Page 52 of Queen of the Wicked (Afterlife #1)
Alessia
T he realm was in flames.
Alessia had barely recovered from Traveling when ash filled her lungs and clouded her vision in a fog that reeked of death.
Screaming rang from every direction, cries for help and begging for mercy repeating on a loop in her mind as she covered her mouth from the smoke and waded through the disaster.
The gates of Hell were demolished, torn from their hinges, and discarded into a warped metal pile in the sand. The glamour was gone, replaced by that ungodly heat that singed her skin with every step she made towards the castle.
“Help!” A cry sounded from one of the houses in the village, and Alessia couldn’t stop herself from responding to the plea, eyes watering amid the smoke as she barged through the door.
Inside, a woman lay across a man, blood soaking through the sheets that permeated the air with a metallic scent that overpowered the ash. “T-The creatures attacked my husband. Please help him.”
Alessia stood motionless in the doorway, her stomach rolling with nausea at the sight of the pale man’s face.
Their home looked as if it had been ransacked, with furniture overturned and their belongings scattered everywhere, but it was the claw marks on the front door that caught Alessia’s eye, only further intensifying her urge to vomit.
What was happening?
“Please, you have to help him,” she begged, falling to her knees before her.
This woman didn’t know her, had no idea that she had zero knowledge about mending someone back to health, but when the woman stared up at her with doe eyes, the last flicker of hope she had shining through them, Alessia couldn’t refuse her.
A battle raged outside, mixed with shouting and the clashing of steel weapons, as Alessia approached the bed.
This man looked to be too far gone, on the brink of passing into the Unknown or wherever it was demons went when they left Hell, but Alessia wanted to at least try for the woman sobbing profusely on the floor.
She was better suited out on the grounds, helping fight whatever creatures had been let loose into Hell, but for some reason, she felt propelled to the woman pleading for help.
The demons who resided in Hell were important to Erebos, and as she lifted a hand to the man’s forehead, she suspected he would do the same if he were here to answer the call in place of her.
Feeling a tingling in her fingertips, she furrowed her brows when she glanced down to see a gold shimmering light trickle down the man’s face and navigate to his stomach, where the wound was.
Beside her, the woman didn’t seem to notice the light.
She just kept glancing frantically from her palm to her husband’s wound.
The golden light seemed to understand where the injury occurred, flaring over the wound and intensifying the buzzing. Alessia couldn’t explain it, but it was as if she could feel stitches sewing him shut. She could sense the heavy blood flow come to a trickling halt. She was…healing him.
She was healing him.
The woman released a choked sob of relief. “Oh, my prayers have been answered! You stopped the bleeding. Thank you, My Lady. I cannot express my gratitude enough. I owe you my life.”
But Alessia still stared at the closed wound in a state of shock that had nothing to do with the war raging outside these four walls.
Healers only resided in Heaven. At least, that was what she was taught.
Those born with the magic of healing typically had a royal bloodline running through their veins, which only reaffirmed what her mother claimed.
She was the lost heir to Heaven.
King Amos’s daughter.
The rightful queen.
Swallowing thickly, Alessia stepped away from the bed, unsheathing the knife strapped to her thigh. “You owe me nothing,” she said. “Remain inside until instructed otherwise.”
“Yes, My Lady.” The woman rose to curtsy, her hand placed over her heart. “May the Makers be with you.”
Alessia sprinted to the castle with a knife clutched in each hand, sidestepping bodies scattered haphazardly and left to rot in the scorching heat.
The smell of burning flesh singed her nostrils, her heart torn between confirming if the demons were dead and finding those she cared about who were undoubtedly amongst the carnage.
Plumes of smoke rose from the castle, carved into the hillside, guards surrounding the perimeter as they attacked?—
A shooting, indescribable pain suddenly laced down her spine, tearing the flesh open and raw in its wake as Alessia fell to the ground with an oomph.
The agony took her breath away, the sand festering its way into the wound and burning her from the inside out as she rolled onto her back, only to be met with the most terrifying creature she’d ever seen.
