King of Darkness (5 page)

“So.” She cleared her throat. “Do I call you… your highness?”

He almost collapsed as relief flooded his insides. She believed him, or at least she was willing to humor him, and thank goodness. There was so much he needed to say. First though… “My name is Thad. Call me Thad.”

Isabel pressed her lips together, chewing them nervously while she studied him, eyes narrowed in apparent concentration. “Okay, Thad.” Her sigh was thoughtful and breathy, and she rubbed at a deep wrinkle in her forehead. She didn’t seem to hide her worry well. “So what’s going on here, exactly? What do you want with me?”

Here
we
go
. Thad cleared his throat and leaned toward her. “In the royal family, at each birth, an Oracle is brought in to bless the baby and, I dunno, predict its future or some such shit. When I was born, the Oracle predicted that I was destined to meet a mate who would lead with me a century later. And until then, I would not come into my power. The Oracle marked me so I would know how to find my mate.” He brought his arm forward, sliding his sleeve up to reveal the unique scar. “It’s the same scar you have on your back. I believe that…” He swallowed. “You are my destined mate.”

Alexia chuckled. Isabel, whose lips were parted in an understandable show of incredulity, flashed a dirty look in her friend’s direction. “You can’t be serious.”

You
have
no
idea
how
serious
I
am, and how badly I wish I wasn’t.
“Look, I know this kind of a big bomb to drop—”

“Wait. No. This is not just ‘kind of a bomb.’” Isabel lowered her voice slightly, despite the fact that the after-hours crowd had all but cleared the street. “First of all, I’m nearly half your age, so I didn’t even exist when your supposed destiny thing happened. That mark on my back is a cattle brand. I got it on a dare, like, forever ago. It’s probably just a coincidence.

“How do you know that you simply never will come into your power? Some of us don’t get one. Just because you’re royalty doesn’t make you immune to drawing the short straw.” Alexia’s continued tittering capped off Isabel’s tirade.

Thad turned to Lee and then Alexia. “I’m sorry, but could you guys give us a minute? This would be easier without an audience.” And without Lee’s thinly veiled coughs of displeasure and Alexia’s schoolgirl giggles.

“Sure, buddy.” Lee turned to Alexia. “C’mon, I’ll buy you a drink or something.”

“Sweet!” Alexia jumped from her seat and grabbed Lee’s arm, pulling him along. Lee looked like he was being marched off to the gallows.

“Just be right over there if you need anything, T.”

In spite of himself, Thad chuckled at their retreat. “I don’t think Lee’s ever been dragged off by a female like that before.”

“Yeah, Lexi’s really something else.”

“So what’s the deal with you and her? How’d you wind up being so tight with a human?”

Isabel smiled. “Just did. Kind of getting off topic, don’t you think?”

They were. Thad leaned in more, legs apart, elbows on his thighs. “Look,” he said. “I get that this sounds pretty insane, but believe me when I say I’ve got better things to do with my time than make up stuff like this. If I didn’t think there was something to it, I wouldn’t have been combing half the country looking for you.

“I thought it was all a crock of shit too, ya know?” He sat back up and studied her face for a second. Her expression was blank and her mouth was slack again, like she couldn’t quite process what he was saying. But his jaw was tight and his blood pounded in his ears with the urgency of what still remained to be said. So he kept going.

“The Oracle you asked about is long dead. My parents—both of them—are also dead. I am close to a century old, and I have no power whatsoever. When word gets out about that factoid, it’s gonna put a crack in the ice. My experience and training up to this point have been completely theoretical. I’m running out of time to officially announce my ascension, and our race
needs
to have faith in its leader.

“We are down to tens of thousands, Isabel.
Thousands.
On a planet of billions of humans. We work damn hard to keep the communities protected from wizard attacks, but if the folks get scared, they might scatter. And if they scatter…” He closed his eyes and shook his head slowly. Jammed his fingers into his hair. The cement mixer in his stomach started up again.

“If they scatter, the wizards are gonna be able to pick them off easier than a shotgun-toting psycho at the top of a clock tower. We won’t be able to protect them.” By the time he came up for air, his face was burning hot and his head threatened to split wide open.

Isabel remained silent, her expression unchanged. Had none of that gotten through to her? Thad pressed his lips together for a moment, then pulled his chair closer and got right in her face so that she would have no choice but to hear him. Really hear him.

“I’m not asking you to believe, Isabel. I’m just asking you not to dismiss me yet. Just give me a shot. Are you willing to do that much, Isabel?”

***

“Selena! What were you doing out of the room?”

Tyra gave her most reassuring smile to the petite Hispanic woman who had spoken. The woman now stood before Tyra, hand over her heart and sleep-mussed hair shooting in all directions like a mad scientist, in the doorway of the tiny room that was her temporary residence at the Ash Falls Interfaith Shelter.

Tyra released the small hand of the woman’s daughter, whom she’d found wandering the halls. Again. The girl stepped forward reluctantly with the guilty smile of a second grader who knew she had been caught doing wrong but had no appreciation of how dangerous her actions had been.

Selena was suddenly very interested in the worn, rust-colored carpet that lined the otherwise bare hallway of the women’s wing. “Felt funny. Couldn’t sleep.”

“You have to stay with me, Selena. I was freaking out when I found you were gone!” Mom’s eyes swung over to Tyra. Relief shone brightly in them, despite the weak lighting. “Thank you so much for bringing her back.”

“No problem, Lisa. I was just heading out when I found her.” Tyra squatted down to meet the eight-year-old’s gaze head-on. “Listen to your mother, Selena. It’s very dangerous to be out by yourself. You never know who you might run into.”

