been trying to breed a pure, white-winged heir!”
“A male! Not a fucking female, you idiot! He’ll probably relish in the act of killing her himself like he does all the females he spawns, right before he gives us placement back in Sterling for our loyalty!”
Okay … yeah, fuck no.
Fuck no.
“Ven’s right man, she could be our chance to gain back everything we lost! We can’t kill her.”
There’s a long pause while I wait to hear their verdict.
“I think you’re right … fuck.”
The others grunt their approval.
“No wonder the Sun Gods liked her … she had pretty wings before you fucked them up, Drue.”
Drue huffs out a laugh. It sounds cocky, though I hear the undertones …
So does my beast …
It’s a laugh plagued with nervous tension that thickens my heartbeat, curls my damaged fingers, and makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
My beast flicks her ears, head emerging from the ball of fur and revealing two, sharp eyes …
He doesn’t realise it yet, but I think he just became prey.
“Take a shit so we can get out of here and summon him, would ya?”
Drue grunts and I hear him shuffle around in the sack while I lay, splayed on the floor in a bloody, feathery heap; my beast prowling in circles, growling under her breath …
I mumble something incoherent, my mind scrambling for purchase as reality seems to bend around me.
“What’s that, bitch?”
I have no idea what I just tried to say. I’m finding it hard to focus right now due to this shrill ringing in my ears. I can feel my sanity fraying at the seams, the essence of myself unravelling …
It seems that, finally, and at long fucking last, my beast is coming to the surface. Though, I don’t expect her to come dragging this boiling cauldron of lava, the one that’s so fucking hot I think it’s going to burn me from the inside out.
What the actual fuck, you psycho animal? Is this like a cat bringing its owner a dead mouse?
Actually …
Lifting our head, cranking our neck to the side, we push our palms flat to the ground—ignoring the blood and feathers that are smeared about like some artistic rendition of our pain. Pain we don’t feel as we push our upper body free from the ground before tugging our legs up under us.
Crouched in place, broken wings fanned behind us, the cauldron tips within—filling every part of us with painless, exquisite heat.
It doesn’t frighten us.
We embrace it, sucking in a great lungful of air, and fuelling the internal blaze.
The ringing in our ears gets louder.
Slowly, we turn … keeping our eyes trained to the ground, until we know we’re face to face with the group of men coagulating in the corner.
They’re silent, though we sense them watching us.
Clenching our fists, we slowly raise our eyes …
The men gasp, stagger backwards, arms flailing, fumbling over each other in an effort to reach the wall.
To hide.
The ringing is almost unbearable while we take in their fearful expressions, their horrified scents. They look as if they’ve just glanced upon the face of death.
Perhaps they have.
We take a step forward, aware that our canines are scraping against our chin. We’re also vaguely aware that our skin is glowing …
That’s right. We’re a naked, broken, bloody whore, and we’re fucking glowing.
Our lips curl in approval as my beast traces my thoughts. But the heat that was a caress before is now becoming a light scald, building at our mangled fingertips, making us feel like we’ve dipped our hands in very hot water.
Our fingers twitching, we take in the scene—the men before us coated in the scent of our blood, our torture, our rape … yet reeking more predominantly of fear as they look upon us, a depiction of their inability to control their own beasts within.
The heat is building—we’re surprised our hands aren’t on fire. We take a peek down, just to make sure, gulping at the lump in our throat.
A cold smile curls at the edges of our lips. We slowly raise our left palm, purposefully shifting our gaze to one of the bastards before us … the one who did terrible things to us with that cattle prod over there.
The one who has piss running down his legs.
We squeeze our palm shut, and he fucking explodes.
Poof, just like that.
A spray of red mist coats the room as his body disintegrates into nothing more than a cloud of blood—the scald on our hand subsiding to a dull warmth.
The remaining men fumble around, horror staining their features.
I want to vomit, even though my beast wants to roll around in the filth and fucking bathe in it.
The men are screaming, huddling together, jostling to be at the back. But our right hand is burning, so we choose our next target … Baby Face. The man who put a nail through most of our fingertips.
We raise our palm, pointing it in his direction.
He scrambles away, cowers in the corner, shits himself.
Unlike my beast, I feel a slight pang of remorse, right before we pump our fist and make the fucker go poof.
We’re coated in blood. Mine, theirs, and the blood of every wom
an who has ever suffered in this cruel, dark world.
