Her Demonic Majesty

By Cassidy Frazee

Jeannette Hagart leads a normal, boring life, wishing for something new and better to happen to her. While returning from lunch she gets her wish, and finds herself hunted by a powerful witch. Forced to turn to unlikely friends, Jeannette used skills she never knew she possessed to stay alive--

Welcome to the Chicago of a mysterious new universe, where the physical laws allow for the use of magic, and what passes for the fictional in Jeannette's old world are part of this usual society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cassidy Frazee
• Release date: May 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301384723

Cassidy Frazee

A long time resident of Northwest Indiana, Cassidy Frazee has long dreamed of joining the writers who grace her bookshelves. And now she's made that dream come true-- Join her as she brings her stories from her imagination and out into reality. It's going to be great ride, so hop in and have fun!

Book preview

Her Demonic Majesty

By

Cassidy Frazee

Her Demonic Majesty

Copyright 2013 Cassidy Frazee

Smashwords Edition

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover by Jeno Marz.

Follow Jeno on her blog, on Facebook, and on Smashwords.

Dedications

It’s impossible to list everyone who helped bring this novel to publication. I give my thanks to the people in the North, South, East, and West throughout the World who played a part and offered me a hand. Your help will never be forgotten.

And to M, who told me NaNoWriMo was something I should try, and who pushed me to finish.

Table of Contents

Part One: New Girl in Town

Chapter One: Normal Time

Chapter Two: Fight in the Streets

Chapter Three: Spirited Away

Chapter Four: Vena Wondering

Chapter Five: Merta Meandering

Chapter Six: Castle Attack

Chapter Seven: Running Away

Part Two: The World in a Day

Chapter Eight: Arriving at Diana’s

Chapter Nine: A Rude Awakening

Chapter Ten: Jeannette’s Big Reveal

Chapter Eleven: Vena Struggling

Chapter Twelve: The Morning After

Chapter Thirteen: Warning From the Coalition

Chapter Fourteen: Regroup and Reassemble

Chapter Fifteen: Back to the Castle

Part Three: The Whip Hand

Chapter Sixteen: Inside the Castle

Chapter Seventeen: Rest and Refocus

Chapter Eighteen: Hit and Run

Chapter Nineteen: Vena and the Coalition

Chapter Twenty: Coalition Warning Redux

Chapter Twenty-one: Deals in the Darkness

Chapter Twenty-two: Jeannette Sets the Stage

Chapter Twenty-three: Jeannette and Vena

Coda: Final Acts

Part One

New Girl in Town

Chapter One

What was going on?

Around her was the echo of many voices. All were yelling: none made sense. It seemed the second she moved, the cacophony grew even greater. She could now make out individual voices: men and women, all screaming—

What in Haydres? She’s supposed to be dead!

She’s moving! She’s—she’s not supposed to get up!

Para, Vena! You said—

Get a gun—

We’re fucked!

From out of that, Jeannette heard one voice: one woman’s loud, strong voice ring out: "Get your whip! Merta, get your whip!"

****

Actually, there was nothing very unusual about Chicago at twelve twenty-three on the early afternoon of 17 August, 2011. Jeannette was walking westward along the north shore of the Chicago River, something she did quite often when the weather was nice, which it was. Temperature in the low 80’s with a slight breeze from the south, scattered clouds and no chance of rain. It was the kind of day the city didn’t often see in mid-August and Jeannette Hagart took advantage of the situation.

As she approached the Michigan Avenue bridge, Jeannette was once again running numbers about in her head. She had money in the bank; not a lot, but enough that she could get by for a year and a half if she were to stop working, cut out the fandom and stop going to cons. Student loans, work on her animation degree . . . she could do all this—

For about two years, she thought. After that I’ll go broke and then I’ll need to find money from somewhere—or someone. Said someones being the parents. Someones who don’t want to lift a finger to help with my dream . . .

She knew could get a part-time job that would allow her some flexibility. There would be less money coming in, and that would mean stretching out the time required to get the degree, but everything was possible—

But what was she really going to do after that?

