The Warlock King (The Kings) (22 page)

He was so weak.

“It will pass,” Lalura said through gritted teeth. “And you have to fight it, Jason. I know you can.”

Jason found himself sitting up and wondered how he’d managed it.
Someone had cast something on him that he didn’t even have in his own repertoire.

Ruthlessly, he shoved aside the mantle of metal-heavy exhaustion and pain still settled over him and
scanned the room. Chloe was laying supine near the head of the table several yards away. Siobhan was kneeling beside her, as was Thanatos.

The Phantom King looked as though he’d been through a war, his suit utterly ruined, his
tattoos showing through, shimmering and shifting and angry. Even his queen looked a little worse for wear.

The rest of the
utterly destroyed, debris-scattered room was cleared out of sovereigns, Overseers, and queens but for Roman D’Angelo, who now came to stand beside Jason and Lalura.

Jason tried to stand. Roman automatically lent him a hand. Jason took it and got to his feet. Dizziness swept through him, vicious and nauseating. He clenched his teeth, swallowed down his rising bile, and stumbled to where Chloe lay.
He dropped once more to his knees beside her.

“
The clones are gone, most of the kings have gone back to their kingdoms, and Evie is safe,” Roman said. His voice had that deep rumble to it that only laced his words when he was being gripped in the fist of anger or hunger and his monster was in control.

Jason glanced up to take in Roman’s appearance. He was covered in blood.

But it was only seconds,
Jason thought, bewildered at the amount of wreckage that had been wrought.
How could this much damage have been done in seconds?

“What happened?” he demanded, looking back down at Chloe. Siobhan moved over, giving him room.

“Your copy got to her,” Thanatos explained grimly. “I think he drained her completely.”

Chloe’s skin had taken on the color of Chinese porcelain. Her lips were blue-gray and her long eyelashes rested against her cheeks like black on white. He had the most horrible feeling looking down on her – as if she were
hollow
–as if touching her would cause her to crack and shatter.

“He took the power you gave her
,” said Lalura, who slowly made her way to the small group.

Jason met her blue, blue gaze.

“And she will die if you don’t act fast,” she continued.

Jason felt a buzzing. He wondered if
he’d heard her correctly. His thoughts jumbled themselves, his memories running over each other. He’d given her his magic. He’d filled her up, enabling her to fall victim to the enemy’s draining in the first place. This was his fault.

The buzzing turned into a kind of roar that was punctuated by the beating of his heart as a new and unfamiliar terror blossomed inside of Jason. He’d never experienced the sensation before.

If she dies
, he thought hectically,
I can bring her back. I can bring her back
.

“
Not this time,” said Lalura as if he’d spoken aloud. She shook her head. “Not her. She’s special. You have to take her to the astral plane. It is composed of the same magic that she is.”

“
I can help you,” said Thanatos, who held out his hand.

Jason took it without hesitation. Both men placed their other hands on Chloe. Already, Jason was focusing his magic. “What happens then?” he asked, knowing even as he asked it that he probably wouldn’t want to hear the answer.

“Then you wait,” said Lalura as she began to fade from sight through an opening portal. “And hope.”

Jason
again gritted his teeth as the remnants of whatever had been cast upon him slowly, insidiously, slipped away and the world began to meld and move. Time changed, colors blended, and he, Thane, and Chloe shifted through space.

A few seconds later, their surroundings solidified once more, and Jason found he was gazing out at a night sky so filled with wondrous color, it looked like a science fiction painting.
It was unreal.

He looked down at Chloe, feeling suddenly as though any place as filled with magic as this
must
work on her. She was Stardust. And it was all around them.

Thanatos removed his hand
from Chloe’s arm and stood. “I have to return to the others.”

Jason nodded without looking up.
He willed Chloe’s eyelashes to move. He willed the color from the slowly spinning planets above them to infuse themselves into her cheeks.

“Good luck,” said Thane before Jason heard and felt his
portal swallow him up, leaving Jason and Chloe alone on the fantastical plane.

He
watched her and waited. Her chest was moving, but barely. The movement was so small and slow, it was almost not there at all. She made no sound, no soft breaths.

Jason leaned over to place his ear to her chest
. A heart fluttered somewhere deep inside, beating like a butterfly’s wings rather than a drum.

Jason’s dark magic writhed like a monster. It wanted blood. It wanted destruction and vengeance.
It made a sound inside of him, from where it waited in its dark and lonely cave. It was the most forlorn sound the universe had ever heard. Jason feared it, so he silenced it – and closed his eyes.

Then you wait… and hope.

Lalura’s words echoed through his mind. But they were helpless words, and he hated being helpless. He hated being out of control.

Jason
pulled off his dress jacket and draped it over Chloe’s slender form. Then he straightened and looked up at the swirling night sky.

The
plain flat horizon was back dropped with one ringed planet after another, their massive gaseous bodies striped in pinks and oranges and purples. A group of comets slowly traveled overhead, their tails shimmering like pixie dust. The stars throbbed with pulsing light, all ten billion of them. The overhead world was so full of life it was nearly claustrophobic.

It was also unfair.
It wasn’t right that the heavens could be dancing with life while their own daughter, this precious creature formed of their DNA, paled and faded in hopelessness.

