The Goblin King (The Kings)

  Evie was thoroughly baffled. She didn’t even know where to start with her questions. One second, they’d all been in the cave – the next, they were here. “But I saw you all down in the cavern!”

  “Powerful illusions,” Roman explained gently. He glanced at Lily, who was wearing a bit of a blush. “Thanks to Lalura and the Seer, who happened to not only find you but foresee what Rafael’s plan was, we were able to turn everything back around on him.”

  “Well, that’s the half of it anyway,” said Lily. “I knew it was a trap – everything from the attack during the meeting to Rafael D’Angelo taking you, Evie. But I wasn’t sure what they were after. Not until just now, anyway.”

  Evie still felt confused. She was also very hungry. And not for food. It was greatly shortening what was left of he temper.

  She found her gaze settling in on the pulse in Daniel Kane’s neck, and quickly averted her gaze. She swallowed hard, hoping no one had noticed. She couldn’t help it. He was an alpha wolf, all power and muscle and vital strength, and she hadn’t fed in far too long. She was a vampire, after all. Nature could be a bitch.

  It was making it difficult for her to think and put the puzzle pieces together. So she decided to do it aloud. Sometimes that helped.

  “Let me see if I have this right,” she began. The others waited quietly and respectfully. She was a queen as well as a vampire. “Lily, you performed a spell to find me? I thought your visions only came to you when they felt like it?”

  “Normally, that’s true,” Lily admitted. “But in this case,” she said as she glanced up at Roman and then over and the rest of the court and Lalura. “In this case, I had a good deal of help.”

  “With the combined power, Lily was able to see now and see more than usual,” said Lalura, her ancient, scratchy voice cutting through the clearing like audible charisma. “She not only found you and the cavern as you were presently, but she saw what had transpired in the cavern prior to your arrival.”

  “In other words, she saw Rafael scheming. And he wasn’t scheming alone,” said Dannai.

  “No,” said Lily, her voice a little softer now that she was recalling her vision. “Kamon was there. He was…. It was like he was wrapped in bright, blinding light and I could barely make out his form. He was painful to look at.”

  “He’s a god,” said Lalura in her scratchy voice. “They’re the multiverse’s drama queens. Very big heads.” Lalura shook her own head and made her way to a nearby boulder. Once there, a few of the men took her arms and helped her to sit. Daniel set her cane to the side.

  Lalura took a deep breath, closed her eyes a moment, and went on. “They somehow knew the court would plan to arrive together. It was Quinn Adams they were after.”

  Evie’s eyes widened. “What? Adams? But why?”

  “Take no offense, dear. Rafael has his sights set on you. But for Kamon, it’s the end game that matters. Quinn Adams possesses a power they desperately covet. If they can copy him as they have managed to do with the 13 Kings, they will absorb his power as well.”

  Evie thought about that, putting the pieces together. Adams could merge with other people. With the power to merge, Rafael could become Roman – and control his every move. Ophelia could become Jaxon – and kill Roman as he slept. A Hunter could become Jesse Graves, the werewolf council Overseer.

  The terrifying possibilities were endless. This was not a doppelganger, who could be found out with a spell or identified by the winged scarab marking on their forehead. A merged individual would be the actual person you loved and trusted – turned against you.

  “All along, I was bait to get to Roman and his vampire court.”

  Roman took her gently by the arms and turned her toward him. “This time, perhaps. But we must believe my brother will come after you again. His hatred spurs him on.”

  Evie gazed up at her husband. She thought about what Rafael had shared with her, the story he’d told her about Iliandra D’Angelo’s death…. Roman had tied her to an altar and allowed the sun to bake her from the inside out.

  The image shot through her mind, poisonous and unpleasant. She could feel the heat seep in through her skin and begin to boil her blood. She could feel her soul being ripped from the safe sanctity of the shadows and cast into the fires of day.

  She could feel it. She’d always been too sensitive that way.

