And they would all fail. And he would win anyway. Because that was who he was. And she was who he wanted.
I want her.
It was more than the healing her touch would give him. It was more than a hunger he felt for her strength and magic and power. Oh, it was so much more.
I need her!
It had been the moment Caliban realized he would forever belong to his new queen and no one else. It had been the moment that despite his pain, his injuries, and his unbearable need for the healing magic of Unseelie mating, he could not imagine touching another. He could not imagine wanting another. And from that moment on, he would eternally only turn to Minerva. That was the painful, desperate moment he’d realized he loved her.
Fate had brought them together. And now it seemed Fate would tear them apart.
*****
Roman watched the king worriedly. He was so quiet, too quiet. Hell, they all were. None of the kings had said a word in long minutes. It might have been hours. But their spirits spoke plenty in another place. They were putting people in danger up there, the lot of them. He had no right to tell the others to pull it together. He was as lost as anyone. The twelve of them were Pan’s boys, every one without his Wendy because she had been taken by Hook before he cast away on an endless, troubled sea.
Roman absently turned his attention to the ground beneath his feet and touched his cheek. Underneath, the skin of his gums had become sore from consistently throbbing for two weeks. He could no longer force his fangs to fully retreat. They were noticeably longer than his other teeth, and no amount of magic erased that aspect of his inner monster. It showed now, like it or not. He was what he was: A possessive and powerful vampire lord whose one true love had been kidnapped.
He was not alone, either. Thane’s teeth were out. Thanatos the Phantom King was lord of the wrongfully dead, overseer of a realm comprised of “Anime,” spirits left over when a being or even inanimate object had its life cut unnaturally short. His kingdom was vast and lonely, and its very foundations existed partly in death. Hence, life was more important to Thane than it was for most.
Nothing symbolized life in its very essence more appropriately than did blood.
The power of every King ran through that king’s veins. And the same went for every Queen.
Thane had clearly developed a taste for his missing wife’s since she’d joined him on his throne.
Chapter Two
Thane ran a strong hand through his black hair and fought the urge to pull the hair right out of his skull. Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets, stepped around a few other Kings, and made his way to a solitary tree on one of the many islands separated by pristine waterways in the massive cave Roman D’Angelo had kept secret from everyone until now.
When he was alone, Thane leaned against the tree and closed his eyes as a memory played before his mind….
The man’s ghost dissolved into the portal, and the portal closed once more. As if she’d done it a thousand times and no longer had to be warned, Siobhan placed her hands over her ears as the thunder passed through the garage.
A few seconds later, she lowered her hands again, but her eyes remained focused on the empty space where the spirit had been. Thane gazed down at her, his entire world tipped on its axis. He’d never seen anything more miraculous than what he’d just witnessed. He’d never seen anything so beautiful.
Can I keep you? The words raced through his mind, a thought – and a nearly undeniable compulsion.
Keep you.
Finally, Siobhan blinked. Then she slowly turned to look up at him. “I don’t understand what just happened,” she said. “I mean, I know what I did. I do know… deep down.” She blinked again, pressed her hand to her heart, and looked down at the floor. “But I don’t know why or how.” Her eyes returned to his. “Thane, what’s going on?”
There were probably a hundred different things he could have said in that moment. But only one really seemed to fit.
“Do you think you could do it again?”
Siobhan’s brown-gold eyes glistened, their depths seeming to swirl to life with understanding. After a few seconds had passed, she nodded. Just once.
And Thane turned to let the next spirit in.
That had been the moment Thane realized that against all odds and despite the vacuous pull of time in Purgatory, his loneliness was finally and forever over. He would never again be alone. Not a single night more, not a single moment. He’d found his queen.
But now he opened his glowing swirling silver eyes and gazed across the cave to the nothingness beyond, and his gums throbbed and his mind burned. I was wrong.
*****
Roman swallowed hard, a muscle twitching in his jaw as he watched the Phantom King wrestle with his emotions. His gaze slid from Thane back to Damon, whose gaze literally burned in his skull. It had been smoldering like fury-fueled fire for two weeks. It was the same powerfully and silently raging blaze that was eating them all alive.
Everywhere Roman looked, he saw men in pain. At the core of it, that was what they were. Men. They were Kings, they were unnatural. They were monsters and they were powerful. But they were, in the end, just men. And a man was nothing without his woman.
He whispered softly, a hissed epitaph of pure and agonized desperation that was merely breathed, yet echoed throughout the vast expanse of the cave. Men looked up.
It was time he did something.
“Gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind…” he said softly as he made his way to the center of the cave. The cavern was the size of two football fields end-to-end, and yet the Kings began pulling in. Every one of them had heard him.
There was a cabin in the middle of the underground space. It was small and cozy, intricately decorated and formed through painstaking magic and love. Evie had told him it resembled “Heather’s Hutch,” a house in a painting by Thomas Kinkade. She’d told him this with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye, so what he’d heard was, “It’s beautiful. I love it.” And that was good enough for him.
