Wonderland City by Rhys Ford

Author:Rhys Ford [Ford, Rhys]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Paranormal
ISBN: 9781644057162
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2020-04-27T18:30:00+00:00

Six

I’D FORGOTTEN about the pain.

I don’t know how I could have. Everything about the Ace of Spades was pain. It was a ravaging monster made to inflict agony and destruction, a killing machine the Queen of Hearts wielded as easily as she wore her crown.

And I was that monster.

My chest burned where she’d branded me. The single spade sigil was a hot piece of iron seared into my flesh above my sternum. The keloid was the size of my hand and tinted ebony by the burnt blood and magical potions she’d rubbed into my weeping, smoking wound. I relived that moment every time I became the Ace. I carried it on my skin and suffered as it seeped into my marrow.

I became everything she’d wanted to inflict upon her subjects, including the ones who’d pleased her. Her cruelty knew no bounds. No one was safe from her machinations and certainly not from the wide range of tortures she could dream up with the snap of her fingers.

Except for Jean Michel. She loved him with an obsession as deep as the night sky and about as empty. But her love came with a price, and it was one he eventually couldn’t pay any longer. She never turned on him until the day he took me from her.

She fought him… and lost.

In the battle, Jean Michel stripped away everything she’d made me into, but there was no way to fully extinguish what she’d done. I was as much of a part of Wonderland City as its air, rocks, and its creatures. I held inside of me everything dark and terrifying in the realm and the power to unleash it on the lands once again.

I wanted to leave that life—those horrors—behind, but what the Red Queen had in store would bring about more pain than I could imagine or cause.

And I could imagine quite a lot.

The wyverns’ howling storm faded beneath the rush of blood through my ears. I was thankful I’d taken off my jacket. I really liked that jacket. I didn’t know if I’d be able to undo what I was going to become. If I strayed too far, I hoped Jean Michel would deliver me a quick death.

That is, if I didn’t kill him trying to save him.

I’d been through the transformation at least a million times, but I’d never gotten used to it. How could I? Every wound I inflicted came back inside of me once I was done, and the queen took great delight in digging out those memories and letting the conflict play out over my flesh before she tucked it back into the sigil on my chest.

God, it hurt so fucking much.

The Ace rose slowly, seemingly unwilling to break its slumber, but once awakened, it took me over, swept away my distaste for death, and left me with a razor-sharp thirst to bathe in mayhem. My skin stung, and the flesh on my arms parted first and crackled into grooves beneath my clothes. The fabric grew wet as it soaked up the viscous fluids that seeped from the fissures.

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