The Time King

  For thousands of years, Helena had been reborn upon the Earth. Each time, she was resplendent. Each time, she embodied hope. Each time, William found her and fell in love with her all over again. He couldn’t help it. He – the Lord of Time and therefore all that ever happened – was powerless against her pull. And she was powerless too. And that was the sweetest torment of all.

  But each time, she didn’t come alone. Every rebirth saw death follow after her, dogging her heels, chasing her to the ends of existence. This time around, death’s name was Victor Hush. Whereas Helena’s appearance changed from life to life, Victor’s remained the same. Tall, hard, blond hair, cold blue eyes.

  William would never understand how Helena had been created. He would never understand why. She was vulnerable and mortal yet not entirely human; and she was unique. Over the years, he had come to understand that Helena was the physical embodiment of happy endings. Ultimate desires. She was the “good luck” of fortune and the positive outcome of Fate.

  Helena was life in all of its goodness.

  Victor Hush was the other half of Fate. He was made flesh the tragedy, the loss, the inexcusable and unexplainable wrongness that befalls so many on the planet. He was misfortune, ill deeds, and slithering nightmares. In the depths of the bottomless blue of his otherwise impenetrable gaze, mortality and ruin lingered. Because that was what he was: Death.

  Helena’s appeal was strong to the world, but infinitely more so for Hush. She was one half of Fate, and he the other. Obtaining her would make him whole. In any other context, two halves would cancel each other out. But in this case, she was everything positive in life. And in this case, the positive aspect was more important than the life aspect. She was the fruition of desire, the happily ever after – which was where the life came in. Few wanted death. Almost everyone wanted life. When people looked at her, they felt they had a chance to obtain that, and in its most satisfying forms: sex, marriage, wealth, wonderful figures, great hair days. And if she ultimately chose them? They would gain every one of them.

  In Hush’s much more straight forward case, what he desired was more death.

  Lots more.

  This was one of the reasons William would not allow it to happen. A whole Death was absolute Death, absolute wrong. What Victor Hush was doing to the world right now with this virus was child’s play in comparison to what he would unleash upon it if he were complete.

  And perhaps what was selfishly more troubling to William Solan was that Hush was the other half of Helena. And William could not abide even the passing thought that there was a sliver of a chance she would be complete… with him.

  So he went down this road. Over and over again. Fate never gave up, never stopped sending her back into the world, so he couldn’t give up either. She was on an infinity loop of death and rebirth. And he was there to watch every scene unfold, his memory never erased, its wretched history as indelible to him as it was to the newspapers on the floor upstairs.

  William was the Lord of Hours, the Lone King, his control over the uncontrollable stronger than any other’s, and yet he could not turn back the clock. He could not go back in time. He could not change history. It was for him as it was for everyone – finished. Wells had been right when he’d written his now famous book twenty years ago. Of course, he’d had help.

  Helena faced William now like the intolerably brave woman she was, lifting her chin and looking him square in the eyes. In the calmest of voices, she asked him the most damning of questions. “How long have you known, William?”

  He did not want to answer her. He would have given anything he possessed to not have to answer that question. But he forever would answer her. He would never lie to Helena. “Weeks,” he told her. He felt it come over him, the dread that was laced with stoic and horrible serenity. “Since the beginning.” He looked down and nodded at the paper, indicating the flu epidemic.

  Helena glanced at the headline, then closed her eyes. And then she released his hands, and as they slipped from his grasp… so did everything else.

  Prologue

  Evelynne Grace Farrow, the Vampire Queen and New York Times bestselling author, looked down at her new leather-bound journal and slowly opened it to the first page. She inhaled the scent of leather and unmarked pages, ran her hand over the empty lines, and marveled at the landscape of possibilities. Then she turned that page too.

  She never wrote anything on the first page of a journal. She didn’t even know why she’d never done this. She just never had.

  When the second page lay bare before her, Evie picked up her coveted Montegrappa pen, blood red and shimmering, and placed it to the paper. Then she wrote. She wrote in a voice that echoed through the chambers of her mind as a new player settled down by the fire of her imagination and told her a story …

  Once upon a time, there was a man with all the power in the world. With no more than a thought, he could create and un-create. The slightest manipulation, and something that was supposed to happen wouldn’t happen, or something that shouldn’t have happened, would.

  He rarely used this power. For the same man with all the magic was the only one who knew how foolish it was to utilize it. And… he liked the world. It was fallible. It was often stupid. It mired itself in politics and religion, in murder and excuses and torture and more excuses. But it also cherished childhood. And it grew gardens. And it was filled with puppies with head tilts and kittens with purrs and baby elephants and giant trees.

  But most of all, the world was part of the multiverse, and the multiverse had an order to it. That order was Time.

  Time flowed through all things. It moved them forward, from yesterday into today, and today into tomorrow. Without Time, there was nothing. That was the true absence of everything, not darkness, but a lack of Time. Before the world, there was stillness. A frozen miasma of impossibilities.

  And then the first second ticked, and the cosmos was born.

  And so was Cronos.

