The Vampire King

by Heather Killough-Walden

  Chapter Two

  “Okay, no let’s go back. Just close everything you have open and look down at the screen on your iPhone.” Evie tucked her phone beneath her chin for a second, thanked the man behind the counter for her sugar-free vanilla latte, and took her coffee to a more private section of the coffee shop. On the other end of the line, her father had his own iPhone to his ear while he fiddled with her mother’s iPhone, mumbling under his breath as he did so. Evie waited. “Are you on the main screen yet?”

  She listened. “Okay, now do you see the app icon?” She blinked. “What’s an icon? Well, it’s just one of the little symbols on the main screen of the phone. Yeah, that. Okay, so tap on that.” She waited again. “You need to do a search for the Kindle app now….. A search? Just type in what you’re looking for. In the search bar. It looks like, well, an empty space where you type something. Like a Google bar. Yes, it has a magnifying glass on it. Okay, so tap on the search bar and then type in Kindle.”

  Evie took a second to sip on her coffee, closed her eyes with the warm, delicious comfort of it, and continued to listen to her father on the other end. “It should be free. Yes. Click on it.”

  Evie glanced up as another group of people entered the shop. The chilled mist of the Portland, Oregon morning curled in behind them, and everyone in the store hunkered down into their sweaters for a moment as the doors let in the December cold.

  The door shut behind the newcomers, but then opened again, almost to a collective groan to the shop’s patrons. But when Evie saw who walked through the door, her stomach tightened and chemicals released in her brain. He was decidedly handsome. Even from across the shop, she could tell he had distinctive, vivid eyes. Green, maybe – it was hard to tell at this distance. Or a very light blue. Evie was an eye girl. Nothing made her melt like an intense set of peepers.

  The man moved forward so that the door could close behind him and then scanned the inhabitants of the coffee shop. When he got to Evie, he paused, their gazes caught, and Evie felt a flush of something warm across her chest. Light blue, then.

  But her father was saying something to her through her phone’s speaker.

  “What was that dad?” She looked down, looked back up, and found that the stranger was still looking at her. He smiled, flashing beautiful white teeth. Heat infused Evie’s face and she hastily looked back down at the floor. Stupid, she thought. You could have at least smiled back. “Yes, you’ll need to enter your password,” she said into her phone, feeling as though she were torn between two realities. “I don’t know what your password is. No, dad. You don’t remember it? Maybe try a few different things?” Evie bit her lip. Something was slipping away.

  She chanced another look up to find that the handsome newcomer was now at the counter and ordering his own drink. It gave her a chance to look him over. He was tall and slim and had nice shoulders. Strong jaw and chin. Thick blond-brown hair cut stylishly…. She frowned. “What? It did what? Well, okay. Just start over again then. Wait,” she said, as a twinge of pain suddenly struck between her eyes. If she’d had a free hand, she would have pinched the bridge of her nose. As it was, however, she was holding her coffee cup with one hand, the phone with the other, and her laptop was tucked precariously beneath her elbow. “Let me get outside,” she sighed.

  And with that, she gave up on the stranger with the beautiful eyes, exited through the coffee shop’s second door onto the frigid, deserted patio, and resigned herself once again to being single. Not that she’d actually had a chance at being anything but single just because a handsome coffee drinker had walked in at the same time that she’d been there – but that was how it felt at that very moment.

  Evie had known that they would hit a snag somewhere. It was never easy when it came to helping her parents through the technological labyrinth of every day modern life. It wasn’t easy when it came to helping her parents at all, in fact.

  Her mother was sixty-two and disabled due to a brain tumor surgery several years earlier. Her father was sixty-six and in constant pain due to advanced arthritis. The two had filed bankruptcy four years earlier and Evie, being the oldest child in the family and the only one who was either mentally or financially available to her parents, had suddenly found herself in the position of care giver.

  On the one hand, there was a lot of serendipity involved with the circumstance. Her parents’ financial situation hit the skids at the same time that Amazon released Kindle and self-publishing became a possibility. If that hadn’t been the case, Evie wouldn’t have been able to do what she did for them. She was fortunate enough to be able to make money doing something she was really good at and loved to do, and that career had allowed her sick and tired parents to throw in the towel and stop killing themselves at a dry cleaning business that should have been burned to the ground a decade earlier.

  It filled Evie with a sense of pride and peace to be able to send them a check every month. She was lucky.

  At the same time, she was an indie author publishing her own work, and it was a lot of work at that. To keep up with her current fiscal demands, she needed to publish a book every two months. That meant writing a three to four-hundred page book in a month and a half and spending the rest of the time editing, creating an effective cover, marketing the work, corresponding with readers, producing video trailers, and posting the book online.

  Over the last few years, she’d cut down on a lot of things that she used to spend more time doing – like bike riding and roller blading. Working out in general had more or less fallen by the wayside. Evie was blessed with a small body and a fast metabolism, not to mention a penchant for strong coffee, so burning the calories was fortunately never a problem. Plus, she had nice curves that always seemed to carry the occasional extra weight with grace. But she did sometimes worry about her heart.

