The Reluctant King (The Star-Crossed Series) (44 page)

              “Will you go with him?” she asked, staring up at me, her chin resting on my chest.

              “No,” I shook my head. “I have decided to fight this war from my throne, from where I should have been all along.” And that was the truth. If I hadn’t been on the battlefield I could have been tracking Terletov better, more accurately. I could have suspected something like this would have happened, or done a better job of preventing it.

              Or maybe I couldn’t have.

              But I knew now that my place was not on a battlefield where anything could happen to me. I had a call to rule this Kingdom and for the first time in my short history as King I needed to take that seriously.

              And for the first time in my short history as King, that task didn’t feel so bad. At least not when I had my Queen by my side.

              “Let’s go home,” Amelia commanded. And I simply followed.

              I ruled the Kingdom, but she ruled my heart.

Acknowledgements

              This book was not planned or anticipated, but came out of a desperate need to write Avalon’s story. For that, I want to thank my readers who have been so incredibly dedicated to The Star-Crossed Series. You fell in love with my characters as hard and fast as I did and because of your steady enthusiasm Avalon got to find love! Thank you for reading and thank you for supporting Indie!

And thank you to the bloggers that support not only me, but the entire Indie community. Every interview, cover reveal and author spotlight is the best kind of gift. You give your time and love generously and I am so grateful for that.

              I want and need to thank God; this book is finished by only a miracle of His grace. Never in a million years did I really believe I could get to do what I love, and live this dream. Thank you God for Your unlimited patience, mercy and grace, those gifts I could not live without.

              Thank you to Zach. You are the best kind of man. You are the inspiration for every love story I write, for every sarcastic comment and steamy make-out scene. I wouldn’t be who I am today without you. Your vision is so much bigger than mine, you see things that I don’t and we both know you bring the common sense to this marriage. I am so thankful for everything that you are and everything that you do for me and our kids. I love you.

              Thank you to my family. Mom you are my biggest fan and I am so blessed to have your love and support. Thank you for kicking me out of the house for college, for encouraging me to travel and the hours of babysitting you put in to help make my dreams come true. I want to be the kind of mother you are one day. Thank you to Ron, Randy and Robbie. You are the kind of brothers that make me thankful I never had a sister, the kind that left me with hilarious and terrifying memories and the kind that showed me respect and what it felt like to know I was protected. And thank you to Stella, Scarlett, Stryker and Solo. I write for you. I write in between your hours of sleep, your activities, in between the owies and the crafts and the hugs and I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for all those blessings. I love you all so much.

              A huge thank you to the girls that helped me put this book together! Sarah Hansen, who is quite possibly the greatest cover art designer in the entire world! You are absolutely brilliant. Thank you for putting up with my million questions, my neurotic visions and creating something that is simply incredible! Jenn Nunez, you are so much more than an editor! You are a friend, a therapist and a colleague. Thank you for enduring my long, nonsensical emails, my addiction to texting and finding all of those important holes! But most of all thank you for knowing the difference between discrete and discreet and Christi’s real last name.

              I need to thank Miriah, Brooke, Bridget, Diana and Lindsay! I am so grateful to have each of you in my life, not just as friends but as fans! You girls make this job fun; you accept the crazy, the scatter-brained and the chaos and support me through it all! Thank you for being the amazing support group you are. And most of all thank you for not letting me take myself seriously.

              I giant thank you to Lila Felix, Jenn Sterling and Nancy Straight! I never imagined the support and friendship I would find in the Indie world. You are all amazing and I am so grateful for your friendship, your advice and your encouragement! I wish you all the best.

              And finally, I want to thank the most amazing group of authors I know, my Hellcats! Amy Bartol, Shelly Crane, Michelle Leighton, Angeline Kace, Samantha Young, Quinn Loftis, and Georgia Cates! You have been an incredible support group! I am so grateful for your advice and opinions. You are not only some of the best writers out there, but by far you are some of the greatest women I know. I am blessed to know you and I cannot wait for the all the amazing things yet to come for you!

About the Author

Rachel Higginson was born and raised in Nebraska, but spent her college years traveling the world. She married her high school sweetheart and spends her days raising their growing family. She is obsessed with bad reality TV and any and all Young Adult Fiction.

The Reluctant King is the fifth book in The Star-Crossed Series.

Look for the Relentless Warrior, the sixth book in The Star-Crossed Series, coming early 2013

Other books coming in 2013 are Sunburst, the second book in the Starbright Series and The Rush, a new and more contemporary series.

Other Books by Rachel Higginson:

Reckless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 1)

Hopeless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 2)

Fearless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 3)

Endless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 4)

Starbright (The Starbright Series, Book 1)

Follow Rachel on her blog at:

www.rachelhigginson.blogspot.com

Or on Twitter:

@mywritesdntbite

Or on her Facebook pages:

Rachel Higginson

Or

Reckless Magic

Keep Reading for an Excerpt from Starbright

Chapter One

              The night had never been darker, the blackness surrounding the car, never so suffocating. Even the piles of snow pushed to the sides of the narrow road, did nothing to break up the oppressive darkness. The Stars above, shone brightly, I was sure of it, but they did so from behind a curtain of clouds that blocked the light from reaching the road. I felt swallowed up by emptiness.

              I gripped the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles stretching until they gleamed white in the glow of the dashboard and my frozen fingers worked numbly against the cold plastic. The headlights of my old Jeep reached only a few feet in front of me and then stopped abruptly against a wall of darkness. I shivered violently, nestling my chin further into the down of my heavy winter coat and cursed the Nebraska winter for being equally as cold as it was desolate.

