The Demon King

by Heather Killough-Walden

  She took a tentative sip to taste the heat of her beverage, and her eyes moved to gaze off into the distance, the way people did when they were remembering things or getting lost in those memories. “I was born in Boston, Massachusetts in the year 1940. I was born as the female half of a set of twins. We were fourteen minutes apart. When Jonathan came…. They said our mother bled to death. It was mid-century, and medicine’s come a long way since then.”

  Another sip. A pause. Then she went on. “Our father died of a broken heart four years later. You know that book The Cat’s Cradle? The one about Ice Nine? There’s a part in it where Kurt Vonnegut describes a type of couple where one can’t exist without the other. A durass, I think he called it. Something like that. When the husband or wife dies, the other spouse goes soon after, just dying of a broken heart. Well, that’s what happened. They tell us the only reason he lasted as long as he did was to see us out of our infancy.” She paused and swallowed hard, sinking further into her past. “I found him one morning in his bed. It was a Tuesday. The alarm was just going and going and going… and this time, he didn’t shut it off.”

  She lowered her mug as she stared down at the floor. He knew she wasn’t seeing the tiles. She was stuck in the past, probably in her four-year-old body, by her father’s bedside, hearing that alarm.

  “Jonathan and I were moved from foster home to foster home. None were terrible, but none were great either. Jonathan read a lot. A real bookworm. I mostly kept people from beating up on him. Because we refused to be separated, no one wanted us. People wanted to adopt one child, not two. So the years passed and suddenly we were eighteen.”

  Now she looked up – at a different past, one a lot closer and far too fresh in her memory. Her blue eyes reflected something horrible, something just beyond his reach.

  “Three years later, our country caught the scent of war.”

  Eighteen plus three years, he thought. It would have been 1961. The Vietnam conflict had begun around then.

  “We were finally out of the homes and on our own. We were given a stipend, tiny really, but enough to make a first month’s rent on an apartment. Jon got a job and was going to try to get into school when he had enough saved. He wanted to be an astrophysicist. He loved the Cosmos.” She chuckled softly. “This was back before Carl Sagan made ‘Cosmos’ the name it is today, but Jon already knew how vast and important it was.”

  She took another sip of her tea and then stared down at it with a bitter expression on her young face. “It’s cold,” she said flatly. As if on auto-pilot, she made her way to the microwave, opened the door, slid the mug in, and shut the door again before pressing the “start” button twice. Thirty seconds plus thirty seconds. A minute would definitely warm it back up again.

  She seemed not to care whether the liquid boiled over. She crossed her arms and hugged herself, still staring into that nothing space that might have been a portal to yesteryear.

  “The next year, Jonathan’s name was called in the draft.”

  Laz’s skin rose in goose bumps. He hadn’t been expecting that.

  “Here I was mean as hell, tough as nails, not afraid to fight… and there was Jonathan with his glasses and his shy disposition and his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. And he was the one who was drafted. Because girls weren’t registered to fight in our wars.” She closed her eyes, and this time he saw a tear press itself free from beneath her lashes to roll down her cheek. “God forbid,” she whispered. “War is a terrible joke, and its punch-line is the unthinkable waste of human life. But if they’re going to throw us away without a thought anyway, then they should know... there’s no difference between a son and a daughter or a brother and a sister. They’re loved the same. They’re lost the same.”

  Laz felt his throat tighten. His chest felt strange. The situation was beyond bizarre in that small cottage kitchen in a small nondescript brownstone… and yet what she said was the truth that rang out like church bells in the fog, pure and clean and clearly heard, even when they couldn’t be seen.

  “When they gave me his dog tags two years later, I don’t know what I felt.” She shook her head and wiped the wetness from her cheeks with the back of her sleeve. “Nothing, I think. At least at first. Someone gave me some money… it was the worst money a person could make.”

  The microwave beeped. Lenore turned slowly to face the machine as if she didn’t recognize it. But then she straightened and came away from the counter she’d been leaning on. She retrieved her freshly heated tea and again wrapped her hands around it. Now he knew she was doing so for warmth. Because what she was telling him made her cold.

