The Magic King Read online

  “Help! Please. Please!” I screamed, recognizing in some small corner of my mind that I was completely consumed by fear. There was nothing rational inside of me in that moment. The only thing I knew to do was to swim, but the more I struggled to move, the harder it felt. I grew more and more tired, flailing and kicking. Panic had set in completely.

  No matter how hard I tried to move away, I was rooted to this very spot in what now was a lake of water. It was so dark that the terror of being confined in the darkness only added to my consuming panic.

  Mama and Papa would weep if something happened to me, and they would never forgive me for sneaking away this way. Why have I done this? Why am I so stupid? My splashing was growing weaker and weaker. I wasn’t a good swimmer. I never had been. What a fool I’d been to go there.

  “You’re a thief!” the watery female cried out.

  I shook my head. “No. Non! I am not. I did not see anybody here—” Suddenly a powerful wave gripped me and dragged me under. I screamed watery bubbles as I lost the breath I should have held.

  Dear gods above, I am going to drown. This crazy siren is going to drown me. All around me I heard the chilling echo of her voice.

  “Thieves deserve nothing more than Davy Jones’s locker.” The watery thread of her voice echoed with a chilling fanaticism all around me. Her laughter was insane, terrifying. It turned my blood to ice, and the water that held me fast didn’t budge even an inch.

  I was going to have to breathe. My lungs were on fire because there was nothing in there anymore, no air at all. I had seconds, if that, before I would be forced to breathe in, and then I would die. I’d drown for a stupid pearl.

  The first twitches took me, and I wanted to scream, but I didn’t dare.

  The chilling sounds of her laughter would haunt me into the afterlife, I was sure of it. But then I was rushed to the surface just as I was forced to take that final breath that would seal my doom. My head broke the surface at the very same instant I began to inhale, so I sucked in only a little bit of water, but it was enough to make me hack and sputter and swear that I would never, ever again steal from her.

  She was a tower of female water standing before me, with a cruel, cutting smile on her face as she said, “No, human. You will not. You have no idea what you nearly took from me today. You will pay for what you’ve done.”

  “Please don’t drown me again,” I sobbed, pleading miserably for her to spare me. “Please. It hurts.”

  She laughed, and the sound was chilling and wicked, making me shiver. “I will not drown you. That type of punishment only lasts for such a little while. You are a thief, little girl, and thieves deserve what they get.”

  Suddenly the water enveloped me, and when I gasped in surprise, I expected to drown in it, but I could breathe in that water. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. The water shoved itself down my throat, bloating my belly until I felt I might burst from it. I screamed, but no sounds came out. The water boiled through my veins, cooking me from the inside. The pain was excruciating. At any second, my heart would stop beating from the shock. Why had I gone after that stupid pearl?

  “Now you too shall know what it means to be haunted for your greatest treasure. Never again can you know peace. Never again will you try to harm another. So mote it be...”

  All at once the cage of water exploded outward, violently thrusting me through the air and out of the cave entrance. I landed with my face upon the shore, hacking and sputtering the disgusting water out of my mouth as I trembled and shook, wondering what it was the siren had just done to me.

  “Girl! Girl!” A man’s voice I did not recognize called out to me. I felt sick and weak, but somehow I managed to push myself to my hands, groaning as fire and pain licked at every square inch of me. I felt different and weird, full and distended with a terrible kind of dark magic. I blinked, trying to tell myself that I was alive, that I was okay, that, for whatever reason, the siren had shown me mercy after all.

  Then I looked up, and I noticed that the man—who was youngish, with a thick mop of curly brown hair and dark brown eyes—had stopped moving and was just looking at me with a wild, crazed expression on his face.

  I spit the sand out of my mouth and tried to stand, but I felt as weak as a baby chick. My muscles trembled in violent spasms. Deep down, I knew the siren had done something to me, and I was terrified that I might never be the same again.

