The Phantom King (The Kings)

by Heather Killough-Walden

  “You didn’t ask me to fight for you, Siobhan, and you certainly didn’t ask me to die for you.” He pushed his ghost body off of the counter on which he’d been leaning and brushed by her on his way out of the kitchen, filling her with a bone-deep chill. “So you can drop the guilt trip.”

  Siobhan deepened her self-hug to stave off the unnatural cold and closed her eyes. He was on the money. Even dead, his detective skills were top notch.

  “And you’re right,” he continued, his voice wafting to her from somewhere down the hall. “You can take care of yourself… for the most part.”

  Siobhan frowned in the new stillness of the kitchen and didn’t respond. She stayed where she was, her gaze drifting from dust mote to dust mote as they whirled and eddied in the sunbeams coming through the windows. Her thoughts turned inward.

  Steven’s ghost form had become increasingly solid over the last few days. It was as if his spirit were growing comfortable with its existence and settling into it. She wasn’t sure what to think of that.

  Whatever had killed Steven had actually been at the house looking for her. But despite the fact that Steven was now out of the way, that danger – that demon – had yet to return.

  It had been two weeks. What was he waiting for?

  And what did he want?

  Siobhan hadn’t left the house much since she’d purchased it. Salem wasn’t exactly a hotbed of cosmopolitan excitement, but it was more than that. Before the attack, she’d spent a lot of time at bookstores and parks and in Boston for whale watching and sight seeing. It was good for the creativity.

  But since Steven had died, she’d felt at odds with the world. It was like the demon had gotten her instead, and she was now as immaterial as the former detective. She saw everything around her through a sepia’d lens and felt as if she had one foot in the grave already. Like she didn’t really belong.

  So she hid away. She ordered things she needed online and met the UPS man every day at the door. She exercised by running up and down her four flights of stairs for thirty minutes and then doing push-ups while wearing her iPod. She focused on fixing up the house and restoring objects of the past. She tried to move on.

  But she was running out of food now and there was a film of uneasiness on her that she had the uncomfortable urge to dig her fingernails into and scrape away. She needed to get out – away from the aged wood that creaked beneath her feet – away from the ghost.

  The ghost that was a constant reminder of how her supernatural life had infiltrated and ultimately destroyed someone else’s.

  Steven was right. She was riddled with guilt. She should have been there the night the Akyri had attacked. She could only imagine that it had sensed her magic and was perhaps hungry. Though how a hungry Akyri could have summoned that much black magic was beyond her. Regardless, it had destroyed Steven because she wasn’t there to stop it.

  Siobhan took a deep breath and let it out with a tired whoosh. She ran a hand through her blood-red locks, leaned one palm against the counter, and chewed on her lip. A second later, she straightened again and left the kitchen.

  Steven wasn’t in the hall. He wasn’t in the living room either. Siobhan pulled her jacket and purse from a peg on the antique coat rack she’d repaired years ago. She scooped her car keys out of a porcelain bowl on the small table beside the rack and made her way for the door. She half expected the former detective to materialize before the solid oak exit in order to stop her. But he didn’t.

  Maybe he was as frustrated with this game as she was becoming. Or maybe he knew she was right and that this really was her fault, that she could probably protect herself with her magic, and that nothing was going to change for either of them until she faced the demon who had killed him in the first place.

  Whatever the reason, Siobhan was grateful for the lack of resistance as she left the house and got into her car. It was quiet and warm inside; the sun had been heating it through the glass all day. The leather creaked under her as she situated herself behind the wheel and tossed her purse on the passenger seat. She sat back in the bucket seat, took another deep breath, and started the engine. It roared to life, sending a delicious vibration through her blood.

  Siobhan loved the sound of a powerful engine. There was something fundamentally attractive about it. It was what she would call caveman logic, old brain sort of stuff. It was loud and incredibly strong, and the combination was very simply sexy.

  She needed to get to the grocery store and stock up on a lot of fundamental necessities before they closed. But she had hours to go, and Highway 107 was just a hop, skip and jump away.