  “I moved around in a daze. I was working at a record store, but I couldn’t hear the music they were playing. I went from job to job, always fired for not paying attention. It got to the point that no one would hire me. By 1970, I was thirty years old, talentless, aimless, and I had to make a choice. I had to do something different.” She bit her lip and released it before she said, “Jonathan would have wanted me to.”

  It was a moment before she did anything then. She appeared to be processing things. Finally, she blinked and looked down at her mug. It was still three-quarters full and still steaming. She blew on the top of it for a few seconds. “I had never used the money they’d given me when Jonathan died. I’d saved it. So I took the money and used it to pay someone to tutor me to help me get me into college. I was going to be an astrophysicist.”

  Now she smiled and looked up at Laz. “I knew absolutely nothing about physics or astronomy, much less what they had to do with one another. It was your uncle who was the genius. But I had no idea what else to do.” She shrugged.

  He found himself sympathizing with her.

  “Anyway, there were these people who were probably the forefathers to the Princeton Review. They had the tests hacked and knew how to beat them. They took me in and showed me what it was about the college entrance exams that made them so difficult. It was all about the tricks, they said. It was all about timing. There were ways to get around the questions in the tests, and they were going to make me remember those ways or they would refund my money. That’s what they promised. Well, they kept the money – and I got into Cornell. It was the same university Carl Sagan himself was teaching at.”

  She lowered the tea, sighed heavily, and moved to the sink to pour the liquid out. Apparently she’d given up on the drink. Tea was a labor intensive kind of beverage, Laz found. It was either too hot or too cold, and there was very little room between the two. You had to utilize that sparse space of time like a goddamn expert, or forget it. It just wasn’t worth it. That was why he never drank tea.

  “Fast forward another ten years, and I was living in an apartment in a pretty nice neighborhood in Boston and working at the same observatory Sagan had worked at a few years before. I could practically feel Jonathan’s ghost following me around. And I’d never been more miserable.” She left her mug in the bottom of the sink and turned to face Laz. “And that’s when I met your father.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “It was the summer of 1980. I was loading the back of a taxi, getting ready to take a research trip abroad when this strong hand suddenly moved over mine, taking the handle of my suitcase from me. I looked up, thinking at first that it was the taxi driver. But it wasn’t. It was a stranger… he was beautiful.” Laz could see color enter her cheeks. “I’ll spare you all the details. To make a long, and honestly romantic story short, we began dating.”

  Laz didn’t know what to make of that. What was his father like? What did she mean by “dating?”

  “He courted me for two years.” She shook her head and touched her forehead. “Two years… The finest restaurants, most lavish gifts and parties, exclusive events, gallery and museum openings…. I was blown away. Drink?”

  Laz blinked. She’d moved to the fridge. Having clearly given up on hot tea, she’d moved on to alcohol. It was well past six in the afternoon, so there was no reason she shouldn’t. Hell, she was rev
isiting the past, and that was reason enough. But he was working. He shook his head. “I’m on the job.”

  She pulled a bottle from the back of the top shelf and twisted off the top. “Suit yourself,” she said before taking a long pull. She let the beer slide down, waited a second, took another long drink, then lowered it again and licked her lips.

  “I was also thoroughly confused,” she said. “Because the whole time, he couldn’t take his eyes off me. Me. I couldn’t figure out why. Before he’d come along, I’d honestly begun to think of myself as past my prime, and a part of me didn’t even care. It seemed that in Jonathan’s death, I’d inherited his curiosity about the universe. The moment I started learning about astrophysics, my perspective on life changed. All I wanted to do was learn more. I dated a few men here and there, but in the end, I wound up alone, a single construct of star dust and a yearning for knowledge. I was forty, with no husband and no kids and I thought that I didn’t care. And then – BAM. He was like a bomb going off inside me. His attentions awakened things I hadn’t even known were dormant. Things I hadn’t even known I possessed.”

