Rather, there was only the circle and the candles. One hundred and fifty-one of them, blood red and half-gone, their wax melted and re-solidified into a molded ring of red that bound the woman within it as surely as did the ropes around her wrists and ankles. Those ropes had dug in over the course of hours, as she’d pulled against them repeatedly. Blood stained the frayed bindings, a visual aid to the suffering that her blue eyes spoke of in volumes.
She felt his hand upon her sore breast; it caressed gently, soothing the bruises it had left there during the night. Then she felt his whisper at her ear. “One more time, angel. We’re nearly done.”
One more time.
Quiet, gagged sobbing joined the silence and heavy breathing that filled the abandoned warehouse. But when the painful process started all over again, the woman stopped crying. She closed her eyes tight, shutting out all but the worst of the feelings, the ones she could not block. Those, she bore with mute strength, because she knew it was nearly over.
When it finally was, her lungs expanded raggedly and a long keening she barely recognized as her own was released from within. She was done. It was done. And that realization was the most blissful relief imaginable.
She was untied, and strong arms, those arms that had done so much and borne so much, pulled her into their embrace and rocked with her back and forth. She wanted to stay there in her body, hang on to the wakefulness of her life, but she also didn’t – so she began to fade. As she did, she had a vague notion of being wrapped in something soft, like satin. She felt warm.
And then she felt nothing.
*****
Two hundred and seventy-seven days later, an African American twenty-eight year old police woman by the name of Officer Rosa Dixon looked up from the front desk of a tiny precinct in a small southwest town in the middle of nowhere to watch the door that no one had come through all day. She was thinking of moving to Boston. She had family up there. Her father was on the force up there. Maybe she could get transferred.
At that moment, the door finally swung outward, and a young blonde woman walked into the station carrying a baby.
The blonde was thin, maybe a little on the too-thin side. She wore jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers, and all of them bore holes. Of course, that wasn’t saying much these days. It was 1983. Clothes are sold with holes in them now, thought Rosa. A somewhat distressed look was coming into fashion, which was distressing in and of itself. But it was harder than ever to tell who was genuinely down on their luck and who just wanted to hide the fact that they weren’t. Maybe the style wouldn’t last. Rosa hoped not. She’d been waiting for years for the Art Deco craze to come back. Fashions repeated; why not the twenties and thirties?
The blonde’s shirt revealed her arms, which were smooth and showed no signs of tracks or bruising. All in all, she might have been too skinny in the officer’s opinion, but she looked clean enough.
Intrigued, Rosa put down her pen, took off her reading glasses – which were hung on a vintage pince-nez chain and quite precious to her – and eyed the woman as she approached.
“I found him in a dumpster outside the grocery store,” said the blonde when she reached the desk. Up close, Rosa could see the girl was beautiful in that mysterious kind of way that was difficult to pin down. There was something in the sleepless hollows beneath her eyes, or something in the way she moved her head that spoke of innate grace, though she looked to be no older than twenty, maybe twenty-five.
The blonde uncovered the baby’s face to reveal eyes like the Caribbean Sea. “I didn’t know what else to do but bring him in here.”
Rosa stared into those blue eyes for a while before she looked from the baby to the woman holding him. The blonde had brown eyes, the more notable thing about them the fact that they were a little red as if she’d been crying. There was no immediate likeness between her and the infant, at least not that the cop could see. Then again, she’d never been the kind of person who could tell a baby looked like its mother or father. As far as she was concerned, that was bullshit people fed new parents to make them feel good. A baby looked like a baby. And a baby looked like a squat, fleshy, pink-cheeked abomination with no teeth and eyes that took up half its face. And don’t even get her started on what a baby looked like just coming out of the womb! That was a wrinkled, purple mess of a thing that looked more like Benjamin Button at the beginning of his life than anything else. No, a human baby bore more resemblance to a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig than it did its mother or father.
The officer pushed out her chair and stood up to make her way around the desk. The blonde woman turned with her, and for a moment, her hold on the baby seemed genuinely protective. Perhaps motherly.
But again, there was no immediate proof that she was the child’s mother. Plus, Rosa had seen women who’d just given birth before. Her sister, for instance, had been ripped from hole to hole. Most women couldn’t walk for hours after, if not days. Even later the same week, they moved slow. And ninety percent of them had at least a little pregnancy weight to get rid of, usually a lot. This young woman on the other hand seemed to be in perfect health other than the fact that she was a waif.
“You say you found him in a dumpster?” Rosa questioned calmly.
The blonde nodded. Her brown eyes focused steadily on the officer.
“Behind the grocery store?” Rosa asked.
“Yes,” replied the blonde. “Spencer’s Farm to Market. Downtown.”
That was what she had been about to ask. She went to the next question on her list. “How did you know he was there?”
“I parked next to the dumpster to go in and do some shopping, and I heard crying.”
She was fast to answer, which sent up a red flag for the officer. The reply seemed almost rehearsed. There were also those crying-red eyes to consider. Who went grocery shopping just after a massive crying spell?