While Jeanette hated her job at the law office, she wondered if she could really do animation work at this point in her life. She was approaching thirty, and by the time she graduated again, she’d be into the middle of that next decade. It wasn’t old, but it wasn’t where she wanted to be right now. I wanted to be at ILM by now, but that didn’t happen. So I should just suck it up and get things done, right?

Jeannette didn’t know, because she was lost, and had been for some time. A child of the 1990’s whose life existed, it seemed, in varied times and different places that were not of this world. Jeannette, an only child, was bright and imaginative. She never needed people to push her: she made things happen on their own. During a parents/teacher conference in 5th Grade, the teacher told her parents she was driven, and they were happy with this news—

Until they saw where Jeannette was driving.

Though the phrase wouldn’t be around for another ten years, by 1990 Jeannette was becoming a geek girl. She began reading adult material that year, and the first book she picked up from the library was The Hobbit. That was all she needed to set her on the road to other works of fantasy, and at eight she discovered another road and began reading science fiction voraciously.

Thus it was that after a year, thoughts of Barbie were shunted to the side in favor of hanging with Cirocco Jones, and the doll’s Dream House was exchanged for a berth aboard the Endeavour as it chased Rama. When other girls were going grunge, Jeannette was going native Fremen, searching for spice to consume and sandworms to ride. When other girls were slotting CDs, Jeannette was dreaming of slotting black ice. She was a happy girl, loving life, loving her imagination, being out there and engaging in activities that were, at that time, only for boys.

By middle school she was into role playing and anime, and Jeannette’s parents grew even more worried because they’d tied all their hopes and dreams onto their baby and she was tearing their fantasy future to pieces. They didn’t understand her tee shirts adorned with girls possessing huge eyes and tiny mouths; they didn’t understand the enjoyment she received playing Dungeons & Dragons or World of Darkness, so terms like THACO, Hit Points, or REF, INT, and CHA, were as indecipherable to them as hieroglyphics.

They didn’t get her.

Jeannette knew they never would—and she didn’t care. Because this was how she expected to live the rest of her days.

Then she headed to college . . .

It was not the breeze she expected. First off, there were a few awkward moments with her roommate, who apparently didn’t care for the strange girl with blue hair done up in pigtails and the anime posters hanging over her bed and the twenty or so books—most of them with dragons on the covers—laying about the room. The roommate wasn’t into the same things as Jeanette, and this led to tremendous stress—

—Which came to a head after a few weeks, when the roommate told Jeanette that she’d expected to share her dorm room with a girl who was a lot more like her—someone who was into current music, and clothing, and having fun. The last thing she expected was to be stuck with a . . .

A geek.

The curse burned like a thousand insults. This was the first time Jeannette felt hurt by someone whom she’d wanted to have understand her, and who didn’t. She was aware that she could ignore the insult, or she could do something to act normal.

Jeannette didn’t know normal, because she’d always ignored it whenever it presented its ugly face.

It was hard. She’d spend so long running about in tee shirts and dyed hair and short black skirts, striped leggings, and scruffy, worn, lace-up Victorian-style boots, that she didn’t know how to emulate this thing called normal. It wasn’t something she’d learned at home or high school, and now—she was pretty sure she was screwed.

She carefully built a I don’t give a shit façade to keep those far too critical of her at a safe distance, then slowly moved towards those she felt were more like her. It took time, because by her second year at the university she realized that people weren’t just seeing the geek, they were seeing the beauty she’d become—

A beauty with no idea how to act around a majority of people. For if there was one thing her geekness hadn’t taught, it was how to relate to those weren’t part of her fandom, who weren’t into her books and games, who weren’t nitpicking the same movies as her.

The whole being normal thing.

Jeannette tried to fit in, and crashed hard.

She made it through college, getting the degree her parents demanded. She knew her life was nowhere near where she’d thought it might be by now, but anymore Jeannette had no idea. She set goals for herself as she approached the end of college: find work, save money, go back to school and do what she really wanted to do. But it wasn’t working: real life wasn’t giving too many shits about her wishes.

She wanted out of what lay ahead, but she didn’t know how to take the next step. For the first time in her life, Jeannette couldn’t see her future.