  Do I look like a monster? Did she transform my outward shell so that I’m a hideous demon-hybrid creature now? I wiggled my toes and my fingers. I still had my limbs, but something was very, very wrong. I could feel it. I knew it. I just didn’t know what or how.

  The stranger stood upon the shore, but he was still several yards back. His intense look only grew more and more terrifying. And he too was shaking violently. “You’re... you’re a...” he mumbled, but stopped himself short as a terrible sort of groan spilled off his tongue. He grabbed at his stomach. “Oh no,” he whispered, shaking his head even as the vein in his neck throbbed with the stiffening of his muscles.

  I heaved for breath, scared out of my mind, but not for myself this time. Finally, I was able to make my way to my knees, and I reached out to him. “What’s, what’s the—”

  “Stop! Stop!” He wanted nothing to do with me. It was as though he wanted to be anyplace but here. But rather than leave, he walked toward me. His footsteps were plodding at first, but growing more and more sure with each step. Madness burned in his eyes and the thrill of true and horrifying fear slid down my tongue.

  For some reason, I chose that moment to finally look down at myself, expecting to find that I was a monster. It wasn’t a monster I saw, but the lambent glow of pearlescent flesh so alluring, so tempting that even I caught my breath at the sight of it.

  I heard the male getting closer and closer, and suddenly I recalled a story Papa had told me only a few months ago about a female, a human, also called a siren. She wasn’t able to manipulate water the way the fae sirens could. The human sirens were cursed to be the physical embodiment of pure lust and desire.

  They were made of a lust so potent and destructive that it drove anyone around them to madness with their desire. They would do anything at all to have them. They would rape or kill. It didn’t matter. The only way to tell a human siren apart from a normal woman was the strangely attractive glow of her lambent skin.

  I screamed, horror and understanding dawning at once. I was too paralyzed with fear to move. And then the male was on me, shoving me into the sand beneath, gripping my arms as he trapped my legs with his.

  Finally, I snapped out of my stupor. I fought him like a devil. I clawed and kicked, but he was overwhelming in strength. Burning with shame and rage at what had been done to me, I sobbed when he kissed my neck.

  He muttered horrible words in between the sucks and kisses. “Forgive me.”

  “I’m not strong enough.”

  “You must die. You must die. You are a monster now. But oh, dear goddess, you’re gorgeous...”

  Sickened by his words, fat tears spilled out the corners of my eyes. I raked at his face. I screamed and slapped and kicked at him. I did anything I could do to try and get him off me. But no matter what I did, the male overwhelmed me, repeatedly whispering that he was sorry, even as he disrobed, and even as I felt the hard length of something prod at my inner thigh.

  Just as I was sure that I would never again be the same, that after that day I would rather die than live on, I heard a howl the likes of which I’d never heard before in my life. It was throaty and full of demonic fury. And for just a wild, strange second, I could have sworn I heard my name rumble in the thunder. “Shayera.”

  Though the blood ran cold through my veins, the man above me did not stop. If anything, he seemed more frenzied and frantic to finish what he’d started. I was outside of myself, aware not of the man above me, but of the one stalking toward me with fury burning like coals through his blood red eyes.

  A moment later, the tall, dark
, and shadowed man gripped the male straddling me and lifted him high. Rage had twisted the shadow man’s face into such stark and raw wrath that all I could do was stare at him in utter and complete shock.

  There were no words exchanged, no declarations of war. The shadow man simply gripped the male by his throat and pulled. Blood, hot and wet and thick, splattered my face, my neck, and my chest. I jerked as I realized that, in less than a second, he’d killed the stranger with his bare hands.

  The shadow man stared down at me, breathing like a bellows and looking like he still wanted to kill or hurt something. His hands furled and unfurled, and long, wickedly curved black nails clacked as his fists opened and closed. In that suspended moment in time, I knew exactly who he was.

  The Man in Black.

  His blond hair was plastered in viscera red. His cheeks were covered in it too.

