The Goblin King (The Kings) Read online

  But he’d managed the spells just as every other window in the house shattered inward and Bookas began to pour inside. He took Selene Trystaine through the transportation portal and into that neither-here-nor-there place in-between transportation locations. As they’d moved through space and time, he searched her memories for her home address.

  And that was when he felt it. It was like slamming on the brakes to barely miss the car in front of you and hearing the tires behind you squeal to a near-miss stop. Or like successfully playing Russian roulette only to find that every chamber but one was actually full.

  It felt as though he’d had a brush with something very, very dangerous. Something deadly.

  There was a power in Selene Trystaine that he was betting even she did not know she possessed. He was fortunate that her very recent memories were at the top of her subconscious and he didn’t have to delve any deeper to find her home address.

  As he pulled back out of her mind, he wondered…. what she was.

  The world re-solidified in the dining room of Selene Trystaine’s house. Roman kept hold of the woman as he quickly scanned their surroundings to be certain they were alone and safe.

  The house was small and old, a late nineteenth century two-story with rooms the size of closets. Roman extended his mental feelers to the second floor, detecting five small hard-wood rooms, a wireless router, a laptop computer that hummed quietly, a mini-fridge that hummed not-so-quietly, and no life forms.

  Down on the first floor, the smell of fresh art supplies gently permeated the air, along with cherry bark and almond, which Roman had also scented on Selene herself. It must have been in her soap, shampoo or lotion. There were two rooms on the first floor not including the dining room, living room, bathroom and kitchen. One was obviously her art studio, its walls splattered with the occasional drop of paint, its floors covered in protective canvases. The other appeared to be a guest room.

  Paintings on the walls included a Rembrandt reproduction – Bathsheba At Her Bath – and a reproduction of The Last Supper. The couches were velvet, the throws cashmere. On one of the side tables was a single framed photograph of Selene Trystaine with another woman who appeared the same age. The other woman looked like a photo negative of Selene, with white hair and eyes of the darkest blue. Both women were smiling happily.

  Selene Trystaine’s décor was simple, but tasteful. Roman pulled back in his magic and returned his attention to the woman. He liked her. She had class.

  “Now if only I knew what you were.”

  Was she perhaps a warlock who hadn’t yet come into her power? Some other sort of thing, such as a remnant Dormant from the times before the werewolf curse had been broken? She didn’t feel like a dragon, and dragons always knew what they were anyway. She wasn’t an Akyri; if she had been, she’d have been drained and lifeless. Unless she’s an original, like Chloe Septeran? he wondered.

  He shook his head. No. She had a completely different feel to her.

  A fae?

  Roman blinked. That was an interesting thought. A changeling….

  They were more than rare these days. They were supposed to be non-existent. The fae kings had outlawed the practice among the people of their kingdoms as soon as they’d taken their thrones thousands of years ago. And yet, Roman had outlawed turning humans into vampires, and there’d been those who disobeyed his decree. With gusto.

  So, it was a possibility.

  But he mentally shrugged. If she was a changeling, it was not his right to deal with the issue. It would be difficult and she would need to be handled with care and experience. He would notify the Sidhe Kings of the possibility later. They would take care of her.

  Right now, he needed to at least settle her most recent memories into the disguise of dreams and get back to Evie before his brother struck again.

  Roman concentrated his efforts and delved very carefully back into Selene’s mind. At once, he was met with that thin-ice sensation, but he treaded lightly, taking every precaution. He closed his eyes.

  As he did, he saw Selene in her car, driving back from Diana Piper’s home. He heard her thoughts – worries for Diana’s well being, fears that Diana was skirting on the edges of depression and shouldn’t be alone. He watched her come to a decision, pull the car over, turn it around, and head back in the direction from which she came.

  But when she got to Diana’s house, the lights were off.

  For some reason, rather than assume Diana had gone to sleep, Selene’s worry ratcheted up a few notches. As if she knew something was not right.

  She got out of the car and headed to the front door, knocking gently. When there was no answer, she found the key she knew was hidden in the weathered hole in the trunk of the front yard’s oak tree, and let herself in.

  No one was home.

  Now Selene figured her best friend was either out saving children at the hospital again, risking life and limb to do so – or she’d gone for a walk alone in the middle of the night – risking life and limb to do so. Either way, it wasn’t good.

  She dropped her heavy, oversized handbag on the couch and pulled her cell phone out of it. She tapped Diana’s number and stepped out onto the front porch at the same time, thinking to gaze up and down the street while she waited.

  That was when an Offspring appeared. Of course, Selene hadn’t known what the man was – he’d simply appeared before her as if materializing out of thin air, a tall and relatively handsome man with white-blonde hair and red, glowing eyes.

  Selene jumped back into the doorway.

  The vampire looked suddenly and unexpectedly panicked for a moment. His burning red gaze dropped to her feet where they stood on the threshold. He reached out, tried to grab her, and only managed to get her sleeve, which ripped from the shoulder to the elbow.