It was as she turned left onto the Michigan Avenue bridge, heading across the river and back to her job, that Jeannette wondered about available options for moving forward. She could get a second job to make extra money, then perhaps take out some student loans and head back for her animation degree.. Or, hope against all hope, she could get her parents to help out—

The moment her thoughts turned to her parents, Jeannette felt a sharp pain in her forehead.

She stopped and put her hands to the side of her head because she felt as if someone was taking a chainsaw to her skull. There was an intense pressure building behind her eyes which quickly spread toward the back of her neck. She moaned as she twisted backwards, while the force turning her brain to pulp spread to her torso and legs.

So this is how it goes, she thought. I die from a brain aneurysm on the streets of Chicago, and strangers will stand over me and think, "What happened to this girl?" They’ll wonder who I was . . .

Jeannette fell backwards onto the sidewalk—

Only to find herself, an instant later, lying on her back in the middle of the street. Her body felt like she’d been beaten with a cricket bat. There were people standing around her; she felt their eyes all over her and it wasn’t a good feeling. Most, if not all, were screaming a name she didn’t recognize—and it seemed as if they were applying that name to her.

For reasons unknown, Jeannette knew these people wanted to kill her.

Chapter Two

Here, pandemonium ruled.

Jeannette had no idea where she was, or what was happening. She knew she was lying on her back in the middle of a street, and she was staring up into a mass of girders and concrete. It’s like Lower Michigan here, she thought, though she noticed the lack of the ever present roar of vehicles on the roadway overhead.

Where are the cars? Why haven’t I been run over by some insane cabbie? Why am I even here? Jeannette rolled a little to her right and looked in the direction that was normally up for her. There’s the bridge, so that’s the river— she remembered that only seconds before, she was walking along the Chicago River, turning onto Michigan Avenue—

Now, somehow, she was about fifty feet to the north and twenty feet lower—

What was going on?

Around her was the echo of many voices. All were yelling: none made sense. It seemed the second she moved, the cacophony grew even greater. She could now make out individual voices: men and women, all screaming—

What in Haydres? She’s supposed to be dead!

She’s moving! She’s—she’s not supposed to get up!

Para, Vena! You said—

Get a gun—

We’re fucked!

From out of that, Jeannette heard one voice: one woman’s loud, strong voice ring out: "Get your whip! Merta, get your whip!"

Casting her eyes towards her feet, Jeannette saw nothing. She rolled to her left and there it was, a black bullwhip with a tightly bound leather handle inlaid with intricate silver patterns. It’s a whip; it’s a real goddamn whip, she thought while reaching out. She ignored the fact that it seemed she wasn’t wearing the jacket she’d brought for work. Nor did she care that she was wearing lace gloves that she most definitely didn’t own. Nope, she didn’t care about any of that . . .

Why am I doing this? she thought. It was that voice, the one she heard clearly, telling her to get the whip, that was making her move. A whip is a weapon—and she understood that when someone told you to get a weapon, it meant there was danger.

Jeannette knew she was in danger.

Things came into focus, and Jeannette quickly summed up her situation. There was a group of about ten people standing about fifteen feet away: six women, four men. One woman stood out from the rest: short, dark hair, dusky complexion, black eyes staring straight at her. Jeannette wasn’t in a position to take in sartorial splendor, but the woman looked like she was dressed for a GenCon cosplay, attired in a long brown coat, a button-up black lace top, a long, puffy skirt held in place with a wide belt adorned with a huge buckle, black stockings with an inlaid diamond pattern, and laced-up granny boots.

As Jeannette made eye contact with the woman, the look on her face changed from a self-satisfied smirk to something more like she’d discovered a pile of cat shit in the middle of her living room. Jeannette didn’t need to read this woman’s mind to know she was pissed—

At her.

The woman pointed and screamed, Get her! Out of the corner of her eye Jeannette saw a man take a few steps away from the rest of the crowd and point a ridiculously huge rifle in her direction. What the fuck is this? she thought. An episode of Trigun?

