If you want to get notified of my books the day that they come out, make sure you join my Facebook fan group (or search and join). If you don’t join my Facebook page, you’ll never get alerted that the next book is out.

  Chapter One

  I stepped down the first stair toward the basement, turned, and looked back. Edony stood behind me with her hands pressed to her chest and her violet eyes were wide with fear and wonder. The Duchess was taller than most women, and her colorless blonde hair shone eerily in the dim light while her thin, willowy arms laid frozen against her chest. I’d thought multiple times in the past that she was beautiful, but I never could bring myself to say it in front of her. Edony may have been stunning and waif-like, but she had the ferocity of a wild animal.

  The Duchess’ eyes were a strange shade of purple and only comparable to the wild lilacs grown down the sides of mountains. Her lips were large and pouty, almost as if she constantly tasted something sour. Her face was angular, her nose almost pointed, and her cheekbones high, but her skin was buttery-smooth like a baby’s.

  I smiled softly up at her and offered her my hand in the darkness. So much had happened tonight, and somehow I’d gotten the Duchess on our side. Yes, it’d taken a few lies and false promises, but she was here and followed me down into my laboratory.

  Into my world.

  Where I would make her mine.

  Edony fully believed that I could augment her abilities into something more powerful, and sure, I could do that, but I hadn’t told her that it would utterly wipe her memories. Whatever she wanted to believe, I would let her as long as it gave me more time to create more monster-girls, kill the Queen, and overthrow the matriarchy. My women and I wanted to change the world and we were going to do it either with Edony on our side as she was or as a newly transformed monster-girl.

  “C-Charles?” the Duchess whispered.

  “I’m here, Edony,” I purred. “We’re almost there. There’s no need for you to be scared. You’ve been in my laboratory before.”

  “I-I’m not scared,” Edony hissed. “I’m the duchess, and none can match my power. I’m just… wary of this place.”

  “Oh?” I chuckled. “Does it hold bad memories for you?”

  “No,” the blonde shook her head. “This is the place I fell in love with you, but coming down here always gives me a strange, eerie feeling… As if it’s a place where I don’t belong.”

  I wasn’t sure how to reply to that. For a long time this was a place where she didn’t belong, and I couldn’t dispute that. I’d hidden a lot of things from her down here, and I was on the verge of revealing all of it.

  “Why do you feel that way?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Edony breathed. “It reminds me of this story my mother used to read me as a child. Have you ever heard of the Cave of the Boaranroks?”

  “No,” I shook my head, rested my hand on the door handle, and paused for a moment. “What is it?”

  “Well, it’s a legend about how women received their powers,” the Duchess explained. “Of course I know it can’t be true now, but I used to believe it as a young child. I’ve read some scientific journals that our powers are some sort of mutation in our genetics, but… the story is much different. It’s said that Boaranroks were the first humans on the earth, and they praised women as their gods. There was a cave where the women would congregate and hold arcane rituals to the sky gods. Do I believe in gods? Absolutely not, but these people did. In the story, it said that men would try to sneak into the rituals to watch or even join in. When they stepped foot through the mouth of the cave, the gods struck them down with bolts of lightning. My mother may have added that bit because of the nature of our manifested power, but who knows?”

  “How is this relevant?” I chuckled.

  “I wondered as a child,” Edony explained. “How those men must’ve felt as they crept closer to the mouth of the cave. It was a place where they didn’t belong and were banned from for good reason. I guessed they must’ve been afraid but unbelievably curious about what was going on deep in the cave. I didn’t understand it then if I’m being honest, but the first time I stepped into your laboratory, I did. It’s like I’m one of those men, and I’m creeping into a place where I know I don’t belong. I want to know what’s going on down there and what they’re doing in secret, but I have this feeling that if I step past the threshold, I’ll be blasted out of existence.”

  “Have you always felt this way?” I asked. “When we worked on the first project together, you’d waltz down into the laboratory like it was nothing.”

