Lord King (The King)

Ashamed, I looked away. I didn’t like how King could hear my thoughts. But I hated how he used them against me.

He grabbed my chin, forcing me to meet his icy pale gray gaze. “I’m not worth your heart, Jeni.”

“Only, you don’t dictate what I feel.” Neither did I. When it came to him, my heart had a will of its own.

His gaze softened. “Then you understand when I say my heart is bound only to Mia. So, if I must die to see her or our son, Arch, again, so be it.”

Arch was his infant son, killed twenty-five years ago by the Seers on the same night they took Mia’s life. Why did they do that?

According to King, he’d had the bright idea of resurrecting the most ancient and powerful of our kind and then forced them to work as his supernatural thugs so he could keep control over Ten Club.

What was Ten Club? Basically, King’s monster.

Try to imagine a group of extremely powerful, corrupt billionaires with sick, dark fetishes and an unchecked lust for power. Some members purely wanted to be above the law, but others became bored over time and turned to the occult.

Ten Club was a sort of group insurance plan. They each paid an annual fee of ten billion dollars into a pool managed by King, and with that, he bought them complete immunity. He offered favors, bought off judges and politicians, or had people disappear. Whatever it took to protect the members, who in turn could kidnap, kill, entrance, enslave, rape, torture, or do anything their hearts desired. Sick.

Of course, the Seers didn’t appreciate being brought back from the dead or being enslaved by King to help him keep Ten Club in check. It all ended badly. They rose up. He killed the Seers, but a few got away first and took out their revenge on his family. Their infant son and King’s pregnant wife.

Sad. So sad. A Greek tragedy if I’d ever heard one.

What got me was how Seers were female healers who supposedly brought balance to the world. So why kill King’s family and not him? Especially because Mia had been pregnant with Ariadna, a Seer. Pretty damn messed up, if you asked me.

Now Ariadna’s soul or light or whatever they called it was a young woman, living with my sisters in Seer-land. I wondered what growing up there instead of here had been like. The two worlds were completely different.

“You are correct,” King said, listening to me rattle on inside my head. “Ariadna was robbed of her human experience due to my poor choices, which is why I do not deserve her devotion. She’s hope where there is none to be had.”

None? What about me, King? I’m here to help you die when it kills me to think of a world without you in it.

King stared but said nothing.

I inhaled slowly. “All I’m asking is that you stop dismissing me. I can’t help how I feel any more than you can help wanting to see Mia again.” I shook my head, my wet sloppy hair sliding across my shoulders. “I’m here to help you redeem yourself and find your way back to your family.” That was what the Seers had asked me to do, and I was going to do it.

He opened his mouth to speak just as a menacing shadow darted across the lobby and began circling him.

Oh god! I stepped back toward the door, my neck and arms exploding with goosebumps. I’d seen the shadow before, right after I met King. At first I thought it’d been my imagination, but then I found out it was his tortured soul detached from his body. It was every piece of King that didn’t belong to the world of the living, yet his flesh and bone could draw on those powers. That was how he’d taken out Ten Club. He’d summoned them and let his shadow loose. They never saw it coming.

The shadow zipped past my head, leaving an ice-cold trail across my damp cheek.

“My soul is eager to return to its owner,” King said calmly, his eyes following the thing around the room. “It is anxious to put an end to the Seers’ punishment.”

This is so fucking weird. “Then let’s get started. What’s first?” I couldn’t get rid of that thing fast enough. Not that it followed me around all hours of the day, but late at night, when the air was still and everything was quiet, sometimes I felt it lurking. Creepy as hell.

“First, we hunt down the three remaining Ten Club members,” said King. “Then we go from there to try to correct some of my misdeeds.”

“I’m sorry, but what? You never mentioned anyone survived.”

“Three members did not answer my summons for the meeting that night and still roam free.”