All Hail the King (Celestra Forever After Book 6) Read online

  All Hail the King

  Celestra Forever After 6

  Addison Moore

  Hollis Thatcher Press, LTD.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Hell on Earth

  2. Gage

  3. Logan

  4. Wesley

  5. The Scourge

  6. Gage

  7. Logan

  8. Wesley

  9. The Prophecy

  10. Gage

  11. Logan

  12. Wesley

  13. Inception

  14. Gage

  15. Logan

  16. Wesley

  17. The King and I

  18. Gage

  19. Logan

  20. Wesley

  21. Black Water

  22. Gage

  23. Logan

  24. Wesley

  25. The Sacrifice

  26. Gage

  27. Wesley

  28. Logan

  29. Immortal Beauty

  30. Gage

  31. Wesley

  32. Logan

  33. Skyla

  Books by Addison Moore

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Edited by Paige Maroney Smith

  Cover Design: Gaffey Media

  Hollis Thatcher Press, LTD.

  Copyright © 2019 by Addison Moore

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places, and characters are figments of the author’s imagination. The author holds all rights to this work. It is illegal to reproduce this novel without written expressed consent from the author herself.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This ebook is for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase any additional copies for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2019 by Addison Moore

  Created with Vellum

  “There is no peace,” says the Lord, “for the wicked.”

  —Isaiah 48:22 (NIV)

  Prologue

  Skyla

  Darkness has enveloped me.

  The world, once young and bright, has lost its vigor, the borders of which have become grievous and tenebrous. There is no greater ache, no sharper deception than to see the one who holds your heart—holds the blade with which to kill you. It is a nightmare within a nightmare to learn the soul you melded over your own is the one who looks to destroy everything you hold near and dear. There is no greater agony than to have the scales fall from your eyes and reveal the one you grafted your life to has been the one to fear all along.

  Heartbreak. It comes in acres when the blade delivered to your chest was thrust by the one you love the most.

  Heartbreak brings you to your knees, forcing you to worship at the foot of its throne. It presses over you with its sword and demands you bow your head in submission. It lances open your chest. It steals your beating heart before pressing your nose in a pool of your own blood in an effort to extinguish the breath from your lungs.

  Heartbreak is a dangerous game that never lets you win.

  But I will find the strength to lift my head one last time. I will see the world around me for what it is, scrubbed free of life’s grand illusions, nothing but the stark-naked truth. I will rise to my feet, snatch back my heart, wipe the blood from my face, and step out into an unknowable future with or without you.

  Time, death, and heartbreak have braided themselves into a noose that you lovingly slipped around my neck. You placed me on the pedestal of your heart, then kicked the chair out from underneath me when I least expected it.

  It was born from love, this unending ache you’ve gifted me. It was because you loved me that you burned my world to cinder. It was all of your affection poured over my head, scalding and blistering, that caused me to lose my grasp on what I needed to hold onto most. It was from the deepest chamber of your heart from which you drew the sharpest sword. Your love proved potent and dangerous—a toxin in my midst, slowly administered into my veins through each one of your kisses. Your love fell over my world like the blackest night, the hottest flame that hell could ever offer.

  You love me. You do.

  I have incinerated under the careful supervision of your all-consuming affection.

  You may have cut the world from underneath me, but I will never let you win.

  My wish come true has become my biggest curse.

  Your wish come true, your greatest horror.

  But you are not the savior our people need. That role was filled long ago.

  You wear a paper crown. He wears one made of gold.

  You lead our people to everlasting destruction.

  He leads us to everlasting life.

  He paid. He reigns. We win.

  He is robed in majesty.

  Resurrection awaits those who dare to believe.

  All hail the King.

  1

  Hell on Earth

  Skyla

  There have been moments in my life when it felt as if I were dying. There have been moments in my life where I wish I could have plunged the knife into my own chest. Death has never been a stranger to me. The Grim Reaper never farther than a breath. The certainty of the afterlife has never done much to quell the feeling of doom and dread that comes with the fact a loved one has been disconnected from their body. Who would have thought that the reverse—a resurrection of the ages—could have brought me such mortal grief?

  The water rides up over my white gossamer gown as I sit tucked among the jagged rocks at the base of Devil’s Peak. My mother took my wings but left the ethereal accoutrement as a reminder I suppose. No sooner did I float safely to the bottom of this hellish cliff side I so daringly dove off of, than my wings evaporated, along with those electric blue butterflies surrounding me like illuminated confetti. It was a magical scene, my powers so quickly restored after a drought of almost a year. The more I bedded the enemy, the faster they diminished.

  But that’s all in the past, I think to myself as I stare vacantly into the ocean as the waves bathe in a river of moonlight.

