The Time King Read online

Helena tried desperately to process it all. All of it. But that made her legs feel sorta wobbly, and her knees began to buckle. So she leaned forward, pulled out one of the chairs at the library table, and sat down hard. She flushed hot, and slipped off her jacket, allowing the cooler air to touch her arms.

  Will was immediately at her side. “Hey…” he said, his tone laced with concern. “You okay?”

  Helena made a derisive sound, but her heart wasn’t in it. Truth was, she was dizzy. A pain in her gut made her glance down. Blood was spreading across her white tee-shirt. “Shit,” she muttered. She’d forgotten about the werewolf wound.

  Will looked down when she did, and suddenly he was swearing under his breath and taking a knee beside her. “You’re bleeding,” he said as he grabbed the sides of her chair in his strong hands. He then spun her around to face him.

  She sat somewhat stunned, looking up at him as he gingerly grasped the hem of her shirt and gave her a questioning look. “May I?”

  God, those eyes, she thought absently. She nodded.

  He lifted the shirt to expose the bandages she’d placed across her stomach earlier. The gauze was drenched. Something about Lucky’s magic spell must have ripped the claw marks right open again. Either that, or it had happened when she’d hit the ground.

  The thought of Lucky back there with whatever she’d abandoned him to pissed her off, and before she realized what she was doing, Helena reached down and ripped the damn bandage off. She winced when she did; the tape stuck to part of the wound, yanking away tiny amounts of skin.

  “Whoa,” Will said, quickly grabbing her hand to settle her down. “Hold up.” His eyes were searching, his brow furrowed. But Helena’s heart was racing.

  “It’s just a few scratches,” she said, teeth clenched. “I just need some new gauze.”

  Will shook his head, glancing down at the four claw marks. “Not anymore,” he told her. “You need stitches.”

  Helena’s gaze narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘not anymore’?”

  Will swallowed hard and froze as if he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I just mean… they may have been more shallow earlier, but you’ve moved around a lot and they’re deeper now.”

  Helena began putting facts together in her head like an algebraic equation. What she came up with when she solved it was something unsettling. How could Will have known what they looked like earlier?

  “How long have you been watching me, Will Slate?”

  Will looked at her long and hard, and Helena began to feel strange. He was boxing her in, his tall, strong body blocking her exit from the chair. His eyes were honest; she could tell that much after all this time. But they were honestly torn too – which meant he was hiding something at the same time. And she knew it was something to do with her.

  Helena moved fast, placing both of her hands on his chest to shove him backward. He managed to catch himself, coming at once to his feet, but she was already out of her chair and moving around the table to put distance between them. “You’re hiding things from me,” she told him, “which means you’re lying to me.”

  “Technically, he isn’t,” said Darryl, who had come up beside her on the stairs. Without hesitation, Helena spun and punched him in the jaw with all of her strength. The powerful warlock stumbled back several steps and hit the wall, where he shook his head as if to regain focus, and gingerly touched the side of his face. His lip was busted, and a thin trickle of almost-black blood escaped his left nostril. It moved slowly because his heart pumped just as slow.

  “That’s for killing me thirteen times,” she told him. Then she turned back to Will. He’d moved. Now he was at the end of the table, only a few feet from her. She took a step back and pulled her gun, leveling it on him in a serious and steady grip. She’d had a lot of practice.

  He at once straightened and raised his hands in placation. “Okay you’re right,” he told her. “We haven’t been completely honest with you.” He hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “But we were telling you the truth about wanting to protect you. That’s why we were watching you, and that’s why the spell was made.”

  “The spell you won’t tell me about,” she hissed.

  Will sucked in his lips, and then said, “It’s just that some aspects of the spell aren’t so… pleasant.”

  Helena felt her throat tighten. She could think of a lot of unpleasant things. “Like what, damn it?”

