Rejected Queen by Meg Xuemei X.
CHAPTER 2
Tessa
The helicopters whirled above me, the deafening noise of the spinning motors hurting my sensitive eardrums. But without my Titan hearing, the rockets would have gotten me. I sighed and quit complaining.
Those douches were just going to cause me great inconvenience.
There was no use running into the shady building as I was fully exposed. The media had found their entertainment of the day, and it didn’t matter if I was a hero or a villain.
I couldn’t outrun them with two helicopters fixing their attention on me. I’d become their mark, and all they cared about was ratings. Our battle to the death over the Demon King was a high for the entire Earth.
Even though I tried my best to ignore the camera lenses all trained on me, the closeup of my face flashed across several billboard screens. Two commentators, an attractive blonde in her twenties and a pretty man who clearly knew his charm and would use it at every opportunity to get what he wanted, took center stage on a large screen.
The man called the woman Becca, and he was Tony something.
“I wonder what powers she has,” Tony said, amusement sparkling in his brown eyes.
“We don’t know yet, but we’ll find out,” Becca said confidently, glancing at her polished nails. “We always do!”
“We’ll try our best to find out for you, but it won’t be easy.” Tony looked at the camera, addressing the viewers off screen, and winked. “You know the rules. Magic isn’t allowed in the second Underworld Bride Trial.”
“Let’s hope the silver-and-pink-haired girl will move to the next trial,” Becca said. “But accidents do happen.”
“They do,” Tony said, almost admiringly. “Did you see how fast the girl moved? She dodged two rocket strikes. The hits almost felt like an assassination or execution attempt, but then this show is brought to you by the King of the Underworld.”
“King Loki is very handsome,” Becca said dreamily.
Tony gave her a sharp look, and Becca shrugged and flashed a smile at the camera as if she could blow a kiss at Loki through the air.
“I bet our audience wants to know what magical creature the silver-haired girl is,” Tony said. “Could she be one of the Olympian descendants? Now that the war with Hell is over, there’s no stopping any Half-Blood graduates from fighting to be the Queen of Hell.”
“You bet,” Becca said drily.
“We know nothing about her, so we’re going to call her the Mystery Girl.” Tony chuckled, loving his own voice. “But we promise you, we’ll soon get her name and background for you. As you can see, she shone even brighter in this trial than the vampire princess everyone is talking about. Now we have a new star. So, who’s going to win Hell’s crown, Princess Veronica or the Mystery Girl? Go vote on our website and win a half-million-dollar house in Queens!”
I wasn’t the spitting kind, but I spat in the dirt, just like my Hell Cat did so expertly.
Those donkeys were going to bring every contestant here to take me out. And I’d wasted precious minutes listening to their bullshit hoping to glean information about who was launching missiles at me.
They had no clue either. They’d thought it came from the package. I jogged behind the building, needing a moment to clear my thoughts and plan my next move.
Snow White had supplied me with a map of New York City, and I’d memorized the geography. But this was still an alien world to me. I half shut my eyes as I concentrated on filtering out background noises to seek the sound of flowing water.
Magic wasn’t allowed in this trial, but water could still shield me. My enemies had marked me, so I needed to get near water and use my advantages against my foes.
The sound of a canal rose above the noise of battle, traffic, and the helicopters and came to the forefront of my mind. I snapped open my eyes and jogged in the direction of the stream.
Just as I turned at a corner alley, a four-wheel-drive truck headed straight toward me at high speed with its blinding headlights on. Two feet and it would slam into me and run me over. I leapt up instinctively with inhuman reflexes and landed on the hood. My shoulder slammed into the windshield and cracked the glass like a spiderweb.
If I’d smashed into the windshield headfirst, I’d have a concussion.
My armor absorbed most of the impact, but it didn’t dull the pain too much. I clenched my teeth, pissed off, as I growled at the driver through the glass, our faces inches apart.
He looked a couple of years older than me, a human. So he wasn’t a contestant but a hired gun. Shock flashed in his metal-gray eyes before they narrowed in anger. He hadn’t expected me to survive.
“Thought this would be an easy gig?” I sneered. “You don’t just run over people and think you can get away with it, little worm.”
“Die, bitch,” he said, whipping out a shotgun from the passenger seat.
Before he could train the barrel on me, I had my handgun twirling around my fingers. The last image he saw was me grinning at him before I shot him between the eyes, point blank.
The windshield didn’t shatter, but a tiny hole appeared where my bullet had gone through.
