The Goblin King (25 page)

The empty ache in Lalura’s chest intensified.

“We got our hair cut, we went to a play, we had dinner – Thai food – and then she went home. The next morning, my mother was shot by a former client. A man she couldn’t keep out of jail. But he was only given fifteen years, and grudges last longer than that.”

She stopped turning her hair now, and Lalura saw the firelight from the heart
h reflected on the tear that escaped Diana’s storm-filled eyes. “This,” she said, lifting the hair a little and at last meeting Lalura’s gaze. “
This
is my final moments with my best friend in the world.” She dropped the hair and turned back to look out the window. “And now it’s falling out.”

Lightning struck somewhere
far, far away, barely visible across the vast distance of the realm. “I’m losing it. I’m losing
everything
.”

Lalura slowly turned away
to once again face the fire. It crackled and popped nervously under her gaze. She looked closer.

“I see,” she said softly.

The fire settled down at once, pretending to be nothing more than a regular fire.

“You can show your face little one. Your queen needs your support now more than ever.”

The fire jumped a few times, and a face did indeed appear. “I thought she could help,” the small fire elemental said. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh?” asked Lalura. She could hear Dian
a move on the window seat behind her. There was a shuffling, and then the padding of bare feet drawing nearer.

“I led her to the great room thinking she could help the king. She’d helped all those xenobe goblins. She could save dying animals and humans. I thought….” The elemental wavered, disappeared behind a shower of sparks as the logs shifted, and then slowly came back into focus. “It’s my fault,” he said. “If she hadn’t gone to him, he n
ever would have spoken his own name.” If fire could weep, it did so now. “He would still be here.”

Lalura wasn’t sure whether or not wha
t the elemental was saying about Diana’s appearance during the fight was true. But at the moment, she didn’t really care. Something else the living flame had said struck Lalura, setting the wheels spinning in her head.

Her mind clicked into place, the cogs of her ancient
mental clock shifting and fitting like puzzle pieces slotted to one another. She sat up straighter.

Diana’s footsteps stopped beside the chair.

Lalura turned to face her, reaching out to take the woman’s hand. “You helped the xenobes?” Everyone in the world of supernatural circles knew about the xenobe goblins. They were the most dangerous, most miserable fae monsters the fates ever drew with messy pen and could not erase – all claw and shark-like toothy maw and spirit mean from remorseless pain.

Diana nodded.

“How?” Lalura asked.

Diana
frowned, and then licked her dry lips. “I… just healed them. They were only hurting, like everything else.”

“Even Damon could not control the xenobes,” said Lalura. “You’re…
.” And it hit her. “You’re more powerful than him.”

In the game of chess
, the queen is always more powerful than the king.

For a warlock to resurrect someone, he must be more powerful than the one who’s been killed….

“By the gods.”

Lalura
’s mind rewound, playing scenes from recent memory. She had not too long ago been forced to lend her power to Jason Alberich so that he could resurrect Katherine Dare, wife of Byron Caige. Katherine had been an ex-Hunter and the Curse Breaker, no ordinary werewolf, if there
was
such a thing. And Jason hadn’t yet become king. He hadn’t yet been a warlock powerful enough to resurrect someone so important on his own. So he’d taken magic from Lalura, and together they’d brought Katherine back.

“By the fickle fae gods,” she repeated, leaning heavily on her cane as she got to her feet. Her old heart was racing as she turned to fully face the young queen. “My dear,” she said. “
You
are more powerful than a king.” She laughed – she couldn’t help it. The sound filled the great room with the noise of dried leaves skittering across an autumn floor. The fire in the hearth leapt and crackled, straining to listen, aching to hear her speak the words.

Diana was a healer. She was also a seer. And now she was a queen.

“
You
,” she continued as her grin almost painfully creased her own weathered, ancient face, and her hands tightly clutched Diana’s between them, “can help bring Damon Chroi back.”

Chapter Twenty-something

No pressure,
she thought as she gave a surreptitious look around at the multitude of people who had come to see her and the Warlock King perform this miracle.

They’d passed through the land of the arborean goblins to get here. They were the goblins who lived in the t
rees. The lights shimmering from the tree house windows had been turned to black flame in honor of the kingdom’s loss. Black ribbons by the billions had been magicked onto branches and flapped in the breeze.

The cobble
d stone road that passed through each portion of the realm was bordered in black stones and black banners that waved forlornly. Even the sea that edged the mighty kingdom so far in the distance had turned the color of liquid tar.

And where Diana and her companions gathered in a field near the base of a waterfall, the somber color surrounded them at every turn.
The rain water that normally poured from the cliffs so high above, thundering to the ground in white-capped glory, was now as black as the mourning oceans. The flowers in the field, all manner of wild blooms, had darkened to take on the shade of the late Damon Chroi’s beautiful sable hair.

The procession
had moved without a word, and though lightning ringed the kingdom, a show of celestial agony the clouds could no longer hide, the sky in its deference continued to hold back its tears. Diana walked beside the casket, which had been carefully created of pure emerald. Through this precious green crystal, she could see the blurred and faint features of her lover.

He would stay like this
forever, they’d told her. The fae did not decompose. They simply slept for all eternity, as beautiful in death as they had been in life.

It was fortunate. Because she’d also been told that resurrection was so much easier when the body was fresh.

Now, everyone who would not be involved in the complicated spell stepped back and afforded the others room. They seemed to be holding a collective breath, and Diana couldn’t blame them. She was short of breath herself.

The emerald coffin was
released to levitate three feet off the ground at the center of the black bloomed field. Several feet away rested a round stone platform, atop which had been piled an enormous stack of kindling and wood.

