Vicious Kings (Vicious Creatures #1)

Chapter 1 – Billie

One

BILLIE

The ceremonial gown hanging on my door resembles a death shroud. Midnight blue fabric, silver threads reflecting the dying light in my sparse room.

Guess it's an appropriate enough outfit for the occasion.

Twenty fucking years of training, bleeding, breaking, and reshaping myself into the perfect weapon. Tonight, I finally get to find out what kind of killer I am.

"Stop staring at it like it's going to bite you." Vera squishes through my narrow doorway, fighting her puffy golden skirts the whole way. She never knocks. That's what happens when you've been best friends with someone since you could barely hold training daggers. "It's only fabric."

"I'm not staring." I turn back to my blade and keep sharpening. Steel against whetstone. Five strokes each side. Always five. "I'm thinking."

"About what? Whether you'll be a blood binder like your mother or get enhanced strength like your father?" Vera drops onto my bed, springs creaking under her. She has that big Cheshire grin, red curls bouncing over one shoulder. "Either way, you're going to be unstoppable."

Blood binding. My mother could stop a heart with a thought. Make arteries burst. Turn a body's own life force against itself. She was legendary.

Until she wasn't. Until she went on that mission to kill Prince Corvinus Luxellier and never came home.

Enhanced strength runs in my father's line. Simple yet brutal and highly effective. He can rip heads clean off, crush bones to powder, tear through supernatural flesh like wet paper.

"Both would serve me well." I set down the blade and pick up another. Five more strokes. "As long as the Shepherd doesn't send me on some bullshit first-year initiation mission."

Vera laughs, but it's too bright. "Are you kidding? You're the best hunter we've produced in generations. Everyone knows you're getting the big one."

The big one. The mission I've dreamed about since I was old enough to understand why my mother never came home. Prince Corvinus. Fae royalty with a taste for human flesh and a talent for manipulation. The bastard who probably has my mother's head mounted on his wall like a fucking trophy.

"I hope so." I test the blade's edge against my thumb. Perfect. If all goes well, I'll be shedding this ridiculous gown and leaving the compound, the only home I've ever known, before the Unmasking even cools.

"Are you nervous?"

I look up.

Vera's still smiling, but her eyes aren't in it. She's worried. About me, about tonight, about what comes after.

"No." My voice sounds flat and final. I don't do nervous. Nervous gets you killed. "Why would I be?"

"It's just... everything changes after the Unmasking. You know that, right?"

Of course I know that. Once they remove the binding spell that's kept my resonance locked away since birth, there's no going back.

I'll know what kind of hunter I am, what I'm capable of, and the Shepherd will decide how best to use me.

Most hunters get sent out within a week of their Unmasking. The strongest the very same night.

Some come back.

Some don't.

"Change is good." I stand and walk to the gown. It's heavier than it looks. "I've been preparing for this my entire life."

Vera joins me, running her fingers over the embroidery. Silver threads form protective sigils across the bodice, each one blessed by Saint Seveline. "You've never worn anything this fancy." Her lips twitch. "As a matter of fact, I don't believe I've ever seen you in a dress."

"Not since I could dress myself." My voice comes out as dry as the mesh fabric puffing out the skirts. It's a far cry from my training leathers, and the bodice is too restrictive for even basic defensive maneuvers, but hunters love tradition. "Help me with it? You're better at this sort of thing."

"But of course. I have to outshine you at something," Vera teases, whisking the gown off its hanger.

"Please. You know we need healers as much as hunters."

She does. Vera was born for it. In a month, when she turns twenty, the Saints will confirm what we already know.

We've always been as different as two people can get in spite of being born into the same clan a month apart, down to the day.

Her big fiery curls and my bone-straight brown hair that won't hold a curl for anything, despite years of Vera trying.

Her light brown eyes and freckles against my dark blue eyes and near-translucent skin.

She's always flaunted her curves. I've always hidden mine under leather.

She treats boys like instruments. I treat them like the plague.

None of that stopped us being inseparable from the day we left our mothers' sides to start training at the age of five. Tonight will be the first major moment for either of us that we can't face hand in hand.

