The Goblin King (The Kings) Read online

  His own desire reared its head like a dragon, reacting to her innocence and warmth like a moth to a flame. He moved in, deepening the kiss, his mind spinning with images of blissful and forbidden things –

  And then she broke the kiss, pulling away with tremendous, willful force and shoving her hands against his chest. It was sudden and harsh, shocking him to his core and awakening the predator inside.

  He straightened, his eyes flashed like gasoline on an open flame, and his blood boiled.

  Diana got her feet under her, springing up out of the chair with a discombobulated breathlessness that only told him she wanted him as much as he did her – and only helped to fan the flames already consuming him. But he held his ground, recognizing the tumultuous emotions racing across her beautiful features.

  “That’s enough!” she told him, teeth bared, stormy eyes flashing. “We can’t do this! I don’t even know you, for Christ’s sake! I don’t care how incredible your kisses are, I can’t be your queen! I won’t! For the love of god, this is ridiculous!” She was trembling, her shoulders heaving with big, great, dramatic breaths. He’d pushed her over some sort of edge – or come close. “I have a life to live in my own world, Damon Chroi! People depend on me! I can’t abandon them! I actually make a difference there!”

  She stopped screaming at him long enough to catch up on those heaving breaths, her chest rising and falling in fast, painful succession, her hands balled into fists at her sides. Damon watched her very slowly uncurl one fist and shakily run that hand through her hair. Once she did, she distractedly glanced down at her fingers – and her expression darkened considerably.

  With sudden, fierce impatience, she shook her right hand out, dislodging several strands of her beautiful, strawberry blonde hair. They drifted to the cold, hard floor like spun gold in a Rumpelstiltskin dungeon.

  “I have to go,” she stated again, this time much more quietly. But her words were laced with an acidic note of bitterness that bewildered Damon. She looked up at him and took a deep, tremulous breath. “Please.”

  In that moment, Damon fought with his own will, mind and body as he’d never fought against anything else in his life. No goblin had ever been this hard to tame. The young woman before him was turning him inside out.

  There was no way in hell he was letting her out of his sights. She’d given up her normal life and its normal routine the moment they’d walked into each other’s lives. She had a destiny to fulfill now, and so help him, she would fulfill it.

  If it was the last thing he did as a living, breathing man, he was going to make Diana Piper his wife. He was going to make her his queen.

  But there was some small sense of decency inside Damon that whistled softly and waved its hand at him and quietly begged him to keep his calm and handle this like a gentleman. So he took a deep breath and corralled his strength.

  “There are a thousand different bonds and a hundred different spells I could use to keep you here with me,” he told her, somehow managing to keep his tone level even while his soul pitched one hell of a fit. “And returning to your home right now would amount to no more than suicide for you. But you are a free woman, Diana Piper. More importantly, you are a queen, no matter what you might believe. Your will is your own.” For the moment. “And you will do what you feel is the right thing to do.”

  He turned away from her – had to – because the memory of her lips on his was making him slightly crazy.

  After a few moments, the world eased out of its stark contrasts and the pain in his eyes began to subside as their flames slowly shrank. Without turning back to face her, he said, “All I ask is that you grant me one boon before I return you.”

  And if that doesn’t work, I’ll damn well knock you senseless and tie you to my bed.

  Fuck.

  He was beginning to understand the dominating actions and desires of a few of the other 13 Kings all too well.

  It took Diana a long while to respond, which did not surprise Damon. She was smart, and only a fool would accept that kind of compromise without first gathering more information.

  “What kind of boon?” she finally asked.

  Now he did turn around. “I want to show you something.” He hesitated, and then he offered her his hand. “You claim that you can make a difference in your world as if your world is the only one where you can do so.”

  Diana looked down at his hand. Her dark gray eyes were very large in her beautiful face. She looked tired, probably overworked. He thought of all he’d learned about her that night. She was overworked. And a little haunted.

  But also strong.

  Her big eyes narrowed, questioning but curious. “And you plan to prove me wrong?”

  “I’ll let you judge that for yourself.”

  Just as he knew she would, Diana slowly raised her hand and placed it within his. He curled his fingers around her, gentle but firm – and this was the moment he would later realize his entire world changed.

  Slowly, so as not to frighten her off again, he pulled her close. She moved stiffly at first but then relinquished, permitting him to draw her near. When she was close enough, he allowed his magic to surround them.

  As it did, Damon’s heart rate slowed. His blood settled down. His eyes closed.

  In a way that it never had before, his magic transformed. He had intended a simple transportation spell. But rather than the twist in time and space he’d grown so accustomed to, he and Diana were surrounded with music. The thunder had stopped. Instead, there were chimes. Distant pipes played as if sounding from a field in the past or from the hills of a dream.

  It reminded him of a lullaby, Celtic and ancient, but one that was drawn from somewhere so deep within him, he had no conscious control over it. He felt no weight. Each note carried another pound, another century away. There was movement like a dance – and Damon opened his eyes.

  They were no longer in his great room, nor even in his castle. The world he’d ruled over for thousands of years now drifted far below them… as they rode through the twilight skies wrapped in a magic pure and a music timeless.

