The Phantom King (The Kings) by Heather Killough-Walden Read Free Book Online Page A

unforgiving. Every nerve ending in his body was humming with the thrill of the chase. The cars blurred past, their lights becoming one long stream of energy as he weaved this way and that in some unaccountable pursuit of the car ahead of him.
    The maneuvers the driver pulled were inconceivable, and the only reason Thane was able to keep up was because he was on a bike.
    At one point, the Mustang passed between no more than five feet of space as the vehicle slammed on its brakes, spun around to face him, amazingly accelerated without spinning any wheel, and literally shrank to slip between the ends of a median wall .
    Thanatos burned rubber as he skidded to a stop . He put his boot down and watched as the Mustang then expanded once more on the other side before taking an exit ramp going in the opposite direction. Most impressive of all was the fact that a cherry top sat waitin g behind a billboard on Thane’s side of the street – in plain sight of everything the Mustang had just done. And yet no sirens sounded, no lights winked on, and the cop stayed where he was.
    Insane son of a bitch , Thane thought, shaking his head as he watched the shiny black car speed out of sight. It would take too many on-road acrobatics to chase it any further, but at least he’d come to a solid realization about the driver, and part of his curiosity, a tiny part, was placated. Clearly this was the work of magic .
    The Phantom King was no stranger to magic. Practically everything he knew, everything he dealt with on a daily basis, was composed of some kind of magic. The ironic thing was, as long as Thane was on Earth and not in his own plane, said magic had virtually no effect on him. It was as if he were a ghost here ; magic passed right through him .
    Nonethe less, it worked on everything around him , including the car that had just escaped into the night , and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
    Thane didn’t move or tear his eyes from the off-ramp and the road beyond it until the last of the car’s lights had disappeared from view. Then he straightened in his seat, revved the bike’s engine, and pulled it once more off of the median and into traffic. He realized, as he passed a sign a second later, that he was now in Salem and probably had been for some time. Highway 107 had become Highland Avenue and then Essex Street.
    There was an odd humming in his bones when he pulled off of the highway at the next ramp and m ade his way through streets a touch darker and quieter than they’d been in Boston.
    He could sense the spirits of the wronged dead waiting for his. He could feel them there, just out of reach, in that depthless line between life and nothingness. There were children there. Slaughtered in a war fought for reasons their parents’ parents couldn’t remember. Time was running out for him ; he’d stretched it beyond its limits . He needed to find that ghost and set things right.
    Thane gritted his teeth and sped into the night.
    *****
    Siobhan slammed the door of her car and looked up the road in front of her house. Her head was spinning and her heart was pounding. If she held her breath, it was almost like she could still hear the motorcycle’s engine. But there were no lights, and a gentle breeze passed through the grasses and flowers in the neighbor’s yard, and bugs buzzed beneath the street light. She was alone.
    Hurriedly, she jammed the car keys into her pocket and ran up the drive to her front door. Once it was bolted tight behind her, she leaned against it and took a deep breath. Then she turned and looked through the peep hole at the jet black car that waited, engine still hot, in the driveway. A house this ancient didn’t come with a garage big enough for a real car; it had been built with wagons and horses in mind. And she hadn’t had a chance yet to “build” one onto the side of the drive. So the car sat out there.
    Like a big black sign that read , “Here I am.”
    She had no idea who the bi ker had