Hellfire Crown by Meg Xuemei X.
CHAPTER 20
Tessa
Close to a dozen vampires besieged the six wolves. The shifters had turned to their animal forms since they wouldn’t be strong enough to go head-to-head with vampires in their human shapes.
Amid rows of cornstalks, the wolves’ movements were greatly hindered while the vampires darted left and right with their long claws slashing at their opponents. The vamps charged viciously and retreated and then charged easily at the wolves again while the cornstalks got in the wolves’ way.
Two wolves tried to untangle themselves from the cornstalks, huffing heavily and snarling.
I took a second to quickly assess the situation and find the best angle for an attack. Then I was on the move.
I grabbed a pair of cornstalks, leapt up using the momentum, and hurled myself into the vampires’ ranks.
My legs split kicked, flinging away a vampire who was on a brown wolf, while my other boot slammed into the throat of a tall vampire, the blade on the front of my boot cutting into her throat before retreating.
Although the rules said that no weapons were allowed, I could argue that it wasn’t exactly a weapon but merely a pair of bladed boots. The biggest cheater, the Wild Hunt, could kiss my ass if the force behind it wanted to get into the details.
Without missing a beat, I wheeled into the thick of the vampires’ ranks.
With the Titan King’s blood in me, I was much stronger than the bloodsuckers. And my Ice Fae heritage gave me speed. The cornstalks couldn’t hinder my movements either. I grabbed a new cornstalk and did a roundhouse kick—horizontal style—and dropped two more vampires. They looked astonished before they fell, not expecting my kind of strength.
“Size doesn’t matter in this case,” I told them. “I’m Princess Marigold’s kin, bloodsuckers.”
I kicked down the vampires, and the wolves descended on them to finish them off by tearing out their throats. I quickly moved on to the remaining vamps. Rinse and repeat, until the vampires’ numbers dwindled to a more manageable level for the wolves.
I thrust a hand into a vampire’s chest and yanked out her heart.
Rage was a terrible thing. I needed to vent after being forced to relive the scene of my family being slaughtered.
I looked forward to the day when I could yank out Ragnarö’s icy black heart and eat it raw, which would be gross, but I’d manage it. My hatred for him could level mountains.
The rest of the vampires started to withdraw, taken aback by my ferocity. I threw the vampire’s heart at her peer. She ducked, and the heart dropped on the shoulder of another vampire behind her.
I flipped up in the air with the assistance of a cornstalk and landed behind the vampires, cutting off their escape route.
“Going somewhere?” I asked. “Stay, please. And where’s your high and mighty princess?”
No one answered me. It was strange that Veronica wasn’t with her guards, and from these vampires’ confused expressions, they were just as clueless. I guessed that the Wild Hunt might have separated them the way it’d separated me from my shifter allies. But the Wild Hunt had favored the vampire princess as its pawn.
The vampires turned the other way to run from me, vanishing into the rows of cornstalks. Without their mistress commanding them to fight to the death for her, they were all about saving themselves.
The wolves dashed to pursue the remaining four vampires, but I called them back.
“The bloodsuckers have no idea where they’re going,” I said. “They went in the direction I came from, a dead end. We need to get the hell out of the cornfield.”
We ruled out going in the directions the wolves and I had come from, then took a wild guess and decided to venture north, if it was north in the maze.
Raina, the new alpha, and Briann, the wolf who had saved my life in the second trial, shifted to their human forms, butt-naked, and flanked me on either side in the next row of cornstalks. We could glimpse each other through the spaces between the columns.
Three more wolves limped behind us. We had to leave a dead wolf behind this time. Before we’d left the white wolf, the other wolves had howled in farewell. I’d placed a hand on her heart and sung the song of the dead in my Ice Fae tongue.
“That song of yours was beautiful,” Raina said after walking silently with me for a while.
“I sang the same song when my family was taken from me,” I said. “I sang it when every one of my warriors passed on to the other side. One day, I’ll meet them all.”
“But that day is not today,” Raina said fiercely.
“We tracked you after the black wind separated us,” Briann chimed in. “The task was almost impossible inside the maze. We got lucky finding you, but then we bumped into the vampires. You saved us again.”
I smiled at her, though she could barely see me. “Let’s call it even. Without your pack, I wouldn’t be here.”
