Amazon Princess Read online

“Out. Of. Nowhere,” I confirm. “I made a run for it, but I might as well have had a lightning rod on my head. Took all of three steps before—WHAM!”

  I smack the table with both hands and Edie jumps.

  “Just like that I was on my ass, smelling like a Pop Tart that’s been in the toaster too long.”

  “And…?” Edie prompts me. “Did you notice anything after the lightning strike? Anything unusual?” She’s leaning forward, practically salivating.

  “Like the fact that I can deadlift three hundred times my own body weight?” I ask, chugging down my Quik Powder and wiping my mouth.

  It took me a few weeks to figure that out. At first I was just happy to have survived that lightning strike. Then all the social fabric busted wide open—kinda like when Jenny May Malone dropped her baton at the third annual Miss Midwest Pure Pork Princess and the seams on her dress couldn’t continue hiding her five months along baby belly. It wasn’t pretty.

  I can’t remember much of the dark days right after that. Mama was real low and I didn’t see the point of pulling her out of it. But then one night she woke me at 3 a.m., all hopped up on something that made the smile on her face look all painful and stretched out. Mama said she’d had a vision that mani-pedis would help pull us through the apocalypse. By the time I pulled on the dress Mama insisted I wear, she was passed out cold. But I figured I’d go and get the nail polishes Mama wanted anyway. Figured it might keep Mama from sinking back down in the darkness…and taking me with her.

  I was picking my way across Main Street when an abandoned car rolled onto my evening gown hem. That’s when I noticed the not-so-nice guy eyeing me from the alley. Instead of ripping my dress (Dolce & Gabbana, secondhand, $4,500), I tried to lift the car…and succeeded.

  I thought it was just the adrenaline, you know, like when a woman goes all mama bear because her baby is in danger? But then when I got back home I did an experiment and flipped the neighbor’s RV. So…

  “That’s not normal,” Edie says, grinning.

  “I do know that,” I tell her. “So fine, if you say I got a bit of Zeus’s power or whatever, I believe you.”

  “Good!” She sits back. “You’re honestly way ahead of where I was when I started.”

  “You still haven’t said what you want with me.”

  “If you want to keep your new power, you have to come with me to Amazon Academy. Once you’re there, they’ll find out if you can fill the void that was created when Zeus died. A bunch of different people got different pieces of him. We need all of you to compete. One winner will end up with all of Zeus’s powers, and he or she can then restore order to the world.” She sits back with an ‘easy peasy’ look on her face.

  But I feel like she left out a big piece of the puzzle. “Okay and what about the losers?”

  “Oh, um,” Edie clears her throat. “If you lose, you lose your powers.”

  “But you just said I gotta go to this Amazon Academy if I want to keep my power!” The words explode out of me, because truth to tell, even though my super strength is still new, it’s already become a part of me. Sorta like when you get a new lipstick and immediately realize it’s gonna be your new signature color.

  Edie holds her hands out in a calm down gesture. “Okay, look. Anyone who doesn’t arrive at Amazon Academy by the evening of the opening ceremony will lose their powers. And that’s tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow!” I take a deep breath, fighting back the growing panic. “So let me get this straight. If I want to stay super strong, I gotta follow you to this Wonder Woman Academy, Hunger Games it out with a bunch of other suddenly supers, and eventually rise to the top?”

  “Don’t freak out, but”—she reaches across the table and takes my hand—“the other contestants aren’t all people. Some are vampires or shifters, like me, and yes, some are humans like you. And there are quite a few royals in the mix.”

  A sharp laugh escapes me. “Like another pageant queen?”

  “Well…no. Royalty by blood,” Edie admits.

  “So you got stuck with me, a beauty queen? Are they punishing you?”

  “No, actually. I chose you.”

  I bark out a laugh. “You had the option of picking an actual princess or queen or whatever, and you chose me? Aren’t I a longshot?” What’s wrong with this girl? Mama always said you gotta back a winner, even if you like the loser.

