The Demon King (30 page)

Now as she knelt in the grass in the dark
beside a river she didn’t know, Dahlia felt her shoulders shake and
heard a slightly familiar sound. She was laughing once more. Things
were a mess again. She was confused. She was scared. But crying
would only give fate the satisfaction. So she laughed.

After a moment, she dropped her hands and
threw back her head, allowing her laughter to ring out into the
night. The world heard her. She knew fate raised a brow. And that
made her laugh even harder.

With each passing second,
she felt stronger. Each laugh renewed her will a little more.
Before long, she was beginning to
believe
the laughter. She started to
believe she was actually happy.

She had reason to be, didn’t she? She was
alive. These days, that was saying something. She was powerful. She
was beautiful. And she may have been saddled with a man she’d had
no say in, but the truth was she couldn’t have picked anyone better
than him on her own anyway. He was pretty awesome. After all, he
hadn’t had a choice in this matter either, but he wasn’t whining
about it. Instead, he was in his skivvies at the bottom of a cold,
deep river, trying to find her phone.

He was either insane or he
was actually trying. For
her
.

After several minutes, Dahlia allowed her
laughter to drift off, and she lowered her head.

Her mouth tasted terrible and there was a
pile of grossness on the ground. She smiled and called up a bit of
good, old fashioned fae magic. The fae were very good at cleaning
things. Personal hygiene was a must with her people. She used the
magic to rid the ground of every last molecule of Lifeblood and
then used the same magic on herself, cleansing her mouth, her face,
her entire body until she tasted nothing but sparkling winter green
and smelled like cherry blossoms.

For some reason, that made her laugh too, so
she let out one last chuckle and stood up. She’d felt sorry for
herself long enough. Now it was time to take matters into her own
hands. She turned toward the river and concentrated on her
phone.

It had been on and playing
an app when he’d thrown it into the river, so it had probably fried
out in short order. Now the screen would be black and impossible to
find in the mud. She may not be able to find it either, but
she
could
reach
out to it. Using a simple fae glamour, she urged the phone to come
to life. As she did this, she realized that if she’d lost it above
water somewhere, she could probably have used the same magic to
make it ring. That would be akin to “calling one phone with
another,” and finding it then would be a cinch.

Or she could have had anyone else with a
phone call her. That too.

But this was underwater, and turning it on
would require bypassing circuitry that had been destroyed. She
would need to repair it. Once she did, turning it on again was only
going to fry the phone once more. She would need to protect it.

Dahlia took a deep breath. Then she got to
work, closing her eyes to pull up her magic. She pictured the phone
in her head, then pictured it whole. It was said Healers could do
this with people’s bodies. The most she could do was fix something
broken, but she was happy for that ability now.

Once she was certain it would be whole, she
sent out an extra tendril of magic to prevent it from frying in the
water by coating the wiring with a protective layer of plastic. She
wasn’t sure it was going to work, but at this point, she just
didn’t care. She didn’t care that she was using magic she wasn’t
supposed to, and she didn’t care if her phone ever made it back in
one piece. Lazarus had been down there too long, and if she was
reading the man right, he was just as stubborn as she was. He
wasn’t going to come up until either he was unconscious or he had a
phone in his hand. So she went ahead and cast the spells, letting
her magic move through her body and reach out into the night.

*****

I’ll be damned if I’m going
back up without that phone
. But he was
beginning to become uncomfortable. When he’d been younger, he’d
learned to hold his breath for nearly four minutes. It was
something he’d wanted to do just for fun, a goal to reach, a
personal victory sort of thing. Now he was extremely grateful for
the work he’d put in, because he was having a devil of a time
finding the phone.

It was dark down here, it
was cold, and he’d gotten water in his mouth. If he’d been purely
human, he would most likely have contracted some type of disease
with that mouthful. Right away, he’d cast a light spell, and
fortunately for him, light
was
one of the things a warlock could cast despite
warlock magic being “dark” magic. It was also fortunate that the
spell didn’t require words.

The problem was, the light only stretched so
far in this strange environment. It was clearly meant for air, not
water, and he’d had to re-cast the spell several times as he moved
along the riverbed.

The bottom of the river was
slimy with algae and bumpy with discarded remnants of humanity.
He’d come across a car bumper from the fifties, an old writing
desk, several toilets, Coke bottles from every generation since
Coke’s inception, and numerous secured trash bags that he could
only
hope
had
nothing but trash in them.

I can’t believe I’m doing
this
, he thought as he swam a little
further and his head began to throb.
This
is absolutely insane. What the fuck am I thinking?
But that’s how he’d felt lately, wasn’t it?
Insane? On the edge? This was just par for the crazy course.
It
must
have
been, because it felt ridiculously important to him. It was
positively vital to him that he get back the phone he’d taken from
Dahlia. In all the world and of all the things that
could
be important, this
stupid, stupid thing was what ranked highest on his list. It was
imperative that he prove he could right this wrong.

And there, in that wet
murky darkness in nothing but his goddamn underwear, Steven
Lazarus, aka Lazaroth the Demon Prince, realized
why
. Dahlia Kellen was
the one stable thing in his entire universe right now. From his own
family to his job to the Table of the Thirteen, the world was
spinning around him, changing, being born and dying. But in the
entropy and the discord, he’d been gifted with something most men
would kill for, die for, then kill again for as zombies. She was
his.

If
he didn’t fuck it up. If he got his act together. If he
somehow managed to prove that he was worth someone as painfully
precious as she was, Dahlia Kellen might, just
might
, become his queen.

