The Goblin King (14 page)

“But
it would seem these Offspring are mine no longer,” the vampire suddenly said aloud. His tone carried a note of regret. He was gazing at Diana’s house and the moving shadows around it. “Kamon and his architects have designed this particular travail. These vampires now belong to my brother, Rafael.”

Damon’s
insides went cold. He hadn’t known that Roman had a brother.

Another vampire master out there who was possibly as old and powerful
as Roman but on the wrong side? It was a thoroughly chilling thought.

But everything made sense now
, too. Rafael D’Angelo was controlling the Offspring. And there was a fae lord who was controlling the others. It was most likely a doppelganger, or
ka
, of either the Seelie or the Unseelie King. From the dark nature of the fae attacking, Damon was betting on the latter. “We’ve only managed to kill two of our doppelgangers,” he said aloud. “The three fae king
kas
still exist. One or more of them must be bringing help over from the other side.”

“Are those what I think they are?” Rom
an asked, his expression perplexed. He was still looking toward the house.

“They are.”

To the normal human eye, there appeared to be nothing at all wrong with the house. The porch light was on and someone moved around inside. The shadows remained still. A car was parked out front. Nothing moved.

But to Damon, who had fae sight, it was like having a veil pulled away.
Nothing
was as it seemed.

Fae
spell spiders crawled over the edifice of the house, their rainbow colored bodies collectively spinning a web around it that would act as a magical trap for anyone attempting to flee. The front door and all five visible windows pulsed with purple warding magic, also blocking escape. The dark, depthless shadows around Diana’s home shifted, grew, shrank, and shifted again. They were not shadows. If they had been actual shadows, the Shadow King would have been there that night just as Roman was now.

Instead, they were fae. Specifically, they were
Bookas
. The Bookas should have been hibernating this time of year; they slept in the darkness of caves alongside other dark fae, from Beltane to the harvest festivals. They rose on Samhain and began their foul business of destroying crops, killing cattle, and kidnapping fae children. The Bookas apparently kept the Unseelie King very busy.

Because Damon had been banished to the Goblin Kingdom ages ago and because the Bookas no longer had any means or right to pass into the mortal realm
where humans dwelt, he had not personally seen a Booka in eons.

They didn’t appear to have
changed any. The tall, gangly creatures resembled white-skinned male humanoids with ram’s heads. Their long, thick horns curled back on themselves, and their eyes were completely white as if afflicted with cataracts. They were notorious in the fae kingdom. Not as notorious as goblins, however.
Nothing
was as notorious as goblins.

“It’s been a very long time since they’ve crossed fae borders, hasn’t it?” Roman asked.

Damon nodded. The real Unseelie King was probably not on the scene to deal with the rogue Bookas because it was the Unseelie King’s evil copy who’d brought them here and was controlling them. The
ka
had most likely also shielded them from Caliban’s worldly detection.

T
he two kings moved in. Damon glanced back at Diana, met her gaze, and hoped she understood. If they encountered battle – and they most certainly would – he couldn’t look back to make sure she was safe. It would be up to her to remain beside him and keep from getting hit.

T
ake the front of the house
, Roman told him mentally.
My men and I will take the back.
Damon had already been planning on doing as much. He nodded again, firmly gripping his sword, and Roman left his side to disappear beneath an invisibility spell. No doubt, he blurred into action to close in on the house.

As he left, Damon detected the othe
r vampires who had been on the outskirts, hidden in the peripheries of their king and awaiting his decree. There were at least a dozen of them. Roman was not taking any chances tonight.

I shouldn’t be either
, Damon thought, mentally kicking himself for not just turning around, grabbing Diana, and transporting away with her somewhere else. These weren’t his fae. Selene wasn’t
his
best friend. Whatever this was, it wasn’t
technically
his business. So why did he feel compelled to take care of it?

Because it’s Diana’s house and that is her best friend and you care about her.

And with that thought, Damon gritted his teeth and strode forward.

And then the cell phone in Diana’s jacket pocket rang.

Chapter Sixteen

Damon froze. The chiming of Diana’s
phone sounded like a fog horn in the careful quiet they’d accomplished up until then. He spun around.

Diana’s stormy eyes were wide as saucers in her face. Reflexively
, she slapped her hand down on the pocket of her gray cardigan.

“Sorry!” she mouthed. At once, she
was yanking the phone out and looking down at the screen.

But it was too late. The noise had already done exactly what he was afraid it would do. It had gained unwanted attention.

“It’s Selene!” Diana told him. Her best friend was calling her from inside her own home. He wondered if it was because Selene wanted to know where Diana was – or because she’d finally become aware of what was happening around her.

He looked up at Diana’s face. She was looking at the house, and she’d gone the shade of porcelain. Her lips parted breathlessly and her eyes glassed over
with fear.

Damon swore under his breath
, turning to behold what it was she’d seen.

Th
e fae knew they were there now, and the glamour had been dropped. Diana was no doubt watching the world change. She, too was seeing the spell spiders, the shifting shadows, the massive ram’s heads atop lanky pale bodies.

“Oh my god,” she muttered
.

The sound of something grunting behind her nearly wrought a scream from her throat, but
Damon was between her and the Booka and thrusting her once more behind him before she could even turn to process what it was that had made the sound.

