[2018] Reign of Queens

by Melissa Wright

  Her gaze met Hunter’s over her brother’s shoulder, and she saw that promise again. He would take care of Riley for as long as he could.

  The girl gave their exchange a raised brow, somehow reminding Mackenzie of her brother when he was a kid. Particularly when he’d taken to inspecting bugs.

  “Be good, Ry,” she said, letting him go for what would unconditionally be the last time.

  “Count on it.” He smiled at her, turning and skipping to the bottom step in one stride.

  She couldn’t have done it without Hunter, without having seen the other side. But it still might have been the most difficult thing she’d ever done. She couldn’t imagine how she would possibly make it through anything harder, and the tethering was sharp in her mind.

  So as she watched them cross the broken driveway, she envisioned little Riley with wings. She imagined him not as a monster, but as a being, alive and content, and buzzing with the energy she felt inside. Even if it wasn’t entirely accurate, she pictured Riley and Hunter, and flying beasts centuries old, in some other realm until the end of time.

  She watched them, wiping at the dampness on her cheek—the weight of her lashes, the pressure of her breaths a tangible thing—and then they were gone.

  And nothing was left but the unbearable pull of the gateway.

  Chapter 26

  Mackenzie sat in the center of her basement floor, legs crossed and eyes closed as she concentrated on tying herself to her place here on earth. It was hurting already, but she pushed through the pain. She felt everything more since she’d crossed over, all of her senses spread out, their edges lingering against one another and nearly coalescing. She could follow the sensations back to where they tightened down, uniting in the density of her chest. That was where she drew out the threads, fastened the energy to this place she would always call home.

  It explained so much, giving credit to Hunter’s suggestions about the weight of superstition and the influence of iron. The ancient symbols curling through their house’s front gate would have dissuaded anyone from coming near. Even now, these new senses gave her a taste of the air surrounding her, her home filled with the bitter tang of metal and a faint remembrance of electricity. She pushed them away as she worked on the threads, binding herself as efficiently as she could.

  Noises sounded in the distance, and she forced herself not to wonder if it was Hunter—his show to scare off the army’s presence—or the shifting of the gateway, that alignment he had spoken so much about. None of that mattered now. All of that was gone for her. This was what was left.

  This one thing.

  It was the only way she could live.

  So when the ground began to shake beneath her feet, she was surprised that she was already standing. She should have listened, she should have been staying in the safety of her darkened basement.

  It wasn’t the knowledge that she’d be torn apart that had her heart racing, not the warnings Hunter had so carefully placed in her mind. It was nothing like thought that pushed her. And she was moving, bare feet skipping over the cold concrete floor, taking the steps two at a time until she hit linoleum, and turning her toward the door.

  When she stepped outside, the light of the sun hit her, hard and fast and with the sensation of bone-deep warmth. Leaves rushed past, blown from some far away soil, and Mackenzie closed her eyes to breathe deep of the bright air, brand new and crackling with life. It was not the scent of ozone and cinnamon as she’d once thought. It was the call of that other world. And it coursed through her.

  A wave of atmosphere slammed into her and she was running, the energy allowing her bare feet to move down the asphalt at incredible speed. The blocks passed easily, bringing her in moments to stand among hundreds of armed men near the park. They didn’t seem to notice her, all of them staring into a purpling sky. The skin tingled over her arms, hair rising as her fingertips itched with power.

  And then the color exploded, shattering the heavens into a thousand bits.

  Mackenzie’s chest tightened, the strands binding her flexing against the gateway’s hold. But her feet did not give out on her, despite the massive pull and surge of air. It was the tornado again, from that first night. Only Mackenzie could see it now, comprehend it was no such thing.

  It was cleaner, hitting an earth that had already been wiped free of their homes. She managed to tear her gaze away from it, seeing soldiers flee as trucks were thrown into the air, men picked at random from their feet, partially constructed tents curling into khaki butterflies on the wind. All of it gone, so quickly. But so much more ahead.

  They were coming. She could feel them drawing near. The Iron Bound already on this side approached, answering their summons home, and the others, the mass of beasts falling through the door from their dying realm, ready to break free.

  She breathed in of it, of the power encompassing everything. It felt like Hunter and it felt like home.

  She opened her eyes, the word dragging her back instantly. There was no changing this. She was tied to the here and now.

  She was tethered to this earth.

  It had been a mistake.

  The sky flushed a deep violet, its outer edges streaked with blue. Stars sprinkled everything, but she could not give weight to the awe.

  Since she had been taken through the gateway, Mackenzie had felt everything with a clarity beyond any she’d ever known. But if the hours since her return had been amplified by a thousand, this was a million. The energy of it was endless, immeasurable.

  Mackenzie fumbled with the tangled threads binding her to this realm, panicked now that she’d realized her error. A swarm of bodies erupted from the opening in the sky, the horde a gathering of tens of thousands of Iron Bound, and she fell to the ground, pressing flat to the earth from which she was so desperately trying to break free.

