The Phantom King (The Kings) (20 page)

“Why didn’t
you tell me any of this?” he
asked.

Siobhan gave him a dead-pan look. She was a witch. She was talking about demons.
“Figure it out, detective.”

Steven’s blue eyes narrowed. Siobhan looked away and fo
und herself caught in Thane
’
s
gaze again. He was smiling. It was an incredibly hot look on him, even if his canines were slightly longer than they should have been. At least the fangs had retreated.

Fangs. The man has got teeth on him.

And then, just like that, his smile was gone. His eyes were widening. He tore his attention from her and looked up at Steven. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “I think I know why you’re keeping the Akyri from returning.”

Steven
’s hands dropped
, his expression
both alarmed and eager
.

“You’re an orphan, is that right?” Thanatos asked
as he came off of the couch and uncrossed his arms
.

Steven nodded. “So?”

Thane
studied him for a moment in secret silence and Siobhan could see he was chewing on the inside of his cheek as if weighing some kind of decision.
A hint of a smile w
as back as he finally
said
to himself
, “Well there’s only one way to know, Thane.”

With that, he raised his right hand.
Power pooled
in his palm. She
instantly
recognized it as the
magic
she had used on him
;
it h
ad the same look and feel to it. It bore her signature
the way a
portrait does its painter’s
.
Her magic
now returned to the world, building in the
grip of Thane’s
hand as if
he’d simply absorbed it and pocketed it a
way
for later.

Steven looked down at it nervously. “What are you doing?”

“Testing a theory.” Thane
raised his right hand and hurled the swirling, sparkling black mass at Steven.

The detective didn’t have time to dodge or run. Instead, he did the only thing he
could
do. He raised
both arms in front of himself like
a shield
.

Siobhan felt her eyes widen with disbelief as her magic slammed into Steven, but instead of blowing him to smithereens, as she’d originally meant for the bolt of power to do, it cascaded over his arms… and then sank into his form.

It was like watching water get soaked up into a sponge. There was no other way to describe it. The glittery black enveloped him and slowly faded, sinking through his shirt and into his skin as if he were thirsty for it.

Slowly, the detective lowered his arms. His eyes were shut and his teeth were clenched. He seemed to be in pain.

No
, Siobhan thought with alarm.
Not pain –
pleasure
.

“F
eels good, doesn’t it?” Thane
asked, probably not really meaning it to be a question so much as a statement of fact.
Steven still hadn’t opened his eyes
, but she could hear him exhale shakily in the magically charged air of the room.

Thane
took a step forward, the sound of his boot
s
on the floor boards ominously loud. “I think I can safely say that I know a little something about your parents now, detective. Or at least about one of them.” He took another step. “And I wager I know the reason you were drawn to Siobhan –” He stopped and looked over at her, then blatantly allowed his gaze to
trail over her figure. “Well,
one
of the reasons
, anyway
.”
His smile was back, and it was oh-so-wrong.

He turned to Steven again. “You’ve got Akyri blood in you, Lazarus.” Another step.

Steven finally opened his eyes. They were glowing
again
, but this time they were glowing red.

“And you were right,” Thane
finished, coming to a stop a few feet from the former detective. “You don’t belong in my realm. Because you were never dead to begin with.”

*****

Marius stood on the edge of the sidewalk beneath the shading of a massive oak and gazed through cold blue eyes at the house across the street. The sun had set hours ago, the moon was high, and the lights shed weak illumination on the empty asphalt and parked cars below. It was mid-May and other than the suicidal moths and mosquitoes swarming around the humming bulbs of street lamps, nothing moved in the stillness.

Except the cat.

Brrreow
.

Marius looked down. It had appeared out of nowhere and now sat in the middle of the black street, its orange tail curled around its legs, its large yellow eyes glued to Marius. It didn’t move, but just stared as if waiting for something.

It was unnerving.

Marius’
gaze narrowed into a glare before he pulled it off of the ginger cat and turned his attention back to the house across the street.

It had been several days since the last time he’d looked upon it. The warlock had made some more changes to its facade, continuing to waste her enormous potential on piddly tasks such as home improvement. The M
ustang that had been in the car
port before was no longer there.

The force field remained, however. Whatever had kept him out the last few times he’d tried to enter was still around.
It surrounded the house like a thin cellophane wrapper,
iridescent
to him, invisible to all others.

The
house
sat on a
cul-de-sac in an older but quieter part of Salem. The rest of the lot around the house had been given over to landscaping that had seen better days.
All the better
, Marius thought as he felt his
newly absorbed power swirl to life within him. The more trees and shrubs there were around the house, the less noise the neighbors would hear.

He smiled a nasty smile and stepped off of the curb. The cat in the road lowered its head and its yellow eyes turned orange with inner light. It made a warning sound, low and long, and the night stopped to listen.

Marius glared at it some more, hesitated, and then raised a hand, intent on giving the ginger beast a taste of his new found powers. However, the cat’s warning meow turned into a hiss, and then
the lights on the street began to hiss as well. Marius looked up. One after another, the lights popped into darkness, the bulbs bursting. Glass sprinkled to the ground, tinkling across the sidewalk and asphalt in a shimmering waterfall.

The street went dark. When Marius looked back down, the cat was gone. It had
vanished. Into thin air.

Marius glanced back up at the house.
It
s lights had gone out as well. T
he animal was clearly not
mortal; he’d
somehow blown the electricity for half
the
block.
Marius felt his
teeth cle
nch
together, his jaw tight in irritation.
Fucking cat.
When he was finished here, he would hunt down and kill twenty of them.
It would make him feel better.
But for now, he had bigger fish to fry.

With a determined pace, Marius continued across the street. As he drew nearer, he picked up the sound of voices in conversation. He stopped when he reached the rose bushes along the walk of the warlock’s yard and listened.

Two men, one woman.
One of the voices was familiar to him.
Very
familiar.

Rage shot
through
the blue of his eyes, turning them first to a muted amber color and then into red.
Thanatos
was in the house
. The
Phantom King
.

Marius inwardly swore, his blood boiling, his head spinning. What the
hell
was that man doing
here
? Didn’t he have a really important job to do somewhere else? Wasn’t he almost
never
in the mortal plane?
Marius’
jaw began to ache and his head throbbed. Thanatos was honing in on his territory. It was the only explanation. He must have come across the warlock at some point and liked what he saw. He couldn’t blame him; she was a pretty thing with all of that red hair and those perfect lips. They were kissable lips – they were
fuckable
lips. He fully planned to have her kneeling in front of him, her throat wrapped tightly around his cock before he was done draining her
of all of that glorious, dark magic
.

There was no way in
any
of the planes that
he was going to let Thane get to her first.

Marius’
hands
curled into fists.
If he attacked now, while the Phantom King was there, it would mean war. His pl
ace at the table of the 13
Kings would be forever revoked. He would become an outcast and all twelve of the others would actively hunt him down. D
’Angelo would no doubt
see to
that.

This was it. Either he believed in the power of his new and dark ally enough to sever his old ties here and now, or he admitted to himself that he’d made the wrong choice and sided with the wrong man. It was zero hour.

Marius stood in the darkness and gazed up at the three-story mansion for another three seconds. And with that, he called forth the power he’d been given
. Above, in the deepening night sky, clouds began to form and swirl together. The stars were blotted from the sky.

And a thousand miles away, an imprisoned goddess frowned in her sleep as a little bit more of her magic was drained away.

Chapter
Fourteen

Thane waited while the former detective got himself back under control. Lazarus’s eyes were now glowing with Akyri light and probably looked the way his attacker’s had several weeks ago. He also looked shocked. And scared.