Jeannette spun on her butt and hip, her head and feet swapping places. She threw out her right arm to stop the rotation, then leaned backwards slightly, brought the whip across her body with her left arm, and, without thinking about what she was doing or why, flicked it in the direction of the person looking to shoot her.

Jeannette knew, in theory, what would happen. The tip of the whip would crack against this guy’s body—probably against the gray shirt pressing into his chest. It should snap and, if she was lucky, leave a huge welt upon his skin that would hurt like hell. If she were really lucky and managed to hit him with all the Indiana Jonesian skill she didn’t possess, the whip could conceivably tear through the fabric and expose the wound, and the sudden rush of air against the open welt would lead to even more pain . . .

She knew that’s what should happen.

The end result was nothing of the sort.

The man had raised the gun to his waist, and had it about two-thirds of the way pointed in her direction, when he was struck with the whip. There was a crack as the tip broke the speed of sound—and that was when things went sideways and behaved in a way contrary to the laws of physics.

The crack was immediately followed by a violent rush of air as the man’s chest sank into his torso. The effect was not unlike someone plunging a sternum separator into his body and gruesomely ripping it open—but rather than leaving a heaving, gushing, bloody mess, there was a rather eerie blackness in its stead. The man dropped the rifle and screamed: those closest to him pulled away as others threw up their arms.

His torso collapsed into itself, and the head and neck sank straight down into the black cavity with a loud snap of the spine and shoulders. The hips shattered with a sickening sound, and for a second the body hung suspended with no support, as if the impact point of the whip had created a singularity pinning the remains of this poor bastard in mid-air—

The body exploded with a bright flash and loud bang.

Body parts flew in all directions. One woman standing two feet from the man was hit in the face and chest with the right arm—the hand still clutching the enormous rifle—and went down in a heap. The left leg swept another man off his feet and planted him squarely on his ass. The blood and viscera missing from the initial implosion appeared from out of nowhere, and nearly all of the crowd were quickly covered in entrails and fluids.

Jeannette heard a loud shout, really more of a growl. It was the same woman who’d yelled about the whip—not at her exactly; she’d said another name, but Jeannette knew the woman somehow meant her. She turned to her right and saw a tall blond women in a raven-black leather catsuit fighting against platinum-colored chains wrapped about her neck, wrists, and torso. Two large men held them in place, but the blond had somehow slipped a hand free and slid it under the chain wrapped around her neck. She pulled hard, and the chain began slipping off her body.

Para, shit! This from the black-eyed woman who, Jeannette realized, must be the person in charge. The restraints, damn it! You’re losing her!

It was too late. The chain burst away from her body and both arms were free. She turned on the man to her right, raising her left hand to strike. Her nails instantly transformed into three inch long claws, and she hit him with a vicious, slashing attack, ripping off most of his right face. He screamed while clutching what remained—but given that the cheek bone was showing, and his jaw had snapped free of his skull when the muscles and tendons were ripped away, there wasn’t much to clutch.

The other man who’d held her pulled a short sword from a scabbard and slashed the woman across the back. It cut through the leather suit, leaving her with a large, nasty wound just under the shoulder blades. Before the man could draw his sword back for another attack the woman spent a moment to look over her shoulder as if she were getting him lined up—

Jeannette saw something flash out from the blond’s body. This something was the color of burgundy and bone, maybe not any thicker than Jeannette’s forearm, but it grew quickly, not only in thickness but in length. The something filled the two feet between her and where the man stood, and the tip of her something—

Oh, hell, Jeannette thought as she got unsteadily to her feet, it’s a tail. It’s a fucking tail. She has a tail growing out of the base of her spine.

The tip of the tail stuck the man in the stomach. There was a small spray of flesh and blood as it ripped through his shirt and entered his body and a second later it was tearing out of his back, snapping his spine with a loud, sickening pop. The tail glistened with his fluids, the tip wiggling side to side for a few seconds before zipping back the way it came and vanishing into the woman’s body as her victim collapsed.

The blond turned and spied Jeannette. Merta, on your left! she yelled.

