The Time King Read online

  A chance.

  William lifted his head and straightened, sitting up slightly in the seat and opening his coal-burning eyes. He was the image of controlled power. And that was exactly what he was.

  “Go on,” he said softly.

  You’ve sent the Queens into worlds of your design, Time told him. I can do the same for you.

  “Send me into one of my own worlds?” he teased gently, his smile cruel.

  No, said Time. One of mine.

  William’s head tilted ever so slightly. His shoulder-length brown hair brushed the collar of his fine suit. The fingers of his right hand curled over the leather of the gear shift. “I’m listening.”

  It cannot last long. The worlds will collide; I cannot forever stop them from crossing paths. But I will create a world for you and the Promised One. It will claim you both for a short while.

  William waited. He knew what was coming.

  But it will welcome your enemy as well.

  He understood the offer; it was the last bit that drilled the point home. If it were truly possible, Time was offering William the chance to win Helena fair and square. He would meet her somewhere else, somewhere new, in some other space and time where and when she was not the other half of Fate, and William was not the Time King – and their enemy was not Death.

  The third player had to be there. There had to be that conflict, William knew. Helena needed to make a choice, even if it were to choose neither of them. There, she would not be swayed by Fate or the threat of destruction to the realms. Instead, she would learn and grow and face her decision as she deserved to. Without influence, without malice, with freedom.

  And William would learn once and for all whether she could ever truly love him.

  If she could – if she did – then there was hope after all. There was a chance. In all of the Cosmos, there was only one force stronger than Fate, and hence stronger than Death. It sounded trite in this day and age. It reeked of platitudes. But the insane thing was, it was true. The one thing stronger than death was love. The proof was in death itself. For the love someone had for another being never died with the stopping of that being’s heart. It never vanished, never diminished. Not even a little. If anything, it grew stronger in the grief of loss that followed.

  Love was stronger than death by far.

  So William knew this: Should Helena love him, then she was his Queen. If she loved him, they were meant to be.

  Death. Be. Damned.

  William gazed steadily and unseeing into the shadows of the timeless room. Upstairs, in another part of his eternal manor, clocks on the walls ticked. Time waited. The worlds waited.

  Then the clocks on the walls stopped.

  “Do it.”

  As you wish.

  Chapter Four

  “Her name is Helena Dawn,” Harley said as he leaned over the restaurant table and set a file folder in front of the man who’d hired him.

  The man made a sound of amusement. “Bright and shining new day,” he said, his voice deep, his accent unplaceable. Then he added, “That’s what the names mean.”

  Fitting, thought Harley. He waited a bit as the strange, tingling effect of the man’s voice wore off. Then he said, “She was as easy to find as you said she would be.” Hell, she’d been impossible to miss. Harley had never seen a more beautiful woman, and he himself was a vampire. He’d been around plenty of beautiful women in his long life.

  “Black hair, brown eyes.” He rattled off the official record. But the words were flat and did no credit to the dimensions of which they spoke. Helena Dawn’s hair was the color of raven’s wings, and so long and thick, she’d appeared drawn rather than real. Her “brown” eyes were nearly maroon, darkened by a purple-red that made them so luminous, they too seemed unreal. “Thirty-eight years old, five-feet-six inches, one-hundred-twenty pounds.” More words. And the truth of Helena’s all-muscle, impossibly lithe figure was never touched upon. “Miss Dawn runs a self-defense class in downtown Chicago with the help of her best friend, who is a werewolf,” he continued coolly. “Her address and the address of the studio she rents are both in the file.”

  The man across from him slowly raised his hand and gently placed his fingertips on the file. “Tell me,” the man said, and his voice was laced with that same dark something that Harley couldn’t put a finger on but that iced his spine good and thorough. “How did she look to you, Mr. Nash?”

  Harley froze a little, feeling colder by the second. “You mean health-wise?” he asked, knowing full well that wasn’t what the man meant at all.

