Chapter Two
Thane ran a strong hand through his black hair and fought the urge to pull the hair right out of his skull. Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets, stepped around a few other Kings, and made his way to a solitary tree on one of the many islands separated by pristine waterways in the massive cave Roman D’Angelo had kept secret from everyone until now.
When he was alone, Thane leaned against the tree and closed his eyes as a memory played before his mind….
The man’s ghost dissolved into the portal, and the portal closed once more. As if she’d done it a thousand times and no longer had to be warned, Siobhan placed her hands over her ears as the thunder passed through the garage.
A few seconds later, she lowered her hands again, but her eyes remained focused on the empty space where the spirit had been. Thane gazed down at her, his entire world tipped on its axis. He’d never seen anything more miraculous than what he’d just witnessed. He’d never seen anything so beautiful.
Can I keep you? The words raced through his mind, a thought – and a nearly undeniable compulsion.
Keep you.
Finally, Siobhan blinked. Then she slowly turned to look up at him. “I don’t understand what just happened,” she said. “I mean, I know what I did. I do know… deep down.” She blinked again, pressed her hand to her heart, and looked down at the floor. “But I don’t know why or how.” Her eyes returned to his. “Thane, what’s going on?”
There were probably a hundred different things he could have said in that moment. But only one really seemed to fit.
“Do you think you could do it again?”
Siobhan’s brown-gold eyes glistened, their depths seeming to swirl to life with understanding. After a few seconds had passed, she nodded. Just once.
And Thane turned to let the next spirit in.
That had been the moment Thane realized that against all odds and despite the vacuous pull of time in Purgatory, his loneliness was finally and forever over. He would never again be alone. Not a single night more, not a single moment. He’d found his queen.
But now he opened his glowing swirling silver eyes and gazed across the cave to the nothingness beyond, and his gums throbbed and his mind burned. I was wrong.
*****
Roman swallowed hard, a muscle twitching in his jaw as he watched the Phantom King wrestle with his emotions. His gaze slid from Thane back to Damon, whose gaze literally burned in his skull. It had been smoldering like fury-fueled fire for two weeks. It was the same powerfully and silently raging blaze that was eating them all alive.
Everywhere Roman looked, he saw men in pain. At the core of it, that was what they were. Men. They were Kings, they were unnatural. They were monsters and they were powerful. But they were, in the end, just men. And a man was nothing without his woman.
He whispered softly, a hissed epitaph of pure and agonized desperation that was merely breathed, yet echoed throughout the vast expanse of the cave. Men looked up.
It was time he did something.
“Gentlemen, if you wouldn’t mind…” he said softly as he made his way to the center of the cave. The cavern was the size of two football fields end-to-end, and yet the Kings began pulling in. Every one of them had heard him.
There was a cabin in the middle of the underground space. It was small and cozy, intricately decorated and formed through painstaking magic and love. Evie had told him it resembled “Heather’s Hutch,” a house in a painting by Thomas Kinkade. She’d told him this with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye, so what he’d heard was, “It’s beautiful. I love it.” And that was good enough for him.
As he approached the front door and opened it, he felt the enormous presence of the other Kings at his back. They followed him inside, crossing bridges or simply flying to the center island, and within seconds, the tiny cabin was filled to the brim with a stupid amount of power.
Roman waited until the last of the Kings was inside – Calidum – and had closed the door before he met each of their gazes. None of Roman’s friends looked even remotely human right now, but the worst perhaps to Roman was Calidum, the Dragon King.
He had claimed his queen mere hours before she’d been taken from him. Of the twelve of them there, his pain was the most palpable to Roman. He’d barely won. And then he’d lost everything.
What was more, Roman and Cal shared something vital in common. Both of their queens had been taken by raving lunatics bent on claiming those women for themselves. The difference was that the man who’d abducted and tortured Calidum’s queen was still out there. And Roman knew that Calidum could not keep that very dark thought from his mind.
They had exhausted every avenue they’d thought open to them. Every spell. Every scry. Every mage, both witch and warlock, every arcane incantation, every single magical method of finding something or someone that had been lost, stolen, or misplaced, had been enacted time and again over the last two weeks. They were exhausted. And at the same time, they could have taken on armies of enemies. There was so much negative energy moving through the twelve of them, nothing could have withstood their wrath.
But that was just it. There were only twelve of them. William Solan was missing.
Solan is missing.
The realization wanted to slip right back out of his head again just as quickly as it had come in – but this time, Roman noticed that. He noticed that he seemed to not want to think on the missing King. He noticed the way the thought faded, slipping into the background of his mind like a thief. A magical thief.
Who’d stolen their wives.
Son of a bitch, he thought. This wasn’t the first time he’d realized William wasn’t there. It was simply the first time he’d been capable of realizing it for more than a split second. There was powerful magic at play here.
He shut his eyes for a moment and called out to someone very special. Lalura… I need you. Please come.
“Where’s Solan?” he asked aloud before he forgot again.
I forgot? He wondered, mystified. Because he had. It had occurred to him countless times that Solan was missing, that the Time King was perhaps involved in this – and then, as quickly as it had occurred to him, the realization was gone. He glanced up at the cabin around him, and thought of the cavern beyond. It was the most warded, most protected, most carefully created location on the planet, and perhaps the universe. They’d only been down here a short while. But it was long enough for the cavern to negate the magic that had been cast upon him.
“Holy crap,” someone said. “Do you have any idea how many times I meant to ask that question?”
Roman felt the stirrings of hope inside. It was like someone striking a match in the darkness.
When another King swore softly, and yet another joined him in sounds of bemused exasperation, Roman knew it was working. They were remembering. They were figuring something out. What they were figuring out, he wasn’t yet certain. But it was something.
“It’s Katrielle now, Roman,” said a female voice. He looked up to watch a young red-headed woman make her way through the crowd of men. They parted for her like the Red Sea until she stood before him across the small cabin table.
Despite the youth and the hair color, those eyes were the same, piercing and so, so blue and filled with a plethora of untold knowledge. But she smiled at him warmly, and those eyes took on a hint of sympathy. She knew he was suffering. She knew they all were. “It took you long enough to figure this out.”
Roman’s gaze narrowed. “You knew?”
But Katrielle shook her head. “Not until you did. You and the other Kings were the trigger that broke the spell.”
“You?” he asked, disbelievingly. Surely Lalura – Katrielle – was immune to the Time King’s magic.
“William Balthazar Solan is the Time King, Roman. There is no more powerful being in the multiverse. When he really wants something to happen,” she shrugged, “it happens.”
Roman swallowed hard, and his body tensed. Without a single hint of patience, he finally asked, “What has Will done with our wives?”
Katrielle took a deep breath, then said, “I truly don’t know, Roman. But you and I both know they’re safe. If this is William’s doing, you all know that.” She looked around at the Kings, and none of them could deny this was true. If any of their mates had been harmed, they would know. They would have felt it. And William was their friend.
“The key to finding them is finding him. And now that we know whose magic is at work here,” she continued, “we might finally be able to work a spell to do just that.”