The Raven Queen
A Villain’s Tale
Book 1
Lena Mae Hill
Copyright © 2019 Lena Mae Hill
First Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except in cases of reviewer quoting brief passages in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, and events are entirely coincidental. Use of any copyrighted, trademarked, or brand names in this work of fiction does not imply endorsement of that brand.
Published in the United States by Lena Mae Hill and Speak Now.
This edition
ISBN-13: 978-1-945780-82-0
Table of Contents
The Raven Queen
A Villain’s Tale
Book 1
Author’s Note:
Fall, 1990
1
2
3
4
Spring-Summer, 1991
1
2
3
Fall, 1994
1
Summer, 1995
1
2
3
4
Fall 1995
1
Winter 1995
1
Spring 1996
1
Summer 1996
1
2
Winter 1996
1
2
3
Summer 1997
1
Fall 1997
1
Summer 1998
1
2
3
4
5
Fall, 2000
1
2
Winter, 2000
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Author’s Note:
I’ve always been fascinated by villains. Growing up reading everything from fairytales to romances, I often found myself rooting for the villain in a story rather than the protagonist!
I love writing villains and anti-heroes, as I’m a sucker for a tormented past. As a writer, though, it’s a delicate balance that makes a villain have understandable motives while also making him less sympathetic than the main character. After all, every story needs a villain, and yet, every villain is the hero of his own story.
In this story, I chose to blur the lines between villain and hero. The Raven Queen is a close retelling of a fairytale simply titled “Doralice.” I made explicit some of the more obvious but unspoken moments in the fairytale, fleshed it out, and added paranormal elements, but the biggest change I made was to include elements of another fairytale—“The Sun, the Moon, and Talia.” You might recognize aspects of the villainous but arguably sympathetic queen from that tale in my Doralice.
Please note, this is a fairytale villain story, NOT a romance. There is no happily ever after. It is a tale of horror, one in which the heroine is very much a villain, but one you just might, for a few moments, understand and sympathize with as you follow her descent into madness.
Fall, 1990
1
When telling the story of how we met, Owen always says that if there’s one thing I know, it’s how to make an entrance. I just smile, because I’m the last person to seek attention. I’m still trying to figure out how I attracted his. For years, I pined after him, as did most of the girls in the valley. But unlike them, I never thought I stood a chance.
As life so often happens, the day Owen noticed me, he was the last thing on my mind. I was ready to leave the valley for good. It was a warm Sunday afternoon in early October, and I was leaving because of my father. An ordinary human, my father didn’t belong to the Three Valleys. He worked on an oil pipeline somewhere out west, a place so far and foreign to me it might as well have been one of the stars we could see on summer nights, the faint ones that colored the sky pale along the path of the Milky Way. When he came home every month or so, he’d eat a nice big dinner and then get busy getting drunk. And he didn’t do it halfway.
By midnight, he’d come staggering down the hall, banging on all the doors, yelling, “Where’s my favorite little whore?”
Along the pipeline, little shantytowns sprang up, filled with people eager to take the workers’ money and give them whatever their hearts desired. Like my father, many of them desired a little whore—often underage, often unwilling. The men who sold them weren’t like pimps in movies, with gold teeth and rings on every finger. They were just everyday guys, my father had once told me, like you’d see in the gas station grabbing a soda and chips in front of you.
But they found the girls. Runaways, sometimes, or they’d just kidnap them or trick them from their parents’ homes with promises of a modeling career or an easy maid’s job. But they’d never send them home again.
That night, when I heard his heavy footsteps, I woke at once, my whole body going rigid.
“Where’s my little whore?” he slurred, his fist hitting the bathroom door. I heard him enter, heard the stream of his piss. And then he was back in the hall, imagining he was in his whorehouse, I supposed. And like always, he ended up at my door. His little whore on his visits home.
I lay still while he did his thing, which took ages because of his level of inebriation. His heavy, stinking body crushed me into the thin mattress. For days afterwards, even when I changed the sheets, I could smell him in the bed. The stink of sour sweat and body odor and whiskey breath.
In his mind, he must have been with his little whore. I made up my own fantasy. That boy at school, son of the shifter king, Owen. His broad shoulders and towering height bursting through the bedroom door.
“What the hell are you doing, you sick pervert?” he yells, leaping towards the bed. In one swift heave, he tears my father from me. “What is wrong with you? That’s your daughter,” Owen rages. He grabs my father’s neck and begins to shake him while my pathetic excuse for a parent flops drunkenly, still unable to figure out what’s going on.
After all, no one has ever stopped him before. No one cares about his loser daughter, with her raven hair and shadowed eyes. The dark circles never went away, even when my father was gone. Good sleep was hard to come by when you woke in terror every hour, sure that it was the weekend again, that he was home.
