The Warlock King (The Kings)

by Heather Killough-Walden

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  Heather Killough-Walden Reading List

  The Lost Angels series:

  Always Angel (eBook-only introductory novella)

  Avenger's Angel

  Messenger's Angel

  Death's Angel

  Warrior's Angel (release date TBA)

  Samael (release date TBA)

  The October Trilogy:

  Sam I Am

  Secretly Sam

  Suddenly Sam (October 1, 2013)

  Neverland Trilogy:

  Forever Neverland

  Beyond Neverland (release date TBA)

  Never Neverland (release date TBA)

  The Big Bad Wolf series:

  The Heat (no longer available separately - purchase in the Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation)

  The Strip (no longer available separately - purchase in the Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation)

  The Spell

  The Hunt

  The Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation (all four books together, in proper chronological order)

  The Kings - A Big Bad Wolf spinoff series:

  The Vampire King

  The Phantom King

  The Warlock King (February 14th, 2013)

  (future The Kings books TBA; at least 13 total)

  The Chosen Soul Trilogy:

  The Chosen Soul

  Drake of Tanith

  Queen of Abaddon (release date TBA; 2013)

  Redeemer (stand-alone)

  Hell Bent (stand-alone)

  Vampire, Vampire (stand-alone)

  A Sinister Game (stand-alone)

  The Third Kiss series:

  Dorian's Dream (release date TBA)

  Aleksei's Dream (release date TBA)

  (future The Third Kiss books TBA; open-ended series)

  Note: The Lost Angels series (not including Always Angel) is available in print and eBook format. All other HKW books are currently eBook-only.

  The Warlock King

  By Heather Killough-Walden

  Sequel to The Vampire King and The Phantom King

  and book three in the BBW spinoff series, The Kings

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  The Warlock King

  “The Queen is the most valuable and important piece and the whole outcome can depend upon how successfully she plays her role.” - Alexander Kotov

  Prologue

  She stirred, long lashes fluttering, smooth crown furrowing. He watched, intently observing, as he always did. He watched and he waited, and eventually she awoke.

  The torchlight touched upon the gold rings in her multicolored eyes like a kind of magic. And perhaps it was; he’d always felt so. She had ensnared him; cast her spell like a web around his heart long ago. He had little doubt that every fiber of her being was composed of the same magic that now reflected in her entrancing gaze.

  She was a goddess, after all. It was to be expected.

  “Why, Kamon?” she asked again. Her beautiful voice sounded like the first rainfall during the monsoons, like the first drying wind when they went again, and like the kiss of sunshine upon the Nile at dawn. But it was weak; his power kept her immobile, allowing her only what strength she needed to survive. Little remained for speech, no matter how softly spoken.

  “You know why, Amunet. You always have.”

  Those gorgeous, hypnotic eyes closed to him, sending a spike of anger through his chest.

  “You continue to fight me, to deny me. Yet it is I who should ask ‘why.’ You think that you will win? Do you not realize where you are, Amunet? Amon is not here to save you. And his child?”

  Her eyes opened once more, this time focused on him with renewed intensity. He had her attention and he relished in it.

  “You hid her from me so carefully. You took her through time and space, where you thought her out of my reach, safe from my gasp. I commend your unfailing devotion to her. But….” He lowered himself, bracing an arm on either stone side of the sarcophagus that imprisoned her. “I have found her, Amunet. Despite all your efforts, I’ve found her anyhow.”

  Her power surged, as he knew it would, and in the manner that he had done a hundred times, he used the sarcophagus to absorb that power. He felt it swell through its conducting magic and fill him like fire in a vessel.

  Amunet’s kaleidoscope eyes illuminated with fury and fear.

  His body tingled – but his heart ached. She’d always looked most becoming when she was emotional.

  Desire fueling his actions, Kamon lunged forward, grasped the goddess queen around the throat, and cast them both from this realm and into another. Just like that. Time and space warped around them, all sensation moved away, and the universe shifted.

  A moment later, they stood alone in the drifting sands of the land they had once called home. A wide river ran through the land; tufts of grass clung to the ground along its edges.

  Amunet stood free beside him, her beautiful form draped in the gauzy garments of their kind, her long, thick hair ruffling slightly in the desert breeze. She gazed out over the barren landscape at the ancient city that waited on the opposite banks of the river.

  He watched her as she contemplated the City of the Dead.

  She spoke at him without looking at him. “If you take what Amon buried there, all will become unbalanced.”

  “Justice is not necessarily balanced,” he told her.

  Her head whipped around now, and her multihued eyes burned with outrage. “Wrong,” she hissed. “Revenge is unbalanced. You do not seek justice.”

  Kamon’s chin rose. He took a deep breath, feeling his temper ebb and recede. “Call it what you will,” he said. “I will do what I must.”

