The Warlock King (The Kings)

Heather Killough-Walden Reading List

The Lost Angels series:

Always Angel (eBook-only introductory novella)

Avenger's Angel

Messenger's Angel

Death's Angel

Warrior's Angel (release date TBA)

Samael (release date TBA)

The October Trilogy:

Sam I Am

Secretly Sam

Suddenly Sam (October 1, 2013)

Neverland Trilogy:

Forever Neverland

Beyond Neverland (release date TBA)

Never Neverland (release date TBA)

The Big Bad Wolf series:

The Heat (no longer available separately - purchase in the Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation)

The Strip (no longer available separately - purchase in the Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation)

The Spell

The Hunt

The Big Bad Wolf Romance Compilation (all four books together, in proper chronological order)

The Kings - A Big Bad Wolf spinoff series:

The Vampire King

The Phantom King

The Warlock King (February 14th, 2013)

(future The Kings books TBA; at least 13 total)

The Chosen Soul Trilogy:

The Chosen Soul

Drake of Tanith

Queen of Abaddon (release date TBA; 2013)

Redeemer
 (stand-alone)

Hell Bent 
(stand-alone)

Vampire, Vampire
 (stand-alone)

A Sinister Game
 (stand-alone)

The Third Kiss series:

Dorian's D
ream (release date TBA)

Aleksei's Dream (release date TBA)

(future The Third Kiss books TBA; open-ended series)

Note: The Lost Angels series (not including Always Angel) is available in print and eBook format. All other HKW books are currently eBook-only.

The
Warlock King

By Heather Killough-Walden

Sequel to The Vampire King and The Phantom King

a
nd book three in the BBW spinoff series, The Kings

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The Warlock
King

“
The Queen is the most valuable and important piece and the whole outcome can depend upon how successfully she plays her role.”  -  Alexander Kotov

Prologue

She stirred, long lashes fluttering, smooth crown furrowing. He watched, intently observing, as he always did. He watched and he waited, and eventually she awoke.

The
torchlight touched upon the gold rings in her multicolored eyes like a kind of magic. And perhaps it was; he’d always felt so. She had ensnared him; cast her spell like a web around his heart long ago. He had little doubt that every fiber of her being was composed of the same magic that now reflected in her entrancing gaze.

She was a goddess, after all. It was to be expected.

“Why, Kamon?” she asked again. Her beautiful voice sounded like the first rainfall during the monsoons, like the first drying wind when they went again, and like the kiss of sunshine upon the Nile at dawn. But it was weak; his power kept her immobile, allowing her only what strength she needed to survive. Little remained for speech, no matter how softly spoken.

“You know why, Amunet. You always have.”

Those gorgeous, hypnotic eyes closed to him, sending a spike of anger through his chest.

“You continue to fight me, to deny me. Yet it is I who should ask ‘why.’ You think that you will win? Do you not realize where you are, Amunet? Amon is not here to save you. And his child?”

Her eyes opened once more, this time focused on him with renewed intensity. He had her attention and he relished in it.

“You hid her from me so carefully. You took her through time and space, where you thought her out of my reach, safe from my gasp. I commend your unfailing devotion to her. But….” He lowered himself, bracing an arm on either stone side of the sarcophagus that imprisoned her. “I have found her, Amunet. Despite all your efforts, I’ve found her anyhow.”

Her power surged, as he knew it would, and in the manner that he had done a hundred times, he used the sarcophagus to absorb that power. He felt it swell through its conducting magic and fill him like fire in a vessel.

Amunet’s kaleidoscope eyes illuminated with fury and fear.

His body tingled – but his heart ached. She’d always looked most becoming when she was emotional.

Desire fueling his actions, Kamon lunged forward, grasped the goddess queen around the throat, and cast them both from this realm and into another. Just like that. Time and space warped around them, all sensation moved away, and the universe shifted.

A moment later, they stood alone in the drifting sands of the land they had once called home. A wide river ran through the land; tufts of grass clung to the ground along its edges.

Amunet stood free beside him, her beautiful form draped in the gauzy garments of t
heir kind, her long, thick hair ruffling slightly in the desert breeze. She gazed out over the barren landscape at the ancient city that waited on the opposite banks of the river.

He watched her as she contemplated the City of the Dead.