  The 1965 Ford Mustang Fastback might not have technically been the fastest car invented, but most of them didn’t have what Siobhan’s had: An engine boosted by a hefty dose of warlock magic.

  *****

  With a glance over his broad shoulder, Thanatos made his way to the liquor cabinet against one wall and eyed the bottles behind the glass. Across the room, the Warlock King stood tall and still, his arms at his sides, his ice green eyes glued keenly to the massive map that splayed itself out across the otherwise vast and empty wall before him. It was a spell Alberich had cast. The wall had been blank minutes ago.

  Thane really hadn’t thought that the warlock would be able to pull off a search of this magnitude. The world was a big place, and Thane was looking for one specific ghost. A spirit wronged had no business being back on Earth. Anime were too volatile, too different. They were filled with so many negative emotions, trapped in the painful moments of their deaths, Purgatory was a much safer place for such souls. There, they were slowly freed of the shackles of their memories and allowed to come to peace with their fates. Here on Earth, they would remain trapped in their anger and hatred and would never find solace in death.

  So while some spirits chose to remain with their loved ones after dying, this was only possible if the person passed of natural causes.

  Still, there were a lot of ghosts who chose to do this, enough so that Thane hadn’t put much faith in Alberich’s spell working. It would be like finding a clear marble in a swimming pool.

  However, the Warlock King was surprising him yet again. Within seconds of Thane’s query for assistance, Alberich’s lips had curled into a smile, his eyes had taken on a telling gleam, and he’d responded with, “You’ll owe me.”

  Then he’d turned around and flung what looked like magic up onto the wall behind him. His lips moved, and words filled the chamber – echoing, otherworldly. The wall lit up like a laser light show, revealing the continents of Earth.

  For a while, Thane just stared at the wall. Little by little, as Alberich worked his dark power, the map’s continents fell away and what was left on the wall zoomed in. Before long, all that remained were North and South America and the oceans surrounding them.

  When South America fell away as well, Thane turned from the wall and made his way toward the liquor cabinet. This next part seemed to be taking some time. He’d had to slow time in Purgatory to a crawl. The wronged spirits were stacking up in Nowhere, waiting for him to return and greet them all. It was taking its toll on his conscience. There was so much wrong with the world. The final sobs and cries of the newly murdered piled up in his mind like echoes, abrading the inside of his brain as if they were razor blades.

  He needed a drink. Fortunately for him, unlike his vampire, werewolf, demon, and otherwise supernatural acquaintances, if he wanted alcohol to have an effect on him, it would. He could also will that effect away with no more than a whim. It was a silver lining to his eternal job, which otherwise sucked giant hairy balls.

  “Help yourself, Thanatos,” Alberich said without taking his attention from the wall and his spell. “It’s unlocked.”

  With that, the glass cupboard door swung open, revealing the bottles inside. Thane didn’t waste energy being impressed or irritated. Instead, he reached in, grabbed one that looked good, and popped the top off of it. The first few swigs burned a little and he relished the feel
ing, closing his eyes to soak it in. At once, it was smoothing out the rough spots and taking the edge off.

  “Better?” Jason asked, again without taking his eyes from the wall.

  Thane upended the bottle, swallowed a few more times, and then re-capped it and joined the Warlock King, the liquor still held firmly in his grasp.

  “I’ve narrowed it down,” Jason said. He smiled a white-toothed smile and shook his head. “You’re not going to believe where to.”

  Thane looked up at the map and watched as North America spun toward them, zooming in as if they were riding a falling star, until at last only one state remained. It filled the entire wall, its highways glistening like trails of headlights, its metropolis glimmering like multi-colored diamonds.

  “Massachusetts,” Thane said, frowning. “Boston?”

  Jason shook his head, his smile broadening. “Salem.”

  Chapter Four

  He’d dropped the alcohol buzz in favor of the high he always got when he took one of his bikes a good distance. This was one of his favorite sports bikes, a Ducati Diavel Carbon, and in the early Boston twilight, its glossy paint job streaked and gleamed beneath the street lights and neon signs as he made his way through town.