  The man merely smiled, his straight, white teeth managing to rip a menacing hole in Harley’s self-confidence. And he didn’t even have fangs. “You know better,” he said casually, chuckling softly. He raised his head just a touch. The overhead light cut through his thick shoulder-length hair and grazed the vivid color in his eyes, highlighting them for a flash of an instant. The glint of something piercing in their depths was wholly disconcerting. Harley felt an instant confusion accompany his instant fear. The man’s eyes were cold blue now. He could have sworn they were dark gray before. Or had they been bright green?

  The man’s name was Julian Cain. He’d hired Harley to track down someone in the paranormal world, and that was what Harley did. He was a private detective… for the other side.

  “Did you find her beautiful?” Cain asked.

  Harley’s jaw tightened. His heart was hammering, and that was unusual for him. He hesitated… but then made a command decision. Lying would not work with this one. He didn’t know how he knew this, but he most definitely knew it.

  He leaned back against his booth seat and cleared his throat. “Yes,” he admitted. There was no point in denying it anyway. No heterosexual man on the planet would have found her anything but beautiful. Hell, she was smoking, painfully hot. Strong, capable. And she was also ethereal and delicate. She was graceful and fast and street smart but good and, well, there was frankly no way to describe her. There wasn’t even an explanation for how he had come to the conclusion that she was all the things he knew she was.

  “I see,” said Cain. “Thank you for your candor, Mr. Nash. And now that I know I can trust you, I wish to hire you for another job.”

  Harley hesitated. Alarm bells went off in his head. Hell, they’d been going off all along and now he had a way out – maybe – and it was time to live to work another day. But a thought occurred to him before he could make any kind of wise decision. He leaned forward again, suddenly and stupidly hopeful. “To do with Miss Dawn?”

  Cain appeared intensely unsurprised. “More or less,” he said. “I will be traveling to Chicago to pursue matters.” He paused, then leaned back in his own booth seat, and Harley felt the strangely charged air around him move back as well, making it easier to breathe. What he could not sense, not in scent or sight or even the thoughts in the man’s unreadable mind, was what the man across from him was. Harley only knew damn well he wasn’t human. Not even close.

  He was dressed well but inconspicuously in blue jeans, black engineering boots, a gray T-shirt, and a suede khaki jacket. The clothes looked expensive and fit his tall, muscular form well, but they were casual and said nothing about the man inside them. Harley wasn’t so lacking in self-esteem that he would deny Cain was handsome, with a strong jaw and vivid eyes that caught the light, but… they seemed to change shades – either that or Harley was losing his mind. His hair was changing too, Harley could swear it. Earlier it had been lighter, more blond. Then it was dark brown. And now blond again.

  Cain was impossible to pin down but unreservedly menacing. There was something wholly and utterly terrifying about him. Being near him felt like a near miss. It was akin to that feeling someone got when they were almost hit by a car or nearly fell off a balcony. When Harley stopped long enough to think about it, which he stupidly rarely did, he was surprised he’d agreed to take the job. But that was fate.

  “I am not alone in this particular interest.” Cain smiled,
again flashing those white teeth that cut through a man’s confidence like a switchblade. “As you can imagine.”

  Harley could. Imagine, that is. He could imagine that all sorts of people would be interested in Helena. “Someone else is after her,” he surmised.

  “Someone dangerous,” Cain clarified. “Someone powerful.” A shadow fell over his features and sparked something nasty in his eyes. Now they were gray. “As powerful as I.”

  Then it’s a fair fight, thought Harley, though he would never say it out loud. He really should let Cain handle this himself. If he did, Harley might live to see another day. Let the two fight it out over the girl, his inner voice told him. You need to get out. Let them kill each other.

  “It isn’t me he wants to kill,” said Cain as if he could read the vampire’s mind. And maybe he could. “Helena’s life is in danger, Mr. Nash. He will stop at nothing to see it snuffed out.”

  Harley’s gaze narrowed as he contemplated that. In truth, he simply couldn’t fathom it. Someone wanting to kill Helena Dawn? No way. Not a chance. But the man across from him was completely still, and the air around them had once more grown thick. He was telling the truth, as impossible as it was.

