The Shadow King (13 page)

The coffee, the cup, and the tiny butterflies vanished.

Now you need to do the same
, she thought.
You need to vanish
. She nodded at her own reasoning, gave the coffee shop a quick once-over, and as sirens began to sound in the distance, she stepped into the hall that led to the co-ed bathrooms. Since continuing on her journey had been temporarily stalled, Violet summoned a portal that did
not
lead to the Dark, and stepped hastily inside.

When she stepped back out a few moments later, it was to find visitors waiting for her in her apartment living room. Lalura Chantelle and Poppy were both there, standing side by side to watch as she exited the portal.

She was surprised, but overcame it enough to prepare to formally greet her teacher – however, something on their faces brought her up short. Dread bloomed in her chest. “What’s going on?” she asked warily.

“Vi, you have to come with us,” said Poppy gravely, stepping forward. “Almost every mage in every faction is being called together. Something terrible has happened.”

*****

He sensed it while he was inside the portal. Something un-nameable
shifted
as he moved through the darkness, and for a split second, it seemed ultra-dimensional, as if it had been fractured around him. The next moment, it pulled together again, but he was already unsettled by that point. When he stepped out of the shadows and into the meeting room, he was expecting something bad.

But he wasn’t expecting this.

The table was devoid of women. The queens were elsewhere, and that alone made Keeran feel very circumspect. It had been agreed from the very beginning that the women had as much right to the table as the men, if not more so. On the chess board, it was the queen who held all the power, and here, in this mish mash of worlds and ways, it appeared as if the same rule held true.

However, the women were gone. Three seats of the thirteen that remained around the table were empty. One was his. Another rested devoid of the man who normally occupied it, Jason Alberich. Ten of the chairs were filled with silent men wearing stern expressions.

And the last chair had been wrapped with a black ribbon.

Oh shit.

“Alberich is tending to a critical affair at the moment,” said D’Angelo. His voice sounded strained. It reminded Keeran of a rubber band that had been pulled a touch too tight. “We waited until the last to call you in, Pitch. We know you are busy with something vital as well.” His tone was sincere in this respect, for nothing was more important to this group than securing their queens. Yet, there was that thirteenth empty chair – the one with the ribbon around it.

That was the general knowledge floating around the room. It was impossible to ignore, that knowledge that one of the seats amongst them was wrapped in mourning.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Keeran didn’t feel like waiting. He didn’t want to have to be told in circling, flowery words that danced around the bush. He just wanted to know. “Mason is dead.”

He knew it was true even when he said it. So, maybe he didn’t need them to confirm it for him after all.

That’s
what he’d felt in the portal in the shadows. It was the after-effects, the shockwave of the murder of one of the Thirteen Kings, splitting the fabric of the multiverse ever so slightly.

D’Angelo didn’t say anything. Perhaps he couldn’t. He was the king of kings, the one who sat at the head of the table. He’d lost one of his own.

But Keeran would damn well speak. “Tell me who did it.”

“The Entity,” said the Winter King, who had also been one to speak when others would not. That was the way of cold like his – it sliced clean and true, and could cut clear to the bone. “But that’s not the worst of it.”

“They’re
all
gone,” said Thanatos, the Phantom King. He looked fittingly white as a ghost and entirely troubled. In a voice that held the repercussions of a thousand slaughtered souls, he said, “Every last gargoyle on the planet is dead.”

Chapter Seventeen

The scene Violet arrived into was surreal. She stepped hurriedly out of the portal, sensing Poppy and Lalura coming through after her. But when she looked around, she became confused on several levels.

The field they stood in stretched to the horizon and was dotted with a multitude of colorfully banded hills. The hills were multi-hued rock with layers of minerals that seemed to denote time periods and weather patterns. The ground of the field was littered with scrub brush and desert weeds. A lonely breeze blew through the grasses, jostling Violet’s hair and filling her with a deep sense of forlorn desolation.

Other than the sound of that wind, it was quiet.

“Where are we?”

“Wheeler County, Oregon,” said Poppy, who stepped up beside her. “This is the Painted Hills.”

Lalura took up the reigns next, moving past the both of them to stand a few feet away, a solitary figure, small and hunched, yet imposing and otherworldly. The wind died down, as if it knew that she was about to speak. In her ancient, scratchy voice, she said, “This is where they came to die.”

She glanced at them over her shoulder.

“Who did?” Violet asked. But Lalura didn’t answer.

Just then, Violet saw something that explained everything, and an answer became unnecessary. Up ahead, approximately twenty to thirty feet away, one of the small hills
moved
. It shifted, causing sand to tumble from its upper layers to land in piles around its base. When it did, Violet noticed the facial features – eyes and a nose, the remnants of a mouth. Darker colored layers that were once hair. A bump that was an arm. A foot.

A person.

“The gargoyles,” said Poppy, voicing the thoughts already blossoming in Violet’s mind. “They were cursed by the Entity.”

Violet blinked and turned to her. “What?” She was so confused. “
All
of them?”

Poppy nodded, her face ashen.

“How?
Why
?” Violet shook her head. How could one simple curse strike an entire nation of beings like genocide? How could it work in mere hours to destroy every last one of them? Who could possibly do that? And why hadn’t she found out about this sooner? Why hadn’t someone been able to stop it?

Lalura turned to face them, and Violet looked to her with desperate eyes.

“The Painted Hills have always been one of the resting places of Gargoyles,” she said softly. “It is their blood that makes the earth red. Their tears that turn it blue.” She moved forward, drawing closer. “At just after six o’clock this afternoon, Roman D’Angelo received a message from Mason Rushmore, the Gargoyle King. However, the message was incomplete.”

