The Phantom King (The Kings) (34 page)

With a deep breath to calm her nerves, Siobhan twisted the t
hrottle as far as it would go
and let the darkness in her take over.
The bike picked up speed. Just as her Mustang had always done for her, this vehicle fed on her power, pulling horses out of thin air and turning them into torque.

Behind her, the gr
ound cracked in her wake. A fiss
ure sped across the parched land and then separated
in a
perpendicular direction
. Siobhan never looked back; she knew what was happening. She was
making
it happen.

The cracks widened, becoming
fault-like, and further spread and deepened until a veritable canyon separated her from the land behind her. And hopefully from its lone rider.

But she wasn’t going to stop there. The Phantom King owned this realm; if she was going to defeat him in this little game of theirs, she would have to hit him on all fronts and not stop until she was certain
she’d reached the “finish line.
”

Darkness began to descend upon Purgatory, and Siobhan realized that she’d passed the last of the black holes a while back. Nothing but the desert stretched before her now. In the indigo horizon, individual stars and what looked like
planets
of rainbow colors started to make their appearance, hanging low
and huge
in the night sky.

Siobhan switched on her headlight
. She knew that it would only help Thane find her, but she needed light
to see where she was going.
She could waste a lot of energy allowing her magic to guide her, but she had other things she wanted to do with that magic.

Beneath her, the Vincent Lightning she’d always wanted and was now finally getting to ride be
gan to change. She concentrated
and the very frame of the bike
shifted, stretching and molding until it became something entirely different. The shape of it was so vastly dissimilar to the classic beauty of what it had been seconds before, Siobha
n was forced to move and adjust
along with it.

The seat beneath her shifted backward
, r
elocating itself toward the rear
of the monster vehicle. The handlebars loomed ahead, forcing her back to arch and her chest to lean forward until she was nearly lying breast to chrome on the bike.

The Dodge
Tomahawk
was the fastest motorcycle known to man. Its outright ridiculous ten cylinder engine was capable of producing 500 horsepower and achieving a speed of nearly 350 miles per hour.

She could never take it up that high. She was fairly certain that her own mind would rebel at the prospect of going any
more than two hundred,
but there was something about having
the power there, just in case,
that deep
ly appealed to Siobhan at that moment
.

Her body fairly crackled with magic now. It was
like waking up from a long slumber only to find yourself
in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It was time to party, and the warlock in her was game.

She didn’t dare look back now. It would do her no good. If Thane was still there
,
then she wouldn’t put any more distance between them by chancing a glance over her shoulder. The only thing she would do is waste time, scare herself, and possibly wreck her bike.

Instead, she focused dead ahead. She had little choice, really
. The bike beneath her was increasing in speed and now rocketed
forward
so fast
, the world began to literally blur on either side of her. The wind pulled so hard on her hair, she wondered whether she would lose some of it during this ride.
For half a second, she considered slowing down.

But she knew that if she did, she would lose. And losing wasn’t in her blood.

Keep going
, she told herself.
She surrendered to the warlock within her
, lowering her head as it stepped out of its darkness
.

Just don’t let him catch me
,
she told it
.

Siobhan felt the hypnotic, almost orgasmic sensation of black
magic allowed to
fully
take the reins as her own
sultry voice
seemed to whisper
,
You got it, babe
.

Chapter Twenty-
Three

She was smart, he would give her that. She was a fast learner.

The problem was, she thought there was a difference between
Thanatos and the
dimension
he ruled
. She’d already been shown evidence that casting spells
directly
at him would do her no good. But she mistakenly thought it ended there, that the reach he possessed for absorbing magic stopped at the
end of his own fingers
.

Not so.

The realm of the Anime and it
s king were one. And as Siob
han threw her magic at the land,
Thanatos simply gobbled it right up.

The chasm was a nice touch
, he thought. If he’d been anywhere near human, it might have actually slowed him down.
And the beast of a motorcycle she turned the Vincent into was certainly picking up some speed. But he was riding his own metal monster, and right now it was breathing fire.

