Page 154 of Incoronate
I staggered. My wings folded back against my spine. The room came rushing back in all at once, the rain and thethunder 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?”