  “Who is he?”

  “Amongst friends, he goes by the name William Solan.” Cain gestured with a nod to the world outside the restaurant’s windows. It was currently drowning in a week’s worth of storm. The rogue blanket of stationary clouds stretched across North America, and in places where continuous rain posed problems, levies had been reinforced. Dams had been altered. Some barriers were close to breaking anyway.

  Fortunately, here in Chicago it was a slow rolling storm, filled with drizzle and lightning, and not as much downpour. “Out there,” the man said softly, “in the mortal world he’s sometimes known as Alexander Cross or Bastion Santori or Jeremiah Crow. He uses aliases.” Cain smiled. “Just as I do.”

  Harley digested that. “So what’s his real name?”

  “In truth, he’s too old for names, Mr. Nash. But he was once called Cronos.”

  Harley raised a brow. The name sounded familiar. “Just… Cronos?”

  The man across from him began to laugh. It started out low and soft, but grew in mirth until Harley saw his broad shoulders shake with it. “Believe me, that’s enough.”

  Outside, a troubled world continued to bear the battering of a furious sky.

  Chapter Five

  Helena glanced at the clock on the studio wall and wondered whether she should trust the time it reflected. Power outages across the city had set a lot of clocks back, and this was an old analogue ticker from 1973. It was the fact that it showed her as being late that made her decide to trust it. She always seemed to be running late. Time was just not her friend.

  “Okay class, we’re just about out of time,” she said hastily, gathering a few last minute things from a duffel bag and taking them to the center of the wood-floored room. Her students moved in from where they’d been stretching or conversing around the studio and met her in the middle.

  “Take a seat really quick; I want to go over a few last minute things before you head to that Valley of Shadow concert I know you’re all going to.” She smiled and looked over at the closest student, a girl of fourteen whose tee-shirt proudly proclaimed the upcoming weekend-long concert in Death Valley, with an opening act by the Marquis de Vaudeville.

  The girl grinned ear to ear and looked at her friends. “We’re all going together,” she admitted. “Josie’s dad’s busing us over in the Mystery Machine.”

  The Mystery Machine was what they’d fondly named Josie’s van because it was older, had been painted in kaleidoscope colors, and because the interior had been replaced many times over the years. It now simply sported rows of comfortable and safe seating, but once upon a time it had been everything from an emergency veterinary care vehicle to a delivery van for flowers. It was the flower job that gave the van its current name, as the paint design was left over from the days it had taken irises and carnations to mothers and girlfriends across Chicago.

  “Well, I’m going to show you a few extra pointers for the concert,” Helena began. She turned to her right. “Ethan?”

  Ethan James stood against the far wall, half in shadow, half in the light that shafted through the windows at one end of the studio. He was a tall, nearly painfully thin man with a lopsided haircut and a nose too big for his face, but he came away from the wall with a bright white smile and a step so graceful, it would give him away to a lot of people as something more than human. The girls in the class on the other hand simply knew him as Ethan: a thirty-eight-year-old somewhat geeky and tremendously lanky human male with brown hair and brown eyes who was a skilled sparring partner, excellent co-teacher, and very good friend.

  “Ethan and I are going to show you a few ways to use what I have no doubts you’re going to wear to the concert – to save your life if need be.” Helena stood up, pulled out a pair of six-inch heels, unlaced her boots, pulled off her socks, and slipped on the red heels.

  The girls let loose with cat calls and roars of approval as she did a quick model-esque turn, smiled, and faced Ethan. He chuckled. “Nice,” he said, and his voice was lower than one would have expected given his appearance. He also had a touch of a southern drawl from being raised in Louisiana, and the accent added points of charisma.

  “Okay,” Helena said to the girls. “You’re at the concert, you’re wearing, well, basically nothing because the concert is in the desert. Everyone is high or drunk, and the guy who’s been scoping you out behind your back for the last hour corners you on the way to the restroom.”

