King Among the Dead (Hell Theory Book 1)

by Lauren Gilley

  She stood at a window in the small break room where they’d installed her, untouched paper cup of tea in her hand. Her breath slowly fogged the glass, but she could still see the mayhem unfolding; more cars than normal, pedestrians hurrying, hiding under awnings.

  She heard someone come into the room behind her. Du Lac said, “We’re getting the first reports in from a fishing vessel in the Atlantic: the Rift is opening again.”

  Just a few days ago, she would have gasped. Would have looked at Beck and said, “What do we do?” Now, she didn’t respond. She was so, so empty.

  “According to the local authorities, there’s already been calls about people acting strangely. Fires.” He moved to stand beside her, resting his fingertips against the glass. “Heaven and hell on earth,” he murmured. “Things are going to get – bad.”

  Things had never been good. She’d had one bright sliver of time – but that was over.

  “Rose.” He turned toward her, she could tell. “I want to help you. It won’t be safe here in the city alone. There are secure locations. You’re good with a knife.” A weak chuckle. “We’ll be recruiting soon, I’m sure, if you want to join up. It’s not pretty work, but there’s food, and it’s…it’s somewhere to belong.”

  But she didn’t belong anywhere, not if Beck was gone.

  “I want to go home,” she croaked.

  He sighed. “Okay.”

  ~*~

  But home wasn’t home anymore. Not with the front door standing open, and the drawers of the hall cabinets ripped out, paper scattered across the floor. With the lamps smashed, and the rugs ripped up. Not with a chair through the screen of the TV.

  Kay lay on the hall runner on the second floor, outside of what had been Rose’s bedroom. Crumpled on her side, impossibly small, one arm flung out, hand limp, fingers curled. Her neck had been snapped.

  Rose knelt beside her, felt for her pulse; her skin was cold and smooth as marble. Her glasses were askew. Rose removed them, carefully, folded them, and pressed them into her hand. Then she closed her eyelids.

  Went into her room, and packed everything she could carry. Shirts, pants, socks, underwear, toothbrush. Essentials. She already wore all her knives. She pocketed her phone.

  The jewelry box caught her eye, as she turned to leave, miraculously untouched. Inside lay the gold ribbons, and gleaming nuggets of old money; a legacy of a family no longer alive.

  The grief welled up, sharp as a heart attack, and for a moment she thought it would choke her.

  She swallowed it, though.

  From the box, she took the ruby rose ring, and the matching necklace. Fastened the ring to the chain, and then the chain to her neck; tucked the jewels down inside her shirt collar, to rest alongside the crown, already warm from her skin.

  Every king needs a queen.

  Arthur Augustus Becket’s queen dropped a kiss on Kay’s cold forehead, walked down the stairs, and out the door, and never looked back.

  ~*~

  For three days, a jagged white shape like a bolt of lightning hovered over the Atlantic Ocean. The images on the TV screen resembled the ones she’d seen in the books in Beck’s library: humans glowing; humans performing miracles that looked like murder. Fires. Death.

  Only now, there were two kinds of conduits. Two colors of fire dancing on the screens during broadcasts. And humans weren’t the central targets anymore. No, now there was a proper war being waged.

  Good and evil.

  Things did get bad, as Lance du Lac had said they would.

  But. Bad was relative for Rose.

  The day she thumped her rucksack down on the table in the front of the recruitment office, the two troops there looked up at her with mixed confusion and amusement. She lifted a hand, and produced a knife. Gave it a twirl. “I brought my own weapons. I’m here to join the Rift Walkers.”

  They looked at one another, and chuckled.

  Twenty minutes later, she stood up from her crouch in the center of the sparring mats in back, potential recruits spread out around her, groaning and rubbing at sore spots.

  No one was laughing, then.

  The Rift closed. The chaos continued.

  Five years later, Rose Greer, Rift Walker, Golden Knight, remembered a book, and a table, and a lesson. Something useful bobbed to the surface of her constant, numbing grief. And she remembered a saint. And a stag. And a legend.

  Beck was gone…

  Until he wasn’t.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  5 Years Later

  Wales

  The room where the ritual would take place was round, stone-floored, columned. It reminded her all too well of the room in Anthony Castor’s mansion where her entire life had shrunk down to a single purpose: retrieving Beck. He hadn’t died; hell had taken him. And according to Brother Eustace, and her years of research, a soul could be taken back.

  They’d shown her the stag up on the porch, the sad, dry, withered bit of wood that Thomas Cromwell had divested of its rider so many centuries ago. But down here, in the ritual room, there stood another. Proud, and gleaming, his knight-cum-saint astride him, arm raised, sword held aloft. It wasn’t the gentle clergyman who would venture down into the depths, but the warrior, the knight in service to King Arthur.

  No part of it was lost on her. For the first time in years, that empty, aching longing in her gut felt settled. Things felt right. This would work, and if it didn’t, nothing else bore thinking about.

  “Rose.” Lance pulled her aside as Brother Eustace and his colleagues lit the candles and the incense. He was doing that thing with his face: the tipped chin, and the raised brows, like he thought she was rash, or insane. Or when he doubted her sincerity. “Are you sure about this? This is – remember what happened last time?”

  “This isn’t like last time. This isn’t opening a portal. Saint Derfel is going to fetch him, and all we have to do is wait.”

  He wet his lips, and darted a glance toward the robed monks. He was worried; she saw the sheen of sweat at his temples and on his upper lip. He wore his hair longer on top than when she’d met him, pretty, dark curls, sticking to his damp forehead now. “Rose,” he started again. He laid a hand on her shoulder.