“We’re your pack now, Lady Tessa,” Raina said. “When we signed up for the Bride Trials, none of us expected to get out of the game alive. We were here for our alpha, but she’s gone. Our mission was to make sure the vampire princess does not reach the throne of the Underworld. The vampire coven is already too powerful on Earth. If their princess becomes Hell’s queen, we shifters will have less space to survive.”
I’d learned from Lucifer about Earth politics and the conflicts between the supernatural races. So what Raina said did not surprise me.
“Our mission hasn’t changed,” Raina said. “You’re now our alpha, Lady Tessa.”
I blinked. “I’m not even a shifter.”
“We saw the Wolf God,” Briann said. “And he called you his mate. We’d be honored to serve you. We’ll do everything we can to make sure you become the champion, and we’ll gladly die for you.”
Only one contestant would get out of the Bride Trials alive.
“The Wild Hunt has been rigged,” I said. “I’ll fight and win this trial, as it’s not in me to let anyone else have my mate, but it doesn’t mean that the pack will have to sacrifice itself. I won’t allow it. I’ll find a loophole and get us out of the trials alive.”
The wolves behind us whined and howled, but Raina and Briann padded silently, tears glinting in their eyes. They hadn’t expected to live through the trials. They didn’t expect anything from me.
“I promise,” I said. “You’re my pack now, so it’s my duty to protect all of you.”
When a pack marked someone as a pack friend, it was a great honor. And when a pack bowed their heads to me like this? It was faith. I wouldn’t insult them by pushing them away.
“Our alpha is a protector,” Briann said.
“I haven’t been able to protect my people, the Ice Fae in the Ice Kingdom, from the Ice God,” I said, holding back my tears. “I’ve failed them for a decade. Only Dux and Fayette are still with me.”
“We’ll follow you,” Raina said fiercely. “If we live through this, the pack will battle for you when you take the war to your Ice Kingdom.”
And I’d make sure I deserved their loyalty.
A blood-curdling yowl rose behind us. Three monstrous hounds charged toward us, leveling the cornstalks in their wake.
Somehow, I knew these three hounds weren’t natives. The only hellhound had gone to live in the Void with Lilith, the former Hell Queen.
These hounds, all with three massive heads, had been transported here.
My pack and I were all battle-worn and spent. Esme had warned that many of us could be trapped in the trial for days or even months until the champion of the third trial found the crown and exited the trial.
We might have been in the maze for a day now, and none of us was in any state to take down one hound, let alone three.
Dread choked me.
Some of us would die here.
The wolves howled in defiance and fear. Raina and Briann were about to shift and step in front of me. They’d all vowed to lay down their lives for me.
No, I wasn’t going to lose more of my people.
I wouldn’t allow it.
I fought fatigue and let a war song course through my veins, but we needed to flee instead of fight.
“Run!” I barked an order and broke into a dead run to lead the pack.
Raina and Briann shifted right away, and five wolves ran behind me.
But the hounds were gaining on us. I could feel their hot, horrid breath on the back of my neck.
“Go! Run faster!” I shouted at the wolves as I slowed down to buy more time for the wolves.
Instead of obeying my order, the wolves slowed down and took a stand with me, huffing laboriously.
I threw up my hands, my ice magic slamming into the hounds. It was far from being its strongest in the maze, but I’d been stockpiling it. It was enough to freeze the three hounds for a minute or two.
My ice encased them, and the hounds froze in midair in their leaping position. The wolves howled in victory.
“Next time, when I tell you to run, you don’t stop,” I told the pack sternly. “I can run faster than any of you. While your loyalty is appreciated, there’s always a good reason behind my orders.”
The wolves lowered their heads and whimpered.
“Let’s go,” I called and picked up speed again.
A path revealed itself ahead with iron walls on either side. We’d reached the end of the cornfield. The wolves howled in relief, but I shouted for them to slow down before diving in headfirst. We needed to scout and assess the situation before we decided where to go. I didn’t trust the Wild Hunt one bit.
But then the hounds’ yowls made the decision for us. They’d broken out of my ice and were tearing through the cornstalks toward us, their nostrils fuming.
I flicked my wrist, but my ice magic was low.
Ahead of us, four valkyries had just slid onto the path between the pale stone walls and were springing toward us. The warrior race and I had tried to avoid crossing paths in the past two trials, but now a fight was inevitable.
