Lock & Key (King & Crown Book 1)

  Lock & Key

  A King & Crown Novel

  Clara Coulson

  Lock & Key

  Copyright © 2018 by Clara Coulson

  Cover Design by Cormar Covers at http://www.cormarcovers.com/

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations is entirely coincidental.

  For more information:

  http://www.claracoulson.com/

  To contact the author, email claracoulson.author@gmail.com

  Contents

  Books by Clara Coulson

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  The Unveiling

  Prologue

  1. Liam

  2. Kat

  3. Liam

  4. Kat

  5. Liam

  6. Kat

  7. Kat

  8. Liam

  9. Kat

  10. Liam

  11. Liam

  12. Kat

  13. Liam

  14. Kat

  15. Liam

  16. Kat

  17. Liam

  18. Kat

  19. Liam

  To Be Continued

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  About Clara Coulson

  Books by Clara Coulson

  CITY OF CROWS

  Soul Breaker

  Shade Chaser

  Wraith Hunter

  Doom Sayer

  Day Killer (upcoming)

  TALES FROM THE CITY OF CROWS

  Dream Snatcher

  LARK NATION

  Hunter of the Night

  Speaker of the Lost

  Watcher of the Dead (upcoming)

  KING & CROWN

  Lock & Key

  Science fiction thrillers under the pen name Therin Knite.

  ECHOVERSE

  Echoes

  Epitaphs

  Encodings (upcoming)

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  Solace

  SHORT STORIES

  Venus in Red

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  To patient people. Thanks for not biting my head off over how long it took me to write this book.

  The Unveiling

  EXCERPTS FROM

  A Complete History of The Unveiling

  By Emma J. Browning

  [Page 24] …and who would have thought, on that sunny day in Washington, D.C., June 10th, 1992, that an army of vampires would descend on the Capitol building, interrupt Congress and the President, on the verge of declaring war against a desperate Soviet Union, and overturn our government at the drop of a hat?

  [Page 56] When the faeries emerged from their hills, riding on the coattails of the more impulsive vampires…

  [Page 82] …and signaled the end of the Nuclear Age, and the dawn of the Age of Magic…

  [Page 156] Yet strangely…it was the shapeshifters and magicians who faced the brunt of the discrimination. Gone were the zealous sermons railing against gays and lesbians, abortionists and whores, and in their place came a wave of loathing for a new Other hiding in our ranks, in plain sight: Animals, they claimed, masquerading as human beings. Animals and heathens bestowed with Satan’s power!

  [Page 201] But in 2001, when the noble vampire houses sent their agreed-upon representatives to the United Nations…burning an effigy of Lord Vanderhall…and fourteen protestors were killed in the confusion.

  [Page 239] …and on October 8th, 2002, the Halloway Act was signed by the President…guaranteeing equal protections under the law for all citizens of the United States of America, human or otherwise.

  [Page 338] The Dunkirk Night Club Arson, on February 16th, 2005, which killed eighty-nine vampires and forty-three humans…and the collaborators were publicly executed, as per vampiric law.

  [Page 339] Similarly, the brutal murder of Alicia Barnum, a coyote shapeshifter, on July 4th, 2006, led to national outrage when the mayor…was implicated…and sentenced to life in prison.

  [Page 376] But the reign of terror that gripped the nonhuman races came to an abrupt end on October 19th, 2007, when the militarized town of Bailey, Colorado, home to a violent coalition of anti-supernaturals, vanished overnight…not a single building left behind, only empty space. At first…the faeries never admitted responsibility…but the Attorney General declined to charge any faeries for the happenings at Bailey.

  [Page 399] The first rumor of a pro-human shadow organization to go viral…on April 15th, 2008…when a photograph of handwritten minutes appeared on the internet…an outline of plans to “exterminate all nonhuman invaders.”

  [Page 444] …and finally, it came to be known as “The Unveiling,” the day that humanity learned we were not alone in the universe, not even on this Earth…supernaturals existed among us from the beginning of time.

  Prologue

  The blackout struck at three AM—the witching hour.

  At the time, the woman was in her cell but not asleep. She hadn’t slept in several days, due to the drugs in her system, stimulants, designed to keep her awake at all costs as part of the latest round of testing. They believed continual stress on the body and brain was the key to activating the new genes they’d carefully woven into her chromosomes over the past two years. As such, they’d designed a series of the most stressful physical tests imaginable.

  First, they made her run for miles and miles and miles, until she couldn’t breathe. Then, they dosed her with hallucinogenic drugs until she tried to claw her own eyes out. Next, they dunked her head into a bucket of water, again and again, holding her down until she began to drown. And after that, they dropped her into a tank where she couldn’t see or hear or feel anything—she thought she may have transcended dimensions once or twice before they dragged her out of that one. Or maybe she just went to hell and back. Hard to tell the difference.

