The Warlock King (The Kings) (18 page)

She put the papers down and sifted through some others, careful not to disturb their order or tear or bend anything. Eventually, she’d more or less pieced together what they all meant.

The realization was profound.

Jason Alberich had been abandoned by his parents as a baby. He’d been found by some bystander, brought in to the hospital, and treated for a plethora of maladies that no child should ever suffer, especially by that tender, innocent age.

Years later, Lalura had adopted him. Perhaps she’d seen something in him or recognized something that others couldn’t. Maybe his magic had called out to her. There were a thousand possibilities. But in the end, Jason Alberich had gone from a home of hatred and neglect to one of celebrated wisdom and care. There was no greater witch than Lalura Chantelle.

Chloe again turned away from the contents of the chest. Her eyes skimmed over the books on the bookshelf. Now she knew who had given Jason the children’s books.
She wondered whether those had been the first gifts Lalura had ever given him. Had she taught him to read, in fact?

She
also knew who had given him the Yule and Halloween cards that were tucked away in the chest.

She knew why Jason had a softer side, if you could call it that. It was a side that might like baseball or building model rocket ships. And she knew why he had a harder side – one that might feel anger and resentment, or the desperate need to maintain
absolute control.

She’d put the puzzle together, and found an image of a man more supremely dimensional than anyone had ever bothered to imagine.

Chapter
Twenty-One

Not anyone
, Chloe Septeran
, thought Lalura.
Not quite
.

She opened her eyes, smiling as she left the vision.
She had taken a spiritual jaunt, journeying into the ether to check up on the young Akyri. It was rare for her to have such an urge. She normally relied upon the visions that came to her of their own accord. But a good occasional walk did the soul as much good as it did the body.

Lalura had often wondered
what Jason had done with some of the things she’d given him over the years – the books, the model rocket they’d built together, the crystal pen she’d gifted him when he started wanting to write his own spells….

Now she knew.

And so did Chloe Septeran, the future Warlock Queen.

Lalura nodded to herself, just once, and pushed away from the table. Her tea had grown cold anyway. She waved it away and reached instead for her cane. Then she made her way across the small, cozy,
fire lit room of her English cottage, magically opening the front door on the way.

She had a meeting to get to.

*****

There was an eerie
quality to the night in the Phantom King’s realm. The road through its endless desert was a dirt track a million miles long that sliced silently across a vastness nearly unmarred.

Siobhan held tightly to the man in front of her on the
bike. His speed and skill forced her to move in close. Her fingers curled through the material of his t-shirt and pressed against the taut ridges of his midsection. Siobhan peeked over his broad shoulder to see his fingers manipulate the clutch, his other hand twisting back where it was wrapped solidly around the handlebar of his bike. The scent of leather and soap wafted over her, as did the dust and heat kicked up by the relentless drive of the motorcycle’s tires.

Siobhan looked back out over the dark horiz
on. It was a line of black against a backdrop of purple-blue that was speckled with the diamonds of distant stars. Up ahead, two shadows loomed on the right. She watched them with a detached interest. They were a fixture of the land, ever changing and always slightly different.

As they drew nearer, the shapes became recognizable:  A Cadillac from the sixties, its front
right tire flat, and beside it – a guillotine.

Siobhan’s grip tightened around the driver’s waist
.

As if he knew she needed the extra touch,
he removed his left hand from the handlebar of the bike and placed it over hers.

Every few minutes, the two riders would pass by some relic on the road. It was inevitably dust-covered, sun-bleached, bent
and faded, used and forgotten. It might be a car from 1952, or a soda-dispensing machine from the same era. Perhaps it was a tractor from the early forties or a tank from World War I. At times, there were older items. Siobhan had seen everything from a medieval wagon cart to a Renaissance era piano – to a hanging tree, its rope swaying ominously in an unseen breeze.

They were
remnants
.

They were as much phantoms of what they
had once been as were the Anime that inhabited the realm. She and her king would ride by, the roar of their engine almost an echo to the voiceless music of memories, and the objects would remain still where they rested, dots on an otherwise empty canvas.

She would pass them by, watching over her shoulder as they slowly – ever so slowly – faded once more
out of sight.

No one had ever claimed the Phantom King’s job was an ea
sy one. He was the greeter and gatekeeper of those who had died unnatural deaths. There was no more solitary and mournful position in existence.

Siobhan was learning that being the queen had its doleful moments as well.

Here in this realm, she had a tie to yesterday that few others neither possessed nor could understand. She literally saw the world as if it had been aged in sepia, and the emotion that was attached to this image
felt
sepiad too. It was a bereft sensation, as if she’d been left on a Scottish moor in the midst of a mournful tune and a cold wind.

Everything was
echoes
. They were so silent, they screamed.

It would have driven an ordinary person mad. Hell
, some days she thought it might have driven her mad too – if it hadn’t been for Thanatos.

From where he
controlled the bike in front of her, Thane gave her hand a gentle squeeze, drawing her attention back to the road ahead. On the left loomed another shadowy outline. This one looked promising.

Thane slowed the bike, allowing her a closer look as they drew nearer. She smiled.
Perfect
, she thought.

She gave him the hand signal to stop the
bike, and Thane slowed to a halt directly in front of a faded once-black 1968 Shelby GT500KR Fastback.

