To the normal human eye, there appeared to be nothing at all wrong with the house. The porch light was on and someone moved around inside. The shadows remained still. A car was parked out front. Nothing moved.
But to Damon, who had fae sight, it was like having a veil pulled away. Nothing was as it seemed.
Fae spell spiders crawled over the edifice of the house, their rainbow colored bodies collectively spinning a web around it that would act as a magical trap for anyone attempting to flee. The front door and all five visible windows pulsed with purple warding magic, also blocking escape. The dark, depthless shadows around Diana’s home shifted, grew, shrank, and shifted again. They were not shadows. If they had been actual shadows, the Shadow King would have been there that night just as Roman was now.
Instead, they were fae. Specifically, they were Bookas. The Bookas should have been hibernating this time of year; they slept in the darkness of caves alongside other dark fae, from Beltane to the harvest festivals. They rose on Samhain and began their foul business of destroying crops, killing cattle, and kidnapping fae children. The Bookas apparently kept the Unseelie King very busy.
Because Damon had been banished to the Goblin Kingdom ages ago and because the Bookas no longer had any means or right to pass into the mortal realm where humans dwelt, he had not personally seen a Booka in eons.
They didn’t appear to have changed any. The tall, gangly creatures resembled white-skinned male humanoids with ram’s heads. Their long, thick horns curled back on themselves, and their eyes were completely white as if afflicted with cataracts. They were notorious in the fae kingdom. Not as notorious as goblins, however. Nothing was as notorious as goblins.
“It’s been a very long time since they’ve crossed fae borders, hasn’t it?” Roman asked.
Damon nodded. The real Unseelie King was probably not on the scene to deal with the rogue Bookas because it was the Unseelie King’s evil copy who’d brought them here and was controlling them. The ka had most likely also shielded them from Caliban’s worldly detection.
The two kings moved in. Damon glanced back at Diana, met her gaze, and hoped she understood. If they encountered battle – and they most certainly would – he couldn’t look back to make sure she was safe. It would be up to her to remain beside him and keep from getting hit.
Take the front of the house, Roman told him mentally. My men and I will take the back. Damon had already been planning on doing as much. He nodded again, firmly gripping his sword, and Roman left his side to disappear beneath an invisibility spell. No doubt, he blurred into action to close in on the house.
As he left, Damon detected the other vampires who had been on the outskirts, hidden in the peripheries of their king and awaiting his decree. There were at least a dozen of them. Roman was not taking any chances tonight.
I shouldn’t be either, Damon thought, mentally kicking himself for not just turning around, grabbing Diana, and transporting away with her somewhere else. These weren’t his fae. Selene wasn’t his best friend. Whatever this was, it wasn’t technically his business. So why did he feel compelled to take care of it?
Because it’s Diana’s house and that is her best friend and you care about her.
And with that thought, Damon gritted his teeth and strode forward.
And then the cell phone in Diana’s jacket pocket rang.
Chapter Sixteen
Damon froze. The chiming of Diana’s phone sounded like a fog horn in the careful quiet they’d accomplished up until then. He spun around.
Diana’s stormy eyes were wide as saucers in her face. Reflexively, she slapped her hand down on the pocket of her gray cardigan.
“Sorry!” she mouthed. At once, she was yanking the phone out and looking down at the screen.
But it was too late. The noise had already done exactly what he was afraid it would do. It had gained unwanted attention.
“It’s Selene!” Diana told him. Her best friend was calling her from inside her own home. He wondered if it was because Selene wanted to know where Diana was – or because she’d finally become aware of what was happening around her.
He looked up at Diana’s face. She was looking at the house, and she’d gone the shade of porcelain. Her lips parted breathlessly and her eyes glassed over with fear.
Damon swore under his breath, turning to behold what it was she’d seen.
The fae knew they were there now, and the glamour had been dropped. Diana was no doubt watching the world change. She, too was seeing the spell spiders, the shifting shadows, the massive ram’s heads atop lanky pale bodies.
“Oh my god,” she muttered.
The sound of something grunting behind her nearly wrought a scream from her throat, but Damon was between her and the Booka and thrusting her once more behind him before she could even turn to process what it was that had made the sound.
The Booka let loose with a barrage of magic, Damon blocked it with his own, and within seconds, he had the fae’s head.
A moment later, a second one attacked, absorbing Damon’s attention. At the same time, an Offspring attempted to grab Diana from behind. The spell Damon had coated her with crackled and flashed, sparking with clashing magics. Diana screamed, easily moving out of the vampire’s reach as he howled and looked down at his singed hands.
One of Roman’s men appeared on a fierce vampire wind, grabbed the other Offspring, and took to the skies with him like an air-borne demon.
Diana dropped to her knees, staring up at the darkness where they had disappeared as if she’d just seen the world come to an end.
And perhaps it had. Her world, anyway.
But Damon had no time to comfort her. The Bookas were multiplying around him, using their magic to create copies of themselves much as Kamon had done with his kas. And Diana’s friend was screaming for help from inside the house; he could hear her slamming her body against the door. A moment later, she’d given up and a chair hit the front windows only to bounce back off again due to the spell spider’s binding webs.
