The fall of kings, p.1
The Fall of Kings, page 1
The Fall of Kings
Book II
The Line Of Tepes
Book 2
E A Williams
Acknowledgments
This book would not be possible without the wisdom and support of my family and my writing community. Every person who gave me an encouraging word when the journey seemed impossible was absolutely indispensable. While writing is a solitary adventure you all made the road less lonely. Thank you.
Content Guide
The Line of Tepes series is a work of fiction filled with magic, monsters, and the struggle against evil, as such it contains situations and descriptions that some might find upsetting. Please use the following as a guide to your content consumption.
The Fall of Kings contains depictions of: sexually explicit scenes, violence, mentions of past child abuse, religious extremism, blood, and death.
Please read responsibly.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Epilogue
… To Be Continued
Chapter One
Emma’s hands went to the thick red ring of bruises on her throat, too fresh to have turned into the yellows and purples they would eventually settle into. She could feel Vlad’s dark eyes on her hands. His weighty gaze, a reminder that her human weakness was the reason Melissa was free. She should have fought harder. Emma knew how violent her mother could be and yet she had let her escape. Shame flushed through her body with a horrible, dizzying throb that wasn’t helped by the humming of the Transempirial’s air conditioning.
There wasn’t enough air in the small security office. It was too crowded with empty chairs and overly large men in expensive suits. Emma shuffled her feet, looking away from the computer playing the video of Melissa’s escape from the tower and her subsequent war path. She dug the toe of her shoe into the low pile of the industrial blue carpet, trying to quiet the whirling chaos of her thoughts.
Death would have been preferable to this. That was the pervading thought going through Emma’s mind as she watched the grainy security camera image of a man, a stranger to her and her mother, bleeding out on the bank of monitors in the Transempirial’s security hub. He had only been doing his job when Melissa Caldwell-King decided to gift him with a bullet. A bullet Emma could have saved him from if she had only had the guts to kill her mother before it came to this. Maybe she was more like her mother than she wanted to admit. The thought settled over her uncomfortably, a prickling cold dose of reality Emma didn’t want to look at too closely.
She stared at the monitors, a myriad of different CCTV angles of the baseball stadium’s closest parking garage, the pictures melding together as Emma silently remembered every opportunity she missed in the last forty-eight hours to take her mother’s life. Maybe Emma should have allowed her mother to drag her back to the Order’s compound and avoid Melissa’s blood lust all together. It would have been tidier for everyone, except Emma.
Shaking off the dread, Emma looked away from the screen, taking in the other occupants of the room. Each of them had a better excuse for a violent disposition than Melissa. Their very nature demanded bloodletting as a simple function of their continued survival, and yet, somehow they displayed a greater empathy for Melissa than Emma had ever seen in her mother.
Emma turned her attention to Sevystian, tall and imposing in his dark suit, taut across the muscular bulk of his shoulders. She admired the sharp square cut of his jaw, the blue light bouncing off of the monitors skated over the fine smattering of scars that decorated the side of his head, fanning out from the top of his ear to his temple, thin as spider’s silk. Emma knew the design of those scars intimately. She’d traced their shape as he drank her blood. Knowing what those scars must mean about Sevystian’s nature, Emma would still choose him over the Order.
With that choice came a steep learning curve, one that Emma was not entirely sure she had surmounted yet. What did it say about her that she was more ready to trust a vampire than her own blood? What did it say about her entire family line? Here she was caught between shores, hoping her next choice would be the right one, but there was an ocean of difference between right and wrong and in those choppy waters lurked monsters of all kinds. Her mother made choices as well and those consequences didn’t stop at the Order’s shores. Now Emma was forced, yet again, to clean up her mother’s wreckage.
As if he could sense her eyes on him, Sevystian turned to look at her, meeting Emma’s appraisal with a searching expression she couldn’t break away from. Emma wondered if that was a vampire thing. She had never experienced it with anyone else, at least not anyone she knew to be human. The Hallmark side of her brain wanted it to be significant for other reasons, but the rational part worried about the man her mother had shot and whoever she hurt next. Emma knew there would be another victim, there always was.
He took a half step towards her, and Emma’s eyes fluttered of their own accord as their gaze met. His green stare sparked icy hot in her chest, a shiver that settled under her breastbone and prickled her nipples against her bra. An absurd worry that he could see them through her shirt popped in and out of her head as he moved closer. For a moment, she was sure he was going to embrace her. Emma would have accepted that embrace, even though it would have resulted in her immediate collapse into tears. Stopping just short of her, Sevystian turned and settled himself against the table she was perched on top of, cutting off their eye contact. Emma was left staring at his rugged profile. His nose must have been quite perfect before it was broken, sitting so symmetrically over the thick slash of his lips.
