Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,21

Randall was dying and coming back to life. He was different now. He recognized that difference as he gazed upon the beautiful woman with the perfect scars and the perfect profile and the perfect magic. He knew why he had been spared in this disaster. He knew what his purpose was.

The angel was precious, a work of art that the cosmos had sent into his path for a reason. Randall Price was supposed to protect her. Care for her.

Keep her.

And keep her, he would.

*****

Victor Maze smiled to himself in satisfaction. This was a job well done.

He had his energy source, and he’d manipulated the situation with just enough influence to get the ball rolling. Or as the sovereigns seemed so fond in referencing of late, to topple the first domino.

He chuckled softly to himself as he slipped his hands into the pockets of his white suit and left the scene of death and chaos and obsession behind him. None of the people scrambling from their emergency vehicles noticed him. No one knew he was there. He was a slow moving calm in a field of rapid-dash nightmares, which was ironic given who and what he actually was.

He liked that irony. It tasted good.

And so would Randall Price.

Chapter Four – Private Location, Pacific Northwest Coast

“I’m telling you they popped into my realm all at once. All at the same time. And….”

Thanatos, or Thane to those who knew him personally, trailed off in his description to the people seated around the large, oblong table. He ran his hand through his jet-black hair and turned his back to them as he continued to pace restlessly. Whatever had sent those anime to him had just happened. But already he could feel the spirits backing up, the line of dead becoming longer by the second, all of them waiting on the Phantom Realm sovereigns to sort them out and send them on their way.

Thane was the Phantom King, ruler of the realm where all who died unnatural deaths went after they’d drawn their last painful breaths. Those otherwise lost souls were referred to as anime, and normally they appeared in his realm one at a time, giving him and his wife, Siobhan, plenty of time to greet them and help them however possible.

But today was different and that was why he’d called this meeting of as many of the other sovereigns as he could get ahold of at short notice.

“And what?” Diana Chroi asked. She was the Goblin Queen, wife to one of the most powerful fae in existence, the Goblin King Damon Chroi. Together they ruled the Goblin Kingdom, which was really just a fanciful name for the realm that apparently took the multiverse’s charity cases. Diana Chroi was a veterinarian in her “mortal” life, and she’d taken her love of all things furry and down-trodden right along with her into the fae kingdom when she’d married Chroi. The once mighty and dreaded Goblin Kingdom, where the most dangerous of the fae had been banished to millennia ago, had for all intents and purposes become the mighty and dreaded Multi-Realm Zoo.

Not that they didn’t do a good job. And from what he heard, their triplet children were naturals with the animals too.

Diana Chroi was a fair-haired woman with sparkling, intelligent eyes. She leaned expectantly over the table and waited for him to continue, as did everyone else who sat at the meeting.

But this was too bizarre, too wrong, and suddenly Thane, a man who represented one of the most mysterious and dreaded kingdoms in all the realms, a man who had dealt with death – and ugly death at that – for as long as it had existed, frankly felt… embarrassed.

So it was Thane’s wife who finally answered the question.

“They were singing,” Siobhan told them. She was still seated in her own respective chair at the table, unlike Thane who admittedly had a harder time containing his agitated energy and had risen almost immediately upon starting the meeting to pace across the room as they talked.

“Singing?” asked someone else at the table. The voice belonged to Jack Colton, the Shifter King.

Thane turned and placed his palms on the table top, leaning in. “Singing,” he repeated. “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

There was silence across the room, and whether it was pregnant with surprise or unexpressed mirth, Thane couldn’t tell. Probably both.

Finally the Shadow King, a man who had gone by many names over the years but who’d eventually settled on Keeran Pitch, said “You’re fucking