Chapter Fifty-one
William reached out for his power. He needed to know right now how much strength he had in this new world, this collided dimension. He was still the Time King, but this was a new Time King and he had no idea what was at his disposal.
Amunet and Ahriman had transported into the field of cars, their arrival so drastic, they’d shoved all other material out of the way with violent domain. They wanted to know where their children were.
From this, William surmised that not only Cain had been changed and sent away, but Arach as well. He wondered how.
“He’s Abel,” whispered Helena beside him.
He looked down at her.
“He’s not who he used to be, so they can’t sense him.” She shook her head. “The Storyteller is Cain and Abel's creator now, not these two.”
William tried to process that. It appeared that history had been changed to the extent it had altered not one Nomad, but two. Helena’s words were meant for William alone, but the Nomads across the field heard her anyway.
William had a feeling Amunet wouldn’t be happy with the news, and he was right. He moved in front of Helena just as Amunet threw back her head and wailed to the heavens above. The window of every car in the field shattered, the cars jumped several feet off the ground, and the grass beneath her lit on fire.
Helena yelped in surprise as the inferno spread like windswept wildfire and raced straight for her. William raised his hand and commanded the fire to stop. It refused to obey.
That’s one power gone, he thought with mounting concern. And it was a doozy.
His ability to stop the world been taken from him when he’d made his contract with Time. He’d been without it for quite a while. When Time sent him and Helena into the alternate dimension, that power was given to her, even if it had come with consequences. But when the dimensional walls collapsed and the worlds were drawn together, he’d rather expected the ability to finally return to him.
It appeared that was not the case. The Queen is more powerful, he thought rapidly. Maybe she had the power.
“Helena, try to stop the fire!”
But she was already attempting to do so. He turned in time to see her lower her hand and make a desperate sound as the fire continued toward her, just for her, and she began climbing the tree behind them. “I can’t!” she screamed. “It doesn’t work!”
William gritted his teeth and used another of his powers, waving his hand to form a bubble of frozen-in-time atoms around them, which made them completely immobile and impermeable. In effect, it was a shield. This caused the fire to veer off in a “Y” of sorts on either side of them at the last second. It rapidly spread in a crackling circle around the tree.
He looked up. Helena was half-way up the tree. She turned on a branch and looked on breathlessly, noting what he’d done. “Nice!” she exclaimed.
But then she peered across the field to where Amunet and Ahriman still stood. Ahriman, the tall and stoic man behind the petite blonde Nomad, had his hands at his sides. He had yet to act, and his stillness was wholly unsettling.
It was his companion who screamed in rage and suddenly sent every single Shelby flying outward as if a bomb had gone off. Power rippled like waves on a pond, and the cars crashed into one another, then disappeared behind trees where they fell beyond the boundaries of Helena’s acreage.
“Oh, you bitch!” Helena screamed, unable to hold back her ire. “Not the Shelbys!”
William watched her maroon eyes flash red with that fire that he’d seen in them earlier. She bared her straight, white teeth and lowered her head with renewed determination. As he looked on, his young bride began levitating. She rose from the branches of the tree like a phantom to hover above its crowning leaves, her eyes glowing like fire. A strange purple-red aura was forming around her body, the same aura he’d seen around the objects in his room when they’d made love.
“Lay off the hardware!” she bellowed.
Across the field, Amunet the Nomad spun around as a groaning sound emitted from her left. William’s gaze skirted to the wooded boundary of the field. Something large rose from behind the tree line. As he watched it rise and spin in the air, William realized Helena was using telekinesis to lift what appeared to be the worn down remains of a mobile home.
With a cry of rage, the Time Queen sent the destroyed vehicle hurtling over the trees and into the field. It headed straight for the Nomad couple.
Now Ahriman acted at last. He reached around his petite mate with a long arm and flicked his wrist. The mobile home made a sudden ninety-degree detour, racing toward Helena instead. Once more, disaster rushed at her unchecked and ultra-fast.