“The police are on scene,” Buchannan said, as he typed a command into his keyboard. The largest monitor filled with a different angle of the parking attendant that Melissa had shot. A police cruiser blocked the exit of the grey concrete structure. They watched as two uniformed officers approached the injured man, guns drawn. One leaned down to single-handedly check the attendant’s throat for a pulse. The small shake of the officer’s head confirmed that the man was long past saving. Emma made an involuntary sound and Vlad, who had been standing slightly in front of her, looked over his shoulder at her. His face was a topographical map of pity she didn’t want.
He looked at her the same way Emma imagined fathers did when they have to explain to their children where the family beagle had gone. The parking lot attendant wasn’t a dead dog, and her mother wasn’t a missed stop sign. The look Vlad gave her made the already cold room feel even colder, and smaller somehow. She fought the urge to shiver and hide away from the pity and the gore.
Emma knew without a single doubt that Vlad would forgive her if she couldn’t stay, if she couldn’t bear witness to another of her mother’s atrocities, if she didn’t have the stomach to see the destruction of the Order through to the end. Vlad would let her hide away in his tower and he would protect her with all the strength and power his money and malice allotted him. He would forgive her if she left it all at his feet. But Emma didn’t want forgiveness, or protection, and she sure as hell didn’t want pity.
“Where did they go?” Emma nodded to the screen, where the officers were no longer visible. Sitting up as tall as she could, she turned her attention to Buchannan and the security footage he had hacked into.
“I’m picking them up in the stairwell B camera, but the angle’s crap.” Buchannan didn’t look at Emma as he answered her questions, his fingers clicking away on his keyboard unnaturally fast. “Hang on.”
Four more camera angles of the garage flashed onto separate screens.
“Gotcha,” Buchannan hissed doing a little fist pump.
The officers walked into the frame of one and out of another, like a fun-house mirror maze. Emma watched as the silent officers waved a family of four to hide behind their vehicle. The two little boys, both wearing miniature Astros jerseys, looked terrified and confused. There was a home game tonight, and while it wasn’t the playoffs there was still enough of a crowd for the five-story parking structure to be filled with cars and famili es hoping to beat the post-game rush. Emma clenched and unclenched her fists.
A hand wrapped around hers and Emma looked down to see Sevystian’s thumb gently digging between her fingers and her palm where her nails were trying with semi-success to cut into the meat of her hand. She relaxed and Sev slid his hand into hers, dragging them both across her body to settle against his thigh. Emma indulged in the comfort of his quiet offering, gorging herself on the warmth it spread through her.
On screen in front of her, the cops froze. Without any audio Emma could only watch as the officers shouted at someone out of frame.
“Can we get a visual on who they are talking to?” Emma asked.
“We’ve got nothing.” Buchannan clacked at the keys some more, smashing them considerably harder than was needed. “We have to assume it’s your mom, Emmy Doll. They haven’t lowered their weapons and well...”
“And well,” Emma mimicked Buchannan’s belabored voice, massaging her brow with the hand that wasn’t in Sevystian’s.
Movement drew her attention to the other silent spectator in the room. Kadir was propped against the frame of the hidden door that led from the security hub into the tower’s holding cells, not watching the bank of monitors. Instead, he was watching Emma, his golden eyes bright, even in the dim light of the office. She frowned at him and he raised a scarred eyebrow in return, before turning to watch the scene unfolding on screen.
Of all Vlad’s men, Kadir was the one to set off Emma’s internal alarms. He wore his hair piled in a bun of sun-streaked curls on the top of his head which drew more attention to his darkly tanned skin. It seemed unnatural to Emma that a vampire should be able to tan better than she could.
“How can she have missed every fucking camera?” Buchannan shouted to the room, his blond hair rumpled from running his fingers through it.
“In some cities, coyotes have been known to use traffic signals to safely cross busy streets.” Kadir’s purring accent was at odds with his matter-of-fact intonation.
“Is that supposed to actually mean something?” Buchannan jerked around, his boyish face twisted with frustration.
“A clever predator learns many skills.” Kadir nodded to Buchannan’s computer, then turned to Emma. “We pick up a few things.”
“Still feels unhelpful,” Emma quipped back, her eyes narrowing on Kadir who held steady in her reproach.
“We need to speak with Ranger McGreggor,” Vlad’s thick Transylvanian accent broke the moment.