  His ultimate destination tonight was Salem, a smaller town about thirty minutes away, but Thanatos had never been to Boston. It had been a very long time since he’d allowed himself to stay out of his realm for this long. The meetings of the kings drew him to this realm but were always straight-forward, to the point, and ended mere minutes after they’d begun. Each and every one of the kings had a job to do, and little time to spare.

  The last time he’d wandered the face of the planet this much, it had looked decidedly different than it did now. He wasn’t going to waste the excuse he had to be here; it was time to open the bike up and see what she could do on a real highway rather than the endless expanse of dirt that Purgatory currently wore.

  With a twist of the throttle and a determined lean, Thane tore up the on-ramp and merged with traffic. Rush hour had ended two hours ago, but stragglers muddled along at the speed limit, slowing down everyone’s progress. Thane made it around these vehicles with expert, incredible ease, carving some short distances to the point that his foot pegs scraped along the road, sending sparks shooting behind him.

  The sky grew darker, the lights brighter, and the exits became fewer as Thane left Boston’s city limits and took 107, also known as the Salem Turnpike, through Lynn toward Salem. The wind picked up a little, spraying rogue raindrops across the tarmac. Thane’s wheels sailed over these on a hydroplane of speed and bliss, eating up the miles with absolute carelessness.

  He rode well ahead of everyone and fell into a contented rhythm until a black Ford Mustang streaked into place beside him, seemingly out of nowhere, and drew his attention sharply to the right. The windows were darkly tinted; he couldn’t see through them, and he had only a second to try before the car sped on past, leaving him a full ten car lengths behind.

  Thanatos had repaired and ridden a lot of engines over the last century. Just like everything he pulled into his world and focused on, it was a hobby he’d begun to pass the time that had quickly become the only thing standing between him and solitude-induced insanity.

  So he knew a thing or two about horse power – enough to know full well that while the 1965 Ford Mustang Fastback was not a slow car per se, there was no way in hell it should have been capable of the kind of acceleration this one was now exhibiting. In fact, no car should have been capable of it.

  Thane was intrigued. He was troubled too, though he didn’t immediately recognize the sensation, but mostly he was curious. His steel gaze narrowed, his gloved grips on the handlebars tightened, and he twisted his throttle once more to send the bike careening forward into the distance between himself and the Mustang.

  He’d expected to catch up right away. However, as if the driver of the car detected the chase, the car sped up. Almost impossibly, it weaved between two cars in the next lane that were no more than a car length apart from one another, and then shot into the darkness.

  Oh no you don’t, he thought as he automatically picked up speed to match it. He was running on auto-pilot, it seemed, his body leaning with the bike, his grip on the throttle unforgiving. Every nerve ending in his body was humming with the thrill of the chase. The cars blurred past, their lights becoming one long stream of energy as he weaved this way and that in some unaccountable pursuit of the car ahead of him.

  The maneuvers the driver pulled were inconceivable, and the only reason Thane was able to keep up was because he was on a bike.

  At one point, the Mustang passed between no more than five feet of space as the vehicle slammed on its brakes, spun around to face him, amazingly accelerated without spinning any wheel, and literally shrank to slip between the ends of a median wall.

  Thanatos burned rubber as he skidded to a stop. He put his boot down and watched as the Mustang then expanded once more on the other side before taking an exit ramp going in the opposite direction. Most impressive of all was the fact that a cherry top sat waiting behind a billboard on Thane’s side of the street – in plain sight of everything the Mustang had just done. And yet no sirens sounded, no lights winked on, and the cop stayed where he was.

  Insane son of a bitch, Thane thought, shaking his head as he watched the shiny black car speed out of sight. It would take too many on-road acrobatics to chase it any further, but at least he’d come to a solid realization about the driver, and part of his curiosity, a tiny part, was placated. Clearly this was the work of magic.