She had a thing for Fastbacks
, and in that year it was more rare to have the fastback rather than the convertible roof. The four-speed car was a gem. “It’s perfect,” she repeated, this time aloud. She slid her arm around her Thane’s chest, using his body as a brace while she gracefully dismounted the back of the bike. Any excuse to hold him.

He dismounted next, a secret smile on his unshaven, strong-jawed face. She saw a flash of silver, his eyes reflected in the moonlight.
Something shimmered for a moment on his left bicep, the shape of a dragon perhaps, slithering for a fraction of a second before it settled in as a tattoo once more.

Thane kicked down the
motorcycle’s stand and turned to face her.

“Think you can fix it
up?” Siobhan asked, knowing that the question was rhetorical at best. Thane could fix anything. But she wanted to hear him say it. The car was too good. It was a Shelby, and such vehicles rarely came along in the Phantom King’s realm. They would have had to die “unnatural deaths,” and for a car, that meant an accident.

A Shelby was
rarely treated with such a lack of care. It was too loved by its owner and too expensive to be purchased by twenty-year-old speed demons suffering from hormonal overfeed and a tragic lack of common sense.

But here was one now.

Thane didn’t bother answering her question. Instead, he smiled a beautiful, fanged smile and shook his head as if in wonder. “She really is perfect for you.”

Siobhan felt a blush creep up and was a little bewildered by it.

“
He
,” she corrected, matching his smile even as her eyes yearned to stray down the length of his chest. She somehow managed to appear nonchalant. “
He
really is perfect.” She willfully turned away from the king to look over the remains of the car in front of her. “And I couldn’t agree more.”

The car had a crunched
right front fender, four flat tires, a dented hood, and every window was shattered. It was aged a good fifty years, its paint worn through and rusted, its base metals shining through dings and scratches. And it was still gorgeous. She eyed it from front to back and saw it in her mind as it had once been. She imagined the roar of its engine, the gleam of its gloss beneath a streetlight, and the dust that she would leave behind when she floored the pedal.

She’d always wanted a Shelby.

Carefully, she leaned close to the vehicle and peered through the window. It was a red and black interior, covered in dust and the scrapes of age. Nine thousand miles were all that had been racked up on the speedometer.
Wow
. “Perfect,” she whispered again.

“I couldn’t agree more,”
Thane said, speaking so close to her right ear that his breath caressed the curve of her neck.

Siobhan
looked back to see his eyes roving over her neck and décolletage. She straightened, bumping into the brick wall of him as she did so. She turned, but was caged between his strong arms as he leaned in, bracing one hand on either side of her.

The
metal curves of the car angled hard into her back as she pretended to shrink away. Thane’s predatory grin broadened, flashing his sharp, white fangs again. She was trapped.

He bent in close, and Siobhan could see the
quicksilver alight in his eyes. “What is she worth to you, little warlock?” he asked, his words whispering across her lips and scaring up a swirl of rampaging butterflies in her stomach.

“
He
,” she whispered back. Her voice shook just a little. Her legs felt weak. “What… is
he
worth?” she corrected.

Thane chuckled, the sound a delicious rumble that was a promise more than anything else.

Siobhan began to anticipate all sorts of delicious, dangerous scenarios – when a portal suddenly opened up behind Thane’s shoulder.

Thanatos blinked. Siobhan frowned.
Damn
, she thought.

The two straightened, Thane dropping his arms and turning, Siobhan stepping around him as the portal widened enough for a tall, handsome blonde man to step through.

“Steven?” Siobhan asked. Steven Lazarus was the Akyri King. He’d once been a detective for the Boston Police Department. He’d also been her boyfriend and lover, but that had been another day – and a lot had happened since then.

“Lazarus,” Thane greeted respectfully, as one king would another. But his expression was one of strained calm, and Siobhan knew
why. The kings had been forced to draw together much more regularly than any of them would have preferred lately. The realms of the supernatural were being turned on their ears.

Siobhan prepared for the inevitable. She took a deep
breath and focused on the spinning doorway behind her ex-boyfriend. Very few people could open a portal into Purgatory as Lazarus just had, and the only reason he could was because he’d once been dead himself. He’d been here before.

“I’m sorry, Thane,” Lazarus
sighed as the portal swirled, waiting behind him. The look on his face said everything.

“Another meeting,” Thane supplied, obviously having figured it out as well. Siobhan gently placed her hand on his bicep.
The tattoos beneath her fingers shifted once more, a mirror to the king’s inner emotions.

“Yes,” said Lazarus. “Only this time, you’re to bring Siobhan.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chloe froze as she was lowering the lid to Jason’s secret chest. The air had shifted
again, another breeze brushing through the long loose locks of her hair. She glanced over her shoulder, but still found herself to be alone.

The candles in the room flickered once more, this time more violently. A second later, they went out. Chloe’s eyes widened in the new darkness.
She dropped the lid noisily. Without ever having cast the spell before, she hastily shouted the few short words to a lighting spell, and the room was instantly awash in new illumination.

The light had an indistinct
source, but seemed to move with Chloe as she quickly stood and left the secret office to make her way back across the dungeon toward the winding staircase.

She tried not to glance again at the assortment of objects hanging on the far wall
in the dungeon as she passed through – but it was impossible not to. Fortunately, her light would only stretch so far, and most of them remained hidden in the shadows.