Waking the Queen Read Online Free Page A

seconds stretched out in eternity as the brain ceased to function and all that was impossible became possible as we waited for the end.
     Well, it could hurry the fuck up. Dying shouldn’t be like the goddamn DMV. It was a simple series of actions. Breathing. Not breathing. Fuck you, you’re done.
     The music stopped and Astrid smiled at me. If I could have raised my arm, I would have hit her in the face just to make that saccharine smile go away.
     “Did the music stop, Brynn?”
     I found myself able to nod my head and I struggled to sit up. It was a certainty now that I was dreaming; there was no way I could live without my heart. Unless this was my first step to ascension, although I thought the lack of a heart would be more metaphorical.
      She yanked me to my feet and just as Astrid pulled me vertical, a man’s face loomed behind her. His visage was a horror—the left side a twisted and ropey monstrosity, the burned scar tissue stretched tight across his bones and the scarred half of his mouth twitched as he smiled. It wasn’t his face that held my attention though, awful as it was—his eyes were the ones I’d seen beckoning me out into the deep water as I lay dying.
     Astrid’s mouth curved into a pink O as those ruined lips whispered in her ear and she seemed to be lost in some kind of trance.
     He stepped out from behind her and I found myself unable to move. I couldn’t shake the imagery of seaweed tangled around my legs pulling me down. The unknown man was one of the biggest I’d ever met, taller than my 6’1 by at least five inches. His shoulders and chest were so broad he reminded me of a brick wall.
     Astrid suddenly crumpled, blood spread across her chest like the bloom of an English rose—petals reaching out underneath her armor. It didn’t surprise me that this stranger killed her; the hatred in his eyes was a wildfire. Any horror he could have perpetrated wouldn’t be any great shock, no, it was the bright light that erupted from her body. Waterfalls of silver and green sparks that consumed her.
     In moments, it was as if she’d never been. Astrid’s flesh, bone, everything gone.
     I shouldn’t have been surprised because I was dreaming. Any matter of the fantastic could happen and it meant nothing.
     But I remembered my alarm clock going off, I remembered guzzling a protein drink and I remembered pulling the last sealed envelope out of my father’s possessions. I left it on the bed. Had I dreamed all of that, too?
     The other choice was this had all happened. I was walking around without a heart in my chest. Cute, blond and deadly had disappeared and the scarred man in front of me thought he was the goddamned Phantom of the Fucking Opera singing songs in my head.
     “Do you know me?” he asked, his voice like whiskey sex, sliding over my skin in a caress.
     I found I could speak now, but I was still frozen where I stood. “Should I?”
     A bleak smile splashed over his twisted mouth. “Oh yes, Darkyrie.”
     My father had told me stories of Darkyries, Valkyries, werewolves and faeries. Myths and monsters were my father’s favorite topic. He’d told me stories no one had ever heard of before, yet this man had. I wondered if he, too, was something different, something else. Something like me. “Why is that?”
     “You really don’t know me, Helreggin?”
     He knew me. Not as Officer Brynn Hill of the KCPD, but as Helreggin, Darkyrie and shield maiden of Hel. Something warm and unnamable surged inside me at the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. But I didn’t know who he was and he’d just killed what I suspected was a Valkyrie.
     “My name is Officer Hill. My credentials and badge are in my jacket pocket.” I would have pulled them if my limbs hadn’t been frozen in place. Or maybe my .40. He was obviously a killer and I valued my own life more than I did the knowledge there were more things like me on the earth.
     His eyes narrowed in on where my shirt had