Chapter 49 #2
The rain stopped. The thunder stopped. Every sound in the house dropped away as though someone had reached up and unplugged the air itself.
And then the magic answered.
It didn’t crash in. It didn’t lash or burn or roar.
It rose out of me, unhurried and absolute, the way deep water rose when a tide came in.
Black smoke poured up from my skin, thick and silent, threaded through with veins of gold so bright they hurt to look at.
It twisted around my legs first, then my waist, then my chest, climbing my body like something that knew the shape of me intimately.
Like something that had been waiting a very long time to come home.
I heard Trace move. Heard the sharp intake of his breath.
“Jemma—”
“Don’t touch her.” Dominic’s voice, low and hard. “She has to do this alone.”
The black and gold curled higher, sealing around me until I could feel it pressed against every inch of my skin like a second heartbeat. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t hot. It just was. Vast and ancient and entirely mine.
The runes on my arms ignited beneath my sleeves, blazing brighter than they ever had. My back burned in two long, parallel lines as my wings tore free of the skin, unfurling without my asking, blacker than the smoke around me, the tips of them brushing the corners of the room.
The talisman at the back of my neck pulsed once, hot enough to make me gasp.
And then the dome closed over me.
Through the swirl of black and gold I could see Trace lunge forward and Dominic catch his arm, pulling him back as the magic sealed itself around me from floor to ceiling. Their voices came through muffled and far away. Trace was saying my name. Dominic was telling him to wait, to hold.
Inside the dome, everything went very quiet.
I stood at the center of it with my eyes wide open and let it move through me.
And it moved.
Through my marrow first. Through the spaces between my ribs.
Through the soles of my feet and out into the floor, then up through the walls, then past the walls, then past the house, then past Hollow Hills entirely, threading down into the earth and through the cracks beneath it and into the deeper places no living person was meant to reach.
I felt every one of them open to me like doors that had always known my name.
I felt the pull of something on the other side of those doors. Hot and patient and waiting.
A throne.
My throne.
I didn’t sit on it so much as recognize it. Recognize that it had been mine the entire time. That every life I’d ever lived had been a long, slow walk back to this exact moment.
I claimed it.
The dome shattered.
Smoke and gold light burst outward in a silent, soundless ring that passed through Trace and Dominic without touching them and kept going, out through the walls, out into the storm, out into the far places I could now feel like extensions of my own skin.
I staggered. My wings folded back against my spine. The room came rushing back in all at once, the rain and the thunder and the smell of wet wood and Dominic gripping Trace’s shoulder so hard his knuckles had gone white.
I stood there breathing for a long second before I finally straightened and I looked at them.
Trace’s pupils had blown wide, the blue of his eyes nearly swallowed completely. “Fuck,” he hissed, looking stunned and impressed and awestruck in equal measure. “Are you…alright?”
“Yeah.” My voice came out lower than I’d expected. Rounder somehow. “I’m okay.”
Dominic released Trace’s shoulder slowly, his eyes never leaving me. “Well, then, angel.” He inclined his head, a single, small dip that I realized too late was a bow. “I suppose that makes you my Queen now.”
Queen.
Something in me bristled at the title before I could stop it.
Not the power or the inheritance or what it came with.
Literally just the word. The way it implied servants and obedience and people who were less than me by birth, when I’d spent my whole life believing none of that.
But underneath the bristle, I felt something else too.
A weight that hadn’t been there a minute ago.
A hum at the base of my spine, low and constant, like an engine I hadn’t known was running.
Power. But not the kind I was used to. Not magic that flared and faded depending on how tired I was or how cornered. This was different. This was claim. Ownership. The dead-certain knowledge that something somewhere in the dark was mine, and would always answer when I called.
“Right,” I breathed, my hand going to my chest. “Okay.”
“How do you feel?” asked Trace, finally moving toward me, his hands coming up to my arms as though to make sure I was still solid.
“Like myself. I think.” I looked down at my hands, half expecting them to be different, but they weren’t. “Just more of it.”
Dominic walked a slow circle around me, his dark eyes assessing. “And the army?”
I turned my palm up and looked at it, reaching for the hum. Feeling for it. There was something there, on the other end of it, vast and patient. But empty space all around me. Empty house.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I feel them. I can feel the demons. I mean, I think I can, but I don’t know how to...” I shook my head, not really knowing anything at the moment.