  For innumerable eons, Cronos acted as the companion to Time, the son, the daughter, the child, the apprentice, and finally the master. For untold forevers beyond that, he kept a now weary Time moving, working, and in order. But to everything, there is a beginning and an end. Especially to Time. And eventually – one time-turned day – Cronos grew bored.

  There are approximately one-hundred-thousand-million stars in each galaxy. There are roughly one hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. And there is an infinity of universes within the multiverse. It was Fate, perhaps a force more powerful even than Time, that lead Cronos to one tiny blue planet circling one mediocre star in one fairly attractive spiral galaxy in one of countless of choices of universes, and there on that itty-bitty planet, he took on physical form.

  It took years to create a body strong enough to contain Cronos’s power. But what were years to a being composed of time? They were nothing. They were not eons, after all. So Cronos took his new body and became a man.

  One would assume assimilation into human culture would be difficult for a being who had never before stepped foot on solid ground, much less worn clothing or even spoken words, eaten food, or tasted wine. But Cronos was the master of Time, and as such, he knew all that had ever occurred – and all that ever would. Passing creations of mortality such as language and cuisine were grains of sand on an endless shore, and they wrapped themselves around him and filled him up with no effort at all.

  In record time – for humans – Cronos became William Balthazar Solan. And William became the master of other things: Money. Sex. Power.

  From the shadows, he pulled the puppet strings of human workings, building a secret empire of wealth and taste that would rival that of any mortal’s. But it was huge and it was empty. It echoed as only a vast barrenness possibly could. And yet another time-turned day, William Solan realized he was lonely. Painfully so.

  And then Fate once more made itself known to him, and one autumn day in a land called Greece, Solan set his clockwork eyes upon another mortal. A
woman.

  Time stopped.

  He felt it hold its breath. He felt it cease to move. It was painful beyond reason. And it was wonderful beyond words. For in that single lack-of-a-moment, she smiled at him, and William Solan felt alive for the first time since his creation. Not simply in existence, not simply being. But well and truly alive.

  When Time remembered to breathe and all returned to motion, William was already changed. He’d already been tied and bound, weakened beyond previous measure, and he was already lost.

  Everything was different now.

  He unwittingly surrendered himself in exchange for the gift Fate offered. It was a choice he made without thought, without will, for it was his spirit’s decision, and the last of his transformation into a creature of this world. He was diminished, lessened from the bonfire of invulnerability Time had made him to a candle’s flame of immortality, eternally burning, but a mere light in the darkness compared to what he once was.

  In the brief measure it had taken him to behold the woman Fate placed in his path, he was rendered by and large powerless. For she was all he had never known he wanted. She was everything he had never known he dreamed of. And that was enough for him.

  They knew love. He and she. It was a great, unbreakable love like no other. Beyond wars and battles, in secrets and in shadows, that love grew to fill the empty spaces within Time, and its beautiful but lonesome master.

  Until a great wrong was born into his world, and the Fate of the woman was shattered in two. Two possibilities. So very different, they were the essence of opposite.

  The wrong pursued her, as desperate as existence can become. That wrong threatened all that was right and good, so she defied the wrong, and in return, it caused pain. It caused loss. It maimed, and it murdered.

  The Master of Time secreted the woman away, sheltered her, protected her, but it was never enough. The wrong was relentless. And it was the one force in the cosmos as powerful as William. It was the one thing William could not defeat.

  In a desperation just as strong, and an utter agony even stronger, Time’s master made a choice, coming to the worst of decisions in the dead of one horrible, culminating night. For the woman could not escape the wrong that followed her.

  And William… could not allow her to join it.

  A merciful potion brought about her end, painless and swift. She died in her sleep, and the candle flame that was Time flickered in an expanding and broken hearted darkness.

  But the thing about Fate is that it can’t be quieted. It cannot be denied. It is the end-all, and it is what will be.

  So the woman one day returned, and the wrong once more pursued her, and hence the cruelest of games was played between the three throughout the centuries.

  Again and again, she was taken from him. Over and over, it was he who ended her. It was a testament to the strength of Cronos that he did not go mad. But perhaps he in fact did, in the end. For one night, when his hands were bathed in the blood of the one he loved, he called out to Time, demanding a deal.

  Once and for all, Time would take what remained of his power, and with it hold the woman’s soul hostage, keeping it in the veil of nonexistence so that William would never again be forced to destroy the only thing in the multiverse he had ever cared for.

  The deal was struck, and the deed was done.

  William Balthazar Solan moved alone from that moment on, through the decades, through the centuries, alone and enigmatic, a powerful mystery of a man cloaked in darkness and emerald eyes, a hint of the cosmos he’d once commanded, tall and regal, rich beyond measure, with the face of a fallen angel… and a smile just a touch cruel.

  Eventually he took a place amongst the renowned of the realms at the Table of the Thirteen, and assumed the sovereignty of the Time King.

  However.

  This story teller has said it before, and she will say it again now. The thing about Fate is that it can neither be quieted nor denied.

  And now, a door is being unlocked, and a path is being once more revealed to the candle flame that was once the bonfire of the Time King. It is a door that leads to trouble, and it is a path filled with obstacles. It is a way, most assuredly, ripe with pain.

