Page 98 of Hot Vampire Next Door: Season Five

The closer she gets, the easier her struggle is to see. Eyes bloodshot, bags beneath. Her skin has a sickly pallor to it.

She starts to speak, to tell me all the reasons she deserves power and I don’t. She tells me how I’ve made a terrible mistake. That I should have married Maven and bowed before her.

And I realize as the hedge man’s grip slackens, as the queen takes a raspy breath, that while she holds the title of queen, she is just a girl, just like me, desperate for power over her own life.

But she holds no power over me.

The queen cuts herself off and her eyes dart to my forehead.

The ice crown is light but I sense it’s presence just the same.

When I wear it, I feel whole.

Hope spreads through my body.

Crystal blue light softens the darkness around me.

The leaves of the hedge man curl up on themselves, then glisten with frost, before pulling free of the branches, flitting away.

When he is barren, when he wears the coat of winter, the hedge man opens his arms and lets me walk right out.

The queen’s mouth drops open.

Thundering footsteps sound through the labyrinth.

The ground trembles.

“No,” the queen says, sensing the inevitability of it all. She stumbles back as the branches around the labyrinth’s center part for the herd of Autumn beasts.

“No!” she shouts. “No!”

The beasts barrel through what remains of the hedge men, shredding them limb from limb.

Soon Bran is free. Then Arion.

The queen motions with her arm, lashing out at me with the thorny vines of a rose bush.

My barren hedge man steps in front of me, taking the brunt of the rose’s wrath.

“Surrender,” I say.

The queen immediately sinks to her knees. Her shoulders shake as she fights it.

I see her resolve crumble.

She was so desperate to restrain me with her power, to show her might, that she forgot one important thing: all of the seasons exist here, in the same space, present in some way at all times. The seed buried in the frozen earth of winter. Sprouting green in the spring. Blooming bright in the summer. Casting its seeds again in the autumn.

The hedge man, too, is all seasons.

The whole point is to find that balance in all, for all of us to hold equal power.

“Do not fight,” I order.

Ice crystals form along my arm.

Snow falls softly between us.

Arion comes over carrying his sword in his hand.