The Demon King (34 page)

Laz knew who he really was, though. They
weren’t brothers. But their fathers were.

“
Steven Lazarus,” Apollyon
replied in greeting, speaking the name as if it left a bad taste on
his tongue. “‘
Steven
,’” he repeated. “How pedestrian. Especially for the son of
Astaroth.”

“
Lazaroth is a bit of a
mouthful in Boston,” Laz said casually, paraphrasing one of his
favorite lines from
Angel
Heart
, a movie about nothing less than the
devil himself. Meanwhile, he was wondering how much damage a
burning Mercedes would do if it were dropped on a demon.

Apollyon laughed, the sound deceptively
charming.

“
Well, actually I
like
‘Steven’,” said
Dahlia suddenly – and the men both looked at her, falling quiet.
She shrugged. “It’s a name of power,” she said as if explaining
something offhandedly at a cocktail party rather than in the midst
of explosions and smoke. “I mean think about it. There’s Steven
Hawking, Steven Spielberg, Steven King, Steven Jobs – if you want
something done right in this world, it’s probably going to take a
Steven to do it.” She grinned, nodding to herself as if pleased.
“Oh!” she added brightly, her eyes widening. “And let’s not forget
Steven Universe! That kid is
amazing!
”

That was when she turned to
Laz and whispered,
“Trust me.”
Their eyes met and a message was passed between
them. And then, just like that, she was gone. She didn’t call up a
portal as a warlock would; she disappeared in a flash – like a
demon.

Laz took that moment to strike.

Apollyon wasn’t expecting the attack. He
hadn’t been expecting Dahlia to disappear, either. That was
apparent by the look on his face. He would have followed her; he
would have instantly transported away to trail after her magical
signature like a dog after a yummy scent – but for the purple,
crackling electricity that filled the space between them. Half a
second and it coalesced into a spear of power that shot forward,
slicing through the demon like lightning.

Apollyon was thrown in the
attack, and though Laz felt the drain on his power, it brought him
massive amounts of satisfaction to see the man land twenty feet
away, his chest smoking, his clothes scorched. The demon rolled
onto his side and slowly, painfully, got to his hands and knees.
“You know,” he grunted as he rested there a second.
“
Steven
… the more
power you use, the faster that change will come over
you.”

Laz stilled. He felt an itch in his veins.
His ears were ringing. His vision flashed, an image in his memory…
a fear he’d recently had of looking at his own reflection in the
mirror.

Apollyon pushed himself up
until he was resting on his knees and sitting back on his heels.
His profile was to Laz. He pressed his hand to his stomach where
he’d been struck, and looked at Laz over his shoulder. “You know
what I’m talking about, don’t you, my
prince
?” he hissed. Red-brown smoke
moved through his clutched fingers, climbing in small swirls to the
darkness overhead. “You can feel it.” He chuckled harshly and
grinned. “And fuck is it going to hurt. Pain like that – it changes
a man.” He got to his feet and faced off with Laz again.

I should have kicked him
while he was down
, Laz thought.
I should have finished him
. It was an ungenerous thought and one that wasn’t really
like Laz. But he had it anyway, and he meant it.

“
She could have taken that
pain away from you,” Apollyon continued ruthlessly. “Too bad she
chose to save herself rather than help you.”

Laz knew better than that. Apollyon was
pulling a cheap shot now, and it meant absolutely nothing. Laz knew
damn well that Dahlia had left because she’d hoped Apollyon would
follow her, giving Laz enough time to heal the people in the
field.

That was why Lazarus had
attacked the demon instead. He knew if he didn’t, the fucker
would
follow
Dahlia.
And she’s mine
, he thought.

Apollyon must have known in
that moment that the baiting hadn’t worked, for he chose to attack
anyway. Laz watched the other demon’s red magic gather around him
and condense in his outstretched hand. Apollyon reached back and
hurled the magic like
Firestarter
pitching for a baseball team.

