Huntress

It took all of two hundred and thirty-six seconds before I could say anything.

“She what?” I eventually settled on.

“Well, actually, I suppose to get technical it was Er-”

I stood suddenly, cutting Asp off. “No. No, no, no – enough of assuming I know things. I don’t. I know nothing and it’s pissing me off. I think now would be a really good time for some fucking explanations!”

Alec looked worried, and with good cause. I could feel myself getting hysterical. “Di, are you sure you don’t need some sleep…”

“Sleep?” I turned on him this time, voice rising in pitch. “You tell me that earlier on in the evening I met the woman who killed my mother, and you expect me to just go to sleep? Are you high?”

Whatever awkward excuse either of them were about to give was interrupted as the front door was unlocked and opened. Asp sharply turned her head toward the door as a young-sounding female voice called out “It’s just me.”

“In here,” Alec called, still looking concerned.

There were not one set of footsteps, but two, something which didn’t go unnoticed. Both of them seemed somewhat slow and sluggish, though. Asp left the room to investigate.

“Oh, shit,” I heard her mutter. “What happened?”

The footsteps increased a tiny bit in pace. Asp returned, supporting a slumped figure on one side. On the other was a girl, who could’ve been anywhere between seventeen and twenty four. Her long, white-blonde hair was slung over one shoulder and traces of dark makeup were smudged. She was about as tall as me.

“We were out in the city. Liv, Noah, Connor, Ave, Nate, Bill, Eli and me. Not on a job, just out. Then Hal pulls up, fast, and Lilith, Joel and a guy who must be new get out.”

At this the figure they were supporting slumped down in one of the remaining two chairs. I could see it was a guy, dark featured and a few years older than me, and messed up with it. He groaned quietly and I could see blood on his face.

“They were looking for you,” she told Alec quietly. “And the ‘emo bitch’ you were with.”

The last part was said with an apologetic look at me. I didn’t take offence – she was just repeating it.

“Obviously, we had no idea what they were talking about, but they just kept on saying we must know, we have to know, where the fuck are you, et cetera. Eli got angry, told them to fuck off,” she indicated toward the still-silent guy sitting in the chair.

“I can guess what happened after that,” Asp said, voice hard.

The girl nodded. “I just got him away. Everyone scattered.”

Alec got up and, getting a cloth from a large, well-stocked First Aid box, wet it quickly. He then bent down in front of Eli and started to wipe his face. Both his voice and expression, I noticed, were laced with resentment.

“You alright, dude? Do you know where you are?”

He got another groan in response and the guilt started to set in. This was basically my fault.

“Hol, can you get me the disinfectant?” he asked, and the girl – whose name I now assumed to be Holly – nodded.

I watched curiously as she did as he asked. Eli’s head was upright now, but only just, and I could see the lacerations around his face and neck. His clothes were also torn and bloody.

“Thanks,” Alec muttered as Holly handed him the small bottle. Deftly, he swabbed the cuts with iodine and then just as nonchalantly pulled a small knife from his belt and nicked both his thumb and forefinger. A bright red bead popped up almost instantly.

“Uh, what - ” I started, even further confused.

Alec ignored me, instead wiping the bead away, pushing another one out and wiping it, pushing again, like they d when you give blood. Rubbing his fingers together to smear the blood a little, he then carefully wiped it over the cuts.

“- the fuck?” I finished, noting how neither Asp nor Holly seemed to think this odd.

Asp gestured at the cuts, small smile one her face. “Watch.”

I turned back to Eli, looking on as Alec wiped a small amount of his blood on each bit of broken skin. What possible benefit that could have was totally beyo-

Oh. My. God.

As I watched, in front of my very eyes, Eli’s skin started to knit together. Within a minute every cut was gone, replaced by only faint bruising.

What. The fuck.

Alec’s blood had healing powers? Who are these people? What are these people?!

The sheer amount of questions jostling in my head made it impossible to speak for a full minute. I couldn’t decide which to ask first, which answers I wanted more, how to phrase them.

Eventually – after Eli had been given a glass of water and led out of the room – I found words.

“What the hell just happened?”

I was tempted to lock the door, if there was one, and make them answer all the questions. The urge increased when Asp made for the hallway again.

Then she turned and beckoned. I got up and followed her first into the hallway and then the lounge room beyond. She indicated for me to sit in a worn armchair and walked over to a mantelpiece.

“What do you know about your mother?” she asked, picking up a picture frame.

I sat. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”

She just turned around to look at me. I sighed. “She had dark hair and I got her blue eyes. She was a factory worker – or not – and she married my dad. She didn’t come home when I was five and she buried a box with a bunch of weird stuff in it in our backyard. That’s it.”

Asp nodded and looked up briefly as Alec and Holly re-entered the room. They sat on a chair each, looking sombre.

“Well, as you probably know, I knew her considerably better,” she told me. “We met about eight years before you were born, on a Monday at the coffee shop she worked at.”

She handed me the photograph she was holding. In the picture were two people – unmistakably Asp and a woman who could only be my mother, just as they would have looked nearly thirty years ago. Both had ridiculous eighties hairdos and were grinning wildly.

“That was taken about a year after. We became best friends, despite the small age gap. We never went a day without talking… went to shows, went out on the town, and eventually to work, always together. Always.