  She took another swig, and Laz could tell that going over all of this, re-hatching a story he barely wanted to hear himself, was more than a little difficult for her. But he was betting it was also more than a little therapeutic. Like ripping off a Band-Aid that had been on way too long.

  “One night, he told me he wanted me to be his bride. And that he wanted me to bear his child.”

  Laz swallowed hard. His throat had once again constricted and this time thoroughly dried out. He almost coughed.

  “I was shocked, to say the least. I wasn’t ancient, and science can do a lot these days, but I wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I asked him what it was he saw in me. I asked him why he’d chosen me the way he had. You have to understand… Aster could have had anyone. He was intensely beautiful and intensely intelligent. His eyes smoldered.” Her expression became winsomely bewildered. “Sometimes he even scared me, those eyes were so intense. And he wanted me.”

  She finished off the beer and tossed the bottle in the trash. As the lid of the can struck home, she said, “He told me it was my soul he wanted. That it was my soul that fascinated him so. I had no idea what to make of that. I remember putting my hand to my chest and asking, ‘My soul?’ But he shook his head and gently touched my forehead. ‘That isn’t where your soul is,’ he said. ‘It’s here. In your mind. In your experiences, your wisdom, and your hunger for knowledge. These are the things I wish to pass on to our son.’”

  Lenore laughed now, and it sounded both bitter and happy. Like the mixture of a pleasant memory and the knowledge that she’d been had. “I could barely think. So I said the first thing that came to my mind. ‘How do you know it would be a boy?’ I asked. And he just… smiled.”

  She looked up at Laz, meeting his gaze for the first time in many long minutes. “I told him again that I was too old. But he assured me that I wasn’t. Far from it. He swore it wouldn’t be a problem. And for some bizarre reason, I believed him. I didn’t know why until two weeks later – when our limousine was struck by a drunk driver behind the wheel of a semi.”

  Laz straightened off the wall where he’d been leaning, his attention ultra-focusing.

  “We were coming back from La Boheme. The truck was on us so fast, I could barely process what was happening. But he’d jumped the curb, crossed the median, and struck us head-on. In the flash of an instant, Aster was wrapped around me like some sort of protective, impenetrable shadow. And I was moving through time and space. Being an astrophysicist, I happened to know movement like this was physically impossible.”

  She laughed again. “And that night I learned what he was. I learned who he was. And my life changed forever.”

  Laz waited a moment, feeling the tension of decades of wondering build up behind his vocal chords. And then, finally, he gave his questions voice. “And… what was he?” he asked softly. “Who was he?” That was what he really wanted to know. He needed to hear her say it.

  “What your father is,” she told him bluntly, “is a demon. Not an Akyri, not some monster like an incubus, vampire or werewolf. An actual demon.”

  Laz pushed the next question through his teeth. He’d met Bael and he’d been in the Demon Realm, but he still had no clear understanding. “What is a demon?”

  “A being who was cursed long, long ago. It’s the Curse that makes a demon what he is. It isn’t the way they look, nor is it the imaginative threats of some religion that makes a demon a demon. It’s the Curse… and what it makes them do. Especially when they’re angry.”

  The cop in Laz wanted more information. The masochist side of him wanted details. “Like what, exactly?”

  “Once, while Aster and I were dating, a strange man followed me three blocks from the grocery store back to my home. I later found out that when your father learned of this, he carved the man’s heart out with a plastic serrated knife. Apparently it took a while.”

  Laz stared at his mother. There was nothing he could say to that. Absolutely nothing.

  So she filled the silence herself. “As to who he is?” She paused a good long while, allowing that tension to build up one more time nice and taut like a balloon about to burst. “That should be obvious to you by now, Laz. You’re a detective after all. You have it all figured out. But just so we’re all on the same page….” Her gaze held his fast. “Your father is Astaroth. The Demon King. And you are his one and only son.”

  All grew still in the room. Except his heart. It hammered away with brute force.

