“Diana,” he said. He spoke her name as a spell. As a fae, he had that ability. Upon speaking a being’s true name, a fae could turn that name into a spell. It was a sort of charm. The name could become an issue of calm, collected obedience. Or an order of death.
The former was what Damon did now as he let the sweet syllables of her identity spill off his tongue.
Diana looked up at him. Her shoulders seemed to relax a little. Her hands unclenched slightly where they’d wrapped around her coffee cup.
He took this as a sign that it had worked.
“I never thought I would be dumping the entirety of our universe on someone in a coffee shop,” he told her. “And I’m sorry that it has to be so fast.” But the truth was, now that he’d found his queen – she was in danger. There were forces at work who would do nearly anything to get their hands on the thirteen powerful women. Once a queen was found, she had to be protected.
It was something he hadn’t even considered until this very moment.
“What would you say to coming with me to see my kingdom?” he asked her, leaning forward even further as he became excited at the thought. “Take a tour of the castle – ”
Damon broke off when Diana suddenly smiled and shook her head. He hadn’t been expecting that.
She took another long drink of her coffee and then tilted her head to the side. “You’re too much.”
She chuckled softly, shaking her head again before she extracted yet more coffee from her quickly emptying paper cup. “You live in a castle. I should have seen that coming.” She squinted one eye at him, screwing her face up a little. “Look… Damon,” she said, speaking his name aloud for the first time.
He held on to the sound. It gave him some comfort, even if it wasn’t his true name.
“If that is really your name,” she said, echoing his thought and clearly distrusting of him. “You’ve shown me a part of the world tonight that I had no idea existed and I honestly don’t know whether to be grateful or terrified.” She shook her head and leaned back. “I mean, if there are goblins, then… I suppose vampires might actually even be possible. And I suppose you would tell me there are werewolves and bansidhes and witches and ghosts and god only knows what else too.”
She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a moment, and then exhaled. “And that’s a lot to take in. Not that I haven’t always felt there was more out there than was immediately visible. I can heal people.” She shrugged a small shrug. “It’s a kind of magic. So magic obviously exists. And that opens the door to a whole new universe.”
It’s a kind of magic, he repeated mentally. It was one of his favorite lines from the movie, Highlander. Damon was very quickly and very thoroughly falling for this girl that he’d only met forty minutes ago.
“But if you think I’m going anywhere with you at all – much less to your ‘castle’, then you’re loony. I’m tired,” she admitted with a small sigh. “It’s been a long day, a longer night, and I can barely think straight. I need to go home.” She stood then, pushing out her chair and taking her coffee cup with her. “Thank you for the coffee.”
Damon pushed out his chair. There was no way in hell he was letting her slip away that easily.
But even as he thought about the spells he could cast and the glamour he could use on her, he noticed the dark circles under her eyes, remembered the sore ribs and sprained wrist, and felt a pang in his chest.
She turned to face him as he stood.
“At least let me walk you back,” he suggested softly, putting enough magic into the suggestion to get past her unnaturally strong defenses. He would make sure she was safe on the way, and then set up watch outside her house. There were about a thousand fae of different species that would only be so happy to lend a favor to one as powerful as the Goblin King.
Diana stood beside the table, holding her cup with both hands, and considered him in silence. Damon trapped her gaze in his and held his breath. He could have tried to force her to accept his company, using a disgusting amount of magic to have his way. Vampires were not the only ones with those kinds of powers. But he had reservations, for so many reasons. It probably wouldn’t work with her anyway. Or worse, she would realize he was doing it and try to kick his ass.
And besides. This was his queen. Using any kind of force at all with her felt unacceptable.
Please, he found himself thinking. Not in countless centuries had he mentally pleaded with fate. Diana Piper was scrambling everything he thought he knew.
