by Louisa Lo
“Even at people higher-ranking than him?” A terrible picture began to emerge in Chelsea’s mind. Could it be that the general had used the tragedy to grab power? It would fit with everything else she now knew about him. If so, then his ascension to power was essentially through mutiny, not succession.
“The low-ranking soldiers were scared. And things were happening so fast. They did as they were told because they feared for their own lives,” Ruiz said.
“Now will you come with us?” Day asked her.
“No.” If anything, what she’d just learned had consolidated Chelsea’s belief that the general would do anything to stop her escape—he needed her presence to cement his claim to power. “You’ll have your hands full trying to survive the trip to Canada. You can’t afford to have Roland on your tail. I’m not going, and that’s that.”
Ruiz and Day regarded her for a long time. Whatever look was on her face, it made Ruiz turn to Day and say, “I think we have to respect her wishes.”
“How could you say that? You probably know even more than me what Roland is capable of, given whatever past you had with him that you haven’t been telling us,” Day retorted, exasperated.
“I’ll lay low,” Chelsea promised, willing Day to believe her. “I’ll play the dumb blonde, the pushover, and be everything he expects to see from me.”
And she would rebel quietly, looking for any possible chink in General Roland’s armor. Maybe there were others within the army who felt the same way as Day’s supporters. Morale couldn’t be that high if word of this had gotten around. She would be patient, and prepared for the day General Cox came for her. She might have to play the part of a puppet, but she would bide her time until she could serve as a true queen to what was left of humanity.
“I believe in you. You will survive.” Ruiz nodded at her. “Until then, Your Majesty.”
Your Majesty. For the first time, those words came from Ruiz with respect and reverence.
“Good luck,” she said, afraid she would cry if she said anymore.
With a sigh, Day nodded as well. No words were needed between them. She knew she would miss him in the long days ahead.
Chapter Twenty-Five
No Harm, No Foul
After Day and Ruiz left, Chelsea waited an hour. It was a balancing act, holding out long enough to give Day, Ruiz, and the rest of them a chance to get away, but not so long that the guards missed their checkin time. Presumably they wouldn’t checkin until the change of guard come morning, but it was better not to risk it.
When she figured she could stall no longer, she picked up two large coffee mugs from the counter of her kitchenette and filled them with cold water. Then she doused her guards with them.
They woke with a start and immediately struggled to their feet, scanning the surrounding area for threats.
Chelsea shook her head. Should she be offended that they automatically assumed the threat was coming from someone other than her?
“I’m glad you’re awake.” She gave them her most casual smile. “You may resume your duties now.”
She pointed toward the door, acting as if having guards being knocked out and lying on her living room floor was a perfectly normal occurrence, and that she truly had the authority to command them to resume their duties.
The guards frowned and looked at each other, clearly thrown off as much by her attitude as by their own ambush.
One of them cleared his throat. “What happened?”
Chelsea looked at him. “What happened is that nothing happened. No harm, no foul.”
“I think somebody was trying to kidnap you,” the second guard commented.
“Do you see me kidnapped?” Chelsea retorted. The tabloids had said that Lady Spendalot was many things. Willful, sure. Elitist, of course. Some even claimed that she had been a high school bully. Well, now she was channeling the inner brat they all assumed her to be. “Now this can go two ways. You could run to the general with some wild speculation about a failed kidnapping, which you haven’t a shred of evidence of, and which would not make you out in the greatest light, or we can pretend that nothing happened. You might want to think twice before admitting to your boss’s boss that someone managed to get the drop on you. Your career path is rather narrow these days.”
Her guards looked at each other in muted communication. As the silence dragged on, sweat formed on her palms, and she had to mentally force herself not to fidget. If she had miscalculated her gamble, then she might have just given the general the window of opportunity that he needed to catch up with her friends.
Finally, the two guards started toward the door. The first one said to her, “We’ll be outside if you need anything, Your Majesty.”
Chelsea released the breath she had been holding.
Godspeed, sweetheart, she thought to Day. Watch that the Obsessed don’t bite.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Like Recognizes Like
Two weeks later…
Chelsea threw a bottle of foundation toward an archery target. It shattered on impact, showering the target with broken glass and L’Oréal True Match Super-Blendable Makeup in Nude Beige. It blended in nicely with the Classic Ivory, Natural Buff, and Porcelain from the same collection, making a liquidy, glittering, flesh-colored mass on the circular board.
She was at a small indoor gymnasium that at one point might’ve been a squash court. It had a tall ceiling with tiny windows near the top. Since the gymnasium was actually in the basement, the windows were in fact level with the ground outside. She could make out the plants that were covering them, preventing most of the setting sun’s rays from coming in.
The gym was symbolic of how trapped she really was.
A trip to this gym was the only outing she was allowed. That was, other than making her pre-scripted broadcasts and the various reality-show-like videos that depicted her as a young queen living a good life that was radically different from the rest of the world’s population.
After the refugee camp incident she wasn’t allowed to mix with the soldiers—in pugil stick fights, grenade-throwing exercises, or anything else. She guessed General Roland didn’t want her close enough to the soldiers to bring anyone else to her side, given what happened the night Day and Ruiz visited her last.
