The Unseelie King (The Kings Book 6) (7 page)

Chapter Seven

Caliban could scarcely believe how good the cake was. In all honesty, he rarely ate sweets. He was a busy man, and he didn’t need to consume mortal food to survive anyway, so he did the things required to keep up appearances – the occasional glass of wine or brandy, the shared beer or cup of coffee, the appetizer snippets at a formal dinner, and that was about it. Still, he
had
lived a very long time, and given enough piled-on days, he was bound to have tried just about every kind of food on a planet.

So it was with some surprise that he realized he’d never before tried
this
. This
rainbow cake
deal or whatever it was she’d called it. It was even more surprising that he enjoyed it as thoroughly as he did.

The Hollow Box didn’t just give you the food you asked for; it read your mind and re-created what you truly imagined and desired. So whether rainbow cake
normally
tasted this good, Cal couldn’t be sure. But what Minerva
imagined
it tasting like was really damned good. It exploded with a variety of harmonious flavors in his mouth, melted a little like ice cream upon his tongue, and was just creamy enough to leave him craving the next bite.

He was shoveling another large bite between his lips when Minerva’s soft, sweet voice broke the humming silence in the room and stilled him mid-bite.

“What am I doing here? What do you want with me?”

Caliban’s entire body froze up. It was a rare thing for him to be taken by surprise, and this slip of a woman with hair like snow and eyes like night had been doing it left and right.

What do I want with you?

He swallowed hard.

And then the plane bucked several feet, and Minerva gasped. Caliban rose to his feet and set his plate aside. His instincts sharpened, his hearing honed, and his magic unfurled itself, reaching out on unseen arms like antennae.

The plane bucked again, this time dropping a dozen feet before it caught itself once more. The sudden dip sent Minerva sprawling across the bed, where she gripped the headboard. Fortunately, it was attached to the wall. Caliban automatically steadied himself, his magic wrapping itself around him as it always did, and easing him gently off the ground until the jet had once more righted itself.

“Take my hand,” he said, striding across the room to the bed and offering Minerva his outstretched hand. Something was terribly wrong. The pilot was dead; he could sense this. The plane only flew now because Cal was controlling it with his own power.

Whatever had taken the pilot’s life was laced with familiar energy; Cal recognized it because it was so similar to his own. It was dark. That was enough. That dark energy permeated the cockpit, and was growing. There was no telling how strong it would become.

Caliban was the most powerful man in the Unseelie Realm, but he was neither so arrogant nor naïve as to believe there might not be a magic out there stronger than his own. There was Minerva, after all. As his queen, she was almost certain to become more powerful than he was.

It was entirely possible the energy in the cockpit would overpower his own strength any moment now. Then Caliban would not be able to protect himself or his mate. His only option was to transport out of the plane and then destroy it himself before it could hit the ground and harm anyone else.

Minerva looked down at his hand, and showing a good deal more intelligence and instinct than fear, she reached out to take it. But as she did, the engines in the plane began to roar, the nose dove downward, and Minerva’s body slammed up against the bedroom wall.

Though he couldn’t hear it, Cal could tell she cried out as the metal headboard of the bed no doubt bruised her ribs, and her grip on the upper bar slipped. She lost control as the plane then began to tailspin, and loose objects in the room went flying, including the Hollow Box.

Cake splattered against the ceiling, and containers of tea and wine spun, sending their wet contents sailing in a painter’s montage across the room. The sound of glass plates and mugs shattering was drowned out by the monstrous whine of the plane’s twin engines, as was Minerva’s scream as her body floated upward.

Cal now acted entirely on instinct, making the only choices he could in a desperate situation. He transported from where he was standing to the back of the bed, popping back into existence directly behind Minerva. His arm slid around her waist, he pulled her tightly against him, and transported once more, instantly taking them both out of the jet plane.

A moment later, they both reappeared standing on the hard baked sand of a desert ground. Caliban was accustomed to such fast transportations; his shiny black dress shoes were planted firmly on the earth, and his narrowed gaze glared upward at the falling jet plane that was merely more than blinking lights and a shining surface in the reflection of a quickly setting sun.

