Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,23
it.
“Hell, a lot of the things we experience would make fantastic video game scenes,” said Stephen Lazarus, the Demon King. Thane realized he’d lost track of the conversation and tried to pay attention to catch up.
Along with his queen, Dahlia, Lazarus ruled over the realms of the demons and the Akyri. But he also happened to be a detective in the mortal world, and like a few others who sat at the Table of the Thirteen – which was now the Table of the Twenty-six in actuality – he hadn’t quit his job when he’d taken on the mantle of king.
“I mean, think about the shit that has actually happened to us,” Lazarus went on. “Dimensional bubbles colliding? Raging, larger-than-life battles with submerged tentacle beasts and black griffons? Runaway trains filled with vampires? Night carnivals teeming with warlocks and werewolves?”
“Ooh, that one even sounds neat like that – Warlocks and Werewolves,” said another sovereign at the table, this time the Nightmare Queen, Adelaide. Adelaide was also a seer, a rare breed who came in handy on many occasion.
Her husband, the Nightmare King, who went by Nick these days, nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah it does sound cool. A little like Dungeons and Dragons, but real.”
Order at the table seemed to crumble then, as each of the dozen or so kings and queens sitting around it began to discuss past experiences and how so many of them were truly game-worthy, at the very least print-worthy, and at best worthy of being on the big screen. And then suddenly at her end of the table, Katrielle the Nomad and powerful mage just unobtrusively raised her hand about a foot above the table, palm-down. A tiny shockwave of sorts emitted from her palm and rolled over the sovereigns. They all stopped talking at once.
“Do any of you hear that?” she asked softly once they’d calmed and were looking up at her in confusion. “Can you hear what you’re doing?”
Thane for his part hadn’t said a word since describing the strange load of two-hundred jetliner passengers who’d appeared in song, but he had to admit that his mind had wandered just like everyone else’s.
He blinked and looked around. They all blinked and looked around.
“What the hell was that?” asked Evelynne D’Angelo. The brunette beauty was the Vampire Queen, and beside her sat Roman D’Angelo, the Vampire King. Strangely enough, the “vampire” kingdom they ruled consisted of only one of three of the breeds of vampires that inhabited the known realms, but one out of three wasn’t bad, Thane supposed. Though Roman’s vampires called themselves “Offspring” more often than “vampires” since these particular blood suckers were literally the offspring of Akyri demons and a warlocks, so they were born rather than transformed –
Shit, thought Thane suddenly. He was doing it again. He was getting distracted.
“That,” said Diana Chroi, “was us giving in to disorder.”
Thane looked down at her and noted the slightly weary, possibly resigned expression on her face. If anyone would know disorder, it was the mother of fae triplets.
“Indeed,” said Katrielle grimly. “And I’m afraid it has been happening to us all with increasing frequency. Haven’t any of you noticed?”
“I’ve… definitely noticed that it’s harder for me to focus on my writing,” said Evelynne, who went by Evie amongst the people at the table. “I either end up taking meandering and bizarre turns within the story – or I stop writing altogether and wind up wasting time on something else instead.” Evie D’Angelo was a New York Times bestselling author in the mortal world. She was one of those who hadn’t wanted to quit her job when she became queen. According to her, writers didn’t just “quit” writing, after all. Not ever. They did sometimes experience periods of writing abstinence, and those were usually not by choice. But the need to turn the world around them into descriptions, to paint scenes using a thousand words rather than a picture, was an undying demand upon their souls. A writer never wasn’t a writer.
Holy fuck, Thane thought, bewildered. He was doing it again! His thoughts had just up and wandered right off the reservation without him being the wiser!
“This is getting bad,” he admitted aloud, though he kept his spoken words a lot calmer than the ones in his head. “Two-hundred people were just slaughtered by something supernatural that clearly thinks of their murders as no more than a joke, and I can’t keep my thoughts on track long enough to see to this mess. Why?”