“Your gun might be bigger,” I offered, blowing a kiss at the muzzle of my gun as I watched his head loll to the side and blood blossom on his forehead, “but mine was better. Sometimes, size doesn’t matter.”
The two helicopters competed to swoop down closer to the driver and me to get a better shot. My actions were out in the open for the world to see. My plan of remaining in the shadows had been sabotaged. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that this sequence of attacks on me had been staged.
And only Loki’s gamekeepers had the means to orchestrate such a large scale of well-coordinated onslaughts. They wanted to get rid of me.
The King of the Underworld had gone back on his word.
“I’m your shield, now and forever,” he’d promised me at the end of the bal masqué.
How easily men lied.
He’d had me. He’d fucked me, even though it was his avatar who had done the deed, but he’d tasted what it was like to have me, and he’d gotten bored and moved on.
My chest heaved. Cold rage burned in me.
I should have known better. I shouldn’t have started to trust him.
But then, hadn’t I come to kill him?
He was just one step ahead of me.
Why was I even surprised?
I’d let my guard down after rejecting men for over a decade. And this was what happened when I let a man in again. Hadn’t I learned?
I let the rage pass through me and conjured the return of my icy calm, killing off deadweight emotions. I was in the middle of the trial, so I needed my head to be in the right zone and my body to be at its best.
Yet my thoughts kept backtracking to Loki.
Somehow, it didn’t make sense. Even if he wanted me dead, wasn’t it a bit of a stretch or overkill for the King of Hell to go through such trouble just to erase me?
Four motorcycles, their riders wearing black helmets painted with three skulls, appeared in the fringes of my sight and instantly killed my troubled thoughts.
Just as I expected—more attacks. Whoever wanted me dead wouldn’t rest until his or her goal was achieved.
The bikers came for me from the ground and the air while I still perched on the hood of the truck. Its driver was dead, and the truck barreled down the street like he had landed on the gas. It wouldn’t be in my best interest to jump off the vehicle now while the assault was waiting for me and there was nowhere to run and hide.
One miscalculated move, and the motorcycles would pin me down.
Two bikes landed on the roof of a bus that sped toward the out-of-control truck I perched on; their bulky riders stared at me through their visors. The bikes’ engines roared, more than ready to take off and gun me down. The third biker chased my truck from the ground—a backup. If I fled on foot, the ground biker would handle me.
The fourth bike waited on the rooftop of a building, about to drop on me and crush my skull.
Blood pounded in my ears at the call of battle.
Beings I’d fought in another arena had called me a warrior goddess. They weren’t entirely wrong. But these earthlings had no idea I was a descendant of Morrigan, Goddess of War.
I glimpsed my fierce features on the billboards. Today, I’d show them what it meant to be a true predator.
I leapt up with a battle cry to meet the biker as he plunged toward me from the sky. At the last second, I twisted my body in midair and swept my sanjiegun in an arc. Its spearhead cut through tissue and bone, slicing off the biker’s head neatly, along with his helmet.
His head thudded on the windshield of the truck I’d left. The truck rammed into an old flower shop, dirt and dead flowers raining down on it.
A biker on top of the bus raised a rifle, cocked the hammer, and fired at me. The bullet grazed my shoulder before I dropped on him. My leg swept out, my boot connecting with his head and crushing it before he could shoot me again.
The biker next to him, her auburn hair beneath the helmet billowing in the wind, looked stunned as her team member tumbled from his motorcycle, rolled over the roof of the bus, and fell beside a dumpster in the alley.
She threw a knife at me before I alighted on the roof, and I blocked it with the second stick of my sanjiegun. Her hand went to the holster at her waist to pull out a pistol, but I’d dashed behind her. I snapped my sanjiegun to fold it, then wrapped the chains and sticks around the woman’s forehead. She clawed her hand backward at me. I added pressure and snapped the sanjiegun closed. The woman’s skull cracked like an egg.
“Have you seen enough?” I roared into the cameras trained on me. “Come after me, and this is what you get. Fuck you all!”
Usually, I wasn’t this brutal. I never killed for show, but my emotions were still raw from Loki’s betrayal. He might not personally have engineered this sequence of attacks, but this was his Underworld Bride Trials.
He’d gotten bored of me, so he wanted me dead. It hurt more than I wanted to admit.
He didn’t even know I was his mate, but then a powerful, rotten man like him wouldn’t care, even if he’d known I could be his. Ragnarö had deemed me his mate, and he’d set out to break me.
The biker on the ground lifted the front wheel of his motorcycle, turned it, and fled.
