The Warlock King (The Kings) (17 page)

An
d then, even more surprisingly, she couldn’t help but imagine
Jason
tied down instead.

Chloe blinked. Heat infused her neck and cheeks.

She turned away from the inner room to face the stairs, anger fanning her rising temperature. The magic inside of her crackled in her eardrums, reacting to her changing attitude.
I’m blushing? Seriously?

She felt like some ridiculous Victorian woman with the vapors.

I can handle this
, she told herself firmly. She turned around to face the room again.

But she proved herself wrong when she roughly put one foot in front of the other only to stop beside the adjustable wooden table, so immaculately kept, so perfectly designed – and found her gaze straying over the straps
. They were reinforced with steel bands, locked down with impossibly thick steel connectors, and looked strong enough to restrain a werewolf.

There’s no way he could escape from that if I got him into them
, she thought.

Then she
blinked again and stepped back.
What the hell is wrong with me?

“It’s this blasted magic!” she exclaimed softly. It was making her feel…
wicked
. No wonder warlocks behaved the way they did! No wonder Jason was so infamous!

“Oh, infamous my
ass
,” she hissed next. Once his secret had gotten out about all of this, the women of the supernatural world had fairly flocked to his proverbial doorstep. Her fellow Akyri had taken to trying to meet him, in fact, wanting to experience a session or two under what was supposed to be a very practiced hand.

He wasn’t infamous. He was
famous
.

Chloe put her face in her hands and forced herself to take several deep breaths. And then a few more.

Finally, after a few long minutes, she lowered her arms and straightened. She turned away from the table and began heading back toward the stairs, having decided that she’d seen enough. But after three steps, the firelight behind her reflected off something in the stone wall adjacent to the stairs.

Chloe frowned and stopped, tilting her head to the side. Rough stone didn’t normally re
flect light. She squinted as she stepped toward it.

The flash came again, this time reflecting the light in a quick horizontal line before disappearing. Chloe hurriedly closed the distance to the wall and leaned in. It was almost impossible to see, as the metal was painted to nearly perfectly match the color and texture of the stone. But there was enough of the paint worn off to give its location away.

Set within the stone was a small metal panel. It was about the size of a playing card and without decoration.

Chloe sensed no magic coming from it. There were no wards over it, no protection spells. If the panel was trapped, it was trapped the old fashioned way. Chloe raised her hands, fingers poised over the metal. She wondered if darts would come shooting out of the other walls. Spears, maybe?

Images from Disney’s
Indiana Jones
ride played in her mind.

With a mental eye-roll and a shake of her head, Chloe pressed her fingers against the panel. It immediately slid inward half an inch and then emitted a clearly audible
click
.

Chloe froze. She began counting the seconds that ticked away as nothing happened. On second number six, there was a scraping sound from behind her. It sounded as if it were coming from all the way across the room.

She spun around. The opposite wall was moving. Something small broke loose near the top and tumbled to the stone below. Then more pebbles broke free, skittering down the wall and across the ground. A cloud of dust was rising, coating the table and instruments nearest to the wall.

Chloe felt lightheaded. She heard her blood rushing through her eardrums, pulsing in riotous rhythm with her terrified heart. She was frozen to the spot, unable to do anything but wait to see what it was she’d just unleashed.

The rumbling raucous grew louder and deeper, the tremor of two very large objects scraping against one another. She watched with wide eyes as the entire wall slid slowly to the side, revealing a new and depthless dark beyond.

The sliding, scraping calamity went on for another few seconds before finally slowing and coming to a stop altogether. There was a remnant tumble of stray pebbles as the final loose fragments broke free and joined their predecessors on the now filthy ground.

Then all was silent.

D
ust clouded the air, causing her to cough. Chloe pulled the sleeve of her shirt down over her fingers. Then she stretched her fingers out, placing them over her mouth so she could breathe through the material as she pondered the yawning, open maw before her.

Chapter Twenty

There was no light switch for this room, nor did a hearth burst into flame when her foot crossed the threshold.
Instead, more than two-dozen candles alighted where they rested atop a desk, small tables and a bookshelf throughout the room.

The effect was beautiful, warm and inviting.
Chloe was pleasantly surprised.

She’d been expecting the worst.
The way the wall had slid to the side – all of that noise and all of that rubble – was reminiscent of some doom and gloom revelation in a treasure-hunting movie. So it was with a newfound appreciation and a deep sense of relief that she walked in to the now candle-lit room to find that it was nothing more than a small office.

Chloe moved slowly into the room, feeling as though she were setting foot into the most important part of the house, despite its outwardly humble appearance. She felt like an intruder…. As if she’d stumbled upon something no one at all was
ever supposed to see.

The room itself was quite small, especially considering the scale of the rooms in the rest of the house. It was also
for the most part unadorned. There were no plush rugs on the ground, no intricate tapestries draped along the carved stone walls.

Instead, there was a desk against one wall, medium-sized and composed of plain, dark stained chopping-block wood. An equally strong but nondescript chair was tucked partway beneath it. Atop the desk were a small number of various types of items.

Along another wall was a bookshelf containing at most a dozen books of different shapes, sizes, and colors. These rested haphazardly against one another, as there were no bookends to hold them in place.

