The Phantom King (The Kings)

by Heather Killough-Walden

  And there was a red glint at the center of his pupils.

  Like a fire.

  “You first,” he taunted, revving his bike’s engine in a direct challenge.

  Siobhan gazed at him for another two seconds – and then she whirled around, kicked the stand out from under her, and shot the bike forward into the waiting desert.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Thane’s look darkened as he watched Siobhan tear out of the garage ahead of him, dust flying behind her back wheel. His hands made tight fists around his handlebars as he twisted his throttle. You’re not fooling anyone little warlock. He knew damn well she was going to use her magic to try to outrun him. He was counting on it, in fact. And he could tell she was using it already.

  That extra bit of defiance, her wicked sense of will, were like gasoline on the fire that was already raging inside of him.

  She was his queen. He’d known it already, but Lalura’s little “gift” had thrust the truth home and slotted it into place. Thane’s realm was vast and endless, but Thane no longer had to bear its harsh expanse alone. Siobhan was capable of changing his entire world. He’d already seen evidence of it. She’d been in Purgatory all of a few minutes and her inherent leadership had begun seeping out. She’d completely taken over – helping Anime to overcome their grief and move on.

  The little warlock was practically made of magic. The ability to withstand Purgatory’s desolate influence was running through her precious veins. It was in her. She could not only survive here, she could thrive. It was why he trusted her to be able to avoid every dark blotch that littered his lands while on his motorcycle. Skill and magic were on her side in that. The show she’d given him on Highway 107 had been a small taste of her capabilities. She was a natural.

  He had known she was something sacred the moment he’d laid eyes on her, he just hadn’t recognized what that sacred thing was.

  But he did now. And the knowledge that he’d found a beautiful being capable of spending the rest of his long existence with him was having a profound effect upon Thane.

  The fact that another man wanted to take her away from him was having just as profound an effect.

  When Marius had traversed the borders of the portal in order to reach Siobhan, something inside of Thane had reached a boiling point. And then the Akyri King had addressed her personally, threatening her with death unless she gave in to him willingly, and Thane had seen red. He’d never lost control before.

  But in that moment, it was like he’d literally been able to hear a cord inside go snap. It made a stretched-taut sound and then a threatening silence – and then it ripped wide open and he’d been shooting everything he had at the image of the man he suddenly hated more than he had ever hated anyone in his very long life.

  In the wake of the barrage of let-loose magic, he and Siobhan had been thrown. At the last second, she’d been ripped from his grip and he felt everything he had ever wanted slip away. When he hit the ground and rolled, he instantly shoved himself back up, got to his booted feet, and could not even breathe until he saw that she had fallen only a few short yards from where he’d landed.

  He was down on one knee at her side before he realized he’d moved, and the world made sense to him again when he saw the rise and fall of her chest.

  Until that moment, he hadn’t realized – not fully – how truly important she was. How essential, and not just for the world and his kingdom, but for his own beating heart.

  For him.

  Now a conflagration of emotions whirled and twisted and built up within him. He needed to figure out what the hell had happened to his realm when his magic had collided with Marius’ within that portal. He also wondered whether it had affected any other realm. But he couldn’t transport any longer, not now. The gods only knew what would happen if he tried to open up another rip in time and space with all of this unstable magic riddling his landscape.

  For now, he was trapped here and the protective beast within him had been unleashed. And his red-headed, fire-blooded, wild-hearted queen inflamed that beast with unbridled lust.

  An evil smile curled Thane’s lips. He felt his fangs prick just behind them. She was running from him now. It was really too perfect. His girl gone rabbit in a plane he controlled like a slave. She could cast any spell she wanted, and he would only absorb it, ignore it, or turn it around to use it against her. Let her drain herself.

  He kicked up his stand and tore out of the garage on a fury fit for a king. Unnatural smoke and ash billowed out behind him as his bike began to change beneath him.