  The clouds that had hung low across his kingdom like a mantle since the beginning of his rule had parted and thinned and drifted away. The moon dominated the pre-dawn sky, and the colors were turning. He’d never seen such colors. Orange across the horizon melting to pink to purple to the deep indigo of the moon’s realm high above.

  This unknown spell that he had never before cast drew from absolutely nowhere and danced around them in blues and pinks and violets that shimmered and soothed. Diana’s frown was long gone. Her beautiful, freshly kissed lips were spread in a brilliant smile. She laughed aloud as the wind curled softly through her hair and shooting stars cascaded across the deep indigo far above. The sound of that laugh was like a magic all its own – and in that moment, he vowed to bring it forth as often as he possibly could.

  The hope that Damon had sensed before now returned and swelled like a balloon inside him. He had thought he’d felt wings unfurling…. He’d been right.

  The world moved in perfect slow motion far below. There was no pain, no cold, nothing but the song of magic that carried them on their walk through dawn’s ametrine colored sky.

  He would have let it go on forever. There could be no tomorrow, no landing, no coming down from the literal and unexpected high that had found two unbeknownst soul mates flying together over a strange and mythical land – and he would not mind.

  But even through the haze of infinite bliss that had wrapped tight around him, he saw what it was he’d been originally aiming for. On the ground, the forest parted to make way for a bramble-filled field that then led to a cliff face filled with cave entrances.

  A familiar sadness entered his chest, bringing back that weight he’d let go of only moments ago. He wanted to shove it away again and return to the happiness he’d never thought he would be lucky enough to find.

  But he let the weight stay. The loneliness. It had to.

  Because ul
timately he needed to show Diana why he’d brought her out here.

  With no more than a thought, he lowered them gradually toward the ground between the brambles and the cave entrances. Diana looked away from the night sky and the moon and gazed down at their destination as they descended. The smile she’d graced him with slowly slipped until they gently touched down, and she stared at the nearest cavern mouth . It was tall and dark and foreboding.

  He knew she would have given almost anything in that moment to be back up in the sky. He would have too.

  “This is what I wanted you to see,” he told her. He still held her hand in his, and she had not yet attempted to pull away. Most likely, she was scared.

  She had good reason to be.

  “This is where the xenobe goblins live. Beyond these cave entrances are hundreds of them,” he told her. “Thousands. They hide in the caves because rock walls don’t get caught in their claws.”

  Diana now pulled her hand from his. She stared at the caves for a long, long while without saying anything. Finally, she rolled her shoulders back, stood a little straighter, and turned to peer up at him. “You brought me here to heal them.”

  “No,” he told her honestly. “I brought you here to see them. I brought you here so that you would know there are creatures in this realm who could use your help as well. Your world is not the only world to know pain. You are a healer, a creature possessing of a magic that until now was so rare, it was thought to belong only to one woman. You’ve opened a new door, Diana.”

  He took a step back and gestured to the cliff wall, dotted with its multitude of dark openings. “For all of us.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Diana closed her eyes and put her hand to her forehead. She’d gone through too many emotional changes over the course of the night. From terrified to turned on to angry and scared to insanely happy – during that impromptu flight over the Goblin Kingdom – and back to scared again.

  Damon Chroi was asking her to do something immense. In the course of a few short hours, he’d entered her world and upended it. He had presented her with a choice of such grand and bizarre proportions, she truthfully wondered whether she were just about to wake up.

  So she waited with her eyes closed and let the images of her crazy new world spin through her head. But they didn’t fade like dreams would. They didn’t blur around the edges or mix up into meaningless nonsense. Nothing changed.

  When she opened her eyes again, Damon Chroi the Goblin King was still standing a few feet away, his badass amazingly handsome self exuding power and strength and the scent of freshly fallen rain – just as he had from the beginning. And his vital, ever-changing green eyes watched her with a mixture of worry… and hope.

  All Diana could do was take a deep breath and let it out with decisive finality.

  “Okay,” she said tentatively, but resolutely. “You’re telling me that the goblin I helped in that alley is not the only one of his kind. The rest are in there.” She gestured to the cave entrances. “And they’re all in pain just like he was.”

  “Yes.” A breeze brushed through a lock of his black hair, causing it to shimmer like a blackbird’s wing in the dawning light.

  “And you want me to heal them.”

  Damon smiled a small smile. “I only know that you can.” The sun creeping over the horizon behind Diana reflected in the depths of his gaze, casting it into a brilliant faceted rainbow of tourmaline colors. “You’ll have to decide what to do now for yourself.”

  Diana looked from him to the caves and accidentally ran a hand through her hair, once more dislodging precious strands to pull them out with her fingers. This time, she just let them fall, her mind on other things. Like choices:

  Return to my world and try to heal as many as I can before the bad guys who attacked my house came back to finish the job….

  Or stay. In a place that shouldn’t exist, with a man too good to be real. As his queen.

  Before she could give him an answer, Damon turned fully toward the caves and raised his right hand palm-out.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Helping you make your choice.”

