The Unseelie King (The Kings Book 6) (6 page)

Gargoyles were formed when enough inherent magic soaked the stone beneath sites where such magic was cast. Eventually, that moment of magical inception became impossible to date.

Not all gargoyles had last names. They could choose to adopt them or not, but if they did choose to do so, they always used the name of the location from which their stone originated.

Hence: Rushmore. Which was a mountain-side site apparently used for magic long, long before it had been “defaced” with the faces of human heroes.

Mason had created the Gargoyle Dynasty eons ago, putting into place a court of rulers and an army of Montem Warriors to protect his people. The Montem were fashioned from the stone of mountains, their blood made of pure liquid will, otherwise known among gargoyles as mercury.

Males and females were equal amongst the gargoyle nation, as there was no difference in the toughness of rock between the sexes. However, ages ago, a rogue faction of gargoyles broke away from the Dynasty, bent on seeing gargoyles to an era of strong males and slave females.

During their coup breakaway, nearly two thousand male gargoyles had escaped into the intricate underground passages of the planet, and they’d kidnapped a large number of Dynasty females to secret away with them. Mason had been searching for these lost souls ever since. But tracking stone was worse than difficult. One need only imagine searching for signs of cement on a sidewalk to comprehend such difficulty.

Recently, there had been a lucky break in their hunt for the rogue gargoyles. A stranger had brought them news, and the last Roman heard, the information had been dead-on, giving Mason and his men a leg-up they’d never before had. Hence, having the Gargoyle King there at the table that night was fortuitous indeed. The man most definitely had other places to be.

The next two seats at the table were empty, reserved for Caliban and the queen everyone at the table desperately hoped he managed to win. Everyone, that was, but the one amongst them who wanted exactly the opposite. Whoever that was.

On the other side of these empty, reserved chairs sat the Shifter King, Darius Walker. Walker was another of their number whose services were rarely called upon, for various reasons, but who might one day prove an extremely powerful ally.

To say shifters were dwindling in numbers was to understate the matter to a grotesque degree. Human hunting and the encroachment upon shifter land had shaved their kind nearly completely off the planet. Their straits were even more dire than those of the werewolves, who had for years been tracked down and destroyed by a fanatical faction of mortals known, quite literally, as the “Hunters.”

There were not many of Walker’s people left to turn to, and they were spread far and thin across the globe. But if push came to shove and there was no longer any choice in the matter, Roman knew he could count on the Shifter King to pull them all together for one final battle.

At least… he
hoped
he knew this.

The spell that hung over the room like a miasma was forcing him to doubt everything. He didn’t like it.

Beside Walker sat Chloe Septeran, the Warlock Queen. She was an Akyri, one of the first ever created, and one composed of a special kind of magic – star dust. Her symbiotic relationship was a little more personal than most Akyri’s, as she absorbed her power and life essence from the man seated to her left, her husband and king, Jason Alberich.

Roman met the Warlock King’s glowing emerald gaze and knew that Alberich was well aware of the spell Roman had cast on the room. No doubt he’d sensed it the moment he’d stepped in. It was warlock magic, after all.

The curve of Alberich’s lips told Roman that the warlock was just a touch amused at the spell. But the depth to his gaze told Roman he was also concerned.

These messages went unspoken between them, before Roman straightened where he stood at the head of the table, and cleared his throat.

Lalura Chantelle sat at the opposite end, stoically watching him in that silent, cat-like manner to which she showed such proficiency. But he could feel her hold her breath. He could feel
everyone
do so.

“I called you all here today as the bearer of unfortunate news.”

In any other company, at any other table, the listeners would have taken that opportunity to fuss in their seats and murmur amongst themselves. But the kings and their queens remained silent and still. Waiting.

“Not everyone at this table is what he appears or claims to be,” Roman continued softly. There was no need for him to raise his voice. “I’m afraid our meetings are no longer secure.”

The table yet remained still, even under this news. So Roman finished with a deep breath and a sense of bewildering loss. “There is a traitor among us.”

Chapter Six

Now the kings and queens did move a little, their heads turning slightly, their gazes sliding from Roman to the other members at the table. The silence became pregnant with a number of baffling and nasty sentiments, unspoken questions and accusations, and most of all, the same loss that filled Roman with empty uncertainty.

This went on for some time, and Roman wondered what they were all thinking. If he’d been capable of reading
any
of their minds the way he could a mortal’s, their problem might have been solved then and there.

At last, one of them broke the silence. “I think it’s Alberich. You can never trust a warlock.” It was Siobhan Ashdown, Thane’s queen, who’d spoken, and she’d done so with a wry smile. She was perhaps the single person at the table capable of making such an accusation lightly – seeing as how she, herself, was a very powerful warlock.

