Crisanta Knight: To Death & Back Read online

  Crisanta Knight: To Death & Back

  © 2019 Geanna Culbertson. All rights reserved.

  Book Five in The Crisanta Knight Series

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Published in the United States by BQB Publishing

  (an imprint of Boutique of Quality Books Publishing Company, Inc.)

  www.bqbpublishing.com

  978-1-945448-26-3 (p)

  978-1-945448-27-0 (e)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930113

  Book design by Robin Krauss, www.bookformatters.com

  Cover concept by Geanna Culbertson

  Cover design by Ellis Dixon, www.ellisdixon.com

  First editor: Pearlie Tan

  Second editor: Olivia Swenson

  Books in The Crisanta Knight Series

  Crisanta Knight: Protagonist Bound

  Book One

  Crisanta Knight: The Severance Game

  Book Two

  Crisanta Knight: Inherent Fate

  Book Three

  Crisanta Knight: The Liar, The Witch, & The Wormhole

  Book Four

  Crisanta Knight: To Death & Back

  Book Five

  Crisanta Knight: The Lost King

  Book Six (2019)

  Dedication

  This book, like everything I shall ever accomplish, is dedicated to my mom and dad. You are my heroes, my coaches, and my best friends. I am thankful for you every day for more reasons than there are words in this book.

  Special Thanks

  Terri Leidich & BQB Publishing

  For everything you’ve done, everything we’ll achieve together, and for always being in my corner, thank you. A hundred times over, and sincerely from my heart, thank you.

  Pearlie Tan

  Whenever I talk about the publishing process, I always mention you and how much I value your work and trust your skill. You are a core part of Team Crisanta Knight and I appreciate you.

  Olivia Swenson

  I have valued your opinion since the beginning and with every book we work on together, I am increasingly grateful to have you on my team. You have made a big difference to me!

  Alexa Carter

  Thank you for being consistently, incomparably one of the dearest friends I could ask for and consistently, incomparably one of the best people I know.

  Ellis Dixon

  I am so glad to have you on my team! Thank you for helping me bring my vision for each Crisanta Knight cover to life. I love every cover more than the last and I know that wouldn’t be the case if not for your skill and patience with the details.

  I also want to thank The Fine Family, Bree Wernicke, Midnight Hour Studios, Girls on the Run, Read to a Child, Aimee Bender, all the other wonderful people who have supported this series so actively since the beginning, and my many fans who I hope to continue to amaze, enthrall, and surprise in the future!

  Bonus Dedication

  Since this is going to be an eight-book series, each book will include a bonus dedication to individuals who have significantly impacted my life or this series in some way. This one is for my brother Gallien Culbertson.

  Brother, you and I spend a nice chunk of time sassing each other, but on a very sincere note, I honestly don’t know what I would do without you. You are a wonderful older brother, but you are also a great friend. In fact, I consider it a privilege and a blessing to be able to say that I consider you one of my best friends. And that’s just amazing. I mean, how many people get to say that about their siblings? Thank you for being my business consultant, life coach, pal, sports educator, TV and film debater, and the Robin to my Batman. (Just kidding; we’re both Batman.) This might be the first book that is specifically dedicated to you, but you are a big part of every single one. Just like you are a big part of me, and everything I shall ever accomplish.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 The Spare Knight

  Chapter 2 Picking Battles

  Chapter 3 Fish-Gut Slut

  Chapter 4 Giants of Geene

  Chapter 5 The Mercy Pit

  Chapter 6 Dancing with the Enemy

  Chapter 7 Heart & Soul

  Chapter 8 The Gwenivere Brigade

  Chapter 9 Morgan La Fay

  Chapter 10 The Queen & I

  Chapter 11 The Hero’s Standard

  Chapter 12 Motivation

  Chapter 13 Elaine the Younger

  Chapter 14 The Big Shift

  Chapter 15 Death (Or Something Like It)

