The Demon King (27 page)

“
Yes my lord. I need to
return presently anyhow. Who knows what damage Apollyon’s men have
done to the palace.”

“
Take Bowie too,” said
Dahlia suddenly, drawing their attention. Dahlia looked down at the
dog, who looked back up at her. Laz noticed that hint of purple
light to Bowie’s eyes. “She absorbed my magic,” Dahlia explained,
and her voice sounded lost. “I don’t know exactly what it did to
her, but she seems to be okay. So if you take her, you’ll have
signatures from us both.”

Bael nodded. “Very wise, my lady.”

Dahlia waited a beat, then said, “But if you
allow any harm to come to her, I will carve your heart out with a
spork.”

Bael froze, as did Laz. At once, Laz
remembered what his mother had told him about demons and their
tempers. His father had cut a man’s heart out with a plastic
serrated knife. Now Dahlia was threatening to do something very
similar. The implications were not lost on him.

Dahlia smiled a raw smile and gave a small
laugh. “Kidding.”

But Laz wasn’t so sure she was. And he knew
Bael wasn’t either. It was something about the tone of her voice, a
note of warning that went well beyond a joke. Bael would be wise to
keep the dog out of trouble.

“
But in all seriousness,”
Dahlia added, her smile slipping. “Keep her safe.”

“
I give you my word that I
will do my best, my queen.”

Dahlia stiffened, and Laz could almost hear
her beautiful body going taut as a pulled guitar string. The
referral of her as Bael’s “queen” wasn’t helping her stress levels.
Any second now, that string was going to snap, and Dahlia Kellen
would go Harley Quinn on them all.

“
Now go,” Laz ordered
calmly, speaking to Bael. The sooner he left, the
better.

Bael straightened and nodded, clearly
accustomed to receiving orders, and comfortable with carrying them
out. “Come Bowie,” he said, motioning for the dog to join him
again.

Bowie looked from him to Dahlia, and Dahlia
nodded. “Go ahead,” she said. “You’ll be safer with him.”

The dog seemed to understand, because its
tail wagged just a little and it trotted obediently over to Bael.
“My prince, I will be at your side in an instant should you need
me. Only call my name.” Bael nodded at Laz, Laz nodded back, and
the messenger and the dog were gone.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Daytime and nighttime are
different between the mortal realm and the demon
realm
, she thought as she looked out the
window of the Detective’s car and spotted a meteor shooting
sprinkles across the night sky.
I woke up
during the day
, she thought next.
My stomach hurts. That Lifeblood tasted really
bad. But my fangs are still there and really sharp. I think my
hands might be shaking. This car smells like leather. Or maybe
that’s Lazarus. I’d love to steal his leather jacket. I would paint
stars on it, galaxies, and purple fire. Purple fire… like Stale
Fire.

Her mind skipped through her thoughts
without order and without slowing. They were in a fancy car, headed
to some state in upper New England. They’d left Boston behind about
forty minutes ago, and now the traffic had nearly cleared to
nonexistent and Dahlia had never felt so much like the rest of the
world had vanished.

Cops can’t afford cars like
this
, she thought as she glanced at the
gleaming angles of a Mercedes symbol on the steering wheel.
I wonder if he stole the car using warlock magic.
No, he’s not like that. Maybe he made it. Lots of warlocks do that.
There’s a bridge up ahead. My stomach hurts. I
need
…. She closed her eyes and touched her
forehead. The moment she did, she was enveloped in her pain, most
of it emotional, and therefore all of it horrible.

At once, she opened her
eyes again.
I need a
distraction
. It was going to be a very
long drive to Portland, Maine, which was where Lazarus had informed
her they were going. She’d gone along with the plan without a word.
And why not? It wasn’t like she had any control over her life any
longer anyway.

Apparently he had a friend with a summer
home in Maine. It was on the beach, no less. For a cop, he had some
well-to-do bosom companions. Off handedly, she wondered if the car
might actually belong to the same friend.