As he approached the front door and opened it, he felt the enormous presence of the other Kings at his back. They followed him inside, crossing bridges or simply flying to the center island, and within seconds, the tiny cabin was filled to the brim with a stupid amount of power.
Roman waited until the last of the Kings was inside – Calidum – and had closed the door before he met each of their gazes. None of Roman’s friends looked even remotely human right now, but the worst perhaps to Roman was Calidum, the Dragon King.
He had claimed his queen mere hours before she’d been taken from him. Of the twelve of them there, his pain was the most palpable to Roman. He’d barely won. And then he’d lost everything.
What was more, Roman and Cal shared something vital in common. Both of their queens had been taken by raving lunatics bent on claiming those women for themselves. The difference was that the man who’d abducted and tortured Calidum’s queen was still out there. And Roman knew that Calidum could not keep that very dark thought from his mind.
They had exhausted every avenue they’d thought open to them. Every spell. Every scry. Every mage, both witch and warlock, every arcane incantation, every single magical method of finding something or someone that had been lost, stolen, or misplaced, had been enacted time and again over the last two weeks. They were exhausted. And at the same time, they could have taken on armies of enemies. There was so much negative energy moving through the twelve of them, nothing could have withstood their wrath.
But that was just it. There were only twelve of them. William Solan was missing.
Solan is missing.
The realization wanted to slip right back out of his head again just as quickly as it had come in – but this time, Roman noticed that. He noticed that he seemed to not want to think on the missing King. He noticed the way the thought faded, slipping into the background of his mind like a thief. A magical thief.
Who’d stolen their wives.
 
; Son of a bitch, he thought. This wasn’t the first time he’d realized William wasn’t there. It was simply the first time he’d been capable of realizing it for more than a split second. There was powerful magic at play here.
He shut his eyes for a moment and called out to someone very special. Lalura… I need you. Please come.
“Where’s Solan?” he asked aloud before he forgot again.
I forgot? He wondered, mystified. Because he had. It had occurred to him countless times that Solan was missing, that the Time King was perhaps involved in this – and then, as quickly as it had occurred to him, the realization was gone. He glanced up at the cabin around him, and thought of the cavern beyond. It was the most warded, most protected, most carefully created location on the planet, and perhaps the universe. They’d only been down here a short while. But it was long enough for the cavern to negate the magic that had been cast upon him.
“Holy crap,” someone said. “Do you have any idea how many times I meant to ask that question?”
Roman felt the stirrings of hope inside. It was like someone striking a match in the darkness.
When another King swore softly, and yet another joined him in sounds of bemused exasperation, Roman knew it was working. They were remembering. They were figuring something out. What they were figuring out, he wasn’t yet certain. But it was something.
“It’s Katrielle now, Roman,” said a female voice. He looked up to watch a young red-headed woman make her way through the crowd of men. They parted for her like the Red Sea until she stood before him across the small cabin table.
Despite the youth and the hair color, those eyes were the same, piercing and so, so blue and filled with a plethora of untold knowledge. But she smiled at him warmly, and those eyes took on a hint of sympathy. She knew he was suffering. She knew they all were. “It took you long enough to figure this out.”
Roman’s gaze narrowed. “You knew?”
But Katrielle shook her head. “Not until you did. You and the other Kings were the trigger that broke the spell.”
“You?” he asked, disbelievingly. Surely Lalura – Katrielle – was immune to the Time King’s magic.
“William Balthazar Solan is the Time King, Roman. There is no more powerful being in the multiverse. When he really wants something to happen,” she shrugged, “it happens.”
Roman swallowed hard, and his body tensed. Without a single hint of patience, he finally asked, “What has Will done with our wives?”
Katrielle took a deep breath, then said, “I truly don’t know, Roman. But you and I both know they’re safe. If this is William’s doing, you all know that.” She looked around at the Kings, and none of them could deny this was true. If any of their mates had been harmed, they would know. They would have felt it. And William was their friend.
“The key to finding them is finding him. And now that we know whose magic is at work here,” she continued, “we might finally be able to work a spell to do just that.”
Chapter Three
William Solan hadn’t moved from where he sat in the leather wing-backed chair in his study for quite some time. All around him, the myriad multitude of clocks on the wall ticked discordantly. Time had been altered, and it showed.
With the slightest of gestures, the Time King pulled a gold pocket watch from the inner pocket of his suit, popped it open, and glanced down at it. This pocket watch was not like any other in the multiverse. It was so much more than it appeared to be, its extra dimensions stretching through the telling symbols of an astrolabe and even beyond that, to the remembered places of long dead stars.
He gazed at the watch. It, too was off. And it never had been before.