When my father begins to fight back, Owen punches him in the face. I hear the bones of his nose snap as Owen’s fist pistons up and down, hammering until that face that looks so much like mine is nothing but blood and skin and bone shards, maybe some brain matter if his fist made it that far in. In a rage, he grabs my father’s head and wrenches it backwards. I can hear the bones snapping in his neck and spine as Owen rips his head from his body and hurls it out the window. Glass rains down on the carpet as Owen rushes to the bed.
“Doralice, my darling, I’m here.” He gathers me up in his arms and kisses my tears away, tells me he’s always loved me. He’s been watching me for years, but he didn’t know it was this bad for me at home. If he had, he would have come sooner. And now, he’s going to take me away and keep me safe forever. He lifts me from the bed and carries me out of the room, down the hall, out the front door. And then he’s carrying me up the aisle at our wedding.
It doesn�
��t matter how we got here or what happened in between. This is my favorite part.
He looks down at me, his eyes full of love and pride for his wife. My long white dress drapes over his arm, the train falling all the way to the ground as he sweeps me away. Everyone from the shifter community is in attendance, sitting on pretty white folding chairs. They all turn to watch us pass, throwing birdseed and clapping and smiling.
I am loved at last.
And not in the twisted way my father was doing as he lay there after his satisfaction, stroking my hair and telling me all the supposed benefits of my young body, ones which enhanced only his enjoyment and never my own. I hated this part more than the other. I wanted him out of me, off me, gone, so that I could strip the bed and pretend this hadn’t happened, that it had never happened, that we were a normal family and I was a normal girl.
I fought the urge to vomit at the stink of his sour whiskey breath clogging my mouth and nose.
“Come with me,” he said. “When I leave in a few days, come with me, baby. We can ditch your mother, leave her here. She don’t care.”
Suddenly, my whole body went cold. My blood froze in my veins as I tried to breathe. He knew.
All this time, I found some excuse for him the same way she did. The first time I went to her, after the first handful of times it happened, I cried and told her he’d hurt me. She held me and stroked my hair and said she was so sorry, but that he didn’t mean it. He didn’t know what he was doing, he was so drunk. He didn’t know where he was or who I was.
That’s what she said, and I believed her. Where else were we going to get the money to live? We couldn’t go anywhere. Not with my mother in her wheelchair since I could barely remember. She used to ride a motorcycle, not a big fancy one, but she loved it, and when I was little, I loved riding on it with her. She met my father at a rally in town before I was born. One weekend, they went to a motorcycle rally in town, leaving me with a neighbor. They got into a brawl outside a bar, and she hasn’t ridden a bike since. Or walked.
This is what we had, the way our lives had to be. My mother took care of what she could, worked from home stuffing envelopes, which made about as much money as you’d imagine.
I took care of what she couldn’t.
He made the money, sent it home, worked himself to the bone every day for us. The least we could do was make his trips home pleasant. We pretended we didn’t know what that entailed, pretended it was just nice meals and a clean house.
He wasn’t supposed to know who I was. He thought I was one of his whores.
“What d’you say?” he slurred, his wet lips moving in on mine. I squeezed my eyes shut and swallowed past the gag reflex turning over in my throat.
“N—no,” I managed, pushing at his chest. “Get off me.”
“Come on, baby…” His lazy eye drifted sideways, away from me, like it always did when he was drunk. All this time, I’d thought he didn’t know it was his own daughter. Somehow, that made it bearable, even when it shouldn’t have been. “We’ll have a good time. I miss you when I’m up there, all by myself. No one will know who you are. We can tell them you’re my wife.”
“No,” I burst out, horrified. I hadn’t said that word to my father in a while, since the first time or two, when it didn’t do any good. It was better just to lie there and think about something else. But I couldn’t do that anymore.
“We can have all kinds of fun,” he said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “I get so lonely, baby. Don’t you want to keep your old man company?”
“No,” I said, stronger each time I said it.
I pushed his chest, hard, but he didn’t budge. He was made of lead. I should’ve known better than to try to move him. He’d passed out on me before, and I had to lie there all night, his sweat trickling down my sides, barely able to breathe, sure I’d suffocate under his weight.
“What do you mean, no?” His heavy black eyebrows drew together. “You’re mine, Doralice. I’m your father. You do as I say.”
“It’s a little late to start treating me as a daughter now.”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d said the wrong thing. His nostrils flared, his eyebrows drew low over his bulging, furious eyes. “You little whore,” he said, his hands gripping my neck. I grabbed his wrists, trying to pull his hands away before he got a good grip, but I wasn’t strong enough. His thick workman’s fingers tightened around my throat.
It’s just like in my fantasy, I thought as I heard something in my throat popping. Except it’s me dying, not him.
I dug my nails into his skin with all my strength, but he wouldn’t let go.
This is not how my story ends, I vowed. Not with him still inside me.
