Becoming his Monster (Playing with Monsters Book 3)

by Amelia Hutchins

  “We’re not safe here,” she uttered. She grabbed Alden’s hand and then stared into the shadows, and then they shone with light. She lit the shadows up until there was no place to hide, nowhere for the monsters to go. I didn’t move, didn’t need to as she let loose a scream that misted the monster’s into ashes, her own anger a palpable thing as she let go of the hold she held on it. “Nobody comes into my sanctuary and fucks with my people!”

  “They left it open to be attacked,” I swallowed as Ristan’s frown confirmed it. “I could almost understand their need to stop the child of Lucifer from being born, but to leave the Guild open to attack after sending us out to die, that I can’t understand.”

  “War doesn’t make sense, ever. Don’t try to understand their logic, or why they did something evil. Evil doesn’t make sense, it just happens, and you deal with it after it does,” Synthia said as we watched Vlad sift in, his silver eyes taking in the damage done to Alden, along with the blood loss.

  “I can’t,” Vlad whispered. “I can only try to save him, but Alden doesn’t want immortality.”

  “I don’t care what he wants, he doesn’t get to leave me,” she snapped. “Fix him, or turn him. I will not lose any more people today.” She paused, turning to stare at me as tears filled her eyes. “We seriously need a win, people. We need the wards down, replaced, and then we need to get the wounded to Faery where they will be safe. After that, we need a fucking plan that gets us closer to ending this war because I’m sick of hiding and licking our wounds as they throw punches.”

  “Then let’s do this,” I uttered as I stepped closer to her, watching as Vlad pushed a needle into Alden’s vein and started the transfusion. “He will need to heal mentally.”

  “He’s the strongest man I know,” she stated.

  “He just lost the love of his life,” I mumbled. “My mother…is dead.” Tears slid from my face as I turned to find Lucian watching me from where he leaned against the wall, staring. “Find her, Lucian. Before it’s too late,” I begged, uncaring that it exposed my weakness, or that it was a plea. She was my sister, my twin. I sent my emotions and senses searching for the bond but felt nothing, only an emptiness where it had once been, severed in death.

  Chapter 32

  Day turned into night as we waited; every minute seemed like an endless vigil of hopelessness as we prayed to any God listening to bring them back alive. I struggled through emotions, the basic need to mourn my mother, and yet the coldness inside my body seemed at odds with what it took or needed. I’d felt the tears slip over an hour ago and yet they seemed to come and go, as if I felt it, and yet…didn’t fully accept it? It was a war that seemed to be waging in my mind. I knew she was gone, I felt it. I felt the stab of pain that every once in a while would creep up and seem to strangle me out of the blue, but then just as quickly as it had come, it vanished, and I was empty again.

  Joshua sat beside me, silent as he stared at the funeral pyres we’d erected for our mother and coven which seemed to spread out further than the eye could see. Over fifty bodies lay bathed, wrapped and ready to receive their final rites. Our entire coven was gone, missing, or dead. It seemed like a nightmare I wouldn’t awake from, and yet in the place where my heart ached, it ceased to beat. As if it was protecting myself from the pain it knew I held.

  Lucian placed his hand on my knee, and I stared at it, the warmth it spread through me was comforting and yet unneeded. I was missing a part of me, that part that should be screaming hysterically, bawling my eyes out because I’d lost my mother.

  “Lena, how are you feeling?” Lucian pried, his eyes seeming to burn with the question as he stared at my side profile since I refused to look at either him or Joshua.

  Alden was being given vampire blood, recuperating from being dinner to some unknown monster that had entered the Guild to feed. My mother was dead, and my family missing, and he wanted to know how I felt? I didn’t even know how I felt.

  “Empty,” I admitted as I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I feel…numb. I’m hollow, like I’m missing a part of me. I know I should be screaming, or crying, or shit, anything but this cold unfeelingness that I feel, right?” I reached for Joshua’s hand, curling my fingers around it as I shook my head. “I feel pissed, like I need to kill things, anything. I can’t just sit here doing nothing, it’s too much.”