  Illumination gathered around his hand. Like a snake of light, it left his hand in a string and floated through the air, entering the largest, nearest cave and lighting it from within before it vanished down the natural corridor.

  Diana braced herself. Damon lowered his hand and moved around her, stopping when he stood at her back. She could feel him there like a hot brick wall, emanating heat and magic that licked at her and heated her from the inside out.

  She kept her eyes glued to the cave entrance and refused to fidget, promising herself she wouldn’t back down from this, no matter what.

  The first of a half-dozen xenobe goblins scraped their massive ways through the entrance of the cave and into the painful, dawning light, and Diana inadvertently broke that promise, stepping back – right into the solidness of Damon Chroi.

  “They’re coming out to see you, Diana,” he said, leaning over to speak the words in her ear. “So I would suggest you stay. I allowed them to witness what you did for their brother in the alley. Obviously, they want to know if you can do the same for them.”

  “What if I can’t help them?” she asked. She became exhausted after healing only a handful of dogs or cats back home. This was so much more. It was bigger than her – several times over.

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  *****

  The first of the giant beasts shuffled his way very slowly toward Damon and Diana. The others hung back, remaining where they’d gathered at the entrance to the cave. A few of them seemed to be surprised by the clear skies and lack of rain. Their multi-colored eyes gazed upward and outward, and they made small, curious sounds.

  Damon had to hand it to his queen. She hadn’t yet really tried to retreat. She was hesitant, understandably. But she had met these monsters before.

  “The same,” she whispered now as she took in the goblin’s appearance from his bleeding maw filled with row upon row of jagged teeth to his three-foot-long claws that scraped along the ground as he moved. “They’re all like the other one was.” She shook her head, and he moved around her to see that her expression had gone from uncertain and a little frightened – to angry.

  “What kind of natural selection allows an animal like this to form?” she asked softly, her voice hissing with renewed energy. She moved forward in a sudden brave burst and me the animal half way. It remained still and simply looked down at her as she reached out, gently grasped its paw, and lifted it in order to study the swollen and bleeding nail beds. “One that is always in pain? One whose own natural body causes it endless agony? What kind of world are you ruling over, Damon Chroi?”

  She looked up, caught his gaze, and held it with silent, seething demand. She wanted an answer. So he gave her one.

  “A world that you could make better.”

  Diana Piper went very, very still. Their gazes held, heating up and filling the space between them with so many things unspoken.

  Then, finally, she looked away. He felt the disconnection as something profound. His heart hammered, his breath held.

  His would-be queen turned her attention to the xenobe goblin. With the grace of natural born royalty and the strength of a true healer, Diana placed her free hand against the goblin’s fur covered chest.

  Twenty minutes later, she’d shortened more than a dozen pairs of overgrown claws, fixed a dozen painful maws, and changed more than a dozen lives for the better.

  She let her hand drop from the latest healed xenobe and turned to look up at Damon. “I don’t understand it,” she told him. “I should be dropping just about dead by this point. But… I feel fine. I honestly feel like I could do this forever.”

  Warning bells went off in Damon’s head. Appearances could be deceiving. No one knew that better than a fae. “I don’t think we should push it,” he told her. “Are you hungry?”

  He looked past
her to the group of goblins speaking their odd language and comparing their new bodies with one another. They’d been completely transformed. They’d once been the most frightening and unpredictable of his charges, and now they reminded him of massive, cuddly plush monsters. They were even laughing. He’d never heard a xenobe goblin laugh before – but the happiness that a laugh exuded, no matter whose it was, would always be instantly recognizable.

  “You’ve been here quite a while,” he continued as he looked back down at her. She was so beautiful standing there with her eyes shining and her smile gleaming and her strawberry blonde hair all wild all around her from the outdoor breeze and latent humidity…. For a moment it took his breath away, even though it was the hundredth time he’d looked down at her and taken in her beauty since they’d met.

  But he schooled himself and kept the conversation on topic. “I think you should eat, and I make a mean breakfast.”

  Diana gave a small laugh. “I could eat,” she told him, smiling broadly. “Just no haggis, okay?”

  Damon’s gaze narrowed. “What in the realms would make you believe I would eat haggis?”

  “The accent,” she said, shrugging and laughing softly again. “And you’re a fae, right? Isn’t the Goblin King supposed to be fae? And the fae are Celtic or Gaelic or something. Right? And don’t they eat haggis?” She laughed outright now, her expression self-deprecating in the most adorable way.

  And he found himself chuckling as well.

  “Perhaps you’ve hit on a few truths somewhere in all of that,” he said through his laughter. “But I wouldn’t feed haggis to the xenobes.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Damon reached down and took Diana’s hand. He went stock still when he felt how cold it was. It was as cold as death.

  His eyes shot to hers. The shimmer that had been in her stormy eyes only a moment ago was gone. They were charcoal now, dull and tired and confused.

  Diana’s laughter faded and her smile slipped. Her forehead creased in a perplexed frown. She pulled her hand out of his and touched her forehead. “I’m… suddenly not seeing everything so clearly….” She swayed on her feet.