  “No, I felt it then, too,” the blonde aristocrat breathed. “But I never let it show. I was excited to see you and be near you, but that same sensation would buzz around the pit of my stomach. I’d push past it because I already know there is no such thing as gods, and if there were, we’d probably be praying on our knees to them.”

  “Do you feel that way now?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Duchess nodded. “But you’re here now and we understand each other. I’m in love with you, Charles, and I know that there’s nothing I should be afraid of down here. I trust you. You’d never do anything to hurt me… even though you did betray me once.”

  “Well, you did threaten to kill me a bunch of times,” I chuckled. “That was the reason why I signed the contract with Ms. Browning. I thought for sure that you were going to kill me and… you did get pretty close that one time in the jail. Edony, I have to ask. Would you have actually hung me on the gallows?”

  “If I’m completely honest,” Edony sighed. “I don’t know. Delphine had gone missing, and we had no other leads. You’d… you’d scorned and thrown my patronage away like it was trash. What else could I do?”

  “Uh, not hang me in the streets?” I chuckled. “But I understand. I am just a male. I wronged you and was the only feasible suspect at the time.”

  “I’m tired of this conversation,” Edony grumbled. “I don’t want to hear of your betrayal ever again. We’ve moved on from it, and we’ll have a wonderful life together because of it. Someday after I’ve been transformed, I will be queen, and you will be my husband.”

  If she was going to be the queen, wouldn’t that make me the king? I doubted that Edony saw it that way. If she were going to control the whole continent, there was no way that I would have even a smidgen of power at my fingertips. It was almost too bad that it wouldn’t work out for her that way. At the end of all of this, sure, she’d be transformed into a monster-girl, but she wouldn’t remember who she once was or the fact that the queen was her enemy.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “Let’s get you into the laboratory, and I can explain a bit more.”

  I yanked the laboratory’s door handle down, leaned my shoulder against it, and swung the door wide. The hinges screamed in protest in the darkened room and I hastily reached for the light switch beside the door frame. The lights hummed to life, flickered for a second, and then illuminated the massive room beyond. Edony leaned in and gazed around the expansive space with wide eyes. She’d been here many times before, but from the way she reacted, it felt as if it were the very first time.

  “My machine,” Edony whispered. “I knew for a fact that it was still here especially if you succeeded with the experiments, but I never thought I’d see it again. To think that this monstrous metal beast brought new life into the world, and I didn’t even know it.”

  The Duchess swept across the room, stood in front of the copper machine, and then pressed the palms of her hands to the cold metal. She stood for a few minutes, sighed under her breath, and then examined the third compartment.

  “Oh, I forget you never got to see it,” I stated. “The third compartment is where everything comes together. I place the beast in the much larger first compartment and the willing aristocrat in the second compartment.”

  My heart hammered in my chest but I couldn’t allow my mask of complete calm to slip for even a second. Edony couldn’t know that all of my women were essentially stolen off the streets and transformed against their will. The Duchess had no idea how the experimentation process worked and if I explained it carefully enough, she’d never know until the moment she stepped inside.

  “And then what, Charles?” Edony murmured. “What happens? What is the need for the third compartment?”

  I had to find a way to work around the fact that the aristocrats died inside of the machine and became completely new creatures. I couldn’t tell her that we’d not only killed Delphine, but Ortensia, too. If I did, the Duchess would have to sentence me to death whether she loved me or not.

  “I don’t want to bore your clever mind with the inelegant details of science, my love,” I purred as I shook my head. “It’s all about the animals that go inside. The beasts are what give their power… Think of my machine as something that aids in the process of the creation of the super-soldiers.”

  “So, it’s the creatures that give them their power?” the Duchess asked. “I don’t understand, how so--”

  “Their powers… combine in my machine,” I waved a hand vaguely. “Their powers are stronger, their bodies are more durable, and they are more athletic than when they went in. In essence, they have evolved into a superior being. The three women I’ve done this on have come out stronger than they ever have been.”

