Free Eterna and Omega by Leanna Renee Hieber Page A

unknown. The larger picture that titles, logbooks, and property records failed to show, due to a careful and thorough wiping of the Wicke line from the Empire, was that there were no Wickes anymore either … Moriel had made painstakingly sure of that, having plotted since the age of ten various acts of poison, accidents and “unfortunate disappearances” that so plagued and cursed the usurping family.
    So Vieuxhelles was conveniently off the proverbial map for the time being, and that suited Moriel’s purpose grandly during this time of preparation.
    There was of course the next conquest: lineage. He had tried valiantly to find a wife and an heir, but that, too, had been foiled by still further usurpers—that damned Denbury—but once his plans had unfurled, he would take as many wives as necessary until the line was assured.
    â€œTell me, James,” Moriel said softly as he sipped tea, “whose house this is.”
    â€œIt is your house, Your Majesty.”
    â€œAnd what will I do for this house?”
    â€œYou will find clever ways to annihilate anyone who tries to take this house from your family line, just as you did the traitors to your family.”
    â€œThank you, James. Would you sit with me in a game of chess?”
    â€œI shall do whatever you wish, Master.”
    James fetched a golden box. “I know, it’s dusty,” he said, brushing off the container, “but the last maid ran off screaming, claiming some kind of witchcraft was here.”
    â€œTruly, good help is impossible to find anymore,” Moriel muttered mordantly. “Slavery or indentured servitude is far more efficient and reliable.”
    With shaking hands, the set was laid upon a marble-topped table at the divan, and Moriel launched into ode and reverie, his favorite music to accompany a good game of strategy.
    â€œThe systematic destruction of this age’s industrial progress and the classes and uppity humans it created is ready to commence, James,” Moriel stated. “Most of the products are in place.”
    â€œVery good, My Lord.”
    The contacts he had cultivated and coerced throughout the years had built a subtle set of detonation points across two continents. Once put into motion, they would inevitably change the course of the future and redistribute power back into the hands of those who should always have held it—the rulers and the aristocracies of old.
    Never mind his line had been questioned, withered, beleaguered, set upon. He would restore lineage as power and, in doing so, set right so much of what had gone wrong when the barriers of society had been tumbled, creating a muddy sea of the unwashed. What had been termed the Industrial Revolution was, to Moriel, a heinous crime. He hated revolutions. They were messy, rabble-roused affairs.
    However, in order to return the world to its natural order, he would have to host a thorough counterrevolution, wreck the spinning top of an unborn future to preserve a more perfect past. He had enlisted the Summoned to help him in this cause, for this sort of rerouting of the human experience was impossible without the aid of the inhuman.
    It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried asking for divine intervention. In his youth, he’d prayed to God to dismantle the injustice that was Parliament, a shouting, obnoxious group rule that accomplished nothing, a boorish, uncivilized mess. But despite Moriel’s ardent prayer, God had not acted. The demons, in contrast, were on his side. They had such sense, those dear shadows.
    â€œIf I could only have the opportunity to lecture,” he said somewhat dreamily, sitting back in the leather chair, sipping the finest of spiced teas flecked with a bit of gold leaf, relishing the taste of grandeur in his mouth. Surely the right kind of people would easily see his point of view. There were only two kinds of persons in this world: the common and the kingly. He’d appeal to