The Phantom King (The Kings) (11 page)

Thankfully, Jason Alberich had no such compunctions.

So when he pressed his palm to her stomach and waves of pleasure rolled through her, wiping out the pain, she didn’t fight it. Instead, she leaned back against the seat in the car and closed her eyes.
A warlock could make his or her victim feel anything they wished with no more than a touch. Whatever anyone said about warlocks, she would always be a fan of this particular ability.

“There now,” he said
, his deep voice a soothing rumble. “That’s
better
.”

Danny could feel him shift beside her, but she didn’t open her eyes. “I’ll follow behind you,” he told her husband. Lucas didn’t reply, but she assumed he nodded, because Jason’s hand gently removed itself from her abdomen, and she sensed his departure.

“
Let’s get you to the hospita
l,” Lucas said, his own deep voice tight with what must have been anxious anticipation as he gave the car gas and they left the garage behind.
They couldn’t transport into the hospital for fear that nurses, doctors and other patients would see them, plus again, Danny didn’t want to chance too much magic at the moment.
Driving was their only option.

She
kept her eyes shut and prayed that the pain relief Jason had bestowed upon her would hold up a little longer. St. Joseph hospital’s urgent care center was twenty miles away. Barring any traffic
mishaps
, they should make it there inside of twenty minutes.

The sudden sound of sirens forced Danny’s eyes open. She leaned over and peered in the right rear-view mirror.

“We have an escort,” Lucas said, picking up speed as a cop car sped past them to take its place in front and lead the way.

Danny frowned. “Is that –”

“Kane,” Lucas told her.
“
Lily had
a vision that this would be your
day
,
but
she
didn’t want
us
to say anything to you, just in case,” he told her. “She and
Daniel came up yesterday
.”

Danny smiled a small, grateful smile.
Lily Kane was a seer, a werewolf, and a good friend of Dannai’s.
Daniel Kane
, Lily’s
gorgeous alpha werewolf husband,
was the police chief of Baton Rouge and probably had very little to no jurisdi
ction here in California. B
ut their tiny convoy was composed of werewolves and
warlocks
,
and jurisdiction was probably the least of their worries. Whatever came along, they could handle. The important thing was to get through traffic and get
Danny to the delivery room as soon as supernaturally possible
.

Daniel Kane’s
expert driving
and police sirens managed to pull it off in record time
.

Chapter Six

The hospital hall was bustling with
a quiet yet buzzing sort of
medical busy-ness. Ramses
,
who had once been known as Amon
,
moved with slow deliberation, his
long stride beating out a steady
pace
, his
deep, dark eyes absorbing every characteristic of the
building that housed and cared for the sick, dying, and convalescing.

It had been a very long time since he’d walked the hallways of Earth’s abodes. In his
absence
, the planet had grown arms of
metal that reached to the heavens
as if trying with all of their might to pluck the sun and moon from their thrones. It had
also developed oozing sores that reluctantly coughed up metal and stone for the humans that ran rampant across its surface. Its forests were nearly gone, its oceans had become
sewage, and the sun
tore through holes in the sky
, burning unprotected skin to a crisp.

Much had changed.

People still attempted to care for one another
, placing their own
short-term well-beings above anyone or anything else’s. This hospital and its endless passageways, humming intercoms, and bitter tang of
antiseptic
was evidence enough of that. But the battle for well-being was no longer one of self-defense
, which had always been natural to Ramses and hence admirable
. Now it was a war that humanity had waged on everything around it. And humanity was winning.

Everything was different. Ramses was no longer so certain about what was right and what was wrong. Thousands of years ago, the supernatural world had preyed upon humanity, using them for food and taking them as slaves. Humans had run screaming from vampires, werewolves, dragons and their ilk. Ramses, then known as Amon, the god of go
ds, had taken physical
form so that he might help protect those who worshiped him.
As a god, he was an idol of imagination, without substance or function. He was an energy that was fed and thus grew, but could give nothing back.
When he became solid, this energy amassed, pooling into a well of power the likes of which no human had ever seen.

