The Warlock King (The Kings) (13 page)

However, just as the Haunted Mansion had been closed down during her visit to Disneyland, the antique parlor car was unavailable for her train ride. Due to a broken window, it had
been temporarily replaced with a second dining car. Once more, only sleeper passengers had access to it, but it was nothing special. It consisted of a few seats looking out the tall partial-ceiling windows and a few dining tables.

Chloe tried to brush off the mild stroke of bad luck. At least she was on a train. This might be the last bit of freedom she ever experienced, and she would much rather have spent it on a train than on an airplane.

The Coast Starlight was supposed to run through some truly gorgeous territory; through the San Fernando Valley, up along the seashore and Santa Barbara, then inland through San Luis Obispo and a host of small mining towns with crumbling missions and weathered monuments. By morning, they would be crossing into Oregon, which meant tall pines, snow-capped Cascade Mountains, and bottomless lakes.

At the moment, Chloe
sat alone at one of the tables in the substitute parlor car, her gaze on the changing scenery beyond the window, three hours into the ride. Her Diet Pepsi had become a small amount of brown watery liquid among tiny slivers of ice. She was thirsty for a fresh drink, but was admittedly a little irritated that she had to buy them despite the fact that she’d paid full sleeper prices and was denied the antique parlor car. The least they could do to make up for the inconvenience was spot them a few cans of soda. It wasn’t that she didn’t have the money. It was the principle of the thing.

After a few minutes, someone made an announcement that lunch orders would be taken shortly. A female Amtrak employee came through the parlor car dressed in the usual blue uniform, her thick black hair pulled into a tight bun. She was a distinctly beautiful woman, her skin porcelain,
and her eyes large and dark, if her lips did look a tad pale. She seemed tired to Chloe; that was the initial sensation she picked up from her.

The woman took the
orders from passengers at the first two tables in the parlor car and then moved on to Chloe.

She looked directly at Chloe, meeting her gaze, and Chloe was struck with a sudden urge to look away. Instead, she tried to smile at her. “Is there a vegetarian option available?”

The employee, whose nametag read “Lia,” pursed her lips and straightened a little in obvious agitation. “For a vegetarian meal, you’ll have to eat in the dining car.” At that, she turned crisply away and walked down the aisle to the next few passengers.

Chl
oe watched her go. The woman’s intensified bad mood radiated out from her like ripples in a pond, abrading Chloe’s nerve endings. She took a deep breath as the woman finally left the car and the doors closed behind her.

Chloe was unsettled by the brief encounter. She didn’t know why. Some people were just rude sometimes. People had stories to them, each and every one of them. Some of those stories were hard and some were sad and some would most certainly leave a person in a bad mood. Whatever the employee’s story was, Chloe didn’t know it, so she shouldn’t judge.

But she felt discombobulated nonetheless.

Well I guess I’d better figure out how to eat while I’m here
, she thought as she rose from her seat at the parlor car table and made her way back toward the sleeper cars.

*****

Six hours later, the sun was setting on one side of the train. The terrain beyond the rails had changed drastically. They were no longer anywhere near the coast, but were instead trudging through tall woods and dropping temperatures.

Chloe had learned a lot in the space of those six hours.
One of the friendlier attendants had informed her that due to a railroad act from the early nineteen hundreds, Amtrak employees were allowed only four hours of sleep every night. Also, some employees were allowed only two days off and kept on for anywhere from eight to ten days in-between.

The system was based on seniority
. Many years under an employee’s belt would allow them to choose better “runs,” which meant they could take a route affording more time off and fewer days on. But a newbie could be worked as many as four hundred hours a month. They would have money coming out of their ears, but neither the time nor energy to spend it.

Now the car attendant’s surliness earlier that day was a little easier for Chloe to understand. One might argue that if a person couldn’t handle those kinds of hours,
they should look for work elsewhere. But sometimes a job was a job, and other work wasn’t available. You took what you could get.

Chloe had just finished
brushing her teeth and showering in the tiny convertible shower/toilet area and was pulling on a fresh pair of jeans when the conductor made the announcement that they would need to make an unscheduled stop due to being stuck behind a freight train. Chloe bent over, towel-dried her hair, and ran her hands through it. Then she sat down and pulled on fresh socks and her favorite pair of Fiorentini and Baker boots.

When she’d finished, she relaxed against the seat back and pulled the curtains of her car aside so she could stare out the window.

Nothing but trees greeted her vision. She had no idea where they were.

“It is time, Chloe of the Twenty-Eight.”

Chloe jumped in her seat, gasping hard as shock ramrodded through her. The voice seemed to have come from directly in front of her, but there was no one else in the small sleeper car. She was alone.

“All aboard!” the same
eerie voice hollered, and Chloe leapt to her feet. Her heart raced, her breathing came in short, heavy gasps, and her eyes skirted the small car around her, searching in fear.

“Who are you?” she questioned. “
Where
are you?”

She stopped when she noticed something moving. The floor-to-ceiling length mirror that backed the connecting door between her suite and the next was rippling like water. Chloe froze and stared at it. Her own reflection was not there. Instead, a swirling mass of darkness and light grew to engulf the rectangle of the looking glass.

An image of the ancient Akyri from Disneyland appeared in its dark depths.

“DaVinci?” Chloe
whispered.

But DaVinci only began to fade back out, calling “All aboard!” once more before disappearing entirely.

Chloe’s own reflection took its place. She ran her hands over her face. “Maybe I’m asleep,” she said. “Maybe this is a dream.”