Trace’s brow furrowed. “Then how are we supposed to—”
“Maybe we should call the sisters?” I cut in, panic rising in my chest that maybe I’d done this wrong. Or worse, that I’d done it for nothing. “If anyone knows how to—”
The doorbell rang and the three of us went completely still.
It couldn’t be.
Dominic’s mouth twitched at the corner. “I do believe that’s for you, angel.”
I crossed the room slowly, Trace falling into step at my side and Dominic at my back.
We descended the stairs in tense, hushed unison, my hand on the Sword of Angelus inside my jacket out of habit even though I already knew, somewhere deep in the part of me that had just been claimed, that whoever was on the other side of that door wasn’t there to hurt me.
Turning the handle, I pulled open the door.
The Roderick sisters stood on the other side of my front porch. In the rain. Like polite guests. Like they’d ever rang the doorbell in the history of visiting me unannounced.
Annabelle dropped into a low, mocking curtsey, holding out the sides of an imaginary skirt. “Permission to enter, Queen of Hades?”
“Oh, fuck off,” I muttered, but I stepped back to let them in anyway.
They filed past me one by one. Anita first, all business, brushing rain from her sleeves like she hadn’t just walked through a thunderstorm to bow at my door.
Annabelle next, smirking, deliberately bumping my shoulder with hers as she passed.
Arianna last, slow and quiet, her eyes lingering on me a beat too long before she crossed the threshold.
I shut the door behind them and turned around.
“You felt it,” I guessed, seeing as they showed up a minute after I’d accepted the throne. Or maybe they saw it coming before I even made the decision. With the Roderick sisters, you just never knew.
“We all felt it,” answered Anita, her dark eyes finding mine. “Every Dark Caster on this side of the Realms felt it the moment you took the throne. The Legion knows now. Every single one of them.”
“Some of them are no doubt already on their way,” added Annabelle, her platinum fringe wet and clinging to her forehead. “Whether you want them or not.”
A small spike of unease moved through me. “What does that mean, exactly? On their way? Where? Here?”
Anita’s mouth curved, just slightly. “It means, Your Highness, that you don’t have an army anymore.
You are the army.” She tilted her head. “Every demon, every Dark Caster, every hellhound, every creature in any Realm that owes its existence to Hades, just felt the line of succession close. You’re at the top of it now.
They’ll come when you call. They’ll come when you don’t, if they think you might want them.
They’ll fight for you. Die for you, if such a thing applied. ”
“They serve you, and only you,” supplied Annabelle helpfully.
“Serve me?” I made a face before I could stop myself.
“Sworn their allegiance, then.” Annabelle shrugged. “Call it what makes you feel better, sweetheart, but the math doesn’t change.”
“And tell her about the Realm of Hades!” chimed Arianna, like this was some luxury cruise I just won.
“What about the Realm?” asked Trace, his hand finding the small of my back, grounding me.
“She can move through it. At will!” answered Arianna, her amber eyes never leaving mine.
Anita nodded that it was true. “The dominion is absolute within Hades and considerable even beyond it. There hasn’t been a Daughter on that throne in over six hundred years. The Legion has been waiting.” She paused. “Some of them rather impatiently.”
“Speaking of which,” cut in Annabelle, glancing toward the front window where the rain hammered against the glass. “You might want to brace yourself. They don’t all have great manners.”
“What? Wait.” I held up a hand. “Stop. Just. Stop.”
All three of them looked at me.
“I didn’t do this for any of that,” I said, my voice coming out clearer than it had any right to be. “I don’t care about the throne. I don’t care about being called Queen. I don’t care about the Realms or the Legions or who bows when I walk into a room.”
Annabelle’s brow lifted. “Way to be a bore about it.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Look, I did this for one reason. To raise the army I need to bring the Order to its knees. To make them answer for every life they’ve taken.
For my father. For Ares. For the future that none of us are going to get to have if we don’t find a way to stop them.
” My voice didn’t break. The hum wouldn’t let it.
“I did this so William Thompson and every last one of his Council goes into the ground tonight, and stays there. And so that nobody who shares my blood ever has to look over their shoulder for the Order again.”
Anita’s eyes held mine for a long, considering beat. Then her expression shifted into something I hadn’t seen on her face before. Something almost like respect.
“Well,” she said softly. “Why didn’t you say so.”
Behind her, Arianna’s amber eyes flickered with something old, and her lips parted, and she whispered three words that traveled through the room like a knell.
“They’re already coming.”