Oh hell, she thought with a mental shrug. Everyone does that at some point. I have. Life is hard.
“Was there anything else with him?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
The officer squinted a little, her gaze narrowing. She’d noticed over the last four years, ever since she’d earned her badge, that when people started calling her ma’am, it sometimes meant they were getting nervous. And sometimes, not always but sometimes, that meant they had something to hide.
Then again… it could just have been the fact that Rosa hated the word “ma’am.” To her, it felt that when she was called ma’am, the word was substituted for other things. Like “crazy lady,” or “irritating lady,” or even and most especially, “bitch.”
And the use of the word could just mean they were trying to be polite, even if they were nervous. The truth was, cops could be dicks. People had a right to be nervous. Having worked with a few bona fide dicks herself, Rosa knew that first hand.
She sighed, feeling suddenly very tired. “Here,” she said softly, reaching out to take the baby. The girl hesitated just a slight, slight moment. And then she placed the baby in the police officer’s arms and took a step back.
“Thank you,” the blonde said. And then, like a flash of yellow and blue jeans, she was spinning around and running full-tilt to the front door. She slammed into the release bar and hurtled out into the twilight beyond without a hint of slowing or a second glance.
Rosa called after her. “Whoa, wait! Hey wait! You can’t leave, you have to fill out – ”
But the girl was gone.
The police officer stared at the front door and the empty space beyond it. On the upside, she could almost certainly mark the woman off the list of possible moms now. That had been some Olympic-style running for a brand new mother. But on the downside, there were a thousand things to do. There were protocols to follow. And….
The police officer looked away from the door and down at the infant in her arms. Acting on instinct, she pulled the blanket away from his face again, once more revealing those beautiful blue eyes.
Why anyone would want t
o be rid of you, she thought, is beyond me.
“Hey little guy,” she said softly, offering her finger for him to clutch. He did, making a soft cooing sound as he gripped it. She felt a tugging at something inside her, and suddenly her eyes felt strange and her throat felt tight. She smiled at the infant. “Don’t you worry. Everything’s gonna be alright.”
Chapter One
Present Day, Meeting of the 13
Time had a funny way. A lot could be said about it, most of that conjecture: Time was fleeting, Time was cruel, Time flew when you were having fun, and Time healed all wounds. Time was apparently bipolar.
But in the end, which was an ironic thing for Time to think, there were a few things that it truly did know.
It knew what sand felt like, not just in its infinitesimally small form, but in its infancy as a mountain. It knew the sounds of birth and of death and understood that they were often the same. It knew how to forget, and how to remember. It also knew how to recognize when it was staring at something that had seen a lot of it. A lot of Time.
That’s what William Balthazar was fairly sure he was doing right now. He was gazing at something very old.
His gaze sharpened, honing in with supernatural adeptness. Colors brightened and contrasts grew sharper. Normally when Will did this, the imperfections carved upon a mortal by nature became starkly clear to him. But though Steven Lazarus had been born a mortal and hadn’t died to become the Akyri King until his thirties, he showed no visible signs of having aged. Not even to William.
Lazarus was as handsome as any man who sat at that table, which was saying something. He was tall and perfectly proportioned, broad shouldered, narrow-waisted. His voice resonated like magic, and his jaw was strong. He was rakishly barely shaven, which William chalked up to being busy more than any actual desire to appear rakish. His teeth were straight, white and perfect, and of course he had a full head of lustrous hair. That hair had strangely enough darkened several shades since he’d become king, and was now a medium to dark brown rather than blond. But it seemed to suit the blue-eyed man somehow, as if what was on the inside was finally showing on the outside.
However, like the others, it wasn’t physical appearance alone that lent the king his majesty. Lazarus had the aura as well. It was an unmistakable aura of power… and that was very strange to William.
The Akyri King was a relatively new addition to the Table. He was a fledgling at being a king, and yet, there was that power emanating from him, pulsing with every beat of his now inhuman heart as if he’d been born with it. Well, I suppose he was born with it, Will told himself. If what they said was true – and Steven Lazarus was the bastard child of Marius, the previous Akyri King.
But not even Marius had ever felt like this. Not even close.
No, there’s something more to you, Will thought, and his green gaze narrowed further. He wondered just how much more there was to the good detective. Was there enough there that the man could be trouble? If it was something old he was detecting, then that was a distinct possibility.
He knew he was staring, but that was something else about Time. It could do whatever the hell it wanted. And the Akyri King was distracted anyway; he had no idea he was being so closely observed.
Quite suddenly, the Akyri King looked up and met William’s gaze. A hard stillness moved through them both, and Will felt the man’s power move in front of him like an invisible wall.
William’s brow lifted. Interesting.
*****
Laz had barely hit his thirties, but he genuinely felt ancient just then. It didn’t help that he didn’t even have a place to go home to, where he could take off his jacket, grab a beer, and switch on the VIVE to disappear into some 3d real-as-hell fairy world. His partner was currently staying with him. Ray Baxter was a shifter, and his girlfriend was a human. Most times, the discrepancy wasn’t an issue, but apparently they’d begun fighting about something else entirely, and of course the obvious differences in a couple – race, background, parents, and in Baxter’s case, species – always came into play eventually when lovers were pissed at each other. The fight had escalated, and now she was in the process of moving out. While she did that, Baxter was crashing at Laz’s place.