  “You’re in shock. I saw a lot of it in Afghanistan. You don’t sense what happened, you just keep moving. Not feeling it or giving into the pain of the loss you witnessed seemed to work, until you’re alone and it’s the only thing you do know. I think I’m in shock too because I’m just…numbed to what I should feel,” he stated as his fingers tightened around mine.

  “We should be screaming or crying,” I uttered through a heavy tongue. “So why aren’t we?”

  No, the truth was I couldn’t feel her loss, not fully. I couldn’t feel shit right now, as if all my emotions had gone mute other than rage and anger. Sure, it felt like something was squeezing my heart, or tearing it out, but not the debilitating pain I’d felt at losing Joshua, which is what I should feel, right? I wanted to burn down the world, to dance in the blood of the archangels as I bathed in their entrails. It was all wrong.

  “I want to feel their organs as they turn to dust in my hands,” I amended. “I want to drink their blood, and paint my flesh with their blood.”

  “That’s…that’s one way to cope with it,” he said as he scratched his head, staring at me. “I feel sad, and lost. I feel like I lost my mother,” he admitted, and I turned empty eyes to him, watching as a black tear slid down his cheek. “We lost our mother, and yet we have not even considered bringing her back. She’s our mother.”

  “She is gone,” I stated firmly. “She wouldn’t have wanted to be like we are, or be immortal. She made it clear when shit started happening at home that if her time came, we let her go. I promised her.”

  “You did what? You knew immortals existed and that vampires were real and you promised to let her go?” he cried angrily, his hand dropping away from mine as he stared at me.

  “I promised to honor her wish to go when her time was here, and so it has come,” I said gently as I frowned. “I know you want to bring her back, but look at us. Look at how wrong we are, we’re not even processing her death; instead, we are sitting here staring at her corpse as we prepare to burn it.”

  “You’re not thinking of bringing her back, but I am, so who is the wrong one?”

  “I am what I was created to be, what you brought me back to be, Joshua. I cannot change that. I know if I had a soul, I’d feel her loss so fucking completely that I’d be shattered, but I don’t. You got to retain a part of yours, but mine is gone. The sliver I have never loved her, I’m not sure it ever loved anyone. Maybe that is why I feel this weirdness in my being? You want me to scream and cry with you? I’ll do it, but I won’t feel it. I loved my mother, in life, I loved her so fucking much that it hurt, but I’m not the same, and neither are you. You want me to rip the creatures that did this to tiny pieces and eat their souls? That I can do, and I’ll relish every second of it. But mourning her loss? I don’t feel the earth-shattering sadness I should. Maybe Hades can bring her back?”

  “She isn’t like you,” Hades’s deep voice emitted as he appeared before me, his violet eyes moving between us and my mother’s corpse. “Her sacrifice wasn’t pure; it was to protect herself, not Kendra. She cannot be brought back as you were, her soul is already gone. When I brought you two back, you wanted to come back. You were just hovering between life and death, reaching for Nyx and her power to bring you back. Your mother made a choice, and where she is now, it’s so much better than what we face. You should have known the angels were here for the child, Lucian. When have those selfish, self-serving pricks ever stepped out to help without having alternative motives?” He spat onto the steps, as if it was vile on his tongue.


  “I was busy hunting for something that’s been lost a long time. Something that can hold the devil himself,” Lucian stated as he stood up and stared down Hades.

  “And the warehouse?” Hades asked as he pushed his thick, midnight hair out of his face.

  “It was a trap, one meant to kill us,” I admitted.

  “And yet you didn’t die?” he countered.

  “No, we had Erie with us to dismantle any wards, but the moment she began to search them for a way to bring them down, it triggered a failsafe in the wards, and gargoyles awoke to attack us.”

  “Gargoyles?” he shivered. “Nasty pricks, those little buggers.”

  “Buggers?” I frowned. “They meant to rip us apart.”