  “Like this,” Liam said. His lips were at her ear, and his arm was around her body before she fully realized what was happening. When he captured her arms, her gun was effectively lowered, and he was smart enough to keep his head to the side so she couldn’t head-butt him in the nose. The needle he stuck in her arm was only the icing on the betrayal cake. She hissed with the sharp but passing pain, and Liam held her tighter, fully emptying the syringe’s contents.

  As soon as he was finished, he took the needle out, and then grappled with her for the gun. He won. They were both equally skilled; but he was stronger and she was too discombobulated to use any of her magical abilities on him.

  In the end, she wound up facing him, and he just watched her with hard, determined eyes. His hands were down at his sides, her gun in one grip, the now-empty syringe in the other.

  Helena touched her arm, glanced down at it, then looked back up. “What did you just do to me?” She was very proud of the fact that her voice didn’t shake. Because she felt very shaken up just then.

  “The potion needed to be absorbed, love,” said Darryl, where he still stood beside the wall. “But not necessarily swallowed.”

  Helena looked from him to Liam and back to Darryl. She realized in that quick moment that when Liam had passed by Darryl and offered him a beer, he’d actually done something else. Unspoken words had passed between them and a plan had been hatched. When Darryl had nodded, he hadn’t been nodding about the drink. He’d been nodding: It’s okay to inject the potion; you don’t need to drink it.

  These guys were good. She was outnumbered. And she was unarmed.

  And Will is now behind me. Her eyes widened and she spun, but it was too late. He was a mere inch away, towering over her, and his hands were faster than hers. She recoiled, leaning into one bent knee to fight, but he was no stranger to fighting stances, and in a hair’s breadth of time he had both of her wrists secured. He then yanked her toward him with such force, she fell against him, splaying her hands to catch herself on the broad expanse of his chest. As she did, he released her wrists, shoved his fingers through her hair, held her tight, and kissed her hard.

  Helena’s mind exploded. There was no reason, no sense, no right or wrong or yes or no. There was nothing but the feel of his lips against hers, pressing in, opening her up. And then there was warmth, uncoiling inside her, beautiful and terrifying. It steamed through her core, sizzling through her muscle and bone, infiltrating her blood – and Will moved in further, his arm coming around her waist to crush her against him.

  It was the perfect kiss, filled with longing and desperation, yet tenderness and deep understanding. She had never been kissed like this. She had never even dreamed of being kissed like this.

  Had she?

  Something familiar niggled at her mind. It was quickly overshadowed by the behemoth that was Will’s magnetic embrace. But when Helena began to feel the penetrating magic of sleep chase hard on the heels of her budding desire, she knew it was also the most traitorous kiss she’d ever been given.

  Whatever magic he’d ignited took over in record time and Helena’s legs gave out. Will lifted her easily into his arms, never breaking his kiss. A flash of very real fear followed hot and hard on that wonderful and deceitful spell, giving her just enough strength to call out with the only thing she had left in her arsenal – her mind.

  Ashrim, they’re coming. Please… help me….

  Darkness overtook her then. In that warm and deep darkness, the Night Terrors opened their arms to welcome her home.

  Chapter Twenty-fo
ur

  “Damn it.” Katrielle lost the image before her. Its solidness faded, wavered, and was gone. She no longer felt any ground beneath her feet, no longer heard sound, no longer felt much of anything solid or tangible at all. It happened so fast.

  She’d been so close. But William Solan wasn’t ready to be found. And just as she’d thought her door was about to open, she’d been sent away again. Now she was lost, trapped in the nowhere essence of that space between spaces, the time between the seconds. She flew through the glue of the multiverse, the sensation not unlike being a dried leaf caught in a violent wind. She was tossed about, sent from the wall of one dimension to the next, and her spirit was being dissolved along the way.

  In this strange miasma of nothing, she felt her mind slipping away. Without time and place to anchor them, her thoughts were becoming less real. She was becoming less real.

  This was the danger of such a spell. This was the risk of taking on the Time King. She’d known it going in, and now she realized that her fear was coming to fruition. The irony of it was that she barely cared, because her mind was barely there.