Drue is trying to hide behind the rest of them, but we’re not going to turn him into crimson mist … no, no. We have another plan for him entirely. My beast has planned it explicitly, and she’s fucking salivating over the idea.
The ringing in our ears is low now, low enough for us to clearly hear their pleads for mercy. It almost works.
Our vision starts to flicker, my beast battling to stay present.
We’re running on fumes.
I look to the cauldron within us, still full to the rim. It’s our body that’s started to give out.
Fuck.
We point through the crowd, directly at Drue. “Give us him,” we rasp, our voice a crumbled melody of darkness.
The men oblige, grabbing at the Feather Plunger and throwing him forward, despite his dramatic pleads for mercy. He fumbles across the ground, losing his footing and landing at our feet, crying at us for clemency.
Funny—watching a man fall at the feet of a woman—seeing the fear in his eyes as he begs time and time again for us to spare his life … to spare his fucking soul.
If I were in control, I’d possibly fold ...
But I’m not, and he’s not pleading to a saint … he’s pleading to my beast, and she has no interest in showing this fucker an ounce more mercy than he showed us.
We pluck the hacksaw from his white knuckled hand, scenting the urine pooling beneath him.
We’re surprised when he doesn’t fight—he doesn’t even try to stop what he must realise is inevitable. Perhaps he can see it on our face, the conviction in our movements … we’re not fucking around.
Or perhaps he thinks that what we have planned is a lesser punishment than going poof.
If that is the case, he couldn’t be more wrong.
We kneel next to him, running our finger over his bare chest, drawing swirls mindlessly in the blood staining his skin. I’m shocked when I see the giant rendition of a cock on his flesh. Guess my beast is trying to say she’s about to fuck him with her beast schlong.
We place the hacksaw against the smooth, sensitive skin of his belly, holding it there while the terrible reality of what we are about to do dawns on him. His eyes widen and he opens his mouth to plead, but instead his scream pierces the fetid air when we slice into his flesh, dragging the serrated blade through skin, muscle, and hard, sinewy tendons. He tries to fight, but his efforts are futile, his pathetic clawing weakening while blood pours out of him in scarlet ribbons.
Smiling, we pull his intestines free, threading them through our fingers and pulping them delicately, as if preparing a meal.
We push along something hard, feel for its edges, confirming it’s the correct shape. Never know, he could have a bizarre affliction for swallowing strange shit.
We smile. It’s definitely the key.
A small part of my mind is aware of just how fucked up this scene must look, the part that’s drowning in the sea of rage and self-preservation.
We point to one of the fear-stricken men, one of the minorities who hasn’t passed out from the sight of all this gore. “Come here.”
He does, like an obedient dog, bowing before us.
We slice the hacksaw straight through the Feather Plunger’s colon, who immediately passes the fuck out. To be fair, we’re surprised he lasted so long.
“Put your hand out.”
The man does so, his palm painted with sweat and blood. We pop the shit smeared key into his hand.
“Go wash it off,” we order, standing, wiping our hands on our bare skin and remembering we’re butt naked, aside from all the blood. “And give us your fucking shirt.”
He peels it off faster than we’ve ever seen a whore lose her clothes, tossing the shirt to us before moving to the corner and rinsing the key in a bowl on the ground, the one the men have been using to wash their hands. It’s probably more cum than water at this point.
We undo a few of the shirt buttons at the top to accommodate what’s left of our wings, then bend down and step into it backwards, putting our arms through the holes and tugging it over our shoulders. It falls to about mid-thigh, our lack in height bringing some advantage by allowing the man’s top to cover our exposed twat.
The shirt smells like the bastard, but it’s better than walking out that door butt naked. Who knows where the hell we might be right now? Probably in the middle of a town square somewhere—if we walk out naked, we’ll draw some undue attention and my beast will be forced to make some more bastards go poof.
With the clean key in our hand, we signal for the man to join the rest of the group, which he does without hesitation, reeking of fear, piss, and shit … predominantly his own.
We’ve never made a man shit himself before, and we’ve just managed three in the space of a few short minutes, if you count the one we sliced open.
In our defence, he did threaten to cut off our vagina. Nobody threatens our fucking vagina.
A wave of lethargy hits, vertigo tugging at our ability to stand up straight as the warmth coating our insides begins to drain away, along with the remaining droplets of our strength.