  Evie gently pulled away from Roman and looked down at the ground. She could sense Roman’s reluctance in letting her go.

  “I don’t think they’re coming after us just now,” said Dannai. “Lily? You sense anything?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “They can’t find us,” said Lalura. “We succeeded on that front as well.”

  Evie looked from her to the others. They must have taken every precaution in the book to pull off this stunt and get her out of Rafael’s grip. But a pain arced through her. She was up during the day, and she was starving.

  “I can’t thank you enough for your assistance,” Roman told the others. “However, I’m afraid you will all have to excuse us.” Roman reached out and pulled Evie tightly to him once more. His magic began to envelop them at once. “Evelynne is very tired and must be tended to.” He ended it with that, and a second transport spell wrapped around them both. As it did and the world blurred once more around them, Evie could swear that she could still feel the rays of the sun eating at her and sinking in deep.

  Protection spell or not.

  Chapter Nine

  Damon gripped the sword tight in his hand and tried to think fast.

  But the woman was providing one hell of a distraction.

  “Just stay where you are and don’t try to run,” he said, his tone even and low. He moved toward them as he spoke, each measured step careful and quiet. “He won’t go after you if you don’t run. The movement provokes his kind.” As it did so many predators.

  The woman stared up at the goblin with bewildered eyes. Those eyes were so beautiful….

  Damon mentally slapped himself.

  “What….” Her voice trailed off, dry and cracking with fear. She swallowed and he watched her throat move. Her hands worked into fists and then un-flexed again as if she wasn’t sure what to do with them or what stance to take. “What is it?” she whispered.

  The xenobe growled long and low, slowly releasing the menacing sound into the shadows of the alleyway.

  “He’s a xenobe goblin,” Damon explained, knowing he bothered with the explanation only because of who she was. Who he knew her to be. Otherwise it wouldn’t matter.

  The cat at the woman’s feet hissed.

  “Now, now,” Damon said very softly as he continued to creep forward. “None of that, cat. You’ll only provoke him – and he’s bigger.”

  The cat actually tilted its gray head a little and looked up at him. Eyes like a glacier in the arctic reflected at him in the moonlight. Damon was struck with the odd sensation that he’d seen the cat before. Or that it was somehow more than a cat.

  The woman chanced the quickest glance in his direction, drawing his attention. Their eyes met.

  Damon’s stomach churned, his heart hammered hard against the casing of his ribs, and any uncertainty that had remained about who the woman was flew out the window of his consciousness then and there.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her without even meaning to.

  The woman’s eyes widened even further, the gray of their stark irises darkening from silver-lined clouds to charcoal thunderheads like a building storm. Any second now, he would see lightning cascade across them, he was certain.

  And he couldn’t blame her for looking at him like that, either. They were in a dark alley in the middle of the night, they were complete strangers, and they were facing off with a beast that as far as she was undoubtedly concerned, should not exist.

  Pull yourself together, he told himself. Get the xenobe out of here. Come back for her later.

  He ripped his gaze from hers and concentrated. Magic boiled
inside him, so thick and primordial, it almost hurt. It was like pushing lava sludge through his veins. Every inch of him warmed up with magma potential, and as he always did, he had to focus hard to keep it from leaking out.

  His eyes burned. It was always his least favorite part of the power he possessed. It felt like the power had been made for a bigger vessel, one without nerve endings perhaps. He knew the pain in his eyes meant they’d gone from green to orange-red and were now crackling and flickering like hellfire.

  The world shifted into stark contrasts. It was a hunter’s view, breaking up the angles of the night and allowing him to watch his target more keenly.

  Unfortunately, his eyes seemed to want to focus on the woman as if she were his target – and not the monster.

  He wanted to know her name. Desperately. There was a lot of power in a name. He should know.

  Focus!

