The Vampire King (6 page)

The meeting would be held at six p.m., just after sunset. Jason casually brushed his hand over the lapel of his black sports coat and then exited the alley. There were probably ten thousand different ways he could have come to the meeting, ten thousand different first impressions he could have made. However, he was one of the Thirteen now. Once a member, a member for life. There was no point in being anything but himself.

New York was cold in December. He’d known it would be so and he’d taken the trouble to cast a protective spell upon himself to keep the worst of it at bay. Even so, his breath steamed the air as he made his way down the busy sidewalk.

The feeling of heady power grew stronger and the crowd got thicker when he entered a more heavily populated area of the city. At points, it seemed he was working against the flow, an individual man weaving through an ocean of faces. Each had a look of stark concentration, and none were smiling. He knew that the cold had something to do with it; the streets were part wet and part frozen, and the combination was painful. But there was more to it than a natural disdain of the weather. These people were headed somewhere for some purpose and needed to be there by some time, and it was miserably clear that they’d rather be doing something else.

This was where they usually were, here on these streets, no matter what the season. And that meant that this was how they spent the majority of their lives. A humongous fraction of their precious, short existence spent in misery and disappointment. For what?

It was perplexing to Jason and always had been. He’d never denied himself the things that made him happy. Perhaps it was that willingness to take life by the balls and make it your slave that cast a wizard into a warlock’s darker colors. If that was the case, then so be it. He was a warlock through and through.

“It’s better than being unhappy,” he muttered to himself.

“Does that mean you’re finally happy then, Jason?” came an all-too-familiar voice.

Jason stopped in his tracks and stared down at the woman who looked like a cross between a dwarf and an elf and who had, until recently, been an elder in his coven. She stood in the middle of the flow of bodies, and for all the world, it seemed as though they moved around her like water, affording her and Jason a wide girth and a generous bubble of space in a place where there wasn’t much to spare.

“Lalura.” The shock of seeing her there so suddenly moved through him, wore off quickly, and was replaced at once by wariness. Lalura’s question seemed too on the spot to have been born of his single spoken sentence. It was as if she’d been following along with his thoughts. “Are you reading my mind now?” he asked, not at all sure that he’d be surprised if she was. She was a very unpredictable and exceedingly ancient witch.

Lalura Chantelle waved her hand dismissively and rolled her eyes. “
Gods
, no. That would really be the shits. I can only imagine what kinds of nonsense I would be pulling off of all of these people. New York,” she said with a shake of her head, “is not a place you want to be reading people’s minds.”

The rest of the world ignored them, continuing to flow around them like an oblivious river.

“Why are you here?” Jason asked.

“To check on you, of course,” Lalura said easily. She hobbled forward a few steps, closing the distance between them. Jason held his ground, towering over her by a good two and a half feet. “You happened upon this position by accident, Jason. You’re a warlock, yes,” she said, taking a deep breath and sighing. “But you’re not Malachi Wraythe.”

Jason’s lips twitched. “Am I supposed to take that as an insult or a compliment?” he asked softly. Despite his quiet tone, his words carried clearly in the cacophony of pedestrian and street traffic.

“It’s meant as neither,” Lalura answered. “It’s an observation. Warlocks work in the confines of a darker kind of magic, Jason,” she said, her tone now becoming more personal. “You were thrust into position of king due to the fact that with Wraythe’s death, you now have more of this kind of power than any other living warlock. Why?” She shrugged. “I have no idea. You were born with it and that power is also growing, like everything else is these days.” She glanced around her, seemed to contemplate something else for a moment, and then turned back to Jason. “And perhaps it’s unimportant. The important thing is that you’re now in charge of a whole host of black magic users.” She paused, narrowed her stark blue gaze, and added, “And you’re about to meet the other kings.”

“Be forewarned, kiddo,” she told him then as she suddenly turned around and began to walk away through the crowd, her afforded bubble following her as she went. “There’s more of the supernatural in that one room than you’ll see in all the combined days of the rest of your long life.”