She stopped and gestured to the hills. Now that Violet knew what to look for, she could see that almost
all
of them were moving in some way; hills both large and small shifted as they disintegrated into the rubble they would ever after remain.

“It took mere minutes for them to begin traveling here to die,” Lalura said gravely.

“If he can commit genocide on this scale, this fast, imagine what he can do to the rest of us,” said Poppy, her voice filled with anxiety and despair. She sounded as desperate and hollow as Violet’s heart felt. But that hollow feeling made Violet
angry
, not sad – and that damn magic she’d absorbed by casting Lovelace’s spell wanted revenge.

“Lady Lalura, you brought us here for a reason,” she said, perhaps speaking a little too harshly or a little too loud considering the one she was speaking to. But she couldn’t stop herself. The hollow sensation was also edged with pain. “What can
we
do if they’re all
dead
?” She didn’t want to talk about the Entity. She needed to stop this – to
save
them – before it was too late and they really
were
all dead. “Are there any left? Any at
all
?”

“No, child,” Lalura said, turning to face her again. “But we need your warlock power, Violet. Because we believe that with enough combined magic of that kind, we might be able to work against the Entity’s curse just enough to – ”

Violet finished her sentence right along with her. “Bring some of them back.”

Just after they said this, the atmosphere above the field changed. It charged with familiar magic, and Violet watched as portal after portal opened up, and warlock after warlock stepped out into the valley.

Accompanying the warlocks were mages Violet recognized. Not all of them practiced the art of dark magic, but all of them possessed useful skills of their own. The Healer was there, Dannai Caige, otherwise known as “Danny.” Another healer and a queen to boot was also there, Diana Chroi the Goblin Queen. The herald of her coven, Imani Zareb, stepped out of a portal. Violet recognized Siobhan, the Phantom Queen – she
was
a warlock.

One after another, portal opened up and shut again, depositing mages into the field of painted, fallen monuments. Soon, the entire valley was brimming with magic users.

Jason Alberich, the king of the warlocks, was the last to arrive. He turned, waved his portal away, and like a wind-swept tower of black, he approached Lalura. “We should begin.”

Lalura nodded grimly. “Light a fire.”

Two hours later, every warlock in the magical world working together had managed to bring a mere five gargoyles back to tentative life. They were all children, as it seemed that with children, there was more life in them to rekindle to start with. However, gargoyles were built on magic in and of itself, formed of the very soil that had absorbed so much magic, life was literally born of it. It was this magic that the Entity had attacked, filled with evil, and destroyed from the inside out. It was this magic that the warlocks had to fight against in order to bring the children back.

It had taken everything they’d had to give, and more. They’d had to pool their power, enhance it with healing ability, and work some of the oldest spells known. It had barely worked.

And Violet had never felt worse in her life.

For some reason, the warlock magic inside her didn’t
want
to help bring someone back to life, even though it was warlock power and warlock power alone that could perform the resurrection spell. The force she was carrying didn’t
want
to waste itself on someone else’s well-being. It was a kind of magic that wanted vengeance, wanted to attack, wanted to cause harm. It was Lovelace’s magic, potent and despicable, deadly and uncaring.

She’d forced it out of herself anyway, using every ounce of willpower she’d possessed, and then some.

As she leaned against one of the fallen gargoyle’s painted hills and wiped her brow, she looked at the five little ones who clung nervously to Lalura, Dannai Caige, and others who were good with children, such as Lily Kane. And she knew it had been worth it. Her power had been the strongest of all the warlocks’ – even Alberich’s. Violet would never forget the look on his face when she’d begun displaying it.

And once she’d finally demanded that it fucking
do
what it was capable of doing, it had infused all five tiny lumps of painted dirt with the initial spark that rekindled their existences and made them into living, breathing beings.

Other mages had rushed forward to place medallions around their tiny necks, at the ends of which dangled crystal phylacteries, the stones that would absorb the life given by the spell and the nearby bonfire. Alberich and the other warlocks had taken over from there, filling those crystal phylacteries with life-light and transferring it into their bodies. Then Lalura, in her exactingly powerful manner, had done away with the phylacteries altogether, leaving the gargoyles’ brand new lives in their own little hands.

Now the deed was done, and there were other tasks at hand, such as taking care of the children, recovering from the trauma, and protecting the remaining kings and their nations from the terrifyingly tremendous clout of the
Entity
.

The bonfire that had been burning bright nearby had become nothing more than quickly-dwindling embers.

And the wind that blew hollow through the Painted Hills picked up ashes and blew them into the sky, where they mixed with the dust of fallen gargoyles.

Chapter Eighteen

“I think you crossed a line, Vi,” Violet whispered half-jokingly to herself, since there was no one around her to hear her. She was trying to make light of the situation, but her head was swimming and felt far too insubstantial on her shoulders. Her fingers and toes were tingling dangerously. And there was a seed of something left within her that was quickly unfurling, its slimy tendrils climbing up the walls of her consciousness.

She had assumed that with the hustle and bustle of the spell cleanup and the new children to care for, no one would notice her standing alone to the side, trying desperately to gather herself. But she was wrong.

Jason Alberich approached her, and she glanced up at him before quickly looking away again. Making eye contact with the Warlock King was uncomfortable, and for some reason, it was especially so now that she was completely devoid of warlock magic of her own. It pissed her off that he was about to disturb her privacy. She just wanted to be alone.