everything was weirdly silent. A half-moon shone, leaving way too many shadows.
“This isn’t right,” J.B. finally said, and his voice was barely above a whisper. “This is the time of night when the court is in full swing. It’s usually like a never-ending party.”
I looked up at the catwalk on the outer wall. There were no soldiers patrolling there and no torches lit anywhere that we could see. All was dark and quiet, almost as if the castle had been abandoned.
I expelled a breath. “We’re not going to find out anything just standing here. We’ve got to go in.”
Gabriel and Samiel nodded, but J.B. just stood there, fists clenched.
“J.B.?” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder.
He spoke through gritted teeth. “She is my mother. I hate her more than you can imagine, but she is still my mother.”
And you don’t want to go in there and find her dead, I thought, filling in the blanks. I squeezed his shoulder and made him look at me.
“Whatever is in there, you won’t be alone,” I said.
He nodded tightly, and we all took flight. As we soared over the outer wall and the courtyard I looked down. There were several cars in the courtyard, but they appeared abandoned. Doors were opened, and I thought I might have seen a skeletal hand hanging out of one of the windows, but I didn’t stop to investigate.
We landed a few feet before the large front door. It was ajar, and there was a dark smear on the heavy wood that could have been blood.
The whole place had the unnatural calm that followed postapocalyptic calamity. I half expected rotting zombies to come shambling out of the castle at any minute.
“Does anyone else think it’s a good idea to go home now and pretend that we never saw this?” Beezle said, his head sticking out of my jacket, and his voice seemed unnaturally loud in the extreme quiet.
I patted his horns. “Just make sure you stay in there when the inevitable freaky thing shows up.”
“Don’t need to tell me twice,” Beezle murmured.
Gabriel conjured up a ball of nightfire. It floated above us and ahead, slipping into the crack of the open door.
He followed it silently, pushing the door open farther. The creak of the hinges sounded like an explosion, and we all paused, holding our breath, but nothing roared out of the darkness.
I fell in behind Gabriel, followed by J.B. and Samiel. We were in the receiving foyer, facing the long central hallway of the castle. The frozen knights that lined the walls stood like accusing sentries.
The ball of nightfire floated ahead of us, illuminating dust and cobwebs and the once-gleaming armor of the dead knights. There were more dark streaks on the floor, and rusty-looking splatters on the wall.
None of us spoke. I didn’t know about the others but I was too tense to talk. The air seemed full of menace, and the sensation was not unlike the feeling I had when I entered the Maze. I wondered briefly if Amarantha was dead, and if so, could the horror that lived in the Maze break free?
We passed through the hallway and all of us turned instinctively toward the throne room. No faeries bustled to and fro; no one stood at the door to announce our presence. There was only a set of carved double doors, lit by nightfire and covered in blood.
J.B. pushed open the doors. I felt a little tremor of anticipation. We entered the throne room like four gunslingers looking for a fight. But again, there was no one to greet us.
Gabriel sent the nightfire dancing left and right, revealing smashed furniture and more splatters of dark red.
“Where are the bodies? What happened to everyone?” Beezle asked. He was still tucked inside my coat, his clawed hands gripping the lapel.
“A fair question, gargoyle,” rasped a harsh voice. “What has become of the court of Amarantha the Fair, she who has ruled over this place for hundreds of years?”
We all spun in the direction of the voice, and Gabriel sent the nightfire higher, made it brighter so that it illuminated the room. The ceilings were so high that even Gabriel’s light could not reach them, so we remained under an oppressive cloud of shadow.
A figure sat upon Amarantha’s throne, face covered by the hood of a dark cloak. Behind the throne, a shadow shifted, as if hiding from the light. There was a whiff of sulfur in the air.
“How dare you show your face here so boldly, spawn of Lucifer?” asked the figure.
“Why do I have to keep telling everyone I’m not the spawn of Lucifer? It’s becoming a bad running joke,” I muttered. Then, to the figure on the throne: “Who are you? Do you know what’s happened here?”
“Lucifer’s justice,” the person spat.
I looked around the room in horror. Had Lucifer punished Amarantha by slaughtering the whole court?
“He descended on this court like the god that he wishes to be, promising benevolence to those who would willingly give up the Queen.”
I glanced at Gabriel and knew that we were thinking the same thing. There had probably been a stampede for the doors when Lucifer had shown up offering mercy.
“Did…a lot of people stay?” I asked tentatively.
“They fled like rats,” the person said angrily. The voice was so strange, so harsh and low, it was difficult to tell if it was a man or a woman.
“Did anyone support the Queen?” J.B. asked.
“Prince Jonquil,” the person said. “Why were you not in court to defend the integrity of your house, to demand that Lucifer respect the sanctity of Amarantha’s kingdom?”
“The Queen sent me from her sight and bade me not return,” J.B. said tightly.
“And if she had not, would you have stood before Lucifer and defied him? You, who have allied yourself with Lucifer’s most beloved child? You, who have displayed contempt for your house and your family name?”
“What happened?” J.B. demanded.
The figure was still for a moment, and in the darkness and the quiet, I heard something shift. Something large.
“Gabriel,” I whispered, sidling closer to him. “There’s something…”
The figure stood abruptly, and again I smelled sulfur. “What happened? All those who swore loyalty to the Queen were marked for their fealty to Amarantha. They did only as they should have by staying loyal to their Queen. They should not have been punished for this. Lucifer has no dominion over these lands, whatever he may believe. He violated long-standing accords by treating another head of state as a subject of his will. The world is not his to carve up as he pleases.”
“But there were no accords between the house of Lucifer and the house of Amarantha,” I said. “The agreements between them had been broken. Amarantha invited his retribution by plotting treason against him with Focalor, and by trying to use his grandchild as a stud. And she tried to have me killed by proxy.”
“And for that, Lucifer has claimed this court of faerie, has made it an outpost of his kingdom and rendered its inhabitants…”
The person under the cloak stopped speaking. The shadow behind the throne moved a little closer to the light, and I thought I saw a glint of green and scaly skin.
“What did he do?” I asked.
There was a sudden movement, a flurry of cloth, and the figure was revealed to us.
The creature was unspeakably ugly. It was humanoid, but it was impossible to tell if it was male or female. Its skin was green and armored like an alligator’s. One large black horn protruded from the left side of its head. The right side of its face was covered in gigantic pustules that oozed slimy-looking fluid. A long, heavy, lizardlike tail dragged behind it.
And shining from that hideous face were the blazing blue eyes of Queen Amarantha the Fair.
“This is what Lucifer did to me, to those who swore loyalty to me. He stole our beauty and our magic, and made us hideous to look upon, so that anyone who dared contemplate defying Lord Lucifer would see my court as a cautionary tale, and reconsider.”
“Mother?” J.B. said. He seemed to be in a trance, approaching the thing that no longer looked like Amarantha.
“Mother,” she said, and there was a wealth of contempt in her voice. “You have never been a child of mine. You belonged to your father, always. Always duty, always Death.”
