I saw no way to stop Mara other than to become her. With each passing second, I felt my old life slipping further away from me. With Mara gone, someone else would have to take her place. Would it be me?
Something pulled me away from the currents of energy zinging through me. I wasn’t ready to let go and I fought the strong arms that yanked at me. Dim voices pleaded with me and then one poked through the mist that fogged my mind.
“Stop it or I will tell everyone about that time you had a crush on Jake Martin in ninth grade.” Donny tugged harder.
Her voice found its mark and the haze began clearing. Donny. Amelia. I was still human enough to care. I found an ounce of will and pulled my hands off Mara, dizzy from the potency of her.
I stared at her lifeless body while mine thrummed with something new, something grave and old and undoubtedly dangerous.
Moving away quickly, as if distance could undo the last two minutes of my life, I heard a strange gasping sound and realized it was coming from me. I stared at my bloodless hands. What had I done?
Donny and Amelia eyed Mara’s prone body carefully as they scooted closer to me. We huddled together in our matching hospital gowns. Everything had changed. I shook, not with cold but with the chill of unholy magic coursing through me, changing me. Rearranging all that was. It felt like my DNA strands were tangled, looping and knotting in a pattern that might look right but wasn’t quite.
“You never told me you liked Jake Martin,” Amelia said accusingly.
Donny let out a shaky laugh.
“Jake is very smart,” I whispered with mock defensiveness. “And he has nice teeth.”
Donny snorted. “He has a mullet and he drinks vodka Red Bulls in first period every morning.”
“Well, he didn’t in ninth grade. Except for the mullet part.” I shrugged and then began to cry. I let Donny and Ame pull me into an embrace.
“That was really stupid, Theia,” Donny said into my hair. “What did you just do?”
“I’m not sure.”
I began shivering and the three of us huddled on the floor not knowing what would happen next. We had each other, but for how long? Would more horrors come marching through the walls? Would I turn on them myself? Would Mara wake up? Was she dead? Was I her now?
“Donny,” Amelia gasped. “You’re not pregnant anymore.”
Donny’s hand went to her flat tummy, her eyes wide with panic. “Good,” she said after her brief reaction. “It was all like a bad dream.” But tears spilled down her cheeks and Ame and I hugged her closer.
The door flew open and we shrieked. Haden raced in with a sword, behind him some of the castle inhabitants I remembered as being loyal to him. His army. He stopped suddenly and surveyed the wrecked room. The wound Mike had given him had reopened and his face bloomed with bruises. Lowering his sword, he said dryly, “Well, I see I’m just in time to save the day.”
His eyes found his mother on the floor and he looked at me, the question raised in his arched brow.
What had I done?
Haden and I traded speaking glances in a wordless conversation while in the background Donny freaked out until she saw Gabe come in. Gabe, whose hair was somehow perfect, despite the fact that his clothing was tattered and full of blood and who knew what else. Despite the fact that when last I’d seen him, he was a skeleton with no hair.
Haden’s chest rose and fell in shallow pants and he swallowed hard. His eyes grew glassy as he looked away from me to his mother and back.
“Is she . . . ?” He didn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t have to.
“I don’t know.” My heart lurched in my chest. I wanted to touch him but I was afraid. What if he hated me for what I’d done to his mother? “Haden?”
Another wordless conversation passed between us. Seconds ticked by as a series of emotions crossed his face, each more devastating than the last. He stepped towards me and I jumped back, my nerves skittering around blindly, not knowing what to expect. His eyes traveled to my marked-up arms, to the most likely dead doctor slumped against one wall, and then to his most likely dead mother slumped against another. “You’ve been busy.”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry.”
This time when he took a step, I ran to him and his arms locked me in a tight embrace, one that I wished would last forever and transport us out of the hell that we’d trapped ourselves in.
“What have you done, lamb?” he murmured as he patted me gently to make sure I was really all there.
“I don’t know. I had to stop her. I didn’t think, I just—”
“Shhhh. It will be all right.” He pulled off his black coat and wrapped it around my shoulders.
“I don’t think so, Haden. I think I’ve done a very bad thing.”
More of Haden’s guards filed into the room. Some were beasts, all of them different but chilling. The skeletons were there, as always, but also men with no faces or faces so deformed that it hurt to look at them.
One was completely blue and about seven feet tall. He had no hair—not even eyebrows. He stooped to Mara’s prone form. “She’s gone.”
It was as if the entire castle exhaled a surprised gasp. His voice echoed off the four walls, getting louder and louder. She’s gone . . . she’s gone . . . she’s gone.
A rounder creature with four arms joined him. “She killed the queen,” he said, and turned to me with an accusing stare.
An eerie stillness precipitated the creaking of the skeletons’ bones as every one of Haden’s guards turned towards me. Fear bubbled in my chest. I had to get to the door, but they were blocking it. Haden pulled me behind him, but they encircled us.
Their macabre masks, terrifying and unsettling, were all looking right at me. Creatures I had no name for, all with unforgiving scars and misplaced facial features, stared at me with lurid intensity.