I gathered all the strength I had left and thrust myself towards the raven huddling in my chest, that black heart pounding with the rhythm of wingbeats, taking shape from the inside out.
If I was stronger and had more time, I could have changed into a lion and ripped his throat out. But I didn’t. I had only the strength to take my natural form. His grip was slipping now as he blinked stupidly, trying to figure out what was happening to his daughter, why she was disappearing under him. If he was even conscious enough to feel that my body was no longer under his, that he was lying on a damp sheet holding a shrinking girl, a girl who was sprouting feathers, whose hands were now wings beating at his arms.
With a cry, he threw me from the bed, leapt to his feet, and stumbled backwards. He looked terrified as he crashed into my closet door, his arms wheeling to keep balance, his naked, hairy body exposed. It would’ve been funny if it weren’t for the horror of the moment, if it weren’t for the fact that he’d almost killed me. I flew around the room, unable to get out. A cry of disgust and fear erupted from the man below me, now collapsed against the wall.
I should have done this years ago. But we weren’t to tell my father our secret. Mother said he’d never send money if he knew what we were. He didn’t have to send us a dime. They never married. If he knew what we were, he’d disappear forever.
Good riddance.
I swooped at him, and he raised his hands with a high-pitched shriek. I slashed at him with my talons, my beak.
He batted me away before gathering enough wits to run for my bedroom door. His flat, pancake ass was the last of him I saw as he lurched down the hall. Tomorrow, my mother would convince him it was a drunken hallucination…if he remembered it at all.
I couldn’t see in the dark, but I was too scared to return to my human form. What if he came back? What if he demanded to know what I just did, how I did it? If I didn’t shift back, though, he could put me in a cage and take me with him. Or shoot me.
After circling the room a few times, I was calm enough to land. I shifted into human form quickly, relieved I didn’t have any clothes on to get in the way. I raced to the door and closed it, then turned back to the room.
“Doralice?” His voice was bellowing and angry. “Is that you?” His footsteps shuddered through the trailer again.
I threw open the window and punched out the screen.
Behind me, the doorknob rattled. The fear must have sobered him up a little.
My throat ached so badly I could hardly swallow, but I didn’t think I was seriously hurt. Yet. When he swiped for the doorknob this time, he got it. As the knob turned, I tried to think of the fastest nocturnal creature I could imagine, one that could flee a drunken man.
I was on the windowsill when he kicked open my door. The trailer shook under his weigh as he lunged at me, arms outstretched. Before he reached me, I jumped. His hand swiped the air, catching a single strand of hair. The sharp prick was so small I almost laughed. Tonight, he couldn’t hurt me more than that, less than the sting of a honey bee. I landed outside the window, wincing at the pain of the sharp weeds biting into my feet in our overgrown, unkempt side yard. Not that our trailer’s weed patch counted as a yard.
My father was at the window, reaching for me. I dropped to my hands and
knees and shifted. I wish I could say I turned into a lion, or a wolf that could bite his face off and tear out his throat. Instead, I turned into a scared little rabbit, which was exactly fitting, I suppose. It was also fast enough to disappear into the night, leaving him drunkenly bellowing out the window after me, calling me a whore and a sorcerer and a witch. If only I were all three of those things instead of just the first.
2
I arrived at the orchard in the valley a while later. There was a big barn where all the apples were kept, and it smelled so amazing right then that I squeezed through a spot under the hinge where a piece of rotting wood had broken off the corner of the door. Inside, it was dark and smelled of fermenting apples, but in a warm, pleasant way, like apple cider. I sniffed around the barrels and found a half rotten apple on the floor to munch on.
After a while, it started getting on towards morning, and I thought I probably needed to change into a mouse and hide in one of the barrels. But a mouse is not a very desirable form, as it doesn’t live long and has many predators. I knew I could hide that way, but what then? As I thought of it, an idea began to form. If the apples were shipped off to the nearest town, I would go with them. From there, they might go further, into Missouri, or who knew where.
We didn’t have a huge operation, but I knew one thing for sure. They went further than this valley, and that’s where I needed to go. Anywhere but here.
After some thought, I decided not to spend the day as a mouse. If the barrels were loaded first thing in the morning, I’d be stuck in the truck all day, as a mouse. I couldn’t shift back into human form, because the barrel would be filled with apples. And if it took a few days to get to whatever warehouse was going to store them, I’d lose years off my life by remaining in mouse form so long.
If I found an empty barrel, I could climb inside as a human, bring a few apples to eat throughout the day, and open it from the inside any time I wanted to climb out or get more apples from the other barrels. At some point, the barrels would be left overnight, and I could escape. So I shifted back into my human form, found an empty barrel in the corner, and rolled it over to the others. The lid was a little loose, but I could hold it on from the inside, when the time came.
The Raven Queen: Fairy Tales of Horror (Villain Stories Book 1) Page 1