  “I’m not going to lie to you. The general consensus is that you’re the underdog. But I was once like you. I thought I was normal and then discovered I had incredible power. With my help, I think you can do this. You can be crowned the new Zeus.” She pauses. “I’m not explaining this very well, am I?”

  “Nah, you’re doing just fine. You want me to compete for a crown. If I win, I’ll be in charge of the gods.”

  My heart pounds loud in my chest as I look around the house. Mama wasn’t much into decorating, but she always made sure to frame and hang my pageant pictures. From ages five and up, I’m there on the wall, competing for sashes and scepters.

  Usually winning meant a crown, a sash, and a cash prize. Most of the money would go to paying for my dresses, the dance choreographer, and dental work. Shiny chompers don’t come cheap. Any money left over, Mama would hide in a Ziploc at the back of the freezer. Her not believing in banking institutions is why I still got money to spend.

  Some of the bigger pageants cost so much up front that—even though Mama never said it aloud—losing wasn’t an option. I always at least placed at those times. Mama always said, “You’re a diamond, Brandee Jean. You shine brightest when you’re pressed the hardest.”

  She also said, “Only losers worry about what happens when they lose.”

  Finally, I turn to Edie, and push my chair back with a screech.

  “Girl, I understand perfectly.” I stand. “Let me grab my tiara, then we’ll go show them what a real queen looks like.”

  2

  Apparently, the potential heir to a Greek god’s power doesn’t merit first class.

  I was pissed like a three-legged groundhog with fleas when the dragon girl—Edie—told me we’d have to fly to this Amazon Academy…and she didn’t mean on her back.

  “You’re flipping kidding me?” I’d shouted at her. “You’ve got free wings and I gotta pay my way?”

  “Sorry,” Edie had said. “Those are the rules. You must get to the island under your own power. It’s the first test.”

  I crossed my arms and plopped down in the kitchen chair, my dress billowing out around me. After pouting for a full five minutes and realizing that Edie wasn’t budging, I’d finally stomped over to the icebox and pulled out the last of Mama’s cash—just enough to book me a one-way flight to a remote Turkish island called Maiden Sky.

  I figured Mama would’ve approved. She always said, “Ya gotta spend money to make money.”

  It damn near broke my heart to leave my old truck in the parking lot. Inside the airport they were less than impressed with Mama’s life savings. I had to come up with a sob story about being reunited with my last living relative (a totally fictional loving Nana). The girl at the counter didn’t look moved. She’d probably heard that one already...like a few hundred times or so.

  Luckily, pervy old men still seem to run much of the world. Her boss came out and gave me a long look. In response my lips trembled and then I squeezed out a few crocodile tears. And a good eyeful of cleavage.

  He came around to my side of the counter and petted my hair like I was some damn pony. Then, with his arm looped around my shoulders, he took my pile of cash and said, “We’ll get you there, sweetheart.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have stepped away at that point. If he’d gotten a few more squeezes in, it’s possible my seat wouldn’t be at the very back of the plan—next to the bathroom. The toilet is out of order and from the smell I can kinda guess why.

  I’m wearing my best gown, because I want to make an impression. The kind that makes the other girls step back about two feet…hopefully off a cl
iff. But now the only way someone’s gonna take a step back is if they get a whiff of me smelling like the result of somebody’s bad burrito. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can do about it at this point.

  Next to me, Edie squirms in her seat, muttering about wind speed velocity and thermal pockets. She’s not very pleased with our pilot, and I can’t say I blame her. We’ve been bouncing around for the past thirty minutes as a storm tossed our plane like a leaf in autumn…not that we had an autumn this year. Wisconsin went straight from summer into winter and the trees were so confused some of them decided to die rather than figure it out.

  Mama made the same choice, downing the rest of a bottle of Valium and telling me to make sure I kept using the whitening toothpaste, because by god, the world would rise again, and so would the beauty pageant circuit. In the days prior, I could see her thoughts were going in a dark direction. I told her to hold on with me and we’d fight our way through it. Like always.

  But Mama said she was tired of fighting. Couldn’t blame her much there.

