Chapter Fifty
Helena caught her breath where she was bent at the waist, and opened her eyes. In the grass a few feet away, something glinted in the moonlight. She straightened and made her way to it, a metal object dropped in the dirt during a battle that never happened.
Time was funny that way.
Helena bent and picked the object up. It was her gun. It was the gun her father had given her, the one that never missed. She pressed the piston and opened the cylinder to count the bullets. Four left.
She gave the cylinder a quick turn to make certain a bullet was in the chamber, then popped the cylinder back in with a click. She turned to face the Time King, shaking her head. “If only they were evil Triad-killing bullets,” she joked softly.
Then she lowered the gun to her side. “You know, you scared me.”
William had been watching her steadily, his gaze as keen and all-seeing as it had always been. But now he slowly strode forward, closing the distance between them. “Did I, now?”
Were you concerned for me, Promised One? She heard him clearly in her head and realized fully how very connected they were.
She chewed on her cheek and swatted his hand away with her free hand, glaring at him with false malice. “It’s really not funny. I thought he was killing you.” She shook her head again. “You’re a hell of an actor.”
He shrugged his strong shoulders. “I didn’t need to act. Cain is strong. All I did was let him win.”
All I did was let him win.
“You sent him back to a very tumultuous time, my Queen,” he said then.
Helena thought about that. “It was what he wanted. What he needed. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
Without warning, a portal opened at the center of the field of cars. It was red and black and laced with the crackling power of unhindered, unadulterated fury. Helena’s eyes widened as a wave of poison-like magic washed over her, knocking her off her feet. William reached her before she would have been thrown, and he pulled her into him as he’d done a lot lately. He took the brunt of the impact yet again for them both when they slammed into the same nearby tree that William had not slammed Cain into earlier.
When they righted themselves and Helena could see again, the Shelbys in the center of the Illinois field had been moved outward in a circle of twenty feet in every direction. At the middle of that circle stood Amunet and Ahriman. She recognized them at once despite their new forms. She recognized them despite the fact that she had never even met them.
She knew them. Because she knew their son.
“Where,” asked Amunet in a whispered hiss that was a vehement warning, “are our children?”
*****
Roman was sliding down from the ice wall of the palace in the Winter Kingdom and shaking the stars from his vision when the bubble forming at the center of the room opened up and allowed the women inside to drop the floor.
The blast of the spell had sent all three men flying, where they’d slammed into various objects or walls split seconds before a literal bubble of space and time shimmered into existence above the floor where they’d all been sitting.
Roman shoved off the wall and blurred to his wife’s side, sliding across the ice to pull her into his arms before the bubble had even dissipated entirely. She seemed stunned. Her eyes had been closed, and Roman realized that she was still holding hands with the other women there. But she blinked up at him, and in the next second, she was sliding her arms around his solid form and squeezing tight.
He shut his eyes and tried not to break her. “Evie,” he whispered, vaguely aware that there was movement all around him. People hugging – people transporting away. Flashes of light, the sucking of air and space, and Roman refused to let go. “By the gods woman, where have you been?”
Evie laughed against his chest. “I’m fine Roman. I was with the others. William was protecting us.” She pushed against him, and he made himself loosen his grip. “But there’s no time.” She looked up into his eyes, and he memorized her face all over again. “If the safe worlds are breaking, then William is in trouble. So is his new Queen. And the Nomads are probably at the heart of it.”
Roman shook his head. “You have no idea.” He looked from her to Katrielle, who had apparently been one of the women to come through with her. So that’s where she went after the spell, he thought. Kat nodded at him and then looked up at the Winter King and Queen, who were also embracing. The Phantom King was gone. So were Violet and Dahlia.
Roman opened his mouth to tell them about Pi and the threat the Triad had issued, but before he could get a word out the ground shook once more. This time it was a lower, deeper rumbling, more ominous and fear-provoking, as if the previous shaking had been a warning and nothing more.
Acting instinctively, Roman grasped Evie to him and instantly began muttering the words of a transport spell.
The portal opened almost at once, and everyone present scrambled toward it as the entire throne room bucked violently beneath their feet. The portal itself even seemed to be under the influence of this disturbance. It vibrated, breaking up the swirling iridescence of its normally smooth walls. Roman’s gut clenched.
This is it. Everything was coming to a culmination.
Time seemed to slow around him, allowing him this moment to reflect on it. No magic was safe. No Kingdom was safe. The evil was on the chessboard now, no longer beyond the horizon but well within sight. It was there in the jagged lines of his portal.
It was one chess move away.
He watched in grim knowledge the others made it safely inside and Katrielle raised her hand toward the portal’s opening. Light flashed from her palm. The mouth of the portal shut tight, cutting them off from the Winter Palace and its Ice of Time, but he knew in his heart that they were leaving a place of beauty and that it was now falling to destruction.
He met Kristopher’s blue gaze. The knowledge was reflected there as well.
The men could feel the hatred moving through their universe like fire, destroying the fabric of it as it went. The Nomads were reaching for them in odium and agony.
Come, the wrongness demanded. Come, commanded the bad. Come and face your ends.
He had never felt such fury. In his existence as King, in his life as a vampire, he had never encountered a wrath like the one that tore through their separate kingdoms just then. He closed his eyes and tried to remember this moment with his precious wife in his arms. She held him just as tight.
Beyond the boundaries of Winter, a dark fae castle fell. Across the border between their realms, its fae brother joined it, the opulence and magic crumbling just like the Winter Palace. In a dimension of darkness and the misunderstood, the Demon Kingdom keep quaked on its ancient foundations. Bricks and mortar and more magic tore apart, and chunks of stone and tradition cascaded from crennelations to tumble into the chasm below. Mansions cracked apart in half a dozen different places and butlers and body guards reached out to hold something stable. A simple house in a world of ghosts began to sink into the ground, the tiny undead fire elemental living in its hearth fires sinking with it.
Roman saw it all, there in the dark behind his closed eyes. He could feel Katrielle’s Nomad magic trying to reinforce the strength of their transportation spell long enough to see them to their destinations. But he knew it wasn’t working. Not only was she failing to keep it stable, it was no longer taking them where they wanted to go. None of the people inside could direct it. The magic was a wildcard, and it was stronger than them.
This is it, he thought again. They stood in stunned silence, each of the pair of Kings holding his Queen with fierce and undying devotion. And when the portal turned red and black around them and the other end yawned open again, he felt the wind of ultimate culmination rush in to greet them.
This was it.