“Right back at ya,” said Alberich with a smile. “But if you ask me, it’s Lazarus,” he continued, his tone laced with only the slightest hint that he might be teasing. He turned, and his gaze narrowed on the Akyri King. “You can never trust a cop.” His green eyes glittered like gemstones.

Lazarus’s head cocked slightly to the side, and he smiled. He laced his fingers together on the table, leaning slightly forward. “Don’t make me eat you, Alberich.”

Someone at the table was unable to muffle their laughter, and because Roman knew him so well, he recognized the chuckle as having come from the Phantom King, Thanatos. He shot Thane a hard look, and Thane cleared his throat and sucked in his lips.

Clearly, the men had decided to make this terrible news a laughing matter. Roman could empathize with the sentiment. Sometimes, you either laughed or you cried, or in the case of the kings – killed someone. They’d obviously chosen the former.

Roman decided to bring the “meeting,” such as it was, to a close. “From here out, play your cards close to your chests, gentlemen. We are attempting to pin-point the leak.” He wouldn’t tell them who was busy casting spell after spell, trying to find the source of betrayal amongst them. That would be as good as signing the spell casters’ death warrants. Simply letting them all know that it was being dealt with was good enough for now. “In the meantime, watch your backs. And trust no one. I’m sorry,” he added, because he felt it was needed. “You’re dismissed.”

They all looked at him then, and some of them smiled wryly. Trusting no one, of course, meant they shouldn’t trust him either.

“Gotta go,” said Mason suddenly, as if the roof hadn’t just been dropped on them all. He pushed out his chair and stood to his full six-foot-three height. His gray and gold ringed eyes glinted as hard as steel and amber when he nodded respectfully to Roman and then stepped back from the table. He snapped his fingers, creating a sound like two boulders being slammed against one another.

There was a brief cloud of talcum-like dust, and the Gargoyle King was gone. A trickling sound, such as you’d hear from a faucet into a bathtub, drifted away as the cloud settled.

Once he’d departed, the others began to follow suit, each leaving in their own dramatic manners, except for the Time King, who simply used the door, until Roman was once more alone with Evelynne, and the unusually quiet Lalura Chantelle.

This was the first meeting the High Witch had ever attended in which she hadn’t had her fair share of things to say. She’d simply listened and watched. And
now
her silent, contemplative visage was fixed intently on something behind Roman. As was Evie’s.

Roman frowned and turned around to face the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Chicago night beyond. A cat was on the other side of the glass, on the 65
th
floor of the Sears Tower.

It was a large ginger cat with short hair, one white spot on its shoulder, and one white foot. It was balancing expertly and impossibly on the thin ledge that wrapped around the centers of the windows hundreds of feet in the air. There was a stiff wind out there, Roman knew. But the feline seemed untouched by it. It simply sauntered across the window until it reached the edge. There, it stopped, sat back on its haunches on a ledge that should not have been wide enough to sustain it, and turned to look into the room.

Roman’s gaze met the cat’s. Piercing yellow-gold eyes seared into his brain, and then into his soul. Something inexplicable moved between them, as if there were waves connecting them, and a transmission had traversed the space.

And then the cat looked away, got back on its paws, and continued around the corner.

Out of sheer curiosity, probably, Evie very quickly stood up and raced to the adjacent windows and craned her neck.

“He’s gone,” she said softly.

“He was never there to begin with,” said Lalura.

*****

There were times in life when there were so many things to say, your only real choice was to say nothing. If you tried to do otherwise, then all of the words belonging to all of the questions would all come spilling out at once and it would be like verbal vomit. Nothing would make sense. Speaking would be pointless, and probably embarrassing, and quite possibly irrevocably damaging. So it was best to just remain quiet.

Now was one of those times for Minerva.

It wasn’t that she didn’t know how to handle adversity. She’d been handling it all her life, in a manner of speaking. No, she wasn’t beaten as a child, she’d never been raped, and she didn’t have cancer – but in a way, she
had
been beaten as a child, she
had
been raped, and she
was
deathly ill. Because for some reason, she’d felt these agonies when they’d occurred to others as if they were her own. No one could comprehend this, no psychologist, no therapist, no psychiatrist. Everyone she’d ever confided in about this strange pain simply assumed she was acting or that she was faultingly far too sensitive, or that she simply wanted attention, and usually a combination of all three.

But now she knew. She knew they were all wrong. She knew the emotions, and even sometimes the accompanying physical pain, were very real. And she even knew why.

