Blood King
Amber K. Bryant
BLOOD KING
By
Amber K. Bryant
Copyright © 2019 Amber K. Bryant
Edited by Tee Tate.
Cover Design by Mibl Art.
All stock photos licensed appropriately.
Published in the United States by City Owl Press.
www.cityowlpress.com
For information on subsidiary rights, please contact the publisher at [email protected]
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.
Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior consent and permission of the publisher.
For Drew and Silas,
who would follow me down a path into a
forest filled with invincible monsters if I asked them to.
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Sneak Peek of Blood Fae
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
Additional Titles
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Don’t miss more of the Spirit Seeker series
with book two, BLOOD FAE, available now.
Sybille Esmond discovers a deep aversion for fae. One kidnapped her friend. Another is threatening her niece. All of them are pissing her off.
But Sybille is a psychic, not a soldier, and when her best friend Devin is taken by a strange fae woman, she’ll have to fight like hell to get him back.
All while keeping his niece safe, and her blood-thirster boyfriend, Elis, at bay. He keeps openly wishing she’d join him in the undead life. Sybille won’t let Elis’ unsavory desires, evil spirits, or the barriers between worlds keep her from rescuing Devin.
She’ll travel between realms and risk war. The fae want control over those Sybille holds most dear: Devin, his possessed niece, and even Earth itself.
If she can’t stop the fae war, everyone she loves will either become a war prize, or wind up as collateral damage.
BUY NOW!
Chapter One
Unlike most of the people in attendance, Sybille Esmond hadn’t come to the county fair to watch a rodeo show or stroke the glossy fur of ribbon-winning show rabbits.
She came to be hypnotized.
Sybille stood among the selected volunteers as the would-be hypnotist, Elis Tanner, circled them, his scrutiny of his subjects aided by a flourish of his hands to the waiting crowd. Their environment presented a jarring mix, up-tempo techno music blaring like a nineties rave set against rainbow-themed carnival tents and food stands hawking deep-fried butter.
Elis raised his uplifted arms higher, mimicking a conductor about to direct an orchestra. As he closed his hands into fists, the music cut out. The crowd stopped their chatter, blueberry snow cones lowered, gazes raised as the man on the stage commanded their attention. A chill ran up Sybille’s spine.
They were ready to be entertained and mesmerized, and though Elis Tanner had yet to do either, people were already leaning forward, hushing young children, silencing their phones.
The music came on again, another driving beat. Its vibrations tickled Sybille’s toes.
She couldn’t blame the crowd for wanting to be tricked in exchange for a bit of harmless fun. Only in this case, they weren’t being tricked, not the way they imagined.
And Elis Tanner was far from harmless.
“How many of you have been hypnotized before?” He spoke with a vaguely British inflection, like someone who had lived stateside long enough that only scraps of their original accent remained. It reminded her of black and white movie actors. Cary Grant but a bit less Bristol.
A few people raised their hands, garnering a knowing smile from him. Sybille kept hers down. “The truth is, you’ve all been hypnotized multiple times. Every one of you.”
The audience shifted. Sybille remained still. Elis was right: hypnotism was no magic. Not under normal circumstances. Today’s show would present a different story, however. If he was nothing else, Elis Tanner offered the most abnormal of circumstances Sybille had ever come across.
“Hypnotism is simply another state of consciousness, no different than the ones we pass through on the way to and from sleep,” he explained to them.
He searched the audience with clear grey eyes and then turned his gaze to the volunteers, stopping at her. It was a slight hesitation most would have missed, but Sybille was determined to miss nothing. In the briefest of pauses, perhaps there lay a hint of recognition.
Or perhaps not. Either way, Sybille must tread carefully. The enraptured audience had made themselves totally vulnerable. She glanced at her fellow stage-mates. They’d been naive enough to volunteer in handing their will over to him to play with for an hour. Sybille volunteered as well, but unlike the others, she did so with full knowledge of what she was getting herself into.
The music continued to blast. Intolerably loud, it forced its way into her, her head throbbing within a wall of sound.
Elis asked the volunteers to take seats in the metal folding chairs set out on the stage. “Are you ready?” He looked at her when he said this. Eleven volunteers nodded. Sybille smiled. She was ready. It was Elis who had no idea what was coming.
