The Phantom King (The Kings) (31 page)

“Thane….” Siobhan’s uncertain voice was muted in the portal. Sound traveled with difficult progression, as did everything else. But he felt her other hand on his arm and sensed it trembling.

And then the second rip occurred,
and it was
like watching lightning strike in the negative. A dark fissure spread across the swirling portal in front of them,
crisscrossing
from the darkness below to the darkness above. The f
orce created with the unnatural
reverse blast
buffeted
against them.

Thane turned
and drew Siobhan into his arms
. It took both concentration and magic to open a portal through dimensions and move from one to the other. Over the years, it became easier. It even grew to be second nature.

But
in the grips of this unnatural event, Thane was forced to double and even triple his efforts, focusing with all he had to maintain the opening long enough for them to get through whatever was happening
without the portal closing on them. If it did, they would be ripped to shreds and tossed to either end of the universe
.

“
You’ll lose in the end
, Phantom King,” came a deep, grating, and echoing voice. In some ways it resembled Marius’ voice, but the physical strangeness of their surroundings was morphing it, drawing it out into something wholly horrible.

Thane raised his head and looked over his shoulder. A face appeared in the nothingness of the lightning-bolt rip behind him. It wavered like the Wizard’s
head
in the Wizard of Oz, and then it smiled. “
You have no idea what you’re up against.”

The massive face’s red glowing eyes seemed to turn, to shift, and to look at the woman in Thane’s arms. As if she knew she was being ad
dressed, she
un-tucked
her head a
nd looked up.

“Come to me willingly
warlock, and I will let you live.
I make no promises otherwise.”

Siobhan stared wide-eyed at the warping, wavering visage.
Her grip on Thane’s
arm tightened
in fear,
and something inside of Thane snapped with fury. He whirled, raising his hand and unleashing the magic he’d stored
earlier that night
.

Every ounce of it came rushing out of his form. He’d never released magic from within a portal before; he had no idea what was going to happen.

*****

It mad
e a warning sound a split second
before it began to expand. Across the
room, the two vampire guards Roman
had dismissed slammed open the door and came rushing back in, obviously alerted
by the distinctly strange noise
.

Jaxon appeared beside him as well. But Roman’s gut clenched and the experience that came with being a king in charge of kings gave him warning. He acted with blurring speed, shoving Jaxon
back several feet and using a burst of his magic as a sudden thrust of force to knock
the other two
vampire
s out of the way as the portal that Thane and Siobhan had just
steppe
d through protracted like a balloon
.

There was a rending
that vibrated the walls of the safe house
, and the portal shook. Instinct drove Roman.

“Get out!” he bellowed the command.
At the same time, he conveyed the mental warning not to use transportation magic.
His vampires obeyed at once, every one of them
rushing in a blur
through the two doors that exited the study
. Roman remained behind
and off to one side
, his dark
eyes trained on the eerily unstable hole. A buzzing came from somewhere deep inside it.

There was a cracking sound, like ice shifting in a glacier.
And then the portal rapidly shrank. But as it did, a
black space appeared to Roman’s right. And another across the room. A piece of the bookshelf vanished. A section of floor
went next
.
As the portal convulsed and closed up entirely, h
oles began to
appear throughout the room to
suck
away
what was once t
here
.

Roman’s heart hammered.
He didn’t dare move, and he also didn’t dare transport away. Within seconds, the holes stopped appearing, leaving three bizarre spaces of black that yawned
from the study and led to some place unknown
.

Roman slowly turned in place, studying the holes ca
refully. Grimly, he
wondered how far the effect
had
stretched.

*****

Siobhan’s instinct was to scream as she was violently thrown forward, but the impact knocked the wind from her lungs. The world
spiraled
out of control as she was sent into bright and swirl
ing space
.

She hit the ground with a kind of numb feeling, as if her body were already in too much pain to notice this further indecency. After she rolled for what felt like a minute or more, she simply lay
face down
in the dust, her eyes closed.

