The Demon King

by Heather Killough-Walden

Naturally, thought Dahlia.

  “Just after I became a vampire, Jane turned thirty-four. Her daughter Alice had been going through some pretty intense bullying at her school. Jane of course raised hell. Unfortunately, one of the kids bullying her daughter had an aunt strung out on meth. One afternoon, Jane was stopped at a light with traffic on both sides of her when a woman got out of the vehicle in front of her and approached her car. Jane instantly recognized her as that same aunt. The woman’s hair was a mess, her makeup was heavy and smeared, and she looked for lack of a better description, ‘hard lived’. She also had a tire iron in her right hand.”

  Dahlia stiffened, her gut tightening as the story progressed.

  “Apparently, the woman approached Alice’s side of the car instead of Jane’s, and since Jane couldn’t swerve away due to the traffic, she did the only thing she could think of and told her daughter to lock her door. Thankfully, Alice obeyed, and just in time. But the woman tried like hell to get in, and she beat the hell out of the car.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I know, right?” agreed Evie. “When they finally got out of the mess, they filed criminal charges. But Alice hid under the covers of her bed for a few days, and any time she had to get in the car with her mom, she would take a household item with her as a weapon.” Evie shook her head. “An eight year old girl.”

  “She was traumatized,” said Dahlia.

  “That’s putting it mildly,” said Evie. “I saw what it did to her mom too. A woman who was generally tough as nails, rendered helpless because someone went after her kid, and that was all she could think about.”

  A moment of silence passed between them as Dahlia digested this. Then, stating what she knew would be the obvious, she said, “So you killed the woman who attacked them.”

  “I didn’t originally plan to,” said Evie. “I tracked her down to teach her a lesson, maybe give her a really good scare. But when I showed up, I found her in the basement counting money, and four dogs chained in the back yard. They’d been used horribly.” She shook her head. “I’ve never seen animals more scarred up. The money she was counting had been collected for dog fights. So… I showed her what it felt like to be attacked and used by a bully, by someone scarier and stronger than her. And then I drained every drop of blood from her body. Despite the fact that the meth made it taste terrible, I have never regretted it once.”

  Chapter Six

  Dahlia was sure some wise person somewhere must have been quoted as saying that every person has a reason for doing the things they do. By that way of thinking, every criminal is there because of cause and effect. The violent alcoholic was an alcoholic because his father beat him. His father beat him because he was beaten as a child by a crazy mother. The mother who beat him was locked in a school closet for every wrong-doing during the school week and had become a manically anxious sufferer of claustrophobia. The teacher who locked her in a closet had lost her daughter when her daughter wandered off one day after being disciplined and was never seen from again.

  Every fault blames another, on and on through the generations until you were left with a caveman writing something hurtful on a cave wall in bison blood. The first abusive human. The root of all evil. The source of every wrong-doing the world would see in the countless years to come.

  But Dahlia had lived a lot of those countless years, and she’d noticed something else. There was no such thing as an absence of dysfunction. There was no such thing as a perfect childhood, a spotless familial resume. Every single person on the planet was scarred by something. What made the difference – all the difference in the world – was what they chose to do once they’d been scarred.

  You could do one of two things. You could reveal your scars as angry and red, still smarting despite the separateness of life, the individuality of experience and time, and you could share that scar with all the honest world. Or you could reveal it for the wound of the past that it was. You could reveal it as something that is done and finished, and you could learn from that scar, treat it for the lesson it had the potential to be, and make certain not to repeat history’s mistakes.

  The latter was the more difficult choice to make. The former was a knee-jerk, instant, and soul-deep kind of response to pain, even old pain, and it made people into bullies and created new scars. But the careful, the empathetic, the sensitive and the truly kind ones were the scarred people who either made the latter choice, or made that knee-jerk first choice, realized they’d done wrong, and then took a step back. They took a deep breath. They admitted that what they’d just done was a mistake, and they never repeated it. They vowed to make the world better, not worse.

  And a chain was broken.