  Edony’s reflection in the machine’s copper panel blinked once, furrowed her brows, and then turned to stare at me over her shoulder. Oh, science, she didn’t look li ke she believed me. I had to brush over all of the facts very lightly because I couldn’t let her find out what I really did to them.

  “Three women?” Edony asked. “You’ve done this thrice?”

  “Yes,” I smiled. “And all three of them came out as monster-women.”

  “Monster…women?” the blonde aristocrat uttered. “I don’t understand what it means. Are they not super-soldiers? The ones I asked for?”

  “They are,” I nodded. “But they’re not exactly super-soldiers as you would expect, but as I said before, their powers are augmented. They’re all the same aristocratic women they were before with all of their memories and power intact but their strength maximized ten fold. I found all of them through… various correspondence. They were interested in the augmentation of their powers, and they agreed to test it out with me.”

  “Hold on. Wait,” Edony urged. “How did you get the first one? How did you know it would work?”

  “As I said before,” I told her. “Through written correspondence. These women looked for ways to augment their powers, and I wondered if the experiment would work with a female instead of a man.”

  “So, these aristocrats agreed to be experimented on?” Edony asked.

  “Of course!” I laughed from my belly. “They sought me out, I didn’t go looking for them, and they agreed to step into my machine. What came after was a total surprise, though I’d suspected that it would work.”

  “Where are they, Charles?” Edony asked. “These women whom you experimented on and transformed? I assume that they went home to their cities?”

  “No, they stayed here,” I said, and I couldn’t help but feel my heart race at how well my lie was working on the duchess. “They stayed with me so I could continue to study them and make changes to the machine accordingly.”

  “Where?” Edony echoed. “Here? At the manor?”

  “Yes…” I chuckled. “I’m sure you’d love to know that I experimented on Daisy Browning. She was the second woman that came to me about the augmentation and transformation.”

  “D-Daisy Browning?” the Duchess stammered. “I knew… I knew it… I knew it! I may not know the Browning’s very well, but I was aware that their family ability wasn’t super-strength.”

  “Ahhh, my dear,” I sighed as I gave her a wide smile. “You are so intelligent. Of course you knew.”

  “That’s… that’s something else that you kept from me, Charles… It makes me very sad to know that there are so many secrets between us.”

  “I couldn’t tell you, Edony,” I grunted. “But I’m telling you now, aren’t I? I’m laying it all out on the table for you. You’re part of this now and you know that I love you very deeply. I will never keep any secrets from you ever again.”

  And yet, she didn’t know that all of my secrets were locked up tight and she’d never know any of them. I felt a strange, sick satisfaction knowing that the Duchess was utterly under my control.

  And she’d willingly walk into my machine and turn into my monster-girl.

  This was just too perfect.

  “Thank you, Charles,” Edony whispered. “But these women… Are they here? Can… Can I see them?”

  “Sure,” I chuckled. “I bet one of them is with us right now… Aren’t you, Valerie?”

  I turned toward the open laboratory door, and Edony gazed over my shoulder. Just as I’d suspected, the feline-woman phased back into view, stepped forward sheepishly with a sly smile, and bowed her head.

  Her long ash-blonde hair shifted lightly around her shoulders, and her oceanic blue eyes sparkled from the overhead lights. The feline-woman wore a dark brown leotard with criss crossing fabric pieces down the front. Her chocolate brown tail twitched softly behind her out of curiosity, but her fluffy ears were fully erect. She was so beautiful, utterly stunning, and I was lucky enough to call her mine.

  “Hello, Duchess,” Valerie purred. “It’s wonderful to finally meet the woman that Charles is so deeply in love with.”

  The feline-woman’s blue eyes sparkled with understanding and nodded to me when Edony wasn’t looking. The ash-blonde knew what we had to do here… and if we all did it together, the Duchess wouldn’t suspect a thing. I assumed that all of my women listening above knew what I was doing, too, and once they were introduced, would play along with this charade.

