The people were different too. Not that he would have known their current forms from their old ones, but he sensed the melding taking place inside them. The Traveler in him felt it. They had been ripped apart in a sense, and shoved back together different. To them, the day was a little off or they needed more coffee or they were experiencing déjà vu. But it was none of those things.
It was the Time King and his Queen. The shit had hit the fan with them somewhere, dimensions had literally collapsed, and…. And the Traveler in him felt his own change as well.
His reflection cast more thoughts into the recesses of his expanding mind. A month ago, he’d been old. But not ancient. He’d been a dragon, and they lived a long time. Very long. But nothing in comparison to a Nomad. He was older now, to be sure. But his reflection was that of a relatively young and very handsome man.
Who was in fact not a man at all, but a vampire.
The Triad moved silently, stealthily through the streets of Chicago, following the trail of the prey they hunted. The separate traces of the magic they followed were like sparkles on the wind, shimmers of diamond dust caught in an errant breeze. They smelled like goodness and night and absolute power. They were Helena, Cain, and Solan.
Cain still wasn’t answering their call. And now it felt as though the First Born were further away than ever. His magic was a comparatively faint whisper where it was left on the wind, and Abel could sense Ahriman and Amunet’s intense displeasure over this.
Abel had mixed feelings about it. He shouldn’t. He didn’t have any mixed feelings whatsoever in his prior incarnation as Arach the Nomad-vampire.
But now… well, again, things were changing.
He’d never met the First Born. He had yet to come face to face with the man who was the full blooded Nomad child of Amunet and Ahriman. He was infamous, he was dangerous, he was all-powerful, and to Abel he’d always been a mystery. He’d wondered what the man would look like. He’d wondered what his voice would sound like, how tall he would be. But that was all he’d done – wonder. There’d been no emotion attached to his thoughts. He had neither hated nor loved his would-be brother.
Until now.
Now when he thought of Cain, he saw him clearly. The image drawn up in his mind was absolutely perfect, no blurriness, no vacillation. The picture appeared instantly. Cain was six and a half feet of hard-honed muscle, towering as tall as Abel if not taller. Blond hair, piercing blue eyes, five-o-clock shadow on a strong chin. Jeans and a T-shirt are what the ultimately powerful man chose to wear. Not a suit worth thousands. Engineering boots, scuffed and well used. Sometimes he also wore a leather jacket with some kind of patch on the back. And at times, Abel thought he heard the sound of a V-twin engine revving in the distance. He even smelled burning rubber and automotive oil, and a hint of leather.
And every time he thought of him, he felt toward him absolute hatred.
Ahriman and Amunet were furious. The evidence was all around them where they moved through the dark alleys of Chicago on their quest for revenge. They themselves went quietly, but the world around them sensed their fury like an echo as they passed through it. Every now and then, car or shop windows cracked, the asphalt split open and emitted coughs of steam, and the storm that had been raging over North America for weeks would let loose with a barrage of electricity that was soaked up by skyscraper lightning rods.
Abel was the only one managing to keep his head. Strangely enough, it was because he couldn’t have cared less that Cain seemed to be vanishing from the realm. He had respect for his Nomad creators and he was loyal. But as for their First Born?
Good riddance, he thought.
And he had no idea why.
Behind him, the Nomads stopped. He caught the cessation of their movement and turned to face them. Both had their faces turned to the sky. Amunet looked truly panicked. “It’s gone,” she said. “Cain is gone.”
Abel’s gaze narrowed. He closed his eyes and sent out mental feelers. She was right. Cain’s presence had utterly and completely vanished. All remaining traces of his existence had been wiped away as if the man who had once been Death was simply no longer. Either he was someone else entirely and hence unrecognizable or he was dead, himself.
Abel hoped for the latter. But he said, “I suggest we find Solan.”
However when he spoke, Ahriman’s head snapped down, and his dark brown eyes turned instantly red. He eyed Abel carefully. “Abel, how do you feel?” he asked. He was a Traveler, so his handsome face remained relatively expressionless as he asked the question, but the glow in his eyes gave away his concern. His second son seemed off to him.
Abel blinked. He considered the question. How do I feel? he repeated in his head. But he didn’t know how to answer that. In all honesty, he was feeling a kaleidoscope of things.
Even as he considered his reply, he began to have doubts – about everything. Not just his reasons for being there in that alley and for targeting the Kings and Queens, but about things like who and what he even was. A dragon. A sovereign. A Traitor.