The final large object in the room was a wooden chest. It had a latch, but no lock.

Chloe stood at the center of the office for a moment, considering her surroundings. Then she moved to the desk.

There were five things atop the desk: a baseball on a stand in a glass cube, a model rocket ship that looked as though it had been constructed out of toilet paper roll centers
and had the word “Stardust” scrawled across it in silver ink, a clear crystal fountain pen with dried ink around its nib, a stack of plain blank papers, and a sterling silver framed photograph of two infants. One of the babies was wrapped in pink, the other blue.

Chloe knew who the children were. They were The Healer’s twins. Most Akyri knew of them; their birth had been a rather momentous event. It had literally been felt in the magical ether, like a shockwave or a rippling after a stone has been tossed into an otherwise indistinct pond.

Chloe gently touched her fingertips to the frame. It was clear to her now that Jason himself had created this little hideaway just off his “dungeon.” He was the one who had hidden it so carefully away, tucking it inside the shadow of something that was sure to gain much more attention should his mansion ever be invaded. No one would think to look past the objects in the other room.

Jason was clever.

Chloe turned away from the photograph and bent to get a closer look at the baseball. It was very old; it had browned quite a bit and some of the leather was cracked with age.

It was also signed.

Chloe was not necessarily a baseball fan, but she’d been alive long enough to recognize the name once she deciphered the faded handwriting.

John McGraw.

Chloe whistled low and straightened. If she’d had the urge to lift the glass and hold the ball seconds ago, it was now gone. McGraw not only played for the New York Giants, but also managed them – and died in 1934. The ball was an invaluable relic. She wasn’t going to be responsible for ruining something so rare.

She stepped back and looked around again, this time focusing on the bookshelf. Some of the books were old enough that their titles had been worn off of their leather spines. The smaller and thinner books, which were also much more colorful, were clearly children’s books. These were easy to identify.

The Giving Tree
was the first she recognized.

The Phantom Tollbooth
.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
.

Oh the Places You’ll Go
.

And
Alice in Wonderland.

Chloe felt something tight in her stomach. It unknotted and unwound, filling her chest with a heavy discomfort.

She thought of Jason Alberich the Warlock King, and imagined him as he must have been as a child.

With fingers that now trembled slightly with the sense that she would at any moment destroy something priceless, Chloe very gently pulled out the largest of the older, leather-bound books.

Mark Twain’s
The Mysterious Stranger
and his lesser known, decidedly bitter if honest final work,
Letters from the Earth
were the first two books she pulled out. She carefully slid them back in place after reading their titles and went for the next book. Emily Bronte’s
Wuthering Heights
.

The heaviness in Chloe’s chest worsened. There was a pattern here. It didn’t take a psychologist to realize it.

As if to seal the fate of Jason’s darkening adulthood, the final book was
The Count of Monte Christo
by Alexandre Dumas.

Chloe replaced the book among its weathered companions and couldn’t help but once again compare them with the bright, new copies of the children’s books beside them. There was no denying the contrast.

How had he come about these books? Had they been given to him? Had he purchased them himself? What made him choose these in particular, and keep them here in this super secret place in his already secret mansion?

Chloe felt a breeze. It caused the candles to flicker slightly, and she hugged herself. She turned toward the opening, sensing suddenly that she was not alone.
She smelled lavender. But there was no one there.

Only ghosts.

With that thought, and the subsequent shiver that followed, Chloe covered her mouth with her hand and turned to the final object of her curiosity – the wooden chest that sat on the ground in the corner of the office.

She knelt before it. At once, she felt the cold of the stone beneath her seeping through the material of her jeans. There was no lock to work around, so it was only Chloe’s own hesitation that stopped her now.

After a few seconds of uncertainty, she placed her fingers on the trunk’s ledge and lifted.

She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Between the BDSM toys in the next room and the nostalgic items in this one, she was left truly confused about the man who slept upstairs in his massive, aptly named king-sized bed.

What she
did
find was paper work.

Chloe let the chest lid drop gently against the wall. From what she could tell, there were around ten bundles in the trunk, each tied with leather strings or held tight with rubber bands. There were a few folders here and there as well, and what looked like a stack of holiday cards.

Now Chloe really did pause. She looked over her shoulder at the small office with its baseball relic, its lovingly framed picture of a brother and sister, and its children’s books.
I’m trespassing
.

This is Jason Alberich
, she thought.
This is the Warlock King. This right here
.

It made little sense. The dichotomy of the sparse, lush décor of the mansion and the cold cruelty of the dungeon – compared with the odds and ends of this small room – was overwhelming.

Chloe reached in to grab one of the folders that stood upright against one end of the chest. She opened it.

Inside were s
everal slightly worn documents.  There were a few medical records and what looked like… a certificate of adoption.

It was from Sacramento, California. Two names
were inscribed on the document: Jason Alberich, and Lalura Chantelle.

As if mesmerized by what she was holding, Chloe gently placed the adoption certificate on top of the other papers in the chest and pulled out the medical records.
They detailed injuries to an infant: a broken rib, contusions, and abrasions. The infant apparently suffered malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, and dehydration. Doctor’s notes were scribbled and difficult to decipher, but Chloe could make out mention of abandonment.