AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“The twins won’t tell you because to speak ill of the queen is considered blasphemy by the gargoyles, but this queen? She was never meant for the Bridge. She forces the dead to languish.”
“What?” My throat closes, and I can’t find the words to ask what she means by languish.
“She doesn’t want to help the souls. The gargoyles keep them here until she gets around to occasionally doing her duty. Dyphena should’ve been queen. She wouldn’t have jumped—not voluntarily at least.”
“Jace saw her throw herself over the side.” The way Jace blames himself for Dyphena’s death? It breaks my heart all over again.
Rona shoots me a side eye. “Dyphena didn’t commit suicide. That girl had every intention of serving as queen and staying in this realm. She befriended those boys, especially Jace.” The way she says boys about the twins who are over a hundred years old? It makes me wonder how old Rona is even as the terrifying truth of what her words would mean hit me like a punch to the gut. “She was murdered. I don’t know how, but someone got into her head with magic.”
I open my mouth to question her about that impossibility and snap it shut. Gargoyles are real. So are brownies, orcs, and wyverns. The battle in front of me is fought in freakin’ flight, and the twins wrapped me in shadows earlier at a haunted house where a demon works as a tour guide. Why wouldn’t mental manipulation through magic be possible?
“Who could have done that to her?” I ask. “And why? What could Dyphena, the twins, or anyone else possibly have done to give someone a motive to murder her?”
Rona steps so close that her long ears almost brush my arm. “I know you came here to ask the Bridge to speak with your great-grandmother as much as you did to save the boys. But the Bridge, the Borderlands, all of us—we need you. The souls crossing the Bridge need you.”
I don’t know what to say. It’s been so long since anyone needed me for me and not whoever they expected me to pretend to be.
The gargoyles closest to us drop low enough I can see Jace and Atticus on the frontline, pushing the wyvern back. The Bridge has crumbled in places and taken on even more damage than earlier. Even worse, the lovely humming that came from it earlier has died to a murmur.
The twins work in tandem, all strength and deadly grace. Their movements are hypnotic. Atticus wields a sword that looks as tall as I am like it’s as light as a kid’s swimming noodle, and Jace swings a giant ax with one hand. But they don’t wield the weapons to kill the wyvern. No, they’re corralling it across the Bridge.
Both seem invincible, but they’re at a disadvantage if they’re not prepared to kill and the wyvern is. I would appreciate their heroics except one wrong snap of the wyvern’s tail or venomous spit ball would end them.
My stomach drops, and sour bile burns my tongue. I barely know them, yet deep within me something flutters as if I know them in the most intimate way and that—while losing Lala tore a piece of my heart away—losing the twins would be devastating. Jace’s talk of fated mates suddenly doesn’t seem so impossible.
The wyvern yelps and retreats. A dozen or so gargoyles go after it as if to guarantee the beast makes it back where it belongs. In the distance, a small army of winged bird-women screech like they’re calling the wyvern home.
“Harpies,” Rona says. “Show’s over. The boys will be hungry.” The brownie’s first thoughts always seem to be of food, and I can’t get over how a woman the size of a toddler calls the twins boys. “But they’ll likely be filthy since they led the charge.” She magics a hose into her hand and shoves it into my palm. “I’ll get rid of the Spidress while you make them strip and rinse off before they dirty my floors. You gave them a show upstairs earlier. They might as well return the favor.”
She vanishes before I can protest.
Great. I have a water hose with no visible tap to turn it on, a pervy, old-lady brownie who seems set on me getting freaky with the huge gargoyles with massive muscles and even bigger trauma issues who she affectionately calls boys, an orc guard who thinks poisonous spit is hilarious, and a twitchy owl I need to keep from hurting himself by flying into something whenever his frequent freakouts hit him.
This is fine.
Everything’s fine.
Then the portal I came through opens up in a flood of colors and light, and a gargoyle strides into the courtyard dragging a howling woman in chains who looks like the steroid-happy lovechild of Xena the Warrior Princess and Conan the Barbarian.
“The last candidate,” Darok grumbles from behind me.
I choke because my heart has leapt into my throat and my body has gone into full panic paralysis with the threat of the incoming beat down. Because if the queen trials have any physical component, any possible situation where that woman can squish me with her gigantic thighs, I’m dead.
I am so screwed.
19
ROSEMARIE
EIGHT OF SWORDS: FEAR KEEPS US TRAPPED.
But There’s Always A Way Out If You’ll Just Look.
The last candidate makes it out of the portal only to drop to her knees and scramble back toward the tunnel. My breath rushes out in a whoosh, and empathy floods me. She’s fighting to return to the hellacious inter-dimensional travel experience that I couldn’t walk through on my own. Her gargoyle Diviner has forced her here against her will, and she crawls toward the portal to escape him. My heart bleeds for her.
“Stop it!” My cry is lost in the gargoyle’s demands for her to submit and her screams to let her go. I’d accused the twins of stalking me, of using my emotions to get me to agree to compete in the queen trials, but this? This is a brutal kidnapping.
The gargoyle holding her chains yanks hard on them, and the woman goes to her belly. Flexing her fingers into the unyielding ground, she struggles to drag herself inch by inch across the courtyard to the portal. The force and strength she’s using? Every fingernail must be breaking. Blood already streaks her skin. Her anguish has me running to help, but Darok puts a hand on my shoulder and hauls me back as easily as if I was a two-pound pup pulling a two-ton anchor.