Dahlia pulled her cell from the inside of
her own leather jacket; they shared tastes in that at least. She
pressed the round button to turn it on, allowed it to read her no
doubt bizarre fae finger print, then slid through the aps until her
favorite appeared. She tapped it and waited, muting the volume so
as not to draw attention to it.

“
I’m sorry about Lalura,”
Lazarus said softly.

Dahlia stiffened. His tone was too gentle;
she could tell he meant it. That was maybe the worst part. She
curled a little toward the door, instinctively wanting to put her
back to him.

“
I know she meant a lot to
you. I think I must be one of the few kings at the Table who didn’t
know her very well.”

“
So are you one of those
good cops or one of those dick cops?” she asked suddenly. Her words
surprised even her. She’d just blurted them out, but she realized
once she said them that she’d done so because was desperate to not
talk about Lalura. She was afraid if she
did
talk about Lalura, she would
break down crying. And that was something she very much did not
want to do in front of Steven Lazarus.

Her fingers feverishly tapped the screen of
her phone, but she was only half paying attention to what they were
doing. The other half of her was trapped in a place of misery that
she was trying desperately to crawl out of.

There was a sizable stretch of silence
before Lazarus, who must have been just as stubborn as Dahlia,
finally said, “Nice try.” His voice was beautiful, deep and laced
with a magic she readily recognized and knew damn well he wasn’t
supposed to be using. He was probably doing it without realizing
it. Maybe she was pissing him off and the magic was a natural
reaction.

“
You’re covering,” he told
her. “You need to say something, so why don’t you say it?” he
prodded gently. “I can take it.”

You want me to say
it?
she thought angrily.

“
I’m here to listen,” he
continued, again sounding like he meant it. “We have nowhere to go
and nothing to do but drive. It’s going to be a long trip. So… you
wanna just let it out?”

You want me to let it
out?
Her fingers tapped a little harder,
and her gaze narrowed. But after a moment, her vision un-blurred,
and she noticed what was going on in the app on the screen. Her
attention re-focused, concentrated now on something she honestly
felt was important.

“
Dahlia.”

She ignored the man beside her. She’d been
waiting for a chance like this for too long, and it was so nice for
once to be engulfed in something a little less real than the
paranormal chaos her life had become.

“
Dahlia? What the hell are
you doing?”

She ignored him some more and redoubled her
efforts, her fingers sliding carefully but quickly across her
phone’s face. Her teeth grabbed her bottom lip and gripped
tight.

“
Are you… what the
fuck
? Are you
playing
Pokémon Go
right now?”

Ignore him, ignore him, ignore him – almost
there….

Suddenly, a hand wrapped around her iPhone
and violently wrenched it from her grip. Dahlia felt panic rip
through her like an iceberg tearing through a cruise ship hull. She
spun in her seat in time to see Lazarus throwing her phone out of
his rolled-down window.

The color red infiltrated
her vision and her heart jumped into hyper drive. “That was
a
Jigglypuff
, you
son of a bitch!” she screamed, fangs fully bared. She lunged for
him, driven purely by rage and uncaring of the consequences. She
went for his throat, intent on sinking her fangs in to the hilt and
draining the mother fucker dry.

Lazarus blocked her attack
with one arm across her chest, breaking with his right boot and
using his free hand to spin the car into a screeching three-sixty.
The world blurred beyond the windows – until it
wasn’t
blurring any longer, and the
blinding brilliance of oncoming headlights white-washed the
world.

*****

Oh fuck…

Well, he’d gone and done it. He’d finally
managed to do to Dahlia Kellen what being kidnapped, tortured,
turned into a vampire, saddled with a queendom, and having one of
her closest loved ones killed by the Entity had failed to do. He’d
driven her off the reservation and the Tuath had snapped, going
Harley Quinn on him after all.