  Chapter 16 Choker

  Chapter 17 The Impossible Place

  Chapter 18 Blood & Water

  Chapter 19 First Contact

  Chapter 20 Well, This Is Awkward

  Chapter 21 Forget-Me-Nots

  Chapter 22 The Window

  Chapter 23 The Reinforcement

  Chapter 24 I Make a New Friend

  Chapter 25 Wave One

  Chapter 26 Blood on Her Hands

  Chapter 27 For the Kill

  Chapter 28 Hands Off

  Chapter 29 Watch Your Glass

  Chapter 30 Cloud Nine

  About the Author

  Prologue

  You know how princesses are supposed to wear pretty dresses, be saved by heroes, and live happily ever after?

  Well, if that’s what you’re into, you picked the wrong book.

  As the daughter of Cinderella, I’m all for pretty dresses, but I prefer to pair them with combat boots. While a few of my hero friends have saved me on occasion, I’ve rescued them just as many times. And as far as living happily ever after goes, at this rate I’ll be lucky just to be alive a few days from now.

  My name is Crisanta Knight. I’m a protagonist and I hail from a world called Book—a magical realm that separates its citizens into main characters and common ensemble characters. One of the things our realm is known for is the Author—a mysterious prophet who writes the stories, known as “protagonist books,” that detail protagonists’ fates.

  Each protagonist book starts with a prologue prophecy, a vague rhyme that predicts the general gist of a main character’s story. Unfortunately, mine was a doozy. I was prophesied to decide the fate of the wicked antagonists plotting to overthrow our realm and eliminate all its main characters. At the end of this story, I would either be responsible for stopping them or helping them see their evil plan through.

  Since learning of my prophecy, the antagonists had tried to strike me down at every possible turn. Protagonists in Book attend special private schools where they train for their fairytale destinies. As a princess and a protagonist, I’d always been trained to do good and be good, so the antagonists assumed that if I made it to the end of my storyline, I would enact the interpretation of my prophecy that implied I would stop them. As a result, they wanted to stop me first, and the only way to keep a prophecy from coming true is by killing its subject.

  Regrettably for them, I was pretty hard to kill. And I had a team of fierce friends that made sure of that.

  SJ (the daughter of Snow White), Blue (the younger sister of Little Red Riding Hood), Jason (the younger brother of the famous Jack who climbed the beanstalk), and Daniel (a hero with no previous ties to fairytales past) were always there for me when things got seedy.

  I also had a Fairy Godmother–issue wand which could morph into any weapon I
willed it into. I possessed the combat ability to utilize this tool dynamically, especially in the form of a spear. And above all else, I had magic.

  My mother’s Fairy Godmother had given me a spark of her magic when I was a little girl so I could operate the wand. This spark had developed into a singular, magnificent ability: life. As in, I had the ability to bring things to life and control them.

  It was pretty awesome as far as powers went. Since realizing I possessed this ability a few months ago, I had spent a lot of time training to control and master it under the tutelage of the very Author who I once resented for supposedly controlling our fates.

  Last semester my friends and I had discovered that the Author was actually a former Fairy Godmother named Liza Lenore who lived under the thumb of our realm’s higher-ups. She didn’t control our fates; she merely had visions of the future that reflected our choices. The higher-ups used her visions to keep order in our realm, convince the citizens of Book that their fates weren’t their own, and separate people into protagonists and commons. Accordingly, Liza was imprisoned and isolated from the rest of the realm and was under an enchantment that made her live forever so she could be used in this way indefinitely.

  Although Liza was a tool of propaganda for the higher-ups, she had become a valuable ally and teacher to me. The reason? She and I shared a similar problem known as Pure Magic Disease.

  Magic normally works like a jacket. It’s supposed to be easy to put on and use when needed, and simple to remove and ignore when not needed. However, every once in a while, magic irrevocably bonds to its host, resulting in Pure Magic Disease—an affliction that bestows great power with one ability, allows its host to see the future, and eventually corrupts them.