Damon could do nothing but twist and turn and slash and hack as magic went flying everywhere, fae creatures exploded into nothingness, and he thanked his lucky stars every time he came away from yet another battle without any injuries.
When he sensed an opening, he knelt down, grabbed Diana’s arm, and yanked her to her feet. “Run!” he commanded.
To her credit, his words kicked in, and she turned with him and began sprinting for all she was worth toward the door of her spider-shrouded house.
Damon spoke several powerful fae enchantments. One by one, the spiders screeched before they began to glow and sparkle and then burst into rainbow-colored flame. They crackled in this fire for several seconds before winking completely out of existence, taking whatever web they’d spun with them.
By the time the two of them reached the front door, the face of the house had been cleared of the magical arachnids. Damon used his power to shove the door open ahead of them. He and Diana rushed through one after the other.
Damon slammed the door shut behind them and they skidded to a stop. They’d come face to face with a very attractive black-haired woman with pale blue eyes who held a handgun pointed directly at them. But she quickly raised it when she recognized Diana a second later.
“Selene!” Diana exclaimed.
“There you are!” Selene shrieked in return. Her white teeth were bared and her t-shirt was ripped at the sleeve, but her entire body seemed to relax upon seeing them. “Where the hell have you been?!” she demanded as she gestured wide-eyed to their crazy surroundings. “And what the hell is going on?!”
Diana looked back at Damon, her gray eyes shot through with a tempest of lightning. Her pallor was too pale, her lips too drawn. She inhaled through her nose. “Selene,” she said, “I’d like to introduce the Goblin King, and there’s a vampire out there somewhere with a bunch of other less important vampires, and there are skinny white guys with deer heads, and rainbow spiders are crawling all over my
house.”
Her voice was pitched just a touch too high for Damon’s liking. She was teetering toward some precipice of non-coping.
Outside, the sounds of magical battle continued. Something crashed into a car, setting off its alarm. A Skittles colored spider the size of a human head skittered quickly across one of the windows.
Damon shook his head. “No time for introductions or explanations,” he said. “We have to get out of here.” He re-sheathed his sword and gestured for them both to come closer. “Move in.”
Diana and her friend looked at each other. Selene’s expression was shocked and questioning. Diana swallowed hard.
Then, like obedient zombies, they both moved in. What else could they do?
At once, Damon cast the spell. Outside, something cracked through the sky and landed on the roof. It scraped and slid – and clicked. The gods only knew what that was.
He waited for the spell to activate, but the three of them remained there in the living room. Damon felt his eyes heating up. He was having to fight against whatever binding webs remained and any extra anchoring spells the Offspring outside had also cast upon the house and its occupants.
Still, it shouldn’t have been so hard to get the three of them out of there. There was something else going on. But what?
Somewhere near the kitchen, a window shattered.
Try harder, Damon told himself fiercely. You’ve no time for this! He began chanting, using the sound of his voice to lend more power to his words. His eyes started to hurt, burning from the inside and casting everything into stark contrasts. He prepared to thrust outward with his magic when there was a solid, and this time welcome disturbance beside him.
Let me help, Roman said.
He was standing beside Damon, his expensive suit worn and bloodied. A deep gash across his cheek was healing before Damon’s eyes, and the sleeve of one arm was ripped from shoulder to elbow. I’ll transport her friend away and wipe her memory. You need to get your queen to safety.
Damon wasted no further time wondering why he needed the help in the first place. With a nod, he accepted the Vampire King’s assistance. Then he reached out like lightning and pulled Diana into his arms.
“What are you –” She cried out in surprise and braced herself against his chest, but her sentence was cut off because the world was already melting around them. The weight keeping them in place was ripped away; time and space warped, speeding them through the transportation spell with all of the immense power he’d put into it.
*****
The last of Diana’s words were literally ripped from her lungs by some unseen force that reached within her, turned something inside out, and sent her hurtling into oblivion. The colors of her living room melted and swirled together as if they’d been placed into a blender. She lost feeling in her fingers and toes, and sound became a wind of static, both quiet and loud.
She closed her eyes to block out the dizziness – and then her boots were touching down, a solid feeling beneath her. The wind stopped. The noise backed down to make way for a warm and comforting crackling sound.
Diana opened her eyes. Damon stood before her, his gentle but firm hold on her arms steadying her. They were no longer in her house. Selene was gone, as was the other tall, dark and be-fanged stranger. The spiders were gone. The monsters with the animal heads. The vampires….
All of it.
All of it, that was, except for the man who called himself Damon Chroi. The Goblin King.
He smiled a beautiful, comforting smile. “Sorry about that,” he said. “It’s usually a much smoother ride.”
Diana pulled her arms away. She tried not to stumble when she did; she was shaking and could feel the unease in her legs settling in around her knees. But she needed space just then, needed to stand on her own two feet.
“Do you know that’s the fourth time you’ve said ‘sorry’ to me?” she said. “You’re off your game, aren’t you Goblin King?” She wasn’t particularly fond of the acidic hint to her tone, but she was pleased with the fact that she could speak at all, and with some force at that.