  Lalura.

  Katrielle heard the name distantly, and just as distantly she recognized it.

  Miss Chantelle!

  Katrielle would have frowned, her brow would have furrowed, had she possessed a brow to furrow. But she was disconnected and immaterial and had no face to frown with.

  She’s Katrielle now, remember?

  Oh, right.

  Can you reach her?

  Almost… Katrielle! Take my hand!

  Kat looked around, thinking that it was odd that she at last had a head to turn in this murky nothing, and when she did, she saw something solid, something more secure and real than everything else around her. It was a wall, not unlike the opalescent wall of a soap bubble, and in that wall was a hole. A woman’s upper body appeared in that hole, blurry but again more substantial than everything else.

  Vaguely, Kat recognized the woman. I know you. She had light brown hair streaked with highlights of ash that looked as though ice had made its way down the tendrils. That same ice was reflected in her very light blue gaze, intense and powerful.

  Katrielle, take my hand! Trust me! the woman pleaded. Her lips moved out of time with the words, as if she were a video being streamed a little too slowly for the viewer. But Kat now felt her entire solid body beneath her head, and she hadn’t before. She was becoming more real herself as she looked down at this woman.

  Down, she thought. I’m floating above her. I am tangible. I am real.

  “Take my hand!” the woman cried desperately.

  This time the words matched up with her lips, and Kat heard them more clearly than before. She maneuvered downward, willing herself to float through the dangerous nothing between worlds.

  “That’s it! You’re almost here!” The woman leaned outward, and now Katrielle could see that she was being held in place by two other pairs of hands. Kat recognized the women holding her too. Names began to materialize in her mind, names that matched the jet black hair and green eyes on one of them, and the gold-blond braid on the other that was so very thick and beautiful, it was inhuman. She was inhuman.

  She’s fae, Katrielle thought. Her name is Violet. The dark haired woman is her sister, Dahlia.

  She looked at the leaning woman again, at the ice blue in her arctic eyes. And this is Poppy Nix. The Winter Queen. They are my students. My warlocks.

  My friends.

  And in that moment, she grasped Poppy’s hands, taking hold of her wrists with every ounce of her strength. Poppy squeezed back and shouted, “I’ve got her! Get us back inside and close the breach!”

  Katrielle felt the last pieces of herself coalesce with finality, and her magic kicked in like a shockwave. She engaged it at once, shoving both her and Poppy back inside the breach the warlocks had created. Her body yanked forward, and she and Poppy collided, rolling end over end onto a sidewalk. A wave of her hand and a hard burst of her power shut the rift behind them with the sound of thunder.

  When the thunder passed, Katrielle found herself sitting up, surrounded by her warlock students. The four of them knelt or sat on the whitewashed cement of a sidewalk lining a clean downtown street. Several hundred yards away, a gazebo with a fresh coat of white paint gleamed beneath an early afternoon sun. Children played in the adjoining park, and across the street, a soda fountain advertised Egg Creams and Black Cows.

  A nearby barber shop storefront featured the traditional candy cane striped pole. All that was missing was the early twentieth century music.

  She turned to Poppy, and then addressed both Violet and Dahlia as well. “Where are we?” she asked. But she had a feeling she knew already. This was one of the worlds William had created. Her spell hadn’t managed to help her get into William’s personal world, but it had helped her get into one of theirs.

  “We’re in some sort of alternate dimension,” said Violet. “Poppy and Dahlia managed to find their way into it with me.”

  “This must be your idea of a perfect world,” said Katrielle. “Solan created one for each of you. I guess he made this one for you, Violet.”

  “It’s not hers,” came a fifth voice.

  Katrielle turned around fully on her rump and looked up to find Evelynne D’Angelo standing over her.

  “It’s mine,” said Evie, smiling. The Vampire Queen’s long brown hair framed her face in a gentle breeze, and her brown eyes were luminous. She shrugged self-consciously. “You know that scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly goes back in time and “Mr. Sandman” is playing, and everything is clean and happy and the sun is shining bright?” She shook her head as she looked around at the picture-perfect town. “I must have watched that scene a hundred times. Maybe two hundred.”