A gentle breeze brushed through the ebon petals
of the field that stretched around them as the Seelie and Unseelie kings each approached the casket, placing their palms against it. The coffin’s lid shimmered away first. When it was gone, the sides shimmered out of existence as well, leaving Damon Chroi resting in death atop a floating sheet of pure gemstone.

Diana didn’t need to be
signaled or told. Her feet carried her to his side automatically. As she neared him, her eyes roving over the curves and angles of his sleeping face, she caught the scent of rain. Still. Even in death.

Lalura Chantelle took her place at Damon’s other side, joined there by the Warlock King, Jason Alberich. Then the old witch turned to the small crowd and nodded at Dannai Caige, who had been carrying a lit torch.

Dannai lowered the torch to eye level and spoke to it. “That’s your cue, Pi. Call the others. We need a big one, please.”

The small fire elemental dancing on the end of the torch grinned so big, Diana could even see it f
rom where she stood. “I’m on it!”

Dannai lowered the torch to the prepared sticks and logs.
The flame leapt from the torch to the kindling and disappeared beneath the wood. A puff of smoke escaped the canopy of wood and dissipated into the air.

The crowd watched the wood in silence. For several long seconds, nothing happened.

And then Dannai leapt back, startled to the point of stumbling into her husband as the entire enormous stack of flammable material combusted, exploding outward before shrinking back to the size of a large bonfire. The clearing was washed in radiating warmth. Diana could see various new faces swimming in the depths of the conflagration, at least three dozen of them. Perhaps more.

Pi had done his part.
The fire elementals would lend not only their heat and flame to the spell, but their innate supernatural power as well.

Lalura turned away from the fire and faced Diana. “Are you ready?”

She nodded. She’d been told what would happen and what to do. She couldn’t really believe that she was more powerful than a man who had lived for thousands of years and ruled for nearly as long. But whatever power she did possess, she was willing to give away. For this.

Lalura nodded at Jason Alberich, who pulled a medallion off his neck and over his head. It was an emerald shard on a leather chord. This, he placed deferently
upon Lalura’s open palm.

“Put it around his neck, dear,”
Lalura instructed Diana.

Diana moved closer, picked up the pendant, and spread the string wide. As she leaned in toward her fallen lover
, Avery the Seelie King lifted Damon’s head. Diana draped the medallion over him and straightened when the emerald lay squarely in the center of his broad chest. An odd feeling washed over Diana. It was almost electric, as if she were entering a static field of some kind.

Jason Alberich closed his eyes.
The clearing grew very still. Even the breeze died down. The bonfire’s crackling lessened. Not a single person gathered made an audible sound. Everyone could sense something coming. They were listening – watching.

The electric, static sensation Diana had
intensified. The hairs on her arms began to stand on end. Her nerve endings buzzed. The bonfire began to crackle furiously, its living embers flying as if harassed by a wicked breeze. The flowers swayed in a wind that suddenly came out of nowhere. That same wind ripped through the low-hanging clouds, piercing vicious holes in them to reveal the full moon overhead.

It shone brightly into the clearing and Jason opened his eyes. They were no longer
the green Diana had noticed they were before; now they glowed red as stoplights and hot as the fire elementals that danced and swooned nearby.

He reached
toward her over Damon’s body.

Diana glanced at Lalura, who nodded. Diana took Jason’s hands.

His lips parted – and he spoke a single, powerful word.

The fae ground
shook beneath their feet. Diana struggled to keep her balance, her hands firmly gripped in Jason’s. She placed her elbows on the edge of the floating emerald table. It was the only thing not moving. Around her, the kings and their queens drew together, leaning on one another to stay upright.

Diana
watched Damon’s face, waiting....

The ground continued to tremble.

At length, there was a popping sound and a sucking sensation, followed by a sonic boom that erupted somewhere in the air above Damon’s body and traveled across the group and surrounding field, rippling over them like water.

The bonfire several feet away coiled in on itself.
The sudden pulling away of its heat and light drew everyone’s attention. Diana watched as it condensed, shrinking but becoming brighter, and she couldn’t help but wonder what was happening to the fire elementals inside. They were condensing, like a pulsar star.

The fire
grew tighter and brighter until finally, it was reduced to a spinning stream of blue-white light, whirling like a lightning tornado. It gave off so much heat, everyone had to move back. Only Diana and Jason remained, still holding hands over Damon’s body at the center of a growing circle of spectators.

The
vortex hovered for a moment above the charred sticks and logs of the now dead bonfire and then shot toward the emerald shard that lay waiting on Damon’s chest.

It entered the gemstone as if through a funnel,
all wind and fury that sent Diana’s hair flying. The emerald began to glow. The light grew brighter until it literally became too bright to watch any longer.

“Shut your eyes!” Lalura ordered
, her old but charismatic voice carrying over the cacophony of the wind and heat produced by the fire tornado.

Diana
knew the old witch was talking to everyone but her. Diana, alone, kept her eyes open; she was blinded as she looked on. And that was when she felt it, the drain that occurred when she healed an animal or sick human. It began small, but grew, pulling energy from her fingers and toes, her leg muscles, her arms, her abdomen – and finally, her heart.

Her pulse skipped and slowed.
Her legs gave out and the entirety of her weight was now on the emerald casket bottom that held Damon, but still she refused to look away. The light seared through her, scorching red, branding her mind and her very soul. She thought, just for a moment, that she felt something rip open deep inside of her, torn asunder so that she could give up the reserves of power she held there.