  Especially since she’d also given up on sleep because it was in the darkest hours of night that inspiration struck the hardest. She never caught up on the lost sleep because during the day, she had responsibilities. She worked part-time at a no-kill shelter in town, where the animals came into custody in droves and there were never enough beds for them all.

  When she wasn’t at the shelter, she was helping her parents with the scheduling of doctor visits and obtaining the proper prescriptions, making phone calls to attorneys and accountants, marketing herself on Twitter, keeping up with readers and fans on Facebook and through email, and attending to the plethora of every-day tasks everyone had to tend to such as laundry and dishes and vacuuming.

  There were mornings that she awoke alone in her bed and imagined what it would be like to wake up in a man’s arms. But she was an author. Many very famous authors had been quoted as saying that family and writing did not mix. Evie was afraid to give too much of herself over to the task of “finding” someone. It would take time, it would take energy, and Evie hadn’t a lot of either of them these days.

  There were brief, blink-like moments when she felt pangs of jealousy for the couple in the grocery store picking out veggies together or the family in the park feeding the ducks. She was thirty and had yet to settle down with anyone, much less have children. But then she remembered that she already had two other mouths to feed, and she tended to get over it pretty quickly. The loneliness remained; a hollow feeling where there should possibly have been something else. But she’d gotten very good at ignoring it and moving on.

  She moved on not only because she was used to it, but because a part of her preferred it that way. It made no sense, but she’d always been like this. She’d had plenty of opportunities to form lasting “friendships” in high school and in college. But there was always something keeping her from making more of it. The boys were… not…. Quite frankly, they were all too human and fallible. It was the drama queen, the creative freak, and the imagination junkie in Evie that forced her to want more in her mate.

  And that non-stop inner yearning for the impossible, for the vampires or werewolves or archangels she wrote about ince
ssantly, had certainly contributed to her single status. She was helpless. So, she shrugged it off when it happened.

  Like right now.

  It would never have worked out with coffee shop boy. He was human just like all the others.

  Evie took a deep, somewhat painful breath of frosty air, put her paper cup of coffee down on the metal round table in the coffee shop’s patio, and switched her phone to her other ear. “Okay, listen dad and I’ll walk you through it again.”

  Her coffee was going to get cold. It was just going to be that kind of day.

  *****

  Charles watched as the woman across the shop exited through the back doors and onto the patio outside. Frost covered the cement and most of the black wrought-iron tables, but she put her coffee and laptop down nonetheless and seemed to accept the fated cold. She was tough. That much was clear from the get-go.

  She was also very fetching. The warlock seer hadn’t told him about that part. She was a petite thing, perhaps only coming to five feet and two or three inches. She was curvy in all of the right places and in such a way that made every one of her movements more feminine, more alluring. Her thick, lustrous brown hair fell in waves over her shoulders and down her back. It shone with natural health and begged to be touched. Long, thick lashes framed eyes that were a combination of dark and light; they were brown, almost black, but both ringed and flecked with flakes of gold. The contrast was intensely alluring.

  At first glance, a man would be surprised not to find a ring on her finger. But Charles had been reading her thoughts for the last five minutes, and the reasons for her single status had been made very clear. There was something almost supernatural about her, despite her obvious mortality, and that part of her was most unsatisfied by what the mortal world had to offer her.

  Interesting, he thought.

  There was more, too. She was committed enough to too many things in her life already, and very honestly feared a further commitment of any kind. The fact that she’d hurriedly escaped through the back door was proof enough of that. She literally ran from the slightest chance of companionship.

  Charles took an unnecessary sip of his coffee and was able to get it down thanks to more magic. Offspring lived under a host of spells from day to day, some of them constant and eternal, some of them re-cast upon awakening in the morning or evening. So many of them existed amongst the humans and under the same guise, eating in front of mortals had become a necessary illusion, and one perfected long ago.

  Charles moved to the side of the shop that she had vacated and sat down at an empty round table. He could feel the eyes of several of the girls in the store on him; he was used to it. Offspring attracted attention everywhere they went. There was a magnetism to them that was undeniable, and he was certainly no different. Normally, he would scan the area for an interesting mind and scope out that night’s entertainment. But this morning, his attention was riveted on the young woman who’d just left, and he easily ignored the others.

  Evelynne Grace Farrow. That was her name. He plucked it from the depths of her consciousness as he listened to her speak to her father. The man’s distant voice was enough to convey that he lived out of town – four or five hundred miles, in fact. He was out of state. Possibly in Montana.

  Charles continued to eavesdrop, taking the occasional sip of his coffee, until he heard something that concerned him. She was planning on going to visit her parents. They were sick, and driving had become difficult for them. They had medical appointments coming up.

  This would not do. Nothing must interrupt the sequence of events that would lead to the culmination of Charles’ plan.

  He narrowed his gaze thoughtfully. Outside, Evelynne hung up her phone, picked up her laptop and coffee, and headed toward the parking lot. Charles stood and discreetly followed.