  Half-formed thoughts raced through her head, singling down to a no, no, no that repeated in a steady chant of terror. She’d done this wrong, so wrong. Seconds passed, rushing headlong into minutes, and Mackenzie’s grip shook against the packed earth. Monsters charged overhead, the sky bursting with energy and movement, everything around her crackling, thrumming with electricity outside what was bearable. And she was too late. She’d chosen wrong.

  A cloud of cold energy moved above her, the human mass of bodies rushing toward the gateway to another realm, and she knew this was it. She was out of time. She was going to be torn to bits. Groping at the snarl of threads still tethering her to the earth, Mackenzie was wholly aware it was not enough to hold her, too many to let her go. Hunter had known the power well, he’d shown her the secrets to fasten herself securely, so she could not break free. The extra sense she had of the gateway told her it was collapsing, that the bodies would be pulled in, swallowed in a cloud of energy and atmosphere, and the sky would close in a billowing pall behind them. Forever.

  She screamed her frustration and grappled with the threads, ripping and tearing in an explosion of mad fury. The air changed overhead, and Mackenzie pushed to her knees, staring skyward as the last human form broke through the gateway, disappearing from view. Monsters followed, winged beasts and flying men by the thousands, but at the gateway’s center was a light that shone like a thousand suns, and she felt it, the energy that was Hunter, that was the gateway, that was the reaping. She stared up at him, unable to hold back tears, and the light faded, fell to nothing as the power waned.

  The last of the Iron Bound were gone now, crossed through the gateway as its edges began folding in. There was only one thing left, one more piece to the end of this scene. The gateway was closing; all that was missing was that last drawing in, that moment when everything Iron Bound was pulled within.

  When she’d be ripped from her fragmented tether, severed by the remaining cords that tied her to a human realm.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, voice lost in the roar of the wind. It had been such a massive mistake. She’d waited too long, she didn’t have time to make it right.

&nb
sp; The air swept past her, the storm suddenly dead as its currents were sucked into the void of the gateway. There was a quick spike of energy, much flatter and denser than before, and three of the strands tying Mackenzie to this realm snapped beneath her chest.

  This is how it starts, she thought. This is how I’ll be torn in two.

  But the power beneath her breastbone was not her own, and before she could process how it happened, she was jerked from the earth, back arching as the energy pulled her skyward in a sudden, wrenching move. The threads flexed, two more snapping as the rest were yanked from their roots, a sensation not unlike every singular hair being pulled free of her scalp at once, like the network of nerves strung through her being were ripped through a hole in her chest.

  The gateway pulsed, throwing one last reach into her world to gather that energy and draw it back in a recoil of the blast, and Mackenzie was gone, jerked into the void as the gateway closed behind her.

  The gateway had stolen her. She was too late, not being pulled through as the Iron Bound, but as residual energy this realm would not leave behind. She was dust, drifting and insignificant among the carnage of the reaping.

  But even as it felt like a lifetime of agony, the moment was merely an instant. A fraction of a second in which Mackenzie would fall forever to the hands of the gateway.

  The precision with which she felt its weight crush her was all-encompassing. She experienced every excruciating snap and pop of her bones breaking with the awareness she’d earned in the dying realm. The echo of crunching bone reverberated through her being, the fluid rush at the press of gravity sliding through her, like drowning, like being pulled beneath the crushing weight of a thousand oceans. Her heart would not beat, her lungs would not draw breath. The pressure was too much for a living form.

  She felt acutely when the pain began to abate, when her mind began the unbearable process of being swallowed by blackness.

  Even in the haze of dark, Mackenzie knew what was happening.

  It was over.

  She was dead.

  Chapter 27

  She wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be.

  Hunter stared at Mackenzie’s motionless form, battered from the storm, broken from being drawn through an abyss. Even as he watched her there, he couldn’t stop seeing the memory of her torn from the earth. He had barely caught her, using every last grain of energy that remained to bring her the rest of the way through, to save her wounded body. They had both fallen into his realm, and he’d scarcely had the energy to even turn his head to look at her.

  But he had. He’d seen her, shirt torn and bloodied, skin a mess of scars. Krea had managed to drag them both back, bring them to the center of their world where the power could restore those injuries.

  Hunter had recovered, but Mackenzie had still not woken.

  His eyes traced the now-smooth skin of her face, her dark lashes, the soft curve of her lips.

  There was nothing she could be but alive. This was the dying lands. There was only one alternative to life here, and Mackenzie wasn’t ash.

  She was alive.

  She had to be.

  When Mackenzie’s fingers finally twitched, the reprieve felt as weightless as flight.

  Once the movement began, she came to quickly, her eyes opening to the pale stone roof of his room. She started, hands flying first to her chest and then her teeth. He pulled them free, worried she’d had some unseen injury, and then he realized what it meant. He laughed at the sheer relief that she was well. He took her hands in his, holding them tightly.

  “Don’t worry. I promise you it will not happen as quickly as that.”

  Her tongue was running over her incisors, still checking for newly formed fangs, and she froze, snapping her jaw shut. “I’m alive,” she said.

  He smiled. “Yes.”