  When she was weak and exhausted, he would be right behind her. There would be no place left for her to turn, nowhere to run.

  The engine expanded, the pipes elongated, and the bike’s exhaust took on a reddish tint as if breathed by the beasts of Hell.

  In the distance, a faint dust cloud gave Siobhan’s location away. The Phantom King honed in like a dragon on dinner, his vision sliding into stark contrasts. Overhead, the sun began to sink in the sky, painting the horizon a gradual pink and orange. He magically shoved the sun into fast forward, knowing that Siobhan would all too soon be forced to use her headlights in the dark. It would be that much more of an advantage for him.

  He chuckled and the sound was echoed in the evil rumble of his demonesque motorcycle.

  He was done playing fair.

  *****

  This is insane, she thought as she leaned and the Vincent Lightning beneath her leaned with her, carving beautifully around yet another odd and dark rip in space. They were becoming fewer and farther between and she had the sense that she would soon be seeing the last of them.

  But they were the least of her worries.

  That was how it felt in that moment, as the sun began to set and she could feel the land’s king bearing down on her. She was certain he’d given her a massive head start, and when she looked over her shoulder, she couldn’t see anyone following.

  And yet…. It was almost as if she could feel his breath on her neck, his hand sliding over her torso… his knee between her legs, nudging them apart.

  Siobhan shook her head, trying desperately to clear it. If she didn’t escape the Phantom King, he was taking her to his bed.

  Oh fuck, she thought now, her eyes wide, her hair whipping about her like the loosed sails of a ship in a gale. What the hell was I thinking? What had she done? What kind of person just up and made a deal like that out of nowhere? Not her!

  She felt like a teenager, and not just any teenager, but a really stupid teenager who had ignorantly eaten all of the fruit at the bottom of the bowl of Jungle Juice.

  Siobhan chanced another glance over her shoulder, and this time, she saw something that momentarily took her breath away and sent her heart racing.

  A second cloud of dust arose on the horizon, but this one was dark, like smoke.

  She knew it was him. She knew that he knew she was planning to use her magic to escape him and that he planned to counteract it with magic of his own – which he was clearly demonstrating now. Whatever was coming her way, it was no Vincent Shadow. It was bigger. Faster. And there was no way in any realm she could outrun it.

  I’m screwed, she thought as she turned back around and frantically tried to think of the best use for her magic at that point in time. It was an odd desperation to be experiencing. She felt as if she were being run down by a monster – a living nightmare. This realm, its dead, and the fact that the king bore the name “Phantom” were not helping to quell the rising sense of turmoil in her gut.

  At the same time however, a small part of her couldn’t help but wonder what the Phantom King would look like without any clothes on… rising above her, his strong arms braced on the bed on either side of her, his lightning eyes flashing in the devastatingly handsome frame of his face.

  That was the small but brave part of her, the hopelessly horny part of her, and the part that at the moment seemed to be in the saddle of her motorcycle.

  Siobhan made a loud sound
of frustration and squeezed the handlebars, gritting her teeth as if she could force that part of her to shut up and behave. It didn’t work. And both her anticipation and her fear were mounting.

  Time for a spell.

  Her warlock awoke, pushed the mortal woman in her aside, and Siobhan felt her eyes heat up in her face. She glanced down and saw that her fingers were beginning to glow, heating up where they gripped the bars of her bike. And she let it happen.

  With a deep breath to calm her nerves, Siobhan twisted the throttle as far as it would go and let the darkness in her take over. The bike picked up speed. Just as her Mustang had always done for her, this vehicle fed on her power, pulling horses out of thin air and turning them into torque.

  Behind her, the ground cracked in her wake. A fissure sped across the parched land and then separated in a perpendicular direction. Siobhan never looked back; she knew what was happening. She was making it happen.

  The cracks widened, becoming fault-like, and further spread and deepened until a veritable canyon separated her from the land behind her. And hopefully from its lone rider.

