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

enslaved. His love, his bride Amunet, had taken h uman form by his side. Together they’d done what they could to see to the welfare of their people. Supernatural killings were now virtually unheard of in the public and accepted annals of human history, and there was a reason for that. When he’d done all he felt he could do , he and his bride had left the mortal realm. That was five thousand years ago.
    For eons, he’d slept, only to come awake with a hard feeling of loss and desperation. Amunet was gone.
    At once, he’d taken mortal form in order to search for her, and as he’d done five millennia ago, he immediately sought out those humans who felt as he did about the scourge of otherworldly creatures on the planet. With nearly no effort at all, he’d become their leader, taking charge of a growing band of men and women known throughout supernatural channels as the Hunters.
    Through them, he hunted down the monsters he’d hunted all those years ago. And as he did, he s earched endlessly for Amunet.
    But n ow ?
    Not long ago, a female vampire by the name of Ophelia had handed Ramses all of the information the Hunters would need to completely eradicate at least one supernatural race from the planet. The Vampire King Roman D’Angelo was very old, having ruled for three thousand years, and Ramses had never met him.
    Ramses had fully expected D’Angelo to be like his forebears – cruel, selfish, and blood-thirsty. However, once he’d been given the vampire’s location and background information, Ramses had delved full-long into a thorough investigation, and what he’d turned up confused him.
    Rather than continue with the senseless destruction of those who had ruled before him, D’Angelo took hold of the vampire kingdom in a mercilessly firm grip, strangled the vast majority of its cruelty into submission, and initiated new laws. Opponents to the law s were destroyed. Proponents were made law keepers.
    As a result, D’Angelo’s people ceased murdering innocents, and the method for turning mortals into vampires was hidden away, bringing the disease-like spread of the vampire nation to a halt.
    It wasn’t what Ramses had expected. Ophelia, had no doubt intended for Ramses to use the information she supplied him with to put an end to the vampire sovereign and his people. But Ramses hesitated. He wasn’t so certain that doing away with D’Angelo woul d be the best thing for humanity – much less even possible . D’Angelo had remained king for three thousand years; it took a massive amount of strength to retain a leadership of any kind for that long, to say nothing of a group of creatures as powerful as the vampires.
    The werewolves were no different. Something had happened to them during Amon’s absence . They’d gone from ravenous beasts to a struggling society of close-knit family and love. They’d suffered a curse that had seen them nearly to extinction. And then they’d come out of that curse – only recently – to find themselves banding together in solidarity in order to fight the adversity that this sudden change had caused.
    The warlocks were now ruled by a man as en igmatic and game-changing as Roman D’ Angelo had been for the vampires. And the same story of metamorphosis and innovation seemed repeated over and over a gain when it came to the other k ings and their supernatural kingdoms.
    Ramses was thrown by this shifting of antipathy to altruism. It was disorienting , to say the least. As of a few weeks ago, he’d brought all homicidal Hunter a ctivity to a halt, and now the Hunters were restless. Not that he cared. The anxious trigger fingers of a few mortals were the least of his concern s . The world was turning underneath him, tilting until he felt he would fall off.
    And there was something else.
    It was the reas on he was here now, walking the halls of this hospital on North America’s west coast. He was no closer to locating Amunet than he’d been wh en he’d first taken mortal