  “No,” she said. “I really thought I was dead.”

  Hunter’s stomach turned, but he didn’t let his expression falter, only clasping her fingers more securely in his. “You should have been. I honestly don’t know what you were thinking.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She drew a hand free of his to push herself carefully up to sitting, glancing around the room in this palace that had always been his. “I’m not sure how it happened,” she said. “But there was Riley, Marked and taken no matter how much I might have wanted it otherwise.” She wet her lips. “And there was the gateway, the energy inside me yearning for it, knowing it would be sealed for thousands of years. There was nothing left for me in that world. Nothing left to stay for.” Her eyes met his, a darker shade of their usual brown, struck through with emerald and amber. He wondered if he could tolerate seeing the change in her, if she would become less Mackenzie when the energy made her more other. She could not cross to the undying lands, she could not be spared the way Hunter had. He should have stopped her somehow. He should have told her again how strong the pull would be, how it would convince her of the impossibility of wanting to stay, he should have made sure she understood exactly what she’d been giving up, what it would be like on this side. He should have saved her.

  “At first, I couldn’t imagine living here,” she continued. “Couldn’t imagine being without my home and that life. But here, there was Riley. And there was you.” She shrugged. “I know it’s a risk, Hunter. But had it been the high dive, I’d have jumped.”

  Except she hadn’t had the chance. She’d been tethered. Her words and the memory were at once cutting and comforting, and Hunter struggled for some way to reconcile this new fate, to allow them both that simple hope.

  But he would have to leave her.

  Here.

  Alone.

  Mackenzie glanced down, palm sliding over the pale silks and jewels that draped her. Krea had made a gown for her. For their queen. He felt as if the ground was sliding from beneath his feet.

  “It won’t last,” Hunter told her, letting the silk slip between his own fingers. “The things they’ve brought over aren’t forever.”

  She could never go back, she had to know that. He had to tell her. The crushing force of the gateway should have shown her without a doubt that that other world was gone to her.

  He could see the questions in her eyes though. She was wondering what she’d gotten herself into, if it would be unbearable.

  “They say you miss things,” he said. “The taste of fruit, the warmth of sun.” His gaze trailed the line of her gown, entranced by the pattern where it met with waves of her dark auburn hair. “But you will get past that. Most importantly, you will live.”

  For a moment, she looked relieved, almost as if she might be able to forget there was another world out there. And if he and Mackenzie were all there was, Hunter might have been able to stay there too.

  But they were fooling themselves. Because on the other side was an entirely new threat. In her realm waited fire and war. A king and his army, bent on savaging their world.

  Why? he kept wondering. Why leave this place that perpetually faded, only to go to one where you yourself would fade? He would fade, Malkyn and Azral, all of them would fade away.

  “Where is Riley?” Mackenzie asked.

  Hunter stood, slipping a hand beneath her arm to help her to her feet. She was doing well, but based on how she’d fared during their last trip here, Hunter suspected she was leaning on him as much for physical support as anything else. He led her to the balcony that overlooked the city, opening shuttered doors to the bright haze of outside.

  On a platform far below waited a mass of newly turned Iron Bound, rows upon rows of kneeling men and women from her human world. They knelt facing the castle walls as if in prayer, each of them under the thrall of this realm’s energy.

  Peaceful.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “They rest there so that the energy can work its way through them. Unlike you, this is their first encounter with the power.” He understood that now, the way she’d been her first trip through. Azral’s cut had given her passage, let
her body make the trip, but her mind had been through a gate it could not possibly comprehend. He let his gaze fall with Mackenzie’s to the men outside. “It’s the safest way,” he told her.

  She studied the group for the longest time, this reality settling in her mind. It would feel strange to her, he knew, but in truth, Hunter had struggled with the idea of the reaping his whole life. Seeing it come to pass hadn’t changed his feelings on the matter.

  “There are no children,” she said.

  His arm slipped further around her to draw her more securely to his side, and he could feel some of the tension melt away as she let her still-mending body rest against his. “The Iron Bound do not bring over any who are too young, or who are with child. It is one of the oldest of our laws. They would not survive the transformation.” His voice was low, but he let the gravity of it come through. “That is why the code is so important, Mackenzie.”

  What he didn’t say tightened in his chest. That is why I never should have broken it. That is why the penalty is above all others.

  She looked up at him, understanding passing over her expression. But she didn’t see it all, she couldn’t know the full truth of it.

  “When the gateway was open,” he explained, “the king and his men slipped through.”

  “To our world?” she said. “To that side?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t realize,” he told her. “I knew they were planning something, I knew I’d have trouble to deal with if I made it through the reaping. But long before the alignment, they’d been arranging this scheme. The king isn’t willing to give up the undying lands.” Hunter’s jaw tightened even now, knowing it was too late to change any of it. His mistakes had been costly, but what was to come was far beyond the breaking of code. What the king was planning was not written in any law. “He found a way to get through the gateway, Mackenzie. All he needed was me, the key to open it.”

  She swallowed hard, evidently aware of what that would mean for her world.