  But she wasn’t going to stop there. The Phantom King owned this realm; if she was going to defeat him in this little game of theirs, she would have to hit him on all fronts and not stop until she was certain she’d reached the “finish line.”

  Darkness began to descend upon Purgatory, and Siobhan realized that she’d passed the last of the black holes a while back. Nothing but the desert stretched before her now. In the indigo horizon, individual stars and what looked like planets of rainbow colors started to make their appearance, hanging low and huge in the night sky.

  Siobhan switched on her headlight. She knew that it would only help Thane find her, but she needed light to see where she was going. She could waste a lot of energy allowing her magic to guide her, but she had other things she wanted to do with that magic.

  Beneath her, the Vincent Lightning she’d always wanted and was now finally getting to ride began to change. She concentrated and the very frame of the bike shifted, stretching and molding until it became something entirely different. The shape of it was so vastly dissimilar to the classic beauty of what it had been seconds before, Siobhan was forced to move and adjust along with it.

  The seat beneath her shifted backward, relocating itself toward the rear of the monster vehicle. The handlebars loomed ahead, forcing her back to arch and her chest to lean forward until she was nearly lying breast to chrome on the bike.

  The Dodge Tomahawk was the fastest motorcycle known to man. Its outright ridiculous ten cylinder engine was capable of producing 500 horsepower and achieving a speed of nearly 350 miles per hour.

  She could never take it up that high. She was fairly certain that her own mind would rebel at the prospect of going any more than two hundred, but there was something about having the power there, just in case, that deeply appealed to Siobhan at that moment.

  Her body fairly crackled with magic now. It was like waking up from a long slumber only to find yourself in the middle of Times Square on New Year’s Eve. It was time to party, and the warlock in her was game.

  She didn’t dare look back now. It would do her no good. If Thane was still there, then she wouldn’t put any more distance between them by chancing a glance over her shoulder. The only thing she would do is waste time, scare herself, and possibly wreck her bike.

  Instead, she focused dead ahead. She had little choice, really. The bike beneath her was increasing in speed and now rocketed forward so fast, the world began to literally blur on either side of her. The wind pulled so hard on her hair, she wondered whether she would lose some of it during this ride. For half a second, she considered slowing down.

  But she knew that if she did, she would lose. And losing wasn’t in her blood.

  Keep going, she told herself. She surrendered to the warlock within her, lowering her head as it stepped out of its darkness.

  Just don’t let him catch me, she told it.

  Siobhan felt the hypnotic, almost orgasmic sensation of black magic allowed to fully take the reins as her own sultry voice seemed to whisper, You got it, babe.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  She was smart, he would give her that. She was a fast learner.

  The problem was, she thought there was a difference between Thanatos and the dimension he ruled. She’d already been shown evidence that casting spells directly at him would do her no good. But she mistakenly thought it ended there, that the reach he possessed for absorbing magic stopped at the end of his own fingers.

  Not so.

  The realm of the Anime and its king were one. And as Siobhan threw her magic at the land, Thanatos simply gobbled it right up.

  The chasm was a nice touch, he thought. If he’d been anywhere near human, it might have actually slowed him down. And the beast of a motorcycle she turned the Vincent into was certainly picking up some speed. But he was riding his own metal monster, and right now it was breathing fire.

  Thane laughed, and the sound carried out across the realm, echoing with mal-intent. He knew she could hear it. He knew it would spur her on.

  Thanks to him, the sun had gone down, and he closed in on her headlight at close to two hundred and fifty miles per hour, knowing that if this had been the real world and if he and Siobhan hadn’t been inherently magical beings, the slightest turn of either of their heads would probably have snapped their necks. The winds they sustained would have been greater than class five hurricane level.

  But a layer of otherworldliness surrounded them both and was echoed in the expanse of Purgatory. This was not the real world. This was not real time.

  Especially when Thane decided the chase had gone on long enough.