William closed the watch and returned it to his pocket, then pushed out of the chair and strode to the door, leaving the cacophony behind for a new mess of sound, as the hallway was also lined with clocks from different eras. He continued through the hallway, a man bent on solitude, until he’d descended several flights of stairs and was entering a long stone corridor.
William flicked a switch on the wall. Coiled lanterns from the era of Tesla sizzled to life to light the walkway, which stretched hundreds of feet into the distance and ended in a single door. The Time King reached the door, grasped the handle, and hesitated. He closed his eyes.
Beyond this barrier was a world he’d never shown to anyone. It wasn’t that it was a huge secret; it was only that the room was fairly new. He hadn’t yet had a chance to reveal it to anyone… but he could well imagine doing so.
William pressed the release on the door handle latch and swung the heavy wooden door open. It creaked in its hinges, the doorway as old, if not older than most of the objects inside the room it protected. He stepped inside.
Here, in this quiet place, the world changed. Time, in all of its ever-ticking presence, was not marked here. Its passage was not recorded, nor was it yet kept. Among the collected objects here in this massive space that ended in absolute darkness on all sides, there were no clocks. Aside from the one in his pocket, there were no time pieces or astrolabes. No reminders of who and what William was, and hence – there was peace.
William stepped into the room, allowing the door to swing heavily shut behind him. He heard it lock safely and moved further into the space. It yawned open like a physical echo, eternal and alone.
Like him.
William smiled wryly at that thought as he made his way to his favorite item in the vast museum of history that was without time. It was a car manufactured fifty years ago, one of several he possessed that were created prior to the electronic dashboard and its inevitable reminder of passing minutes and hours. This one was a 1967 Mustang Shelby, and like all of his belongings, she was in mint condition. He’d named her Lilith, after an old friend.
William opened the door and a waft of well-oiled leather greeted him. He slid into the driver’s seat, which was notched back as far as it would go to accommodate his great height, and then he shut the door again and closed his eyes.
At last, there was no off-mark ticking. There were no discordant chimes.
He had created twelve rifts in the fabric of reality, complete and perfect. Within those twelve rifts, he had hidden away twelve of the thirteen most precious objects known to the multiverse: the Queens. He’d done so to protect them.
The evil that was even now born on the horizon, gaining strength and momentum, possessed an impetus that could not be stopped. Not by anyone or anything. Except those twelve women. And the other one. The last one: The thirteenth Queen.
The Thirteen Queens were all that stood between existence and its end.
William had been at the end before. He’d been at the beginning. He knew its emptiness. He would do anything, even steal that which kept his best friends alive, to prevent the multiverse from going there again.
But doing so was exhausting. Behind closed lids, the Time King’s eyes glowed an unearthly and terrifying hue. Within their vivid green-black depths, deep down in the recesses of his private being, the mechanisms of the multiverse rotated, slipped and slid, clicked into place and pressed ever onward. No one could see these workings, not without him allowing it. But they were there, intimately a part of him.
His soul was clockworks and pixie dust, magic and machine, as this was the foundation of all that ever happened in the multiverse. This was the basis for happening in general. Nothing happened, nothing moved forward, nothing occurred at all without his old friend, Time.
Hence without William, its king, there was nothing.
But right now, he wanted to throw a wrench in those workings, watch them grind to a halt, and stop all that ever was and ever would be. He wanted to see it cease as it was, full and mid-motion, rife with color and chaos and life. He wanted to prevent the future. Now more than ever. The Time King was shattered and seething, and had never felt more scared.
I can’t do this again. In the background of his mind, a quieter voice echoed, I can’t lose her again. He’d always assumed he deserved her,
or could at least earn her. Her affection, her attention, her love. He would finally have a family. A wife. Even children. He was born of nothing and therefore had no parents. He had no siblings. He was alone and always – in every sense of the word “always” – had been.
Helena had made him think that could all change. As she did for everyone, she gave him hope and made him believe. But in the end, he always lost her. Every single time. It always – in every sense of the goddamned word “always” – ended bloody.
Maybe it’s not supposed to be me.
William’s eyes flew open. Upstairs in the room he’d left behind, the clocks on the wall stopped for an interminable fraction of time before starting back up again.
Aye, there’s the rub, he thought.
For that was the true crux of the issue, wasn’t it? That question right there, the one he’d been too afraid to ask himself all this time, was at the heart of it all. It had ended wrong so many times. And why was that, exactly? Was it perhaps, just maybe, because she wasn’t supposed to be his after all? Because he wasn’t supposed to win? Because she was not his other half… but Death’s?
I can help you, said Time.
William remained perfectly still, his eyes moving the world, his body a column of hard coiled magic resting easy in that leather bucket seat.
I can give you what you’ve always wanted. For a short while.
“And what exactly is it you think I’ve always wanted?” he asked aloud, but so, so softly. His voice was deep, his words beautifully accented by the many places of eternity.