All The Queen's Monsters (The Queen's Slave, Book 3)

Eight: Are Those....Bullet Holes?

"She had killed and she had liked it, and he surely would have delighted to see her as she was now. Half-mad and fading fast, every inch the Gothic heroine that he'd envisioned. Ophelia, floating dead in the water and haunted by ghosts. Lilith, crafted from the earth instead of as a subjugate of the flesh, drawn to the fiercely blazing beauty of an angel only to find that the brilliant light singed as cruelly as the fires of hell. A fallen woman, drawn to her Lucifer. A cautionary tale to those who refused to bend to the natural order and fell in love with the wrong kind of man."

Nenia Campbell, Escape (Horrorscape, #4)

"Complex"

By: Katie Gregson-MacLeod

&

"matthew"

By: Elijah Woods

A Z A L E A

Day and night blurred into one as the truck rattled onward. I had only the light from my cramped cage to guide me, and the humans around me. For a while I watched them talk and converse amongst themselves, always making it back to the wolf in the room. As the sixth night of our travels droned on, I listened intently to the women around me. They spoke of their homes, their lives, the families they'd been ripped from. It was painful to hear, and even harder for me to come to the realization that perhaps I needed to be humbled. The days had blurred into weeks after I'd been cursed, but oddly I wasn't so angry anymore. A part of me believed I deserved it, my sentence for allowing my family to fight my battles for me. There was no more of that now, now it was between me, and the living, and currently the living were winning.

Too cramped to shift an inch, a weak groan left my muzzle as one bullet dislodged from my skin, clinking onto the floor, loud enough to catch the attention of my new friends. Their idle chatter faded as I panted, their low voices whispering with fear, uncertainty, and wonder as the second bullet tore it's way out if me. The dark haired girl leaned in close, and I rattled the cage with a warning growl, surprised when she stayed put. The others sucked in a breath, falling silent as the last one fell, staining the truck bed with my blood.

"Is it supposed to do that?" A woman with yellow hair and more than a few missing teeth commented.

"Probably not." The girl next to me responded, bravely reaching through the bars to stroke my fur. I didn't have the strength for a growl with my body working overtime to heal itself.

"What are your secrets?" She whispered to me, a fiery spark to her eyes. "Why have you traveled so far from home?"

I tried to turn my head a little more, catching her eyes out of the corner of mine.

I wish I could tell you. A mournful whine left my muzzle, almost a whistle.

I wish I could tell you that I used to be just like you.

But I was not, and as nausea began to build in my stomach, dread filled my heart. Forcing my head to turn, I crammed my face into the bars, the movement so suddenly the woman jerked back, my eyes pleading with her to be unafraid.

"What is it?" She breathed, pressing her forehead against mine as best she could.

My eyes rolled back into my head as familiar pain gripped me, worsened by the small space. Fire tore a path down my re-aligning spine as fur faded into skin. I savage moan spilled from my lips, my body contorting, inverting inwards, a silent scream forever stuck in my chest. My vision failing, my hearing sharpened, panic and fear saturating the air, as the sound of bone crunching filled the air. Laying my fevered and naked skin on the cage floor, I pulled my knees up to my chest, trying to remember what humanity felt like. My back to them, I could hear the shocked gasps, the stirrings of conversation.