The Demon King (10 page)

Laz blinked and took a slow, deep breath.
Then he looked down at the card. It was an address to a place in
Boston. He flipped the card over. There were no names and no
decorations. There was nothing else but the address, typed in
simple Times New Roman.

So why was it that when he looked at it, his
gut tightened and his insides felt funny?

The words the disappearing man had just
spoken to him swam like lightning fish in Laz’s head. His guts felt
heavy and his ears were ringing; his cop instinct was telling him
something loud and clear, and what it was saying made no sense. It
was telling him that everything that had just happened was real.
And that everything the man had said was true.

“
Very well,” he muttered
with an outward calm he didn’t inwardly feel. He would go to the
address on the card. A bizarre lead was better than no lead at
all.

*****

Boston was set up on very old streets.
Nothing was symmetrical, because the roads had been carved by
horses and their carriages in the late eighteenth century. You had
to wind to and fro and dodge inordinate amounts of angry traffic to
get where you needed to go – but if you’d grown up in and around
Boston, this was par for the usual course, and not as much a source
of high blood pressure as it was for tourists.

Lazarus’s car was unmarked,
so it fortunately did nothing to slow traffic as he made his way
through Cambridge and Back Bay, passed the Public Gardens of
Boston, and headed into Boston’s tiniest neighborhood, the
historical Bay Village. Siri had been directing him on his iPhone,
which he’d erected on his dashboard. But when he realized
this
was where the
address on the card was taking him, his curiosity, already piqued,
went ahead and stood at attention.

Bay Village had become one of the most
expensive areas of Boston, filled with houses built in the early
1800’s, and unchanged by time due to strict historical regulations.
Because it was tiny, it was fought-over and sought-after, and what
had once been a lower to middle-class population had eventually
become a middle to upper middle-class one.

He knew there wouldn’t be any available
parking, especially if the address was one of the famous row houses
of the neighborhood. So he readied himself to prop the police light
on top of his Buick just in case and wound his way through the last
few streets Siri directed him down. It was only a little irritating
that he was ending up within walking distance, less than a half a
mile away, from where he’d been that morning at the John
Hancock.

A few minutes later, he was
standing outside the small redbrick house that matched the address
on the card. It had a redbrick fence and a single front lot tree,
and he was shaking his head. He was pretty sure this particular
house was actually registered with the historical society it was so
old. It was well cared for though. The white paint on the shutters
was fresh, the windows were spotless, the house wasn’t leaning in
any particular direction, and none of the steps leading up to the
tiny porch were bowed or warped or splintered. Effort had been put
into maintaining the home’s 19
^th
century feel while adding a
touch of modern amenity.

He had no idea what to expect as far as its
inhabitant was concerned. Why had Bael directed him here? Who was
inside?

He steeled himself to go knock on the door
when he spotted the sundial in the tiny front lot. It was decorated
Art Deco style. Seeing it set off the mechanisms of his memory with
sudden, fierce clarity. The vision that came to mind was so vivid,
he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed by the sights and sounds of the
past. Gears were shifting, his surroundings were altering, and all
at once he was a child again.

His adoptive mother was sitting with him on
the edge of his bed. She was wearing her uniform, but her stud
earrings were sterling silver placed at the triangle and rectangle
angles of art deco style. She’d always favored that.

Laz had just asked her why she’d chosen to
be a cop.

“
Steven… what do you do
every day, child?” she asked in her gravelly, sweet
voice.

Steven’s young brow furrowed. What did she
mean by that? What did anyone do every day? “Wake up?” he
asked.

“
Okay,” she nodded. “Then
what?”

“
Eat breakfast.”

“
Good. What do you
eat?”

“
Different things.” He
looked down at his plate. “Today it’s eggs and toast… ham… apple
slices and orange juice.”

“
Okay. What do the eggs
come in?”

“
Shells.”

His mother laughed. “Okay, that’s true.” Her
laughter trailed off, and he found himself smiling. “But what are
the eggs and their shells put into when they’re sold?”

“
Styrofoam,” he answered
readily. This time he knew the answer easy. His teacher re-used the
Styrofoam containers for arts and crafts.

“
That’s right. Do you know
what Styrofoam does to the earth?”

Actually, he knew that too. His science
teacher had recently told them that it took just about forever for
Styrofoam to dissolve… was that the word? Dissolve? It was
d-something. “It stays around for a long time,” he said.

“
Yes, it does. A very long
time. And that isn’t good for the planet. Your orange juice
sometimes comes in a plastic container. That’s not good for the
planet either. That plastic often ends up in the ocean, choking
animals and plant life. The ham comes in plastic too. And so does
the bread.”

“
That’s a lot of
plastic.”

“
Mmm-hmm.” She nodded. Then
she sighed and leaned back into the bed, lacing her fingers
together behind her head. She was still in uniform, and he could
tell she was tired and that laying back for a bit felt good. “What
do you do after breakfast?” she asked, staring up at the
ceiling.

“
I get dressed.”

“
In clean
clothes?”

“
Sometimes,” he answered
honestly.

His mother laughed again, flashing those
beautiful white teeth he adored so much. “Okay, fair enough,” she
said through her laughter. “But when you do get dressed in clean
clothes, it was water and detergent and electricity that got them
that way.”

Steven frowned. He had a feeling he knew
where this was going. “Aaaand… those aren’t good for the earth
either?”

Rosa Dixon shook her head. “Nope. The
detergent winds up in the rivers and lakes, electricity is created
by huge factories that blow toxic things into the air, and we only
have so much fresh water to go around, Steven. One day, it’s gonna
run out.”

Steven thought of all the water in the
oceans. “No way,” he said, shaking his head and smiling.