Jason watched her go. For a second, the bubble of humanity closed in around her, and when it opened again, Lalura Chantelle was gone.

Jason lifted his chin and took a deep breath through his nose. For a few seconds more, he stared at the spot where she had disappeared, considering her words. She was right, of course, but her warning had been unnecessary. Jason was well aware of what he was about to experience.

The Thirteen were the Thirteen Kings. One or two of them, he was now familiar with, such as the Vampire King Roman D’Angelo. D’Angelo was arguably the most powerful member of the Thirteen, but it was arguable for good reason. Every King was notable in some manner.

Jason also knew of the Akyri king, a fairly ruthless man with an insatiable appetite for women. There were a few he’d heard rumor of, such as the Shadow, Dragon, and Phantom Kings. There was talk of turning the Thirteen into the Fourteen by inviting the werewolf Overseer into the fold, but as of now, the issue was on the table, most likely due to the fact that Jesse Graves was not the kind of man to want to have anything to do with politics of any kind and had only happened upon the position of Overseer through a kind of bequeathing.

The other Kings were complete strangers to Jason’s knowledge; he didn’t even know what they were kings
of
. This would be his first time meeting
any
of them personally. It was sure to be an experience he would never forget.

The Warlock King took another deep breath and moved forward to continue his way down the busy sidewalk. The smell of curry, taxi exhaust, and trash bins was too strong to be completely drowned out by the cold. Jason’s ice-green eyes scanned the crowd as he moved; the magic in the air had him on high alert. His fingers twitched, his jaw tensed.

And then he saw her.

She was waving down a taxi, her long, slim form rushing to the curb to meet it half-way. He stopped in his tracks, his chest suddenly tight. She smiled a gorgeous, white-toothed smile at the taxi driver, tucked a stray lock of blond hair behind her right ear, and readjusted the purse over her shoulder as she opened the back door.

It was a big purse; a travel bag. She was going away.

The realization struck Jason with an inordinate amount of stress. A kind of separation anxiety burgeoned inside of him, both freezing him to the spot and filling him with the urge to rush forward, grab her by the arm, and send the taxi on its way.

She paused, glanced over her shoulder just once, and her tropical sea foam eyes roved over the crowd until they met his.

He caught her gaze and held it.

At once, he recognized who – or rather
what
– she was. He’d never seen her before in his life, and yet even from this distance, he could feel the darkness in her aura. Outwardly, she was a stunning smile and long golden hair and eyes the color of the Pacific shore. But on the inside, she was hungry. She was an Akyri. She looked nothing like her kind normally looked; Akyri were usually dark from head to foot. But he recognized the signature on her soul nonetheless.

He could tell it had been too long since she’d last fed from a warlock. Her own essence was weak, more mortal now than immortal. No Akyri that he’d ever known had gone as long as she apparently had without benefiting from the symbiotic relationship of a warlock’s power.

And she was running away.

As he stared her down, fear, palpable and real, crossed her beautiful features. He saw her swallow hard and watched her upper lip twitch with decided nervousness before she broke eye contact, spun on her heel, and hurried into the back of the cab, slamming the door shut behind her.

Alarm shot through Jason.

I can’t let her get away
, he thought.

But the taxi was pulling from the curb, and more importantly, if he went after her, he would be late for the meeting.

Still, he was torn. Turning up late for the first time in front of the Thirteen would be all kinds of stupid. But the unique Akyri beauty with the ocean eyes was speeding away in a yellow car that blended with the thousands of other cars around it. And she wasn’t coming back.

An unprecedented rage spurned by shocking panic surged through Jason’s mind, releasing tendrils of his magic. It was as if he had no control over it. Without premeditation, he infiltrated the receding taxi, whispering the words to a spell that would afford him glimpses of his target’s thoughts.

…
a warlock… but gone now… it’s going to be okay, it’s going to be okay…

Jason’s green gaze narrowed, taking on an eerie, bright cast. He focused, concentrated, and shot deeper.

