Chapter One
(Seven months earlier)
When the Entity possessed Hesperos, it felt like a bomb going off inside his body, but in reverse. There was an implosion of sorts that sucked the Nightmare King’s consciousness deep into his being and compressed it into a tiny, dense sphere of awareness.
And that was despite the fact that Hesperos had done it on purpose. He’d known the Entity was about to consume some unsuspecting individual, and he’d acted on that knowledge. Nightmares possess the ability to pull a soul into themselves. They had this ability for good reason. It wasn’t a kind of magic, but an inherent ability, like walking was for a human, and flying for a bird.
Without thinking nearly long enough about it, Hesperos had done exactly that.
Suddenly, his arms, his hands, his legs and the rest of his mind were out of his reach, out of his control. The terrifying sensation of not being able to decide to even take a breath for himself was all he suddenly knew. It also hurt; the Entity’s presence was like cold fire, the sudden agony of skinny dipping in liquid nitrogen.
And he couldn’t even gasp.
Hesperos had never experienced anything so horrible in his long, long life. It was worse than death. Not many things are. It didn’t have to hurt; Hesperos could sense that, read it off the Entity’s soul. But the Entity was furious with him and making him suffer for his act.
It probably didn’t help that Hesperos had been so weakened by the battle with the Hunters. His body and his power were already so drained. He was already so tired.
The fight had been horribly strenuous. Eighty-plus Hunters in one location, he and his men a dozen in number at most. The plan had been to take as many out as possible and keep them from transporting to their leader’s location so the Shifter King and his Queen could rescue one of their own.
He hadn’t expected such large numbers, for one. But he also hadn’t expected that there would be more warlocks amongst them. By the time the battle was completed, Hesperos had personally shut down three attempted transport portals and had sustained the damage of a dozen different spells and countless weapons.
He would heal from all of it. Nightmares were incubi, and when they were angry, they were the stuff of one’s darkest dreams, massive, terrifying, and all but impossible to kill. But healing would take time, and until he was healed, he would bleed.
At the battle’s end, he was tired, freezing, and in pain. But one of his men nodded at him from across the Hunter headquarters, having received word that the fight at Chanute Air Force base was over, and the good guys had won.
Hesperos experienced a brief, blessed moment of relief. If any Hunters had made it through to aid their leader during that battle, they’d gone in from somewhere else. The Nightmares had done their part and kept reinforcements at bay. They’d succeeded.
He released a breath. And then the Entity had suddenly been there, in the room. He’d clearly escaped the air force base, and now he was looking for someone small and meek to inhabit until he could regain his power.
A few horrid seconds passed before Hesperos used his power one last time. It was his final conscious act.
After the evil force invaded his body, Hesperos came into his own consciousness once more. He was able to think, but not in the way others did. He couldn’t hear his own thoughts. It was like being deaf, but in the mind.
Those terrible moments were the worst kind of awareness. Hesperos was unfortunately aware of everything the Entity did and said, but he had nothing to do with any of it. Worst of all, the Entity was behaving exactly as Hesperos would. Same words, same motions, same intonations. He was able to read everything about the Nightmare King and copy it to the letter.
And he was sitting there, betraying his fellow men just as the Traitor had.
For Hesperos, there was only one solution. There had been only one solution from the moment he’d made the decision to pull the Entity into himself. It was the entire reason he’d done so in the first place.
The one thing the Entity could not duplicate was the normal enormity of the Nightmare King’s presence. That was diminished right now. Those around him might not have noticed, and if they did, they probably chalked it up to the fact that he’d just fought off a small army and had multiple severe injuries. But he knew better. And more importantly, his Preceptors would know better.
They would sense that he was dead – or in the process of dying, rather. They would feel that the part of him that was him had suddenly all but vanished. It had been suppressed and taken over. They would sense this because it would feel to them like the dying of their king. At least, that was what Hesperos was desperately hoping.
If they came, they would know what to do.
And they always came when he was dying. It was their one job: see the Nightmare King safely from one body to the next.
When Hesperos recognized that possible solution, he also realized that perhaps fate had not been fickle in sending the Entity into his reach when it had. For Hesperos was the only king who could do what he’d done.
Hope calmed him. It settled him down inside that tiny space where the Entity had stuffed him. He focused solely on his Preceptors. He fixated on Andros and Minnaea, on their faces, and on their minds, so closely interwoven with his own. He told them, in his eerily silent thoughts, what to do.
Come to me, he said but couldn’t hear. Come to me now and finish this. It’s time.
It wasn’t until the Entity had taken his body to the next, private meeting place of the Thirteen Kings that Andros and Minnaea finally arrived. This time was different for them. They didn’t have the stilled beating of his heart to draw them into his world. They had to fight their way into it themselves.
But when they did, and their shimmering forms appeared in the meeting room on the private yacht somewhere in the Pacific, it was with a mixture of intense fear and equally intense relief that Hesperos looked upon their faces, peered into their eyes, and willed them to do what needed to be done. He was only lucky that the evil force inside him had chosen to show up at the meeting place before the other Kings in order to sabotage it. That meant they were alone.
The Entity didn’t have a chance to react when the two appeared. He had no time to fight back; he barely had enough time to realize what he was seeing when they materialized next to him. The Preceptors were invincible warriors. They had to be; their job was to see their king safely through a transition that left him temporarily defenseless. They had to be his defense until his power returned.
Minnaea was the carrier of the Sleeper. It was a legendary blade, and one of two weapons that could kill the Nightmare King. When driven through his heart three times, it destroyed body, mind, and magic, slaying the sovereign in his current form and ensuring he would be reborn in another.
Hesperos saw the dagger descend, and despite the fact that he lacked control over his own body, he felt the blade slice through his heart’s upper chambers with dreadful, staggering efficiency. There are no words to describe the sensation of something cutting through your vital organs, and the heart is the most vital of them all. Suffice it to say, he went still inside. He went still in shock, in agony, and in certainty.
His body, however, was still being controlled by the Entity – and it fought. It fought with magic, which the Preceptors waved away with little effort. It fought with battle skill, which Andros and Minnaea intercepted and repelled with equal and opposite force. And within the course of atrociously long seconds, the Sleeper was forced through his heart two more times.
The legendary blade had never before been used on him. In all honesty, he’d always been dubious about its abilities. After all, he couldn’t fathom a reason for the weapon’s very existence in the first place. It was kept by the Preceptors. Aside from the dagger the Challenger possessed that was an exact copy of the Sleeper, no one else could use it. What motive could they ever have for utilizing it against him? And of course, the Challenger had never successfully used his own dagger against Hesperos. Hesperos had won every battle with him.
So… he’d had never really known whether the Sleeper worked as it was supposed to.
Well now we know, he thought ironically as the last of the light went out around him, and the pain finally stopped.
And then he was waking up on the floor of a high-rise office to find he was a billionaire with cold metal eyes, his name was Nicholas Wargrave – and he was a bit of a jackass.