  She made her way to a Ford pickup truck on the far end of the parking lot and used her coffee hand to fish a set of keys from the front pocket of her jeans. It wasn’t a new vehicle; he could tell by the slight fading of the paint and the older style of the chrome accents. Even from where he stood, he caught the scents of animal all around it. She’d washed it, but clearly used it to transport dogs and cats from point A to point B. Still, there were no visible dents or dings. She’d taken good care of it and seemed to be a safe driver.

  Once she had the car door open and was putting her things inside, Charles began to chant. He spoke softly and made certain his back was turned toward the coffee shop’s windows. In the truck, Evelynne, who apparently went by Evie with friends and her parents, turned her key in the ignition.

  Nothing happened.

  Charles smiled. The truck’s engine was dead and his spell had worked.

  Evie tried again, and again failed. He concentrated on the sounds coming from the truck’s cab and almost chuckled when he heard her softly swear under her breath. He watched as her lovely little profile put its head on the steering wheel in temporary defeat.

  A few seconds later, she straightened and began dialing a number on her phone.

  “Hi dad, it’s me. I’m having some car trouble. Yeah. I did get the oil changed; I always do that. Dad, listen – I may be late getting to Billings.” She sighed heavily. “I might not make it at all, in fact.” She was silent for a moment and then continued. “I’ll call Beth. She might be able to help you this week, okay?” More silence. “I love you too. Bye.”

  Charles tossed his coffee cup into the nearest trash receptacle and headed toward his own vehicle, a black Escalade with dark tinted windows. He glanced in his rear-view mirror as he pulled out of the lot. Evie was still behind the wheel of her non-working truck.

  Problem one averted.

  His smile was back as he pulled out into traffic and down the busy street.

  Chapter Three

  Roman sat back in the leather seat of the Lincoln Town Car limousine and took a deep breath. Lalura was right, of course. He needed to actively search for the angel who haunted his dreams and plagued his every waking thought of late.

  The world had become a more dangerous place ever since the lifting of the werewolf curse. It was a good thing that the wolves would no longer have to struggle so hard to remain amongst the living and that the women were no longer weak compared to their male brethren.

  The Hunters were everywhere. The Curse Breaker, Katherine Dare, soon to be Katherine Caige, had unleashed a whirlwind of power, both good and bad. Roman couldn’t help but wonder what part his little dream angel played in all of it. Why did she need his help? What kind of trouble was she in? Where was she?

  How did he find her?

  Lalura had initially spoken of her weeks ago, and at that time he had already been dreaming of her. But Lalura was not a seer. What she “sensed” about the world was purely due to the fact that she was so old and so seeped in the legerdemain, the fabric of her spirit constructed a part of its web. It was natural for fragments to get stuck in it every once in a while. And when they did, she said something, just as she had with him.

  But that was all she could do. If Roman wanted further answers from a magic user, he was going to have to go somewhere else. Which was what he was doing now.

  In the driver’s seat, Roman’s long-time and loyal servant pulled the car out of the mansion’s lot and into the busy streets of Portland beyond.

  This location was one of many in which Roman kept a careful and constant vigil over his realm. The mansion was a public place, maintained for meetings and for entertaining guests. His actual home, the one to which he retreated when all was said and done and the deepest kind of exhaustion made its way into his soul, was much different, and he alone knew of its existence.

  Roman D’Angelo was a very powerful king amongst very powerful men. Among mortals, positions of power were constantly the focus of underhanded plotting and political back-stabbing. It was no different among those in the supernatural community, and in fact could often be worse. For this reason, Roman took nothing for granted. And because he took nothing for g
ranted, he’d been king for thousands of years.

  “My Lord, we will be arriving at the train station shortly,” the intercom sounded. He would take the train to Trinidad, California, where Lucas Caige and the witch known as the Healer currently resided. The Healer’s best friend was the herald of her coven, and Roman had a feeling it would be the best place to start. That particular coven had seen a lot of hardship and action and they knew of the existence of the Offspring. At the very least, diplomatic dealings with them would be less difficult than they would with other covens.

  Roman could have transported there, but there was no reason to. If he wanted, he could transport everywhere. Eventually, a soul yearned for some sense of normality, and Roman liked trains anyway.

  He turned away from the car’s interior to look out the window. It was late afternoon and the winter sun was already setting. It was at times like this that Roman couldn’t help but think of the traditional vampire and the way the world perceived it. If he’d been what Hollywood wanted him to be, he would only be rising now.

  How little did they know.

  Something strange and foreboding suddenly flashed through Roman’s brain as if in warning, and he found himself straightening. He sat up, his expression darkening.

  “My Lord? Are you well?” Jaxon asked from the front seat.

  Roman held up his hand as if to say, “I’m fine,” but the warning sensation sliced through him yet again, and he lowered his hand.

  “Jax, stop the car,” he whispered.

  Jaxon, being a vampire as well, heard him very clearly despite his quiet tone. Without question and without hesitation, the driver began to pull the long black limousine over to the side of the road.

  The turn-off for a driveway offered a convenient escape from the traffic, and Jaxon took it. Roman watched the car turn with only half of his attention. The rest was focused inward, where something nasty was unwinding. His heart was hammering; it hadn’t done that in ages. His senses were prickling. His hearing was becoming sharper and expanding outward in an ever growing radius.