Page 23 of Born Wicked
Of course there’s an actual castle involved.
“No one questioned me as I followed the crowd. We all ended up in the throne room, and there he was. King Cyrus. Damn crown and all. There was something… chilling about him. Some people, you look at them and you just know they’re not a good person. The power radiating off of him…”
The creep factor raises tenfold.
“There were three women standing in front of him, dressed in these fancy red dresses. I could smell they were human. Cyrus launched into this speech. About it being the one hundredth anniversary of the most recent death of his wife. The entire town was in mourning for her. And those three women…” Jon trails off, and the haunted look in his eyes makes me pause, makes me let him have as much time as he needs to process this. “They were the human daughters of the Royal lines the queen kept being reborn into. They’d reached an age appropriate to see if they were the queen.”
Elena and Mason only mentioned it once. This Resurrecting queen. A woman this King inadvertently cursed to die over and over, only to be reborn with a new name and face. And she only remembered who she was after she died and Resurrected.
“Cyrus slit their throats,” Jon says in little more than a breathy whisper. “All three of them. He held them as they bled out and died. I will never, ever forget the look on that man’s face. The hope. The agony. The impatience. It was all so morbid, but it was the most palpable thing I’ve ever experienced. Whoever his queen is, King Cyrus would do absolutely unspeakable things to get her back.”
Goosebumps flash over my arms. It’s kind of romantic. Morbid. Disturbing. You hear about romantic tragedies; Shakespeare perfected it into an art. But the original story goes back to a vampire King and his Queen.
“I couldn’t stay,” Jon moves on. “After witnessing that, I had no more interest in staying and being part of that disturbing world. I wouldn’t stay and learn more about that madman’s court. I left that night.”
“Were any of those women his queen?” I ask, uncontrollably curious.
Jon shakes his head. “It’s been more than 250 years, and he still hasn’t found her.”
Why would I feel pity and sorrow for someone like Jon just described?
Because it’s so damn sad.
If Cyrus loves this woman as much as Jon has conveyed, how agonizing must it be to wait centuries for the one you love to return?
Maybe I can’t blame him for turning into the bogeyman everyone says he is.
“From Austria, I went to America,” Jon says, and almost instantly, the mood lightens. “I spent forty-five years living in forty-five states. Would have been fifty, but not all the states we have now were states yet back then.”
“What?” I blurt out, completely shocked. “Really, a year in each state?”
He smiles and nods. “My favorite state to live in is Oregon, in case you were curious.”
I just laugh. “I’ve never been to Oregon. Never even considered it once.”
“We’ll make that our next trip,” he says with a smile.
I like this idea. Going on trips. Seeing each other’s favorite places. Though, to be honest, I have no idea what my favorite place is. I’ve been to so few of them. “I’d like that.”
“Eventually, I started missing the ocean,” Jon moves on. “I bought a sailboat at the turn of the century, doing private runs between New York and London to make some more money since it had been a while since I’d needed any. By the eighties, I was on my own again, with a brand-new boat and ready for adventure again. I sailed to Norway for the first time and met your mother just a few days after I got into port.”
My heartbeat instantly picks up. And it reminds me of what I’m doing on this airplane. We’re flying to Kansas to search the graveyard for where she is buried. I plan to come back with her bones and take them to Markus the Necromancer.
“She was playing the piano at this little lounge,” Jon says, the look in his eyes softening. “And she wasn’t very good.”
A laugh fires out of me before I allow it to. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” he says, the corners of his eyes crinkling just a little. “It was a pretty small town, and her uncle owned the place. He was desperate. She was bored, back home for the summer from university.”
“What was she studying?” I ask.
“Technically, it was botany and chemistry, but really, it was holistic health.”
I blink three times, frozen in shock and grief. “She was a healer?”
Jon nods, a small smile at the corners of his mouth. “It might not have been the same method, but you two have that in common.”
“Did she know about her gift when you two met?” I ask, suddenly filled with a million questions about my parents.