  Regardless, none of those things woke up whatever monster they’d sewn inside her.

  So now they’d taken her ability to sleep, the same way they took everything else. Her clothes, long replaced by a thin hospital gown. Her dignity, as they monitored her twenty-four-seven with cameras in every corner of the room. And, somehow, even her memory. They still wouldn’t explain how they managed to take that from her, the life she must’ve lived before the tiny, cold cell and the endless tests and the doctors who acted like she wasn’t a person at all but a dummy full of secrets meant to be poked and prodded.

  Honestly, she would’ve been tempted to accept all the things the doctors had taken, all they’d done and would do, be a good little test subject, if they’d only return the memories of who she was before.

  She’d tried to trade for that once, actually—Dr. Morris laughed and walked away.

  And so, there she lay, on the floor of a cell with no bed to speak of, staring at the ceiling, having not slept a wink in nearly four days. If the sensory deprivation tank didn’t drive her crazy, this certainly would. She’d started to hallucinate hours ago. Voices she didn’t recognize. Faces she’d never seen. The beautiful baby blues of a man she didn’t know, peering down at her, his ghostly form flickering in and out of sight. The blue-eyed man spoke to her once too, murmuring softly
above all the disembodied whispers.

  “Kat,” he said, “don’t give up. Not now. You’re so close.”

  Kat? That was the name she’d given herself, when the doctors refused to admit she had one, or deserved one. They refused to admit she deserved anything other than the label “Subject 91.”

  Katherine “Kat” King.

  Yes, that was her name.

  The man with the blue eyes spoke her name with a fondness she—Kat—could not remember ever hearing inside the plain gray walls of Advent 9’s laboratory. Who is he? she wondered in her insomnia-induced reverie. Someone I made up to pass the time? A fantasy of a handsome man coming to rescue me? She scoffed at that, the sound bouncing off the walls, an army of scoffs mocking her every senseless thought. Right, someone coming to save her. She wasn’t stupid enough, or naïve enough, to believe a valiant knight would come charging through the bolt-locked doors to whisk her off to a castle anytime soon.

  No one dangling from the strings of Advent 9 left these labs alive.

  In fact, no one left at all.

  When you died—and you would—they just tossed you into the incinerator.

  I have so much to look forward to, Kat thought, eyes affixed on a too-bright bulb in the center of the ceiling that burned hot all day and night. In all likelihood, she’d end up like Subject 90, who did have a name, Sarah, and who died from this same round of tests last week. Kat thought but wasn’t sure that Sarah died during the sleep deprivation part of the trials as well, because she heard poor Sarah screaming nonsense for hours on end, for days on end, until her throat had been torn too raw to make any noise at all. After that terrible tipping point, she’d only lasted a few more hours. Kat remembered the sound, the sound she always dreaded, one of those sterile metal carts squeaking loudly as it wheeled a body away.

  Kat never had the chance to speak more than a few words to Sarah, but even so, the woman was the closest thing Kat had to a friend in this bleak, unending hell. She missed the scant minutes they’d had together three or four days a week, when the doctors would wheel them to the same room for the same checkups, and she would look at Sarah, who was rather shy, and Sarah would look back and do a little head bob. A cute gesture. One that always made Kat smile. It was one of the very few things inside the lab that made Kat smile.

  And these bastards had taken that too.

  Poor Sarah.

  Kat wasn’t sure if she believed in a god or not—her current situation made her lean toward not—but if there was an afterlife with more than one possible course, she hoped a god whisked Sarah away behind some pretty, pearly gates, to a place that didn’t smell like antiseptic and blood.

  And if that place truly existed, then maybe—

  The light bulb flickered. Dim. Bright. Dim. Bright.

  Kat blinked the haze of voices and apparitions from her beleaguered mind, trying to focus on what she knew was real, the single light bulb that had never changed in all the months she’d been here. She watched it with wide eyes, lids stretched as far as they would go, the surface of her whites slowly drying out. Watched it like a hawk would watch a mouse skittering along through a bean field in the dead of night. Watched it like you would watch the world end—terrified of the oncoming rain of fire from the sky, yet anticipating it all the same, something new and wild.

  She watched the light bulb.

  It flickered again.

  Again.

  Again.

  The light bulb went dark.

  And the electronic lock on Kat’s cell door…clicked open.

