The Demon King (35 page)

“
And you are the lovely
Dahlia.” He moved further toward her, and she felt the edges of his
power as if he were surrounded by a barely contained bubble of it.
She had the sudden impression that the slightest loss of
concentration on his part would release that power – and it would
overwhelm everything in its path.

“
I’m afraid we have little
time for formal introductions,” he continued, placing his hands
behind his back to clasp them easily. It put her at some ease. “I’m
here on my son’s behalf.” His expression grew serious. “He needs
you,” he told her. “Now more than ever.”

*****

“
Bael!” Laz called out to
his servant, desperation taking the better portion of his pride and
flushing it down the toilet. He was on his fourth victim, and so
much of his magic had been used to heal by this point, he felt like
a vessel for nothing but pain. Empty of all but agony.

Sweat poured over his
eyebrows, stinging the cut he’d sustained on his forehead. A
watery, bloody mixture threatened his left eye, but he batted it
away with zero patience and put his head back. “
Bael!
”

“
My lord!” Suddenly, the
redhead was falling to his knees beside Laz, his face etched in
worry and fear. “My lord, what are you doing? The change is coming
over you! You can’t do this to yourself!”

“
Bael, for the love of
demons, shut the fuck up and help me.”

“
Of course my lord, but
how?” he asked hurriedly.

“
Get Roman D’Angelo. Tell
him that people here need to be healed. Have him bring Diana Chroi
and… Dannai Caige… or….” His voice trailed off as a stab of pain so
sharp it felt like a spike of fire moved through his body. He was
being impaled by it. It was unimaginable. Stars swam before his
shut eyes, and he followed their crazy progress across his vision,
wanting to do nothing more in that moment than grab one and have it
take him out into the vacuum of space where he could implode so the
pain would end.

“
At once, my liege! Now you
must leave here!”

He knew the other man had no idea what to
tell him and that the situation was hopeless. Bael only wanted him
to leave the premises so that he wouldn’t be tempted to try to heal
anyone else. Laz knew there was no cure for what he was going
through. Apollyon had been lying when he’d said Dahlia could have
helped him. He’d been baiting him again. There was no way to stop
this pain from happening. He just had to suffer it.

Laz willed himself away. Where he went, he
could barely surmise. Time and space moved him and he felt the
ground beneath his knees and the coolness of the night air before
he doubled over, clutching at his own body as if he could peel it
away from his soul.

This was what happened to demons who didn’t
know they were demons. They went through the change. They became
what they were born to be. And for the males, the cursed ones, it
wasn’t a pretty metamorphosis.

He could feel it in his bones, this ancient
Curse coming to pass. The story was being told to him as the pain
took hold: Long, long ago, two men had gone head to head in a
battle of morals and wills. One man stood firm, despite the
consequences. He hadn’t backed down, and the demon had come away
cursed. Forever, his kind would know the suffering of the other’s
wrath.

There was so much more to it of course… but
at the moment, it didn’t matter. For him, just then, the entire
demon world was encased in a single potent drop.

And that little drop was eating Lazaroth
alive.

Chapter Forty-Five

Astaroth stopped before her and closed his
eyes. She felt a hiccup in his power, and then it was back again.
He opened his eyes and settled them on her. “Lazaroth has made the
transition. He is now the Demon King.”

Dahlia blinked. Her dizziness was coming and
going. She felt strange, almost high. She had no idea what she even
was any longer, so she had no clue whether she needed blood like a
vampire or needed to suck some dark magic from a warlock like an
Akyri would or have sex like a Tuathan fae would. She was utterly
lost. The strangest thing of all was that she barely cared. She was
a hell of a lot more interested in what Astaroth was saying about
Steven.

“
But
you’re
the Demon King,” she said
softly.

“
No,” he said, shaking his
head once. “I
was
.” He turned and waved his hand a little, and the air parted,
revealing a vision of another place. It was obviously a throne
room. The two thrones at one end were massive and ornate, carved of
something like onyx and ruby, black with shimmering red crystals
within its darkness. Both thrones were empty, and from the dust
gathered atop them and the cobwebs in the corners of their angles
and spaces, it was clear they had been for some time.

“
My throne has been empty
for nearly thirty years. And the queen’s throne… it has lain empty
always.”

Dahlia looked at the
thrones and then at the king. Or the man who had once been king.
“Did you not have a queen?”
What about
Steven’s mother?
she wondered.

“
Lenore was always my
queen. But she was not destined to be the
Demon
Queen. Hence, she never made
the transformation. You, on the other hand…” his words trailed off
and the vision vanished, leaving the air cold and empty. “You are
the Demon Queen, Dahlia Kellen. And as such, you are making the
change even as we speak.”

But she wasn’t hurting. Nothing in her body
hurt, in fact. She felt a little weak, a little dizzy, but there
was no pain. From what Apollyon had said to Steven, shouldn’t she
be writhing right now? “But nothing hurts,” she countered.

“
Only males suffer the
agony of transformation, and nothing can halt that pain. It carries
through until the change is complete.” Astaroth explained. “And so
my son has learned.”

“
Learned?” she repeated.
“You mean he’s done… changing?” That felt like a very stupid
question, and she regretted it the moment she’d asked it. But he
nodded as if the question hadn’t been stupid at all.

“
Now comes the dangerous
part.”

Now?
she thought incredulously. After
the
pain?

“
The real Curse of the
demon is not the discomfort of its transformation, Dahlia. It is
what being a demon does to the mind. He will now be faced with a
choice, though he will not see it as such. He can either hold on to
the part of him that was once kind, or he can give in to the half
of him… that is not.”

Astaroth paused and his eyes became distant,
as if he were looking into another place and time. “I chose to
become the Curse. And I have done some terrible things in my
life.”