Elis spotted her as soon as she’d pushed through the crowd to take a seat midway from the stage. She wore sunglasses even though the day was never going to be anything other than dull and overcast. All day, he’d watched fair-goers glance towards the heavens, shaking their heads and cursing the weatherman. It could rain any moment and then their day would be ruined. For Elis, the clouds were welcome. This sort of sky kept the elements close, blanketing them low to the ground. A dark sky meant a world thrumming with electrical charge. He gathered this power on his tongue, like a child catching snowflakes, and then licked his lips.
Even with the weather in his favor, the woman in the sunglasses was an odd presence Elis was ill prepared for. She was as steady as a ticking clock where those around her, himself included if he was to be honest, registered as jumpy and nervous
. Either she really was this calm or she hid anxiety well—he determined then to find out which was the case.
She would become one of his volunteers. She’d raise her hand, without a doubt. She was here for a purpose beyond entertainment—beyond a carnival sideshow act. She sought something. Something from him.
His heart strummed, fear of her unknown intentions making his palms sweat for the first time in ages. This was unacceptable. His act necessitated that he command the stage and here he was already having to work to maintain composure.
Elis shouldn’t pick this woman. He already doubted his ability to control her, which made no sense—he had no reason to doubt himself.
He shook free of his mind’s pointless meanderings, asked for volunteers, tried to select a diverse group—a girl wearing a state university sweatshirt, a man in his thirties with a goatee, a few middle-aged folks. Not wanting to seem too obvious, he picked the woman neither first nor last. He led his volunteers up onto the stage and instructed them to sit on rickety chairs.
The woman still had her sunglasses on, the audience visible in their reflection. Maybe she was one of those people—the skeptics who believed they could not be hypnotized, who assumed it was possible to hide their thoughts behind a layer of cheap plastic.
He didn’t need her to remove the lenses, but he wanted her to. He wanted to see her without their interference. Maybe her eyes would tell him something her emotional restraint was able to hide.
“If you could take off your sunglasses, miss.” He kept himself turned to the audience, his words, as always, spoken with a smile. “I bet there’s more than a few men present who’d like to see what’s behind them.”
“Including you?”
His smile nearly broke at her words. There was a heat behind them, like an appetizer with a kick to it.
The audience laughed at her insinuation. She’d be great for his act. Her punchiness, conveyed in just two words, already made her a crowd favorite. He could use that.
“I’d be lying if I said no.” Only now did he step in front of her, crouching near her chair. He breathed through his mouth, afraid her scent would be too distracting. Reaching forward, he lifted the glasses from her face. Now there was no breathing at all. Large hazel eyes looked right at him, olive green with a circle of warm brown framing her pupils. She was the strangest of strangers to him, yet her gaze was oddly familiar.
The steadiness he’d sensed in her earlier hadn’t gone anywhere. If his touch affected her at all, she didn’t show it. He could have studied her eyes for the rest of the afternoon, but he had a show to run. Besides, he was the one who did the mesmerizing, not the other way around. Elis placed the glasses in the woman’s outstretched hand and stood again, twirling towards his audience.
“A beautiful woman has been revealed. We’ve gotten what we wanted.” But he wasn’t sure that he had.
It was foolish but necessary to let him come close. Could he truly not remember her? She had to be certain and now she was. A man capable of hiding such things from himself—who knew what else he was capable of?
The music no longer pounded in Sybille’s ears. Instead, it cascaded into a repetitious and melodic raga. A flute quipped out note after note. It warbled gently, the underlying drone of a sitar making the piece quite mesmerizing, as was surely the intent.
Elis’ voice was like the music—soft but intentional, magnetic, enticing. From her position at the end of the row of chairs, Sybille eyed the other volunteers. Their limbs were already relaxed. The girl next to her, dressed in her school’s colors, nodded in rhythm with the music.
“…wants what’s best for you.” Sybille’s attention returned to Elis’ voice mid-sentence. “Your fear is floating away as you bob along the current, but you make no attempt to reach for it. You watch it go. Let it go…let everything go…”
She did her best to relax her limbs, allowing her shoulders to curl forward while loosening the tension in her neck, but no way in Hell was she going to let herself go.
“I’m going to take you deeper, farther away from your fears and closer to who you truly are. Each word I speak calms you, gives you back a piece of yourself you’d thought was gone forever.”
That sounded nice. If only she could believe him. The girl next to her had no trouble. She sighed, her lips curled up into an easy grin. Sybille kept her mouth open slightly but made no attempt to smile. At this point, it would feel too strained. If she let anything break the pace of her mind, there was no telling what he would do to her.