  Warlock power flooded his veins, stolen from the spells the little magic user continued to cast on the world around her. He was drunk on it, high on lust and residual anger, and spurred by the predatory instinct to hunt down what ran from him. As this red-hot emotional cocktail swelled and throbbed through his tall body, Thane folded space before him, warping the distance between him and the headlight far ahead until she was a mere few hundred feet away.

  As if in response, he felt her magic pulse. An enormous boulder appeared in front of him, so close that he barely had time to swerve to miss it. It was an instinctive reaction since he could just as easily have ridden right through it. But perhaps she knew his instinct would be in charge; maybe she was counting on it to slow him down.

  Thane righted the bike beneath him, straightening it out as dust and smoke went flying. Not three seconds passed before she was tossing her power out at him once again, this time in the form of a sudden copse of trees that sprouted out of the sparse ground, thick roots shooting upward like Jack’s bean stalk.

  Thane’s monster motorcycle roared as he kicked it into a higher gear in order to escape a meandering root that struck out at him and attempted to shoot through his back wheel. At the same time, he leaned heavily, steering the bike out of the way of the veritable tree that twisted in front of him.

  The trees multiplied and spread before him like a forest. It was reminiscent of a Tim Burton horror scene, each strange tree alive and writhing, each branch and root out to get him. The effect was disconcerting enough to keep him on the defensive, especially at the speed he maintained.

  He smiled grimly. He’d underestimated how well she would think this out.

  With mounting impatience, Thane sent a flare of his stored-up power out in front of him, turning Siobhan’s own magic against her as he lit every wayward, ominous tree on fire from root to tip. The conflagration hissed to life, lighting up the horizon and casting a bright glow into the night sky. It ate at the magical forest with voracious speed, turning it to ash within seconds and clearing the way ahead.

  He kicked his bike into break-neck speed, closing the distance between him and his beautiful prey with unnatural acceleration. Thane saw red hair fly as Siobhan no doubt heard him coming up on her and unwisely looked over her shoulder.
His smile broadened. She was getting nervous now.

  Excitement burned in his veins, awakening each nerve ending and sending his heart pumping like mad. The things he was going to do to her….

  But she wasn’t finished yet, it would seem, because the ground beneath Thane’s motorcycle suddenly changed on a molecular level, shifting from a solid – into a liquid. The bike gave an angry whine and quicksand went flying in all directions as his front wheel sank into the grime, spinning wildly. Up ahead, Siobhan shot ahead of him, once more putting precious distance between them.

  Thane’s fangs throbbed, his hands ached where he gripped the handlebars, and every muscle in his body bulged with strength as he re-focused his power and brought his bike back out of the muck.

  It rose dripping and angry, a beast with a mind of its own, and growled in fury.

  He could almost taste her blood now. He could feel her skin give beneath the prick of his teeth, her complaint flesh mold where his earnest grip dug in, her wet warmth welcoming him as he held her down and claimed her in triumph.

  He’d had enough of this.

  With a blast of finality, he broke the ground up ahead and forced it to rise into the sky. A hundred yards in front of Siobhan, mountains formed, climbing like rockets toward the stars and planets above. He watched as she reacted, hastily slowing her motorcycle just enough to skid to a long and dirt-flying stop without laying the bike down and killing herself.

  Thane was right on her tail. Fifty feet… thirty…

  And then, just as he thought he’d reached her, she and the Dodge Tomahawk she was riding vanished into thin air. Invisible? He used his magic to sear through any unseen shield that would cloak her from sight. But there was none there. She wasn’t there.

  It was an illusion, he realized, eyes wide. Thane’s own motorcycle skidded to a cacophonous halt. He lowered a boot to the cracked ground. The bike bucked and rumbled beneath him as his quicksilver gaze scanned the darkened landscape. Somewhere back there, without him noticing it, Siobhan had switched herself out for a doppelganger mirage.