Strangely enough, Laz was not afraid. Just
the opposite. He smiled grimly. With a simple jerk of his head, the
fireball made a right angle turn in mid-air and went flying into a
nearby motorcycle’s remains. The bike jumped up into the air,
sparks flying, to settle a good twenty feet away.

Laz shook his head in
reprimand. Apollyon’s eyes widened. He seemed out of breath, and
watching his distress was like flour on Laz’s furious fire.
Suddenly he didn’t care how much pain he would suffer from it, he
just
had
to hit
Apollyon again.

So he did. His own dark magic rushed into
his hands and out into the atmosphere with barely any enticing. It
was ready to do harm, ready to do damage. His magic was nearly more
powerful than his will when it coalesced into a spear of force.
This time, the spear struck Apollyon through the neck.

The man shot back another two dozen feet to
hit the ground on the side of the highway.

Laz’s smile became a grin of nearly
gluttonous gratification… and then it slipped. Pain ebbed to life
in his gut, like a blossom unfolding as it bloomed. His fingertips
crackled. His legs buzzed as if the nerves running through his
spine to his extremities were damaged. It was a wholly
uncomfortable feeling, one of a sudden and stark loss of
control.

But he’d be damned if he was going to let
his enemy see his pain. So he remained standing and remained
staring, waiting for Apollyon to once more get to his feet.

It seemed to take forever
this time. In fact, Laz’s magic seemed to have done so much damage
to the man, he couldn’t help but wonder why Apollyon frightened
Astaroth so much. Why didn’t he just kill him? If the way he was
clutching his throat as he got back to his feet was any
indication,
Laz
nearly had.

Apollyon didn’t bother
saying anything this time when he turned around. Maybe he
couldn’t
say anything.
Maybe Laz had taken out his vocal chords. The demon’s irises had
gone stark red and were backlit like stoplights. He met Laz’s gaze
and held it for a moment. And then he vanished.

Laz released the breath he’d been holding
and clutched at his stomach. The pain was moving through him now,
reaching out as if it were a Cthulhuan demon, its tentacles the
deliverers of its masters’ agony.

He’s going after
Dahlia.
The thought was bright and red and
blinking, like a sign on the Las Vegas strip. But he was hoping
he’d given her enough of a head start to confuse the trail, and he
was also hoping he’d done enough damage to Apollyon that the man
would simply crawl home and curl into a ball to heal.

Plus, she’d told Laz to trust her. And he
needed to do just that.

Tendrils of pain snaked up along his spine
and down his arms, traveled into his brain through his neck and
encased his vision in an aura of red. He wondered if his own eyes
had shifted colors too – but it was a passing thought, one of those
that moved unhindered through the brain of someone in vast amounts
of pain.

You still need to heal those people.

That was a passing thought, too. But that
one, he stopped in its tracks and held on to. Dahlia had believed
in him. She’d left and used herself as bait because she’d trusted
him to do the right thing.

So as he faced some kind of ghastly
transformation all alone. As his magic grew stronger and stronger
and darker and darker and the humanity inside of him slowly died,
Laz somehow found the will to move one foot in front of the other.
He found the will to re-enter the field he’d left moments earlier
with Dahlia.

He found the will to kneel beside a woman
whose brainwaves were becoming quieter by the second, and he
pressed his hand to her chest. He gritted his teeth and tried not
to moan low with the pain as his power shifted from him to her,
bringing her back from the brink of death.

One down… five to go.

Chapter Forty-Four

Dahlia felt herself pop out of existence in
one place and reappear in another, and it was the strangest
sensation she’d ever experienced. She would liken it to being a
character in a book where the reader suddenly turned several
chapters’ worth of pages so that the character was all at once in
another place and time. There was a gentle tug on the core of her,
a blurring that was more mental than visual, and then everything
was solid again and she was standing somewhere new.