“Then it… changed.”

I looked up, curious.

“She’d go out at night without me and, when I confronted her, lie about it. Occasionally she had bruises, bad ones. There were new clothes, totally at odds with her normal style. She dumped her boyfriend at the time and I saw her hanging off a guy who was, in a word, seedy. There was something messed up going on and I wanted to find out what it was. So I followed her.”

Now she sat down and sighed.

“That one night, I found the Masquerade.”

Flashes of a hard-to-read expression crossed the faces of all three of them. Still totally confused, I said nothing.

“You’ll experience this in time but let me just give you the bare bones. You’ve heard there's a seedy underbelly of our major cities… this is something like that. The Masquerade is a court, ruled by a King, or a Queen, who sits upon the Nightshade Throne. Everyone in it has to earn their place.

“The Masquerade, and therefore the Monarch, basically runs the city. Or rather… the underworld of the city. Any black market stuff, drugs, jobs, hits, anything big-time against the law, goes through the Masquerade.”

I’m still, I thought, confused. Where does my mother come into this?

“Isabella – or Belladonna, as she was styling herself then – got into it, predictably, through a man. But she soon became obsessed with it – she loved everything. The night, the danger, the power… and it was taking its toll.

“She was finding it difficult to handle, all the scheming and scandal that goes with such things. She needed help, and I… well, I’ve always had a head for plotting.”

Asp looked a little proud of herself, if slightly rueful.

“I revealed that I knew, and that I could help her. After getting angry for a day or so – I’d lied to her, apparently – she agreed and so we began our onslaught onto the Masquerade. Within less than a year she was Queen.”

Without knowing why I felt a small surge of pride. My mother made herself a queen, queen of a whole city. In fact, if you wanted to get morbidly technical, I suppose that made me a princess. And now a queen by birthright.

“You have to understand, Diana, that your mother wasn’t like a queen from fairytales… she was ruthless, and liked giving orders. Luckily for her this was tempered by a degree of humility and compassion, which made her in effect one of the best Monarchs the city has ever had. She ruled like that up until one rainy day, in the October of 1988.”

I’d been born in 1990, so I knew this wasn’t when she died… or was killed. “So why the change?”

Asp smiled, as if in remembrance. “She met your father.”

Now she went to a drawer and rummaged through its contents. After a minute she picked out another photo and once again handed it to me. It was of my mother and father, in a picture I’d never seen before. They were looking at each other like no one else existed.

“They met at a hospital, after someone challenged her for the crown. Naturally she fought tooth and nail and won – you don’t get to be Queen without knowing a thing or two. But she was bloody, and in need of a doctor. So we found an old factory uniform I used to wear and took her in. Your dad bandaged her up and it was all downhill from there.

“I say downhill in a good way, I suppose. She started to neglect her court to spend time with him. So much time she barely noticed another contender for her seat, a young redhead with a familiar fire in her eyes.”

“Persephone,” Alec growled.

Asp nodded. “Your mother married your father and soon after had you, which made her richer in some ways but weaker in others. By the time you were five Persephone wasn’t the only one to think she was in need of replacing. It took all my cunning to keep her away for that long.”

At this her eyes shone with tears. “She killed Isabella with barely any warning, on the night she was going to abdicate anyway. Law of the Masquerade is that if you kill a Monarch you take their place, unless you used a firearm – honour, and all that. But Eris, already Persephone’s number two, shot her, so another contender took the throne by force for a few years. The next time she didn’t make any more mistakes. She’s been Queen ever since.”

“Mainly because of Eris,” Holly put in. “She’s a psycho bitch.”

“No kidding,” I replied.

This was all a huge amount to take in, especially when I wasn’t at my most awake in the first place. I had to keep stifling yawns, despite desperately wanting to know. It all sounded so… medieval.

“So… what is this?” I asked, gesturing around the room. “You, and the people that know you… I mean, are you planning for some sort of takeover?”

Asp nodded nonchalantly, but thoughtfully. “In a way. I knew that the only person who rightly deserved to rid the world of that psychotic bitch wasn’t me, or the next ambitious fool. It was you – the one who had needed her most, and lost her.

“So I kept her in power, but in a more indirect way. If I heard of a plot against her, I silenced it. If she looked like failing, I helped her. Discreetly. All these years,” Asp went on smugly, “she thinks it’s because of her own skills that she’s stayed in power…”

Right, I thought. Not to be bitter and twisted, or anything… but I could see where she was coming from. I leaned forward and put my head in my hands, trying to take it all in. Everything just seemed too… big.

“Oh… kay…” I said, yawning at the end. I couldn’t help it, I was just so tired…

“We’ll tell you the rest, including the blood thing, in the morning,” Asp informed me. “For now you need to sleep.”

This time I didn’t object, just nodded.

“So, in conclusion,” Alec finished, “Asp here, and everyone loyal to her, need you. Is that alright, if we just totally fuck up everything and possibly endanger your life?”

I looked up from my hands and smiled tiredly at his phrasing. “Doesn’t sound like I have a choice, does it? And by the sound of it, it will definitely endanger my life. In fact, it already has.”

“Well,” Asp said dryly, “that’s why it’s called the Nightshade Throne… it tends to kill whoever sits on it.”