The Demon King

by Heather Killough-Walden

  She pulled her arm out of his grip and took a step back. A wind caught her hair, and her magic moved around her like glitter on a breeze. She could feel it, so strong, so different, so new. It wasn’t vampire magic and it wasn’t warlock magic. It was purple like the night and endless like the universe. It was demon magic, and she knew it.

  She rolled her shoulders and lifted her chin. “Let’s do it. I’ve been itching for a fight anyway.”

  “I just bet you have, Dahlia Kellen,” came a stranger’s voice.

  Dahlia and Steven both turned to the source of the voice. The sound of a leather sole on pavement was too clear amongst the caterwaul of confusion around them. There was magic in that too.

  A man stepped calmly from behind the roiling, broiling conflagration of their destroyed vehicle. His hands were in the pockets of his leather jacket as if to signal harmlessness, but he set off every alarm in Dahlia’s body.

  She recognized him at once. “You’re the man from the warehouse,” she said.

  He had very blue eyes. They’re just like his, she thought. The stranger smiled, flashing bright white fangs. Damn if he wasn’t the very image of tall, dark and handsome. She felt an outpouring of power from the Detective, so much that it was almost stifling. It made her dizzy.

  “I can’t tell you how honored I am that you remember,” the stranger said, ignoring her companion to speak directly to her. His blue gaze intensified on her. “Meeting you has been a highlight of my life.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The stranger continued forward, his boots sounding out a closing distance that threatened everything Laz cared about. His fists clenched, his gums began to ache around his own set of fangs, and his vision shifted into stark contrasts tinged with red. His hands flooded with magic, and his mind snapped into a clean-slate hyper alert mode filled with fight or flight. Mostly fight.

  “You know they’re dying out there, don’t you,” the man said. It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact that the stranger knew damn well Laz knew too. It was true. Laz could sense the life forces of several of the injured bikers leaving their bodies. These were men and women who had accepted Dahlia and Laz without blinking, who had treated them without judgment – even him, a cop. These were good people. And when he’d thought that coming to this bar and endangering them would be better than endangering other mortals, he’d been as wrong as wrong could possibly be. Maybe he’d been wrong about everything, and he was a dick cop after all.

  Now he felt trapped between a rock and a hard place. He possessed the ability to heal. He could help them. If it weren’t for the fact that he was facing off with a man who wanted his queen.

  “The males of our kind can sense the waning life of a mortal,” continued the man. But his eyes were on Dahlia. He was talking to her alone. “It’s actually our ability to detect faltering brainwaves. But ignorance in the past chalked it up to the ability to detect souls. Which is one of the reasons demons have the bad reputation for desiring said souls.” He chuckled. “Well, that and our penchant for hunting down females with beautiful minds to mate with.” Now he looked at Laz again. “Like your mother.”

  Laz wasn’t going to be baited by that one. “You must be Apollyon.”

  “He looks just like you,” Dahlia whispered.

  Laz glanced at his own reflection in the nearby car window where it lay separated from the vehicle. She was right. His hair had progressively darkened over the last week or two, and at the moment it was pure, pitch black. So was the stranger’s. Their height was the same, their build the same, and the bastard was even dressed like Laz – jeans, dark shirt, leather jacket, boots. Right down to his eyes, his blue, blue eyes, they looked like brothers separated at birth.

  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 tw
enty 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.

  “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.