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

Seventeen: Becoming Whole

"Perhaps someday I'll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow."

-Sylvia Plath

A Z A L E A

The heat was stifling, sweat pouring down my skin, colored a peeling red from wandering in the desert. My feet hit burning sand, one step, then two, and three, a repeated continuation of agony. This was the second time I was made human, the second time I struggled to remember who I was and why I was here. A hot wind tore through my matted and dirty hair, a scent carried in its claws. My head turned, and my chapped lips parted in response to the black alpha, his scarred muzzle twitching and yellow eyes burning. My mind rolled and twisted, memories struggling to reach the surface, but as he rose his muzzle and howled, the fog cleared away. I felt him brush my mind, ancient knowledge and thought pushed past my barriers with ease and there was nothing I could do to keep out.

"What do you want?" My mental voice lashed out, raw and unhinged. I fought the urge to back away while he advanced towards me.

Blinding light haloed his form, and in the span of a second a man stood before me, and the memories rushed back with vengeance. I looked around me and the landscape changed, the once barren sandy prison was now filled with bones and rusted metal, sand blowing over the dead and fallen. Unknown fear pumped through me, instinct urging me to turn tail and run far far away from this place, but when I tried, my feet were rooted to the ground.

"What do you want?" I asked again, my body threatening to come apart beneath my skin.

"To remind you of your purpose in this world." His answering rumble echoed through my mind, a vibrating timbre that knocked my very bones together.  His skin was the color of golden brown sand, and dark markings swirled across his muscled chest as he walked towards me. My broken mind tried to make sense of this moment, and how I never knew he was much more than a wild wolf. I wore no clothing, but his eyes never strayed from mine, a deep and pure yellow as bright as the sun in the sky. "Death surrounds you," he rumbled again, his arm outstretched to indicate the battlefield around us, stepping over the skull of a long dead wolf as if to punctuate his point. "It will follow you wherever you go, until you surrender."

I wanted to scream at his cryptic words. Surrender to what?!

"Mortality, Azalea. You have lived your life as a god, and you are not." I shuddered, raw power melting off of him.

"I am your guide. I am here to warn you. You are straying from your path, and duty compels me to steer you elsewhere." There was a gentleness to him now that had not been there before. I had only been human for a few moments the first time he showed me his mortal form, but this, this was different, and I had the distinct realization that I was speaking to a being not unlike the one who ferried souls to the afterlife. A being with the ability to walk the world between life and death.

"What will happen to me?" I started to shake, staring up at him.

"In three years time, the curse Hades placed on you will begin to take it's toll. You will succumb to it the longer you fade from that which gives you your strength. When that time comes, you will be forced to make a choice. Succumb to the madness, and this is what you will face." The landscape swirled again, and this time instead of bones, my loved ones lay in the sand, dark red blood seeping from their bodies. A garbled cry wrenched free of me, my knees hitting the sand. I found Camille and Emilee, holding each other in deaths embrace, their throats cut. And all around more faces appeared, more wolves, more lives lost. I wailed at the sight of Elizabeth, her lifeless gaze trained on the sky, and Kore, her wings twisted grotesquely, agony painted across her face, and three small bodies cocooned between them.