The Reluctant King (The Star-Crossed Series)

by Rachel Higginson

  A huge thank you to the girls that helped me put this book together! Sarah Hansen, who is quite possibly the greatest cover art designer in the entire world! You are absolutely brilliant. Thank you for putting up with my million questions, my neurotic visions and creating something that is simply incredible! Jenn Nunez, you are so much more than an editor! You are a friend, a therapist and a colleague. Thank you for enduring my long, nonsensical emails, my addiction to texting and finding all of those important holes! But most of all thank you for knowing the difference between discrete and discreet and Christi’s real last name.

  I need to thank Miriah, Brooke, Bridget, Diana and Lindsay! I am so grateful to have each of you in my life, not just as friends but as fans! You girls make this job fun; you accept the crazy, the scatter-brained and the chaos and support me through it all! Thank you for being the amazing support group you are. And most of all thank you for not letting me take myself seriously.

  I giant thank you to Lila Felix, Jenn Sterling and Nancy Straight! I never imagined the support and friendship I would find in the Indie world. You are all amazing and I am so grateful for your friendship, your advice and your encouragement! I wish you all the best.

  And finally, I want to thank the most amazing group of authors I know, my Hellcats! Amy Bartol, Shelly Crane, Michelle Leighton, Angeline Kace, Samantha Young, Quinn Loftis, and Georgia Cates! You have been an incredible support group! I am so grateful for your advice and opinions. You are not only some of the best writers out there, but by far you are some of the greatest women I know. I am blessed to know you and I cannot wait for the all the amazing things yet to come for you!

  About the Author

  Rachel Higginson was born and raised in Nebraska, but spent her college years traveling the world. She married her high school sweetheart and spends her days raising their growing family. She is obsessed with bad reality TV and any and all Young Adult Fiction.

  The Reluctant King is the fifth book in The Star-Crossed Series.

  Look for the Relentless Warrior, the sixth book in The Star-Crossed Series, coming early 2013

  Other books coming in 2013 are Sunburst, the second book in the Starbright Series and The Rush, a new and more contemporary series.

  Other Books by Rachel Higginson:

  Reckless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 1)

  Hopeless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 2)

  Fearless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 3)

  Endless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 4)

  Starbright (The Starbright Series, Book 1)

  Follow Rachel on her blog at:

  www.rachelhigginson.blogspot.com

  Or on Twitter:

  @mywritesdntbite

  Or on her Facebook pages:

  Rachel Higginson

  Or

  Reckless Magic

  Keep Reading for an Excerpt from Starbright

  Chapter One

  The night had never been darker, the blackness surrounding the car, never so suffocating. Even the piles of snow pushed to the sides of the narrow road, did nothing to break up the oppressive darkness. The Stars above, shone brightly, I was sure of it, but they did so from behind a curtain of clouds that blocked the light from reaching the road. I felt swallowed up by emptiness.

  I gripped the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles stretching until they gleamed white in the glow of the dashboard and my frozen fingers worked numbly against the cold plastic. The headlights of my old Jeep reached only a few feet in front of me and then stopped abruptly against a wall of darkness. I shivered violently, nestling my chin further into the down of my heavy winter coat and cursed the Nebraska winter for being equally as cold as it was desolate.

  The farmland rolled away from the winding road, buried beneath several feet of iced over snow in every direction. Trees, planted for the privacy of farmers, lined the way home with empty branches and snowcapped tops. My breath puffed out in front of me, fogging up the frozen windshield and reminding me that the heater to my fifteen year old Jeep Cherokee remained unfixed.

  “Tristan!” I growled furiously into the frigid air. “Why I let you talk me into another movie I will never know!”

  There was no one there to hear my complaints, or sympathize with me against my best friend, but it felt comforting to make noise in an empty antique without a radio. Still, receiving not even a groan of empathy from the Jeep, I sat forward and peered into the impossible night ahead of me.

  I knew these roads; I had each curve and turn memorized. The distance between Tristan Shields’ house and my own was well traveled and practically sacred. Still, out in the country where street lights were for city-folk and the deer and the antelope tended to play, their familiar territory became a dangerous, never-ending expanse of nerves and tension.

  Even in summer, unless the Stars and moon were bright and friendly, the country roads of the Nebraska farmland became shrouded in a heavy obscurity, the headlights of the best of cars mapping out the only visibility in the heavy cloak of night and beyond those flickering lights the world seemed to drop off the edge of a cliff into nothingness. But now, in the dead of winter, with temperatures well below zero, the night around my old Jeep seemed to have a life of its own, oppressive and angry.

  I cleared my throat and mentally determined to conquer the creeping feeling of being afraid. I bit down on my lower lip and clutched the steering wheel tighter. My breath came out in shaky puffs of air, reminding me it was more than the roads and the night that curdled the most terrified places of my heart. It was more than the late hour and bitter cold that forced me to shiver and shift my eyes suspiciously in every direction.