  Amunet looked at him, long and hard, and gradually, the anger in her beautiful features turned to surprise. “What have you done? I sense more than my own magic about you now.”

  “Astute,” he told her. “There are indeed others.”

  Her eyes widened. She shook her head. “But how many?”

  “Many.” The auras of 13 kings and the servitude of a very special vampire lord and his creations now bowed before Kamon’s will. But he didn’t say as much. He would not give anything away. Amunet had always been far too smart.

  “Why have you done this?” she asked him, her tone one of both helplessness and hopelessness.

  He smiled a small smile. “Why do you think, Amunet?”

  She remained silent, saddened.

  He took a step toward her and turned his attention to the same barren city of stone relics she had gazed at moments earlier. “When the guardians of this world are defeated, what they possess will become mine. I will bring what I have won here. Combined, we will overcome Amon’s wards, and when I take what he has left here, it will kill him.”

  “Why? He is your brother!” Always, it came back to this question. For thousands of years.

  And always, it came back to this reply. “Because you chose him,” he said calmly as he raised his hand to cup her cheek. She pulled away, but he knew she would. She always did.

  He l
et his hand drop. “When you should have chosen me.”

  He allowed his own words to be lost in the annals of time and caught up in a dusty, desert wind as he then took them back from where they’d come. The laws of physics warped around them both once more as they tunneled through a labyrinth of impossibilities to return to the torch-lit stone chamber.

  The torches flickered with their strange, temporal coming and going. But otherwise, the sanctuary was quiet. Kamon straightened beside the sarcophagus. He looked down at his captive goddess. She slept, held under by the magic that he had taken from her and turned against her.

  A moment later, he closed the sarcophagus with a wave of his hand and turned toward the exit. A large ginger cat sat in the center of the archway, its luminous gold eyes reflecting the flickering glow of the torches.

  “You can not help her, Wa’ali.”

  The cat blinked, slowly, and its tail flicked. Its intense gaze never wavered.

  Kamon met that gaze head-on. Then, without a word, he moved around the cat, leaving the room and allowing the massive stone door to roll shut behind him.

  In the quiet darkness and dancing shadows of the crypt, the ginger cat looked up at the sealed sarcophagus. He meowed. His tail flicked again.

  With a strong bound, he leapt atop the stone coffin, curled into a sleek orange and white striped ball, and stared into the darkness.

  Chapter One

  “You’re not… thinking of going out there, are you?”

  Chloe turned to regard her friend where she sat closer to the bonfire. She smiled. “No. I’ve no real interest in getting intimate with a Tiger.”

  Miliani Noe laughed and looked back out over the water. Chloe followed her gaze. The night was still for a change. Normally the valley between the mountains south of Lahaina screamed with wind, day or night. The docks in that area were literally the windiest port in the world. But at the moment, all was oddly serenely quiet. The moon was full, and it cast a white, diamond-studded road across the depthless sea.

  It was something Chloe could stare at forever. She liked stars. Stars within reach were even better.

  A quick movement in the sand grabbed her attention, and she turned to see nothing. The plethora of crabs that littered the beach were perfectly camouflaged and completely still. They seemed to know when humans were looking; as soon as Chloe turned away, they would explode from their tiny holes or begin to scuttle once more.

  Chloe looked back out to sea, giving them the privacy they clearly desired.

  The “Tiger” she’d referred to was a Tiger Shark. They ran patrol of the reefs when the water was murky or dark, and it wasn’t a good idea to tempt fate with their near blindness. They could sense you, they could hear you, but they couldn’t tell you were human and therefore unpalatable until they’d taken a taste of you.

  She had no intention of going into the water at night. But she could gaze at it until sunrise.

  “I can’t believe you aren’t staying,” said Miliani, Chloe’s life-long and very best friend. “I finally get you here and you know you love it – and you still won’t stay.”

  “I can’t, Mili.” I can’t, Chloe thought. I can’t put you in danger.

  Miliani had been her closest friend for years; they’d gone to college on the mainland together. Mili had always been very clear on the fact that she fully intended to return to Hawaii when she graduated, specifically Maui, which was where she’d been born. Now she worked three jobs to be able to continue living there, none of which had anything to do with her degree.

  Yet she was kind enough to offer Chloe a place to stay. A place to escape to. Chloe was not a poor girl, though. Living a very long time had allowed her to collect a fair amount of money, so she’d declined the offer and rented her own one-bedroom apartment in Kihei.

  Maui was a welcome repast in a world of chaos for Chloe Septeran. It was also a destination of escape. She’d come to Maui to get away from the same thing she’d been trying to escape her entire life.

  She was an Akyri – with a warlock hot on her tail.

  For many Akyri, feeding from a warlock was simply a way of life, no more inconveniencing than a mammal’s need for oxygen. Akyri served warlocks, and in return, they were given sustenance. Most Akyri viewed it as a human would view working for an office job paycheck in order to buy groceries with it.