“You killed the queen,” one said, and then dropped to his knee. “Long live the queen!” The rest followed, bowing their heads and murmuring words I didn’t know or understand.
Haden’s arm snaked around my waist, pulling me against him even though the imminent danger had passed. We realized, at that moment, that a new danger had just begun.
I was their new queen.
CHAPTER TWENTY
As the creatures pledged their loyalty to me, I felt the foundation of my existence shift once again. I couldn’t be their queen. I didn’t know the first thing about being a queen. They bowed their heads, the skeletons’ joints creaking in horrible cacophony as they swore fealty to me. Haden must have read the panic in my eyes because he got them mobilized and back out the door while I sank to my knees next to Mara.
She looked peaceful, like she was sleeping. How did she fit so much evil into that body? How had I managed to eradicate it all? She was supposed to be immortal. Why had she given me the very key to her demise?
Haden knelt beside me and reached for my hand. I searched his face for a trace of anger. I’d killed his mother. How could he hold my hand? “Are you okay, Haden?”
He rubbed his temple absently. “A part of me is glad she’s dead. What kind of bastard does that make me?”
I traced the shadow of a beard forming on his cheek. “I’m actually more worried about the other part—the one that’s upset that she’s dead and blames me.”
“I can’t blame you for defending—”
He cut off his words as his face tightened into a grimace.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“She’s not dead.”
I looked down at her body, startled when her chest rose. I rolled onto my haunches, ready to bolt, but she remained prone and quiet. Her breath was shallow and she showed no other signs of life. I hadn’t killed her after all. Part of me was relieved, yet I couldn’t shake the wariness.
“She’s still gone. I can’t feel her at all,” Haden said, watching her breathe.
“What does this mean?”
“Everyone under her tyranny can feel that her presence has lifted, but sh
e’s still alive, technically.”
“Like my father?”
“I’m afraid so, love. She’s drained beyond hope of recovery.”
“Which means my father is too.”
“I really don’t know, Theia.”
He helped me up and began ordering the soldiers and servants to different tasks. They were to secure Mara, find my father and make him comfortable, get our friends to guest rooms so they could rest and refresh themselves. He took his time describing the food trays he wanted delivered. He was very specific. Food could be frightening in Under. Some of the inhabitants preferred their meals still squirming.
Then he ordered a search of the castle to find Varnie. All of us stopped and stared.
Varnie.
He didn’t know. Ame crumpled into Donny and Gabe and they took her out while I tried to find the words.
“Haden, I’m so sorry.”
He paled. “Why?”
But he knew. I could see the realization spread as his color returned.
I took his hand and held it close to my heart. Every bone ached with weariness and loss. I was so tired I didn’t think I could stand much longer and yet so much needed to happen. I licked my lips and tasted the salt of tears I hadn’t realized were falling. “Varnie was killed while saving Amelia.”
Haden’s entire body tensed and the blacks of his eyes overtook the white. Varnie was his best friend and he was gone because we brought him into our lives. I could see the guilt and the pain coming off him in waves. He raised his chin to the ceiling and bellowed a harsh curse and the walls around us began to bleed in streams of dark red.
The guards that had remained took a step towards him, but I held up my hand to halt them. “Leave us,” I ordered as if it was the most natural thing in the world to command skeletons to do my bidding.
Haden thrummed with a wild energy. I lowered myself to the floor and pulled him down until his head was in my lap. I stroked his hair, which felt like cool silk rushing against my fingers, and murmured words in a language I didn’t know I knew. He shuddered with silent tears and I comforted him, though it felt that so much had happened we would never feel whole again.
* * *
My father had been unleashed from the torturing machines, but he only stared blankly and unseeing, unable to respond. I stood at his bedside, knowing he was in two places at once, but I could do nothing for his broken spirit or body. I pleaded with him to just wake up until I grew hysterical.
Haden pulled me away from my father’s bed and guided me into the hall. “You need to rest, love.”
“Rest?” Was he joking? I couldn’t rest until my friends were safe. Until my father woke up. I wanted to throw myself on the floor and scream like a child who had suddenly realized that life was unfair. “I have too much to do to rest right now.”
When Mara collapsed, some of her leftover magic spells sparked brightly and chaotically and some of them faded or disappeared instantly. As a result, Under became even more disordered than usual. There were thousands of souls that had been freed from the forest trees, but they were disoriented and still trapped in the realm, angry and confused. Some of Mara’s experiments were having strange reactions: people were spontaneously combusting or going mad—well, more mad than they already had been. The entire dungeon had disappeared, causing the castle to shift precariously as it settled into its new shape. And until some of the magic stabilized, my friends were trapped in Under as well.
Haden kept guiding me away from my father’s room. “If nothing else, you need to at least sit down. When was your last meal?”
“About an hour ago,” I answered, reminding him that I’d fed recently and that was why we were in this mess.
He turned me to look at him so I could get the full effect of his stern demeanor. “Mara can’t get out of her cell even if a miracle happens and she wakes up. Your father is as comfortable as we can make him, and I have sent for the finest witches in Under to discover a way to restore his essence to his body and reinstate the portal back to Serendipity Falls. Donny, Gabe, and Amelia are sleeping safely under guard.” He tapped my nose. “You need to rest.”
