The monsters on the floor clutched their throats. Their mouths opened and closed but no sound came out. Their claws scrabbled at their necks like they were trying to pry open air that had turned to stone.
I saw a huge reptilian thing,scales like armor, teeth like daggers,fall to its knees. Not kneeling in respect. Falling. Collapsing. Its eyes rolled back in its head.
The shadow creatures, the three beautiful nightmares who had knelt before me, staggered.
The girl grabbed her own throat. Her twilight eyes went wide with shock. Her mouth formed words she couldn't speak.
The male shadow on her left,broad-shouldered, silver-haired, face like a statue that had been cracked and glued back together,dropped to one knee. Not kneeling. Dying.
The third shadow,I couldn't tell if it was male or female, its features kept shifting,actually cracked. I saw fissures spread across its shadow-skin like ice breaking on a frozen lake.
All of them. All of them dying.
Because I made a timeout sign. I looked at my hands. Still glowing. Still shimmering. Still me.
But something was coming out of them. Something invisible. Something that filled the room like pressure, like gravity, like the weight of a mother's no.
I dropped my hands.
The timeout sign broke.
And every single monster in that room gasped,a thousand throats opening at once, a thousand lungs filling with air, a thousand bodies slumping forward in relief.
The reptilian thing coughed. The shadows clutched their chests. The girl looked at me with something that might have been awe or terror or both.
They could breathe again.
I stared at my hands. The glow was fading slightly, but I could still feel something humming under my skin. Something that wanted to be used. Something that had almost killed an entire legion of nightmares because I made a basketball gesture.
"What the hell is happening?" I whispered.
The silver-haired shadow,the one who had almost cracked apart,pushed himself to his feet. His movements were shaky. His face was pale under the cracks.
"My Queen," he said, and his voice was hoarse, like he'd been screaming for hours. "You must control your power."
"My what?"
"Your power." He took a careful step toward me, hands raised, like I was a wild animal he was trying not to spook. "You nearly killed your entire legion with a single hand gesture. If you had held that sign for a moment longer..."
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
I looked down at the thousands of monsters. Some were still on the ground. Some were being helped up by their neighbors. Some were staring at me with expressions I couldn't read, fear, devotion, hunger, all mixed together.
They had been ready to devour the human world.
And I had nearly killed them all by accident.
I sat back on the throne. The gold was cold against my back. The crown was heavy on my head. The gown shimmered around me like it was laughing.
I was a mother of three. I changed diapers. I wiped noses. I broke up fights over crayons.
And now I had a power that could kill thousands with a hand gesture, and three shadow nightmares calling me queen, and a legion of monsters waiting for me to point them at Earth.
My daughters were on Earth.
I closed my golden eyes. I took a breath. I felt the power humming under my skin, waiting, always waiting.
When I opened my eyes again, I looked at the silver-haired shadow.
"Explain," I said. "Everything. From the beginning. And if I don't like what I hear..."
I raised one finger. Just one. Not a timeout sign. Not a gesture at all, really.
The entire legion flinched.
"Let's just say," I finished, "that you really don't want me to make another basketball reference."
The shadow girl swallowed. The silver-haired one nodded. The shifting one simply stared.
The shadow man frowned at me.
Not a small frown. Not a confused wrinkle between the eyebrows. A deep frown, the kind that suggested he was trying to solve a very complicated math problem in his head while also being mildly offended.
I raised a brow. Waiting. My mother taught me that brow. It meant I am not impressed and you have approximately three seconds to fix that.
"My Queen," he said carefully, "do you wish me to tell you everything from the beginning? Or should I simply summarize the meeting we had earlier in the war room?"
I stared at him.
"Everything," I said. "From the beginning."
"The beginning of what, precisely?"
I felt something flicker in my chest. Impatience. Or maybe the power under my skin, responding to my mood. The golden light around my hands pulsed slightly.
"The very beginning," I said. "The beginning beginning. The one where you explain why I'm sitting on a throne wearing a crown and glowing like a radioactive nightlight."
The shadow man's frown deepened. But I noticed something strange, I could feel his thoughts. Not hear them, not exactly. More like reading the title of a book from across a room. I couldn't see the words, but I knew what the book was about.
He was confused. Not about the question. About me.
He was wondering if I was testing his loyalty. If this was some kind of game, some elaborate trap to see who would slip up and say the wrong thing. He was also wondering, and this part made me almost laugh, if I was just bored.
Because apparently, according to whatever was going on in his ancient shadow brain, the last time I was bored, I killed a massive three-headed dragon the size of a mountain.
Just for fun.
Okay, that was not me. I have never been bored enough to kill anything larger than a spider, and even then I felt bad about it. I am a mother. I cry at animal commercials. I do not murder mountain-sized dragons because I have nothing better to do.
"Stop thinking nonsense," I said. "And tell me everything."