Laz was just betting the other detective was enjoying the hell out of the VIVE. Laz had saved up for four paychecks to buy the virtual reality device. For short, he called it virtuality. For a cop living on a cop’s wages, even that of the BPD’s head detective, his VIVE was one of Laz’s most prized possessions. Of course… it didn’t have to be. As an Akyri, and as the king of the Akyri, Laz could have conjured up all the money he’d wanted. He didn’t even have to make it a material conjuring. He could just switch the numbers in a few electronic bank accounts, and voila – he was filthy, stinking rich. Anyone started to ask questions, they could be dealt with by order of a few mind control and mind erasing spells. All in all, Laz had the world in his hands, just as did every king sitting at the Table of the Thirteen.
But first and foremost in Laz’s mind, he was a cop. As a police officer, not to mention a leader of an entire nation of supernatural beings, what kind of example would he be setting? Besides, there was little Laz really wanted in the world. Little in the material sense, that is.
A queen….
Like so many thoughts these days, that one came without warning and without invitation. He was not a lonely man. His bed was kept warm most nights, any night he felt like having it warmed. So what the hell did he want with a queen? Why would it be important to him? He had enough to deal with at that moment, without having to impress some woman that fate decided he’d be saddled with.
In short, the world was going to hell. As a cop and as a man and as one who’d been human most his life, Laz felt disillusioned, tired, and weary of all that was around him. He was somewhere in-between the stages of being genuinely disgusted by the state of things and giving up on caring about it altogether. Was he supposed to feel this way? So young? Wasn’t it usually the eighty-year-old man who poked people in the chest with his cane and said “bah humbug?”
The truth was he couldn’t even stand to glance in the mirror any longer. In the mornings, he used his electric shaver to shave without looking, going by touch and feel rather than sight. He just… didn’t like what he saw in his own eyes. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly. Was it a hard, jaded edge setting in far too soon that made him so uncomfortable? Or was it something else he saw there? It was almost as if when he dared to look into those blue, blue eyes, he saw someone else looking back.
Was he going mad?
Detective Steven Lazarus, king of the Akyri, ran a strong hand through his thick hair and sighed quietly. The Table he sat at was getting pretty big. In addition to the kings of thirteen different supernatural nations, there were now eight queens sitting among them. Plus Lalura Chantelle the ancient “human” witch sat down at one end, watching the goings-on with eyes far too bright and far too perceptive for the human she claimed to be.
If this had been a meeting of twenty or so normal humans, there probably would have been some trouble hearing everyone when they spoke. Attendants would be bored, texting, day dreaming, maybe sleeping and even drooling. Possibly playing Pokémon Go. Hell, he liked the game himself. Cops weren’t even supposed to like the game, apparently. They were supposedly up in arms about people playing while they drove or walking out into the street without looking both ways. But the truth was, people did that without Pokémon Go. They got into wrecks while they were drunk, while they were on drugs, or worst and most prevalent of all, while texting. And that had been around a lot longer than Pokémon Go.
Personally, Laz felt the benefits far outweighed the detriments. In his apartment complex, his next door neighbor’s kid had been on insulin since he was eleven. But now, just after his thirteenth birthday, he was back off it. All signs of diabetes were gone – because of that game.
Laz was almost 22nd level, and he’d reached it without the cheating use of magic and
without having spent a nickel. It was sort of nice to have something he could do as a regular guy and still progress. Sometimes it was nice to be reminded of the fact that human beings were capable of pretty cool things.
But they were distracting things, and if humans had been sitting in this meeting rather than the ridiculously powerful men who were here, no doubt someone would at least be on their phone. However, magic took the place of doldrums here, magic that amplified voices, fluxed like a pulse around them all, and tingled against the skin. It was anything but boring. That same magic supplied the top of the Table with coffee, tea, soft drinks, wine, water, an assortment of beverages unheard-of in the mortal realm, and a variety of snacks that would make any culinary master both drool and seethe with envy.
Laz was just considering taking one of the pastries, if for no other reason than to have something to keep his hands busy, when he felt the weight of someone’s eyes. He froze and looked up, managing to locate and zero in on who it was on his first try.
William Balthazar Solan, the Time King, had fixed him with an intense green-eyed gaze.
Again.
This wasn’t the first time Will had looked at him like that. The expression was hard for Laz to pin down. It was a perceptive look, but there was something else too. Since he couldn’t tell what it was, Laz made assumptions. Maybe it was fear.
Maybe William Balthazar Solan was afraid of Laz. Maybe he knew that as a detective, Laz stood a good chance of figuring out that Solan was the traitor that sat amongst them, the one who’d made life difficult for the lot of them for the last year or so. Solan hadn’t yet found his queen, and rumor had it he was acting out of character. Word in shadowy circles was that William was using magic these days. That was an odd turn of events, wasn’t it?