Elis strode back and forth in front of his volunteers. He paused when he came to her chair. Her head tilted forward, it was impossible to see if her eyes were closed or not. She appeared like all the others, which of course meant little. If there was one thing he’d learned in life, it was that a surface often hid what lay beneath.
She was so steady, so unmoved. So unexpected.
“Many extremely intelligent people have said to me that they believe they cannot be hypnotized.” He spoke to the audience, to the hazel-eyed woman slumped behind him. “There is a common misconception that only the weak-minded can be put under, but I assure you, the opposite is true.” He turned so that he could see her reaction, if there was to be one.
“I have hypnotized doctors, lawyers, physicists, all at the top of their fields. It’s the weak-minded who can’t achieve this state of consciousness, not the reverse.”
He imagined she raised an eyebrow at this, knowing his words were spoken for her benefit. One thing was certain: she was no feeble-minded townie. And even if she had been, it shouldn’t have mattered. He played at being a mentalist; it’s what everyone assumed he was. His act was a good one, but it was his show and he knew what lay behind the scene. Elis was no humbug on the other side of the green curtain. His abilities were fool-proof—that’s what he had believed until today.
Elis led his subjects into a deep sleep. The hazel-eyed woman slumped to the side, resting her face on the back of her neighbor’s chair, her breathing relaxed and even.
One by one, he tapped the sleeping volunteers’ shoulders, giving them make-believe scenarios to play out for the amusement of the audience. At Elis’ suggestion, a young boy believed himself to be a carrot about to be eaten by a rabbit. The college student transformed into a dental hygienist who cleaned people’s teeth by singing Broadway show tunes.
The audience roared. Elis was a star, a marvel, a wonder.
He tapped the woman’s shoulder last.
“You are at a fancy ball. When I ask you to dance, you’re thrilled, but when you move to the dance floor, you realize you’ve forgotten how.”
He tapped her shoulder again, a light and uncertain pat. There was no explanation for how this woman had avoided being mesmerized. Was she doing this to make him look the fool?
She raised her head, her eye blinking open. He offered his arm to her. “May I have this dance?”
The audience sat with rapt attention as she rose to her feet, a congenial smile on her face. She moved aside an imaginary princess skirt from her imaginary gown so that she could step forward. “I thought you’d never ask.”
They took a few steps to the front of the stage. He calculated his reactions to his own movements, his hand placed on her lower back, the other clasped in her own. As he tamped down the thrill of it, he tried not to wonder what she tasted like, immediately finding he couldn’t help himself.
Cinnamon…it would be cinnamon.
He stepped forward to begin the dance. She shuffled awkwardly to the side. The audience’s laughter grew as she stumbled with every move until, while attempting to get her feet out of the clumsy position she’d found them in, she stumbled and collapsed against him. He caught her and for a moment, his lips were near enough to whisper something to her. If anyone caught him doing so, they’d assume it was part of the act.
The woman’s hands crossed in front of her, pressing against his chest as though she was using him to regain her balance. She paused there, her hand to his heart
—his unnaturally slow beating heart. She took a step back from him and he snapped his fingers.
“You may sit down now.” He turned away from her, hoping he came across as aloof and unphased. “Wasn’t she amazing, ladies and gentlemen?”
The audience broke into applause. She was amazing. They had no idea how much so. Elis twitched behind his calm façade as he swept his hand in the direction of the volunteers, giving them their due. They were awake but still mesmerized, still without memory of the events that had unfolded over the course of the show. He walked behind them, again tapping each on the shoulder, this time releasing them from his hold and giving them back the past hour of their lives. They laughed behind their hands and shook their heads in disbelief, all skepticism vanished. Eleven charmed people returned to their seats. The twelfth stepped away seemingly unchanged, the steadiness of her gate a stark contrast to the clumsiness she’d allowed people to see during their dance.
“You are an impossibility,” he’d whispered to her. Now as he watched her sway towards the back of the benches lined up to face the stage, the urge to follow her came on him like a hunger. But he had enthralled this audience for a reason and now his ability to pursue her was hampered by a throng of admirers who couldn’t help but want to purchase his CDs. He collected their money and steered several exceedingly eager people to the pricy hypnotherapy course on his webpage. He encouraged them all to make an appointment—first consultation is free! By the time his newfound fans dispersed, his impossible woman had disappeared into the crowd making their way to and from the midway.
Blood King (Spirit Seeker Book 1) Page 1