  In the space between breaths, Kat considered whether here and now was all a fantasy dreamed up by her sleep-deprived mind. But then she remembered that she’d gotten nowhere in her tormented, amnesiac life in the lab through her endless days of complacency. So even if this moment was all in her head, was it not better to prove to herself she was capable of doing something, anything, even if that action ended in failure?

  Even if she died, she’d just end up with Sarah, and that wouldn’t be so awful an end, now would it?

  Kat braced herself against the cold metallic wall and rose on her shaking legs that hadn’t been used properly in years. They held her weight. (Because she was underweight.) She pushed off that wall with her open palms, walked forward, one step, two steps, three steps, across the meager length of the cell. The door was within reach, and she raised a quaking hand, set her spindly fingers on the heavy metal, and shoved it. The door swung open, soundless.

  The hallway past the door was as dark as her cell. It was a total blackout. A storm had knocked out power lines. Or a surge had overloaded the system. Anything that ran on electricity had stopped working. Like her cell door locks—and the clamps that kept the bolts on the cellblock’s exit doors secure. Without the clamps, the bolts could be manually pulled back.

  There was a way to escape from the lab.

  There was a way to escape Advent 9.

  Take the chance, Kat, whispered a voice she didn’t know in a corner of her mind she didn’t recognize. Run. Run. Run!

  Kat King stepped out of her cell of her own accord for the first time in two years. Her bare feet transitioned from cold stone to even colder tile. Her body passed through a pressure wall, the difference between the stale air inside her prison and the air beyond, laced with the echoes of pain and suffering. Though it was dark, Kat found herself able to see perfectly. The outlines of the other empty cells. (All the subjects on this block, save her, were now dead.) The lone chair where a guard sat during the day, reading dirty magazines or listening to music. The barred windows that had never shown anything other than a sliver of a nearby gray-brown wall.

  Kat glanced right—that was where they took her for testing.

  Kat glanced left—that was where the guards came from when they changed shifts.

  Left, she knew. Left was freedom.

  Kat turned swiftly on her toes and marched down the left wing of the cellblock, up to the bolt-locked door. She ran her finger over the two large bolts, tracing them to the clamps that held them in place. As she suspected, the clamps had released, depowered by the blackout. Which meant…she found a small handhold on the top of each bar and tugged.

  At first, the bolts didn’t move, too heavy for her exhausted body to tackle. But the more frustrated Kat became, the more energy that surged through her. She growled, a rough, animalistic sound that rebounded off the walls, down the hall, into each and every empty, silent cell. She growled, and it flicked a switch inside her. She growled, and with both hands, she heaved the first bolt back, followed shortly by the second. They screeched along their tracks, resistant, but each one succumbed to strength Kat briefly wondered why she had.

  There would be a time for wondering later though.

  Kat gripped the doorknob and carefully twisted it around ninety degrees. The door opened.

  Beyond the door was a hallway Kat had never seen in her two years as a lab rat for Advent 9. Unlike the cellblock, or the testing rooms, this hall looked more like what you’d see in an office building. The walls were off white. The windows were wide rectangles, no bars. The left wall sported an array of doors, none bearing electronic locks, with peekaboo windows that gave you a glimpse of what was inside.

  What was inside? Desks. Computers. File cabinets. Calendars filled with pictures of women in bikinis.

  The normality of it sent Kat careening into the doorframe. She held on for dear life, breath caught in her throat, her muddled brain swimming for an explanation. How could this building be a brutal prison on one side of a door and a plain old office on the other? How could there be people in the cellblock screaming and crying for days on end, while managers and analysts and executives sat in fancy ergonomic chairs, typing away at reports? How could Advent 9 be so contradictory? How could they be so indifferent?

  Kat had the urge to spit at the office rooms, but her throat was too dry.

  “Keep going,” she muttered to the darkness. A gravelly rasp was all that was left of a voice she
’d barely used during her captivity. “Keep going until you’re free. Or keep going until you’re dead.”

  That was the mantra she would follow until her heart stopped beating.

  Kat encountered no resistance until she reached the doors that led outside. Which went to show how much confidence Advent 9 had in their prison and surveillance systems. The only reason Kat made it this far, to a lobby with fancy marble floors and an oak front desk and a half-dozen glass doors with gold frames marking the exit, was because of the blackout. Without the blackout, Kat would’ve remained their prisoner forever, stuck in her tiny cell. God bless power failures, she thought as she emerged from the stairwell and headed across the lobby floor.

  Two of the guards who sometimes sat in the chair outside her cell during the day were stationed on either side of the exit doors. Kat thought they only bothered to guard the cellblock during the day because that was when the doctors removed the subjects from their cells for rounds of testing and checkups. What point was there in sitting in front of thick steel doors all night, when the sad little test subjects behind couldn’t possibly get out?