[2018] Reign of Queens

by Melissa Wright

  He’d drawn his hand away as soon as he’d seen she’d woken, but smoothed it over her arm, brushing at the sleeve of her shirt. The gesture was sweet, but awkward in the way a dog person might pet a cat. She hiccupped a laugh. He mustn’t have spent much time around kids with nightmares.

  Mackenzie drew in a full, deep breath, pressing her forehead into Hunter’s ribs, and let his arms relax around her.

  It was morning. Sunrise.

  Time to face the city.

  They left the car hidden in the apartment’s parking garage, Hunter assuring her that it would do them no good the closer they got to the city.

  “It would only draw attention.” He pulled aside a section of chain-link fence for her to crawl through. “People think having a vehicle will get them to safety.”

  Hunter’s words were a bit ironic after he’d suggested returning her home the night before, but Mackenzie restrained herself from pointing that out. They walked through abandoned garages, empty alleys, and broken buildings. Population was picking up, but “things” were becoming more and more scarce. They ambled through a closed-down grocery, its shelves disassembled, looters taking pallet racks and shelving and the little plastic shopping carts she and Riley had played in as kids. It wasn’t just empty. It couldn’t even be called a store.

  Every step closer the change became more noticeable. The crowds were louder, the buildings barer. The streets were full of people, walking and yelling and demanding help. Fights broke out at random, no one there to prevent the young and strong taking what they wanted, no one to protect or punish or provide.

  They made their way to the downtown business complex, and Hunter boosted Mackenzie up an ornamental brick wall, its crown a flat white stone nearly a foot wide. She crouched there, waiting, until Hunter joined her and it felt safe enough to stand.

  From their new vantage point, Mackenzie could see the boundaries of the military camp. Soldiers lined the interior of a razor-wired fence, surrounded by two cages of chain link bordering the camp’s periphery. Guards were posted at intervals on each concentric ring, armed and ready. She recognized the khaki of the local Guard, the dark green and gray of armed forces, but there didn’t seem to be a pattern to their arrangement. She squinted, working to make out what sort of weapons the lookouts carried, and was baffled by their full-body armor.

  Gas masks, she thought. Why are they wearing gas masks?

  She dredged up a memory of the news reports, warnings of contamination and magic, the alienness of the official response. It was like they didn’t understand these creatures at all.

  Mackenzie glanced skyward, searching for shapes—monsters—in the tendrils of cloud. “The ones we saw at the park, is that all there is? The only kind?”

  There had to be something larger, surely. There had to be some other threat that explained what the military had planned for.

  Hunter peered into the crowd below. “They’re no different than your people, a variety of the same species. Some just appear more beastly, I suppose.”

  Mackenzie pursed her lips. “So where are the bears, then? You know, tigers, vipers, the really nasty stuff.”

  He almost laughed. “The worst, you’ve already seen.” She thought he said something that sounded like, “Here, anyway,” but he turned away, jumping free of the wall with an ease that made her feel ungainly and scared. It was a long way down.

  Hunter’s arms moved up to her, but she still must have been a good five feet from his hands. And it was only the first step in a long path on their way to Riley. She took it with a cautious leap.

  Hunter led the way, Mackenzie close behind him, and the loiterers and protests got thicker and thicker, eventually driving them toward the main group, a ring of figures surrounding the fence for as far as the eye could see. She’d known it wouldn’t be easy once she’d spotted the layout from atop the wall, but down there, on ground level, she could barely see past the men in front of her.

  “Okay,” Hunter said over his shoulder, “stay close.” He wedged his way between them, steering Mackenzie to the lead, and the tightness in her stomach returned. They pressed through the throng, a protesting mass of bodies, their progress slow and indirect. It was too hot, too close.

  Mackenzie edged sideways past a man in a dirty rag of a shirt—fist pumping skyward as he yelled his dissent—and was shoved into him by the crowd. He grabbed her by the shoulder of her jacket, yanking her closer to examine her face. His unshaven cheeks were dark with stubble, his right eye bruised and puffy. A crusted patch of blood below the man’s ear flaked onto his partially covered arm. Arms thick with muscle flexed as he dragged Mackenzie nearly off the ground.

