Waking the Queen Read Online Free

against the wall,” I directed her.
     “I can’t let you cuff me.”
     “And I can’t let you leave, so it seems we’re at an impasse.”
     “It seems we are.” She sounded strangely reasonable and was quiet for a moment before she spoke again. “It’s your birthday today.”
     Again, something that was common knowledge—information that was easily attainable. “And?”
     “It’s time.”
     Then she moved so fast, I never saw it coming. I only felt the cold steel of the sword as it split through my chest and bisected my heart.
     
     
     
     

 
    CHAPTER TWO
     
      I fired wildly, my finger jerked back on the trigger more out of cellular memory than any actual intent. I couldn’t feel my hands and all I could hear was my blood thundering through my veins like a tsunami, but I knew the .40 had fired because I watched the bullets rip through Astrid Johanson’s pretty forehead.
     The back of her head should have exploded as my bullet tore through her skull, but it didn’t. Her smiling face peered into mine and the gaping wounds in her head closed like the tide washing away footprints in the sand. She caught me as I fell, my eyes focusing on the strange glint of the firelight on her armor. For a moment, I thought I saw the faces of dying men, but maybe it was my own death I was watching. My own face.
     I kept waiting for the pain, but it didn’t come. Only an arctic chill that was heavy like sorrow until Astrid drew back and took the sword with her, along with my heart. It was surreal to see it there, beating and pulsing outside of my body. More surreal still when it stopped and I was alive.
     This had to be a nightmare. My goddamn alarm was going to go off any minute and pop me from this hell into wakefulness. Or what passed for wakefulness until I had a cup of vanilla bean Folgers.
     Voices raised in song echoed inside my skull. I was damn sure those voices weren’t a choir of angels singing the angelic host to welcome me to Heaven, but there were no accordions, so I didn’t think I was in Hell either. The melody was soft and lovely, like butterflies flitting over my skin—a physical manifestation.
     Although, the more logical explanation was that the phenomenon was simply the mind’s way of coping with the trauma of death. Any minute, everything would fade to twilight and shadows and I would be nothing more than an empty meat sack in an abandoned warehouse.
     It wasn’t death that pissed me off; it was failure. I was supposed to ascend, I was supposed to be a goddess. Dying here hadn’t been part of the plan.
     The murderess’ hands were cool and soft on my face. “Don’t listen. I know it’s pretty, but stay with me, Brynn. Stay with me.”
     I wondered wildly why she’d say something so stupid after she’d pulled my heart out of my chest with a fucking sword. Dumb bitch.
     Maybe I was the dumb bitch because I was still alive. Or just so fucking stubborn, I didn’t know when to lie down and die.
     She pulled my hands up to cross them over my chest and I could see my fingernails were a strange shade of blue and the tips of my fingers purple. The rest of my skin had blanched to an alabaster white like the marble of some ancient statue. There was still no sensation there, only the absence of such that comes with the bitter cold.
     The music continued to reverberate in my awareness and I was flooded with sounds, scents and sights of things that were woven like a tapestry into every note. The white sands of Greece under an impossibly blue sky, the deep green of the sea and the scent of brine and figs. Visions of the sky as it shifted into black velvet and the foamy waves crashing over my feet beneath a gravid moon calling me out into the unknown and promising this for eternity if I surrendered. The green sea became the eyes of a man and he called to me, urged me to wade deeper into the water.
     I knew it wasn’t real.
     None of this could be real.
     Perhaps this was death,