Read Online Red Queen by Christina Henry - Free Book Online

hideously distended, as if the whole skull had been pressed between two blocks and then a child had pulled the nose out long and the chin down to the chest.
    Its limbs, too, were unnaturally elongated, though its whole body was drawn into a crouch that put its face at Alice’s eyes. The skin was a mottled green, covered all over by some shiny yellowish substance that oozed. It wore a kind of jerkin composed of patches of skin sewn together, and Alice thought some of those patches looked like human skin.
    All this she registered in an instant, and then the smell of it, the reek of decay and death, reached her nostrils and she choked, staggering out of the reach of those long, grasping fingers.
    It hissed at her, took a step forward on its oversized feet and reached again. Hatcher spun, swinging the axe so hard and fastAlice felt the brush of air as the blade whistled past her. She squeezed her eyes shut, anticipating the hot splatter of blood splashing over her, the final agonized cry of the thing that had stalked them through the woods.
    It did not come.
    Alice opened her eyes again to find Hatcher staring in bewilderment at the empty space where the creature had been.
    â€œWhere did it go?” She could not disguise her astonishment.
    Hatcher never missed. It was a truth as reliable as the rising of the sun and the blue of her eyes. Hatcher never missed once he’d unsheathed his axe and moved with intention. And yet, somehow, he had.
    â€œIt disappeared,” he said, then shook his head. “No, that’s not exactly right. It sort of . . . stuttered, I suppose, in front of me and then I didn’t see it anymore.”
    The image of the creature was burned in Alice’s eyes, so that it was almost as if the thing stood before her still, fingers grasping for her face now instead of her neck.
    â€œWas it real, do you think?” Her heart pounded in her chest, and she could hear how breathless and fluttery her voice was.
    The encounter disturbed her greatly, much more than she would have thought possible given all the horror she had already seen. It would have been a comfort to have the bloodied corpse of the monster at their feet. Then at least Alice would know for certain that it
had
happened.
    Hatcher sniffed the air. “It smelled real enough. I can still smell it.”
    â€œIf it was real, what is it? What does it want with us?” Again she was surprised by the intensity of her fear. It looked like something from a childhood tale, a thing that crept out from under the bed in the darkness, a thing that reached its thin, creeping arms over the bed to snatch little girls from their blankets before they had a chance to scream. It looked like a—
    â€œGoblin,” Alice said, remembering a maid called Liesl who’d come from the forest in the high mountains, a long way from the City.
    She’d told Alice stories of goblins and of witches with candy houses that lured children, of girls who chopped their feet in two to fit inside a glass slipper.
    They were not, Alice reflected, very nice stories, although Liesl claimed they were told to children.
    â€œWhat’s a goblin?” Hatcher asked.
    â€œSomething that’s not supposed to exist,” Alice murmured.
    The thing that had been there a moment before still did not seem real. It was easy to accept the presence of magic in the world, and that animals could talk if you knew how to listen to them, and even the idea of a mermaid. It was easy to accept the pleasant and nice things (
although magic isn’t always used for pleasant and nice things, is it?
), but monsters, especially ones from children’s stories, were somehow more difficult to grasp.
    Her mind wanted to slide away from the reality of the goblin, to deny that her eyes had seen what they had seen, to pretend her nose had not smelled what it smelled, to forget the almost-touch of long fingers reaching for her neck.
    Alice shook her head, telling