If I'm nervous about anything, it's that.

But some armor doesn't come off. Not even in front of your best friend.

The gown goes over my head. Vera's fingers work the lacing at my back, pulling it tight enough to cut into my breathing. The skirt falls in heavy folds to the floor.

I feel like I'm wearing someone else's skin.

"By the Saints, you actually have tits under all that leather," Vera says, mock-horrified.

"Oh, shut up." I try to adjust said tits into something I can breathe around. "I'd like to find the elder who made this stupid rule and see how he likes going through the most important night of his life with his balls trussed up in a vice."

Vera throws her head back and cackles. "You and me both."

Then she sobers. Just like that, one breath and the laugh is gone, replaced by a somber expression that sits wrong on her face.

"Now the mask." She lifts the ornate blue mask from its velvet box. Carved from supernatural bone, inlaid with silver, the eyeholes rimmed with tiny sapphires.

She places it over my face and ties the silk behind my head. The world narrows to what I can see through those holes.

And suddenly I feel like myself again. Hidden and ready.

"You look..." Vera starts.

"Like a weapon dressed up for a party?" I turn to the mirror. The girl staring back is a stranger. A doll, not a killer.

"I was going to say like a princess." She reaches for my hand, and her eyes are wet. "I can't believe we're finally here. If your mom could see you now..."

My throat closes.

I don't trust myself to reply, but Vera has always had enough words for both of us. It's half of why we work.

She hugs me then, fierce and quick and desperate. "Good luck, Billie. Whatever happens tonight, you're the strongest person I know."

I hug her back. I can already feel the distance opening up between us.

She's afraid she won't see me again, which is valid. Hunters go on missions and don't come back. It's the nature of the work.

But I don't plan on dying. I plan on Prince Corvinus's head leaving his shoulders. Everything after that is negotiable.

"This isn't goodbye," I tell her.

We both know it might be.

The temple bells begin to toll, their deep bronze voices rolling through the compound.

Time to go.

I grab Vera's wrist and we sprint across the clearing, formal gowns billowing behind us. Five hundred yards of exposed ground between the residential block and the training halls. I count my steps in groups of five to keep my breathing even.

The Moreau compound sprawls around us with its squat cement buildings, ancient mountains rising on all sides, and pine forests pressing against the wards that keep us hidden from the supernatural world.

Our ancestors claimed this valley centuries ago.

The stones under our feet are worn smooth from generations of hunters making this same walk.

Some to glory.

Most to death.

"Hurry," I whisper, tugging Vera when she stumbles.

The temple looms ahead, carved directly into the mountain face. Twin stone angels flank the entrance, their faces shielded by wings, their hands holding giant bronze torches, weathered but no less imposing. Torchlight flickers from the hall inside. The bells are still going.

"Five more minutes and we'd have been late," Vera pants beside me, face flushed. "The Shepherd would have had our hides."

I say nothing. My mind is already through those doors, already holding a blade, already watching Corvinus's head roll across stone.

The meeting space doubles as our temple with its massive chamber carved straight into the mountain. Torches line the walls and make the carved Saints seem to move. Chief among them, at the very top of the chamber in white marble, is Saint Seveline.

The first hunter.

The Mother.

She's wearing servant's robes, a blade in one hand, the severed head of the Fae King in the other. Her face is set in a beatific smile. Blank white eyes. Twenty years old when she turned the tide of her people's fate. The same age all hunters after her have taken their vows.

Her image is reserved for the most sacred of spaces, and the interior of the amulet every hunter receives at initiation. The one we're buried with. The air in her chamber smells of incense and old blood, centuries of ritual soaked into the stone.

The Shepherd stands at the altar below her feet, his white robes pristine against the dark stone. He is ancient and wrinkled, older than any mortal has a right to be, eyes sharp as broken glass. My father stands to his right, tall and broad.

Refusing to meet my gaze.

Typical. He hasn't looked at me directly since my mother died. Sometimes I wonder if it's because my eyes are the same cobalt shade as hers. One of us will probably die without that question being asked.