Underworld Queen Read Online Free PDF Page A

smirk still fresh on her face, she held the white stick out front at arm’s length and lit the end with a red ray of fire from her index finger.
    Pleased with herself, she put it to her lips and took a long hard drag, filling her lungs with the awful smoke.
    “When in Rome,” she whispered as she exhaled and coughed. She surveyed the park as she leaned on the railing and took another drag. Rarely did it happen, but the scene was worse than she had remembered.
    The fit of coughing and spitting up something otherworldly reminded her that her mother was calling her again.
    “Coming.”
    Audray bent down to hand over the lit cigarette, but it got ripped from her fingers. Seeming to get strength from a couple of deep puffs, her mother addressed her with a scowl, “Thanks.”
    Yes, Mother. You were right. There are things that are worse than death.
    “How’d you like to live like this forever, Mom?” Audray raised her eyebrows and gave her a sultry smile.
    Her mother looked back at her with squinting eyes, holding the cigarette in the lower right quadrant of her purple lips, and responded, “You nuts?”
    Audray took a seat on the corner of the bed, careful to avoid getting punctured by an empty needle. Her mother noticed.
    “Vitamins.”
    “I didn’t figure you for the health nut type.” Why can’t you just will yourself to die? Or do you hate yourself so much you want to linger on and make everyone else miserable too? She looked at her mother’s shriveled breastbone and blotchy yellowed skin and wondered how she could have suckled from this woman as a baby. What kind of poison did you feed my soul?
    As if her mother could read her thoughts. “Well, missy. Look at you, all growed up and ‘sophisticated’ like. Here you are, driving around in that beast and lettin’ your ol’ mother waste away in this shithole.”
    “I’ve paid my dues.” Audray gave her a steely stare, tinged in red, hoping to scare the woman.
    Her mother didn’t notice. She was trying to whisk away ashes that had fallen from the cigarette onto the blue and yellow daisy quilt. “You weren’t the only one. I had to put up with that man’s beatings nearly every day, even when I was pregnant with you.”
    “You should have left.”
    “I did, moved here, moved a hundred miles away and thought maybe he’d leave me alone. But he found me.
    “You took the scumbag back? What were you thinking?”
    “Audray, your father had been killed in the war and I was all alone. I was pregnant and I was a mess. He took care of me at first. He seemed so nice. But then he changed.”
    “He nearly ruined my life,” Audray whispered as she stared out the small porthole window to the dump of the trailer park.
    “Well be grateful. He did ruin your sister’s life.”
    “My sister?” Flashes of a recurring dream about being in danger, and someone, some blonde angel protecting her. Her mother had always told her she was crazy.
    She’d blocked out so much about the rape, despite her best efforts, she began experiencing the nightmare of that day again. She saw Burt’s body looming over her, taunting her.
    “Go ahead, I’ll do to you what I did to her,” he’d growled. Audray had always thought he was talking about her mother. Did he mean her sister?
    Her mother turned her head to the side and wept, her chest caving deep as her painful gasps punctuated the stale air inside the trailer. Audray used her fingers, digging into the woman’s cheekbones under her jaw and righted her face so they could look into each other’s eyes. “Tell me about my sister.”
    Her mother looked like a little girl. Her lower lip quivered as her eyebrows tented. Silently, she nodded. She stared at Audray as if in fear, as if she expected to be struck. “Burt—Burt strangled her and ran off.”
    Audray was filled with rage. She wanted to snap the woman’s neck. “So he came back, and you let that man back into our house? Why didn’t you have him arrested?”
    “They