  It was easy to blame one’s problems on someone else. It was easiest to blame them on everyone else. It took a bit more courage and a lot more strength to own up to your own decisions, your own mind, and climb out of history’s tired grooves and onto a fresh path.

  Hence, Dahlia had a hard time feeling sorry for the perpetrators of evil. To her, evil was the result of one of two things: apathy or weakness, and usually it was both.

  “I realized that I was full of a mortal’s blood and that Roman would smell it on me, and I did what anyone in my situation would do. I turned to Lalura Chantelle for help,” Evie said, continuing with her story.

  Dahlia almost laughed when she mentioned Lalura. But she was right; it was what anyone in her situation would do. Anyone smart, anyway.

  “She hid the scent for me. No small feat I imagine; Roman is observant. But she also told me I either needed to get over my need to partake… or learn to be more careful.”

  Well, clearly she didn’t stop ‘partaking,’ thought Dalia, since she told me she’d killed twice as many as I had by this point.

  “I decided a bit on both. I wasn’t going to stop what I was doing, but I did become more careful. I learned to use my strength and powers to even out the bad guy – good guy numbers on the planet without ingesting my victims’ blood. I couldn’t go running to Lalura after every encounter. So I just….”

  “Became a vigilante.”

  Evie smiled a small smile. “Pretty much.” She finished off her tea and returned her cup to its saucer.

  “You know… you are the Vampire Queen. If you want to kill people and drink their blood, Roman shouldn’t have any say in the matter,” Dahlia told her friend. She was being frank, but the truth was frank. That was its nature.

  “True enough,” said Evie. “That’s why I eventually told him what I was doing. He had to deal with it. I am what I am and he is what he is, and we’ve accepted it. Besides, as members of the Thirteen factions, we have a lot of crazy shit to deal with. Getting rid of scumbags pales in comparison. But for what it’s worth, these days I’m sort of more busy writing than bringing dark justice to the world. My deadlines have become ridiculous. I have to release a book every three months to keep up with the competition.” She shook her head.

  “Lucky for the bad guys.”

  Evie’s grin was filled with fang. “Indeed.” She picked up a cupcake from the same tray Dahlia had taken hers, and began to unpeel the bottom. Dahlia had simply taken her bite from the top; she’d wanted the icing immediately. She smiled at the thought as Evie finished with the wrapper and pulled the pastry apart with long, slim fingers. “So what was your first?” she asked conversationally.

  It was almost eerie to be asked about such a thing in such a way. But, then again, being a vampire was eerie. Things were different now on a fundamental level.

  “An asshole who cheated on his wife.”

  “Was that all he did?” Evie asked. It wasn’t an accusatory question. It was more like Evie already knew the answer, and she was just urging Dahlia to tell her more.

  “He cheated on his wife of forty-three years. Then he refused to help support her as he divorced her. She became depressed and sank into a shell of the vibrant, beautiful woman she once was, which just killed her daughter. Her daughter’s name is Nora. They’re m
ortal, but Nora is still a close and personal friend of mine.”

  “We always go after the ones who hurt those we love first, don’t we?”

  Dahlia nodded. “It gets better.” Or worse, she thought. Worse, definitely. “The man began steadily dating the twenty-eight year old woman he’d originally cheated on his wife with, and as soon as the divorce went through, he married the tramp, giving her all of the money he’d originally promised his wife. His wife became so distraught over everything he was doing to her, she grew unstable. One morning, with Nora in the other room….” Dahlia closed her mouth and swallowed hard. She realized she was shaking. It was quite sudden.

  “She killed herself, didn’t she?” Evie asked softly.

  Dahlia met her gaze. “She had just been on the phone with him. She begged him to at least help her find a job so she could support herself. She was pushing sixty. He hung up on her. Nora heard her mother crying as she hung up the phone. And then she heard a gunshot.”

  “Oh Christ.”

  Dahlia watched Evie shut her eyes and knew the woman felt the same foreboding hatred that Dahlia had felt upon hearing the news.

