The Shadow King (23 page)

He didn’t know what the Entity’s end-all plan was or what he was going to do now that he figured he had a suitable body to inhabit. For all Keeran knew, the monster could vanish from sight at any given moment and proceed to rip the realms apart at their seams. No one had any idea how powerful he was, or even what purpose possessing a queen’s form could serve for him. All Keeran knew was that if he was going to save the woman he loved, he needed to act now.

So that’s what he did.

“How fast do you think the dark moves, acorn? As fast as light, if not faster.”
His words to Violet played through his mind as he shifted momentum to take on the velocity of the very darkness he was composed of.

He wasn’t even sure this was going to work. But where the sense of his logical mind failed, the older, more fundamental aspects of him excelled. Keeran allowed his instinct to rule, and after this many thousands of years, he had the strange feeling that it wasn’t going to lead him astray. He was a predator, after all. Instinct was his life blood.

He recognized the uncertainty on the Entity’s face a split second before he had dissolved completely into the black mist he was so famous for as the Shadow King. That black mist then took on the form of a massive black wolf.

The wolf rushed forward, leaping onto the Entity so hard and so fast, they flew backward twenty feet. In the air, Keeran materialized again, still moving at the impossible pace that caused the rest of the realm to appear frozen. They spun and landed, and Keeran positioned himself just right.

When they came to a stop, he straddled his possessed queen. He then fisted his hand in her hair, and once again allowed his form to dissolve into mist. But this mist had fangs. And those fangs, he then drove into the side of her neck without mercy.

It hurt him to hurt her. It was the hardest thing he had ever done. But he didn’t hold back.

Violet closed her eyes and screamed, her lithe back arching, her hands attempting to claw him off of her. But it wasn’t the pain of the bite that delivered such agony; it was the fact that the Entity was no longer the only one trying to take control of her body.

Keeran was possessing her as well.

Pan Shadows might hunt forever for the perfect mortal form that would make them once more whole. Keeran had stopped looking for his long, long ago, and had instead turned his attention to ruling a nation filled with other lost men and women searching for completion. But when he had encountered Violet Kellen in the shadows of a long forgotten city the night she’d tried to enter his realm, he knew deep in his heart what it was he’d truly found.

She had that darkness to her that no one else had. She was an open mind, an accepting soul, a brilliant acorn in a twisted forest, and yet she loved the darkness around her. She understood it. She was different. She was different because there was a part of her still waiting to be completed. She was not a whole person either.

At first she’d taken Lovelace’s magic into herself, welcomed it when no other warlock dared try. That was his first clue. He’d been a fool not to fully accept it and confront her with the truth then. But he knew now. Oh, how he knew now, as he held her down and pulled her sweet, sweet blood from her veins. She needed to welcome a deeper darkness, a
better
darkness, in order to be whole as much as he did. She’d not only been made for him; he’d been made for her.

She was as unique as he was.

It was that uniqueness that he reached for now. He yearned for it, craved it, and called it out of hiding. The wolf in him weakened her body even as the shadow in him planned to make their spirits stronger. It was their only hope.

Come to me, Violet. Let me in. Let us be one.

There was a faint cry in his heart. He knew she was in there somewhere, fighting, struggling. The Entity tainted everything around them. It was like swimming through sludge to get to the precious, wide open sea. But he kept swimming, and he prayed Violet would too.

I’m here, Violet. Hear me. Come to me. Fight!

A far away voice returned.

Fight
….

Violet!
It was her spirit; he could feel it, stubborn as hell as usual.
That’s it, acorn! Come to me!

At last, her voice sounded loud and clear.
Keep. Fucking. Fighting.

Like a sudden burst of fresh, clean water, he was awash with her. She was there, with him, beside him, inside him, and he was inside her.

The Entity recoiled, losing control. It ripped from her spirit like a well-stuck Band-Aid, ringing another cry of pain from Violet’s throat as it was at last torn free. Keeran gave him the final push by pulling a painful amount of Violet’s blood out of her body, making the Entity’s vessel too uncomfortable to remain in any longer. At the same time, he cemented his connection with his queen in spirit, forming an unbreakable bond – one only a mortal and its shadow could ever know.

Except she wasn’t mortal. And this bond would last forever.

The Entity went spinning, flung from Violet’s body with ferocious finality.

Keeran yanked his fangs from Violet’s neck and leapt to his feet. Power surged through him. The wolf within him had been fed. He was whole in spirit. And there was an intruder in his kingdom.

“Get the fuck out,” he hissed as the Entity wavered into a semi-solid form several feet away. All around them, chaos ruled. Beasts fought, shadows fumed in and out of existence, and the ground trembled with battle.

The long, black figure cocked his white, featureless head to the side for just a moment, as if he were a confused puppy trying to understand what had just happened.

And then Keeran raised his arms at his sides, and using magic he hadn’t used since he’d been attached to Wolfram Lovelace, he shoved the monster out of his realm with nearly every ounce of power he possessed.

The blast shook the foundations of the Shadow Kingdom, knocking down every abandoned, blackened house on the street block. Dark shards of wood went flying in every direction. The air opened up in front of Keeran, ripped in two by the power of his sudden spell. The Entity squealed a high-pitched scream that sounded like an alarm, and shriveled into a small cloud of dust that was crushed by Keeran’s magic as he sent it flying through the rip in space and time and into another dimension.

The hole closed back up again with the sound of thunder as a ring of power fluxed out from Keeran like an expanding blast zone. Behind him, he could feel the Pan Shadows dissipate into mist, just as they’d done when Violet had cast Lovelace’s spell.

He heard men grunting, someone crying out as if in pain, and knew that the incubi and Nimbus were diving for cover, hitting the ground, and praying to survive.