  “You’re a monster,” I said. I didn’t know why I’d said it. Maybe because that’s what Papa had always told me the man in black was. I was ashamed to admit, even in the safety of my own head, that it wasn’t the brutal killing of the other man that scared me. That wasn’t it at all. Truth was, I wasn’t even sure what I was feeling at that moment. Fear, but so much more too.

  I clutched at my chest, only just realizing that the male had torn my shirt in half and my chest was showing. The moment I noticed, the man in black must have too, because he shuddered, looking suddenly agonized.

  He turned to the side, opening and shutting his mouth and still clenching and unclenching his fists. What is happening to me? Why aren’t I screaming? Why aren’t I running away? Is this shock?

  I thought it might be. That other man had almost raped me, and the man in black had suddenly and violently slaughtered him in front of my eyes. I’d never seen anyone die before.

  It wasn’t just his death. It was the brutality of it that ate away at me. I looked at the crumpled body lying there where the dark man had tossed it away like garbage. I didn’t have to see his throat to recall with perfect clarity what had been done to him.

  That man had come because I’d called out to him. He’d come to save me. To help me. For just a second he’d been a savior to me, until he’d turned into the very same kind of monster he’d accused me of being. I’d led him to his death.

  This is all my fault. Every bit of it.

  The tears finally came in great, big torrents then and I couldn’t stop them.

  The man in black turned toward me with a wildness in his eyes. He was going to kill me too. I just knew it. Oh my gods.

  All I could do was curl in on myself, wrap my arms around my middle, and sob as I cried out long and low for “Mama.” Just one word, her name, but I chanted it like a prayer. “Mama. Mama. Mama.” I wanted to tell her how sorry I was for being so stupid. How sorry I was for hurting her this way. For what the man in black was about to do to me.

  But then he howled. The sound chilled my soul, turning it to ice in my chest, and I looked up, swiping at my cheeks. The dark man was looking down on me with tortured, glowing eyes. I felt his pain like a blade to my chest. I sucked in a shaky breath as the fire of it ripped right through me, causing my tears to flood down even harder.

  “Carrots,” he cried. Then he jerked, and the broken man looked suddenly terrified by what he’d said.

  I shook my head, so bloody confused. I just wanted to go home and to wake up from this nightmare.

  With another echoing cry that made all the fine hairs on my arms stand on end, he turned on his heels and ran, as though Hades’s killing hounds nipped at his heels.

  A second later, I was alone again. The body of the dead man was gone, and only a depression in the grass remained. Maybe the man in black took him away. Would he bury him? Eat him? I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. All I knew was he was a very bad man—a terrible, deadly man who had let me live.

  I couldn’t stop the tears. I sat there for a long time, alone, battered, bloody, and horribly ashamed of what had been done to me. Finally, I sensed that I was no longer alone.

  When I looked up, I spotted Prince. He whimpered in a broken, high-pitched whine from where he hid in the shelter of a scrub bush. I finally got to my feet and ran to him, sobbing openly, grieving for what had been stolen from me that day. I don’t remember getting to his side. I don’t remember wrapping my arms around his shaggy neck. I don’t remember riding on his back toward home. But the next thing I knew, I was on my porch steps, curled in on myself, gripped with heartache, crying the sorts of sobs that came from deep within. I wept, full of pain and the knowledge that I’d just lost something vital to me.

  I’d lost my innocence.

  Prince whined and wailed, and finally the front door opened. Uncle Kelly’s big, strong arms wrapped around me, and he hissed the second he touched me. Prince growled and snarled, but I didn’t know why, because Prince had always liked my Uncle. Uncle Kelly shook violently, but he took me inside. Only once we got in there did he drop me onto the couch and run off as though I’d burned him.

  Then I felt another set of arms, softer, but strong and sure, around me.. Briley whispered to me in his sweet voice, “It’s okay now, Shay Shay. You’re okay.”

  I curled into his strong chest. Prince never growled at him. Briley picked me up as if I weighed nothing, and he took me straight to my room. He sat me in my bed, holding me until Mama and Papa came back.

