Monsters, Book Two: Hour of the Dragon

by Heather Killough-Walden

  That boy had been dead. He hadn’t been breathing. Whatever had happened to him had stopped his heart.

  She had started it back up again.

  That strange feeling that washed over him earlier was back, but stronger. He was transforming there in that field of death and rebirth. He was doing the same thing the boy had done, but on another level. Randall was dying and coming back to life. He was different now. He recognized that difference as he gazed upon the beautiful woman with the perfect scars and the perfect profile and the perfect magic. He knew why he had been spared in this disaster. He knew what his purpose was.

  The angel was precious, a work of art that the cosmos had sent into his path for a reason. Randall Price was supposed to protect her. Care for her.

  Keep her.

  And keep her, he would.

  *****

  Victor Maze smiled to himself in satisfaction. This was a job well done.

  He had his energy source, and he’d manipulated the situation with just enough influence to get the ball rolling. Or as the sovereigns seemed so fond in referencing of late, to topple the first domino.

  He chuckled softly to himself as he slipped his hands into the pockets of his white suit and left the scene of death and chaos and obsession behind him. None of the people scrambling from their emergency vehicles noticed him. No one knew he was there. He was a slow moving calm in a field of rapid-dash nightmares, which was ironic given who and what he actually was.

  He liked that irony. It tasted good.

  And so would Randall Price.

  Chapter Four – Private Location, Pacific Northwest Coast

  “I’m telling you they popped into my realm all at once. All at the same time. And….”

  Thanatos, or Thane to those who knew him personally, trailed off in his description to the people seated around the large, oblong table. He ran his hand through his jet-black hair and turned his back to them as he continued to pace restlessly. Whatever had sent those anime to him had just happened. But already he could feel the spirits backing up, the line of dead becoming longer by the second, all of them waiting on the Phantom Realm sovereigns to sort them out and send them on their way.

  Thane was the Phantom King, ruler of the realm where all who died unnatural deaths went after they’d drawn their last painful breaths. Those otherwise lost souls were referred to as anime, and normally they appeared in his realm one at a time, giving him and his wife, Siobhan, plenty of time to greet them and help them however possible.

  But today was different and that was why he’d called this meeting of as many of the other sovereigns as he could get ahold of at short notice.

  “And what?” Diana Chroi asked. She was the Goblin Queen, wife to one of the most powerful fae in existence, the Goblin King Damon Chroi. Together they ruled the Goblin Kingdom, which was really just a fanciful name for the realm that apparently took the multiverse’s charity cases. Diana Chroi was a veterinarian in her “mortal” life, and she’d taken her love of all things furry and down-trodden right along with her into the fae kingdom when she’d married Chroi. The once mighty and dreaded Goblin Kingdom, where the most dangerous of the fae had been banished to millennia ago, had for all intents and purposes become the mighty and dreaded Multi-Realm Zoo.

  Not that they didn’t do a good job. And from what he heard, their triplet children were naturals with the animals too.

  Diana Chroi was a fair-haired woman with sparkling, intelligent eyes. She leaned expectantly over the table and waited for him to continue, as did everyone else who sat at the meeting.

  But this was too bizarre, too wrong, and suddenly Thane, a man who represented one of the most mysterious and dreaded kingdoms in all the realms, a man who had dealt with death – and ugly death at that – for as long as it had existed, frankly felt… embarrassed.

  So it was Thane’s wife who finally answered the question.

  “They were singing,” Siobhan told them. She was still seated in her own respective chair at the table, unlike Thane who admittedly had a harder time containing his agitated energy and had risen almost immediately upon starting the meeting to pace across the room as they talked.

  “Singing?” asked someone else at the table. The voice belonged to Jack Colton, the Shifter King.

  Thane turned and placed his palms on the table top, leaning in. “Singing,” he repeated. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

  There was silence across the room, and whether it was pregnant with surprise or unexpressed mirth, Thane couldn’t tell. Probably both.