“Okay,” she finally relented. Damon felt his spirit soar. “Why not? Never know when we’ll come across another goblin… or something.” Her voice trailed off a bit and her gaze slipped to his lips – and then his shoulders. She swallowed hard and Damon wanted to crow. Then her eyes were back on his – and he could only hope that his hadn’t begun to glow. He was pretty sure they hadn’t.
She smiled, bathing him in the sensation of stepping into the sun after a harsh winter. She became ethereal and vulnerable and positively stunning in the light of that smile.
Then she turned away, and it was all he could do to keep from grabbing her and spinning her around again just to bask once more in that smile. “If we do run into some extra dimensional monster with pink bat wings and a three-pronged unicorn horn,” she said as they made their way to the doors, “it’ll be nice to be with someone in the know.”
He reached around her, not at all minding when his arm brushed up against her shoulder as he pressed the metal bar to open the coffee shop door. He held it open as she gratefully passed through.
Chivalry was all but dead amongst human males in this day and age, but among the fae, it was not only tradition – it was a fundamental covenant of social behavior. He would always hold the door for a lady. Always.
And his reward for doing so now was another genuine smile from the woman he would make his queen.
Damon Chroi could have sworn that wings were unfurling inside him. As he followed the smiling woman out into the night, he realized that for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel an absence of hope.
Just the opposite.
Chapter Thirteen
“I know what he was trying to do and I refuse to let him win,” Evie told her husband in hushed tones. “He wanted to drive a wedge between us with his wife’s death. So I want to hear it from you, Roman. What happened to Iliandra D’Angelo?”
They were seated beside the electric fire in the study of one of Roman’s safe houses. The night was deep and in its autumn beyond the windows. A gentle breeze rustled through branches far overhead. Animals called in the darkness. The fake fire crackled warmly, cutting through an otherwise uncomfortable silence.
Roman sat across from her in a massive over-stuffed love seat. His tall, strong form dominated the piece of furniture, and his eyes reflected a fire not in the room.
Evie curled her legs under her and pulled the throw from the back of her own love seat to wrap it around her. She’d been cold ever since returning from her ordeal. It had been the second time someone who hated Roman D’Angelo had chosen to take it out on her.
“It was a long time ago,” Roman began softly. His gaze shifted from her to the fire and was lost there in memory. “My brother and his new wife were in Kisilova, Serbia. I had just become king.”
Evie stared at her husband, lost in the deep charisma of his powerful voice. It dragged her from the study, from the safe house, from the warmth of the present and cast her into the past right along with him.
“The year was 1725. Iliandra was….” He stopped here and seemed to search for the right words. “She was a free spirit in all the wrong ways. I know now that she behaved as she did because she was filled with anger. Bitterness. And perhaps rightly so. Iliandra did not hesitate when my brother offered to make her a vampire. She jumped at the chance to inherit such magical power. She wanted to find out what those powers could do to satisfy her… darker tastes.”
Evie wasn’t sure she liked where this was going. When
she wrote her novels, it was right about here that she braced herself because she knew she was about to divulge to her readers something disturbing.
“A few years after she’d been turned, Iliandra and Rafael passed through the village of Kisilova during their travels. I can’t even recall where it was they were originally heading, but Rafael loved to travel. He enjoyed hearing stories of the past, as they reminded him of his youth. He wrote these stories down in leather bound journals that he kept in a vast and growing library. The history contained in those volumes was impressive and honorable. It was something I’d long encouraged in him, and it was the reason that upon my coronation, I’d made him the official historian for the Offspring nation.
“In Kisilova, summer was in full swing, the harvest was about to be brought in, and the town was alive with festival planning. There was a young farm boy by the name of Peter Plogojowitz who lived on the outskirts of town. He was strong and handsome, and Iliandra had always had a wandering eye.”
Roman sighed heavily. “She could have chosen anyone else from the village. She could have fed carefully, sparing precious life. But Peter was engaged to be married later that August. His intended’s name was Rose. Rose was the jewel of Kisilova, both beautiful and kind. And this was another reason Iliandra chose Peter. She loathed female beauty – any that was not her own.”