I nodded grimly. I had very little energy left to argue. Haden whisked me away to a quiet parlor removed from all the revelry that was happening throughout the castle as the inhabitants of Under celebrated their freedom from the tyranny of Mara.
I’d never been in that room. Everything in it felt old and delicate. The spindly furniture would have made a lot of money at an antiques sale, and there were lace doilies on every surface. I think Haden chose the parlor because it was the least influenced by Mara. There was nothing of her decorating taste in it—no statues carved from human bones, no paintings of people dying terrible deaths.
He built a fire in the hearth while I stared out the window at an impromptu party that had begun on the grounds outside. I pulled the dark velvet curtain closed. I didn’t want them to see me. I felt exposed and raw.
“This was my father’s parlor.” My quizzical look prompted him to carry on. “My mother tried to make him more comfortable, so she had it decorated to match the room she’d abducted him from. She was . . . a complicated woman.” He ran his hand over the back of a chair, going back in time in his mind. “I would sit on his lap in front of the fire. He stopped talking when I was about six. He would just stare at the fire and I would sit with him every evening.”
“I’m sorry, Haden.”
“I’m sorry that she managed to do the same thing to both our fathers.”
The lines on my arm still mapped a course of Mara’s evil and they itched beneath Haden’s coat, which I wore over the hospital gown. “I need to clean up.” I wanted them scrubbed off me. I’d cut them off if I had to. And the hospital gown made me feel weak and naked. Haden pulled a golden tasseled cord and directed the skeletal servant who entered to “make ready a bath.”
“You sound even more old-fashioned when we’re in Under,” I remarked.
He looked older too. The worry lines on his forehead weren’t usually as pronounced. His aura flared and I noticed he still had a gap where he’d been stabbed by the silver knife. He’d been moving a little slower, now that he wasn’t in battle any longer—it worried me that he wasn’t healing as fast as he should.
He noticed me staring at him. “What are we going to do, Theia? You can’t possibly stay here. I don’t care if they think you’re their queen. You can’t take her place.”
“I have to. Varnie said humanity needed nightmares and the mare to survive. I’m her now.”
“You are nothing like her.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Under is no place for you. You’ll wither slowly as it takes everything you’ve ever known from you. It’s no place for a beautiful young woman with her whole life ahead of her.”
I shrugged. “I’m not exactly excited about being the queen of the underworld, Haden . . . but I’m not going to wither away.” I hoped. I thought of my willow tree and the heart-shaped petals . . . of the song that haunted me. “Sometimes I even kind of like it here.”
He rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “You’ll grow to hate it and hate me for it. You can’t stay here. You’ll miss your friends and your family. There is a whole life you won’t get to lead.” Haden pushed aside the curtain and watched the merrymaking outside. “There is nothing in Under but fear and heartache.”
“And you.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
He turned sharply to look at me, dropping the curtain. “As I recall, you decided we can’t be together, remember? You threw me over.” He grinned. “Not that I ever took that seriously. You can’t break up with me. Not when I feel your heartbeat in my chest.”
He stared at me darkly, waiting for a response. Haden had always advertised that getting near him was risky, but at the same time, I could never resist the heart that lived beneath the danger.
I recalled our first meeting, when he was nothing but polite, but warned me of the peril of being near him while simultaneously daring me
to take him on. And then almost begging me to stay while pushing me away.
“Haden, we are broken up. Now is not the time to discuss our love life.”
“Or lack of love life.”
Feeling like a wrung-out dishrag, I had nothing left to argue, so when the servant let us know that my bath was ready, I followed the skeleton without reservation and without responding to Haden.
* * *
I don’t know how long I’d been in the tub, but the water was still magically hot despite my pruning fingertips. I considered never getting out. Every inch of my body held so much tension I was surprised I hadn’t burst.
The candlelight glinted off the frothy bubbles like millions of diamonds. Every time I moved, a whisper of jasmine scented the air. My skin softened from the moisturizing treatment of the soap, and the plate of chocolates on the little table next to my oasis were caramel bites of bliss.
But could I really stay here?
Could I give up my human life? Under was strangely fascinating, but would I ever be completely at home here? There was never a place to get your footing, not really. It changed and rearranged itself constantly. Its beauty was matched only by its viciousness.
A long sigh escaped me. I should get out of the bath. There was so much to work out—I was being selfish by hiding in the stolen moment of luxury. I reached behind my head to massage away a knot in my neck muscles.
“If you have stiff muscles, I am more than happy to offer my services.”
Haden’s voice surprised me and I sank lower into the bubbles, sloshing water over the sides of the tub. “What are you doing in here?” I shrieked.
He chuckled. “We were worried that you’d fallen asleep.”
His voice got closer and I panicked, sinking farther below the water and arranging the bubbles to make sure he couldn’t see me. “I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute.”
He crouched at my head and blew a breath playfully at the bubbles, laughing at my squeal. “Relax. You’re wearing more bubbles than even your long nightgowns cover.”