Little by little,
sensations returned to her.

There was a breeze in her hair. There was dry, cracked and dusty ground beneath her. Her chest ached a little, but she was breathing. She moved her legs and then her arms, slowly check
ing to see whether anything was
broken.

A hand gently grasped her shoulder and pulled, rolling her over.

She blinked up at a too-bright sky and the shad
ow that moved before it, blocking
it from her sight.

The Phantom King gently brushed a bit of dust from her cheek and tucked a lock of her red hair behind her ear.
He was beside her on one knee, the muscles of his arms and legs
pronounced as he leaned over her. “You’re alright
,” he told her,
seemingly both for her benefit,
and for his.

Her gaze narrowed. “How do you know?” she said, feeling irritated. She’d just been thrown through a portal at what felt like light speed only to land face-first in the dirt. How the hell would he know if she was okay? She could have a broken leg or… o
r a ruptured spleen
!

He smiled down at her, insta
ntly melting a bit of her
ire. “I’ve seen every injury known to man,” he told her. “I know what the human body looks like when it’s hurt,” he explaine
d. His eyes raked over her
from head to toe. “And when it’s not.”

A low-grade thrill
went through Siobhan as he took her in with those silver-gray eyes
. The woman in her felt subconscious under his scrutiny… and the warlock
in her
wanted to strip off her clothes
so that his view was unencumbered
.

But that
beautiful,
coveted gaze of his lifted, leaving her feeling a bit bereft. His expression darkened, and she followed the line of his eyes, sitting up as she did so.

Several yards away, a black
hole
for lack of a better term sat in the middle of the desert, a stygian space of nothingness where dirt and sand and sky once was.
Beyond it, another forty or fifty feet away, was another.

Siobhan slowly rose, allowing Thane to help her to her feet. But as she did, her gaze skirted over the horizon. Three
… f
our
… f
ive.
As far as the eye could see, these
black
empty spaces stretched, no rhyme or reason or pattern to their appearance. What had once been a stark and unbroken landscape was now riddled
with spots
like
Swiss
cheese.

“What the hell is that?” she muttered.

“
Darkness
,” Thane said
, his
tone low.
“
When I cast the spell within the portal, it met whatever it is on Marius’ end. Wherever he i
s,
whoever he is dealing with,” Thane continued, shaking his head, “it’s evil. And some of it leaked through.”

Chapter
Twenty
-One

“
He can’t get to you here, so he attacked in the portal. He’s getting gutsy,” Thane said. “
I nee
d to see how far the damage goes
,” he told her
over his shoulder
as he
made his way toward the large metal
door that led to his dimension-defying garage
.
“The easiest way is to take a bike out for a survey.”

Once more, the Phantom King shrugged off his black leather jacket. It was dust-covered and as he took it off, a small cloud of the stuff hit the air. He slammed it against his side distractedly to dust it off, every inch of him masculine to the core. As he moved, his muscles flexed and bunched, and Siobhan felt her teeth clench tightly together.

Christ
, she thought as she ran her hand through her hair.
I need a cold shower.
She’d long ago figured out how to use her magic to keep clean so that she could go without showers during long trips. But right now, it was the
cold
part of the shower she was most interested in.

The tattoos she’d spied on Thane
earlier were different now
. The
vivid
colors of the phoenix and the dragon were gone. In their places were just as beautifully
rendered
tattoos of black, tribal and stark, that scrolled around his biceps and up under his short sleeves. The difference was surprising enough to distract her for a moment from the
mouth-watering
spectacle he made as he finished pulling the door open.

He st
raightened and turned to her once
he was done.
His eyes were vivid in the half-shadow coming from the garage beside him. They fell on her like a brand.
“Come inside and I’ll get you a drink,” he said.
He watched her for a few seconds more, as if contemplating something.
Then he stepped into the darkness beyond and disappeared.