We walk to the door. Trying to look like a badass even though we’re fairly certain we’re about to pass out, we use the key to jiggle the bolt open with trembling hands, then swing the door wide.
The remaining men stand huddled in a growing pool of piss. “Follow us, and we’ll paint the walls with your blood.” Our voice echoes off the walls, full of shaded malice and bearing little resemblance to my own. We sashay out into a dark hallway, with only the distant scent of fresh air wafting through to guide us.
We turn and follow our nose for a good few minutes before it occurs to us that we should have locked the bastards in there. We’re not going back though, not after that final speech about painting the walls with their blood. It would ruin an epic fucking epilogue …
Dragging our throbbing hand along the cobbled wall that’s dripping in fuck knows what—hoping like hell we don’t run into another one of those Fae biting spiders—we stumble on uneven ground and fall face first into the steps rising before us.
Boasting a few more bruises, cuts, and probably even a broken nose, we crawl up the steps, slowly dragging our broken body away from the stench of fear and death.
Panting, muscles trembling, dribbling sweat despite the chill, we emerge into a blanket of pitch black, gulping back fresh lobs of air, our hands and legs dragging through freshly tilled soil draped with dead leaves and twigs.
Caped in darkness, we haul ourselves into a standing position, waver, and put one unsteady foot in front of the other, trying not to trip and fall on the shrubs littering the ground.
My beast coils around herself and that fucking cauldron, then disappears altogether.
Bitch.
Alone again, I stumble through the darkness, bleary-eyed, bloody, and broken. The watery light from a wavering moon breaks through the clouds and I see it too late—a jutting rock. I hit it with my calf, tumble over and catapult into a river of icy cold water.
That wakes me up.
It feels like a dream, a plagued nightmare as I’m sucked into the rushing turmoil, swept over rocks, dragged against sticks and debris, not even fighting for breath …
It occurs to me that I lost a part of myself tonight. Perhaps even something integral. I lost a part of my soul, and I fucking revelled in it …
Who am I?
Who am I becoming?
Now, more than ever, I hate myself. Because now? I’m just as bad as them. I’m just as bad as the fuckers who’ve destroyed me time and time again—the same men who’ve condemned this world to rot.
I’m my father’s daughter. Am I predestined to follow in his footsteps, leaving a bloody stain on a world already ruined? Am I just as bad as … him?
I’m probably drowning, and I hate that my last act on this world was to blow two fuckers up and gut another. If I could take it back, I would.
I may be dying, but the impli
cations of that are muted. Because above all? I feel sick.
Sick with guilt.
Sick with … remorse.
Fuck.
As I’m pushed down a collaboration of rolling rapids that are less than kind to my already broken body, I realise I’m not like them at all—all those men who’ve left such a blemish on this world, because I have remorse. Because I recognise the monster within myself, aware that I’m equal parts dark and light … and I did what I had to do to survive.
I don’t have to be a saint to make an impact on the world … I just have to be me.
Because I’m enough.
I’ve always been enough.
Who am I?
I’m the child who witnessed her father kill her mother. The girl who fell in love with the man who sold her body for a living.
I’m a branded whore, I even enjoyed it at times.
I’m a woman who’s been broken time and time again, moulded into an object of male desire, and forced to comply in a society that’s poisoned with obscurity.
There’s not much left of my sanity, but I survived. I’m more than who I was born to be, because I’m a survivor.
I become aware of a sharp burning sensation in my lungs, a cool darkness threatening to overwhelm me while the rapids toss me about like a giant, watery hand hauling me this way and that.
I’m a survivor.
I kick, trying to find leverage in the stony, crumbling ground rushing beneath me. My feet give way and I flounder, arms flailing … drifting, drifting, bubbles cascading around me.
My legs drag against something hard and jagged, the sting of torn flesh like fire against the icy chill of the raging current. My feet find traction and I push upwards, finally breaking the surface, dragging a deep bout of bitter air into my lungs …
I refuse to give up.
I will fucking live.
Who am I?
I’m the damaged heir to a broken empire.
My name is Adeline Sterling, and it’s time my father learnt the true value of a woman’s worth.
Chapter Fourteen
The sun caresses my face, rousing me out of the deepest fucking sleep of my very long life. My mind is heavy, stretched … emotionally hungover. I don’t do ‘emotions’ very well, never have. I prefer to keep that shit locked up, rather than evoke a weakness in my shield.