  It was the Darkness.

  Not the country night, or the moonless sky. But the real Darkness. The Darkness that moved secretly through this world and threatened every living, breathing creature. The darkness that slithered in unseen places and survived on the death and rotten things. The darkness that I would fight until my dying breath.

  But not tonight. Tonight I wasn’t ready. Tonight, I was still only sixteen, and my parents were still off saving the galaxy while I stayed home to finish high school with an elderly woman as my keeper.

  Something moved out of the corner of my eye. I could swear it. Swirling my head around, and keeping a steady hold on the steering wheel, I peered into the darkness, searching out the moving creature.

  Nothing.

  Nothing beyond the snow banks piled in the ditches and the swaying lifeless trees that were becoming sparser as I passed expansive fields blanketed under the white of winter.

  I turned my attention to the road again and with a numb hand, brushed my platinum blonde hair under the brim of my stocking cap. My fingers snapped with electricity and for a moment the cab of my Jeep was lit with the sparks of static. Only a few more miles till home. I could make it. There was nothing to be afraid of.

  But why did tonight feel so different?

  So dark?

  And then out of my peripheral vision I saw it move again. A swift shadow sliding effortlessly through the night, riding the whipping wind like a wave and dropping the frozen temperature several degrees lower. The pungent smell of rotting eggs drifted through the air.

  I didn’t have to turn my head this time to confirm. I knew it would be gone before my head could move in the right direction. Besides, they only existed in the peripheral, in the slight glances and far off places.

  I had seen them before. Since before I could talk my parents would tell me about them, explain to me of their existence, warn me of their danger. I saw them everywhere, even during the day I could spot them, because they were everywhere.

  Foot soldiers of a greater evil, sent to Earth, the last remaining inhabited planet, to prepare the way for their master. They were the evil in all things, the tyranny, the oppression, the hunger and violence. The Darkness. The force of wickedness that battled against the forces of good with one purpose in mind, to abolish the Light.

  I was the light.
And because I was the answer to their destruction I hunkered further into my winter coat and braved the bone-chilling cold.

  It could be easy for me to warm up; even in a car with a broken heater it was the natural reaction of my body. I was born of the light, of the warmth. And to suffer against the natural elements was difficult enough, but the extra layer of malevolent chill became excruciatingly painful even in small doses.

  Still, they couldn’t know what I was. They couldn’t discover me after all this time. At least not yet. So I breathed in the frosty air, feeling the burn in my lungs and forced myself to push forward a few more miles.

  My parents had worked so hard to hide my existence and to blend in with normal humanity that no matter how easy it would be to ease my pain, I had to fight against the elements. I was brought to Earth as a baby, with the sole intention to one day take over as Earth’s Protector. And so my parents had given up their positions as two of the greatest Warriors of their generation to raise an alien infant in the middle of farmland.

  And it was here, in Western Nebraska, that I waited for the day the Earth would become my charge, my responsibility.

  But that day wasn’t today. I had years before I was supposed to deal with that kind of duty!

  Years…. I promised myself.

  And as soon as I decided these were regular Shadows, which had no idea I was anything special, another one flittered across my peripheral. I swallowed the lump that had taken up an annoying residence in my throat and felt the passenger’s seat for my cell phone. I thought I laid it out before I started the car, but after blindly feeling around my worn upholstery decided it must still be hiding inside my over-sized bag.

  I strengthened the grip of my left hand and thrust my right hand into the black hole of all my important possessions, hoping to come out victorious in three seconds or less. Defender of the last planet or not, I was hopelessly unorganized. My purse was a cluttered mess of unknown objects and somewhere, hidden in the melee was my cell phone.

  I liked to believe I was brave. Or at least I would be one day. But tonight, all I wanted to do was call Annabelle, wake her up and forcefully let her know I would be home in ten minutes, just to hear her reassuring voice. I thought about calling Tristan too and demanding to know why he thought we needed to watch an entire trilogy all in one night!

  Lip gloss. Gum. Floss. Wallet. Candy bar.

  Where was my cell phone?

  The road was dangerously icy and my constant shivering did nothing to balance out my driving. I sucked in a frozen breath and then glanced down at my purse, hoping to be able to spot the phone right away.

  Not there.

  At least not right where I could see it in the one point five seconds I allowed myself to look. I heaved an irritated sigh and turned my eyes back to the road. Apparently that second and a half was way too long because standing in the middle of the road was a giant buck, poised and stilled only ten feet away.

  I panicked. Somewhere in the rational-thinking part of my brain, I knew I was supposed to hit the animal; that it was safer to collide with the deer than slamming on my brakes in the middle of the night on an iced over country road. But my animal-loving instinct took over and my foot pressed furiously against the brake pedal while my hands jerked the steering wheel hurriedly to the right.

  The next few seconds became a blur as my Jeep spun wildly out of control without even pretending to slow down. Belatedly I released my foot and tried to pump the brake but it was too late, the tail end flipped around to the front and then the front flipped around again and hit the snow bank at an alarming speed and bounced off.