  Her toes slipped across the asphalt and she raised a boot to kick the flat of his shin, but Hunter was faster, knocking the man in the back of the knee and grasping the nape of his neck to pull him down to chest level.

  The man stared up at Hunter, bowed backward but obviously preparing to fight. Hunter jerked, twisting the man’s neck to pin him in a fixed position, and Mackenzie got her footing, wrenching the stranger’s grip from her sleeve. Hunter leaned forward, whispering something toward the man’s wounded ear before shoving him to the ground.

  He glanced up, gesturing toward the gate. “Get inside. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Mackenzie hesitated, mouth opening and closing in nothing but an empty gulp of air before another stranger shoved her. She pressed back against the crowd and was rewarded with a hard elbow to the ribs and a close shave between a shovel handle and the side of her head.

  “Go,” Hunter demanded.

  She ran, struggling against faceless bodies and makeshift weapons.

  It seemed a million miles farther than it had from their spot on the wall.

  Nothing about this was the way she’d expected. The only soldiers she saw were behind wire, guarding gates and fences. Where would she find the troops, the volunteers?

  How would she get to Riley?

  She stood before the gates, hopeless, helpless, and Hunter’s hand pressed against her back, his voice in her ear. “You start here. I will circle around to the right and check with the other gates. Either of us gets in, we come back for the other afterward.”

  She nodded, forcing her way toward a uniformed man built as if he were in his twenties posted behind a mesh fence. A helmet sat low on his shaved head, gas mask and collared jacket covering all but a strip of pale, sweat-speckled skin.

  “I have information,” Mackenzie yelled over the noise of the crowd. She wished she could see his face, gauge his reaction. She’d never seen a machine gun up close. “I need to get inside.”

  “Me too!” a tall woman yelled from her side. Her face was thin and exotic, smooth, dark skin beneath a layer of filth. Mackenzie thought she might have been a supermodel in a previous life. Or two weeks ago.

  The crowd surged and knocked the woman forward to land hard on the edge of concrete footers with bare knees. Mackenzie was jostled too, kicking an elbow out to defend her space, and reaching to help the woman to her feet. A second woman tripped over them, pulling Mackenzie’s sleeve and yanking at her hair in an attempt to get to the guard station. Two men pushed past them, shoving Mackenzie forward again, into the chain link fence.

  She wrapped her fingers through, tearing the material of her jacket from the grip of the crowd and pulling her shirt collar back into place. She reached up hastily—with a shoulder still sore from being dropped on a bridge—to tie her hair back. Her fingers crawled along the fence line, dragging her closer to the guard. Three others were rattling words at him, begging and cajoling and angry threats, but the man’s eyes were on her. Well, the lens of his gas mask, anyway.

  “I have to get inside,” she repeated. “I know where they came from.” She pointed to the sky, yelled, “The monsters. I can tell you where it’s at.”

  Mask still on her, the guard raised a hand to his ear. Mackenzie couldn’t quite hear him over the bellowing crowd, but she climbed the fence a few feet to get close
r, edge her way past a brawny man in delivery-man brown. It sounded like, “Yeah, gate india-seven, we’ve got a one-seventy-two here. I repeat, one seven two.”

  The three men directly in front of the guard stiffened, stepping back to glance nervously at one another before pushing into the crowd. A woman made a high, keening sound, and things fell eerily quiet.

  And then the hair rose on Mackenzie’s neck as a solid roar emerged from the crowd behind her. She was partway up the fence, scrabbling toward the gate, as a path cleared near the roadway behind her.

  A supply truck was lifted through the air, turning on the wind as if caught in the vortex of a storm. It was unceremoniously dumped on its side, metal crunching and tearing against the asphalt and wooden posts as a horde of winged monsters fell out of a clear sky.