But Minerva had a few thousand more transports to go before she would be used to it. The scream she had begun in the jet plane now continued, but much more audibly. She was still grasped firmly in the steel coil of Caliban’s right arm, and he could feel the air leave her lungs beneath his tightly gripping fingertips. Little by little, the scream faded away, and she began to tremble. The sensation of this beneath his touch did odd things to Cal, and he found himself looking down, away from the jet.

With a wide, bewildered gaze, he watched the top of her head as she slowly looked up, following his former gaze. A popping sound, far enough away to be muted, but loud enough to be felt, forced him to look up once more. He found the plane just as its
real
tail spin began. One of the craft’s engines had exploded, and the other was going to follow closely on its heels.

Caliban took a deep breath, releasing the woman in his arms. She took an unsteady step away from him and turned to face him. He met her gaze, but said nothing.

Then he concentrated.

What he needed to do next would take a good deal of his strength, and the need for it couldn’t have come at a worse time. He closed his eyes. The ground beneath his feet began to light up with the glow of fae power. The air around him changed, filling up with something thicker, but invisible. If it could be seen by mortal eyes, humans would liken it to an incandescent fog of black, shimmering and mesmerizing. Within its depths would be lightning bolts, fissures of incredible heat, as magic met magic and exploded.

This unseen force expanded exponentially within split seconds, moving outward in an ever-widening circle of unseelie influence.

He heard Minerva gasp as that black wave slammed over her, sliding lightning-fast across her skin like electrified silk, touching her in a way that no man would ever dare. He knew the effect it would ultimately have upon her – and the distraction of that thought didn’t help him any.

To him, it felt like a short lifetime as the strength it took to manipulate the physical nature of the world drained him so thoroughly, he almost swayed on his feet. But in actuality, it was mere seconds before the spinning, smoldering, out-of-control aircraft a mile above them began to disintegrate.

Little by little, like a 3-D rendered pixelated drawing on an animator’s screen, the airplane dissolved into thin air from its nose to its tail. Until, at last, there was nothing left of it but the bizarre, inexplicable smoke trail it had left behind it.

The Airbus 319 Corporate Jet vanished with the last of the sun, winking out of existence just as the massive star slipped past the final boundaries of Earth’s horizon and cast the Nevada desert into darkness.

For a moment, he and Minerva simply stood there in that fresh, quiet night, gazing up at the newly blackened sky and its quickly diminishing trail of vapor and smoke. A cool breeze touched Caliban’s hair; he saw it whisper through a lock of Minerva’s, making it dance like spider’s silk. The stars above them winked at them as if keeping their secrets. They’d seen what the Unseelie King had done. They seemed to find it amusing.

Somewhere in the not-too-far distance, a coyote yipped, and a few more joined in. Something scuttled in a Russian Thistle bush a few feet away.

The night was all-encompassing, all-consuming.

Until, at last, Minerva Trystaine turned around to face him.

Caliban tried to remain standing tall. The disintegration spell had drained him horribly. Causing things to un-exist was as difficult as conjuring something from nothing. Physically impossible, magically improbable, and highly taxing. He was hungry now, deep down in his soul.

Minerva licked her lips. “I couldn’t do anything,” she aid. “I froze up.” Her voice was unbelievably steady for what she had just gone through. But he could tell it was a façade. Her arms, she had crossed over her chest. Her teeth were clenched to keep from chattering, and her words were spoken through gritted teeth. “All the power in the world, I’m supposed to have. And all I could do was scream.”

Caliban shook his head. He wanted to console her. He understood fully why she’d done what she’d done. The downside of being a Wisher was a sensitivity most people could not fathom. And one of the many problems with sensitivity was that fear could grip you harder and tighter than it could anyone else. It could make you breathless. It could squeeze your heart right out of your chest and into your throat.

But before he could think of what to tell her, Minerva spoke again.

“But
you
sure came through,” she said softly, whispering her words now before they were eaten up by the desert breeze and carried to the coyotes’ ears half a mile away. She shook her head in bewilderment, her eyes as large and bright as the moon above. “How the hell did you do that?” A beat passed. “And, can you teach me?”