  Finally the Shadow King, a man who had gone by many names over the years but who’d eventually settled on Keeran Pitch, said “You’re fucking with us, right?”

  “Nope.” Thane shook his head. “Two-hundred people singing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. And they were singing in a perfect harmonious round.”

  His wife, Siobhan, spoke up. “That combined with the fact that all two-hundred people showed up in our garage at once was enough to convince us that we needed to meet with the others right away. We think this…. Well, we think it has Victor Maze written all over it.”

  At the other end of the long table, seated in the chair that would have been reserved for the head of the household had this been a dining table, a red-headed young beauty leaned back in her chair and tapped her finger thoughtfully on the armrest. This was Katrielle the actually ancient Nomad who had once been known to the sovereigns as Lalura Chantelle the crotchety Nomad. Nomads were bafflingly powerful beings capable of godlike acts and who were born time and again in different forms, but retained the knowledge of each form every time they were reincarnated. The red-haired Katrielle was not only this Nomad’s latest form; it had been her first as well.

  “So… it has never happened before that victims of large-scale tragedies show up in Purgatory at the same time? Not during any of the deadly events in history’s past?” she asked. “Such as with the Bubonic Plague? Hiroshima? Mount Vesuvius?”

  Thane shook his head. “No. Natural disasters don’t create anime. They’re natural deaths, whether they’re thought of as fair or not. Even disease doesn’t count. But as far as war casualties are concerned, even large-scale events such as bomb droppings? Their spirits come to me individually, each anime appearing one after another, no matter what. Time moves differently in my realm, you know that.”

  Katrielle nodded. She did know that; the Nomad knew a lot of things. Thane had a feeling she was only having him reiterate it all for the benefit of everyone else in the room.

  Since, due to war and homicide, there were simply too many “wrongful” deaths to count, time in Purgatory worked differently. It stretched itself out, turning the seconds into days and the years into centuries. As the Phantom King, Thane retained control of this time bubble and dealt with the plethora of wronged one at a time.

  “This is the first time more than one has appeared at once,” said Siobhan. “And it was wholly unnerving. I mean you can just imagine…” she gestured, leaning back in her chair as Katrielle had done, “two-hundred semi-transparent people suddenly appearing at the open end of a dusty garage, their spirits backdropped by a vast, empty desert and hollow wind,” she described and then sat forward again and lowered her voice, “as they sang an old nursery rhyme with absolutely eerie perfect pitch.”

  There were sounds all around of general agreement that it would be quite the sight to take in.

  “That would make an incredible scene for a video game,” said Pitch, who was not only the Shadow King but also a self-made billionaire in the mortal realm where he’d made his fortune creating more than a few stupidly popular video games as the mysterious mogul-gamer, Shadenigma. Shadenigma was a man in a black hoodie and leather jacket who never showed his face, but for the glowing eyes that peered from the darkness of his drawn hood.

  Angst. The gamer generation ate it up.

  “Leave it to you to think of that,” said Caliban, the Unseelie King. The Unseelie were Tuathan Fae, who practically dripped power and sex a
ppeal, and unlike his brother the Seelie King, Caliban was more than a little fond of using both to wicked ends. Fortunately his queen usually kept him in line these days. At the moment however, both the fae queens were back in the Unseelie Realm dealing with matters concerning the Taal.

  That was a Noah’s ark load of trouble right there. When it rains it pours, Thane thought as he pondered the dark and dangerous fae. Taal were what Thane imagined you’d get if you took a vampire and an unseelie Tuathan fae and mashed them together. In fact… maybe that’s what they were? They were unseelie fae, and they did drink blood. Thane had no idea. But whatever their origins, they were absolutely deadly. He should know; victims of the Taal had been steadily coming to his realm as anime for thousands of years. And right now they were on a literal hunt for something they couldn’t seem to find and they were crabby as hell about not having it.

  “Hell, a lot of the things we experience would make fantastic video game scenes,” said Stephen Lazarus, the Demon King. Thane realized he’d lost track of the conversation and tried to pay attention to catch up.