  “Skyla!” Logan calls to me from a distance as he makes his way down the rocky cliff. But there’s not one part of me that has the strength to answer him, to turn and greet him like the old me would have done. Every last part of who I was prior to this demonic evening has dissolved along with the illusion of everything I thought I knew—it dissolved right along with the people I believed I could trust with my living soul.

  I take in a deep lungful of ozone-rich Paragon fog while doing my best to usher from my mind the events that have transpired earlier this evening. It’s too painful, too incomprehensible to believe anything that has happened in the last few months, let alone the last few hours. I don’t want to think about the horrors of what my new reality brings.

  Gage and his wicked transformation feel soluble in every sense. Who he’s become and what he’s done are nothing more than the esoteric rantings of a madman. His new reality is nothing but an echo of a demon’s voice without a tangible vessel to produce the sound. It is smoke and mirrors. It has to be.

  This new version of Gage is nothing at all like the solid, fire over stone, palpable, warm-bodied, warm-hearted version he once was. This new rendition is nothing more than a puff of smoke ready to choke out the world. He already choked mine. This new adaptation, the one born of a
wicked nobility, is nothing more than what Logan suspected Fems were from the beginning—a ball of hate-filled air. That is what Gage Oliver has reduced himself to, perhaps what he’s been all along—a ball of hate-filled air.

  But I don’t want to think about Gage or anything he’s done. Give me the here and now, this moment with my legs dipped into the icy brine of the sea, the hard granite beneath me cold as a tomb. I want to feel the chill in the air, feel the sting of the fog as it burns my lungs like fire. I want to hold my little boys, my angels’ happy bodies, feel their heft and their girth. Feel the carpet of the Landon house under my feet. Taste Emily’s delicious pancakes while the boys indulge in their own. I want to run my fingers over the bark of the evergreens that line this island like guardians and feel the sand of Silent Cove between my toes. Grip my hands over the steering wheel of the Mustang. Run my finger over the Eye of Refuge around my neck that has proven to be no refuge at all. Give me something real I can touch and feel, probe with my finger and hold over my tongue like a communion wafer. Take from me this evil vapor that my husband has become. Make him go away. Make him disappear. Have the grave open up twice in one lifetime and swallow him whole like it should have done the first time.

  He is not real. He is not the Gage Oliver I had known and loved. It is a cruel injustice for him to parade around in that familiar coat of flesh and those heated flames he calls eyes already pinned on another woman. His belly filled with the flesh of my people.

  “Skyla!” Logan comes upon me quickly, panting out of breath, his skin illuminated from the trip down the cliff.

  He offers a hand, but I hop to my feet without his assistance. Accepting a hand from others has been one of my greatest downfalls. I have learned the hard way that there are none that I can count on, no one I can fully trust. Not even Logan. Especially not Gage.

  “I have to go.” My feet quickly move me from the rocky crags to the dirt lot with expedited speed and Logan promptly follows. I find his hand connected to mine, but every last inch of me is numb and frozen. He could have removed my hand and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I pull myself free from his grasp. “I have to get out of here. I need to crawl out of my head. I need to fix the mess that my life has become. I have to fix this for my people.” Every manic thought swirls through my head at once. Never have I felt so inspired and frustrated all at the same time. Never have I felt the need to both kill and heal simultaneously. There is so much destruction I am determined to achieve—so much rebuilding, redrafting, and resurrecting of my own that I will move supernatural mountains to make happen. And I will.

  My people, Celestra, will stand tall once again as the victors. The Fems might be on the winning side of the celestial fence at the moment, but I will fight tooth and nail to make sure their moment of glory extinguishes like a flame at the bottom of the ocean. The struggle will not be mine; it will be theirs.

  My supernatural abilities enliven within me, and soon I’m racing my way back to the highway with minimal effort.

  “Skyla, wait!” Logan calls after me. But I don’t plan on waiting for anyone ever again. All that waiting, all that trusting landed my people in the hot seat—and all of Noster nearly extinct. My God, people are dead because of my negligence.

  Soon enough, Logan is shoulder to shoulder with me, breathless, panting as he struggles to keep up. Logan belongs to Celestra as well. He was the one that fate, also known as my mother, had delineated for me to begin with. And had I followed dear old wicked Mom’s advice in love, I could have avoided having to deal with Faction war after Faction war.

  My sons bounce through my mind once again and I cradle them there. Nathan and Barron just turned two. It’s their birthday, or it was Nathan’s and mine yesterday. Today it’s Barron’s and his father’s.

  My heart lurches as I push Gage right back out of my mind. It’s the boys who are, in fact, the cornerstone of my existence at the moment. I couldn’t imagine a life without them. So no matter how much I want to decry Gage Oliver as my biggest mistake—and dear God up in heaven, he is exactly that—I can never wish we didn’t happen. And knowing how much blood is on my hands makes what happened between us feel all that much more wrong.