  “Nora rushed into the room just in time to pull her mother into her arms as she died. In the weeks that followed, Nora tried to at least obtain the items her mother wanted to leave to her in her will. But her father made it impossible, giving all of his late wife’s jewelry and material possessions to his new young wife instead.”

  “Oh fucking hell, no.”

  Oh yes, thought Dahlia. Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly hate someone more, he went and proved you wrong.

  “I hope you made him pay, Doll.”

  Dahlia lowered her gaze and chose her words carefully. “He got what was coming to him. And so did his daughter.” She’d made sure of that. Nora now owned all of her mother’s jewelry and personal possessions. Dahlia had only had to destroy a little evidence, erase a few memories, and set the police records straight on an “accident” to make it happen. Two fewer assholes in the world. Two nasty birds killed with one “justice” stone.

  It was a while before Evie spoke again. She blew out a sigh and shook her head. “And just think. That shit head would still be alive if you hadn’t been turned into a vampire. Hope comes in all sorts of dark disguises.”

  Chapter Seven

  He was going to do this by the book. I’m going to do this by the book, he told himself. Then again: By the book.

  It had become a mantra of late. It was that way when every blood vessel was expanding, heart rate was increasing, pupils were dilating, skin was prickling with the electric-sizzle of magic and every molecule in your body was telling you to do it differently and screw the book. Throw the book on a great big bonfire and watch it burn.

  Roast marshmallows on it.

  He could give in to it again. He could let it consume him and try not to be so damn strong. But when he did that, people died. Too many lately. Yes they were scumbags, and truth be told, the world was probably better off without them in its breeding circles. But Roman had been able to tell that he’d gone down this road, and that wasn’t a good thing. It meant he’d crossed a line and gone too far.

  Lazarus had taken an oath to serve and protect people, even the shitty ones. So do it by the goddamned, mother fucking book. He straightened, his eyes focused with inhuman clarity, and moved tall and calm into the darkened alley.

  It had rained most of the previous day and into twilight, and the ground was still damp. The air was heavy with remnants of the storm. It was June, almost summer, and the garbage in the trash bins along the alley wall wreaked of death and all of its symbiotic bacteria. Like a knee-jerk reaction, he longed for the days when all of humanity’s leftovers froze solid and stopped stinking.

  Debris crunched beneath his shoes, and the figures up ahead jostled into a frantic kind of quiet at the sound of his approach. There were four of them, all male, but only three were moving. Only three were conscious; the fourth was their victim.

  “Evening boys,” Laz drawled. “What have we got going on here?” As if he didn’t know. “Mind if I join in?”

  The restless three exchanged glances, and one or two of them hissed a few obscenities, both angry and fearful at his sudden presence. He wondered if they could detect the cop in him. Or if maybe they could feel that other thing in him. Or both. Only a cop or something far more dangerous could have the audacity to approach a bunch of men in a dark alley on a new moon in the middle of the night in Boston. Maybe he wasn’t making it too hard for them to guess what he was.

  “Fuck off, asshole,” one of them finally spat. He turned to face Laz, and his body, thin though it was, seemed to want to hide what was behind him. He stood between them, cop on one side, criminals on the other, as if he had a hope in hell of keeping them separated.

  He didn’t.

  “I have a better idea,” Laz said calmly, touching his chin as if he were giving it a spur-of-the-moment thought. “Why don’t you and your buddies march yourselves to the police station five blocks away while I call an ambulance for the gentleman cleaning the ground with his expensive suit?”

  That earned him a good, long moment of shocked silence from the three men, and he couldn’t help but smile. That smile didn’t waiver when the man who’d spoken pulled a distinctive, dark shape from his left hoodie pocket. Laz heard the sound like a splintering of night when the asshole cocked it.

  “You know, you don’t need to cock automatic weapons,” Laz told him, his voice weary as if he were schooling a slow child. “They’re called automatic for a reason. Also, your chances of hitting something when you hold it sideways like that are about as good as the chances of you sleeping anywhere but a jail cell tonight.”