  “Mademoiselle?” Brother Eustace called.

  She touched Lance’s hand. “I know what I’m doing.” And removed it from her shoulder. He pulled back with a wounded look, one he quickly tried to hide.

  Poor Lance. He’d never really understood, though she knew he’d tried to. But he’d never felt about anyone the way she felt about Beck – not even about her.

  She stepped around him, and walked to the gathering of robed men, at the feet of the stag.

  Brother Eustace looked at her with warmth – and with something like awe. “The sacrifice?”

  She withdrew the dagger from its sheath inside her jacket. The rubies winked in the candlelight. The monks took a collective breath, and shrank back a step.

  “We will begin the prayers,” Brother Eustace said in French. “But the sacrifice, and the request, must come from you. It has to be the thing you want most in the world.”

  She nodded.

  He patted her shoulder, and they all withdrew. A low, almost musical chant began: Latin prayers. An invocation.

  A faint breath of wind stirred in the room. The candle flames flickered.

  “Jesus,” Gallo whispered. “This is–”

  Someone shushed him – Tris, probably.

  Rose lifted the dagger, and pricked the fingertips of her left hand, one after the next. The blade was so sharp that it didn’t hurt; she only felt cold, where her skin had been cut.

  She turned her hand over, and let her blood drip down at the feet of the stag. Her belly clenched with anticipation. Please work. Please, I need him back…

  She lifted her face, and regarded the stone countenance of the saint. She had to say the name. “Saint Derfel,” she said, in English. “I have a request for you, if you’ll honor it. I need a soul back – a damned soul i
n hell. I need Arthur Augustus Becket.”

  For a moment, nothing changed. There was only the low, Latin chanting, and the rush of her own pulse in her ears.

  But then…

  The statue moved. It was no statue at all anymore, and Rose stumbled back from it, clutching the dagger a moment before she remembered – and then she slid it across the floor, toward the sinuous, blue-glowing smoke that was a man astride a stag. A stomping snorting, circling stag. The man of blue smoke leaned down, and scooped up the weapon with grace and ease. Raised it, examined it. Then he met her gaze, and she felt like her heart was being squeezed; lifted and examined, too.

  The stag bellowed, turned, and dove. Headfirst, it shot down through the stones of the floor with curls of blue mist.

  “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” Gallo chanted. “It really worked, it really–”

  The stag returned, trumpeting, tossing its head, spectral antlers misting where they struck the ceiling. The beast circled a few times; Saint Derfel turned to her, a faint smile on his ghostly lips.

  And then it was a statue again. Solid, unmoving stone.

  And on the floor…

  It was smoking, she saw first. Steaming. An indistinct, onyx shape that didn’t look human.

  Rose stared at it, and became aware that the chanting had stopped. No one uttered a sound – but she could hear breathing. Ragged, and deep, but regular. Coming from the black shape at the foot of the statue.

  “Rose–” Lance started. She felt him grab at her.

  She ducked away and crossed to the shape. Circled it. Her heart was racing. And she knew, she knew…

  It was him. Naked, curled up on his side, arms and legs drawn in, flanks quivering, ribs heaving. She knew that skin, and those muscles; would have known the shape of him anywhere.

  But his hair was wrong: still too long, and silken, gleaming in the candlelight, but jet black. And there was…something amidst it. Something hard, and solid.

  A flicker of movement caught her eye down by his feet. She thought it was a snake at first, the way light glimmered on sleek, flat scales. But the head was not a head, but a sharp spade, and the flexing, coiling black length was…

  A tail.

  And in his hair, those were…horns.

  “Beck,” she whispered.

  His eyes snapped open, gold as before, but gleaming. His mouth opened, and his sharp canines were even sharper, and longer.

  He struggled upright with a low, rumbling sound in his chest like he’d never made before. And the black, leathery shape around him was not a cloak, but wings.

  They opened, and fanned. Nearly too wide for the room, sleek, and deadly, and hooked at the top.

  Rose stared.

  Lance whispered, “What the fuck?”

  Beck rubbed his eyes with black-tipped fingers. Yawned. Stretched. He tipped his head back, shook his hair off his shoulders – and, yes, those were horns, thick, and spiraled, curving back over his ears like a ram’s.

  He opened his golden, lion eyes, and found her. His gaze cleared.

  He smiled. “Rosie. Hello, sweetheart.”

  He held out a hand to her.

  And she placed her hand in his.

  THE END

  ~*~

  To Be Continued…

  Look for Hell Theory Book Two:

  Night in a Waste Land

  Coming Soon

  (featuring: details about the five-year gap,

  a look at the Rose’s complicated relationship

  with Lance during that time, a proper introduction

  to the Golden Knights, and Beck’s grand, winged return.)

  Other Titles by Lauren Gilley:

  The Dartmoor/Lean Dogs Legacy Series (in reading order):

  Fearless

  Price of Angels

  Half My Blood

  The Skeleton King

  Secondhand Smoke

  Snow In Texas

  Tastes Like Candy

  Loverboy

  American Hellhound

  Shaman

  Prodigal Son

  Lone Star

  The Sons of Rome Series

  White Wolf

  Red Rooster

  Dragon Slayer

  Golden Eagle

  Lionheart (coming soon)

  The Russell Series

  Made for Breaking

  God Love Her

  Keeping Bad Company

  The Walker Series

  Keep You

  Dream of You

  Better Than You

  Fix You

  Rosewood

  Standalones

  Whatever Remains

  Walking Wounded

  Shelter

  Hell Theory Series

  King Among the Dead

  Night in a Waste Land (coming soon)