The blast moved over everyone like a slow-rolling wave of death. And then it was over. Silence filled the street. It filled the sky.

Keeran knelt beside his queen and helped her to sit up. He noticed both the piercings in the side of her neck, and the acorn that glittered at her throat. “Lovelace’s spell,” she said very softly. Her throat no doubt hurt quite a bit. She shrugged, unimpressed. “I did it better.”

His gut clenched. She was joking with him? Some warm, giddy emotion flooded his midsection.

“Holy shit, Pitch,” someone grunted behind him.

Keeran turned around to see Hesperos dragging himself off the ground. He was injured in several places, bleeding from a bottom lip, and sporting a fast bruising jaw, but he was smiling.

The problem was, when he breathed, the air frosted before his lips.

Keeran frowned.

Behind the Nightmare King, others were pulling themselves from the ground as well. Keeran recognized his hunters. And he watched as the Nightmares turned back into their mortal forms. And then he saw the Winter King, where the man had fallen to one knee.

Oh shit.

Kristopher Scaule opened his eyes. They were glowing cold blue, as frosted as a winter’s night.
I’m sorry
, Keeran heard a voice in his head. It even sounded cold, and when the words formed in his mind, they made his head feel chilled.
I can’t hold it any longer.

Keeran swore out loud. He’d forgotten about the Darkfire.

He turned, bent again, and picked up his queen. Then he rushed toward the nearest shadows, once more moving at the speed of dark.

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Well, clearly he managed to relight the damn thing.” Poppy watched Lalura pour yet another bottle of something into the bowl of liquid on top of the spell table.

But it was Dahlia who answered her. “He did. But he owes the Winter King one hell of a favor now.”

“I bet,” said Poppy. “‘Liah, how is Violet?” She hadn’t seen her best friend since Violet had encased her in ice, but she’d heard about everything that had gone down in the Dark, and she’d been worried about her ever since.

“She’s fine,” Dahlia assured her. “She’s ‘happy’,” she said, making a giddy face that Poppy rolled her eyes at. “She even joined the Nimbus.”

“No way!” Poppy exclaimed. “Wow, I’m actually jealous. I bet those guys are hot.”

Lalura’s eyes shot to Poppy, and Poppy stilled. “Are you so certain it is something hot you want, Poppy? With what you did to that encasement spell?”

Poppy’s eyes widened. “You… know about that?”
Of course she knows. Idiot. It’s Lalura
.

Lalura simply made a small sound of acknowledgement a little like, “Mmm.”

Dahlia, bless her, intervened on Poppy’s behalf. “Anyway, with Violet helping him, now the borders to the Shadow Realm are strong enough to keep the Entity out. They really did complete each other, it seems. And now the Shadow King and Shadow Queen are resting.”

“Which is what you should be doing, Dahlia,” Lalura said. She turned an ice blue gaze of admonition on her Tuath student. “Each Lifeblood you drink will only last so long, and the more you do between drinking them, the faster they will wear off.”

“I know. But I’m fine too, I promise.”

Poppy knew the reason Dahlia was here, in the training room the three girls shared, rather than at home and in bed, resting. She’d been through an ordeal, to be sure. But she’d come away from it with a boon worth more than anything anyone had been able to gain against the Entity so far.

The Entity apparently had the ability to turn people into vampires. Dahlia was unfortunately the first he’d changed in many, many years, and apparently he’d done it out of sheer anger. These were not like D’Angelo’s vampires. They were different. Dahlia said they were “older.” She said, in fact, that there were three factions of vampires on the planet, not one, and that each of them erroneously believed they were alone in their vampirism.

But apparently one faction was from another realm altogether and had been something akin to angels prior to “falling” to Earth. Another faction were the Offspring of D’Angelo’s ilk. And the third belonged to the Entity.

According to the knowledge Dahlia had stolen from him, there were
thousands
of these vampires. But they were dormant, sleeping. And no one knew where.

Theories were that The Entity wanted to awaken them. The kings wondered if that was why he wanted a queen. The queens of the thirteen realms had thus far proven themselves to be far more powerful than their kings. They had in fact proven to be some of the strongest beings on Earth. Hence, the kings posited that perhaps taking on the vessel of someone so potent would complete the Entity in much the same way a king was completed by his queen. Maybe this would give him enough strength to bring his vampires out of hibernation.

But Dahlia told them there was something else…. She agreed that the Entity wanted a queen because of her power, but she insisted there was another reason in there somewhere. Her impressions of it were fragmented and fuzzy; she’d been in a lot of pain when she’d deciphered this bit. But she could have sworn the Entity had one particular person in mind.
One
being he wanted to awaken.

Dahlia had filled everyone in as best she could, despite how tired she was, and Poppy quietly marveled at her friend’s strength. Dahlia wouldn’t talk much about what the Entity had done to her while he’d had her, but from what she had admitted, the torture had ranged from mental to magical in nature. On the mental front, he would taunt her, lock her away in dank oubliettes filled with unseen menaces, and attempt to ply away her self esteem. On the magical end, he used something in the very air around her to bring pain to her body without leaving marks. He’d done this again and again, and Poppy knew he had no doubt done it in every sick way imaginable. But Dahlia had never broken.

Poppy could tell she was drop-dead beat. Her deep black hair lacked a bit of the shimmer it normally had, and her green eyes were more jade than emerald. Her lips were pale, which they’d never been before. But her ordeal, if anything, had proven to Dahlia that the Entity was powerful beyond what they’d imagined. And the thing was, he’d been thwarted on several occasions.

In each occasion, it seemed
Lalura Chantelle
had a hand in the thwarting.

The Entity was sure to notice this. He was sure to realize that Lalura was an enemy he needed to be rid of if he wanted to succeed in his plan – whatever the hell that was.