  “The night before I conceived you, my body was transformed. I was young again, barely twenty maybe. There was no age attached to me. And still, there isn’t.” She looked down at herself and gestured. “As you can plainly see. A bonus is that I can change my appearance to some degree, especially my eyes. But what was important was that my body was suddenly at its peak of health. That was what Aster had meant when he’d told me my age wouldn’t be a problem. My ultimate reward for agreeing to give you life was eternal youth.”

  She swallowed hard. “I earned it, though. The conception wasn’t easy. It couldn’t be. Your father’s people are cursed, after all. Conception will not work, will not take… unless it hurts. For both of us. The burden your father endured,” she shook her head. “It was worse than mine. Far worse.”

  There was a very long pause after this, and Laz found himself turning away from her. He ran a hand through his hair… that hair that had grown so much darker over the last few months. He closed his eyes. Something akin to insanity gently rapped at his mind’s door. Could he believe any of this? Could he afford to let himself believe?

  Could he afford not to?

  “He told me your eyes would be like mine,” she said behind him. “And they are. But your hair… it grows less and less like mine and more like your father’s every day.”

  Another pause.

  “Why do you think you chose the name Lazarus as your last name?”

  Laz slowly turned back around to face his mother. She had crossed her arms over her chest and cocked her head to one side. Their eyes met, and he knew she could tell he was barely digesting things at this point. She sighed. “That wasn’t given to you. Rosa’s last name was Dixon.”

  Laz’s brow furrowed. “You know of Rosa?” His voice was thin. He could barely talk. He sort of didn’t even know what he was saying.

  “Of course I do. I chose Rosa for a reason. She had all of the mothering instincts I wanted in the person who would raise you. She was a good person. One of the few who become police officers for the right reasons. I turned my eyes brown so she wouldn’t automatically link me to you, then took you into the precinct where she was working when she was alone. Rosa Dixon wanted to make the world a better place, and I knew she would raise you the way you needed to be raised. I was right.”

  She took a deep breath. “You were named Steven after her father, a policeman s
he emulated. You kept his name for her. But Rosa’s last name was Dixon. So why did you change yours to Lazarus?”

  Laz couldn’t answer. He didn’t really know. At least… he didn’t used to know. Before. He’d always assumed he’d taken such a strong liking to it because it had a nice ring. He just plain and simply liked it.

  And then he’d actually proven his namesake right and come back from the dead to become the Akyri King. When that happened, Laz began wonder whether his choosing the name was prophetic. In the back of his mind, he’d continued to wonder, and he had continued to become increasingly confused. He’d had no idea why fate turned out the way it had.

  But he knew now.

  “Your name is not Lazarus, but Lazaroth,” said Lenore. “In the language of your realm, it means ‘Of the throne.’ When demons are conceived, their parents place within them a piece of their souls. You carry a piece of me inside of you, Laz, and you always have. But you carry a piece of your father as well. Your name is as ancient as your people, nearly as old as time itself. And because of your father – so are you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The Demon Realm, 1982

  It has to hurt to work.

  This was the thought Astaroth kept foremost in his mind as the tool of his torment made contact time and again. He felt his blood run, felt it burn like acid against his skin, a race of blood that was meant to see neither the light of day nor the dark of night. He knew it would run forever more, and burn all the while.

  The chains around his wrists were unnecessary; he wanted this. He wasn’t going anywhere. But they dug into his skin, and he knew that ultimately they kept him in place, as the worst of the pain struck and the strongest of his will threatened to waiver. He’d told them to do it. He’d all but placed those chains there himself.

  His servants were following his orders. He felt their hesitation with every withdrawal of the whip. They were going against their very nature in seeing to his destruction rather than his protection. It didn’t help that this was no ordinary whip. This was a weapon meant to mar the flesh of a demon. One strike would have felled a mortal… and possibly devoured its soul. Demon tools tended to do that, devour souls. Astaroth supposed it was part of their eternal Curse. The things his people created, even the most benign of them such as books or jewelry, were wrapped in that Curse, more often than not bringing misery to those who used them.