  Mackenzie watched in suspended horror, unable to even process the scene before her eyes.

  There were legions of them. Thick masses of creatures flying and swooping and tormenting the vehicles and civilians below. Trucks were pitched into the razorwire cages, stone and metal pulled from the surrounding buildings to be propelled into the streets. The electrical wiring seemed to come to life, popping and cracking, throwing sparks through the throng.

  The crowd appeared to be of two minds: scream and run, or stare in wild wonder like her.

  The army wasn’t even fighting them. Not one soldier stepped outside their walled-in complex to help. She had no idea what their plan was—stay locked up and slowly starve when their supply trucks didn’t get through? Wait and see what happened? Hope this all went away on its own?

  Where were all the troops? Where were the missiles and tanks and whatever you used to fight flying monsters?

  Mackenzie’s fingers were ripped from their grip on the chain link, torn free as hands seized her from behind. She flinched, drawing her shoulders inward, preparing to be slammed onto the concrete and asphalt, but they stopped her, two large men in white hooded suits. She jerked an arm free, and was shoved into a run. To the gate.

  Mackenzie’s toes caught the asphalt, skipping at first, until some part of her convinced her feet to move forward. The gate was what she wanted, right? Bulky hazmat suits brushed up against her and she faltered, losing a step. Why were they wearing hazmat suits? What was happening?

  She was through the second ring of fencing, nothing but a large open space of black and yellow stripes. It must have been thirty yards to the next checkpoint, thirty yards before she was one step closer to helping Riley—

  The thoughts and hopes vanished in the blink of an eye. The brush of a wing.

  It was air. Nothing but air. One minute she’d been running in the grip of a squad of plastic body suits and the next she was gone. The memory of the grasp of those gloved hands was all that was left. And then terror. Terror, terror, terror. In the grip of a monster above.

  Flying.

  Part II

  Painted Lions

  Chapter 11

  The strange thing about living through a trauma is that the world doesn’t end. No matter how bad it feels, no matter how over things should be, being left behind means you have to keep on living. Someone will make you do the things you need to do. There will be a knock on the door telling you to go to school, feed the dog, tie your stupid shoes. You can stand there, knowing by the crushing weight on your chest that a thing can never be undone, that your heart will never heal, and yet you still have to brush your teeth.

  Mackenzie knew the weight of suffering. She’d seen that life would go on. It had given her a remarkable capacity for endurance. Since the accident, regardless of how horrible a situation became, she understood some things wouldn’t bear changing. You had to accept them and move on.

  She would never have guessed she’d be using that particular hard-earned knack for monsters.

  She was flying through the air—held perilously in the grip of a wingless beast-creature’s talons—for the second time this week. And she was screaming. Because regardless of how accepting she might be, this. Was. Scary.

  The last thing she could remember, Hunter had smacked into her, slamming the three of them into one large, spinning tornado of bodies. It had taken her a moment to realize they were still hurtling through the sky, to grasp the fact that Hunter was also airborne. That his attack had come some fifty feet off the ground. She was being jerked and torn, claws and fists and flailing limbs inches in front of her face. And yet she still couldn’t comprehend at first how he was there.

  The beast who clutched at her growled, barely retaining Mackenzie by the strap attached to her pack as he reached around her to fight. Her limbs were useless, dangling in the chaos of midair, but she was clinging to Hunter, instinct forcing her to at least try. And then he spoke, those same strange words he’d used in the park when she’d found him, the language she’d thought the ramblings of a boy about to die.

  The monsters’ language.

  There was a flurry of action, some strike by Hunter and the tearing sound of fabric when the strap finally collapsed, leaving nothing but her bag in the monster’s hands, and she was free of them, falling through the air. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t falling because Hunter held her. And she wasn’t free of the monsters.

  Because he was one.