  “I’m sure they did, but that shouldn’t have stopped you. Lucian, you fancy a trip to an angel warehouse? I could use a workout.”

  “Lena?” he asked, watching as I slid my gaze back to my mother and then to Joshua.

  “I’m staying,” I uttered as I slid my fingers back to Joshua’s and held his hand. “My family needs me more than you do. Kendra is still lost.”

  “Gods, they took her?” Hades huffed. “The fucking hell did you guys do? Leave those bloody bastards alone here while you went off to search for shit?”

  “They’re archangels; they’re supposed to protect people.”

  “That’s your first mistake, Lena. They serve no one but their own needs; they brought heaven to its knees with Lucifer.”

  I swallowed hard as I stared up at him. “They’re working with him?”

  “Those particular ones, yes,” he nodded. “Raphael helped kill a few others, Diana included, you met her briefly, I believe. There’s only one being who could kill an archangel minus current company and a shadow who seems to have gone missing, and that’s Luc. I’m sorry, but you fuckers got played. And it looks like it cost you an entire coven’s worth of witches.”

  I stared out across the funeral pyres that were being built and realized it had cost us greatly. Assuming they’d been on our side had lowered our guard, and we’d rushed at the chance to bring Lucifer to heel, and in doing so, we’d lost most of the coven, and a few humans in the process.

  “They came for the witches,” I uttered thickly. “They wanted them out of play, why?”

  “They have ancient ones who need new bodies, and the only way they can transfer souls is to have ones who match them in magic and power. My guess, they needed vessels to transfer into. A Sarah suit would indeed be something they’d want, and need.”

  I stared at Hades and then opened my mouth and closed it. My teeth gritted as anger shot through me, unfurling my wings to deadly tips as I rose and faced him.

  “The warehouse can wait; to transfer would take a magical point of the leyline. They’re in Metaline Falls. At the house. At our house. It’s where the leyline meets and dumps power into the Inland Northwest. Once they removed it from this Guild, it’s where it began to push up through the ground. Lucian…” I growled, but he smiled, watching me with pride as I reached for him. “Take me home.” I shivered as memories seemed to slither into my mind, my heart clenched as I considered the last time I’d been home.

  For Kendra, I’d go back.

  For Grandma, I’d go back.

  To get revenge, I’d go back.

  “Lena, the last time you were there…” Joshua argued.

  “I slit my fucking throat. This time, I’m going to slit theirs.”

  Chapter 33

  Lucian

  She’s darkening, deeper into the form she’d become. Her eyes leak tears, and yet she doesn’t feel the death as she would have if she’d housed a soul. Empty and cold, devoid of the emotions she should feel for the loss of her parent.

  Joshua watches her, his stare unnerving and condemning and yet the rest who she claimed were soulless aren’t entirely so. They house more of their soul than she does, she who has none of what she once held, and something Hades slipped into her as if she was a fucking cocktail he was creating.

  It’s not that I don’t enjoy knowing that she cannot find release or pleasure with others, but that she doesn’t mourn the loss of her loved one. She should be screaming, tearing the world apart with her loss, but instead, she’s calm, empty.

  I watched her pile wood beneath the corpse with a cold detachment that is driving me bugfuck crazy. I wanted to hear her screams, the denial that her mother was lost, and yet she didn’t rally the pain; no, she clung to the cold rage that slithered through what she had become, and begged to bathe in the blood of those who took from her.

  Fury: a mythical being who seeks justice for those too weak to claim it…How ironic that my girl would seek to right the wrong done to her, even though she herself ended her life. She no longer fears death because, in her own way, she’s become it.

  She’d become a winged warrior who craves chaos and blood in payment for those who took from her. It’s a small miracle that she doesn’t crave my blood for what I had done, for the game she was forced to play as I fought to protect this world from the responsibility I’d fucked up. I’d done this to her, my game with Katarina as I struggled to free her took the only being I craved more than life from me.

  She faltered next to the shrouded body of her mother as Alden approached, his eyes rimmed red from the loss. He searched her face, scouring it for any sign she felt the loss, and then she wiped away the single black tear that slipped free.