Here, Roman paused and looked down at his hand where his finger gently brushed a thread of gold in the tapestry of the love seat. “It is exceedingly and painfully difficult for a woman who is highly attractive to one day find that she no longer turns eyes as she once did. That she is no longer called “miss” but “madam,” and that there are other, younger upstarts who are now so very eager and willing to fill her shoes. Iliandra was a very beautiful woman, a princess by human royalty. But she was the second of three daughters, destined to waste away in either a nunnery or as the trophy wife to a man with mistresses. The lives of the royalty are smiling masks to the world. There is no privacy, no sanctuary, and at every turn, there are expectations nearly impossible to meet.”
“Are you speaking from experience, Roman?” Evie asked softly. The way her husband’s voice had drifted into a lilt of quiet desperation had awakened a deep note of worry inside of her. This was not just Roman telling a story. This was Roman empathizing with a woman he had apparently killed. There had to be a very good reason for such a thing.
Roman looked up at her. “I have a cave to hide in,” he told her, his tone now slightly teasing. But then it became serious. “And now I have you.”
Evie saw both pain and salvation in her husband’s eyes. She tore her gaze from his and peered back into the electric fire.
“Iliandra was both lovely and intelligent – full of potential,” Roman continued. “But she lived her life under the chokehold of a harsh monarchy. To make matters worse, she did not meet Rafael, nor was she made vampire, until she was in her mid-forties, at which point she had already suffered the uncaring attentions of an obtuse, philandering husband for nearly twenty years. And she was already beginning to show the signs of mental duress.
“She was still incredibly striking, and being an Offspring did not diminish her charisma, but enhanced and preserved it. However, she needed help, she needed reassurance, and though Rafael loved her very dearly, his head was in the past and he had never been a good listener to anything that did not directly pertain to history. As a result, Iliandra continued to diminish.
“Meanwhile, young Rose of Kisilova was but nineteen. And to Iliandra, she represented every future hope and dream that she herself had lost. Iliandra was naturally, and insidiously, jealous.
“One night, Iliandra left Rafael, who had been sharing stories with one of the village elders. She approached Peter Plogojowitz in the fields, where he was working late, and she entered his mind. The next day, Rafael decided to move on to the next town, and Iliandra asked to remain in Kisilova, claiming she enjoyed the people and atmosphere. Rafael could never deny her anything she asked for. So completely oblivious, he readily agreed and left on his own.
“Over the next few weeks, young Peter’s attitude toward Rose deteriorated. He became sullen and preoccupied. Rose began to question the upcoming wedding. Not satisfied with the rift she’d caused between the would-be couple, Iliandra played with the minds of others, forcing a town official to betray his wife’s trust and inflict his attentions upon Rose, even as the young mortal feared the impending loss of her betrothed’s love.
“It became a disastrous affair. Finally, Iliandra brought it all to an end by luring Peter Plogojowitz into the forest and draining him of every last drop of his blood. She did so slowly and painfully, allowing him to feel it as a punishment. When she was finished, she gave him just enough of her own blood to ensure the spell would work, and she spoke the three words of transformation. With this spell, Iliandra D’Angelo lost what little remained of her sanity. She then placed a protection spell over Peter to shield her new toy from the sun’s rays.
“The townsfolk found an apparently dead Peter early the next morning, and because of an already tumultuous view of the supernatural due to the Black Plague, they looked upon the multitude of bite marks on his body and hurriedly buried him along with piles of religious mementos that supposedly kept vampires at bay.
“Rose entered a time of deep mourning and depression, during which time the aforementioned official forced himself upon her, nearly causing her to end her life in despair. But Iliandra, now completely mad, was not yet finished.