  The Phantom King was no stranger to magic. Practically everything he knew, everything he dealt with on a daily basis, was composed of some kind of magic. The ironic thing was, as long as Thane was on Earth and not in his own plane, said magic had virtually no effect on him. It was as if he were a ghost here; magic passed right through him.

  Nonetheless, it worked on everything around him, including the car that had just escaped into the night, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  Thane didn’t move or tear his eyes from the off-ramp and the road beyond it until the last of the car’s lights had disappeared from view. Then he straightened in his seat, revved the bike’s engine, and pulled it once more off of the median and into traffic. He realized, as he passed a sign a second later, that he was now in Salem and probably had been for some time. Highway 107 had become Highland Avenue and then Essex Street.

  There was an odd humming in his bones when he pulled off of the highway at the next ramp and made his way through streets a touch darker and quieter than they’d been in Boston.

  He could sense the spirits of the wronged dead waiting for his. He could feel them there, just out of reach, in that depthless line between life and nothingness. There were children there. Slaughtered in a war fought for reasons their parents’ parents couldn’t remember. Time was running out for him; he’d stretched it beyond its limits. He needed to find that ghost and set things right.

  Thane gritted his teeth and sped into the night.

  *****

  Siobhan slammed the door of her car and looked up the road in front of her house. Her head was spinning and her heart was pounding. If she held her breath, it was almost like she could still hear the motorcycle’s engine. But there were no lights, and a gentle breeze passed through the grasses and flowers in the neighbor’s yard, and bugs buzzed beneath the street light. She was alone.

  Hurriedly, she jammed the car keys into her pocket and ran up the drive to her front door. Once it was bolted tight behind her, she leaned against it and took a deep breath. Then she turned and looked through the peep hole at the jet black car that waited, engine still hot, in the driveway. A house this ancient didn’t come with a garage big enough for a real car; it had been built with wagons and horses in mind. And she hadn’t had a chance yet to “build” one onto the side of the drive. So the car sat out there.

  Like a big black sign that read, “Here I
am.”

  She had no idea who the biker had been who’d followed her, and she also had no idea why she was so afraid of him, but something had taken ahold of her. Driven her. She’d never run from anyone before. Maybe it was the fact that he’d given chase in the first place.

  Or maybe it was his strong frame – she’d been able to tell he was tall. Very tall. He’d had black hair; he hadn’t been wearing a helmet, stupid man. And she was almost certain his eyes had been not gray, but silver. They’d flashed once beneath a streetlamp, almost like lightning. He had a strong jaw; his profile was Roman and masculine. But she’d taken it all in during quick, furtive glances. That was all she’d had time for as she raced down the highway at break-neck speeds, casting spells left and right.

  He’d kept up beautifully. It was uncanny and frightening and alarming and intriguing and thrilling. He’d come closer and closer, until he’d finally sent her magically careening through a tiny hole in the median wall and barreling down the off-ramp to get away.

  She’d been terrified. Excited, but genuinely scared.

  How strange.

  With that thought, Siobhan waved her hand at the car beyond the door and muttered a quick few words that would cloak the vehicle. It disappeared. She exhaled.

  “Where are your groceries?”

  Siobhan squealed and jumped, spinning around to face Steven. He stood in the hallway, leaning against the wall, his arms crossed casually over his chest, his ghost gray eyes even more solid than they’d been before she’d left that afternoon. Siobhan blinked. Was there a hint of blue to them? It was as if he were re-forming… becoming whole again.

  “The store was closed,” she came back, not thinking before she told the lie. At once it felt wrong.

  Steven’s brow raised. “Over the course of the three hours you were gone, you could have made it to the nearest Wal-Mart in Boston, which is open twenty-four-seven.” He straightened, coming off of the wall and dropping his arms at his sides, and Siobhan was reminded of why she’d begun dating him in the first place. He was impressive. He was smart, he was built tall, and he was good-looking. He’d grown up an orphan, but had taken society by the balls and made the most of it like only the best could. Not much got past him. He’d even been a goalie on his college hockey team.