Chapter Eight

The diner reminded Minerva of that famous painting of the café on a dark street with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean inside. She was pretty sure there was someone else in there too, though she couldn’t remember who. Her sister would know; she was the painter.

She paused on the doorstep as Caliban filled the doorframe in front of her, his hand on the knob. He turned and glanced back at her as if sensing her hesitation, and once again, Minerva was struck with the extreme oddity of this situation. He was the Unseelie King. And he was alone with her in the middle of nowhere, leading her into a deserted café on a deserted street on a hot summer night that the desert had actually turned a little cold. He was doing
these
things rather than ruling, from a dark throne, a dark land filled with even darker wonders.

And she still had to wonder why.

Caliban opened the door, sounding the bell above the it like Christmas chimes in the strange silence. She followed him inside. He chose a table for them at the far end of the booths along the windows on one side, and she slid into the vinyl covered seat across from him. The floor to ceiling window to her right reflected the empty bar to her left, and behind that reflection, a vast and unyielding darkness awaited on the other side of the glass.

The difference between this diner and the one in the painting was that outside of this restaurant, there were no city streets or other buildings. This diner sat alone on the side of a dirt road that was literally in the middle of a desert in what Caliban had assured her was Nevada.

There was nothing else for miles around, and because of this, a pump with gasoline had been installed at the front of the restaurant for desperate, empty gas tanks. Maps were sold on a rotating stand by another window for the lost owners of those desperate, empty gas tanks.

There was no one at the counter, and no one had yet responded to the sound of the bell. Though the restaurant gleamed with cleanliness, she imagined that customers were infrequent; maybe the owners weren’t keeping an ear out for the bell.

She had never felt more isolated than she did out here, so far from the rest of humanity. It felt like the rest of the world had actually vanished. Like the yet-unscary, but sort of spooky-mysterious beginning of a Steven King novel.

In a strange way, she really liked it. It took some of the sharpness off the razor-edge of the shock the last forty-eight hours had given her. She even felt a little relaxed. Like she could exhale.

“I have to tell you,” Caliban said as he slid his jacket off and set it down beside him on the vinyl bench. “You are handling this transition exceptionally well.” He leaned back to drape his left arm over the top of the red sparkly seat, causing the muscles in his arm to flex against his dress shirt. “I’m actually a little surprised.”

Minerva bit her lip and tried to suppress a smile, but failed. “You mean that you expected me to faint a whole bunch? Or maybe run around screaming and pulling out my hair?” she asked softly.

Across from her, the Unseelie King blinked and went still in his seat. His eyes were fixed on her lips, and when she realized this, her smile slipped, becoming self-conscious.

He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat, then ran a hand through his jet-black hair. “Not in so many words.”

Minerva followed his movements, and found her attention glued to his biceps as he unconsciously flexed them in his movements. She swallowed hard and looked down at the plastic table top. “To be honest,” she said softly, “I’m surprised too.” Yes, she’d grown used to unpleasant surprises, but the murder of her parents was one was one
hell
of an unpleasant surprise, and it had been topped with the
galactic
revelation of her being a Wisher. He was probably in his rights to expect she’d be babbling and drooling by now. “Everything came into me at once,” she told him.

He leaned forward, placing his arms on the table-top and folding his hands together. She could feel his attention focus on her, almost as if it were a kind of heat.

She went on. “For thirty-six years, I thought I was a human being.” She paused, adding with some reluctance but absolute honesty, “I thought I was a very
flawed
human being, but still human.”

She shook her head. “And then, the day before yesterday… my adoptive parents are murdered….” The word left a strange numbness on her tongue, making her next words more difficult to form. “And suddenly I realized I’d been wrong all along.” She looked back up at him as emotion threatened, at last, to overwhelm her. “I’m not human after all.”

Still flawed
, she thought.
So very flawed. But not at all human.

Minerva warmed under the Unseelie King’s gem-like gaze. He shifted, straightening a bit, and Minerva caught a glimpse of something red in the folds of his dress shirt. She frowned and leaned forward. “You’re bleeding.”

He looked down – and then looked worriedly up at her.