Nobody told her exactly how many soldiers had defected, but it must have been more than Day and Ruiz expected, given that as isolated as she was, even she caught whispers about it as she went about her daily routine.
Chelsea hoped they had raided the hell out of the general’s weapons reserve while they were at it. They would need a lot of ammo to last until they reached Canada.
She threw another bottle. Unlike the first one, which had come close to the center of the target, this one barely landed within the circle at all. Her aim had been shit ever since Day and Ruiz left, with a success rate of less than forty percent. Fearing for her own life, and the safety of everyone she cared about, her jarred emotions were playing havoc with whatever mojo she used to have with this game.
If she had been able to make any headway with her quiet rebellion against the general, it would have been a source of comfort in her enforced solitude. Unfortunately, that was not to be. Other than preventing a massive manhunt, staying where she was had accomplished little else. The general was too wary now to let her out of his sight. Sure, in her broadcast she had managed to slip in a misread coordinate here and there, and she had figured out, to a certain extent, who among the command structure didn’t get along with whom. But other than those things, she had been unable to succeed in anything else.
Suddenly the room was flooded with the warmth of sunlight, and there was a scraping sound from above.
Chelsea lowered the bottle of foundation she had just picked up, and squinted at the windows. Someone had pushed aside the leaves covering one of them, and proceeded to cut the glass with a tool she had only ever seen in movies. A suction cup was placed on the glass, while the other end of the tool rotated and made a large circular
cut in it. Then the piece of glass was removed. Next a lithe figure slipped through the hole and jumped down.
Chelsea almost screamed. Surely the person would break a few bones making contact with the hard concrete floor of the gymnasium at such velocity. But the figure landed gracefully with a minimum of noise, a mass of dark hair falling behind her in a mad riot of curls.
As she straightened, the woman smiled. “You didn’t think I’d just leave you here, did you?”
Chelsea’s jaw dropped. “Anita.”
Anita tilted her head as if she was listening to something only she could hear. “I don’t think your guards outside were alerted. We have a bit of time.”
Chelsea forced herself to ask the one question that kept her up at night. “Did you find my father?”
“Of course,” Anita huffed as if Chelsea had offended her. “And I took him to a safe place. Why do you think it took so long for me to come back here? I’ll take you to see him now.”
“You’re not talking about going to General Cox, are you?” Her heart sank as she imagined her dad in the clutches of someone who might be as bad as Roland. Who knew what they would do to him there?
“No.” Anita looked offended all over again. “I’m taking you someplace where I can train you.”
“Train me?” Chelsea echoed.
“That’s right.” Anita grinned. “You’re the foretold queen.”
“Err, no offense, but I’m already a queen, and it hasn’t been working out that well for me.”
“Not the Queen of Great Britain, silly,” Anita tsked. “The Slayer Queen.”
“The what?” Chelsea felt like an idiot. But in her defense, Anita was spewing some weird nonsense.
Anita rolled her eyes. “Why do you think I have the strength to cut through ten men? And run like the wind? I have supernatural strength, and so do you. Why do you think you can strike anything your heart desires?”
“Well, not recently,” Chelsea admitted modestly.
“Only because you’ve let all the stress and worry distract you,” Anita informed her. “Believe me, you are the foretold Slayer Queen. And you can learn to do much more than just throwing stuff. I can teach you.”
Anita casually picked up a foundation bottle and threw it. Her aim was pretty terrible, and the bottle bounced off the target and landed on the floor, unbroken. A pretty poor demonstration of Anita’s ability to teach Chelsea, truth be told. Then Chelsea realized the point of that act. It drove home to Chelsea her own strength—those bottles were built surprisingly tough, but they always shattered whenever she threw them, no matter the aim.
That reminded Chelsea of the need to keep the sound of shattered bottles going, lest her guards became suspicious. So she threw more bottles while she kept talking to Anita.
“Just how does it all work, this whole slayer queen business?” Chelsea asked.
She thought back on what Day had said about Anita:
For almost as long as there have been stories about the Pretties, there’d been tales about a hunter who kills them. They called her Anita.
It seemed too unbelievable if not for what she had already seen with her own eyes. So she was a queen? Again? Hadn’t she found enough trouble with the royal status she already had?
“What do you know about your own family’s history?” Anita asked what seemed like a totally unrelated question.
“Which part?” Chelsea laughed mirthlessly. “We go back quite a few hundred years.”
“Alright, let me put it another way—how did the noble houses get started? Think about it. Before nobility meant wearing fancy dresses and speaking in pretentious accents, what did it take for a king to declare you and your family more superior than the common folks?”
“You had to do something monumental for the king. Or in some cases, be the kingmaker.” Chelsea still had no idea where Anita was going with this.
“Exactly. Every nobleman started out as a commoner, and every kingdom started out as a dream for a better life for the people, even if, in time, it became just as corrupted as the old political system it was trying to replace. Every king, or kingmaker as you put it, started out responding to the needs of the average citizens.”
