Free The Winter King by Heather Killough-Walden Page A

“home.”
    And he could get there first.
    Kristopher looked at the portal around him
and considered his options. He could do this one of two ways. He
could either transport back to her apartment and wait for her, or
he could cut her progress off in the portals themselves by latching
on to her by the sound of her voice. The very fact that he’d heard
it meant she was close by. He was probably almost upon her.
    Why wait? He was pressed for time
anyway.
    He switched his magic, locked on, and felt
his body grow warm. It nearly stole his breath. Just the touch of
his magic upon hers had an intense effect on him. Her magic felt
like the brush of fur against bare flesh, comforting and warm, but
also like the lick of a flame when you got too close to a fire, hot
and dangerous.
    If her magic feels like
this… he couldn’t help but wonder what
her body would
feel like against his. His hands curled into fists at his sides,
and he had to close his eyes. He lowered his head, waiting for the
desire roll through him and away. But it didn’t leave. He wanted to
jump right into that fire and feel it burn.
    “ Shit,” he muttered,
raising his head and opening a second portal off the first one. He
strode into it with purpose and prepared himself for his inevitable
second meeting with his queen.
    But something in the portal drew his
attention, pulling his thoughts outward. The streaming lights
around him should have been the colors of the place he was headed
into – as multi-hued as the mortal world. However, they were not
multi-colored. Instead, they were primarily white. Some of the
white was touched with a turquoise blue, so similar to the color of
icebergs, Kristopher knew it at once.
    It was the color of his eyes. And, as
fortune had it, it was the color of Poppy’s eyes.
    It was the color of the Winter Kingdom.
    Confusion stole over him.
He was firmly locked on to Poppy’s trail, and she’d claimed she was
headed home. From the feel of it, that was certainly what she was
asking her transport magic to do for her. But Kristopher would have
recognized the path to his realm even if he’d been stinking drunk
on bjorr .
    Which he had been. A few times. Well, more
than a few. But that was a long time ago.
    Okay, that was last week.
    The Winter King’s eyes began to glow as he
neared his home, and he felt the crisp fresh air of his world greet
him as it blew into the portal.
    *****
    Poppy saw the exit of her final portal
coming up and once more prepped for the landing. However, for the
second time that night, her transport magic seemed to have betrayed
her, because instead of the soft carpet of her apartment, it was
the cold, hard, and smooth surface of ice that greeted her boot as
she stepped quickly out of the spinning tunnel.
    Those leather-soled boots slid for just a
second before she willed them to stop, and miraculously, they did.
She stood in place and stared at her surroundings as the portal
sucked shut behind her.
    Quiet surrounded her, long and hollow.
Distantly, a cracking sound echoed, muffled and deep. Then it
happened again, but smaller. And again. Little by little, she
realized it was a background noise to this place she was in,
wherever that was. She recognized the sound from winters on the
lake with her grandfather. It was a sound you heard often during
ice fishing, the noise the ice made as it settled beneath you.
    She seemed to be standing in the middle of
an enormous antechamber. It spanned out around her in a wide circle
of thousands of square feet in every direction. She could have fit
basketball courts on either side of her without any issues. The
floor, walls, and ceiling were white-blue in color, a beautiful
arctic hue. In each wall of the massive room were a set of closed
double doors, four sets in all, that led to some unknown
destinations.
    The palatially high ceilings rose more than
a hundred feet overhead, crowning in a huge dome made of an
enormous, round pane of glass. This allowed a crystal clear view