The Unseelie King (The Kings Book 6) Read Free

around the door’s edges, light emitted, outlining the opening with a tempting curiosity. What lay beyond it? Anyone would want to find out.
    It was beside this door that two men waited. One was dressed in finery of a style unknown in the mortal realm, hewn in the same dark tones of his approaching king. The other wore the same, but his sleeve had been torn, his collar bloodied, and there were stains upon his knees. He was also in chains.
    There were four other men in the room, but these men were clearly soldiers, nearly featureless in their monochromatic synchronicity. They remained standing at the room’s four corners, postures tall, shoulders back, eyes properly fixed on something no one could see.
    Caliban approached the two men beside the door. “My liege,” greeted the one holding the other by his cuffed wrists. It was a greeting, a question, and a show of fearful respect.
    Caliban said nothing as he closed the distance and stopped before them. He didn’t have to say anything. The bound fae was a Korred, a beautiful man with a black heart and a mind that had drifted unfortunately toward treason. He’d been caught leaking information about Caliban’s borders to Shadow Fae spies. Shadow Fae, otherwise known as Shades, were the dark and sneaky inhabitants of the cross-over land that was partly governed by the Unseelie King and partly by his brother, the Seelie King, Avery. The realm was generally known to fae as the Twixt, and as it contained no real “borders,” its reaches were vast, possessing of a large variety of fae species, from those aligned more with the Seelie to those… not. But their allegiance was to neither.
    Shades lived in a portion of the Twixt that also bordered the Shadow Kingdom, much like regions or states of a country could border one another in the mortal realm. They were tainted both by this darkness, and the different kind of darkness inherent in the Unseelie Realm.
    Shades wanted nothing more than to dissolve the borders, and allow the unseelie fae to roam freely into the Seelie Realm, where portals to the mortal world were more plentiful. The chaos that would then ensue amongst the mortals would keep both kings so busy, the Shades would be free to slip away unnoticed – into the mortal realm and beyond, where they could become what their souls directed. Thieves. Bounty hunters. Assassins.
    And worse.
    And not a force in any mortal realm would be able to stop them, much less gather them all up again and imprison them in the borders they were currently kept to. Contrary to uneducated belief, all fae had a dark side. Even those seemingly harmless creatures that roamed free in the Seelie Realm, even the fluffiest of them with large eyes and floppy ears and twitching tails – even those humans would endearingly term “adorable” – were more than what they seemed. But amongst the fae, dark sides and all, some were undoubtedly darker than others.
    Most of those lived in Caliban’s realm, and his hold upon them was tight-fisted and brutal. It had to be. Others lived in Damon Chroi’s realm, where goblins resided, and where their king was forced to be as strict and unendingly vigilant as Caliban. The last lived in the in-between realms, such as the border between Caliban’s realm and his brother’s, trapped there because no king wished to guard them alone. That would be foolish.
    Shades did not reside there alone, of course. There were others. But the Shades were the most trouble. The others simply bided their time, knowing that one day, one of the kings would slip up, and the plan the Shadow Fae continuously tried to set in motion would finally come to fruition. And they would all be free.
    Now, as Caliban approached the traitor who would have brought the fae realms one step closer to that dismal fate, he prepared himself to do what needed to be done. It should have been easy. He’d been here before. Hundreds of times. But regardless of his reputation and the nearly cruel lifespan of