  Mama gave birth to me at sixteen. She hid the pregnancy up until the day she gave birth, rushed to the hospital from chemistry class. When she got home, her parents locked the doors against her. Though they said they’d take me. She showed ’em her two middle fingers and left. Never saw them again. I don’t even know where they live.

  I dug a big deep hole for Mama in the backyard. Didn’t take long with my new strength. But in the end, I couldn’t put her in it. I didn’t want to be sitting outside, talking to a patch of grass. It was wrong. I wanted to see her face. Hold her hand. And I didn’t want to be living in Mama’s house without Mama.

  So I preserved her the best way I knew how. (I sure hope no one goes poking around our house. If they do, they’re gonna get a big surprise when they open the freezer chest in the basement.) Once I get Zeus’s powers, I’ll come back for her. Maybe I’ll make friends with a vampire and they can turn her after the fact. I’m pretty sure stranger things have happened.

  But I can’t think about Mama right now. I’ve got a shot at being the next Zeus—and a semi-truck ton worth of questions.

  “So how did Zeus die, anyway?” I ask Edie.

  “Uh…” She glances around at the other passengers, but most are asleep, and not that many seats are full, anyway. Not a lot of people can afford vacations during the apocalypse. The only passengers even close to us are another pair of teenage girls; a super-hot blonde with a strand of green in her hair, and a stunning black-haired girl with cheekbones that could cut glass.

  Green Hair notices I’m looking at her and glares daggers.

  “What’s her problem?” I mutter.

  “Just ignore Tina.”

  “Wait…you know her?”

  “Yeah. She’s my old roommate.” She shrugs like this isn’t important information to share with me. “She’s mentoring the vampire princess.”

  “That girl with cheekbones is my competition?”

  Edie nods. “Tina is trying to get back into the good graces of the vampires. It’s a long story.”

  “Girl, as my guide in all this, you need to tell me when an opponent is sitting five feet away. And when she’s a freaking vampire. Give me the deets. Now.”

  Mama always said, know your enemy. Well, she actually said, “Google your enemy,” but the internet’s spotty these days.

  Edie sighs. “Look, I don’t know much. Sophia is vampire royalty. She’s been training her whole life to be a leader, and now she inherited something extra from Zeus as well. She’s going to be hard to beat.”

  I nod in agreement. Especially since I don’t know what I actually have to beat her at yet!

  “Okay, tell me what you do know, then.” I adjust my bodice so I don’t have a wardrobe malfunction. Tina’s glare made me wonder if my other set of eyeballs was peeking out at the world.

  “Amazon Academy isn’t the only school for the supernatural and super-gifted,” Edie says. “There’s also Underworld Academy—a school for the dead—and Mount Olympus Academy—that’s where I’m from.”

  “Uh-huh.” I lean forward, resting my chin in my hand, then re-thinking it. Mama always said that’ll make me break out.

  “So,” Edie continues, “Mount Olympus Academy was founded by the gods in order to draw in students like me—shifters. But also vampires, witches, and seers as well. Anyone they thought would make a good soldier in the war against the monsters.”

  “Monsters?” I ask. “Like nightmares in my closet kind of stuff?”

  “No,” Edie shakes her head. “Like monsters from Greek myths—minotaurs and harpies, creatures like that.”

  That’s way worse than what I had in mind. The nightmare in my closet is a knock-off pageant dress Mama ordered from China that definitely did not look like the picture.

  “So, you fought monsters?” I ask Edie.

  “At first,” she says, lowering her voice and glancing around to make sure no one is listening in. I glance at my competition. Both Tina and Sophia have their eyes closed and are sharing a pair of earbuds. I bet they’re listening to Vampire Weekend.

  Edie goes on, “But then I realized the monsters were actually the good guys. The gods treated them like crap for centuries. They were only fighting for their freedom, while the gods were using the Mount Olympus students as human shields to protect their own skins.”

  “Like really good moisturizer?” I ask.

  “No, not like that,” Edie says.

  “It’s kind of the same thing,” I argue. “This one time, when I was in the tri-county circuit, there was this girl—Candy Messmer—her mom ran a lot of the behind the scenes stuff and one of her jobs was recruiting new blood to come into the pageant life. But what she did was find girls with like, overbites and really bad skin.”