Or
what.
She’d been a bit terrified herself to discover the child loitering outside her office. For weeks now, Tyra had felt an uneasy prickle at the base of her skull. Someone or something was watching the shelter. She wasn’t feeling the distinct sock-you-in-the-gut terror and nausea usually caused by wizard vibes, but still the feeling was concerning. Anything from a wizard to an angry ex or a dealer looking to get paid could be out there, and Selena had been just wandering around, barefoot, unguarded, and completely oblivious.

“You were up all by yourself too, Miss Tyra.”

Tyra stood and smiled. “But I have magic powers to protect me from bad things that go bump in the night, Selena.” She winked at the girl.

The girl grinned. “Will I have magic powers someday, Miss Tyra?”

Tyra lifted her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Maybe someday. Who knows?” The girl’s mother laughed and herded her nightgown-clad daughter inside their room.

“Thank you, Miss Tyra. You should get some sleep yourself, huh? It’s almost morning already.”

Tyra gave a tiny good-bye wave and headed back to her office, doing a quick check to ensure that the grimy hallway was otherwise empty. They ran on a skeleton staff at night, but the relative safety didn’t slow her heart rate. It was always good to be sure. She stretched her senses, feeling around for bad mojo, but oddly enough, everything seemed quiet tonight.

She opened the door to her office, which was dark except for the warm, amber glow of her cell phone display. As she grabbed the phone off the clunky, old schoolteacher desk, it buzzed joyfully in her hand to indicate a new text message:
Think we found her. Will let U know asap.

Lee.

“Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.” Tyra hugged the phone to her chest. Already there were rumblings in the community. Folks wanted to know why Thad hadn’t officially announced his ascension.

Due to a recent uptick in wizard sightings, many of the elder conservatives were pushing for a ban on interacting with humans or breaking up the vampire communities and moving out of the area in smaller groups. Some civilians were even talking about taking up arms against the wizards themselves, Michigan Militia-style. The whole situation had “impending shit storm” written all over it.

A drop of moisture escaped from Tyra’s eye. Her half brother might be inexperienced, but if he didn’t rise to the challenge of being king, the vampire race was in trouble. If he had managed to track down the mate that had supposedly been prophesied for him, then he could finally come the hell back from wherever he was and get down to business. There was still hope. She sniffed and swiped hastily at her wet cheek, turned the lock on her office door, and sent herself home in a scatter of tiny molecules.

Thad paced Isabel’s bedroom. The sparse furnishings—from the functional Ikea desk and the explosion of party flyers on the walls to the bed decked out in spaceship-themed sheets—all screamed college-kid chic. He compared it to his own home. His life.

Nothing about the two of them was similar.

Easing onto the bed, Thad ran his hands over a soft pillow that could have been made from the hide of that Wookie character in
Star
Wars
. He could just picture Isabel’s face resting upon its furry surface in the daytime. His chest tightened at the thought. There were stickers on the walls and ceiling, too. Little white glow-in-the-dark stars and planets that scattered all over like their own special solar system.

A bulletin board over the desk was packed full of pictures of Isabel and her human friend, Alexia, with their tongues out and their arms slung around each other. Most were taken in club settings like the one where he’d found her. She had a life here, and while not exactly prosperous by Thad’s standards, she seemed happy. How was he going to make this work?

Thad’s thoughts vanished into the ether as soon as Isabel stepped from the bathroom, having changed again into black yoga pants and a plain, white form-fitting T-shirt. Her skin was paler than his, peachy and freshly scrubbed of her heavy club makeup. A faint network of scars, which hadn’t been visible before, traversed her neck and cheek. While he ached to know more about them, his gut told him not to ask. Not yet. Vampires didn’t scar easily, so whatever had caused them… well, he and Isabel probably weren’t “there” yet.

That she had allowed him to come back to her apartment was a huge victory, even if he might have elicited the invitation by insinuating that he and Lee would be stuck without a place to hide from the sun.

A hint of lemon wafted in her wake, and Thad couldn’t help but suck it into his nostrils with gusto. His chest squeezed again, even as his dick swelled in appreciation. Whether because of lust or the prophecy or just an intense longing to do right by his kind, damned if he didn’t already want to fall on Isabel and wrap around her until there was no way to tell where she ended and he began.

Damn.
He had planned and he had strategized, but every time he looked at her, his mind went completely blank. He simply hadn’t expected this. How could he have? He’d expected his destined mate to be like the other females he’d known: desperate for the status of becoming queen. And yes, admittedly, someone well bred. Not that he was pretentious; he just hadn’t counted on a potential mate who looked at him as if he had sprouted horns when he suggested the idea of them being together.

“Do you mind if I put some music on?” She headed toward the desk.

He shook his head. “Not at all.”

As she leaned forward to pull up an MP3 player on her computer, Thad got a really good look at how well the yoga pants hugged her rear view. Her ass was practically begging for his attention while she bent at the waist to scroll through her playlist. After a few clicks, something he assumed to be techno started to come out of the computer speakers, but it was altogether different from what had been playing at the club. He cleared his throat and did his best to act casual as she straightened up and sat herself in a desk chair with one leg tucked beneath her.

“So what are we listening to?”

“It’s a set by Anthony Pappa. He’s, uh, he’s one of my favorite techno DJs. This is an old recording of a live show that he played in Mexico, I want to say…” Her eyes locked on Thad’s. He had no clue what she was talking about, and that must have showed. “I get the feeling this isn’t really your thing. I could put on something else—”

“No, no. It sounds good. I’ve just never really listened to this stuff. I’m more of a jazz man.”

“Ah.” She bit her lip and looked at her lap, picking invisible lint from her pant leg. An uncomfortable silence lingered, because yeah… it was a damn awkward situation. Thad didn’t figure it was the right time to blurt out how sexy he thought she was, or how he was terrified he’d be a shitty king if she didn’t save his ass.