A human head with razor sharp teeth sprouted several limbs that contorted his body in the shape of a fucked up tarantula. Its soulless eyes were so black she feared she’d teleport to the Unknown if she stared hard enough, reminding her of Erebos’s when he became angered to the point of no return.
At the end of the human limbs were claws, which were likely what had impaled her back.
“Our master will be very pleased we have found you,” it purred, emanating a clicking, paranormal sound that sent chills down her body, despite the rising temperature.
Her knives had slipped out of her hold from the fall, one lying beside a claw so long she was surprised it hadn’t severed her spinal cord.
Her heart rate spiked into overdrive, and she mentally calculated how quick its reflexes would be if she rolled out from beneath it and grabbed the knife beside the rubble at the base of the castle, another area the creatures seemed to have left in ruins.
The guards were still fighting at least another eight of them as they attempted to gain access past the rise, instigating a total blood bath that had Alessia quickly averting her gaze from one horror to the other staring down at her.
This had to be Bastian’s doing. There wasn’t another explanation for it. Somehow, he was responsible for the creatures wreaking havoc in Hell, and as she watched them destroy a realm Erebos worked so hard to build, she vowed to decimate them all.
Alessia didn’t know the first thing about fighting a being with eight legs sprouting from its torso, but she did have her powers, which had to account for something.
She was heir to the throne. The lost queen.
And she wouldn’t allow a mutated spider, no matter how horrendously large it was, to be the end of her life before it ever truly began.
Migrating her fear to a locked cabinet in her mind, she smiled deviously at the creature with eyes that reflected the blood surrounding them.
She could feel it seeping from her back, creating a halo that was far from righteous, but there was a reason she was sent to Earth and kept hidden from seraphims and archangels alike.
She wasn’t righteous.
She wasn’t wicked.
Alessia was a formidable combination of both. If she could get her hands on that amulet, she would be the only person capable of restoring the realms to their rightful state, and she would not die today.
From here on out, she would take what was rightfully hers.
Smoke wisped around her, colliding with the ashes from around them before snaking around the human limbs and cutting off circulation.
The creature thrashed in her hold, but it couldn’t escape.
Not when she willed the smoke to squeeze until the flesh turned purple, veins bulging and seconds from imploding.
“Bitch!” It hissed, narrowing its beady eyes on her. “You choose to remain on the wrong side of history?”
Alessia lifted a brow, thinking of the Makers and the choice they made for her without her consent: creating her mate with the intention of disposing of him like he was nothing but trash.
“It’s a shame you won’t be alive to tell Bastian, your king, that he can fuck off, but not to worry.
I’ll ensure I get the opportunity to tell him that myself.
” Her smile grew into a sadistically wide grin.
“You and the rest of these abominations will eventually learn that there is no wrong or right side to choose. There is only mine.”
The limbs severed, leaving the creature to bleed out at her feet as she lunged for her knives and continued on her path to the castle.
It turned out she didn’t need her knives at all.
Her smoke worked for her, robbing the creatures of their breath until they collapsed before the exhausted, bleeding guards.
Her smoke seemed to sense who she intended to kill because the guards remained unharmed, aside from those already injured from the battle.
They looked around, dumbfounded, until their gaze landed on her, and although she couldn’t see herself through their point of view, she had a good idea what stood before them: a woman with fire raging in her eyes, seeking revenge on their behalf.
She stood before them as the harbinger.
One by one, the guards took a knee with a fist over their hearts, and only then did she feel feathers flutter against her skin.
Sparing a glance over her shoulder, she gasped in awe at the wings protruding from her back.
One white, one black, a symbol of what she already knew was inside of her. Good and evil. Light and darkness.
The realm’s greatest weapon.
The guards' show of respect didn’t last for long. A new wave of creatures screeched in the distance, their crawling figures vaguely visible in the red sun, tainted by smoke.
It would only be a matter of minutes before they descended upon them, and Alessia didn’t know if she was powerful enough to swipe out what looked to be hundreds.
Where were they coming from?