This time, it was an elevator. Thank
goodness it was empty and there was no camera. She willed herself
to transport again, and she felt the same tug on her insides. She
closed her eyes to minimize the strangeness of the sensation. But
she reappeared so quickly, it was almost as fast as blinking;
closing her eyes had been pointless.

Now she was standing in a stairwell in what
looked like a Motel 6 or something akin to it. Again, she was
fortunate no one was witness to her appearing and disappearing act.
She transported again and found herself standing in a large room
filled with velvet furniture and clocks on the walls. The room was
genuinely beautiful, with shining exposed copper pipes, flickering
gas lights, and deep cherry wood carved crown molding. There were
so many details to the room, she didn’t have time to take them all
in – especially since her attention was captured almost immediately
by the man in the room. He was tall and dangerously handsome, green
eyed and black haired, and all too familiar. It was William
Balthazar, the Time King.

When she appeared, he looked up from the
desk he was standing at. He had been wrapping something like gauze
around an injury on his arm. Their eyes met – his surprised, hers
confused. And then she was gone again.

Now she was standing in a cold and empty
space surrounded by concrete and bars. Echoes banged and cleared,
like metal on metal in pipes buried far beneath the earth. It
smelled like salt and mold and bird droppings. Dahlia turned a slow
circle. On either side of her, a row of cells stretched into the
distance. Prison cells.

“
Holy shit, this is
Alcatraz,” she muttered. A deep chill moved through her, and she
hugged herself. When she transported again, though it most likely
took the same amount of time that it had taken before, it seemed to
take longer. She closed her eyes and pushed, and when she opened
them again, she was standing in an environment so different from
the last unpleasant one, she felt dizzy.

She looked down. Surrounding her feet were
the lines of a maze made of white and dark pebbles. The Zen-styled
maze stretched for twenty feet or so in a circle around her. Beyond
the maze on one side was the green of a jungle forest. On the other
was a building with a banner over the door. It was a gift shop for
something called The Sacred Garden.

Of Maui.

“
Yeah,” she said quietly.
“This is definitely not Alcatraz.”

But it could become a prison just as easily
as a room with bars if she took any time to stop and enjoy the fact
that she was in Hawaii. She needed to keep moving. There was no
room for error here. A mad demon was literally on her trail. “Maybe
I’ll come back,” she said. “Next time, with Steven.”

She closed her eyes, because now the
transports were beginning to be too plentiful for her vertigo to
ignore. This time, when she opened them, only darkness greeted her.
At once, she cast a spell for light, and purple-white illumination
flooded the area around her. “I’m underground.” She recognized it,
actually. There were remnants of wooden building facades on either
side of her, junk from the early 1900’s was strewn about and
covered in dust and cobwebs, and a trail led through the
underground passage, but it was a well-traveled one. She’d been
here before. She’d come on a tour with Violet once after Violet had
married the Shadow King.

“
This is the Seattle
Underground.”

A wave of dizziness washed over her and she
stumbled, bumping into the wall. She grasped the wall, turned
around, and pressed her back to it. She took a deep breath, one
filled with the must of ages past, and let it out slowly. Her
eyelids drifted shut. The constant transports were becoming a drain
on her power. Either that or…

“
You’re changing, my
dear.”

Dahlia’s eyes flew open. The sound of a
leather soled shoe on pavement brought back memories that flooded
her hands with what magic she had left and prepped her for one hell
of a fight. But it wasn’t Apollyon who stepped into view this
time.

Though the darkness seemed to want to hold
on to him, a tall figure moved from the shadows into the light. He
had long black hair that curled carelessly around his shoulders and
sported a single long, gray streak from his temple. The hair’s
color was familiar to Dahlia, as was the strength in the chin, the
build of the man’s frame, and the set to his jaw. But his eyes were
a hellish deep, dark blood red that had yet to be set alight.

“
You’re Astaroth,” she
whispered. Her voice seemed to be failing her. But the man smiled,
having heard her words nonetheless.