Ahriman’s question seemed to push over a domino that had been wobbling for a while now.
Dragon? Traveler, even? No, he thought. That wasn’t who he ultimately was. He was something else. He was someone else.
Now he felt both Nomad gazes on him, but he was lost already, unable to respond, trapped in a yawning-open maw of realizations. Memories came pouring forth from that widening chasm, and they swirled around him like a thousand movies playing at the same time.
He saw ages of things, history experienced first-hand, and all of them witnessed as the same man. In these memories, he was so much older than the dragon. So much older than the one standing in that alley. He was one of the first of his kind ever created. He was the second ever created, in fact.
The Second Vampire. Abel.
Killed by his brother, Cain.
Son of a bitch, he thought with dark, red, and ancient menace. It was anger tamped by the turning of time, so that it was no longer chaotic or brutal or uncontrollable. Now it was systematic. Now it was so much more dangerous.
Like the man and woman standing before him, Abel also wanted revenge. But for something completely different. He wanted revenge against his brother.
How do I feel? he thought with a sneer that revealed a glimpse of fangs. The answer was a tricky one. He no longer cared about the Kings and Queens, even the one called Evangeline. But he cared a whole hell of a lot about something else.
And as his form began to lose cohesiveness, and he felt the painless dissipation of his tall, strong body, he laughed. The laugh echoed long and low and vitally wrong. He wasn’t dying. He knew that. He knew full well what was happening and he welcomed it.
He knew where Cain had gone. Just like the First Vampire, Abel was leaving this life, this existence, and returning to the one he was supposed to have all along.
And once he did, he would track down his long lost brother once and for all.
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 con
cerned 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.
Chapter Fifty-one
William reached out for his power. He needed to know right now how much strength he had in this new world, this collided dimension. He was still the Time King, but this was a new Time King and he had no idea what was at his disposal.
Amunet and Ahriman had transported into the field of cars, their arrival so drastic, they’d shoved all other material out of the way with violent domain. They wanted to know where their children were.
From this, William surmised that not only Cain had been changed and sent away, but Arach as well. He wondered how.
“He’s Abel,” whispered Helena beside him.
He looked down at her.
“He’s not who he used to be, so they can’t sense him.” She shook her head. “The Storyteller is Cain and Abel's creator now, not these two.”
William tried to process that. It appeared that history had been changed to the extent it had altered not one Nomad, but two. Helena’s words were meant for William alone, but the Nomads across the field heard her anyway.
William had a feeling Amunet wouldn’t be happy with the news, and he was right. He moved in front of Helena just as Amunet threw back her head and wailed to the heavens above. The
window of every car in the field shattered, the cars jumped several feet off the ground, and the grass beneath her lit on fire.
Helena yelped in surprise as the inferno spread like windswept wildfire and raced straight for her. William raised his hand and commanded the fire to stop. It refused to obey.
That’s one power gone, he thought with mounting concern. And it was a doozy.
His ability to stop the world been taken from him when he’d made his contract with Time. He’d been without it for quite a while. When Time sent him and Helena into the alternate dimension, that power was given to her, even if it had come with consequences. But when the dimensional walls collapsed and the worlds were drawn together, he’d rather expected the ability to finally return to him.
It appeared that was not the case. The Queen is more powerful, he thought rapidly. Maybe she had the power.
“Helena, try to stop the fire!”
But she was already attempting to do so. He turned in time to see her lower her hand and make a desperate sound as the fire continued toward her, just for her, and she began climbing the tree behind them. “I can’t!” she screamed. “It doesn’t work!”
William gritted his teeth and used another of his powers, waving his hand to form a bubble of frozen-in-time atoms around them, which made them completely immobile and impermeable. In effect, it was a shield. This caused the fire to veer off in a “Y” of sorts on either side of them at the last second. It rapidly spread in a crackling circle around the tree.
He looked up. Helena was half-way up the tree. She turned on a branch and looked on breathlessly, noting what he’d done. “Nice!” she exclaimed.
But then she peered across the field to where Amunet and Ahriman still stood. Ahriman, the tall and stoic man behind the petite blonde Nomad, had his hands at his sides. He had yet to act, and his stillness was wholly unsettling.
It was his companion who screamed in rage and suddenly sent every single Shelby flying outward as if a bomb had gone off. Power rippled like waves on a pond, and the cars crashed into one another, then disappeared behind trees where they fell beyond the boundaries of Helena’s acreage.
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