“
You’re thinking of the
oceans, aren’t you? That’s salt water, child. We can’t drink that.
We can’t water our plants with it. We can’t grow things with it.
We’re stuck with the tiny bit of water that already exists on the
small fraction of the planet that isn’t covered by
ocean.”

Whoa
, he thought. “You mean like rain. And lakes and
rivers.”

She nodded. “Exactly.”

Still, it seemed it would take a long time.
But then again, there were a lot of people. He remembered how many
lanes of cars there had been during their trip to Disneyland two
years ago. There must have been twenty lanes, at least. And all
those people needed water for their clothes, and to drink, and to
take showers. That was a lot of water.

“
After you get dressed, you
go to school. Gasoline fuels the bus that takes you there. That
gasoline is burned and more toxic fumes are sent into the air.
Factories made the bus, too. And those factories have to have
energy – and that energy is used up and coughed out.”

“
How many factories are
there?” he asked, thinking of Willy Wonka and how different these
sounded from his candy factory.

“
Lots,” she said softly.
“Lots and lots and lots.”

“
How do you know so much
about this?” he asked. He believed her – every word. She’d never
lied to him. But the things she knew sometimes blew him away. How
could one brain hold all of that?

She chuckled and placed her
hand on her stomach, sighing deeply. “I’m just a grown up, sweetie.
You learn lots of things over the years. The way you know how to
brush your teeth and tie your shoes and ride your bike and read
your books. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Red
lights mean stop, green means go. We learn things over time.
Just
time
.”

Steven processed that. Time was an
interesting thing indeed. But… he was confused as to why his mom
hadn’t answered his question. She’d taken him down another road
altogether. Until she sighed at last and softly said, “All these
harmful things we do, day in and day out, they need to be balanced,
Steven. Or the world is like a top that’s been bumped. Instead of
spinning on, it starts to wobble. Too much wrong and not enough
right.” She shook her head. “One day we’ll just topple over
altogether.”

“
So… that’s why you’re a
cop?”

She grinned now, and that beautiful smile
was like a flower that had only partially bloomed before. “Yes. I
see people trudging on, trying to just keep going, and some of them
– they can’t anymore. Life gets to them and they wander off their
paths and into the dark woods. I want to help those people, Steven.
I want to help them get back on the right path again. And in the
meantime, I want to keep them from pulling anyone else off the path
along with them.”

“
So, bad guys are just
people who are in the dark woods?”

She waited a second, then nodded, and her
gaze lifted from him to stare somewhere he couldn’t see. It was a
grownup place. He would find it one day, he vowed. “There are lots
of different kinds of dark woods, Steven. But yes. Some wander
further in than others. Some can never find their way back out
again.”

“
I can help them get out,”
he said. And he meant it. In that moment, staring at his beautiful
adoptive mom who made the world balanced and helped people out of
the woods – he knew he would do the same. He promised himself. “I
can’t wait to be a cop.”

Chapter Eleven

Angry power surged through Dahlia when she
woke from her vampire’s slumber early the following evening. When
she opened her eyes, it was through a red haze that she viewed the
cottage around her.

She’d been a strong warlock
already, and her Tuathan bloodline had lent itself to that ability.
But now she was a vampire as well, and what dark magic she’d
contained within herself sat seething inside like a contained atom
bomb – two glued halves of something volatile that were just
waiting
for some unlucky
bastard to come and split them apart.

Well, that was exactly what fate had done
when it had thrown the Stag her way. The atom was split, and the
mushroom cloud was on the rise. She’d been toyed with enough in her
long existence. This was crossing a line. She’d been so mad, she’d
barely been able to sleep, even in that “sleep of death” vampires
were said to get caught up in.

She would have thought she
was already defective enough.
I’m already
a traitor. Now I’m a vampire committing revenge killings.
How broken could a person get? If dangerous and
insane wasn’t enough to keep fate and its expectations at bay, she
would just have to go about scaring it off another way. She could
top off the broken-vampire-traitor-murderer bit with something
undeniably un-queenly. Maybe something ridiculous. Something
embarrassing.

Like, fuck, I don’t
know
, she thought as she launched herself
from her dark bed and transported out of her cottage and into the
mortal world.
I need to do something
stupid as hell. Like….

She ended her transport, watched the
melting, swirling colors around her dissipate, and looked up at the
brilliant, enormous screen of a drive-in movie a fifth of a mile
away. She didn’t even know where she was in the mortal realm. She’d
transported at random, moving on the energy afforded her by a
mounting fury.

But the air was dry and devoid of life, the
dark was ushering in the kind of nighttime cold that came with a
desert climate, and she was alone. The drive-in was half deserted.
The few cars parked in the dirt lot were covered in desert dust and
spring pollen, so she was guessing she was in the southwest not far
from some tiny shit-kicking town. It must have been in the middle
of the human work week, given the sparse turnout. It was Tuesday
maybe, or possibly Wednesday. She really should keep better track
of such things.

The movie’s music was audible over the
expanse of desert between them. On the screen, two men were talking
from either side of the bars of a jail cell. The mood was serious,
but Dahlia’s lips curled into a sensuous smile.

Something like going to
jail.
She laughed out loud.
Yeah, that ought to do it
.
I’ll get tossed into the human
slammer. Who wants a jailbird as a queen?
It was strictly off limits for a member of any of the
supernatural realms to alter human behavior, law, or momentum. The
fae must always remain hidden, vampires were a secret, mages kept
their spells under human radar, shifters remained just out of sight
in the shadows of the forest. If she suddenly made a grand display
of getting involved in the human realm, if she drew human attention
to herself, it wouldn’t look good for her. The higher-ups would
disapprove, and maybe fate would change its mind about her being a
queen.