Thoughts of escape, of sanctuary and solitude, skirted through her mind. She saw an ocean, much the same color as her eyes, and she saw an empty beach. Jason felt her lean against the back seat of the cab and exhale softly as she let her mind wander. The car was pulling out of his spell’s range now, but just before the connection was lost, he heard a single word, breathed like a mental sigh.

Maui.

Jason pulled his power back, straightened, and smiled slow, triumphant smile. He knew where she was going. It made no sense that he should care. He had no idea who she was. He hadn’t even pulled her name from her thoughts before leaving them. She was a stranger in every sense of the word but one. He knew she was an Akyri and he could feel the predatory pull of her flight. Men couldn’t help but want to chase what ran from them.

Jason was no different. If anything, the dominant in him enjoyed it more. And the Akyri pulled at him as nothing ever had in his life. Not even Dannai had filled him with the urges he was experiencing just then, in that decisive moment.

Run away
, he thought tauntingly.
Run, run as fast as you can
.

Still smiling, he turned back to the sidewalk and continued to make his way down the street.

A few minutes later, the Akyri had taken a back seat in his mind to the situation directly at hand. Jason passed through the revolving glass doors that led to the marble-floored lobby beyond. He didn’t pause at the security desk and didn’t slow as he passed through the metal detectors. His magic pulsed around him, protecting him from the sight of both cameras and man as he made his way to the elevators and waved his hand over the button.

At once, a set of gold-gilded double doors slid open. Jason stepped inside, once more waving his hand over the buttons on the inside. Every one of the dozens of floors lit up at once. Jason’s gaze narrowed on them. He released a last pulse of his power, and a final button appeared beneath the others. It was unlabeled. Jason pressed it, it lit up a bright red, then orange, then yellow, until it had highlighted every color of the rainbow. And then Jason felt the elevator budge into gentle motion. It was impossible to tell whether it was headed up or down; the sensation was unlike that of a normal elevator.

Jason moved to the center of the elevator, closed his eyes, and corralled his power around him. The elevator came to a stop, dinged softly, and the doors slid open once more. Jason opened his eyes.

“Welcome, warlock,” came the most charismatic voice Jason had ever heard. Jason nodded respectfully and stepped off of the elevator.

Chapter Five

Evie blew out a frustrated sigh. She’d been sitting in the same spot, her fingers poised over the keyboard for at least five minutes. It never took her this long to figure out what to write. The words were there, swimming through her mind, but none of them would pair up properly. It was all nonsense.

It didn’t help that the trio of teenage boys at the next table couldn’t stop describing the gore of some horror flick in vivid and very loud detail. That was distracting, to say the least. But it wasn’t just that.

For the most part, the words in her head were nonsense because the last two days of her life had been a strange sort of blur. She didn’t drink or take recreational drugs, but she could have sworn that what she’d suffered was like a kind of blackout.

One minute, she’d been crossing a parking lot to the grocery store – the next, she’d been waking up in her bed as usual, warm and comfortable and a little more sleepy than normal. She couldn't help but wonder whether the events of the night before had been a dream. Dreams often went unfinished. It would make sense.

But since then, she’d been experiencing…
flashes
of things. They were like bits of a movie reel separated from the rest of the film and highlighted for only a second. She saw horses, or smelled and heard them anyway. There was wind. Holiday lights.

And a man.

Evie closed her eyes for a moment, took a deep, shaky breath, and sat back in her chair, dropping her arms. The man was all-encompassing.

Evie had always had vivid dreams. Some of those dreams contained men in them, men so charismatic that they’d earned special places in her stories and books. Entire series had been plotted around some of them, in fact.

But never before in her life had she dreamed of a man like this. He was quite literally inconceivable. She never could have made him up on the fly or on her own. Most frustrating of all was that despite the fact that this man was positively the most powerful persona she’d ever witnessed in a dream, she couldn’t seem to find the right way to bring him to life. She desperately wanted to use him for her writing. But instead… it seemed he was using her.