Dahlia felt a chill. She had a very good
imagination. And she could just imagine a whole lot of “terrible
things.”

Astaroth was silent for bit. Then his eyes
were back on her, and they were focused. “Only you can stop my son
from following the same path.”

“
How?” She felt helpless.
She didn’t even know what
she
was any longer. How was she going to help someone
else figure that out?

He smiled, but it was a gentle smile, one
she frankly would not have expected to receive from a man who
claimed to have forgotten the good in himself. “Help him to
remember the man you have come to know. Help him to remember the
man that you are falling in love with.”

A stillness moved through her, and an
acceptance.

Suddenly, the former king’s expression
changed. His gaze became distant once more, and again she felt his
power hiccup. His deep blood red eyes began to glow. “Only you can
save him now, Dahlia Kellen. Time is short. Go to him before that
man is lost forever and my son becomes the monster I have always
been.”

Dahlia looked down at the ground and thought
fast. Was Steven still back at that bar beside the road? Had he
transported somewhere else? How did she find him?

“
By the way,” said
Astaroth, drawing her attention. “Did you know that the Dahlia
flower is known as
Les Etoiles de
Diable
?”

Dahlia translated in her head. “The Star of
the Devil,” she whispered.

Astaroth smiled. Then his smile vanished.
“It may be too late. He is already on the hunt.” He raised his hand
in an upward motion, and Dahlia felt a rush of magic swirl over her
like a tingly tornado.

She gasped and looked down to find that her
clothes had been magically changed. Her eyes widened. “The hunt for
what?” she squeaked.

“
Why, for
you
my dear.”

Her head snapped up, but she didn’t even
have time to meet Astaroth’s gaze again before she was being
transported against her will. The Seattle Underground vanished from
around her as the transport spell pulled at her insides. She gave a
cry of surprise, but squelched it half way through, afraid that she
would end up somewhere she didn’t want to draw any attention to
herself.

But she needn’t have bothered squelch
anything, because she wouldn’t have been heard anyway. Music
instantly accosted her senses, so loud it vibrated her limbs and
made her already knotted stomach feel even stranger. She looked up
and around, slowly taking it all in.

As the fae loved to dance, the Unseelie
Kingdom was ripe with its fair share of dance clubs. They were
usually packed, loud, and hypnotic. Coffee was the drink of choice,
and the club wouldn’t close until the sun was rising.

By and large, this didn’t
appear to be much different. The beat of the music coincided with
the flashing of lights, which caught on the multitude of
crystalline chandeliers overhead and the mirrored tiles around the
large room. Other tiles, including the large squares on the floor,
seemed to be
made
of light, fiber optic and ever changing in color. Reference
points could be easily lost in such a location, allowing the body
to move and the mind to freely spin.

Coffee wasn’t necessarily
the drink of choice in such a place in the mortal realm, but
there
were
coffee
drinks in the area; she could even smell them. There was a large
variety of drinks, in a rainbow of colors, and people held them
aloft casually in one hand as they made their ways between tables.
The atmosphere was one of slightly drugged, highly glamorous
ecstasy, and the music matched to perfection. The lights strobed
and lasered so heavily that this was perhaps the only place in the
world just then Dahlia Kellen could have blended in without drawing
too much attention to herself.

She looked down at the dress Astaroth had so
brazenly dressed her in. A chill went through her at the sight of
it. It was dangerous.

The dress was a scarlet red velvet brocade
mini dress, embroidered with thousands of tiny blood red dahlias.
It was sleeveless and body hugging and came to a mere six inches
below her bottom. She was all leg from there, to the bright red
velvet, five inch heeled pumps he’d put on her feet. Though her
arms were bare, Astaroth had wrapped them in velvet red ribbons
that crisscrossed up the length of her arms and tied around her
biceps in bows that hung their ends to her knees. Her hair was
loose and fell in thick shimmering black waves around her
shoulders. When she turned her head, she could feel it brush
against her bare back.

The outfit was stunning to say the least,
and when she looked up it was to find she was not the only person
who thought so. Little by little, a buzz seemed to be passing
through the building. A nudge here, a nod there, a whisper later,
and groups of people were staring at her across the fiber optic
floor.

The music continued to rave, but it seemed
to grow more hollow by the moment as fewer people swayed their
bodies to the beat and more eyes fell on Dahlia’s figure. She
swallowed hard, her heart hammering. She was a Tuathan Fae in the
human realm in a dance club filled with high and drunk and horny
mortals, and she was wearing a killer red dress.

She was racking her brain, trying to figure
out why Astaroth would send her to such a place looking like she
did, and was considering transporting away – when the music
faltered altogether.

There was none of the scratching and tearing
of a record suddenly ripped into silence. It wasn’t a record the DJ
had been using. Instead, he’d been playing an ongoing backbeat to
which he added a multitude of different sounds at different
intervals so that the music was changing at a constant pace.

All at once, however, the changing stopped.
The lights and strobes stopped. The backbeat alone continued
unhindered for a few seconds despite the fact that no one was
dancing any longer – and then it, too, was halted.

Dahlia hugged herself gently. She had never
felt more conspicuous in her life.

But it wasn’t her who had stopped the music.
All around the dance club, sets of eyes were shifting. They were
moving from her to the club door.

Dahlia slowly turned, following their gazes.
In the doorway to the establishment stood a man in a fine dark
tailored suit. His hair was the color of shimmering pitch. His jaw
was strong and clean shaven, his shoulders broad, his build tall
and graceful. His tie was missing, and his white shirt had been
unbuttoned casually at the collar. His eyes were so blue, they
nearly glowed.

He looked like every kind of money. And he
looked like all kinds of power. He oozed control and confidence. He
was everything a woman would ever dare to desire.