Something With a Prince

Chapter Fifty-Seven: The Windows Were Ghosts

Arlyn

I had started walking before I knew what I was doing. All that was known to me was Dominic, getting closer and grinning wider. Licking his chops.

For years I had imagined his face. In my head and outside every window I looked through. Other times I swore he looked at me from the other side of the mirror. Infiltrating my every moment, my every thought. Walking toward him now, I could feel it all rising up in my chest but forced it down. Anger could kill me in a moment like this if I let it get the best of me. He would see it filter over my face and know that the battle was won. And that is all it was, a battle. This fight was not war. It wouldn't last for more than 10 hours. Dominic and I, however, that was war. Nearly ten years of taunts, spies, stalking, and plotting. Ten years of letting me be a boy King and now that I could wield the crown, he was here to rip it from my hands. For a moment, I regretted not taking Cassida's deal, but then realized that I would have been standing here regardless.

I would have always ended up here.

Nearly there, he began to laugh at me. I was coming to him, walking right in his trap and I knew it. I had accepted it.

"Well, I have to give it to you, boy. You play soldier quite well. I almost did not recognize you. Personally, I thought I'd find you crying in the corner...I'm almost impressed."

He had light green eyes, nearly reflective, and as translucent as his skin. Dominic was older than I had expected. There were lines all over his face. Some from age, some scars, and yet all of them seem magnified by the rain. He was broad shouldered and stronger than most men of fifty-seven. But age didn't mean anything to Dominic. He was capable of great violence and was aware of the damage he could cause. This isn't the first war he's started, but it will be the last he ever loses. Thick gold earrings lined his ears all the way up and one more was placed in his eyebrow. I planned on ripping them out... one by one.

"Not that I could recognize you as James's anyway. He was a great King. You couldn't even inherit his appearance let alone his reputation."

Nothing came out of my mouth. I didn't want to jest, or taunt, or play along. I wanted to be done. I wanted to step outside all the shadows and take the light for myself.

"What?" He spit at me, getting closer and backing out as if we were dancing. "Didn't you learn to speak? Or did daddy croak before he could teach you?" Dominic ran the tip of his finger across his lips, "Should've been more careful...poisoning appears so natural in an old man with a rotten heart." Dominic grinned, splitting his lips to reveal shiny white teeth, "Long live the King."

The air went still. Then it was surged with so much electricity that I thought I would have been struck by lightning where I stood. He murdered my father. Sound seemed to drown out, and I thought that rage was about to swallow me up. That I was about to unhinge, and my body was simply preparing for it. But when the entire battlefield stopped in their tracks, every hair raising off the back of our necks and the center of the sky swirling with lighting and grey clouds, I knew I was not the only one who felt as if something was coming to reap us all.

Dominic left his crowing to gape at the skies, watching lightning twist around and the rain turn to ice. My ears felt as if I had been pushed underwater. Thunder rolled in a deafening bellow. That's when the mud under our boots began to roll and rumble.

"What the hell?" Dominic looked around, almost with fear.

The world went white, cracking open the heavens with an ear-splitting sound. That's when we all saw it.

Not one, but two bodies that were twisted up by something from the trenches of hell. One, the first spread out about the sky as if it were the fabric holding apart the sun to the moon. A feminine looking body, but undefinable with the shapes of darkness moving around it like bees around a hive. It had blood red eyes, and long fingers that twisted up. The second figure was more masculine looking, and darker than pitch. It screeched out and the two of them dropped onto the battlefield.

Screams tore through the crowd as it descended from the skies in a blazing heat of smoke and fire.