  Along with his queen, Dahlia, Lazarus ruled over the realms of the demons and the Akyri. But he also happened to be a detective in the mortal world, and like a few others who sat at the Table of the Thirteen – which was now the Table of the Twenty-six in actuality – he hadn’t quit his job when he’d taken on the mantle of king.

  “I mean, think about the shit that has actually happened to us,” Lazarus went on. “Dimensional bubbles colliding? Raging, larger-than-life battles with submerged tentacle beasts and black griffons? Runaway trains filled with vampires? Night carnivals teeming with warlocks and werewolves?”

  “Ooh, that one even sounds neat like that – Warlocks and Werewolves,” said another sovereign at the table, this time the Nightmare Queen, Adelaide. Adelaide was also a seer, a rare breed who came in handy on many occasion.

  Her husband, the Nightmare King, who went by Nick these days, nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah it does sound cool. A little like Dungeons and Dragons, but real.”

  Order at the table seemed to crumble then, as each of the dozen or so kings and queens sitting around it began to discuss past experiences and how so many of them were truly game-worthy, at the very least print-worthy, and at best worthy of being on the big screen. And then suddenly at her end of the table, Katrielle the Nomad and powerful mage just unobtrusively raised her hand about a foot above the table, palm-down. A tiny shockwave of sorts emitted from her palm and rolled over the sovereigns. They all stopped talking at once.

  “Do any of you hear that?” she asked softly once they’d calmed and were looking up at her in confusion. “Can you hear what you’re doing?”

  Thane for his part hadn’t said a word since describing the strange load of two-hundred jetliner passengers who’d appeared in song, but he had to admit that his mind had wandered just like everyone else’s.

  He blinked and looked around. They all blinked and looked around.

  “What the hell was that?” asked Evelynne D’Angelo. The brunette beauty was the Vampire Queen, and beside her sat Roman D’Angelo, the Vampire King. Strangely enough, the “vampire” kingdom they ruled consisted of only one of three of the breeds of vampires that inhabited the known realms, but one out of three wasn’t bad, Thane supposed. Though Roman’s vampires called themselves “Offspring” more often than “vampires” since these particular blood suckers were literally the offspring of Akyri demons and a warlocks, so they were born rather than transformed –

  Shit, thought Thane suddenly. He was doing it again. He was getting distracted.

  “That,” said Diana Chroi, “was us giving in to disorder.”

  Thane looked down at her and noted the slightly weary, possibly resigned expression on her face. If anyone would know disorder, it was the mother of fae triplets.

  “Indeed,” said Katrielle grimly. “And I’m afraid it has been happening to us all with increasing frequency. Haven’t any of you noticed?”

  “I’ve… definitely noticed that it’s harder for me to focus on my writing,” said Evelynne, who went by Evie amongst the people at the table. “I either end up taking meandering and bizarre turns within the story – or I stop writing altogether and wind up wasting time on something else instead.” Evie D’Angelo was a New York Times bestselling author in the mortal world. She was one of those who hadn’t wanted to quit her job when she became queen. According to her, writers didn’t just “quit” writing, after all. Not ever. They did sometimes experience periods of writing abstinence, and those were usually not by choice. But the need to turn the world around them into descriptions, to paint scenes using a thousand words rather than a picture, was an undying demand upon their souls. A writer never wasn’t a writer.

  Holy fuck, Thane thought, bewildered. He was doing it again! His thoughts had just up and wandered right off the reservation without him being the wiser!

  “This is getting bad,” he admitted aloud, though he kept his spoken words a lot calmer than the ones in his head. “Two-hundred people were just slaughtered by something supernatural that clearly thinks of their murders as no more than a joke, and I can’t keep my thoughts on track long enough to see to this mess. Why?”

  “I believe your beautiful bride was right,” Katrielle told him. “I believe this is Victor Maze’s doing. We’re feeling his influence. He may have been greatly weakened when he escaped Bantariax and came to the realms, but he is clearly becoming stronger. And as he gains strength, so does chaos. Arrangement loses stability, calm becomes disquiet, order becomes disorder.”

