The Vampire King

  “To check on you, of course,” Lalura said easily. She hobbled forward a few steps, closing the distance between them. Jason held his ground, towering over her by a good two and a half feet. “You happened upon this position by accident, Jason. You’re a warlock, yes,” she said, taking a deep breath and sighing. “But you’re not Malachi Wraythe.”

  Jason’s lips twitched. “Am I supposed to take that as an insult or a compliment?” he asked softly. Despite his quiet tone, his words carried clearly in the cacophony of pedestrian and street traffic.

  “It’s meant as neither,” Lalura answered. “It’s an observation. Warlocks work in the confines of a darker kind of magic, Jason,” she said, her tone now becoming more personal. “You were thrust into position of king due to the fact that with Wraythe’s death, you now have more of this kind of power than any other living warlock. Why?” She shrugged. “I have no idea. You were born with it and that power is also growing, like everything else is these days.” She glanced around her, seemed to contemplate something else for a moment, and then turned back to Jason. “And perhaps it’s unimportant. The important thing is that you’re now in charge of a whole host of black magic users.” She paused, narrowed her stark blue gaze, and added, “And you’re about to meet the other kings.”

  “You know about the meeting then.”

  She just looked at him.

  Jason smiled a toothy smile. “Of course you do.”

  “Be forewarned, kiddo,” she told him then as she suddenly turned around and began to walk away through the crowd, her afforded bubble following her as she went. “There’s more of the supernatural in that one room than you’ll see in all the combined days of the rest of your long life.”

  Jason watched her go. For a second, the bubble of humanity closed in around her, and when it opened again, Lalura Chantelle was gone.

  Jason lifted his chin and took a deep breath through his nose. For a few seconds more, he stared at the spot where she had disappeared, considering her words. She was right, of course, but her warning had been unnecessary. Jason was well aware of what he was about to experience.

  The Thirteen were the Thirteen Kings. One or two of them, he was now familiar with, such as the Vampire King Roman D’Angelo. D’Angelo was arguably the most powerful member of the Thirteen, but it was arguable for good reason. Every King was notable in some manner.

  Jason also knew of the Akyri king, a fairly ruthless man with an insatiable appetite for women. There were a few he’d heard rumor of, such as the Shadow, Dragon, and Phantom Kings. There was talk of turning the Thirteen into the Fourteen by inviting the werewolf Overseer into the fold, but as of now, the issue was on the table, most likely due to the fact that Jesse Graves was not the kind of man to want to have anything to do with politics of any kind and had only happened upon the position of Overseer through a kind of bequeathing.

  The other Kings were complete strangers to Jason’s knowledge; he didn’t even know what they were kings of. This would be his first time meeting any of them personally. It was sure to be an experience he would never forget.

  The Warlock King took another deep breath and moved forward to continue his way down the busy sidewalk. The smell of curry, taxi exhaust, and trash bins was too strong to be completely drowned out by the cold. Jason’s ice-green eyes scanned the crowd as he moved; the magic in the air had him on high alert. His fingers twitched, his jaw tensed.

  And then he saw her.

  She was waving down a taxi, her long, slim form rushing to the curb to meet it half-way. He stopped in his tracks, his chest suddenly tight. She smiled a gorgeous, white-toothed smile at the taxi driver, tucked a stray lock of blond hair behind her right ear, and readjusted the purse over her shoulder as she opened the back door.

  It was a big purse; a travel bag. She was going away.

  The realization struck Jason with an inordinate amount of stress. A kind of separation anxiety burgeoned inside of him, both freezing him to the spot and filling him with the urge to rush forward, grab her by the arm, and send the taxi on its way.

  She paused, glanced over her shoulder just once, and her tropical sea foam eyes roved over the crowd until they met his.

  He caught her gaze and held it.