  Liza was the only person I knew who had overcome the corrupting effects of Pure Magic, which made her the only person capable of teaching me the control to do the same. This involved tremendous focus and blocking out emotions—particularly negative ones—when I summoned my abilities. For while emotion made magic stronger, it also made it more unstable.

  I had ardently tried to keep my emotions in check as my magic usage increased and developed, but that had become a lot more difficult lately thanks to Alex.

  Alex is my older brother, and until a few days ago he was the beloved prince of our kingdom, Midveil. That all changed when he aligned himself with the antagonists and helped the common characters who had been rebelling in Book launch an attack on our home.

  His betrayal had devastated me. He was no longer the hero, friend, and brother I once held dear. He was a monster working with Arian (the antagonist who’d been leading the charge against me since my prophecy appeared) and Mauvrey (the daughter of Sleeping Beauty, a former classmate at Lady Agnue’s School for Princesses & Other Female Protagonists, and my long-time nemesis).

  I wished I never had to see Alex again, but our stories were entangled. Alex and company, like me and mine, were now after Excalibur—King Arthur’s legendary blade, which had been lost since his supposed death.

  According to legend, Excalibur resided on Camelot’s infamous Isle of Avalon under the care of the Lady of the Lake, waiting for someone worthy to claim it. The next person who would be able to do this was foretold by Merlin, Camelot’s legendary wizard, in the Great Lights Prophecy. Enter my brother and me.

  The Great Lights Prophecy indicated that a “Knight” of royal blood who was heir to the lion’s throne was meant to claim Excalibur. Alex fit that description, as did I. We were royal, Knight was our last name, and Midveil’s symbol was a lion. However, there was a deciding factor that could narrow down which of us had the chops to fulfill the prophecy: the Boar’s Mouth, a mystical statue in Camelot. According to the prophecy, the Knight meant to claim Excalibur needed to get blessed by the Boar’s Mouth in order to have any hope of completing the quest. The thing was, the statue only responded to people who had pledged a vow of loyalty known as The Pentecostal Oath to the king of Camelot.

  Which brings us to the present.

  Finding Excalibur was the key to accessing the memories of a lost Fairy Godmother named Paige Tomkins, who knew the location of Book’s missing genies.

  Our search for Paige Tomkins had brought my friends and I to Neverland. There, we discovered that the rightful king of Camelot, King Arthur, was not dead like everyone long believed. After being mortally wounded by his half brother Mordred, he had accidentally ended up in Neverland where biological time stood still, thus keeping him alive and also keeping him from aging.

  We’d allied with Arthur and his Neverland friends—Peter Pan and the Lost Boys and Girls—and I had sworn The Pentecostal Oath to the king so I could receive the blessing from the Boar’s Mouth in Camelot. Alex, meanwhile, had sworn The Oath to the person who had taken Camelot’s throne in Arthur’s place—only to learn he couldn’t receive the blessing because the Boar’s Mouth sensed Arthur, the true king of Camelot, still lived.

  Now my brother, Mauvrey, Arian, and a buttload of their antagonist henchman intended to track down Arthur and force him to complete the pledge of The Pentecostal Oath with my brother. If the antagonists succeeded with this endeavor, Alex and I would both be eligible to get blessed by the Boar’s Mouth.

  This made my status to Arian and the antagonists more complicated.

  While Alex and I had become opposites in a lot of ways, we were equals in terms of our chances at being the Knight of the prophecy. And since there was no guarantee that pledging The Oath would make the Boar’s Mouth bless us, Arian and company weren’t presently interested in killing me. They wanted to save me until Alex fulfilled all the requirements of the prophecy (the pledge and the blessing). In the meantime, I was their spare Knight in case he didn’t cut it. Which meant Arthur was not the only one who needed to evade their capture. One wrong move and he and I would both become pawns in the antagonists’ vicious game.