Amon became Ramses, using his physical avatar to protect the humans who had created him against
the creatures who would see those humans
dead or enslaved.
His love, his bride Amunet, had taken h
uman form by his side. Together
they’d done what they could to see to the welfare of their people.
Supernatural
killings were
now
virtually
unheard of in the
public and accepted
annals of
human
history, and there was a reason for that. When he’d done all he felt he could do
, he and his bride had
left the mortal realm. That was five thousand years ago.

For eons, he’d slept,
only
to
come awake with a hard feeling of loss and desperation. Amunet was gone.

At once, he’d taken mortal form in order to search for her, and as he’d done five millennia ago, he immediately sought out those humans who felt as he did about the scourge of otherworldly creatures on the planet. With nearly no effort at all, he’d
become their leader, taking charge of a growing band of men and women known throughout supernatural channels as the Hunters.

Through them, he hunted down the monsters he’d hunted all those years ago. And as he did, he s
earched endlessly for
Amunet.

But
n
ow
?

Not long
ago,
a female vampire by the name of Ophelia had handed
Ramses all of the information the Hunters would need to completely eradicate at least one supernatural race from the planet.
The Vampire King Roman D’Angelo
was very old, having ruled for three thousand years,
and
Ramses had never met him.

Ramses had fully expected D’Angelo to be like his forebears – cruel, selfish,
and
blood-thirsty. However, once he’d been given the vampire’s location and background information, Ramses had delved full-long into a thorough investigation, and what he’d turned up confused him.

Rather than continue with the
senseless destruction of those who had ruled before him, D’Angelo took hold of the vampire kingdom in a mercilessly firm grip, strangled the vast majority of its cruelty into submission, and initiated new laws. Opponents to the law
s
were destroyed. Proponents were made law keepers.

As a result, D’Angelo’s people ceased murdering innocents, and the method for turning mortals into vampires was hidden away, bringing the disease-like spread of the vampire nation to a halt.

It wasn’t what Ramses had expected. Ophelia, had no doubt intended for Ramses to use the information she supplied him with to put an end to the vampire sovereign and his people.
But Ramses hesitated. He wasn’t so certain that doing away with D’Angelo woul
d be the best thing for humanity – much less even
possible
. D’Angelo had remained king for three thousand years; it took a massive amount of strength to retain a leadership of any kind for that long, to say nothing of a group of creatures as powerful as the vampires.

The werewolves were no different. Something had happened to them during Amon’s
absence
. They’d gone from ravenous beasts to a struggling society of close-knit family and love. They’d suffered a curse that had seen them nearly to extinction. And then they’d come out of that curse – only recently – to find themselves banding together
in solidarity
in order to fight the adversity
that this sudden change had caused.

The warlocks were now ruled by a man as en
igmatic and game-changing as
Roman D’
Angelo had been
for the vampires. And the same story
of metamorphosis and innovation
seemed repeated over and over a
gain when it came to the other k
ings and their supernatural kingdoms.

Ramses was
thrown by this shifting of antipathy to altruism. It was disorienting
, to say the least. As of a few weeks
ago, he’d brought all homicidal Hunter a
ctivity to a halt, and now the Hunters
were restless. Not that he cared. The anxious trigger fingers of a few mortals were the least of his concern
s
. The world was turning underneath him, tilting until he felt he would fall off.

And there was something else.

It was the reas
on he was here now, walking the halls of
this hospital on North America’s west coast. He was no closer to locating Amunet than he’d been wh
en he’d first taken mortal form, but he
had
located someone
else
. Someone he could not comprehend, could not fathom,
and who should not have existed:
Amunet’s daughter.

She was here
in this hospital. He’d been watching her over the last few months, though she and her multitude of protectors had no idea he was there. She
looked like her mother; her eyes were similar. Dannai Caige had eyes like muted rainbows, green, blue, brown and gold. Her husband lovingly referred to them as “kaleidoscope eyes.” Her hair was similar. Her bone structure. And she carried her mother’s ability to heal.