Not sure how to reply, Chelsea threw yet another bottle. Whatever Anita was saying, it was lighting a fire in Chelsea’s heart and making her aim sharper. She had made three direct strikes to the center of the target in a row while talking to Anita.
As she threw more projectiles, Chelsea digested Anita’s words. What the warrior said made sense. Even Daenerys from the Game of Thrones was motivated, at least partially, by the desire to help her people. Yeah, she burned alive those who opposed her, but she was also quite keen on abolishing slavery.
“So what I’m saying,” Anita stepped closer, “is that your blood means more than getting the VIP treatment at a dance club. You carry with you the legacy of a bygone military leader who rose to the challenges of its people. Those legends of unparalleled, almost inhuman strength that every noble house used to describe their ancestors—they weren’t legends at all. You carry the genes to wield supernatural power, just like me. It has lain dormant through the generations until activated by the needs of the people. The question is, what do you choose to do with it?”
“Wait,” Chelsea held up her hand. “All those medieval stories about the knights in my family slaying dragons, they’re real?”
“Dragons, giant sea creatures, the Obsessed,” Anita shrugged. “They’re all just different forms of monsters. You should thank your lucky stars the good general has no idea who you really are. Hell, from what I’ve heard, this entire base witnessed your mad aim and nobody knew what they were looking at.”
“I’ll come with you,” Chelsea suddenly decided. What Anita said was wild, but it made a weird kind of sense. How else could Chelsea explain her ability to aim and throw, given that she had no training whatsoever? At any rate, anything was more preferable than this half-life she was living. At the very least, she could stop being a figurehead for General Roland’s gain. And if she learned from Anita, she could come back and be a true queen to her people.
“Good.” Anita smiled, her eyes glinting with amusement and a hint of challenge. “Let’s escape and get you your first lesson all at the same time. How do you feel about learning how to scale up a smooth surface?”
THE END
This Is Where The Author Shamelessly Begs You To Leave a Review…
Did you enjoy A ROYAL APOCALYPSE? If so, I would really appreciate it if you could write a review on your online retailer and/or Goodreads!
Chelsea’s adventures continue in…
SLAYER QUEEN IN TRAINING (Coming soon)
In the meantime, check out Louisa Lo’s VENGEANCE DEMONS series:
Vengeance Be Mine (Vengeance Demons #1)
Before Vengeance (Vengeance Demons #0)
Vengeance Unclaimed (Vengeance Demons #2)
A Good Vengeance (Vengeance Demons #3)
Vengeance For Hire (Vengeance Demons #4)
Hell Hath No Vengeance (Vengeance Demons #5)
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About the Author
Louisa Lo lives in Ontario, Canada with her husband, seven bookcases, and more cardboard boxes than she cares to unpack. She decided to write about kick ass heroines because it seems like a better choice than trying to become one in real life and landing herself in jail/hospital. She just has that kind of luck.
You can connect with Louisa on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads or visit her website.
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Blurb and Excerpt — VENGEANCE BE MINE
Megan is a typical university student trying to figure out her place in the world, except instead of hoping to pass the bar or get into med school, she’s studying to become a licensed vengeance demon.
Nineteen-year-old Megan Aequitas is
the only vengeance demon and trickster hybrid ever born. In a world where vengeance demons are respectable, rule-obsessed guardians of the Cosmic Balance, and tricksters are playful, happy-go-lucky perpetrators of chaos, being half and half is, well, tricky.
Determined to prove herself worthy of her vengeance blood, Megan enrolls in University of Demonic Studies’ prestigious co-op program. Wreaking karmic revenge on wrongdoers from cheaters to crooks sounds fun and simple, if it weren’t for the unsuspecting human roommate, Megan’s flamboyant trickster half-brothers, a changeling-raised fellow outcast, and a trio of evil wannabes. Then one assignment turns deadly when Megan discovers a plot to unleash an ancient force so authoritarian, most creatures would be deemed too unworthy to exist.
After a lifetime of being embarrassed by her trickster tendencies and striving to fit in vengeance society, Megan now has to learn to embrace both of her worlds if she wants to save them.
Chapter One
There is a saying amongst vengeance demons—justice comes slowly, but surely.
Or on rare occasions, it could hit hard and fast, like the waves of contractions my male target was experiencing as I stood over him.
“Make it stop. I’m begging,” he groaned, arching his back on the hotel bed. His T-shirt was drenched, like in those bar contests he frequented, revealing the long torso and lean six-pack of an athlete in his prime. He looked up at me, his brown eyes pleading, and his gaze unfocused—the way humans got when they were in pain.
“Mr. Lodge, it’s not even midnight yet. We’ve got another four hours of torment to go, according to my work order.” I tried to sound professional, but my nineteen-year-old voice was just a bit on the squeaky side, even to my own ears. The business of vengeance was harder than I’d ever thought possible.
This was my first solo practice session after a year of in-class lectures at the University of Demonic Studies, Faculty of Arts and Vengeance. I needed it to go well.
Problem was, none of my textbooks mentioned how to deal with a crybaby.