Jeannette turned—wondering why this woman was calling her by such a strange name—and saw the woman who’d been knocked over by the exploding man was now on one knee and looking in her direction. She held her hands before her, almost like she was holding an invisible ball, and there was . . . there was fire forming in the space between her palms. At some subconscious level Jeannette knew what the woman was doing, only she’d never seen this happen in real life: this was something that only happened in movies and animes, where someone was about to get hit with a—

The woman drew back her right hand, a large ball of animated flame resting an inch above her palm. Someone yelled, No, you stupid bitch! but the woman obviously didn’t hear the comment because, in that moment, she threw the fireball at Jeannette.

In the few seconds it took the fireball to cross the open space between them, it went from being a sphere three inches in diameter to a body-piercing flamethrower a couple of feet across. It momentarily hovered a foot away from Jeannette before engulfing her entire body in searing orange flames. She had only enough time to throw up an arm and close her eyes before she felt the heat on her face and arms. She felt it wrap around her body; she felt . . .

She opened her eyes because, unbelievably, she was still feeling. The flame was all around her, only inches away, outlining her body perfectly. She lifted her right arm and saw how the fire—which was now dissipating—flowed around her limb.

I’m not dead, she thought. She knew she should be, but she wasn’t—and didn’t understand why. Then again, she didn’t know how someone had thrown a fireball at her, so all was even.

The heat died, as did the effect, and when it vanished a few seconds later, Jeannette was completely unharmed. She now faced the woman who’d launched the attack, and her face quickly adopting an "Oh, shit’ appearance.

Jeannette gave her a pissed off shrug. Okay, honey, she said, her words coming out in her own little mini-growl. You wanna play? Let’s play. She didn’t know why she was twirling her whip about in a little circle over the ground, or why she’d developed this totally murderous attitude before she drew back her left arm and attacked, or why she thought hitting this woman with her whip was going to do anything other than sting the shit out of her—

But none of the why mattered. Jeannette let fly.

The whip struck the woman’s right shoulder. Once again there was the loud crack! Once again it acted in ways that had nothing to do with how a bullwhip should act. The effect was different this time. Whereas before it’d punched a hole into a person that sucked them into a black void before they were blown into hundreds of little pieces, this time a bright light tore through the woman’s skin, and sliced downward through her body.

The white-hot light was like a plasma lance burning away a third of the woman. Her scream was high pitched, painful to hear—though Jeannette believed things were a hell of a lot more painful for the screamer. The arm and shoulder fell away from the rest of the body: half the right breast and a section of her tummy followed before the whip lance reached the hips. The cut line turned inwards towards her groin and ended when it sliced through the middle of her vagina. The right half of the woman—her arm, shoulder, ribs, hip, and leg—fell one way while the other two-thirds fell in the opposite direction. There was no blood, no dipping, disgusting body parts cascading out of her torso and onto the street. The wound was smooth and clean, with the severed torso neatly cauterized.

The woman was screaming and in tremendous pain, and there was the echo that Jeannette remembered, coming from everywhere. But it wasn’t the sound of trucks and cars and buses she heard. No, now that echo was filled with the sounds of yelling and shouting . . . and screaming . . . the sudden, sharp, loud report of a weapon—

Jeannette was surrounded by the sounds of death, which rapidly became a far too overwhelming experience to bear. All the doubt and anxiety she felt when she first arrived came rushing back . . .

She had no idea why the hell she was here. She didn’t know why she was acting so impulsively, running on little but reflexes, performing in ways she didn’t understand. She’d never used a whip before, and yet she was flashing this leather death cord around like she’d used it all her life. She’d never seen a woman grow a tail and impale a person but she acted like it was no big deal. She’d never had a fireball thrown in her direction—and had it deflected away, rather than experiencing the sensation of her flesh being charred into cinders—but already that memory was melting away.

None of this should be happening.

Yet it was.

The shock kicked in and reality took that moment to beat Jeannette’s ass hard. There was only one way she knew how to respond—

Jeannette shut down.

She slipped into a semi-catatonic state, as there was simply too goddamn much to comprehend. She was hurting people, killing them, but they were trying to do the same to her. She’d woke up in the middle of