  At once, he recognized who – or rather what – she was. He’d never seen her before in his life, and yet even from this distance, he could feel the darkness in her aura. Outwardly, she was a stunning smile and long golden hair and eyes the color of the Pacific shore. But on the inside, she was hungry. She was an Akyri. She looked nothing like her kind normally looked; Akyri were usually dark from head to foot. But he recognized the signature on her soul nonetheless.

  He could tell it had been too long since she’d last fed from a warlock. Her own essence was weak, more mortal now than immortal. No Akyri that he’d ever known had gone as long as she apparently had without benefiting from the symbiotic relationship of a warlock’s power.

  And she was running away.

  As he stared her down, fear, palpable and real, crossed her beautiful features. He saw her swallow hard and watched her upper lip twitch with decided nervousness before she broke eye contact, spun on her heel, and hurried into the back of the cab, slamming the door shut behind her.

  Alarm shot through Jason.

  I can’t let her get away, he thought.

  But the taxi was pulling from the curb, and more importantly, if he went after her, he would be late for the meeting.

  Still, he was torn. Turning up late for the first time in front of the Thirteen would be all kinds of stupid. But the unique Akyri beauty with the ocean eyes was speeding away in a yellow car that blended with the thousands of other cars around it. And she wasn’t coming back.

  An unprecedented rage spurned by shocking panic surged through Jason’s mind, releasing tendrils of his magic. It was as if he had no control over it. Without premeditation, he infiltrated the receding taxi, whispering the words to a spell that would afford him glimpses of his target’s thoughts.

  … a warlock… but gone now… it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay…

  Jason’s green gaze narrowed, taking on an eerie, bright cast. He focused, concentrated, and shot deeper.

  Thoughts of escape, of sanctuary and solitude, skirted through her mind. She saw an ocean, much the same color as her eyes, and she saw an empty beach. Jason felt her lean against the back seat of the cab and exhale softly as she let her mind wander. The car was pulling out of his spell’s range now, but just before the connection was lost, he heard a single word, breathed like a mental sigh.

  Maui.

  Jason pulled his power back, straightened, and smiled slow, triumphant smile. He knew where she was going. It made no sense that he should care. He had no idea who she was. He hadn’t even pulled her name from her thoughts before leaving them. She was a stranger in every sense of the word but one. He knew she was an Akyri and he could feel the predatory pull of her flight. Men couldn’t help but want to chase what ran from them.

  Jason was no different. If anything, the dominant in him enjoyed it more. And the Akyri pulled at him as nothing ever had in his life. Not even Dannai had filled him with the urges he was experiencing just then, in that decisive moment.

  Run away, he thought tauntingly. Run, run as fast as you can.

  Still smiling, he turned back to the sidewalk and continued to make his way down the street.

  A few minutes later, the Akyri had taken a back seat in his mind to the situation directly at hand. Jason passed through the revolving glass doors that led to the marble-floored lobby beyond. He didn’t pause at the security desk and didn’t slow as he passed through the metal detectors. His magic pulsed around him, protecting him from the sight of both cameras and man as he made his way to the elevators and waved his hand over the button.

  At once, a set of gold-gilded double doors slid open. Jason stepped inside, once more waving his hand over the buttons on the inside. Every one of the dozens of floors lit up at once
. Jason’s gaze narrowed on them. He released a last pulse of his power, and a final button appeared beneath the others. It was unlabeled. Jason pressed it, it lit up a bright red, then orange, then yellow, until it had highlighted every color of the rainbow. And then Jason felt the elevator budge into gentle motion. It was impossible to tell whether it was headed up or down; the sensation was unlike that of a normal elevator.

  Jason moved to the center of the elevator, closed his eyes, and corralled his power around him. The elevator came to a stop, dinged softly, and the doors slid open once more. Jason opened his eyes.

  “Welcome, warlock,” came the most charismatic voice Jason had ever heard. Jason nodded respectfully and stepped off of the elevator.

