Rise of a Queen

Chapter 46

He stumbled a step back. Then another.

Slowly his hands lifted to hover around the hilt protruding from his chest, catching his own blood in his hands as it dripped from a gaping hole. He looked over at me, his eye was lost and confused but beginning to understand.

Then he dropped.

Abrupt energy shocked my body into action and I dove to catch him before he hit the ground, shoving myself between him and the wooden floor to soften his plummet. He roughly landed on top of me in a jumble of limbs, but my pain didn't register. At that moment, nothing else registered other than the startling amount of red that exploded across Lumiere's chest in the shape of a widening starburst.

"Lumiere?!" Dustin ripped wildly at the nails in his hand. The sheer agony in his voice caused his single spoken word to fracture into millions of inconsolable pieces, "Lumiere!"

At the sound of that name so shredded by despair, Erie's eyes opened.

From where she lay after being assaulted, her head rolled towards us, only her head. When she saw Lumiere cradled in my arms with a knife through his heart, her eyes glossed over and her flushed cheeks were washed by tears that slipped into her raven hair.

Shadows scurried across the floor in route for her body and they shroud her in extraordinary darkness that tinted the shade of her skin and made her tattoos fluctuate. Those loyal shadows lifted her from the floor and provoked a furious, heartbroken, soul shattering wail that ripped from her throat and shredded through us all like shrapnel.

The first man to approach her stood no chance. Her leg whipped out, swift and unseen, and it broke the chains that had been binding her ankles. Her foot rocked across his face and snapped his head too far to the side. He flew back and landed on the ground in a heap, eyes open but no longer seeing.

The second man who tried to stop her dodged the first kick but did not see the second, and Erie's heeled boot sliced cleanly through the center of his neck. His spray of blood sprinkled across Erie's face, it dripped perfectly into streaks that followed the trail of her tattoos and added crimson swirls to their charcoaled composition.

A third, fourth, and fifth man was sacrificed ... three more bodies dropped at Erie's feet. Her hands were still chained but she did not need them, every inch of her body was deadly on its own. She was seething and emitting dangerous waves of black hatred that contaminated the surrounding area and burned everything it touched. Her heartache was potent, it suffocated those who were dumb enough to neglect her power; her grief was unrestrained, it turned her limbs into weapons.

And never has there been a greater mistake than harming Lumiere in Erie's presence.

Four more fell, one after the other, and Erie sent their unknowing souls to hell for gambling so foolishly. But her accumulating tears hindered her vision and she missed the man that caught her from behind. He was her last victim before several men brought her down, shouting and cursing, wearing a layer of smoke that pulsed an inch over her flesh and stained the surrounding floor in soot.

When she did not surrender, a man above her rammed his knee across her face. She fell back against the ground, dazed and bleeding, and crying.

So very softly, painfully, crying.

"Erie ..." Lumiere mumbled, having watched her plight in awe, "Stop, pumpkin ... stop ... "

"Don't talk!" I ordered. I sat us up and held him tightly against me, careful not to touch the protruding knife. Should I pull it out? No, they say to never remove the object penetrating a potentially vital organ. I need to leave it in and keep pressure, but I can't do that with the knife in the way. And Dustin's yelling and Erie's crying. And Lumiere drifting farther and farther away. My body toppled into arctic paralysis, "Lumiere! Hey, stay with me, okay?"