  “Skyla? What’s going on?” Logan snatches up my hand and threads his fingers through mine before I can stop him. And judging by that death grip of his, he’s not letting go anytime soon. “Your nightgown is all wet. Let me take you home.”

  It takes all of my strength to yank back my hand as I stop abruptly on the road and watch as Logan sails on without me from sheer momentum. He finally jogs to a stop about a block away before backtracking at a lightning clip.

  That elongated dimple of his goes off as the moon makes his eyes glow a deep shade of citrine. Logan Oliver has always been a dirty blond god, emphasis on the dirty. It’s not his fault he’s handsome to a fault. We tried to make it work in high school by way of using Gage as a cover so that the Fems wouldn’t kill me. But it was the Fems’ plan all along to have me with Gage, bear his children, and hand over my people on a silver celestial platter. However, Logan and I were married briefly after the first Faction war. And when I say briefly, I mean for all of three days. But it was heaven and perhaps the purest moment of my life outside of any time I spend with my children.

  “This isn’t a nightgown.” My chest bucks as I look down at the illuminated fabric clinging to my skin. “It’s a wedding dress.” That’s an outright lie, but my mouth chose those words over the truth. In reality, it’s nothing more than a Halloween costume. A flimsy toga that I chose not to wear on that fateful Halloween night Gage swiped the celestial rug out from underneath my people. Instead, I dressed like a superhero and ended up being anything but.

  “Wedding dress?” Logan takes a half step back. “You did it? You married Gage,” he says it mostly to himself, stunned. His chest expands as wide as a football field with his next breath. Logan is clearly floored that I’d side so intimately once again with the man who just finished eviscerating my people. “Okay then.” He winces as he inspects me in this dim light. “Why don’t you go be with him? Take a honeymoon. I’ll help watch the boys. You deserve it,” he says it so soft it’s hardly a whisper as if he were actually happy for me, but the fact he’s inadvertently glaring my way suggests anything but.

  I lunge forward and grip him by the shirt. “I’ll be watching the boys while Gage goes on his honeymoon—with Chloe.”

  My feet pick up their frenetic motion once again as I head down the dark, damp highway, but Logan quickly catches up and stops me. The two of us stand there a moment, our chests heaving as we take in vats of crystalline Paragon fog.

  “What did you just say?” He touches the back of his hand to my cheek as if checking for a fever. “Did you hit your head on those rocks?” His voice hikes up an octave and I can tell he’s reaching his boiling point. I’m not sure he knows exactly why.

  “Ask your nephew the same question,” I roar as I turn back toward the road ahead, the mist swirling around us like a band of curious poltergeists.

  “Skyla,” Logan says my name sharp like a reprimand. “Are you fucking with me?”

  My chest bucks in lieu of a laugh. A horrible sound claws from my throat, something between a scream and a howl and Logan collapses his arms around me in one aggressive move.

  “Oh God, Skyla.”

  “No, don’t.” I push him away. “I can’t do this. I can’t think straight, Logan. I went all the way to that demonic plane his father gifted him and he didn’t choose me!” I riot into the night. “He chose Chloe Fucking Bishop!” I hop backward, my entire body in full submission to my rage. “He could have had me! My mother was gifting him the keys to the kingdom, Logan!” My voice lances through the pristine silence only the early hours of the morning can afford and a peacock screams in the distance. “I was there.” A cold sweat breaks out over my body all at once. “The throne room was glistening like a jewel—roses everywhere.” I shake my head in disbelief and I begin to settle down, my g
aze lost in the woods across the way. “I went there to marry him. Our sweet baby girl Sage was there, Demetri and Wesley, too. Gage stepped toward the altar looking dapper.” I beat my fist to my chest in hopes to stop my heart. “So alarmingly handsome.” I take a simple breath as I recall that last moment in which I thought we could be real. “Marshall came with me and so did Chloe. She wore the dress they buried her in and I marveled at the irony. It was going to be like a second funeral for her to witness the holy union, a binding covenant between Gage and me. It should have been the final one we’d ever need.” It all comes back to me, so painfully clear—not just the serene, surreal surroundings, but the way I felt, so much hope, so much love for the soul I was willing to walk away from my people for. I look back to Logan with heavy eyes. “He said his vows and then he took Chloe’s hand. The rest is history.”

  “Skyla.” Logan pulls me in, shaking me slightly as if to wake me. “It’s not true. Gage would never do that.”

  My mouth opens as the fog filters in, flirting with my tongue, ready to choke the life out of me if I let it. I look past Logan toward Devil’s Peak, my gaze penetrating right through this night and back to that wicked realm Demetri gifted his wicked son.