  “They know about me?” Edony balked. “How, Charles? You’ve told them about me?”

  “How could I not?” I snickered. “You’re the reason that all of them exist. If it weren’t for you and your patronage, I would’ve never built the machine and accidentally created these monster-women.”

  “Is that what you call them?” Edony asked as she glanced up and down Valerie’s sleek body.

  “Well, super-soldiers seemed a little too impersonal,” I explained. “When I hear those two words, I think of mindless brutes obeying every command. The monster-women are their own people, they have their own likes and dislikes, and I think we should celebrate that. I tried to create drones that would follow your every command blindly, but we all know how that turned out. All of the men I used in my experiments died horrible and painful deaths, but the monster-women flourished.”

  Edony stepped closer to Valerie, but the feline-woman didn’t flinch away from the Duchess. If anything, the ash-blonde stepped closer, smiled warmly, and held her arms to the aristocrat.

  “And they look like they did before the examination?” the Duchess asked. “Except for the small animalistic alterations to their appearances?”

  Edony seemed to have bought my story and I hoped that if I continued to lie believably, there would be no issues from now.

  “Yes,” I nodded. “All of them resemble who they were before they went through the experiment. This is Valerie Delorie. She’s an aristocrat from the far west and came all of the way here to go through the transformation.”

  “Lovely to meet you, Duchess,” the feline-woman giggled. “We’ve waited a long time to be introduced.”

  “‘We’ve’?” Edony echoed. “I assume you mean the other two women?”

  “Yes,” I grinned. “Let me bring them in. I bet the other two are patiently waiting at the top of the stairs to meet you.”

  “To meet me?” Edony echoed. “Why would they want such a thing?”

  “Well, you already know Daisy, so you don’t have to meet her,” I chuckled. “But, I’m sure the third monster-woman wants to meet you finally.”

  “I’m here, Charles,” the brunette called from the stairs and then stepped inside the laboratory. “I’ve been listening from above while you told the duchess of your brilliant experiments.”

  Daisy held one hand against the doorframe and paused for a second. Her dark brown hair rustled with a light wind as it shifted down the laboratory stairwell. Her enormous honey-colored eyes moved in between the Duchess and me for a second, and then she stepped fully into the room. She was much shorter than Valerie, at least by four or five inches, and when they stood side by side, the brunette only came up to the feline-woman’s shoulder.

  “Ms. Browning,” Edony snapped. “How… wonderful to see you.”

  “Edony,” Daisy breathed. “I hope that now that you know everything that Charles has told you, we can move past our previous grudges. I’m here because I volunteered for Charles’ experiment, and as you can see, it worked beautifully.”

  “Undoubtedly,” the Duchess chuckled. “I never saw what you looked like when you lived in the capital, but I trust Charles when he says that you look like you always have. But Charles, I’m still confused about how the--”

  “Rian,” I called and cut the Duchess off. “Why don’t you come in?”

  I couldn’t let her get a word in, especially right now. Edony and I worked together for months building my machine but she had no idea what went into the process or how monster-women were created. I couldn’t let any information that could get me or my women killed spill out. My heart hammered in my chest so loudly I thought it would echo across the room and sweat beaded at the base of my neck like a river but I kept my expression calm.

  “Charles?” the Duchess barked. “What--”

  “Yes, Charles?” Rian boomed, stepped through the doorway, and loomed over her sisters. “You asked for me?”

  Edony stared at Rian with wide eyes, took a half step backward, and held her delicate hands to her chest. For the first time knowing her, Edony looked afraid, and I couldn’t really be surprised. Both Daisy and Valerie looked at least friendly to outsiders. Both of them had fluffy ears and tails, but Rian… her skin was tinted red, black spiral horns curled out of her hair, and her yellow eyes burned menacingly in their sockets. The imp-woman was gorgeous, but she also looked like some sort of spawn that had crawled out of the pits of the underworld.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26