  Selene screamed, rushing inside and slamming the door behind her.

  Roman frowned as he saw this particular memory. This was different. The vampire couldn’t follow her inside.

  There was an old wives’ tail that claimed a vampire could not enter a person’s home without their permission. This, of course, was total bunk. Offspring were warlocks and could not only enter any house whenever they wished, they could usually work magic to get past locks as well.

  However…. It was possible that Kamon’s vampires were different.

  Evil paints its masterpieces with a tainted palette.

  It was something Lalura had once told him. Evil breeds evil.

  It was feasible that Kamon’s vampires had become tainted. Under the evil god’s rule, they might now exist as a twisted version of what they had once been. They could no longer enter a mortal’s home without the owner’s permission, in effect bringing the wives’ tail to fruition.

  Selene’s memories certainly seemed to indicate as much. And now that he thought about it, when he’d been fighting them outside of Diana’s home – he’d been fighting them outside of Diana’s home. None of them had made it inside.

  Now he knew why.

  Roman finished watching the last of Selene’s latest memories….

  She stumbled to the couch, dropped her cell phone, pulled the handgun out of her purse, flicked the safety off with shaking fingers, and turned around to suddenly freeze. At once, she saw everything as it truly was. Roman realized she was seeing through the fae glamour.

  There were twelve inch spiders crawling over her windows, spinning webs with unnatural speed. And beyond these mini-monsters were men with glowing red eyes and others with the heads of some kind of deer or elk… all of them staring in at her.

  The animal headed men began to jiggle the handles of her doors, and Selene felt something that Roman instantly knew as magic begin to curl its insidious fingers into the house.

  She hadn’t understood what was happening. She prepared to shoot.

  Then Diana appeared with Damon, the two of them bursting through the front door behind her. Selene spun, her finger sliding over the trigger.

  Relief flooded her sy
stem nanoseconds later.

  This was where Selene’s memories began to blur.

  As the last of Selene’s memories dropped away, Roman opened his eyes.

  With the deference and care deserving of the best friend of a Queen, Roman scooped up the images, sounds, and feelings as if they were a handful fine and precious gold dust. He then sprinkled this dust into the sweet surrealism of Selene Trystaine’s dreams, thereby diluting them with the improbability of her nighttime reveries.

  As he did so, Selene’s beautiful pale eyes closed and she swooned on her feet.

  Roman lifted her easily into his arms, carried her up the stairs to her bedroom, and laid her down atop it. Then he straightened, cast up one last transportation spell, and disappeared.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Diana slowly sipped the tea from the mug in her hands. It was excellent tea, she had to admit. It had a notably pleasant flavor to it, an even better aroma, and the creamy warmth was surprisingly soothing.

  Especially as she tried to digest and understand everything Damon had just told her.

  It was so much more than she’d ever considered possible. She’d always assumed there was more… magic out there somewhere. If she possessed it, then surely someone else must. If there were magic people, then maybe there were magic other things.

  But she’d had to struggle with her secret since she’d discovered it as a child. Her parents helped, hiding it from the world to the point that they decided not to have any more children so the risk of exposure was minimized.

  The fewer people who knew….

  So, although these were the questions that had always been resting in the back of her mind, she’d never dreamed they would be answered. And especially not like this… while sitting across from a man who oozed masculinity with every single damned breath.

  “Vampires and werewolves and dragons – oh my,” she muttered before taking another slow sip of tea.

  Damon smiled, showing her those beautiful snow white teeth again. He sat across from her on one of the large couches in the room, both arms thrown over the back of the sofa, outlining the hard curves of his biceps and the strength in his forearms. He watched her unwaveringly through green eyes that reflected the firelight like multi-faceted gemstone. But he looked troubled.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” he told her, that troubled expression deepening.

  Diana looked at him over the rim of her mug. Over the course of the last hour or so, she’d told him a little about her life – the veterinary office, the animals she healed, and even her occasional dangerous excursions to the hospital at night to do what good she could there.

  In exchange, he’d explained his side of the proverbial story to her as he’d promised. He’d told her that there were thirteen kings who ruled over thirteen different supernatural factions or worlds, and that even within her own seemingly non-magical world, there were witches and werewolves, seers and healers…. People like her.

  “A lot to take in” didn’t even scrape the surface. It was a paranormal information overload.

  “Yes,” she said blithely. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  Damon straightened, bringing his arms off the couch to lean forward and lace his hands together, elbows on knees. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “But given what we encountered back at your house… well, you need to know.”

  “Why?” she asked, sitting up a little straighter. “What happened back there, anyway?” She set her tea cup down on the coffee table. “What were all those things? And what exactly did they want?”

  They wanted to kill me, she thought for the thousandth time in the last few hours. A bunch of monsters from god only knows where were breaking into my house and trying to kill me. And she didn’t know why. Granted, she probably wasn’t the best person in the world. She was hellishly crabby some mornings, and she’d lost her cool a few times in public when she was overly tired, and she knew there were a few smiles that people had freely given her that she hadn’t bothered to return. She’d just been too out of it or too exhausted. But she hadn’t meant anything by any of it. It wasn’t like she’d murdered the pope or something.