The Booka let loose with a barrage of magic
, Damon blocked it with his own, and within seconds, he had the fae’s head.

A moment later, a second one attacked
, absorbing Damon’s attention. At the same time, an Offspring attempted to grab Diana from behind. The spell Damon had coated her with crackled and flashed, sparking with clashing magics. Diana screamed, easily moving out of the vampire’s reach as he howled and looked down at his singed hands.

One of Roman’s men appeared on a fierce vampire wind, grabbed the other Offspring, and took to the skies with him like an air-borne demon.

Diana dropped to her knees, staring up at the darkness where they had disappeared as if she’d just seen the world come to an end.

And perhaps
it had.
Her
world, anyway.

But Damon had no time to co
mfort her. The Bookas were multiplying around him, using their magic to create copies of themselves much as Kamon had done with his
kas
. And Diana’s friend was screaming for help from inside the house; he could hear her slamming her body against the door. A moment later, she’d given up and a chair hit the front windows only to bounce back off again due to the spell spider’s binding webs.

Damon could do nothing but
twist and turn and slash and hack as magic went flying everywhere, fae creatures exploded into nothingness, and he thanked his lucky stars every time he came away from yet another battle without any injuries.

When he sensed an opening, he knelt down, grabbed Diana’s arm, and yanked her to her feet
. “Run!” he commanded.

To her cred
it, his words kicked in, and she turned with him and began sprinting for all she was worth toward the door of her spider-shrouded house.

Damon spoke several powerful fae
enchantments. One by one, the spiders screeched before they began to glow and sparkle and then burst into rainbow-colored flame. They crackled in this fire for several seconds before winking completely out of existence, taking whatever web they’d spun with them.

By the time the two of them r
eached the front door, the face of the house had been cleared of the magical arachnids. Damon used his power to shove the door open ahead of them. He and Diana rushed through one after the other.

Damon slammed the door shut behind them and they skidded to a stop
. They’d come face to face with a very attractive black-haired woman with pale blue eyes who held a handgun pointed directly at them. But she quickly raised it when she recognized Diana a second later.

“
Selene!” Diana exclaimed.

“
There
you are!” Selene shrieked in return. Her white teeth were bared and her t-shirt was ripped at the sleeve, but her entire body seemed to relax upon seeing them. “Where the
hell
have you been?!” she demanded as she gestured wide-eyed to their crazy surroundings. “And what the
hell
is going on?!”

Dian
a looked back at Damon, her gray eyes shot through with a tempest of lightning. Her pallor was too pale, her lips too drawn. She inhaled through her nose. “Selene,” she said, “I’d like to introduce the Goblin King, and there’s a vampire out there somewhere with a bunch of other less important vampires, and there are skinny white guys with deer heads, and rainbow spiders are crawling all over my house.”

Her voice was pitched just a touch too high for Damon’s liking. She was teetering toward some precipice of non-coping.

Outside, the sounds of magical battle continued. Something crashed into a car, setting off its alarm. A Skittles colored spider the size of a human head skittered quickly across one of the windows.

Damon shook his head. “No time
for introductions or explanations,” he said. “We have to get out of here.” He re-sheathed his sword and gestured for them both to come closer. “Move in.”

Diana and her friend looked at each other. Selene’s expression was shocked and questioning. D
iana swallowed hard.

T
hen, like obedient zombies, they both moved in. What else could they do?

At once, Damon cast the spell. Outside, something cracked through the sky and landed on the roof. It scraped and slid – and clicked.
The gods only knew what
that
was.

He waited for the spell to activate, but t
he three of them remained there in the living room. Damon felt his eyes heating up. He was having to fight against whatever binding webs remained and any extra anchoring spells the Offspring outside had also cast upon the house and its occupants.

Still, it shouldn’t have been so hard to get the three of them out of there. There was something else going on.
But what?

Somewhere near the kitchen, a window shattered.

Try harder
, Damon told himself fiercely.
You’ve no time for this!
He began chanting, using the sound of his voice to lend more power to his words. His eyes started to hurt, burning from the inside and casting everything into stark contrasts. He prepared to thrust outward with his magic when there was a solid, and this time welcome disturbance beside him.

Let me help,
Roman said.

He was standing beside Damon, his expensive suit worn and bloodied. A deep gash across his cheek was healing before Damon’s eyes, and the sleeve of one arm was ripped from shoulder to elbow.
I’ll transport her friend away and wipe her memory. You need to get your queen to safety.

Damon wasted no further time wondering why he needed the help in the first place. With
a nod, he accepted the Vampire King’s assistance. Then he reached out like lightning and pulled Diana into his arms.

“What are you –” She cried out in surprise and braced herself against his chest, but her sentence was cut off because the world was already melting around them. The weight keeping them in place was ripped away
; time and space warped, speeding them through the transportation spell with all of the immense power he’d put into it.

*****

The last of Diana’s words were literally ripped from her lungs by some unseen force that reached within her, turned something inside out, and sent her hurtling into oblivion. The colors of her living room melted and swirled together as if they’d been placed into a blender. She lost feeling in her fingers and toes, and sound became a wind of static, both quiet and loud.

She closed her eyes to block out the dizziness – and then her boots were touching down, a solid feeling beneath her. The wind stopped. The noise backed down to make way for a warm and comforting crackling sound.