A flood of numbing horror went through Minerva as she recalled everything she’d done to him on the back steps of her adoptive parents’ Oxford home. “Oh my god,” she whispered. He was bleeding from several injuries across his mid-section and up and down his arms. “Did I do that to you?”

What was the punishment for attacking the king?

She knew the answer to that. The punishment for attacking the king in any manner was death. And she had out-and-out tried to kill him.

A new kind of fear pierced through her with ferocity. The unseelie fae could be very imaginative when it came to killing. Thoughts came unbidden to Minerva’s mind – images of
devices
. And creatures. And “methods.”

The palms of her hands began to sweat. A coldness swept through her, and she wondered how far she would get trying to run from someone like the Unholy King in a desert the size of Nevada.

But then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Caliban reached out and grabbed her hand. It was a tight grip, but not a painful one. Rather, it was
tender
.

She tried to pull away as heat moved from her chest into her neck and then her cheeks. But he held her fast, and pointed firmly to his chest with his free hand. “This isn’t your fault, Minerva.” His unnatural violet eyes had hardened into amethysts, faceted and multi-dimensional, sliced through with shards of emerald. “This is
my
fault. For not finding you and helping you sooner.”

Minerva heard his words and processed them in a slow kind of wonder. As she did, the cold fear that had all but engulfed her thawed. Once it did, she found, quite unexpectedly, that she was worried about him. She actually felt guilty.

“Why didn’t it heal?” she asked. “Why is it bleeding now?”

Caliban’s eyes shimmered. They glittered with something untold. Minerva absorbed the details…. His skin was more pale than it had been before. There was a new darkness under his eyes, too, that gave his handsome features a haunted quality.

“You’re weakened, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question. She was simply putting the pieces together and expressing her findings out loud. “That’s why you can’t heal yourself. I attacked you with iron.”

The king sighed. “It’s a number of things.”

“That spell you cast to make the plane vanish. It was a big one, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t reply, but from the way his eyes cut to her and his lips parted, she knew she was right. It was the magic he’d used on the plane that was further weakening him.

A new and horrible idea occurred to her, and she felt the blood leave her face. “Oh my God… you didn’t transport it, did you?”

She’d assumed he’d transported the pilot away, then moved the plane somewhere safer to crash, maybe even a different realm. But now she realized she’d been wrong. “You
disintegrated
it.”

Caliban’s pained expression was again all the answer she needed.

She stood up in new fury, leaning over the table. “There was a
pilot
on that plane!”

“No,” he corrected. “There wasn’t. Not any longer. He was already dead when I destroyed the aircraft.”

Minerva went still. That coldness was back, working its way diligently into her chest and heading for her heart. “He was dead?” She felt bewildered. “How?”

“Dark energy, dark magic,” he replied simply. “I’m uncertain what kind. There wasn’t time to study it. But suffice it to say, he died quickly.”

“Why would someone want to take out the pilot?” She asked the question even as she realized there was no need. It was a stupid question. Taking out the pilot would put the plane in jeopardy. And that meant….

“Someone was trying to get to you,” Caliban filled in for her. “They knew they couldn’t do it directly, not with me protecting you. So they did the next best thing.”

Minerva very slowly sat back down. “But… why?” She felt like a child suddenly, asking such a thing. Were they after her because she was a Wisher? Was it a fae of some sort? It would make sense. The fae feared her kind.

But what fae was powerful enough to take out the Unseelie King’s private jet pilot? She knew he had to have been protected too. “Who?” she asked next.

“That is the trillion dollar question, my dear,” said Caliban absently as he again glanced down at his own chest to see that the blood stains had spread. “We’ve been under the impression that the queens were wanted by Kamon very much alive. This would seem to indicate the contrary.”

Mentally skipping over all of the very important things he’d just said in order to focus on the
single
most important thing, Minerva asked, “They want me dead?”

Caliban looked up, and this time when he did, he captured her gaze with a kind of power that immobilized her in her seat and opened her up to him like an open book. It would have been impossible for her to look away now, and she realized he’d been going easy on her all this time.
This
was the real Unseelie King. Relentless. Even cruel.

“Oh yes,” he said, in that faintly accented voice that made goose bumps rise across her flesh. “Very much so.”