  He began to speak to the xenobe then, using a tongue ancient and virtually unknown. He wanted to gain the beast’s attention, pull it to a safer distance from the woman, and then use his magic to send her away. If he did that, then at least he could follow his own magical signature to find her later.

  The xenobe continued to stare down at the woman, however, completely ignoring Damon.

  Damon frowned, his body heated up further, and one of the streetlights down the alley zapped out, casting them into partial darkness.

  His magic was leaking.

  He glared at the goblin and tried again, raising his voice some this time.

  The woman’s gaze shifted from one of them to the other. She took an uncertain step back.

  The xenobe made a strange whining sound.

  Damon had never heard a xenobe make that kind of noise before. It drew him up short, and his words drifted off into silence.

  The woman frowned, blinking. She swallowed so hard, he could hear it. He could also hear her breathing. It was a trembling breath.

  But against all reason and expectations, she shocked the hell out of him by straightening, rolling back her shoulders, and addressing the goblin first-hand. “You’re hurting… aren’t you?” she asked softly.

  It was the most timid question Damon had ever heard anyone ask – a goblin. He could scarcely believe he’d heard it right. Even more shocking was that the xenobe made a second strange sound. This time, it was a cross between a whine and a whimper.

  The woman licked her lips, taking a tentative step forward – toward the goblin.

  All at once, Damon’s protective instincts overwhelmed him. “Get back!” he bellowed. The xenobe goblin glowed for half a second before his large body was lifted off the ground and thrown backward. He hit the wall with a terrible thunk and a roar of pain and remained there, suspended like a pinned bug four feet off the ground.

  Damon rushed forward, coming to stand between the xenobe and the woman, and then he spun on her.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

  He froze as he realized she had just asked him the exact same question at the exact same time. Her stormy eyes were shooting their lightning sparks now, every ounce of anger within them directed not at the now-helpless goblin – but at him.

  “What do you mean?” he asked incredulously.

  Against all reason, the woman squared off on him. “I don’t know who or what you are, but you’re clearly as thick as the wall you just slammed that poor beast up against if you can’t tell he’s in pain!”

  Damon was too stunned to say anything. He could feel his eyes still burned with pent-up power, but he had absolutely no idea just then what to do with it. He was in the Twilight Zone.

  “Or worse,” she went on, shocking him to the core. “You don’t care that he’s in pain, and you’re hunting him down, which makes you more of a monster than he is!”

  Damon stared at her. He stared at her tumultuous, emotional, starkly beautiful eyes. He stared at her red, sensuous lips. He stared at her white teeth, bravely bared as they were against him. And for once in his very long life, he found himself utterly at a loss as to what to do next.

  The xenobe goblin behind him made a mewling sound. He could hear its obscenely long claws scraping against the brick wall to which he was being held. But Damon couldn’t bring himself to turn to face the beast. His attention was completely taken by someone else.

  The woman, whose fear seemed to have quickly made way for sympathy and determination, attempted to actually brush past Damon.

  But as her arm inadvertently touched his, a thread of his magic broke loose and found its mark.

  He had no control over it. He seemed to have no control over anything this night.

  Chapter Ten

  Diana felt the jolt as if she’d touched the metal prongs of a plug she was pulling from the wall. It arced from the stranger to her, and she instantly saw stars.

  And more….

  She was floating, falling weightlessly down a rabbit hole. As she fell, images opened up to her left and right, clearing and coalescing into detailed visions.

  She saw herself touching the monster – the monster that should not exist, the one with the body covered in red-brown fur, the claws that were too long, and the teeth that were too plentiful and sharp in its bleeding mouth.

  And then that vision was replaced with another.

  She was in a massive banquet room. There was a table of polished mahogany covered in platters displaying expensive foods and drink. She heard a fire crackling somewhere, most likely in a hearth. She smelled heavenly scents but felt nervous – so, so nervous. She saw the gleam of the polished wood before someone swiped all the food away and the platters went flying. The glasses hit the ground, shattering.