With a rush of adrenaline-laced fury, Jason leapt to his feet
and roared at the night sky. Hearing his desperate call, his magic reared up and joined him, temporarily leaving his body like a massive black dragon. It bellowed a terrible bellow that shook the ground beneath Jason’s feet, spewing its hot, deadly power into everything around them.

Black lightning crashed into the ground in more than ten dozen places spanning the space of miles, coming out of nowhere and searing terrible holes into the plane. A vicious gale-force wind raced across the plain, echoing the bellow of the Warlock King’s fury. Portals flashed open and shut again like the
multiple eyes of a Lovecraftian monster. The ground split open, cracking in fissures that released steam into the air and crisscrossed the landscape like Frankenstein’s monster.

Jason
ignored it all and fell to his knees once more, his gaze locked on the cosmos. The stars yet pulsed – but they pulsed brighter now.

He glared at them, daring them to do their duty and save Chloe. Daring them to listen and see and act.

And as he watched, they also began to pulse
faster
.

Suddenly
, one of them fell, racing toward the plane below like a blazing meteorite. Jason held his breath.

It was joined by another.

Then another.

Jason’s fear
ratcheted up from general, miserable despair to life-saving, pulse-pounding terror. The chunks of frozen rock were going to hit him and Chloe. The astral plane was going to punish him for his insolence by pulverizing them.

As the
“stars” shot straight for him, he tried with all his might to transport himself and Chloe away from the plane again, but his magic would only go so far. It wrapped around them, vibrated with unused potential, and waited. It would not take them out of the astral plane. Something was forcing it to hesitate, holding it back.

The night grew brighter and brighter as the stars drew closer and closer.

Finally, there was no darkness left, and Jason was blinded. With nothing left for him to do, the warlock sovereign made a desperate sound and pressed himself protectively over Chloe’s limp form.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

They were whispering to her; she could hear them all around her, voices like angels or children. They laughed, and it tinkled like wind chimes and shifting crystals. They knew her name, an old name, a name from a time before this – before
all
of this. They’d been friends then.

They’d p
layed together as children.

Chloe tried to answer them
and let them know she’d heard, but her own voice was trapped within herself like a firefly in a jar. The jar was cold… and it was dying.

But
she could hear the joyous voices coming closer. The world brightened through the curtains of her eyelids. The air grew more heated.

And then
they enveloped her. Her skin warmed as if she’d been frozen and was now dreamily languishing in a bucket of blankets fresh from the dryer. It tingled as if it had been brittle and cracking but was now healed. She felt herself floating, rising – and the voices were now within her.

Remember, Chloe Septeran
, they said.
Remember, Chloe of the Twenty-Eight. Remember who you are. Be known by us.

Chloe felt the cold and hard emptiness of her body being brought back to
malleable, vibrant life. Little by little, it was infused with a profound energy, with the very substance of the stars. She sensed a flame building inside of her where there had been only an ember of vitality before. It grew and expanded, filling each molecule of her physical form, infusing each space in-between each living cell with the essence of what she had once been, until she was being lovingly consumed by its reconstructive inferno.

I knew it
, she thought, laughing on the inside just as the others did. She had always known that coming here would make her better. She knew where she was. This vast, expansive, untouchable plane was composed of the same cosmogonic and unbounded stuff that she was made of.

The a
stral plane.

If only she’d had the courage to find a way to come here years ago.

You are the only Chloe Septeran
, the voices told her.
Remember this truth.

And then she was falling.
The warmth of her brethren stars, space, and dark matter faded but for the gift they had left within her. She was moving through both time and the infinite voids of space, being pulled from the astral plane and into another one.

She hated to leave.

But she’d been there long enough. She was whole now. She was
more
than whole. She was
different
.

She was
Chloe Septeran – as she had been thousands of years ago.

*****

Jason gasped and rose up off Chloe’s body as one of the stars shot straight underneath him and into her side to infiltrate her sleeping form. Briefly, she was infused with light. It shone from beneath her eyelids and caused her skin to glow. Then it faded into a shimmering blackness, dark but radiant. Potent.

Dark matter
, he realized.

A split moment later, a second star was entering her, shifting from brilliant white to sparkling black. And a third.

Jason could do nothing to stop
the procession. He didn’t even know if he wanted to try. He could scarcely believe what he was witnessing. He looked up briefly, his eyes wide, his heart stunned to see them coming from all around him.

The very sk
y was falling for Chloe.

Stars circled and swirled down from every a
ngle, pixie-dusting their dazzling ways across the night to tumble in magnificence toward Chloe’s body. One after another they shot into her, causing her to be illuminated from within in faster succession.

At length, Chlo
e’s glowing form rose from the ground. Jason could almost swear he heard voices –
music
even – as she turned in place, rays of galaxy glimmer radiating out from her in a wondrous display.

This lasted some indeterminate length of time; Jason could not tell how long it had been. He was too fa
scinated.

He was t
oo much in love.

Chloe Septeran was perhaps the most magnifi
cent creature in the universe. She was unique, no matter what the king clones had thought they’d accomplished. There was no one like this creature here floating before him, her soul infused with the most archaic, most primordial kind of magic.

And she was
his
.