A wave of cool relief washed over Nicholas, but it was short lived. He had pressing matters to deal with. The shortcomings of his latest persona were going to have to await adjustment. He needed to contact the Kings and get “reinstated,” so to speak, one of them was a son of a bitch traitor, and there was an Entity to face.
But even more pressing was the reason behind his hope that the strength and grace of his new body were the result of real training and exercise. And this was the fact that each time the Nightmare King was reborn, he was forced to prove his worthiness as king.
With each materialization of his new form as king came the materialization of another. This other form, this other new-born creature was known as the Challenger. The Challenger was always a Nightmare of immense power. Though no incubus possessed the beauty of their king, the Challenger could nonetheless charismatically win over legions. He could then lead them in battles with strength and grace nearly unequaled. And his sole purpose in life was to usurp the Nightmare King’s throne.
Every time he faced him, the Nightmare King barely won. It was always – always – the most difficult thing the he had ever done.
“Do you know the whereabouts of the Challenger?” he asked softly. It was probably what they’d been waiting for him to ask, and he admittedly wished he could have put it off. As it was, sound and light were beginning to lace the pounding between his temples. His headache had become a migraine. But on both sides of his damned handsome head.
He closed his eyes again and gingerly rubbed his temples. Unfortunately, when he was reborn, it took a little while for him to regain all of his Nightmare abilities, including the abilities to quell his own pain or heal his own wounds.
“Not yet,” said Minnaea.
“But we know he’s materialized. And….” Andros’s voice trailed off, and Nicholas looked up, catching an exchanged glance between his two Preceptors. They looked worried. And they looked like they were keeping secrets.
“And what?” he asked, his tone hard.
Andros turned back to him. “And he’s more powerful than ever before, your majesty. I’m afraid this time… well, this time….”
“This time it’s different,” said Minnaea. The two always did finish each others’ sentences.
“Different how?” asked Nicholas. Though, he had a feeling he already knew the answer.
“This time it’s different because this is your final form,” said Andros plainly. His expression had changed, and his face was suddenly as hard as Nicholas’s tone. “This time it’s different because this time, there’s a queen,” he said.
Nicholas Wargrave knew where they were headed before they got there, and he felt the floor tilt a little under his feet as he sensed the weight of the cards stacked against him.
Minnaea picked up the reins, just as he knew she would. Her tone was as serious as her husband’s. “And I hope you regain your strength quickly, your majesty. Because your Challenger is going to do everything in his power to get to her first.”
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 Hesp
eros 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.
Chapter Two
When the premonition hit her, it was just past midnight, and Adelaide Lane was three feet underwater and on her way back up to the surface to begin her late night laps. As usual, the flash of light and the buzz-explosion sensation the vision set off inside her head forced her to inhale sharply. She knew she was inhaling water. But the knowledge was distant, as was the sudden wrongness of her lungs filling with water.
Like always, the premonition had her firmly in its grasp. There was nothing she could do to save herself. Instead, she watched her surroundings change. The pool water became a hallway. It was crowded with people. They were blurry at first, but as they came into focus, she determined they were teens, and the hall was full because it was a passing period. It was that brief five minutes or so between classes when kids were expected to catch up with friends, go to the bathroom, walk to their lockers, unlock them, switch out their old books for their new ones, and wind up firmly in their seats in their next classrooms before the bell rang.
It was impossible, of course. But she had a theory that those in charge were well aware of this. Passing periods were their way of controlling the students, like sleep deprivation or brain washing.
This hallway was actually over-crowded. Something about it felt familiar to Addie. Backpacks bumped into shoulders, and students’ faces were stony, their heads pointed straight forward. It was as if they wore blinders; their eyes attempted not to make contact with anyone else’s. Addie had seen it before. The sidewalks of New York were like this. People did it in stressful, packed circumstances. They avoided one another. It was survival instinct.
She stood in the midst of this orderly chaos, this packed vein of constant tension and looked around, wondering what the hell her vision was trying to show her. She remembered high school all too well. She didn’t need her psychic side to remind her of the stress. From the looks of it, other than clothing and electronics, nothing had changed.