  Everyone pondered that in silence.

  “So you’re telling me that Maze grows stronger every time he uses his powers – because he’s using them to create chaos? That’s fair.” Thane’s anger was palpable in his words this time. Because it wasn’t actually fair at all. Normally those who used their power grew weaker the more they used it. That was the way it was supposed to work.

  “That isn’t exactly what I said,” Katrielle corrected calmly. “I said that the stronger he gets, the stronger chaos in turn becomes. But I meant chaos in general, chaos out here – among us – in the world, and so forth.” She shook her head, then glanced at the window of the meeting room, which this time happened to look out over a very cold Lake Eerie. The meeting room for the sovereigns changed on a constant basis and was always warded in order to keep those inside safe.

  She frowned for a moment as if noticing something they couldn’t see, then turned back to them. “I would imagine that using his powers still weakens him as of yet, and that he’s probably fueling himself some other way. At least for now.”

  But Thane had a feeling that she was thinking what he was thinking – that before long, it would all just become one big loop of chaos feeding chaos. Because that was what Entropy did. That was its very nature.

  “Before long, he won’t need to feed any other way,” said Damon Chroi, echoing Thane’s thoughts. “Entropy feeds itself, doesn’t it?” He glanced at his wife, who smiled knowingly. “Like dominoes.” Again – parents of triplet fae children.

  She nodded. “Entropy is a building momentum of disorder. Leave one thing out of place, and everyone thinks someone else will take care of it. Pretty soon, just due to pure chance, something else gets dropped. And everyone thinks, ‘If I pick that one up, then I’ll have to pick them both up because picking just one up is stupid.’ So no one picks up either and you have two things out of place. And then two becomes four, because now everyone’s just thinking, ‘Well, it was already getting messy, so who cares about a little more mess? Besides, I’m certainly not cleaning up for everyone now!’ And then four becomes eight. And eight, sixteen. And so on, until pretty soon? You’re rebuilding the treehouse in another part of the forest because someone decided to just set the forest on fire rather than obey their mother and take on the task of tidying what was by now a very messy treehouse.”

  Thane blinked. He tried very hard not to smile at the image that p
opped into his head. He failed. So he tried very hard not to laugh.

  His wife failed on that one first, and her laughter was joined by Evie D’Angelo’s, and soon by everyone’s at the table.

  “You need a nanny, dude,” said Nick, the Nightmare King.

  “We had one,” said Damon resignedly. “You don’t want to know where we found her when the kids managed to convince a new mother faeline that the nanny was one of the cat’s newborn children.”

  Thane’s eyes widened. Faelines were wildcats normally found in the Twixt, a realm between the fae kingdoms that was somewhat considered neutral ground. Faelines were enormous beasts, like sabretooth tigers on steroids.

  “Uh… yeah, we totally do,” said Lazarus with an encouraging and rakish grin.

  Diana slapped her hand over her face in more resignation and said through her fingers, “We found her in the faeline’s den, squashed between six naked mewling faeline kittens, terrified to move an inch or mutter a sound. The mom was trying to get her to suckle from her teat.”

  The table exploded into laughter, this time louder than before.

  “Needless to say,” interjected Damon, “she’s no longer our nanny. And… we have to pay for her to receive regular visits from her choice of healer for therapy.”

  Thane’s laughter trailed off a little as the others continued to chuckle, and suddenly he was looking up and meeting Katrielle’s eyes. The Nomad looked sad.

  She nodded at him, just once.

  “Okay then,” said Thane softly as he straightened from the table. Everyone fell silent when his words rolled over them like a gentle shake. As they slowly realized what they had just once more done, he asked Katrielle, “What are we going to do about this?”

  “Right now, we can’t do anything about the building chaos,” she told him. “Except try to find Maze. That’s what we have to concentrate on where he’s concerned. We have to locate him and then we have to somehow pin him down. Until we can? We won’t stand a chance of holding up this domino.”