  Then that vision was replaced as well.

  Next, she was standing tall and proud, wrapped in an emerald green gown unlike any she could have imagined. Beside her stood a man in a tailored suit that fit his tall, powerful figure like a designer glove. She couldn’t see his face. But he had raven black hair.

  Like the stranger’s.

  He took her hand in his. As Diana looked on from her floating and falling rabbit hole, he slipped something onto her finger. It shimmered in some unseen light. Within it, she caught the reflection of a pair of eyes as emerald green as her dress… and then as burning red as the fires of an abyss.

  Diana tried to turn, tried to remove herself from this strange slip from reality, but as she did, she was faced with one final vision.

  It wavered, black and white and vast. When it solidified, she stood upon a horizon of chessboard squares. They stretched into forever. But she did not stand alone. With her, stretched side-by-side like the line of a small army, stood twelve other women. Their hands were linked, held tightly in solidarity, in friendship, and in a desperate resolve to survive.

  In the distance, danger approached. It was a darkness and a chaos, an indescribable wrongness. It rushed toward them like a hoard of tornadoes, a hurricane of devil winds, an earthquake to suck them all up and close them all off forever and ever.

  It was an entire war’s suffering, like an ungodly stampede of bony black nightmares and fiery breath.

  Diana felt her hands being squeezed. She gritted her teeth.

  It was pain that rode toward them – it was death.

  She wanted to scream, but her mouth wouldn’t move.

  And then her eyes were flying open, she was sucking in air, and she was – she was gazing up into the stranger’s deep, penetrating gaze.

  It took her a moment to regain her bearings. She was on the ground. The burning-eyed stranger was kneeling over her, his hand behind her head, supporting it. His touch was very slightly electric. It was warm.

  She must have hit her head or something because she could swear that his tender grip felt secure and safe and possessive and wonderful and terrifying.

  “I’m so sorry,” he told her in his deep, warm voice. “It won’t happen again.”

  But she barely made sense of his words. The images she’d just witnessed swam in her mi
nd. The monster with the claws and teeth was still stuck to the wall; she could see him from over the stranger’s broad shoulder, pinned there like a swatted fly. The gray feline she’d rescued only minutes earlier hadn’t run away as she’d expected her to when Diana had set her down. Instead, she remained sitting off to the side, partly in the shadows, and watched the proceedings with uncommonly intelligent eyes.

  And Diana was feeling a little overwhelmed.

  It was traumatic enough to have to resort to fisticuffs with a bunch of very healthy and strong young men, wind up with a bunch of bruised ribs and a sprained wrist, and then heal a horribly tortured animal on the verge of death. But the moments after the incident transpired were more than she could fully contemplate.

  She’d been heading toward home when she’d heard the strange scraping sounds. She’d followed them, wondering if it was an animal dragging an injured leg.

  Even though she’d already healed one creature that night, she had enough energy to do it again; she’d just be tired the next day at the office. It would be worth it. Anything to make the world even the slightest bit more hopeful and good than its sorry ass was at the moment.

  She was holding the cat gently in her arms when the animal started to squirm, getting restless. The scraping sound had grown louder. Diana set the cat down and rounded the corner to find herself face to face with something straight out of a Wes Craven nightmare.

  But Diana was not your run-of-the-mill human. She’d possessed the innate, magical ability to heal others since she was a child. Granted, she couldn’t heal herself, and that was a cruel twist of fate, but she could bring another person or animal from the brink of death to perfect health with no more than a touch.

  Possessing this kind of magic made her understandably more accepting of the idea of monsters. Diana had long ago agreed with Shakespeare’s philosophy that “there are more things in heaven and earth….” It was an anything-goes world.

  She had to take a few deep and shaking breaths to come to grips with the monster with shark teeth and scraping three-foot-long claws, but she managed. She could even tell the monster was not actually angry and aggressive for the sheer joy of being angry and aggressive. It was in pain.