It was all very real to her because she was a Wisher. She had no choice in the matter. Anger was to be her life’s blood. And she supposed that over time, a soul just got used to sucking up nasty surprises and dealing with them the best it knew how, because that was what she felt her soul doing now. It was going over the new knowledge she’d acquired and
dealing
with it. Processing it. Accepting it. She was a pro at this.

The one kink on her experience, the one contingency her soul could not fit into its practiced scheme – was the man who sat across the room from Minerva, in a large leather wing-backed chair that was part of the luxurious décor of a
bedroom
in an enormous jet that at that moment soared high over the United States of America.

He was beautiful. And she knew why, too. She knew who he was, with his six-foot-whatever tall and supernaturally strong frame and his slightly accented voice that automatically reminded her of evil men dressed in black with master plans. Minerva’s knowledge of the fae world was now as vast as it would have been had her Wisher mother raised her and her twin sister in the fae worlds from the get-go. She had
both
worlds in her repertoire now.

The man sitting across from her, taking oddly tentative bites of the rainbow cake, but clearly enjoying it if the look on his gorgeous face was any indication, was no other than the Unseelie King.

What she
didn’t
know, what she
couldn’t
figure out, was why the hell he was there with her now. Why was he bothering with her at all? Of the two realms, the Unseelie was definitely more work to rule over. The unseelie, or Leanan, as they were sometimes called amongst their own, were an unruly bunch. Not motley – just unruly, in the strictest sense of the term. They were beautiful, they were powerful, and they were selfish. They were talented, secretive, devious, and deadly.

Their king was supposed to be the worst. He was also the single man capable of uniting such a world under a single sovereign and his rules. It must have been like one rider taming a million wild horses. Yet somehow, he managed to do this.

It left little time for other pursuits. So the fact that he’d focused upon Minerva, a single fae amongst countless, was confounding.

Maybe he was terrified of her. The fae tended to feel that way toward Wishers. That was why they’d wiped out her kind thousands of years ago.

Maybe he wanted to wipe her out too. And her sister.

The thought made Minerva’s chewing slow. She looked down at her own slice of pastel rainbow layered cake and considered this.

If he wanted to kill me, he would have done so already
, she thought. Because he’d certainly had the opportunity, and she knew he had more than enough power. But instead of using a spell of death against her in the streets of Oxford, he’d transported her away. And rather than destroy her when she’d been about to attack him again in that forest next to the bonfire he’d created, he’d simply put her to sleep. He could have killed her then, too. When she was defenseless.

But here she was, sitting alive and well, and eating
cake
of all things – on his bed, in his personal, private jet.

Okay, so he doesn’t want to kill me.

What, then? Did he somehow feel responsible for her? Did he consider her a dark fae and under his rule? An unseelie? It had never really been determined which realm the Wishers belonged in. They were empathetic, sensitive creatures, and that would have lent them more toward the seelie end of the spectrum. But their capacity for such deadly and severe magic would have tilted the scale and slid them more toward the unseelie end.

They’d all been murdered before anything was decided once and for all.

Minerva put down her fork and took in a deep, slow breath. The “release” she’d experienced in Oxford was a mixed blessing. She’d never felt so much pain, and the culmination of it all at once was the trigger that had set her transformation in motion. But now… as she stared down at her half-eaten cake and tasted the remnants of it on her tongue and felt a little thirsty, she realized a lot of the pain had subsided, going as quickly as it had come.

Her adoptive parents were dead. But they hadn’t been young, and her father had been sick, and her mother had been suffering more from that sickness than he had.

There was something else, too. They’d decided to come back to Oxford at exactly this time. The decision had confused Minerva and her sister. But now Minnie wondered whether they’d
known
, whether they’d made the choice to return to where Minerva and Selene had been adopted because they’d wanted her to learn about her birth mother.

Because they’d known they were going to die.

Did people know sometimes? Minerva felt that they did. Sometimes.

It must have been a salve on Minerva’s emotional nerve endings, because most of the pain was gone just then. More than anything, she was now curious. A little cautious. And a good bit afraid. She glanced up at the dark, powerful man across from her.

He met her gaze.

And she quickly looked away. She couldn’t help it. Being trapped in that gaze was like… it felt like drowning in shadows filled with pixie dust and powdered sugar and bubbles like the ones from
The Labyrinth
. She could lose herself forever in those eyes.

And she wasn’t ready to do that just yet.

But at least she finally knew what she wanted to say to him. Her brain seemed to focus, calm itself down, and slip into some discernable pattern. She licked her lips and asked, “What am I doing here?” It was best to just be straight-forward with her questions, she’d decided. Hopefully his answers would be as much so. “What do you want with me?”