Kings of the Wyld (The Band, #1)

by Nicholas Eames

But life, Clay knew, didn’t work that way. It wasn’t a circle; you didn’t go round and round again. It was an arc, its course as inexorable as the sun’s trek across the sky, destined at its highest, brightest moment to begin its fall.

Vellichor. As in the sword entrusted to you by the Archon himself as he lay dying? The sword he used to carve a fucking doorway from his world to ours.

There were only the words be kind carved into the birch’s brittle skin, as if whoever did so had been crying, or a child, or both.

“The gods forbid we waylay some fool with a pack full of diamonds, oh no! But rocks! And socks! And … what’s that there on those sandwiches?” “Ham.” “Ham,” the woman growled, as though uttering the name of a bitter enemy.

“Um, do you … need a sec?”

“Judge them for what they wished to be,” he begged the Father of Gods, “not what the world made of them.”

The truth, he knew, was that the world needed his kind of monster. It was a brutal place. It was unfair. And Clay Cooper, such as he was, was quite simply the right kind of wrong.

WHEN WE SEEK TO RULE ONLY OURSELVES, WE ARE EACH OF US KINGS.

But even a coward found his courage in a corner, and there were things even a craven heart could not allow.

“I’m sorry, guys, I really am. I mean, flirting with the Frost Mother is one thing, but putting your cock in her mouth is just plain stupid.”