She spoke at him without looking at him. “If you take what Amon buried there, all will become unbalanced.”

“Justice is not necessarily balanced,” he told her.

Her head whipped around now, and her multihued eyes burned with outrage. “Wrong,” she hissed. “
Revenge
is unbalanced. You do not seek justice.”

Kamon’s chin
rose. He took a deep breath, feeling his temper ebb and recede. “Call it what you will,” he said. “I will do what I must.”

Amunet looked at him, long and hard, and gradually, the anger in her beautiful features turned to surprise. “What have you done? I sense more than my own magic about you now.”

“Astute,” he told her. “There are indeed others.”

Her eyes widened. She shook her head. “But how many?”

“
Many
.” The auras of 13 kings and the servitude of a very special vampire lord and his creations now bowed before Kamon’s will. But he didn’t say as much. He would not give anything away. Amunet had always been far too smart.

“Why have you done this?” she asked him, her tone one of both helplessness and hopelessness.

He smiled a small smile. “Why do you think, Amunet?”

She remained silent, saddened.

He took a step toward her and turned his attention to the same barren city of stone relics she had gazed at moments earlier. “When the guardians of this world are defeated, what they possess will become mine. I will bring what I have won here. Combined, we will overcome Amon’s wards, and when I take what he has left here, it will kill him.”

“
Why
? He is your brother!” Always, it came back to this question. For thousands of years.

And always, it came back to this reply. “Because you chose him,” he said calmly as he raised his hand to cup her cheek. She pulled away, but he knew she would. She always did.

He let his hand drop. “When you should have chosen me.”

He allowed his own words to be lost in the annals of time and caught up in a dusty, desert wind as he then took them back from where they’d come. The laws of physics warped around them both once more as they tunneled through a labyrinth of impossibilities to return to the torch-lit stone chamber.

The torches flickered with their strange, temporal coming and going. But otherwise, the sanctuary was quiet. Kamon straightened beside the sarcophagus. He looked down at his captive goddess. She slept, held under by the magic that he had taken from her and turned against her.

A moment later, he closed the sarcophagus with a wave of his hand and turned toward the exit. A large ginger cat sat in the center of the archway, its luminous gold eyes reflecting the flickering glow of the torches.

“You can not help her, Wa’ali.”

The cat blinked, slowly, and its tail flicked. Its intense gaze never wavered.

Kamon met that gaze head-on. Then, without a word, he moved around the cat, leaving the room and allowing the massive stone door to roll shut behind him.

In the quiet darkness and dancing shadows of the crypt, the ginger cat looked up at the sealed sarcophagus. He meowed. His tail flicked again.

With a strong bound, he leapt atop the stone coffin, curled into a sleek orange and white striped ball, and stared into the darkness.

Chapter One

“You’re not… thinking of going out there, are you?”

Chloe turned to regard her friend where she sat closer to the bonfire. She smiled. “No. I’ve no real interest in getting intimate with a Tiger.”

Miliani Noe laughed and looked back out over the water. Chloe followed her gaze. The night was still for a change. Normally the valley between the mountains south of Lahaina screamed with wind, day or night. The docks in that area were literally the windiest port in the world. But at the moment, all was oddly serenely quiet. The moon was full, and it cast a white, diamond-studded road across the depthless sea.

It was something Chloe could stare at forever. She liked stars. Stars within reach were even better.

A quick movement in the sand grabbed her attention, and she turned to see nothing. The plethora of crabs that littered the beach were perfectly camouflaged and completely still. They seemed to know when humans were looking; as soon as Chloe turned away, they would explode from their tiny holes or begin to scuttle once more.

Chloe looked back out to sea, giving them the privacy they clearly desired.

The “Tiger” she’d referred to was a Tiger Shark. They ran patrol of the reefs when the water was murky or dark, and it wasn’t a good idea to tempt fate with their near blindness. They could sense you, they could hear you, but they couldn’t tell you were human and therefore unpalatable until they’d taken a taste of you.

She had no intention of going into the water at night. But she could gaze at it until sunrise.

“I can’t believe you aren’t staying,” said Miliani, Chloe’s life-long and very best friend. “I finally get you here and you know you love it – and you still won’t stay.”

“I can’t, Mili.”
I can’t
, Chloe thought.
I can’t put you in danger
.