  It was a dangerous, precarious situation to say the least. However, while I was wary about the immediate future, I was honestly not as intimidated as I once might’ve been. The antagonists were a fearsome group—cruel, cunning, and ruthless. That worked to their advantage. Nevertheless, they had a bad habit of underestimating me and that was their greatest disadvantage. We’d spent a lot of time together, my enemies and I, and if there was one truth that I carried away from our experiences, it was this:

  The only thing better than being feared is being underestimated; because then nobody will see you coming.

  I was coming for Excalibur.

  If my enemies were smart, they would get out of my way.

  ou know what’s annoying? When your enemies don’t attack at a reasonable hour.

  It wasn’t even dawn and our camp was under siege. Daniel woke me as the fairies and Lost Boys and Girls jumped into action. I snagged my black backpack before we made a break for the outside.

  We’d been in the kids’ belowground sleeping quarters. The only way to the main camp was through elevators in hollowed out tree trunks. We leapt across the bunker’s trampoline floor, hopped into an elevator, and shot up. The seconds seemed like syrup-laden eons. I drew my wand in its sparkly hairpin form from my bra strap and transformed it back to its sleek, silvery state with the command word Lapellius.

  At ground level, Daniel and I took half a step out of the elevator before I grabbed him by the jacket and yanked him sideways.

  Shield.

  My wand transformed just as a flaming cannonball took out the table where we’d eaten dinner. Big, angry sparks and lose embers sprayed from the explosion.

  Surrounded by the cover of trees, the Lost Boys and Girls’ hideout was a perfect woodsy camp with lots of open space to run and play. There was a fire pit surrounded by cushions, various obstacle courses, and treehouses overhead that were interconnected with zigzagging rope bridges and framed with strings of lime green lanterns. Now all that perfection was lost in chaos.

  The forest was a flurry of fighting and fire. Antagonists were everywhere, laying siege to everything. I had
the misfortune of knowing the foes leading the charge. Arian, Alex, and Mauvrey, along with no fewer than thirty henchmen, were engaged in various forms of attack across the forest area. Several henchmen mixed in throughout the space operated portable flaming cannonball launchers.

  I was impressed that our enemies had narrowed in on Arthur’s location and found the hideout so quickly, though I wasn’t surprised. Our enemies sucked, but they were tenacious and shrewd. I didn’t know where Arthur was in this pandemonium, but I worried it wouldn’t be long before they located him—and me too. While they’d come here looking for the king, I was very aware they would happily catch and secure me as their spare Knight, so I had to avoid being seen if I could.

  Many of our Neverland allies, including Dorothy Gale, had beaten us to the action and were already in full defense mode. The tall twenty-three-year-old protagonist from The Wizard of Oz was working with Tinkerbell and a fleet of fairies to fend off attackers. The fairies swarmed the enemy and blinded them with flashes of colorful light before Dorothy swooped in with a combination of brutal punches and kicks.

  Some time ago, Dorothy and the rightful ruler of Oz (Princess Ozma) had been on a mission to Camelot. During their quest, the pair had gotten separated and a horrible monster called the Questor Beast had poisoned Dorothy with one of its venomous fangs. She should have died, but accidentally found her way to Neverland. Now, like Arthur, she would die if she left.

  Dorothy and the fairies were doing a good job of kicking butt. The Lost Boys and Girls were also fighting hard and strong. The camp had more than enough weapons to fill an armory and, given that they spent their free time battling Captain Hook and his pirates, the kids had plenty of combat experience. However, these were ruthless, mostly adult antagonists we were dealing with. So as the fight scene unfolded with increased fire, arrows, and aggression, I wondered how long we could keep back the threat.

  “Do you know where the others are?” I asked Daniel.

  Suddenly muffled shouts came from overhead. Two of Arian’s henchmen dropped out of the trees and landed face down on the ground beside me. Swiftly after, a third figure swung from a branch eight feet above us and landed in a perfect crouched position. Startling blue eyes looked up at me through a frazzle of dark blonde hair.