  She couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want her dead.

  Unless…. They wanted to kill her not because of the bad things she’d done – but because of the good. Because she could heal.

  “Were they trying to kill me because I have the ability to heal?”

  Damon hesitated before responding. He looked down at his hands. “No.”

  Diana blinked.

  Damon looked up, pinning her with his powerful gaze. “They weren’t trying to kill you,” he told her. “They were trying to abduct you.”

  He pushed himself up, at once appearing too agitated to sit still. He paced away from the couch, his hands on his narrow hips. His boots tapped out a hollow sound on the stone floor of the castle’s great room. The fire crackled noisily in the hearth.

  Diana watched and waited, feeling as if she were on the verge of something even more mind shattering than everything else he’d already dumped on her.

  Damon made his way to that fire and gazed into it, bracing his hands on the mantle to lean in. “The 13 Kings are destined to meet thirteen very special women,” he said. “These women will become our queens. And just as they are on a chess board, each queen will become even more powerful than her husband. This power is what the people who were at your house are after.”

  “Why at my house?” she asked.

  It was a stupid question. She knew it was stupid even as she voiced it, but it was one of those damned questions that sat there and begged to be asked so it could watch the cat being let out of the bag or the can of worms finally opened up and turned on its side.

  Damon straightened a little and glanced back at her over his broad shoulder. Their eyes met. He looked at her as though he were waiting for something.

  Diana knew what it was he was waiting for. He wanted her to put two and two together and come up with the fact that she was one of the queens. But her conscious mind refused to wrap around it. She circled the knowledge like a child dancing around a mud puddle – within proximity but tauntingly un-touching.

  She would not think it. She would not say it.

  “Diana, I think you and I both know why they were at your house.” He turned to face her, dropping his hands to his sides.

  “Don’t say it,” she whispered. Her chest was tight. She felt out of breath.

  He walked toward her, his eyes shifting from green to orange to red and back again. “You are one of the thirteen queens,” he said, his lightly accented voice filling the spaces of the great room with magic. “And I think you also know which one.”

  “Don’t say it,” she begged.

  Damon stopped directly before her chair, forcing her to crane her neck to look up at him. His nearness washed over her, intoxicating and dangerous. She could feel his magic as if he were shrouded in it. It brushed against her, teasingly hot and electric. He leaned over, bracing one well sculpted arm on the chair on either side of her.

  She was trapped now.

  “Think of it, Diana,” he said, as he leaned in to speak the words so close she could feel his voice inside of her rather than hear it. His raven dark hair curled over his forehead and framed his strong, handsome face in waves so thick and shining, her fingertips twitched with the need to touch it. Her eyes tore to his lips with their wicked scar and slightly cruel smile. Her heart hammered, her legs going weak. A warmth was awakening in her middle and spreading with brutal tenacity. “Your power to heal would be amplified. Whatever you can do now would be nothing compared to the magic you would possess as queen.”

  He hesitated – just for one near-fatal moment in which Diana felt the world spin and then drop out from under her.

  “As my queen.”

  So close.

  His queen….

  “I….” She had no breath; her chest was too tight. “You….” She felt dizzy, unfocused. He was too da
mn close!

  She forced her eyes closed in a desperate attempt to shut him out. It didn’t work. He was all around her now, his presence fiercely all-consuming.

  But freed from the magnetic pull of his heated gaze, she was at least able to talk. “You’ve got the wrong girl,” she quietly insisted. Even if he were right, she couldn’t stay with him. She had a job to do, a duty to the people who came to her for help. “I’m not queen material.” She worked with animals, in piss and crap and dander. She went home every night smelling like wet dog and wanting nothing more than to shower, put on some sweats, make a bowl of spaghetti, and eat it in front of Netflix.

  She opened her eyes – a massive mistake. Fire seared through her, marking her soul with the brand of the Goblin King.

  Fight, she told herself. Think of the real world. Think of the animals! But despite her inner strength, her last words were once more a mere whisper. “I’m… not your queen.”

  But Damon Chroi’s fiery eyes crackled. “I beg to differ.”

  And then he moved fast, taking her face between two strong hands and claiming her lips in a hungry kiss.

  Diana’s mind spun out of control, her body’s internal flame roared into a raging fire, and she barely suppressed the moan that rose to the demands of his mouth as her heart stopped.

  And kick-started back up again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  He’d been thinking about doing it all night. He’d been craving it like the poor wanted money or the aging wanted their youth back. From the moment he’d stepped into that alley to find her facing off with his goblin, he’d had the nearly undeniable urge to corner her, trap her against a wall, and take her mouth with his.

  And he’d been right to want it. He’d been right about everything.

  She was tender and malleable under the force of his kiss. Her body responded to his just as he’d imagined it would. She opened to him, melted under him, and tasted like promise.