  Katrielle considered her and the town square, and everything made sense. “There’s no pain here,” she said. There had always been pain, but the square was pretend, made up by Hollywood, and it had been done so specifically to give the impression of something “better.”

  “There are no family obligations, no illnesses, there’s no abuse and no war,” Kat continued. “And the sun is shining.” She smiled. “Something I imagine you miss these days.”

  Vampires were the offspring of Akyri and warlocks, and as such they were born with inherent magical power, and most of them learned how to cast protection spells or charms from the sun before they could walk across the room on two feet. However, Evie hadn’t been born to an Akyri and a warlock. She had been changed into a vampire by the Vampire King. She was a seer by nature, and hence magic still ran through her system. But not warlock magic. Not dark magic.

  Katrielle had never considered it before, but she could now imagine how taxing it must have been for Evie to have to learn warlock magic in order to protect herself from something that ruled and reigned every single day on the planet. Something as prevalent and merciless as the star at the center of their solar system.

  She could also imagine that if Evie grew weary of it, grew tired, she would not ask for help. She was proud. It was a fault and a blessing. It forced her to work hard. She’d helped support her family with her book earnings for years. She always aided where she could, volunteering at shelters and facilities when she had time. She wasn’t the kind to admit weakness.

  So here in this world where the sun shone and Evie walked beneath it without fear, her perfect world allowed her the rest she probably secretly craved.

  William had obviously seen she’d needed that when no one else had. Katrielle perhaps knew him better than anyone, and she’d still underestimated him.

  She turned to Poppy and asked, “How did you get here?”

  Poppy shrugged. “I had help. I knew something was off. Everything was just too good. It was all too happy.” She laughed. “In my world, it was springtime and I had no allergies and I wasn’t having heat-induced migraines. Not that I’ve had them since I joined Kris, but… I didn’t remember I was queen either. I just fe
lt peaceful.”

  Kat’s brow rose. “And… that was a bad thing?” she asked, chuckling.

  Poppy shrugged. “I’ve never trusted perfect things. They’re like a fresh coat of snow covering something ugly underneath. Even a prison or a slaughterhouse looks like a wonderland on the right winter day.”

  “So she started casting a spell,” said Violet, who was also smiling. “And since in my world, I was becoming just as suspicious, I happened to be doing the same thing at the same time. I was casting a spell that showed me what was real from fantasy.”

  Kat nodded. “The darkened mirror spell.”

  They all nodded right along with her.

  “I was casting it too,” said Dahlia with a wry smile. “In my world, women were the rulers of every country on the planet. If anything will set off a buzzer that things are just too good to be true, that’ll do it.”

  They helped Katrielle up, and the redheaded Nomad looked from one of them to the other. “But you didn’t tell me how you ended up in Evie’s world.”

  Dahlia shook her head. “For some reason, we were all casting the exact same spell at the exact same time. The timing of the magic caused rifts. Some of us were sucked through those rifts into the same nothingness we found you in. Fortunately, Evie managed to hang on to her world long enough to pull us in.”

  Kat glanced at the Vampire Queen. Evelynne D’Angelo had been the first Queen. Something in that gave her more strength in times of crisis, and that strength had been there when she’d needed it most.

  “So how did you find me?” Kat asked next.

  Violet grinned. “Your magic is stronger than ours, Miss Chantelle. We heard you knocking and opened the door.”

  Kat laughed. Violet had always called her Miss Chantelle. She was having trouble switching from Lalura to Katrielle, and right now that didn’t bother Kat at all. She found it endearing in fact, and was just glad the girls had kept their heads and remembered their magic well enough to pull her out of the nothing – before she became nothing herself.

  Kat sighed. “So here we are.” She looked around again at the picturesque image, the children playing, a dog catching a Frisbee, classic cars driving by.