  “You will be okay,” he stated, his grey eyes watching her as she stepped away from him, letting him touch the corpse of the woman he’d briefly found love with. “Fiona knew what the cost was to protect her children; she knew she’d pay with her life eventually.”

  “You loved her,” she stated, her hand fisted at her side as she watched him with a detached sentiment.

  “I did,” he admitted, his silver hair sparkling beneath the moons iridescent glow. His flesh is red, rimmed with the glow of the immortal blood he’d consumed to heal as he had. He’d woken up pissed, assuming they’d made him immortal against his wishes, but then calmed once he had figured it out. Most people would kill for immortality and yet he’d come enraged when he’d assumed they’d changed him into a vampire.

  “You need to back the fuck off,” Joshua snarled, his eyes alight with the need to fight.

  “I loved her,” Alden snapped, holding his ground as the Fae sidled closer to the old man who had yet to release his hold on Fiona, as if he could will her back to life.

  Personal experience told me otherwise, and yet I moved, closing the distance between Lena and myself as Joshua prepared to fight anyone stupid enough to touch his mother.

  “Enough,” she uttered thickly, her eyes slowly moving from Alden to Joshua. “She loved him too, Joshua. You can’t fight him because he loved her, so thank him. Thank him for being there when I died, and holding her through the pain because I remember wishing one person would hold me when news of your death reached us. I had no one, no one to hold me and tell me it would be alright.”

  “I loved her,” he argued.

  “No one is questioning that,” she replied sharply. “No one doubts you loved her. I sense her loss, even though I cannot feel the pain. There’s a place that is…voided. As if her leaving has left a hole, and yet while I may not feel it, I understand it should hurt. I sense you feel it on a different level, and I wish you didn’t.”

  “He retained pieces of his soul,” Hades admitted as he stared at Joshua. “That’s how he found you, knew you as he had in life. You, on the other hand, had no soul to save. You know what you should feel because you’ve retained your mind, but the soul is where we feel loss when it comes, and without one, you only know what you should feel. You just can’t feel it because it isn’t the soul you house’s loss, but you’re aware of it. Inside, you feel something missing, like something was st
olen from you. Use that to find the ones who remain, Lena. You know how to find them and when the time comes, you’ll save them.”

  “Shouldn’t we go now?” she asked, her voice low but even as she squared her shoulders, no longer letting them droop with the loss she’d felt guilty at not mourning.

  “No, it takes time to prepare to transfer souls into a body, and right now they’re expecting you to show up with an army at your back. Right now Lucifer is holding your sister, telling her all of the horrible things that will happen to her when she births the antichrist into existence. She’s safe, or as safe as she can be considering he sees you when he looks at her. You…pissed him off pretty good, Fury. Not many can say they’ve crushed the skull of a fallen angel and lived through it. Luckily, he wants you alive to use against us.”

  “Us?” I snapped coldly.

  “Us, Lucian,” he nodded as the words left his lips. “He’s aware of why she is alive, and who brought her back to you. More than that, he’s aware she cannot be killed easily, but that she can be killed. That is actually why I am here. There’s a blade, one forged in the river of the Gods that can kill her. We need to find it and destroy it before he does.”

  “You think he’d kill her? He wants me to suffer because unlike him, I am not bound to Hell, or trapped there. I’m free to walk the earth.”

  “He isn’t bound there anymore. Magdalena freed him when she entered Hell knowingly, remember? I do believe you spanked that perky ass for doing it. Then you impregnated her as the eclipse played out. Now I’m here to help clean up your mess again. The other Gods have been awakened, and while you may not die, Lucian, there are other things, worse things than death.”

  “They can try, but they will fail as they always have,” I grunted, watching as he nodded but turned those violet eyes onto Lena, who snapped her fingers as flames leapt to the several funeral pyres around us. She silently stepped closer to me, her hand skimming against mine as if she wanted or needed comfort and then her words replayed through my mind.