  But Chloe knew better. She recognized the evil inherent in a warlock’s magic, and she wanted no part in it.

  This refusal to take part in the traditional, accepted mode of sustenance caused Chloe to be weaker than she could have been. It was a sacrifice she was willing to make, but one that made her susceptible to those who would use that weakness to manipulate her. Hence, she was always running. Always hiding.

  To make matters more complicated, Chloe Septeran was not like other Akyri. The origin of the Akyri was a little known fact and one carefully guarded by her kind. They were known as “demons” among other supernatural beings, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Akyri were indeed composed of darkness, but not a darkness that came from anything as simply ridiculous as a fiery locale under the Earth’s crust. Akyri were literally the coalescence of the untamable, intangible substances of the universe. They were the timeless centers of black holes, the empty spaces that nonetheless showed up on radars as pulsating entities. They were the unexplainables…. They were dark matter.

  This is where Akyri originally came from.

  Of course, Akyri could give birth to more Akyri by mating. This was fortunate for them since contrary to appearances, Akyri did grow old and die. Their outer bodies never aged, but one day an Akyri’s energy would simply run out – and they would vanish.

  When an Akyri mated with a warlock, an Offspring or vampire was formed. When Akyri mated with one another, another Akyri was created. This also occurred roughly half the time when an Akyri mated with a mortal.

  Though they were long-lived, enough time had now passed that all of the original dark matter Akyri were dead. All remaining Akyri were the children of other Akyri.

  All of them but one.

  Chloe was the last of the originals, the last dark matter coalescence. She knew there had been 28; the number stood out in her head because it was a mathematically perfect number. She couldn’t remember any of the originals personally though, and she had no idea why she had not yet passed away herself. She was certainly weak enough.

  Over the eons, she’d grown used to feeling weak, to feeling empty. It was like growing used to hunger pangs. Some days she barely noticed it. But it was always there.

  “How long are you planning on running, Chloe?” Miliani suddenly asked, ripping her from her internal thoughts.

  “I can’t put you in danger, Mili. I’m running from nothing short of the devil.”

  Miliani made a sound of vague disbelief. “Is that really what you think of him?”

  Chloe shot her a look.

  Mili caught the look and sighed, straightening to wrap her arms around her knees. “I know you, Chloe,” she said softly. “I know all of your deepest, darkest secrets. So tell me honestly…. Is that really what you think of Jason Alberich?”

  Chloe blinked. She chewed on the inside of her cheek.

  Then she broke eye contact with her best friend and stared out at the moonlight-spangled sea.

  “That’s what I thought,” Mili said.

  Chloe let it go.

  Being an Akyri was a little like owning a computer with Internet access… or a member of the Borg. Akyri shared knowledge with one another without being consciously aware they were doing so.

  Every Akyri on the planet knew about Jason Alberich.

  Warlocks were a dark breed. But he was not only a warlock; he was a decidedly powerful warlock, a practiced and capable warlock, and a terribly smart warlock. If that wasn’t enough, he was the goddamned Warlock King.

  All Akyri knew this now. The best of her kind had been chosen as his servants, and they were grateful for th
e positions.

  But Chloe feared him. The look he’d given her when their eyes had met over that busy New York sidewalk had scared the hell out of her. In the space of a heartbeat, he’d recognized her for what she was. But it was more than that. He’d not only seen her as an Akyri… he’d seen something else in her as well.

  Did he know she was the last of the originals? Did he know she was different than the others?

  He must, she thought now as she gritted her teeth in earnest. The pain that shot through her teeth then reminded her of another difference between herself and the others. She was the only Akyri in existence who didn’t possess fangs.

  Chloe ran a hand over her face, trying to focus. Jason must have known the truth about her because he was coming for her. He had come for her. She could feel him there now, somewhere on the island. He was searching for her, biding his time, taking it slow.

  Like the notorious predator he was.

  Chloe closed her eyes and shivered as an image of the tall, dangerous man flitted before her mind’s eye. He was blatantly beautiful in that slightly cruel manner that a fire is beautiful. He was all encompassing. And she had been completely unable to obliterate his image from her mind since she’d seen him face-to-face that day several months ago.

  “Fuck,” she whispered.

  “Whoa,” said Mili, brown eyes wide. “What is it?” She appeared alarmed suddenly. She looked over her shoulder at the dark beach that stretched behind them. “Is he here or something?”

  Chloe raised her hand placatingly. “No, no. I’m sorry. It’s just….”

  “Oh,” said Mili, smiling knowingly. “You were just thinking about how freaking hot he is again.”

  “This really isn’t good. This really isn’t something to laugh about. I mean, what if he’s come here to kill me or something and I’m not doing everything I can do to escape him because I find him attractive?”