Free Waking the Queen by Saranna DeWylde

 
     
     
     
    PROLOGUE
     
     
     I am the daughter of a serial killer.
    They say my father was sick, but murder isn’t a virus or some alien bacteria. I can’t deny it’s an infection. His blood runs through my veins, his breath is in my lungs and my synapses fire the way he programmed them. Murder is always there, hanging over me—the familiar stranger.
     He was a handsome man—black curls framing a marble Botticellian face. Yet for his classic beauty, he was a chameleon. His skin shimmered and there was something beneath it that was not like them —the ones he hunted. I remember his hands the most, strong and broad. Tools of his trade, their width and breadth meant to span a man’s neck. Meant to crush bone and tear sinew. I remember the way blood looked on those hands, like melted rubies splashed against snow.
     I am part of him, but I am not like him.
     I’m not like them either—the prey.
     Once, when I was very young, I tried to be. I rebelled as all children do, and swore I’d never be like my father. I hated him, hated the life he forced us to live. I believed I could have any life I chose, a normal life, if only I was free of him. I was sixteen when I got pregnant, but it wasn’t the boy I’d slept with on the roof of our apartment building who held my hair out of my face through the morning sickness, sat up with me those sleepless nights, or even held me as I shattered when after eighteen hours of labor, my daughter Thora was born dead—the cord wrapped around her tiny throat. It had been my father with his quiet voice and strong arms telling me everything would be okay even as I screamed and choked on my grief. Telling me that if I stopped trying to be human, that I would never feel such agony again. That only humans suffered so wretchedly.
     I was something different. Something apart. I was Helreggin, the Queen of Hel reborn to walk the earth and hunt the dark things that needed to be caged. So I surrendered to my father: my humanity, my pain, traded that empty chasm that drilled into my very bones for destiny. I would have given myself over to anyone or anything in that moment if I never had to feel that anguish again.
     I was twenty-one when I killed my first victim. They gave me a medal for it because I’m a cop. I have a lot of medals for valor. For service to my community. For killing.
     My first execution was a hunter, like my father. I knew it as soon as I saw him. Our eyes met over his prey, a pretty little coed begging me to save her life, the cool halogen street lights flickering in a pale nimbus around him and I knew on a primal level he belonged to me.
     My gun was suddenly in my hand and I pulled the trigger. I didn’t tell him to let her go; I didn’t identify myself as KCPD. I didn’t do anything but what I was made to do. An explosive flowering of crimson and meat blossomed against the wall of the building behind him. A splatter of flesh and bone as my bullets ripped through his guts and tore his life from him.
     He knew he belonged to me, too. With his last breath, he said he’d waited for me. That all his work had been for me, and he smiled when the death rattle gurgled past his lips in a river of blood.
     Father said it would happen like that; they’d come and bring me tribute because of who I am. What I am. He was a monster because of who and how he killed—outside the rest of what homo sapiens say is acceptable. And I am a hero covered in medals and glory because I do the very same thing, but within their societal norms.
     He was a beast, some even say a demon. But he was the one who kept me warm, tucked me in at night, read me stories of the Old Gods of the Northmen and the heroes of Valhalla, bandaged my hurts and baked me cupcakes with Nutella frosting every Saturday morning while we watched Nova.
     I don’t blame the legal system for killing him, for putting him down like a rabid dog. It was what he wanted. I know as surely as I breathe that they only