“What?” Emma switched her attention to Vlad.
“I believe your mother has just shot two Houston police officers.” Vlad nodded to the screen where the two officers had collapsed.
Emma let go of Sevystian and headed for the elevator that would take her to Vlad’s penthouse apartment where the rest of her mother’s carnage waited for her.
Chapter Two
Ranger Aaron Davis was dead, only his body had yet to decide how to go about finishing things. Every beat of his heart was slowing down. His breaths were sharp little gasps. Even his warm brown skin had an ashy hue as the circulation drew away from his extremities, trying to keep his major organs working. Aaron’s eyes were slits, hanging open in his ever-deepening unconsciousness. His perfectly coiffed hair was limp and stuck to the long-cooled sweat that stippled his forehead. The body on the couch did not even seem like the Ranger anymore. It seemed to Fields that he was witnessing the soul slipping from Aaron’s features, the unknowable essence that lit the Ranger from within was dripping out like leaking motor oil. Fields couldn’t stand to look at him anymore and turned away.
An immense pity settled upon Fields. With every sloppy wet crack of Aaron’s lungs, he winced. It was a terribly familiar sound. The scene, as a whole, was one with which Fields found himself uncomfortably accustomed. His own transition had been similarly bleak, the uncertainty so high that in the end, Buchannan had been forced to dig him out of the family crypt.
Fields turned away, running an elegant hand down his shirt front. He remembered his own death, a miserable pitiable affair in a terribly lonely sanitorium in Bath, where the nurses had sad eyes and the view was as abysmally bland as the weather.
Aaron struggled with another breath, sending a phantom twinge cracking down Fields’ sternum, dislodging the more gruesome memories of his turning and bringing him back into the present. Simon, the taller of the two rangers, paced circles around the room.
Fields picked up a stray book from one of the library’s many side tables and made to return it to its crowded shelf, nearly colliding with the dirty-blond cowboy. Simon’s hobbled gait spun a hypnotic rhythm; step, click, step. The tacky silver head of his cane tickled at the back of Fields’ conscious thought. The gaudy longhorn cap was enough to prickle goose flesh down his back with each pass the man made behind him.
There was another wet shuddering breath from the sofa. Ava was humming a near constant stream of incantations. Her voice a low, sweet affair gently convincing Aaron’s heart to maintain its unsteady staccato. It wasn’t going to last much longer. The Ranger’s body was exhausted, filled with the worst kind of destructive magic. When Melissa King stabbed him with that jagged bit of glass, she had unconsciously performed rudimentary magic that was the metaphysical equivalent of a pipe bomb. Emma deserves a better mother than that odious cultist. Pity weighed heavy in Fields’ mind as he thought of her.
Simon passed behind him and Fields’ skin prickled. The man’s worry was a palpable thing. A wasteful emotion. Aaron was going to die. The only real question was whether or not Ava could keep him alive long enough for the transitional magic to take hold. There were fairly even odds on both sides, though if pressed, Fields would have to admit a preference for the young man’s continued existence. Aaron’s acerbic wit invited the type of banter Fields had always been fond of and there was a distinct lack of good men, in Fields’ opinion. They really couldn’t stand to lose this one.
Across the room, Ava took a weary breath and Aaron’s heart stuttered. He wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the lethargic sound of his arteries suggested that it wasn’t a good thing. Another sharp breath and Ava looked up. Her eyes met Fields’, speaking volumes. Fields had known Ava for too long to mistake the firm set of her lips as anything other than merciful tact. Whatever happened next was up to the scant amount of Vlad’s blood that had made it into Aaron’s veins.
“Do we give him more?” Simon paused in his march between the sofas.
“Non,” Ava answered, her delicate accent soft even as her eyes held the hard truth. “The amount is not entirely relevant. If the transition has started it will make no difference. If it has not, then it is too late.”
“Too late…” Simon’s voice trailed off and Fields chanced a glance at the ranger.
Leaning against his gaudy silver headed cane, one hand gripping his forehead, Simon made a heart wrenching sigh.
Fields had to look away. He had seen too many men with the same grieving stance, too hard to cry and too heartbroken to move forward. The field hospitals of the continent had been full of them.
For all the lives Fields had lived since his human one, he still had a tender place in his cold, pedantic heart for lost heroes. He shook off the sentiment with an unhealthy shiver of distaste and moved back to the mindless task of tidying up the library. Fields heard Simon come to a stop in front of the adjacent sofa. There was a responding groan from the leather as he sat down.