Thane laughed, and the sound carried out across the realm, echoing with mal-intent. He knew she could hear it. He knew it would spur her on.

T
hanks to him, t
he sun had gone down, and he closed in on her hea
dlight at close to two hundred and fifty
miles per hour, knowing that if this had been the real world and if he and Siobhan hadn’t been inherently magical beings, the slightest turn of either of their heads would
probably
have snapped their necks. The winds they sustained would have been
greater than
class five hurricane level.

But a
layer of otherworldliness surrounded them both and was echoed in the expanse of Purgatory. This was not the real world. This was not real time.

Especially when Thane decided the chase had gone on long enough.

Warlock power flooded his veins, stolen from the spells the little magic user continued to cast on the world around her. He was drunk on it, high on lust and
residual
anger, and spurred by the predatory instinct to hunt down what ran from him. As this red-hot
emotional cocktail
swelled and throbbed through his tall body, Thane folded space before him, warping the distance between him and the headlight far ahead until she was a mere few hundred feet away.

As if in response, he felt her magic pulse. An enormous boulder appeared in front of him, so close that he barely had time to swerve to miss it. It was an instinctive reaction since he could just as easily have ridden right through it. But perhaps she knew his instinct would be in charge; maybe she was counting on it to slow him down.

Thane righted the bike beneath him, straightening it out as dust and smoke went flying. Not three seconds passed before she was tossing her power out at him once again, this time in the form of a sudden copse of
trees
that sprouted out of the sparse ground,
thick roots shooting upward
like Jack’s bean stalk.

Thane’s monster motorcycle roared as he kicked it into a higher gear in order to escape a meandering root that
struck out at him
and attempted to shoot through his back wheel.
At the same time, he leaned heavily, steering the bike out of the way of the veritable tree t
hat twisted in front of him.

The trees multiplied and spread before him like a forest. It was
reminiscent
of a Tim Burton
horror scene, each strange tree alive and writhing, each branch and root out to get him.
The effect was disconcerting enough to keep him on the defensive, especially at the speed he maintained.

He smiled grimly. He’d underestimated how well she would think this out.

With mounting impatience, Thane sent a flare of his stored-up power out in front of him, turning Siobhan’s own magic against her as he lit every wayward, ominous tree on fire from root to tip. The conflagration
hissed to life, lighting up the horizon and casting a bright glow into the night sky.
It ate at the magical forest with voracious speed, turning it to ash within seconds and clearing the way ahead.

He kicked his bike into break-neck speed, closing the distance between him and his beautiful prey with
unnatural acceleration.
Thane saw red hair fly as Siobhan
no doubt heard him coming up on her and
unwisely looked over her shoulder. His smile broadened. She was getting nervous now.

Excitement burned in his veins, awakening each nerve ending and sending his heart pumping like mad.
The things he was going to do to her….

But she wasn’t finished yet, it would seem, because the ground beneath Thane’s motorcycle suddenly changed on a molecular level, shifting from a solid – into a liquid. The bik
e gave an angry whine and quick
sand went flying in all directions as his front wheel sank into the grime, spinning wildly. Up ahead, Siobhan shot ahead of him, once more putting precious distance between them.

Thane’s fangs throbbed, his hands ached where he gripped the handlebars, and every
muscle
in his body bulged with
strength as he re-focused his power and brought his bike back out of the muck.

It rose dripping and angry, a beast with a
mind of its own, and growled in fury.

He could almost taste her blood now. He could feel her skin give beneath the prick of his teeth, her complaint flesh
mold
where his
earnest
grip dug in, her wet warmth welcoming him as he
held her down and claimed her in triumph.

He’d had enough of this.

With a blast of finality, he broke the ground up ahead and forced it to rise into the sky. A hundred yards in front of Siobhan, mountains formed, climbing like rockets toward the stars and planets above.
He watched as she reacted,
hastily
slowing her motorcycle just enough to skid to a
long and dirt-flying
stop without
laying the bike down and
killing herself.