This was his thought as the
car went spinning out of control on a bridge in Boston and stopped
in the opposite lane, face-to-face with oncoming traffic. But the
moment he saw the bright white of the headlights, all previous
thought and fury fled from his mind, and instinct took over.
Elsewhere
, he thought.
And that was all he had time for.

In the next instant, the bridge, the
traffic, and the bright lights of oncoming traffic vanished.

A second later, the world reappeared outside
the windows of his borrowed car, and Dahlia Kellen was still coming
for him. Her body impacted his with brutal and unnatural force,
propelling him violently through the car door and into the space
beyond. He lost his breath, feeling the impact with every fiber of
his being. It temporarily shocked him, but before he hit the
ground, he was refocused, breathing, and reacting.

He waited until they landed, wanting to take
the brunt of the impact himself. He almost regretted the decision
when his body hit the ground and the air was again wrenched from
his lungs. Pain erupted all along his spine, but that was quickly
squelched by the monster in him.

Akyri and demon battled it out for control
of his systems, and he fought to maintain a clear mind as he
wrapped his arms around Dahlia’s body, trapping her against him.
She collapsed into him, just short of sinking her beautiful and
deadly fangs into the side of his throat.

He rolled with her in the cage of his arms
until he she was underneath him. She must have recognized that he
was gaining the upper hand, because her efforts to harm him
redoubled, her body bucking violently under his. Laz wrestled to
grab her wrists, but her fingernails found him first, and she
carved large bloody grooves in the backs of his hands. He hissed in
pain, but compartmentalized it, ignoring the sting to concentrate
on the issue.

His instinctive urge, of course, was to tell
her to calm down. But years of police work had taught him that if
there’s anything a person in the grips of feverish anger, fear, or
panic hates to hear, it’s the words, “calm down.” If they could
calm down on demand, they would have done so already. The only
thing such a command serves to do is add an element of frustration
to the situation, along with another layer of fear. Frustration,
for their lack of control. Fear, because now they’re also afraid
that the person dealing with them lacks any empathy whatsoever.

So he kept quiet and concentrated on getting
the situation in hand. Literally.

He’d already used magic to get them out of
what would surely have been a massive car accident, so he used it
again now, allowing his hands to fill with hard, dark magic. Amidst
the wild struggling, he managed to press one hand to Dahlia’s chest
just long enough to release this magic. It sucked out of his body
and into hers as if propelled by a vacuum, and Dahlia inhaled
sharply.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Dark magic came in all forms and served all
kinds of purposes. Right now, all he wanted to do was exact control
over his opponent without hurting her in any permanent manner. He’d
infused this desire into his magic and let it take over. At once,
she stopped fighting, the strength leached from her limbs as an
unimaginable sensation rushed like fire through her bloodstream.
Her eyes closed. The spell he’d wordlessly cast was the
infiltration of her form by his power, and it subjugated every
nerve ending, taking her breath away.

He’d once been told that using that spell
would make an opponent suddenly feel as if they were really, really
high. To him, that sounded atrocious. He’d seen what people did
when they were high as kites, and vomiting and falling over were
only the beginning of that mess. But from the way Dahlia stilled
beneath him, her cheeks and lips flushing with the prettiest pink
he’d ever seen, he was getting the impression that it was different
with him. Or maybe it was just different with Dahlia.

Either way, he didn’t waste any time. Almost
instantly, he had her wrists in his tight grip and was pressing
them to the ground above her head. The ground was cut grass, and he
found he was thankful it wasn’t anything damaging like sharp rocks
and dirt.

He leaned in close and waited until her eyes
opened. When they did, he was struck with the most magnificent iris
hue he’d ever beheld. Her eyes were a sparkling, stunning mix of
green and violet, like tourmaline infused with diamonds. He was
lost in them.

Concentrate, you dumb
fuck,
he internally
hissed
.

He gritted his teeth and
spoke across her perfect, plump lips. “
Dahlia
,” he said, letting more magic
lace his voice.