“Peter awoke as one of us, just as Iliandra had intended. Unfortunately, he was six feet under when he did, and being new to the powers of the Offspring, he did not know how to transport himself out. He clawed his way to the top, ripping skin and eventually breaking off fingers as he did so. Iliandra was waiting for him in the moonlight. She looked at his bleeding, broken body and smiled. Then, taking a negligible amount of pity on her slave, she kissed him, told him that it would all heal in short moments so long as he fed, and then directed him toward his first kill.”
Evie felt a rush of cold run through her. The tale had been mountingly horrible, but this was what she’d known was coming.
“His first victim was a child of five years. A little girl with long black ringlets and blue eyes. The girl’s mother would have been his second but for Iliandra’s cruel instruction. She told him to leave the woman alive… to suffer the loss of her child. Peter’s second victim was a loving husband and father to four.”
Roman stopped and ran his hand over his face. “Over the course of days and under Iliandra’s relentless tutelage, Peter Plogojowitz killed nine people. All innocent. All young – all loved.”
Evie closed her eyes. Her chest ached. She saw a little girl and thought of a parent’s ultimate loss. Nothing worse could happen to a person. Nothing.
“As king, I caught wind of the situation even before Rafael did. I hastened to Kisilova, saw what had become of the townspeople, now wrapped in a full vampire hysteria, and I confronted Iliandra. However, as I looked into her eyes, I saw all that had happened. I read everything, and I understood. The woman she had once been and the woman she might have become were no longer present and were no longer a possibility. She was a monster now, more hatred than anything. And she needed to be stopped.
“I ended it quickly and mercifully. But in her madness, Iliandra laid one last curse upon my family. She used the last of her magic in a dying spell. As I took her head, that spell was released.
“When Rafael found her, he found her wrapped in the intricate and insipid illusion she had so carefully weaved. He found her ashes upon a makeshift altar of stone covered in wards of trapping. And just as she’d intended, he assumed his wife had been tied there to be found by the sun and slowly burn to death by its merciless rays.”
His voice grew quieter. “I tried to explain to Rafael that this was not the case, that she had died a quick and merciful death. But there is no stronger magic than a dying wish, Evie. And to this day, he does not
believe me.” He paused, and the sound of the fire crackling filled the silence. “He is not the same man that he once was, my brother. If I had known that killing Iliandra would destroy him as well, I would have found another way to put a stop to her evil. But it is too late now. And Rafael will do anything to exact revenge.”
Chapter Fourteen
“This seer of theirs will be a problem.”
Ophelia watched her master move from the table where he’d served himself a drink to the windows, which displayed a star-studded night beyond. “She’s interfered once, hence we can assume she will attempt to interfere again. She’ll have to be eliminated, as will the old woman. The high witch is too powerful to leave alive.”
He took a drink of whatever alcohol he’d poured for himself – from what Ophelia could see and smell, it was scotch – and then lowered the crystal glass. “It was a disappointment, and Kamon won’t be happy to hear another of his plans failed. However, not all is lost.”
He turned to face her now, and Ophelia stepped back. The red had returned to his eyes. It meant he was hungry.
“While they were so busy trying to find my sister-in-law, we were at work searching for the next queen.” He smiled, flashing fangs. “And we’ve located her.”
Ophelia tried to think fast. She needed words, something to distract him, to stall him from using those teeth.
“Securing her and killing her king will be our first order of business,” he said. “We’ll have to act fast and take her before she has absorbed the power of one of the thirteen. The queens are far too strong once they’ve stepped up onto the playing board.” He returned to the small table from which he’d first poured his drink, and set back down his glass. “I believe we can expect some very lovely company again very shortly.”
Ophelia felt a squirming in her stomach. Not that she had anything against killing any of the queens. The fact that the fates had seen fit to make these women as important as they were and yet leave her to suffer in the dust didn’t sit well with Ophelia. In fact, it filled her with a bitterness she could barely contain. Her anger was a physical embodiment within her, sitting like a ball of molten lead somewhere just above her stomach and just below her heart.