  Edie just stares at me.

  “That way she had no real competition,” I explain.

  “Yeah, I get that,” Edie says slowly. “But I don’t see what it has to do with Mount Olympus Academy.”

  “Well,” I say, my voice getting louder as I break it down for her. “Your gods didn’t want to fight their own battles, right? And Candy’s mom saw the writing on the wall. Her daughter was pretty and all, but on stage she was like a bag of cold French fries. Except it turned out that this one girl cleaned up pretty good, and ooh could she sing too. Candy and her mom had to resort to some low tricks to win that one.”

  “I can’t believe I’m asking this,” Edie says, “But what were the tricks?”

  “They rubbed all that girl’s razor blades in a poison ivy patch day before the swimsuit competition,” I tell her. “Her bikini line looked like a war zone.”

  “Oh my gods,” Edie says. “That’s terrible. Okay, so maybe there are some things in common with Mount Olympus, then. We definitely had people operating behind the scenes. Spies and traitors.”

  “You were one of them?” I hazard a guess.

  “Yep,” Edie nods, a little bit of a spark in her eye. I’ve seen something like that before. Like when Miss All State Full Fat Milk purposely loosened the heels of the Two Percent girl right before the runway walk. Miss Two Percent broke a hip in that fall, and nobody ever crossed Full Fat again.

  Sometimes it’s the quiet ones you’ve got to look out for.

  “With Zeus dead, Mount Olympus Academy has folded. The war with the monsters is over. Themis, who was Zeus’ second in command, has been sending former students out into the world to fix the mess that Zeus’s death caused. She’s not powerful enough on her own to keep all the other gods in check. Not like Zeus. Getting rid of him seemed so right at the time. I didn’t know it would cause so much trouble in the world.”

  I got still. Replaying that whole ‘getting rid of him bit.’

  “Wait…did you kill Zeus?” I ask Edie.

  “I…” She pauses. That hesitation is all I need.

  “You did, didn’t you?” I put my tray table back in the locked position and gather the rest of my stuff from under the seat. S
tanding, I lurch out into the aisle, bumping the seats around me and knocking Sophia’s earbud out. She stares at me in disgust.

  I roll my eyes at her. There’s always someone thinking you’re trash and wanting to take you out. That’s what Mama would say whenever someone would give us the stink-eye as we rolled up to a pageant in her old Chevy that had a sheet of plastic for the rear window.

  “Wait,” Edie loud whispers. “You don’t understand.”

  “Screw you, dragon-breath,” I say, not bothering to keep my voice low. “Because of you, I don’t have a mom anymore, or the Real Housewives, or…cheese.”

  I totally still have cheese. Everyone in Wisconsin has cheese. But I throw it in there, because it seems like a very crappy thing to say to someone, accusing them of being responsible for a world without cheese.

  Tina, the girl with the green in her hair, is smirking at us. “I told you yours was going to be a dud,” she says. “The only thing she’s the queen of is Dairy Queen.”

  The words Dairy Queen make me think of poor Desirae. “I woulda worn the Dairy Queen crown with pride,” I tell her, and then add, “And by the way, the one streak of color in your hair thing is so five seasons ago. You go full head of green or you don’t go there at all.”

  Tina stands. There’s murder in her eyes and—oh wow—actual fangs in her mouth.

  “Leave Brandee Jean alone.” Edie warns, stepping between us before I can get a better look at Tina’s pointy teeth.

  “Wait, her middle name starts with a J…and her first name starts with a B?” Tina asks, glee lighting up her face.

  I know where this is going. This isn’t my first BJ insult. I’ve got to shut that shit down. Quick.

  I give her a look of pure death. “Yeah, those are my initials. And look at how fast you figured it out. Now what were the two words you were gonna connect it with? Butterscotch jellybeans? Ben and Jerry’s? Baby Jesus? Or were you leaning towards what’s sometimes known as a hummer, lollipop love, peenie polish, or most commonly, a blowjob?”

  Sophia’s lip curls. “You are disgusting.”