William stepped beneath her, willing the mobile home to again change course. Fortunately it did – but he still wound up catching Helena when the mobile home came close enough that she ducked out of instinct, and the fast, drastic movement caused her to fall from the sky and crash through the branches.
The vehicle made a second sharp turn and sailed past them to land yards away in a crumpled heap of metal siding, and mold.
William glanced down at Helena. Her hair was filled with leaves, her cheek was scratched like a tomboy’s and her face was flushed with excitement. Power burned in her pupils like backlit rubies. She was adorable. But now was not the time to show her just how much he thought so.
He looked back up at the pair of god-like beings at the center of the scorched and now empty field. They seemed to be waiting, both of them still now, even as their fury struck William in continuous waves.
Then the air split open approximately twenty feet or so to their left – and Damon Chroi and Diana Piper were ejected from a portal that snapped open and shut again with tremendous speed and force. The sovereigns hit the ground and rolled.
Another slit in the air appeared. And another.
Within seconds, every King and Queen at the Table of the Thirteen was being spewed out into the burned field like so much garbage. It was bewildering to see men and women of such enormous power actually hitting the ground. Nearly all of them possessed the magic within them to do things like hover above the ground, wrap armor around themselves, use telekinesis to move their own bodies, or even sprout wings. But hit the ground they did, and when they stopped rolling, all Thirteen pairs of leaders were present in the field.
So was Katrielle the third Nomad.
She was the only one who hadn’t been tossed about. When the portal containing her and her companions opened up, William saw Roman and Evelynne D’Angelo shoot out first, followed closely by the Winter King and Queen. And then Katrielle stepped calmly from the portal, turned, and allowed it to shut behind her.
Then she turned her attention on the two standing at the field’s center.
“It’s good to see you again, Amunet,” said Katrielle.
The fact was, Nomads didn’t lie. William wasn’t sure whether this was because they honestly couldn’t – or because they were so old and powerful, they didn’t care either way and this was an easy way to excuse the bad behavior that telling the truth usually turned out to be.
But he knew that when she said this to Amunet, she meant it. They were sisters, after all. William had only possessed a cousin for a very short while… that was also a lifetime… but he would give a lot to be able to see Liam again.
Amunet cocked her blonde head to the side and narrowed her gaze on her sister. “Is it? Even though I’ve brought you all here to destroy you?”
Katrielle shook her head. “Then you’re a fool, Amunet.” She turned away from her sister and walked through the field, watching as each of the sovereign couples got to their feet. William and Helena stepped forward. William noticed Helena still held her father’s gun. She’d managed to hold onto it through the tree climbing and everything. As a warden, she was probably used to doing things like that.
As Kat made her way in a circle around Ahriman and Amunet, the Thirteen Kings and Queens moved in, effectively surrounding the powerful Nomads.
“Do you truly not know?” Katrielle asked, once more stopping before her sister and her sister’s evil mate. “About the vision?”
Amunet sneered. “Bitch,” she said, her expression one of surprised disgust. “Of course I know about your stupid vision. Let me see if I can sum it up for you.” She pretended to clear her throat, lifted her hand to her chest as if she were touching her heart in a vision, and affected a holier-than-thou voice that rang out through the field. “Only the Thirteen Queens can defeat the terrible evil on the chessboard!” She lowered her arm and tilted her head. “Did I get it about right?”
Katrielle was taken aback. William could feel her confusion even at a distance. “Then why would you bring them here together?” she asked. “When you are down by two, no less.”
But Amunet gave a short, contemptuous laugh. Behind her, Ahriman closed his eyes and slowly lifted his arms at his sides. “Little sis, we’re not down by two.” Amunet said, shaking her head. “We’re up by two-hundred.”
That was when William heard them. That was when he sensed them.
“Oh my God,” whispered Helena, her deep ruby gaze on the tree line around the field. It moved as branches made way for large bodies. “The Night Terrors.” They were coming out of the forest all around them, every manner of beast, every kind of monster, creeping en masse into the field where good faced off with evil.
Ahriman had called them here. Evil it would seem, had help.