Damon considered her a long, silent moment, and she wished she knew what was going on in his head.
Finally, he turned away from her, putting distance between them. Now she was able to take a look at her surroundings. She was in an enormous great room, its walls ancient, weathered stone hung with heavy, detailed tapestries. One of the tapestries depicted a coat of arms with a crescent moon on top and two lone towers on what appeared to be islands down below.
A fantastic chandelier cascaded from a vaulted ceiling what felt like miles above her, its crystalline lights giving the chamber a warm but ancient feel. The architecture was unfamiliar and grand, some kind of cross between Saxon and decorated gothic. A fire crackled merrily in a massive stone hearth against one wall. A few couches, love seats, and a settee rested atop rugs of varying sizes and color, all of them appearing authentically and expensively medieval.
“Nothing about this night has gone the way I would have chosen,” he told her frankly as he shrugged off the straps and scabbard he had across his back and gently laid the sword down on a shining end table. Next came his jacket.
As he shrugged that off as well, all of the muscles that Diana had been imagining beneath its thick leather were exposed. Her mouth went try – and then it began to water. He was that perfect amount of sculpted beauty that rested on that impossible pedestal for so many hard-working steroid addicts and skinny teenagers who dreamed of beefing up overnight. This was the kind of man that put others to shame.
Shame on him, she thought – as she placed her hand to her stomach and bit her bottom lip.
And then she blinked. What the fuck am I doing?
“Where are we?” she asked, brutally shoving her mind away from his body and back to more important matters. Like where he’d taken her.
He turned back around to face her. “You’re at my castle,” he told her, gesturing to the room around them and probably to what lay beyond. “In the Goblin Kingdom.”
Thunder rolled through the skies overhead. The fire in the hearth jumped and popped.
Diana didn’t say another word. Instead, she walked over to the nearest window. It looked as though it were made of lead glass, the upper bits colored brilliantly and framed by stone carvings depicting creatures that shouldn’t exist.
She stood at the window, braced her arms against its edges, and peered out.
The moon above was full and actually tinted blue. It shed so brightly on the land, Diana could make out everything as if it were simply a cloudy day. For nearly as far as her eye could see, forest stretched. It was thick, dark wood, cut through here and there with foot trails and occasionally dotted with what looked like round fields and rings of stone. Some of the taller trees had structures built around and through their branches, like an Ewok village – or an elven city.
At the far edge of the forest stretched the gray-blue darkness of a deep and troubled sea. Clouds hung low in the sky overhead, blocking out everything but that moon, instead forming a kind of blue-ringed halo around its massive, white body. Lightning crisscrossed the remaining darkness.
“Where’s the labyrinth?” Diana asked. The acidic note was still there, but was now softened by her tone of bewildered awe.
From behind came a soft chuckle.
She spun to find herself between hard stone and the stone-hard body of a man who was making more of an impression on her with each passing second. There was about a foot and a half of heated space between them, and it was only growing warmer.
“When that movie came out, I thought about putting one in.”
Diana actually had the urge to smile at that comment. But his nearness was making her think about things that were anything but funny.
Damon cocked his head a little to the side, his gaze sliding to the windows. “It’s not raining.”
Diana’s brow raised. “And that’s bad?”
He looked back down at her, studyi
ng her closely. Too closely, for her tastes. “It’s… unusual.”
After a moment, he took a deep breath. “I think you and I should sit down, enjoy some hot tea, and have a long talk.”
“You mean about what the hell those things were outside my house, who the man with the fangs was, what he did with my best friend, and why this is all happening to me tonight?”
“To start,” he said, turning a little to gesture to the couches at the center of the room and the tea tray that had just appeared there, covered in tea sandwiches, biscuits, and a steaming teapot and porcelain mugs. “Please have a seat.”
“I can’t stay here, you know,” she said, not moving from where she was standing.
Damon’s brow raised.
“I have to work tomorrow. People need me. Animals need me.” She tried to swallow past the lump that had been in her throat since she’d first met Damon Chroi and his magnificence in that dark alley with the goblin. “I… can’t stay.”
“For the moment, I’m afraid you haven’t much of a choice,” he told her frankly – but softly. “And if you’ll have a seat, I’ll explain why.”
Diana looked from him to the tea and hugged herself.
Something popped and fizzed in the fireplace. Damon glanced in its direction, a small smile at the corner of his lips.
Finally, Diana let out a breath. “Why not?” she asked. Nothing made sense anyway. What was another few minutes in a massive stone castle at the center of a Goblin Kingdom going to hurt? She moved toward the couches. “Cream, no sugar please.”
Chapter Seventeen
Roman had only wanted to find her home address so that he could safely return her, but when he’d delved into Selene Trystaine’s mind, he was met with something that slowed his transportation spell nearly to a halt and alerted all of his senses.
It had been difficult to start the spell to begin with. As soon as he pulled the woman into his arms and cast the magic that would put her in his sway and take them out of the Goblin Queen’s house, he was met with resistance. He’d had to exert quite a bit more force than usual to silence and still the woman, and he understood what had been giving Damon a hard time. There was something about the girl that made her hard to magically control.