But then there was a ripple through the river of students. It started in the distance and moved through the crowd like a wave, a general movement away from something – or someone. The boy nearest to her fell backward, moving through her; she wasn’t there, after all. Screams erupted, echoed and eerie. Sound was always distorted in her visions. The screams were followed closely by the unmistakable cacophony of gunshots. Even with an echo, she would recognize that sound.
One. Two. Slow, methodical, purposeful and terrible, the bullets were released. Addie stayed where she was, frozen in the terror of what she was witnessing, as student after student was targeted and shot.
Books and papers scattered, people fell over one another in their desperate attempts to get away, and someone was crying. But Adelaide could do nothing. Please, she thought. Show me the shooter.
She could only remain immobile in the hall, staring in horror until enough students had fallen or fled before her that she had a clear view of the shooter.
Adelaide focused. This was essential.
The shooter was female. That was rare. She was also beautiful, with an athletic build and full, light brown hair that fell in waves around her face. Her clothing was well cared for, she wore simple but expensive earrings that hinted they were heirlooms, and her shoes were relatively un-scuffed. There was almost nothing outwardly obvious about why she would be doing what she was doing.
Almost.
Her clothes might have been well maintained, but they were baggy on her slim frame. They were oversized, and though they failed to hide her true figure, it was clear she had been attempting to do so. They were the clothes of someone who wanted to cover up, to hide from the world.
And that was it. There was nothing else. Nothing but the gun in her eerily steady hand, the deadness that had come over her gaze, and the cold, calculated aim and pull of the trigger.
Think, Addie! The vision wouldn’t last much longer. Already, she could sense the re-blurring of figures on its outer edges. She was fading, being pulled out. Hell, she might be dying, seeing as how she’d been in the pool when the premonition struck.
Think! Notice something important!
She looked down at the ground, at the students who’d been shot. If she couldn’t glean anymore from the shooter, maybe she could from her victims. Addie tried to register as much as possible as quickly as possible.
The victims were mostly girls. No, not mostly, she corrected herself. They were all girls.
They’re people who have probably hurt her, she thought. This is vengeance. Girls were cruel to one another. So very, very cruel. It was a learned trait, studies sho
wed, one gained through social interaction. The silent treatment. Sudden outbursts. Backstabbing. Name calling. Underhanded complements. Neglect. Rumors… ugly, ugly rumors. All learned and spread, and there was no better place to do it than high school.
Addie looked back up at the shooter, and something flashed through her vision, like lightning through a building fog. It was something familiar again, something personal. It tasted like acid on her tongue and was confusing as hell.
But it was gone as soon as it had come. And the gun continued to go off.
Every round struck its target. None of the bullets were wasted. The shooter knew how to use the weapon and had a steady hand. The cold determination of one aware that their time is up, of one who has been pushed to the point of no return, was all that kept the shooter going.
Addie spun, looking at the walls for some indication of what school this might be. To her right was a painted mural. She saw a sea animal, blurring words, mountains in the distance.
She slowly turned back to the shooter, not because she chose to move slowly, but because the vision was ending, and time was fighting against her now. The bullets were fewer and farther between, and the echoing reverberation was more distant. But at last, she managed to fully turn back around, and for a split second – the shooter’s gaze met hers.
Eye to eye.
A stunned sensation went through Adelaide, coiling cold and hard in her core.
And then the stunned sensation deepened, coalesced, and grew more dense, until it was painful. That pain grew and spread as the vision completely faded away. The fog was all around her now, and it was horrible. She couldn’t breathe through it. It was too thick. She inhaled hard, desperate, and felt a burning in her throat. There was pain in her chest and in her throat, her nose was stinging, and she was coughing violently. Light engulfed her, blotting out the nightmare of her premonition like a welcome white-wash.
With each cough, reality peeked through the veil around her. Addie continued to hack, unable to control herself. Her side and right arm brushed against the ground. She heard a voice. “That’s it. You got it now. Just cough it up and come on back. Thatta girl.”
The Nightmare King (The Kings Book 11) Page 2