We were rivals, after all. We had to take down the competition to get to the Hellfire Crown.
Raina and a gray wolf shot in front me, snarling at the new arrivals. Briann and a silver wolf posted themselves behind me, shielding me in a protective huddle.
I curled my fingers, ready to tear through our opponents. But I could probably convince the valkyries to fight the hounds with us before we settled our differences.
Then an ominous feeling buzzed in me, almost like a premonition.
“Get down!” I shouted at the wolves, power in my command.
But two wolves had charged ahead toward the valkyries.
“Fuck,” I cursed and made a mad dash toward the racing wolves.
I grabbed the first snarling wolf by her scruff, tossing her backward. Then I snatched Raina in her wolf form just in the nick of time, wrapping my arm around her middle and hurling her backward as I fell. My adrenaline was running so high that I didn’t even notice the wolf’s weight until we both crashed at the edge of the cornfield.
Raina tumbled free from me, shaking.
My heart rammed painfully into my ribcage as the two stone walls slammed toward each other, hundreds of spears thrusting out of either side.
In an instant, the valkyries inside the path turned to meaty pulp, a stream of thick blood flowing along the granite ground.
The valkyries were all for battle glory, but had died such a gruesome, meaningless death in the trial.
The pack froze in place as they watched in horror, but they crouched low to the ground as I’d ordered them. Everything happened very fast.
Unable to stop their momentum, two hounds leapt over us into the passage between the two closing walls. The shrieking and crunching of bone and flesh were the most sickening sounds I’d ever heard.
And the show wasn’t over yet.
We were now facing one massive hound outside the walls. Ferocious snarls rose from each party, signaling an inevitable battle. The five of us and the hound charged at one another.
I jumped onto the hound’s back while the wolves tore into it from the front and behind. I grabbed the beast’s fur as he vaulted violently to shake me off. My boots found their purchase and kicked two of its heads. Blades sliced out of the front of my boots and slashed into the hound’s thick skulls.
It bellowed horribly and tried harder to toss me off its back, but my pack held it with all they had, not letting go of their foe, tearing and snarling in the process despite the hound opening some nasty slashes along their hides.
After several brutal, repetitive kicks, I sliced off the hound’s two heads. The battle lasted another half a minute before my pack and I got the hound’s last head off.
I stayed on the hound’s back, panting even as it tumbled down.
Raina shifted back to a naked woman.
“We need to drink its blood to recharge our energy,” Raina said, hesitation flashing in her big brown eyes as she waited for me to give a nod or deny her suggestion.
She knew that I wasn’t a wolf or a vampire. A humanoid like me didn’t drink blood or eat raw meat, but this was survival, as no one knew when we’d have our next meal. And I wasn’t some delicate lady. My team and I had eaten raw rats and scorpions to live to fight another day.
The pack would wait for me—their new alpha—to take the first drink.
I scoop up a handful of blood from the gaping wound on one of the hound’s heads.
“Drink your fill,” I ordered. “No need to wait for me.”
I held my breath before I drank from my hand and swallowed a mouthful of the hound’s warm blood.
Raina mimicked me, drinking the blood from her hands. She didn’t shift again, as it would require more energy for her to do so.
The other wolves tore chunks of flesh from the hound and started chewing.
“How did you know the walls were going to seal, Alpha?” Raina asked in awe, though she grimaced as well, probably at the horrific image of the valkyries and hounds turning to mince. If I’d acted a little slower, she and the other wolf would have suffered the same horrific death.
Raina was still shaken.
“I had a flash of premonition,” I said.
She perked up. “Are you also a psychic?”
I knew what she was thinking. If I could predict the future, I’d be able to get us out of here nicely.
I shook my head with a tight smile. “This has never happened before.”
“I wonder why it happened now,” she said, musing.
I wondered the same. Despite the Wild Hunt turning on me, it might not want me dead too soon. Had it been the warning through the mating bond between Loki and me? But then, even the king and his tight circle didn’t know what would happen in the third trial.
While the wolves were still eating, thick fog rolled in toward us, followed by a strong gust.
“Gather around Lady Alpha!” Raina shot to her feet and barked in panic.
The fog became so thick that visibility dropped to zero in a blink.
My heart pounded in my ears, anxiety sinking into my bones.
“Whatever comes, we’ll face it together as a pack,” I told my team.
The wolves yelped quietly in agreement.
