Page 79 of King Among the Dead

But she didn’t belong anywhere, not if Beck was gone.

“I want to go home,” she croaked.

He sighed. “Okay.”

~*~

But home wasn’t home anymore. Not with the front door standing open, and the drawers of the hall cabinets ripped out, paper scattered across the floor. With the lamps smashed, and the rugs ripped up. Not with a chair through the screen of the TV.

Kay lay on the hall runner on the second floor, outside of what had been Rose’s bedroom. Crumpled on her side, impossibly small, one arm flung out, hand limp, fingers curled. Her neck had been snapped.

Rose knelt beside her, felt for her pulse; her skin was cold and smooth as marble. Her glasses were askew. Rose removed them, carefully, folded them, and pressed them into her hand. Then she closed her eyelids.

Went into her room, and packed everything she could carry. Shirts, pants, socks, underwear, toothbrush. Essentials. She already wore all her knives. She pocketed her phone.

The jewelry box caught her eye, as she turned to leave, miraculously untouched. Inside lay the gold ribbons, and gleaming nuggets of old money; a legacy of a family no longer alive.

The grief welled up, sharp as a heart attack, and for a moment she thought it would choke her.

She swallowed it, though.

From the box, she took the ruby rose ring, and the matching necklace. Fastened the ring to the chain, and then the chain to her neck; tucked the jewels down inside her shirt collar, to rest alongside the crown, already warm from her skin.

Every king needs a queen.

Arthur Augustus Becket’s queen dropped a kiss on Kay’s cold forehead, walked down the stairs, and out the door, and never looked back.

~*~

For three days, a jagged white shape like a bolt of lightning hovered over the Atlantic Ocean. The images on the TV screen resembled the ones she’d seen in the books in Beck’s library: humans glowing; humans performing miracles that looked like murder. Fires. Death.

Only now, there were two kinds of conduits. Two colors of fire dancing on the screens during broadcasts. And humans weren’t the central targets anymore. No, now there was a proper war being waged.

Good and evil.

Things did get bad, as Lance du Lac had said they would.

But. Bad was relative for Rose.

The day she thumped her rucksack down on the table in the front of the recruitment office, the two troops there looked up at her with mixed confusion and amusement. She lifted a hand, and produced a knife. Gave it a twirl. “I brought my own weapons. I’m here to join the Rift Walkers.”

They looked at one another, and chuckled.

Twenty minutes later, she stood up from her crouch in the center of the sparring mats in back, potential recruits spread out around her, groaning and rubbing at sore spots.

No one was laughing, then.

The Rift closed. The chaos continued.

Five years later, Rose Greer, Rift Walker, Golden Knight, remembered a book, and a table, and a lesson. Something useful bobbed to the surface of her constant, numbing grief. And she remembered a saint. And a stag. And a legend.

Beck was gone…

Until he wasn’t.

TWENTY-FOUR

5 Years Later

---