His light spell brought to view a bicycle
he’d wager had been built and painted red in the seventies, a
shopping cart a little too small to be modern, and several carp. He
kept moving, but was beginning to worry. He hadn’t been counting,
but he felt like he’d been under the water for several minutes
already. He was in enough pain that his fangs were pronounced in
his mouth; it happened when he was hurting. He couldn’t control or
hide them. His skin was tingling uncomfortably, and there was a
general burning along the inside of his limbs that he didn’t
recognize. To say nothing of the burning in his lungs.

I’m not going to find it.

Just then, a blue-white light blurred to
life in the darkness far up ahead, and Laz blinked several times,
afraid he was now so oxygen deprived that he was seeing things. But
the light remained. He kicked his swim into overdrive and drew
closer to it.

There was a lit-up rectangular screen
protruding from the mud in the distance. He raced toward it, his
hope pounding harder and more vibrantly with every won meter. Until
he was floating right over it, reaching down, and retrieving the
cell phone from where it had landed in the mud. It was turned on. A
Team Instinct avatar stood on an empty plane of green and blue,
waiting for its owner to make it do something.

I can’t believe
it
, he thought as he shoved his way
rapidly to the river’s surface, the phone held tight in one hand.
The fact that it was on while it was wet should have killed it. But
it was still working, and that could only mean one thing. When he
broke the surface, inhaled sharply, and finished coughing, he laid
eyes on what that thing was.

Dahlia Kellen stood at the water’s edge, an
ethereal goddess of the night, her long black hair billowing around
her like a cloak of darkness. She was tall and lithe, a superhero
in a comic strip. Her eyes and hands were glowing a white-purple
light that sent her appearance over the edge of otherworldliness.
She’d obviously cast some kind of magic to help him locate the
phone.

For a moment, he was so
entranced by her, Laz forgot to tread water and he began sinking.
He caught himself, tried not to look
too
surprised, and made his way to
the river’s edge. Slowly, the light faded from Dahlia’s hands and
eyes, and she met him at the bank as he pulled himself
out.

“
I can’t believe you
actually did that,” she said, smiling. He stood and stared at that
smile, utterly captivated. She even smelled good. He, on the other
hand, was covered in slime.

But he bent down, pulled his own cell phone
from the inner pocket of his leather jacket, and turned it on. He
tapped the Pokémon Go symbol to turn on the app and waited for it
to come to life and warn him not to trespass. Then he held both
phones out to her and smiled right back. “I had to,” he said. “Team
Instinct is vastly outnumbered.”

The screens each showed avatars in the
traditional Pokémon Go clothing with an experience bar beneath
them. What he knew she noticed the moment her beautiful eyes
widened was that both experience bars were yellow – the color of
Team Instinct.

“
We need to stick
together.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

“
You know, we’ve both used
so much magic now, I bet we’re positively glowing on the bad guy’s
radar,” Dahlia brooked casually as she watched the Detective get
dressed. She’d cast on him the same spell she’d used on herself to
get rid of the river water, and now his hair was even dry. She was
interested to see that it wasn’t any lighter in color when it was
clean and dry than it had been when it was wet. She was pretty sure
The Akyri King was supposed to have blond hair, but Lazarus’s hair
was now pitch black.

He smelled like sandalwood and leather. He
moved like the fae, all grace and muscle. A lot of women would have
been sorely disappointed when he pulled back on his jeans and
slipped his black tee-shirt over his head, but Dahlia had always
been one of those people who appreciated men when they were
dressed, too. She liked the way a well built man filled out an old
pair of jeans or a new tailored suit. It was like the wrapping on a
gift, and who didn’t like ripping off wrapping paper?

“
I’ve no doubt,” he replied
as he shrugged on his vintage leather jacket and joined her at the
base of the hill that led from the river bank to the street up
above.

“
So… what do we do now?”
she asked. He smiled where he stood so near, towering over her in
darkness and demonic strength. Dahlia gazed up in wonder as his
power cascaded over her and his fangs promised delightful
wickedness. But she swallowed hard when his blue eyes flashed with
something that looked like fire, for just a moment, fast enough
that she might have imagined it.

He raised his right hand, fingers curled
deftly beneath her chin. His touch was warm – almost hot. Had it
been this hot before?

“
We need to lie low and
regroup,” he said. “Driving somewhere else is still our best
bet.”

Dahlia looked up to where
the car was at the beginning of the bridge. “Is that
your
car?” she
asked.

He smiled. “Of course not. That’s Baxter’s.
His dad left him a ton of money and he has a few nice rides because
of it. Unfortunately, that’s also a point of contention between him
and his girlfriend.”

Dahlia thought for a moment and decided not
to say anything about that. It was best not to get involved in
people’s private romantic lives. She had enough to worry about with
her own. But the “ton of money” thing did open a new avenue of
conversation. “You know, your dad obviously left you a bit of a
legacy as well,” she said as they got back into the car and buckled
up. “At least…if that gilded room I woke up in is any indication.”
She pictured the chamber of gold and shook her head in wonder.

Laz looked over from the driver’s seat as he
turned the key in the ignition. “That was Bael’s doing. He thought
it only fitting for his queen.”

Dahlia looked at his profile and caught the
edge of the smile that was still there.

“
But yeah… I guess he did,”
he said, putting the car in drive and pulling back out onto the
empty road. The night was long and dark on either side of the
highway. There wasn’t much civilization to pierce the darkness with
its electricity. Dahlia reached up and pushed the button that
allowed the moon roof to slide easily back into its slot. A slight
breeze caught her hair and the stars twinkled overhead. They only
did that out here, away from the city.

But the city was where they needed to be.
More people, more places to hide. The bigger the commotion around
them, the easier it would be for them to blend in. Out here, there
was less of a chance of someone getting hurt, yes. But there was a
far greater chance of them being singled out amidst the nothing
around them.