              The farmland rolled away from the winding road, buried beneath several feet of iced over snow in every direction. Trees, planted for the privacy of farmers, lined the way home with empty branches and snowcapped tops. My breath puffed out in front of me, fogging up the frozen windshield and reminding me that the heater to my fifteen year old Jeep Cherokee remained unfixed.

              “Tristan!” I growled furiously into the frigid air. “Why I let you talk me into another movie I will never know!”

              There was no one there to hear my complaints, or sympathize with me against my best friend, but it felt comforting to make noise in an empty antique without a radio. Still, receiving not even a groan of empathy from the Jeep, I sat forward and peered into the impossible night ahead of me.

              I knew these roads; I had each curve and turn memorized. The distance between Tristan Shields’ house and my own was well traveled and practically sacred. Still, out in the country where street lights were for city-folk and the deer and the antelope tended to play, their familiar territory became a dangerous, never-ending expanse of nerves and tension.

              Even in summer, unless the Stars and moon were bright and friendly, the country roads of the Nebraska farmland became shrouded in a heavy obscurity, the headlights of the best of cars mapping out the only visibility in the heavy cloak of night and beyond those flickering lights the world seemed to drop off the edge of a cliff into nothingness. But now, in the dead of winter, with temperatures well below zero, the night around my old Jeep seemed to have a life of its own, oppressive and angry.  

              I cleared my throat and mentally determined to conquer the creeping feeling of being afraid. I bit down on my lower lip and clutched the steering wheel tighter. My breath came out in shaky puffs of air, reminding me it was more than the roads and the night that curdled the most terrified places of my heart. It was more than the late hour and bitter cold that forced me to shiver and shift my eyes suspiciously in every direction.

              It was the Darkness.

              Not the country night, or the moonless sky. But the real Darkness. The Darkness that moved secretly through this world and threatened every living, breathing creature. The darkness that slithered in unseen places and survived on the death and rotten things. The darkness that I would fight until my dying breath.

              But not tonight. Tonight I wasn’t ready. Tonight, I was still only sixteen, and my parents were still off saving the galaxy while I stayed home to finish high school with an elderly woman as my keeper.

              Something moved out of the corner of my eye. I could swear it. Swirling my head around, and keeping a steady hold on the steering wheel, I peered into the darkness, searching out the moving creature.

              Nothing.

              Nothing beyond the snow banks piled in the ditches and the swaying lifeless trees that were becoming sparser as I passed expansive fields blanketed under the white of winter.

              I turned my attention to the road again and with a numb hand, brushed my platinum blonde hair under the brim of my stocking cap. My fingers snapped with electricity and for a moment the cab of my Jeep was lit with the sparks of static. Only a few more miles till home. I could make it. There was nothing to be afraid of.

              But why did tonight feel so different?

              So dark?

              And then out of my peripheral vision I saw it move again. A swift shadow sliding effortlessly through the night, riding the whipping wind like a wave and dropping the frozen temperature several degrees lower. The pungent smell of rotting eggs drifted through the air.

              I didn’t have to turn my head this time to confirm. I knew it would be gone before my head could move in the right direction. Besides, they only existed in the peripheral, in the slight glances and far off places.

              I had seen them before. Since before I could talk my parents would tell me about them, explain to me of their existence, warn me of their danger. I saw them everywhere, even during the day I could spot them, because they were everywhere.

              Foot soldiers of a greater evil, sent to Earth, the last remaining inhabited planet, to prepare the way for their master. They were the evil in all things, the tyranny, the oppression, the hunger and violence. The Darkness. The force of wickedness that battled against the forces of good with one purpose in mind, to abolish the Light.

              I was the light. And because I was the answer to their destruction I hunkered further into my winter coat and braved the bone-chilling cold.

              It could be easy for me to warm up; even in a car with a broken heater it was the natural reaction of my body. I was born of the light, of the warmth. And to suffer against the natural elements was difficult enough, but the extra layer of malevolent chill became excruciatingly painful even in small doses.

              Still, they couldn’t know what I was. They couldn’t discover me after all this time. At least not yet. So I breathed in the frosty air, feeling the burn in my lungs and forced myself to push forward a few more miles. 

              My parents had worked so hard to hide my existence and to blend in with normal humanity that no matter how easy it would be to ease my pain, I had to fight against the elements. I was brought to Earth as a baby, with the sole intention to one day take over as Earth’s Protector. And so my parents had given up their positions as two of the greatest Warriors of their generation to raise an alien infant in the middle of farmland.

              And it was here, in Western Nebraska, that I waited for the day the Earth would become my charge, my responsibility.

              But that day wasn’t today. I had years before I was supposed to deal with that kind of duty!

              Years…. I promised myself.

              And as soon as I decided these were regular Shadows, which had no idea I was anything special, another one flittered across my peripheral. I swallowed the lump that had taken up an annoying residence in my throat and felt the passenger’s seat for my cell phone. I thought I laid it out before I started the car, but after blindly feeling around my worn upholstery decided it must still be hiding inside my over-sized bag.

              I strengthened the grip of my left hand and thrust my right hand into the black hole of all my important possessions, hoping to come out victorious in three seconds or less. Defender of the last planet or not, I was hopelessly unorganized. My purse was a cluttered mess of unknown objects and somewhere, hidden in the melee was my cell phone.

              I liked to believe I was brave. Or at least I would be one day. But tonight, all I wanted to do was call Annabelle, wake her up and forcefully let her know I would be home in ten minutes, just to hear her reassuring voice. I thought about calling Tristan too and demanding to know why he thought we needed to watch an entire trilogy all in one night!