  They had apparently flown away from the city, out of the danger of attack, because at some point, Hunter returned her to the safety of the ground. She curled into a ball, one hand clawing into dirt and the other the material of her own shirt. Her head spun as if she’d just thrown it back and the-hills-are-alive twirled across the length of the park. Her ears rang, eyes closed tight against a slew of flickering spots. She wasn’t sure which side was the earth and which was sun, and for a moment didn’t even want to know.

  She thought she might vomit, but rolled, rocking back and forth before opening her eyes to the sky.

  It spun. Still. On her back, she pressed palms into the cool grass, felt for the equilibrium to hold her there. It did come. It came and she breathed and life returned to living as she sat up, slow and careful, to stare at the land around her.

  They were in the park, her park, near the portal. It was flattened, demolished and covered with debris, but she was there, deposited firmly on the earth.

  She stood, nearly off balance, and had the surreal, sickening feeling she knew where she was. The tree. Her mother’s destroyed tree. Mackenzie’s mouth fell open, hand pressed against her middle, and she turned to take in the setting, finding him instead.

  Her chest heaved, fingers balling into a fist. “You,” she hissed, emotions swirling her back into that dizzying spin. He was a monster, one of them. He was a monster and he’d tricked her and he’d saved her and what was she doing at her mother’s tree?

  She had told him about her mother.

  She had wanted to kiss him.

  He knelt on one knee across the lawn from her, mere yards away. His hand pressed to his side, wound bleeding again into his shirt. Riley’s shirt.

  She seethed. “I trusted you.”

  Hunter winced, lifting himself to stand, and then a horrible screech slashed the air.

  “We don’t have time for this,” he said. “I need you to listen.”

  Mackenzie bit down so hard it overshadowed the other pain as she took a step toward him. It was difficult to say exactly what she might have done, but the impulse died before she had a chance to find out. Because the sky had filled with darkness. Monsters.

  A mass of figures, wings and arms, teeth and fur, lined the heavens. There must have been hundreds of them, birds like men, beasts in the sky, coming for her and Hunter.

  “You need to hide,” he warned her. “Get beneath the ground and do not come out, no matter what occurs.”

  All she heard herself say was, “What?”

  He tilted his head, indicating a cavern left by the old, uprooted trees. “Hide. Don’t come out.”

  Mackenzie’s mouth formed an O, and Hunter took to the air. Flying.

  The boy from her basement could
fly. She blinked, staring after him, and then felt the boom on her skin, crawling over her before its sound reached her ears. It hit and she flinched, recoiling into herself, shoulders raised as she rushed to the base of the displaced trees. The loose dirt was crumbling, rolling over wet leaves into the tunnels the root system had left below her feet, and she fell, pressing a shoulder against the curling tendrils of a sideways tree as the sky went violet-blue.

  Chapter 12

  Hunter was done with this. All of it. He’d been ambushed and beaten and forced to take out his own men. He’d been poisoned with iron and left to die in the undying lands. This girl, whom he’d only recently determined was not another trap, had saved him, hidden him, and given him passage to the one place that might have aided in his quest.

  But it was over. A bust. The human army was in no way prepared for a true battle. It was evident with one look at their corps. They thought hiding the Marked would save them. They had no idea what was to come.

  He was back to square one. Worse than square one, because now he was three days closer to the end of the line. Three days nearer the reaping.

  No less than an hour ago, he’d been at their army headquarters. He’d glanced up at the sky, the shifting shapes in waves of blue, and seen the Iron Bound sitting in wait, playing with their human toys.

  He’d known it was time to go, figure out some other angle to get his Iron Bound inside once more, bring Mackenzie’s monsters back to their home. He’d glanced across the field of soldiers, to the gate where he’d left her. He couldn’t seem to help it.

  She’d been standing there, bloodied fingers clinging to the network of fence, hair and clothing askew. There was nothing he could do for her. She’d have to find her brother, make do with what time they had left.

  It was all Hunter could offer any of them now. Time. He’d turned to go, make his way once more to the flattened earth beneath the threshold in hope that he’d find Azral before it was too late, when the air whispered with movement.