  Chapter Five

  Evie blew out a frustrated sigh. She’d been sitting in the same spot, her fingers poised over the keyboard for at least five minutes. It never took her this long to figure out what to write. The words were there, swimming through her mind, but none of them would pair up properly. It was all nonsense.

  It didn’t help that the trio of teenage boys at the next table couldn’t stop describing the gore of some horror flick in vivid and very loud detail. That was distracting, to say the least. But it wasn’t just that.

  For the most part, the words in her head were nonsense because the last two days of her life had been a strange sort of blur. She didn’t drink or take recreational drugs, but she could have sworn that what she’d suffered was like a kind of blackout.

  One minute, she’d been crossing a parking lot to the grocery store – the next, she’d been waking up in her bed as usual, warm and comfortable and a little more sleepy than normal. She couldn't help but wonder whether the events of the night before had been a dream. Dreams often went unfinished. It would make sense.

  But since then, she’d been experiencing… flashes of things. They were like bits of a movie reel separated from the rest of the film and highlighted for only a second. She saw horses, or smelled and heard them anyway. There was wind. Holiday lights.

  And a man.

  Evie closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep, shaky breath, and sat back in her chair, dropping her arms. The man was all-encompassing.

  Evie had always had vivid dreams. Some of those dreams contained men in them, men so charismatic that they’d earned special places in her stories and books. Entire series had been plotted around some of them, in fact.

  But never before in her life had she dreamed of a man like this. He was quite literally inconceivable. She never could have made him up on the fly or on her own. Most frustrating of all was that despite the fact that this man was positively the most powerful persona she’d ever witnessed in a dream, she couldn’t seem to find the right way to bring him to life. She desperately wanted to use him for her writing. But instead… it seemed he was using her.

  “… No, man, the shit was coming out of her mouth then ‘cuz her throat was sewed on to that dude’s…”

  Crap, Evie thought furiously. She’d never been more tempted to tell someone to shut up. It was fortunate for the boys behind her that there were no children around; they would have afforded Evie the excuse she needed to get nasty.

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Almost at once, she saw him again. It was just a flash, but so powerful, so omnipresent, it honestly felt as though he was watching her then and there.

  If I could put people like him to paper, I’d sell like Malcolm Cole, she thought. The thriller writer, Malcolm Cole, had dominated the New York Times bestsellers list for years and probably would for years to come. His descriptions of people and places were so in-depth and three-dimensional, it was as if the author had experienced them himself. Evie would give just about anything to be as good as he was. As successful as he was.

  She bit her lip and racked her brain for more memory detail. But all she could come up with was what she witnessed in those strange, fast flashes. A gleaming, expensive wrist watch. The smell of high-end cologne or aftershave. He was taller than her – way taller. She could just barely make out the perception of his form in front of her, larger than life and… and…

  Evie made a small sound of frustration and ran a hard hand through her brown hair. It tangled almost at once, and she remembered that she hadn’t brushed it that morning.

  Ugh, I must be a mess, she thought. It wouldn’t have bothered her at home, but she’d gone to the trouble to leave the apartment this morning in order to ignore the building laundry and dishes and dust and focus on her writing. She needed to. She needed to get another book out soon. Her parents were depending on her and tax time was just around the corner. To say nothing of Christmas.

  She swore under her breath. Her stomach was knotting up and by the return expressions she was getting from the people around her at the coffee shop, she knew that the look on her face was probably pretty unpleasant. Either that or they were just as irritated by the teenage trio as she was.

  The no-kill shelter she volunteered at had lost a dog that morning. He’d been hit by a car and then brought into the shelter because the person who hit him couldn’t afford to take him to the vet. The shelter employed a vet, but the doctor didn’t make it on time. It hurt. Every time it happened, it hurt in a new way. Evie had been volunteering at the shelter for four years; she’d thought that by now she would be used to it. But nothing ever changed. She saw each animal as its own animal with its own soul and its own story to tell, and when it died, it was like reading the last page of that story.