She dropped
her hands and looked around the room. Everything certainly
seemed
real. Dreams were usually much more blurry than this. “Maybe I’m going crazy,” she whispered. “Maybe I’m finally….” She swallowed hard again, realizing it was harder to say than she would have thought. “
Dying
.”

But she didn’t feel like she was dying either. Of course, Akyri didn’t get sick or old – other than DaVinci. Instead, they simply popped out of existence one day never to return.

Maybe her time was coming up. Maybe that was what the image of DaVinci had meant by,
“It is time.”

“Not quite, lovely.”

Chloe whirled around to face the door of her car. It had come unlatched and open and she hadn’t even noticed it. A man now stood there in its frame. She didn’t recognize him, but due to the familiar sensations coming off of him, Chloe knew right away what he was. He was an Offspring – a child born of a warlock and an Akyri.

Otherwise known as a
vampire
.

His enormous height, rugged good looks, glowing red eyes, the warlock magic moving through him, and the fangs he showed her when he smiled cinched it.

“And fresh out of the shower too,” he said. “My luck seems to have turned. Your presence is desired by my master, little queen.” He came forward into the cabin, forcing Chloe to bump against the folded table behind her as she retreated. “He’s guessing you taste like falling stars.”

Chloe’s stomach felt like
it was boiling lead. Her vision tunneled and her legs would move no further. Not that it mattered. There was nowhere for her to go.

“Fr
om the scent of you, I’m guessing he’s right.” The vampire’s smile turned blatantly hungry. “Maybe he’ll consider sharing.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,
” came a second voice – a split second before the vampire was shoved violently into the car. Chloe barely managed to sidestep the two men who came tumbling toward her, a towering mass of muscle and snarls.

She dodged, shoving herself up against the mirrored wall, eyes wide, heart pounding as the vampire turned on his attacker, whom Chloe vaguely recognized.

A werewolf
, she thought. And a big one.

She was proved right a second later as the werewolf, a black man with glowing gold eyes, was enveloped in a bright white flash, temporarily blinding Chloe. She knew it was a transformation flash, and when she lowered her arm again, a massive wolf nearly the size of a horse had his fangs around the vampire’s throat.

Chloe didn’t waste time. She lunged past the two fighting creatures, shot through the door, and sprinted down the hall beyond.

Chapter
Fifteen

The Coast Starlight lurched to the right, knocking Chloe off balance. She slammed roughly into the wall to her left. The metal doorframe
of another sleeping room dug into her upper arm, bruising it instantly. She ignored the pain, trying to catch her balance.

The train rocked violently, seeming
to have picked up an exorbitant amount of speed. Chloe hurried to get her feet under her, stumbled down the remaining hallway of the sleeper car, and jammed her hand against the large black panel that electronically opened the first set of doors between the cars.

She squeezed through them as soon as the opening was wide enough, noticed the ground speeding away from under the gaps between the linked cars, and then slammed her hand against the second black panel to allow her access to the next car.

As soon as it opened, Chloe took a few running steps through – and then stopped in her tracks. “Holy….” Her voice trailed away.

The parlor car had been totaled, ravaged by what looked like a terrible struggle. White
tablecloths had been tossed about, some bearing scorch marks where they lay smoldering in the aisle or haphazardly draped over what few surfaces remained upright.

Seats and tables had been ripped from their metal casings and upheaved, tossed clear a
cross the car and left overturned where they landed. The rails beneath the car screeched by through massive holes that had been blown in the floor. Every tall viewing window was shattered.

The wind whipped through the remains of the car, sending Chloe’s hair flying. She roughly brushed it out of her eyes and tried to get a handle on what it was she was seeing.

Remnants of magic crackled along the metal in the room. Sparks ignited dangerously from torn wiring, and the smell of sickly sweet alcohol wafted toward her despite the car’s exposure to the elements. The bar was still standing, but its store of alcohol seemed to have been destroyed in some explosion.

It was cold, too. The pine trees had grown taller and thicker and the buildings more sparse. The train had turned away from the coast and was now inland at a higher elevation.

Chloe clenched her teeth tightly and lurched forward, grabbing on to whatever stable seat or table remains she could manage in order to make her way across the car’s Swiss-cheesed remains. Off-handedly, she realized she was now grateful the antique parlor car had been replaced. It would have been destroyed otherwise. By
what
, she didn’t know, but she was guessing it had something to do with the werewolf and vampire now duking it out in her room.

She was
halfway across the car when the doors at the other end slid open. Chloe stopped.

A second vampire stepped through the doors toward her, pulling Chloe’s stomach into her throat and stilling the air in her lungs. She froze, eyes wide, body held in terror.

“Chloe, run!” came a sudden command from behind the vampire. It was a female voice.

The vampire bared his fangs, growled a few magic
words, and a spell rent the air, hurtling toward Chloe with wicked intent. Chloe ducked, knowing it would do no good. Magic didn’t work that way. It was like a heat-seeking missile; there was no ducking.

Just before the spell would have struck her
and she was sensing the wave rising and ready to crash, there was a new presence beside her. It was a solid, larger than life, cold, hard and cruel kind of force – and she recognized it at once. This new presence brought the offending spell to a sudden, inarguable stop.

Jason
shielded her, stepping in front of her to raise his arm like a weapon. Sparkling, whirling, impossible magic filled the already destroyed car.

There was a roar of rage or pain, and Chloe closed her eyes as two opposing forces turned the air to tiny razor-sharp, erratic waves that abraded her nerve endings like nails on a chalkboard.

An explosion came next. It reminded Chloe of a grill alighting on an entire bottle of lighter fluid. She could feel the heat of a fire against her skin, and she backpedalled, turning her face away from the heat source.