The Phantom King (The Kings) (4 page)

Jane stopped in her tracks and stared at her with wide
, blinking
eyes.

Siobhan
smiled and shrugged. “When can I move in?”

*****

S
he
stopped just after she entered the living room and dropped the heavy padded glider chair she’d been carrying. It sent a cl
oud of dust flying as it clattered noisily
to the wooden planks, which Siobhan ignored as she used the back of her forearm to wipe the sweat from her forehead.

“Not that I mind having you around,
Steven
, but I have to admit I wish you
were
solid right now. This crap is heavy.” Siobhan sighed and lowered herself into the glider before resting her head back on the head rest and closing her eyes.
She’d sent the police detail away earlier that afternoon. It had been ten days since
Steven
’s death and she felt conspicuous and strange having cops watching her twenty-four-seven. She also felt guilty.
Salem was right next door to Boston as the crow flies. Boston
was a big city, often a dangerous city, and there were certainly more useful places for a pair of police officers to be than parked in a car
across the street from her new
worn-down, still empty home.

So she was stuck lugging the furniture in on her own, and after four hours of hauling heavy things straight, she was nearly done – and nearly done
for
.

She could feel
Steven
’s ghost hovering beside her to her left.

Steven
’s ghost.

She’d come home on Monday night a week and a half ago to find her street blocked off by fire trucks and ambulances – and her house on fire.
The entire block had smelled like evil.

Siobhan was a warlock. If anyone in the world understood the power and pull of evil, it was her. She fought it every day.

Twenty-eight years ago, s
he’d been born with a penchant for magic
. Of course, the skills didn’t make themselves apparent until a number of years later, when
at the age of eight,
she unwittingly
and telekinetically
slammed
her mother’s fingers in the kitchen drawer because she couldn’t get a word in edge-wise around her numerous brothers and sisters.
That
got her mother’s attention.

It also got Siobhan’s. And it felt terrible.

That was the first time her magic had reared its head and caused harm. Since that moment, Siobhan made great effort to retain control over her emotions. Because when she didn’t, bad things happened.

Several years later, a friend was hosting an Oldies but Goodies movie night and Siobhan watched a very young Drew Barrymore kill peo
ple
with massive fire balls. She
stared at the
child on the screen, and felt
like an imposter amongst humans. There before her was someone with dangerous magic, magic she could barely control, and it was so
fantastical
, so unbelievable, it was the basis for a science fiction horror.

And Siobhan
was reminded of herself – and of the secret she’d kept hidden for the duration of her childhood.

Every now and then, she considered going to a Wiccan coven or something similar and trying to get help.
Talking to someone.
Trying
to figure things out.

But these witches were so vastly different from Siobhan, the gap between them felt
un-breachable
. They stressed a philosophy of
“harming none,” and all the while, the magic inside of Siobhan begged her to do just the opposite. It was a
nasty
, volatile kind of magic.

Siobhan’s power was not a modern day witch’s power. It had nothing to do with cauldrons or herbs or crystals. It was about anger and hatred and revenge…. And…. It was
real
.

Day after day, night after night, year after year, Siobhan struggled to get a firm grip on what she was and how to deal with it
, and she did so alone
.
Being the youngest child in a family of four daughters and three sons made her task both more difficult and more simple. Hiding was
a
constant
necessity
, but it was like hiding in New York; there was always someone else around to take the attention off of her.

In
high school
, she was the attractive but unpopular kid that young adult romance writers loved to pen about now, only at the time, there had been no gorgeous vampire to save her and no strapping werewolf to protect her. It was just her, in a non-stop battle with her own flaring temper and the magic
that thrummed through her veins,
begging for release.

The effort was taxing, to say the least. As time went by, the tiring effects of her constant
war with herself
took different forms, lending her OCD tendencies, a touch of insomnia, and a firm,
undying need for at least five
cups of strong Irish tea a day.

Other things happened as well. Little by little, she was made aware of the fourth dimension of reality around her. Life did not consist of humans and animals and then her – different from the others and alone in this difference. I
nstead, i
t consisted of
humans and animals and
magic
.

This magic ran through the veins of supernatural races that she’d once only dreamed of but that now followed her, tracked her down, and noticed her even when no other human did. The first run-in she’d had with one of these races was with an Akyri child.

A hungry Akyri child.

Siobhan had been thirteen at the time and the little girl, who must not have been any older than four or five, had looked at Siobhan as if she were a Big Mac at the end of a marathon run. She was starving for magic
,
and Siobhan’s looked like a feast.

Over the next fifteen years, Siobhan learned more about these Akyri and their symbiotic relationships with warlocks, and she came to accept that a warlock was what she was. A black magic user.

Whether she liked it or not.

Witches and warlocks were not made, not trained, not formed. They were not bred by their environments or nurtured this way or that. They were
born
. And it was as simple as that.
Siobhan had no idea why she possessed the abilities she did while her brothers and sisters seemed devoid of them. She had no idea why they were
dark
abilities, tainted by wrath the way that old houses were
tainted
with mold. But
that was the hand that life had dealt her, and she came to accept that she would always be struggling with it.

She didn’t
have
to struggle
of course
. She knew this. Her magic reminded her of it over and over again, coaxing her and massaging
her and whispering in her ears:
G
ive up
.
Give in.
Let me handle this.

But if she did, she would become something that deep down in her heart, she didn’t want to be. It just wasn’t her.

So in the end, she grew more tired every day and relied more and more upon tea and coffee and sleeping in late and tried to distract herself with
work
.
Because she didn’t like to chance losing her temper around someone else, she tried to keep to herself as much as possible, and her “work” consisted of
finding antiques, using magic to restore them to
pristine
and mint condition,
and selling them online. She was good at it.
It was something about the magic that ran through her veins that lent itself to dealing with things that were past their prime. Old things. Worn out things. Even dead things.

She’d witnessed a coyote hit by a bus once while she’d been traveling through the Southwest.
It had one black leg.
A few nights later, she’d found that same
black-legged
coyote skulking around her car in the motel parking lot.
She had no idea how or why. But there it was.
Dead things found their way to her. And sometimes, as was the case with the antiques she bought and sold, she brought them back to life.

She earned
an okay
living
, but the money wasn’t the biggest advantage to doing what she did. It was being able to drive the car she drove – a
jet black
1965 Ford Mustang
built
the first year that Ford began putting bigger, 225 horse power engines in its ponies – as if it were fresh off of the lot.
It was being able to wear the same pair of perfect fitting jeans for
thirteen
years.
And it was this house,
forgotte
n, left behind, and crumbling,
and what it would look like when her magic was finished with it.

Siobhan opened her eyes and looked up at the cracked rafters above her.
When night fell and lent her a blanket of privacy, a single, powerful spell
would fix the house’s interior so quickly and so completely, it would be like turning back time. The
exterior
, however, would take
longer
. It wouldn’t do for Siobhan to cast a spell that corrected everything
outside
all at once. Someone was sure to notice something so drastic.

Instead, she would repair it little by little, a spell here and a spell there, and a few
weeks into it, the neighbors
would pass by, glance at her house, and nod their approval at all of the work she’d done to fix up the old Victorian
-style
manor.

In the meantime, she needed to give off the appearance of normalcy. And so she lugged her furniture from the van outside into the manor’s dim, cool interior, and marveled at the way no one ever offered to help. She was the stranger in town. She was the one buying the “haunted house,” the “cursed house,” and she was red-
headed
to boot.

Siobhan smiled now, sat up straight, and sighed heavily. Beside her, a thin wisp of white energy brushed past her hand,
drawing her attention.