  So many of those stories were far too short.

  It left her with a withered sensation, a little more helpless, a little less hopeful.

  She was also worried about her parents. Her truck had been acting up lately and she hadn’t been able to make it to Billings to help them out as she’d planned this week. Plane tickets were too expensive at this short a notice. Her mother had two medical appointments to make it to, and neither she nor her father could drive. Her youngest brother, Stephen, was a marine enlisted in Afghanistan. As a result, Evie had been forced to call upon her other brother to ask for help.

  Derek… was begrudging at best. And that worried Evie more than anything. The last thing she wanted was for her parents to feel that they were a burden to anyone. They’d taken good care of their kids for as long as they’d been capable of doing so. They deserved to be treated better in return.

  Her stomach knotted again, a cramp of anxiety, and Evie ran a fast hand over her face. It was flushed hot, though her body felt cold. Sugar, she thought. I need a sugar fix and some more coffee.

  The coffee shop always sold a plethora of uber unhealthy, ultra fattening dollops of sin that she normally turned a blind eye to and that would more than do the trick this time around. Evie grabbed her wallet out of her purse and headed to the front counter. Her pant size wasn’t going to thank her for this, but frankly, she couldn’t give a shit. She was really starting to stress, and as far as she was concerned stressed out people should be afforded an extra calorie allowance.

  *****

  Roman’s dark, dark eyes followed Evelynne Grace Farrow as she stood from her small round table and made her way to the coffee shop’s front counter. They tracked every tiny movement she made, each breath, every idiosyncratic twitch. They noted and memorized the angles of her chin, each emotion that crossed her face, every thought that skated across the spellbinding gold and brown of her eyes.

  He’d been watching her like this for two days. He’d been shadowing her ever since saving her life from a group of rogue horses in a parking lot outside of a mini-mall. He remained close by, always within a vampire’s arm’s reach. He could see her, but she couldn’t see him.

  Roman D’Angelo was hidden from the sights of humanity beneath the shield of a spell, and from the solitude of this invisibility, he played guardian angel to his unwitting target. He was transfixed by her. He couldn’t pull away.

  He’d been in her head, reading her thoughts like a fledgling vampire for the last forty-eight hours. It
wasn’t like him. Such invasive Offspring behavior was the kind carried out by the young and rash and power-crazed. Roman had been around for millennia. There was a kind of exhaustion that came with the wisdom of time. They went hand in hand. He no longer treated the mortals around him as lesser beings with fewer rights, and hadn’t for a long time, partly because he knew better – and partly because he was too tired to care.

  But Evie….

  She’d been thinking about him, remembering him, despite the immense strength of the spell that he had placed over her. It was unheard of for a human to work past such mental walls. Who was she that she could do such a thing? It boggled his mind, fanning the flames of his curiosity into a bonfire of obsession.

  Just now, she had been thinking about her parents. She was preoccupied with her responsibilities, saddened by the loss of one of the animals she helped care for, afraid for her parents’ safety, stressed over finances. The inner turmoil was causing her physical pain. He didn’t miss the way her heart rate sped up as a cramp claimed her abdomen and a headache developed behind her eyes. He wanted to interfere. With so little effort, he could fix everything and ease all of her worries away. At least, he could with anyone else. But if her resistance to his memory wipe was any indication, Evie was somehow at least partially immune to his powers.

  Amazing….

  Evie Farrow had shoved herself under his supernatural skin the moment she’d unwittingly come to him in his dreams. Her voice, her eyes, her very presence were confoundingly alluring. And then he’d held her above that parking lot two nights ago, and all reason had flown from his mind. He wasn’t himself now. She’d bewitched him.

  But she was a mortal, not a witch. He’d have known otherwise.

  At his command, Roman’s men had done their homework on her. What he hadn’t pulled from her mind, they’d discovered the old fashioned way. She was an “indie” published author with works in several different genres, and she hoped to one day win a Pulitzer.