  “Come on, Miss D. We know better than to hit the can alone,” said one of the girls.

  “Yeah it’s, like, the first thing you drilled into our skulls,” added another.

  “Shut your pie holes and let her finish,” said Ethan good-naturedly. He pinned them all with a hard look that was just shy of serious. They shut up.

  “He manages to corner you.” She gave them a narrowed gaze and continued. “You think you’re weaponless, but you actually aren’t. Don’t try running in the heels, ladies. In fact, do me a huge favor and don’t freaking wear heels like this anywhere, at any time. The reason they’re sexy to men is because they hobble you, and men are predators. They like picking off the weak in a herd. The more helpless you appear, the more debilitated, the more they’re interested. Because you’re an easy mark.”

  “They’re right,” Ethan told her with a shake of his head. “You’ve been over this before with them.” He chuckled, but she shrugged. She never missed an opportunity to double-drill an important point into someone’s head.

  “Okay, so you wore the heels anyway. Kill two proverbial birds with one stone by taking off your heels, grabbing one firmly like this.” She did a quick maneuver that de-shoed her in record time, then turned the red shoe over in her hand, showing them how to hold it with the heel forward like the barrel of a gun. The entire process took less than a second. “And it becomes a spike you can drive straight through your opponent’s eyeball and into his brain.” She mimicked attacking Ethan in such a manner, and he mimicked a bloody and admittedly exaggerated outcome. Apparently, if such a thing happened to a man, blood would go pouring everywhere and eyeballs would bounce.

  The girls’ eyes widened. “Ouch,” said one of them softly amongst the nervous laughter.

  “There’s more,” Helena said before she continued with the lesson.

  Ten minutes later class was out, and the studio was empty but for Helena and Ethan. She finished packing up in time to see Ethan lifting his duffel bag over his shoulder. They met at the door, and she locked it behind them.

  “How are Cass and the baby?” Helena asked as they made their way down the hall to the stairs.

  Ethan shoved his hands in his pockets, lowered his head as they descended the concrete steps on the seventh floor, and blew out a heavy sigh. Cassandra was his sister, and she and her husband had finally managed to “g
et pregnant.” Until just recently, the werewolf curse that had presided over the werewolf community had prevented all but a tiny portion of their kind to reproduce, forcing them into a state of near extinction.

  However the curse had been lifted, and now Cass and her husband were expecting. “Well, they’re how you’d expect a peanut sized zygote and the hormonally challenged woman carrying it to be. She wants to eat Nate. And I don’t mean in a good way.”

  Helena laughed. “Then I suggest you tell your brother-in-law to start spending more time with her, buy her frequent treats and gifts, ask her constantly how she’s feeling, no matter how many times he has to hear the same complaint. While he’s at it, he can thank his lucky stars that he’s in the situation he’s in.” She stopped on one of the landings, and when he saw that she’d stopped, he halted as well and turned to her questioningly. “Because a year ago, he wasn’t, and he would have given his left leg to be.”

  “I remind him of that every day,” he said with a lopsided smile. “Otherwise I think he would hit the Everclear every morning and not the Wheaties.”

  Helena nodded, patted his chest just a little condescendingly, and said, “Good dog.” Then she brushed past him and started down the stairs again. “And you can tell him I said the same. Plus, give Cass a gentle hug for me.”

  Ethan James was Helena’s oldest and truest friend. They’d met just before their fourth grade school year, on the crumbling tarmac that their cheap public school had substituted for a playground. The school itself consisted of nine mobile homes strung together in an orderly fashion – six mobile homes for the classrooms, one for the nurse’s office, one for the administration offices, and one for public restrooms. Lunch was held in a nearby hangar that had been converted into a kitchen separated by large sliding screens from rows of long tables lined with benches.

  Helena’s father had moved to the southern town late summer, and taken her to the school to register her for the following year. As luck would have it, Ethan’s parents were doing the same with him. They met on the way to the “bathroom” mobile home and had been friends ever since.