  As if in slow motion, my passenger’s side rammed into the iced over snow bank and then flipped over what felt like several times until I smashed to the frozen field far beyond the road. My Jeep hit the ground with an ear splitting cry of metal crushed against a rock hard surface.

  I exhaled violently, the seatbelt cutting into my awkwardly hanging neck and waist. I felt unconsciousness threatening to sweep me away as the broken bones in my right hand, where it had been crushed between my body and the armrest in the impact, screamed angrily at me.

  If I were human I would already be unconscious.

  If I were human, I would have a lot more to worry about than a broken wrist.

  I wiggled my feet and tried moving my arms, just to make sure there were no other issues, before reaching over with my left hand and unbuckling the safety restraint. I fell gruffly against the impacted passenger side door and let out a fierce cry of pain.

  I sat up and rubbed my shoulder that now felt displaced but not broken. Climbing into position I bent my knees and braced my hands, one strongly, the other gingerly, against the car around me and thrust my legs forward into the already cracked windshield.

  The fractured glass moved against the force of my legs, but it took several more tries before I removed it completely. When I crawled carefully through the now gaping hole, the windshield remained intact, but definitely fissured and hung awkwardly across the sideways front hood, still attached near the driver’s side.

  I slid down the rusted green paint of my Jeep and landed softly in the snow. The night was still outside of the crash, silent and subdued. The snow that blanketed the landscape muffled the usual night sounds and the absence of animals, even winter ones, felt eerily dangerous.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw one move. A Shadow. The Darkness.

  But it wasn’t possible. They didn’t know I existed, let alone that I lived here, in the middle of nowhere. I brushed my fear away and simultaneously readied myself for an altercation. I shouldn’t be afraid. I couldn’t be afraid.

  These were mere minions besides. And even if I wasn’t prepared to go into hand to hand combat with them, if they really knew who I was they would be more afraid of me than I was of them.

  Or at least that’s what I promised myself.

  I lifted my head in search of the buck that caused all this trouble to begin with but he was nowhere in sight. Either he was frightened off by my car turning in wild circles just to avoid him, or he never existed in the first place, just an apparition that turned to the smoky wisps of evil.

  But that would mean a purposeful attack. And that couldn’t be. There was just no way they could know who I was.

  Unless…. Unless, my parents had fallen.

  I froze for a moment, my hands clenched at my sides, my chest a shallow cavity filled with a heart that refused to beat and lungs that refused to breathe and played through that possibility in my mind. They had been gone for several weeks, on a mission that specifically required their skill set. I hadn’t heard from them since they left, and so it was entirely possible that they failed.

  That they fell.

  I gazed into the sky, willing the clouds to move out of my way so I could find them. If they were gone, I would be able to tell immediately, their bright lights would be blank in a sky full of their fellow soldiers. The sky was too overcast though, even with my powerful eyesight and ability to cut through darkness, the clouds were too heavy and clustered to see through.

  I cursed uncharacteristically under my breath and then again when I realized my phone was still somewhere unknown in the dark abyss of my Jeep. As I wedged one of my booted feet into the space of my car, where the hood made room for my windshield wipers, I decided that even if my parents were gone, there was no amount of torture or distress that would have prompted them to give up my location. They worked their whole lives to keep me a secret, to prepare me for the day when I would remain here alone, and on top of that, they loved me. There was no way it was them.

  I ignored the clustering Darkness as I pushed myself up and through the broken windshield, reaching for my spilled purse, whose contents littered the crushed passenger’s side door. The Shadows weren’t trying to hide anymore; they were coming for me, gathering around me as if waiting for the command to attack. I reached down hurriedly, ripping my coat against the rough edges of the broken windshield, but I managed to gathe
r at least the important stuff into my purse before hauling it back with me and hopping down from the Jeep.

  I tossed the purse that now only held my wallet and cellphone and a few random items that managed to survive the spill, onto the snowy ground and lifted my head to meet my enemy. They moved around me like a slow tornado of darkness. As separate entities they appeared like slender gusts of black wind, but united they became a solid wall of evil. Even my keen eye sight could not see through them, or my superheated blood feel anything beyond their oppressive iciness.

  I had never seen so many Shadows in one place. I had never even heard of them organizing themselves into a unified attack. They worked separately and secretly; their purpose was to influence mankind, to spread the Darkness like a disease to every corner of this planet, not to outright attack it. The deer had to be them. And even in that instance, their work was not so much of a surprise. But surrounding me now was something so unheard of that I was more taken aback than actually frightened.

  The wall of Darkness moved against me, tightening its spaces and obviously trying to be threatening. I remained frozen, unwilling to reveal my identity even in this frontal attack. I wished more than anything that my parents were here, on planet and nearby, but this was a battle I alone would have to fight or figure out how to outmaneuver.