The bus driver put the brakes on, and the vehicle skidded to a stop, its tires screeching.
“Don’t kill me!” a woman in her mid-thirties shouted through the open window, a look of aghast fear pinching her broad face. “I have two children waiting for me at home, please.”
“Who sent you?” I snarled.
“I don’t know, girl, I swear,” she said in a trembling voice. “They told me this gig would pay well. So I—”
A bullet pierced the air and bit into the driver’s temple before I could do anything. Blood covered half of her face immediately.
I leapt out of the bus as it crashed into a wall. I crouched by its side to take cover, peeking up. My focus zoomed in on the surroundings, searching for the next immediate threat. I caught a faint conversation inside the red helicopter, despite the noise of the spinning motors.
“That wasn’t in the program,” a man with a bass voice hissed.
“It is now,” a woman said. “We can end the girl while we have the advantage. We’re at close range, and she still thinks we’re from the media.”
“We are part of the crew,” the man grunted. “Just let me get in position and film it. The footage of her last breath will be gold.”
The helicopters had chased me all the way here, putting me in the limelight as if I were an exotic animal. And one of the flyers carried assassins.
Flashes from their cameras offended me. I looked up at the red helicopter and smiled.
The crew inside wanted to take the last valuable footage of me while I still breathed, so I offered them a bright smile. I could almost hear the gasps of the crew and the audience.
I could be stunning.
At this point, I no longer cared if the earthlings would learn soon that I wasn’t from this planet. I was going to use an advanced weapon they’d never seen before. I was only thankful that I hadn’t lost my backpack during all the action.
“Hey, how about this closeup?” I shouted. “I hope you like it.”
This was more than a trial. It was war.
I yanked out an energy weapon, turned it on the red helicopter before the crew could take aim at me, and pressed the fire button.
Entwined twin laser beams of silver and orange blasted the red helicopter’s fuel tank. The flyer exploded in a big fireball, a plume of smoke, and a few short screams. Chunks of shrapnel plummeted to Earth, and I dashed out of range of the raining metal and burned body parts.
War was merciless, but they’d started it.
And I didn’t react kindly.
The remaining helicopter made a sharp turn and fled at high speed.
“That was unexpected,” Tony, the male commentator, murmured in shock but recovered fast and smiled at the camera. “Isn’t that exciting? And now let’s see how the Mystery Girl did it.”
The images of me roaring, leaping, and beheading the first biker replayed in slow motion on the billboards, then the video fast forwarded to the explosion of the red helicopter with footage shot by the fleeing silver helicopter.
Leaning against the rear of the bus, I lifted my energy weapon again, focused my sight, and fired three shots. All the billboards in sight shattered.
I’d exhausted the energy weapon, but it was worth it.
I smiled. “Have a nice day.”
There’d be no more show for all the sick fuckers while we bled here.
I turned and sprang toward the canal, destroying any cameras I spotted on the streets and buildings I passed with a handgun. That lessened the chances of the enemy mastermind tracking me and then sending worse forces my way.
Five more blocks and I would reach the waterfront. I could hear the sound of water, my element, calling me. Battle raged here and there, and I whooshed by, focused on getting to my intended strategic spot.
The street suddenly broadened. I was in the town square where the old Chinese museum faced the large immigration court. City Hall also occupied a corner along with a three-story police precinct that had a moss-green front wall.
An alarm blared in my head. All my hairs stood on end as I sensed a new trap. I slowed to a jog, my sanjiegun tight in my grasp.
A wave of unnatural wind blew past me. Shadows skittered across wrecked buildings. I wheeled slowly, realizing my retreat had been cut off. I stilled, waiting for my enemies to announce themselves. I was one and they were many.
A dozen, two dozen, then hundreds of armed supernatural beings emerged into the open. The rest sealed every block and cross street. The mobs closed in on me—vampires in their monstrous forms with claws and fangs, demonesses flicking axes and chainsaws, and a coven of black witches with their potions and dark spells ready.
A large group of mercenaries carrying machine guns mixed with the contestants.
I wasn’t surprised that my enemies had rallied, but how did they know where to ambush me and arrive here so fast and well-organized?
Something didn’t seem right.
Some dark force was at work and had pushed everyone together to go against me. But why? The sense of wrongness set my every survival instinct on edge.
As I tried to calm my wild pulse and scanned for the weakest point of the enemies’ line, Veronica, clad in red armor, stepped out into the center of the square, a dozen of her vampire guards flanking her.
“Little whore,” she said in a breathy vampire voice. “This is the end of your trial, and you won’t go further.”