  The man pulled the trigger, a knee-jerk reaction to the direct threat to his manliness. But Laz mentally directed the bullets into the wall at his side, all four of them. Not that any of them came anywhere near him anyway. He’d been right about holding the gun sideways.

  When the man finally stopped jerking the trigger – jerking the trigger also lowered a shooter’s chances of hitting a goddamn thing – Laz took a deep breath and let it out in a heavy sigh. “Finished?”

  The gun went off again, and the men behind the shooter bolted, deciding on safety rather than valor. That was irritating. Now he was going to have to track them all down. It had already been a long night, so he was betting that by the time he caught up with them, he wouldn’t be in the mood to go easy on them.

  Laz counted the shots while the shooter emptied his chamber. Just by sheer dumb luck and proximity, one actually went through him. He didn’t feel like re-directing all of them. Fortunately, it did nothing to his immortal body.

  Some of the bullets bounced off the garbage cans or the thicker metal of the cars parked at the end of the alley. Laz heard glass shatter and knew a window or perhaps a windshield had become victims. But the street was clear of pedestrians; it was 3:37a.m. on a Tuesday night in a middle-class part of town, and most people were just trying desperately to get enough sleep to face another day at the office.

  “Okay,” he said when the ringing silence finally filled the alley and the main shooter was backing up in numb terror. “Now we’re finished.” He moved in, intent on apprehending the man as quickly as possible so someone could help the guy on the ground. But the criminal dropped his gun and raised those hands to begin moving them in an arcane manner. The glow that grew around his hands and the instantaneous impression of dark magic that filled the alley were all too familiar to Laz. He’s casting a spell, he realized. It was a warlock spell. What the hell was a sideways gun-wielding idiot doing messing around with warlock magic? He clearly wasn’t bright enough to handle it!

  But Laz really knew better. An affinity for magic was not something you learned, it was something you were born with. The idiot part for this guy must have come later. It was obvious the man had never felt comfortable exploring the magic inside him; he was unschooled, and for good reason. The b
itch about dark magic was that if you weren’t smart, you couldn’t control it. It would control you.

  Out of a mixture of curiosity and resigned hesitation toward what he was going to have to do, Laz waited to see exactly what spell the young man was trying to cast. The perp’s eyes were wide. His expression was uneasy and far too uncertain. The words coming from his mouth were a little garbled, as if he wasn’t sure he was pronouncing them correctly. Little did he know, it was impossible to pronounce them incorrectly. Dark magic didn’t make it into your mouth until it was fully formed. In fact, the only reason you spoke at all was because the spell wanted out.

  It was the young man’s uncertainty and lack of practice controlling the magic that were going to make things go wrong. Laz had two choices. He could either stand there and wait for the shit to hit the fan and clean up the magic mess, or he could just eat the guy and be done with it. It had been a while since he’d fed anyway. Maybe this was just fortuitous.

  “Fuck it,” he hissed. Then he raised his hand, and his palm tingled. A symbol was forming across his skin, swirling in ominous red. The words coming from the young man’s mouth faltered, stumbling to silence. “Sorry,” said Laz insincerely. “You’re out of time and I’m hungry.”

  The red mark on his palm expanded, enveloping his entire hand in bloody light. It flashed, and Laz closed his eyes in dark satisfaction as a sudden influx of warlock magic fed the Akyri King molecules in his body.

  Akyri were an ancient race of creatures that fed on the magic of warlocks. They were supposed to have originally formed of stardust. One Akyri that Laz knew of in particular seemed to verify that theory. Chloe Septeran was the Warlock Queen, and ironically an Akyri. She was ancient, one of the first of her kind. She also happened to be literally made of stardust.

  As one of the eight queens that now sat at the Table of the Thirteen, she enjoyed the same luxuries Laz did at the Table. The most important of which was the fact that she didn’t have to wait or beg or ask for the magic she needed in order to survive. As a queen, she was more powerful even than her exceedingly powerful husband, the Warlock King, Jason Alberich. When she wanted his magic, she simply took it. Not that he didn’t willingly give it to her at every opportunity. Laz was betting Alberich enjoyed giving her a lot of things.