  In my head, I heard the devil’s voice repeating one sentence over and over. The same husky female voice who’d told me to take the pearl at the beach said, “It had to be, Carrots, it had to be.”

  Chapter 5

  Rumpel

  I should have been there. I damn well should have bloody been there.

  The raw fury I felt was nothing compared to the pain boiling me up alive. Seeing Shayera that way—broken, weeping, and clinging to the battered edges of her clothes with that bastard rutting over the top of her—hurt too badly to bear.

  I choked on my breaths, fighting the urge to howl and rage and rampage through the hamlet, killing any and all men. No matter their innocence, all men were her enemy now. Even me.

  How the hell could this have happened? I thought bitterly. Dropping my head into my hands, I leaned against the siding of her home, shuddering and fighting the beast within me. I couldn’t give into this mania, and I knew it.

  I was hanging on by a thread.

  I should have known, though. I’d felt the tremors, the disturbance in fate’s fingers, all night long. And then Giles had called for me because Euralis had been deadly sick. It was the time of the transformation, a kind of puberty for Demone males that forced a painful and terrible change upon us. Euralis had already experienced it once in his previous lifetime, and it’d been the very last thing on my mind. I hadn’t expected it to happen again, but I damned well should have.

  I seethed.

  When he got ill, my worrying about the strings of fate ceased. I’d been so sure the unease I’d been feeling the weeks leading up to it had been tied to that and nothing else, but it’d been Fate clearing the way, taking me out, keeping her family away, keeping her alone, and forcing her down her destined path.

  I felt my face grow hot. When the male had touched her, I’d felt a ripple through my soul. Her emotions wracked me, tearing me asunder. Her adrenaline and her terror had nearly choked me. I’d tethered myself to Shayera forever many years ago, when she’d been only a baby. It’d been a way for me to be able to keep guard over her and to keep her safe in case everything else failed. The tethering didn’t come without cost, and even so, I’d almost been too late to save her.

  Again, I saw the image of that male, rutting and sweating and kissing her neck with greedy sucking motions. What if he’d raped her? What if I’d gotten there just a second later? What then?

  Grinding my teeth, I opened my eyes and looked wildly about for something— anything—to hurt. I spied a tree several yards away and ran to it. I growled, drew my arm back, and punched it with all my might. A mighty crack and
groan splintered the air. The scent of my blood wafted under my nose, but only I noticed the gaping cut in my knuckles when I flexed my fist .

  I shuddered. I should have been there. I should have known. Euralis should have been home by then, sleeping and healing, but the moment he’d learned of Shayera’s fate, he’d forced himself to go to her. In two days’ time, he’d be hale again and no longer weakened by the transformation. It would be as though nothing at all had ever happened to him. Shayera, would never be the same again.

  I knew, though, what this would cost for him and the pain he’d feel. I’d seen the flash of agony in his eyes when he’d learned what had been done to her in his absence. Demone loved hard, with everything that was in us, so what’d been done to Shayera would be excruciating to him. He’d feel like a failure, just as I did. My heart ached at what had been done, which could never be undone.

  It’d taken hours of Prince and her family cuddling her before she’d calmed and quieted. I stood beneath her window, draped in shadow, feeling wild and desperate and aching to do something—anything—to make it right. But there was no making it right.

  Once she finally fell asleep, I forced Prince away from her with a short, sharp whistle, undetectable to human ears. He needed to rest. He still needed to heal from his own trauma of the night past.

  My son would never forgive himself for what had been done to her, and neither could I.

  Alone and full of impotent rage, I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that standing there and doing nothing was unacceptable too. There were words that needed saying and there was no one that could stop me from saying them.

  I called Genesis to me with a snap of my fingers, and she arrived with a throaty, rumbling growl less than a minute later, after cutting through a travel tunnel like a hot knife through butter. Marching toward her, I patted her chrome tank just once. She purred for me. Sitting astride my silver steed, I was soon sailing across the navy-draped sky.