  But just as Fate cannot be denied, the thing about a candle flame is that it can spread. Fire can always grow. All that is needed for the conflagration to expand to the boundaries of the horizon and consume everything in its path… is a good, stiff wind of change.

  Evie lifted her pen and stared down at her words. As often was the case after writing in such a manner, it felt like a tale told through her, as if she were a vessel for the scribed story of another. However, this time, she found her brow furrowing.

  Something was not quite right.

  She glared at the pages. Something here in the sentences she’d scribbled was blatantly incorrect. It was a lie. It was an untruth told to her by her muse, and that had never happened before.

  Baffled, she wondered just where the lie was.

  And she wondered that for a long time before she took a deep breath, recapped the pen, and sat back in her chair. “Huh,” she said.

  Then she was surrounded by a nimbus of green light, and vanished altogether.

  On the desk in front of the now empty chair, the journal’s written pages flipped in a magical breeze. When the breeze settled and the stirring pages slowed, the journal at last came to rest on its first, empty page.

  And the room was silent.

  Chapter One

  The cavern’s stone floor was divided into separate islands bedecked with redwoods or willow trees or gardens with vegetables and fruit. Wooden bridges spanned the rivers that acted as their dividers. The water was purified and crystal clear, always the perfect temperature to drink. A waterfall of massive proportions filled the cavern with the faintest fog and a distant static sound that acted like a solvent on the nerves. Evelynne, who went by Evie with her friends, had loved that about it most.

  She was a sensitive soul, beautiful to her very core, and unsettled panic was the byproduct of caring as she did. The cave had been her salvation. Roman had never been more proud or relieved to share something with another person as he had been the night he’d brought her here.

  This cave had been home to him and his wife for years. It had been theirs alone. No one else in the world – no one but Lalura Chantelle and Dahlia Kellen, that is – had known it existed until today. He’d originally brought Evie here to seduce her, and it felt like yesterday. He would never in a million years have guessed that he would have reason or compunction to bring anyone else into the private sanctuary it afforded.

  But it was all that was left. Borders, wards, dimensional barriers and the like made it impossible for the lot of them to gather in any place but the mortal world for long. And the cave’s location far beneath the living, breathing mortal world made it the only place the twelve of them could collect without unwittingly slaughtering thousands.

  Even here, in the relative seclusion of a cave a mile under the Earth, Roman could sense the destruction taking place above. The heavens were enraged. Their angels had been taken, and the realms were left in wide, open chaos.

  He was partly to blame. He knew that some of that tempest was his doing. But it was also Thane’s and Jason’s and Caliban’s. It was a storm that belonged to Scaul and Pitch and Calidum. It bore the name of a dozen kings, and it turned and curled in on itself, and the world below its fury hunkered down and boarded up windows and braced for yet another hurricane in a season of hurricanes unlike any the historical world had ever seen.

  Roman’s gaze had been lost on the same group of smoky gray crystals on the wall of his cave for an untold period of time. But he saw them as rubies. His vision had been tainted red for countless hours, sleepless weeks. He was not alone.

  The Vampire King glanced over his broad shoulder to find the Goblin King standing on one of Roman’s wooden bridges, staring down at the small stream that trickled underneath. He knew Damon Chroi had closed up his c
astle in the Goblin Kingdom. He’d used powerful fae magic to place everyone and everything in a stasis until the lady of the castle could return. He was not the caregiver she was, and even if he had been, he could not tend to them now. Even his own children… slept.

  Beyond Damon, on another of the stone “islands” formed by crisscrossing rivers in the underground cavern, stood the Seelie King. His strong hand was fisted in his blond hair, his eyes were closed, and two days’ worth of scruff darkened his strong chin. Not far from him stood his brother, the Unseelie King, looking a good deal more composed in all black, a freshly shaven face, and raven black hair that fell perfectly into place. It was his eyes that gave him away. The lot of them were basically immortal, having lived for thousands of years, and yet Roman couldn’t recall ever having seen them look the way they did right now. They weren’t simply glowing, they looked like tourmaline Tesla coils, literally zapping with Unseelie magic.

  *****

  The Unseelie King gazed into the water that moved beneath the bridge. He was not there, in that place and time, not really. In his mind and heart, he recalled another moment…

  Caliban gritted his teeth until he felt they might crack. He squeezed his eyes shut so tight they hurt. But neither helped him focus. His wounded body was raging. He’d never had to wait this long for healing magic. If he ever ailed of so much as a splinter, ten women would hone in on him as if he were a beacon. He could take his pick.

  His body was well aware of this. It was out of control, like a terribly spoiled child. It wanted what his mind knew it could not have.

  He couldn’t stop imagining what it would feel like to press Minerva up against that wall and feel every inch of her furious body against his as he captured her lips and drank her in. She would probably fight him. She may be the most empathetic soul on the planet, but that also meant she was one of the strongest. She didn’t like injustice one bit. She no doubt rooted for the underdog. Likely, she stood up for the weaklings against bullies. She would consider his actions wrong, and she would probably use every physical defense she could muster to rally against him.