The Demon King (11 page)

Okay
, she thought. She would cause a stir and get herself
arrested. When she got sick of the scene, she would simply break
out. A few extra protective spells ought to keep her safe from the
sun for long enough to make a sufficiently bad impression, and then
she’d just transport away. If that didn’t work for some reason, she
had a host of other abilities both new and old to fall back on. She
could fly. She could turn to mist. She could move at blurring
speeds, rather like DC Comics’
The
Flash
. She had superhuman strength, a good
set of fangs, and – oh yeah – there was that vampiric mind control
thing she’d begun to hone. That was a doozy of an ability. Granted,
it was difficult to control, and a mind had to be relatively weak
for her to infiltrate it properly. But there were a lot of
weak-minded humans out there, were there not?

Then and there, Dahlia decided she’d
transport again, this time to some place a lot more populated. Then
she would break into the first large public building she saw. She
was hoping for a bank; that would get major attention, but anything
with a decent alarm system would do, and she really wasn’t feeling
picky right now. She was feeling anxious instead. Every time she
closed her eyes, the glow of that damn Stag filled her mental
vision.

When the cops started showing up, she would
destroy some expensive shit and ride the blue wave in from there.
She needed to make sure she kept her destruction within the human
range, though… she didn’t want to cause so much trouble that entire
supernatural nations had it in for her. She didn’t want to die. Not
really. She just wanted to be undesirable.

Okay we need big
cities
…. She could do New York. That was
big enough.

But she liked New York. And
destroying any bit of New York had a slimy feel to it, especially
given what New Yorkers had been through this century. Plus, the
bigger cities on the east coast were dragon territory. Dragons
loved glitz, and no one put on the glitz like New York.
No, the Big Apple is out
, she decided. Ironically, the west coast was off limits for
her too. Where she liked New York, she
loved
the west coast cities of San
Francisco and Portland – and the west coast was D’Angelo’s
territory. She didn’t want the king of kings mad at her.

She could obliterate
Houston.
That
was
a huge one. But then again, people who lived in Houston were
miserable enough. It was hot, it was humid, the traffic was
maddening, it was crime-ridden, and many days of the year the air
was un-breathable. If she were one of the gods, she’d transplant
all of Houston’s people to some place fresh and clean and then take
a celestial hole punch to that town and be rid of it for good. But
that was just her.

She sighed.
Well, crap
. The more she
thought about it, the more she realized she was having a hard time
picking a city because she was having a hard time settling in with
the idea of being destructive around humans. She was fond of
humans. She liked their cities – because she liked
them
. She liked what
they built, what they created. She admired human invention, and she
revered human hope and willpower.

The fact that mortals kept going despite the
way the cards were stacked against them was frankly amazing to
Dahlia. She was surprised they hadn’t all decided on a mass suicide
years ago. Poppy was human – or she had been, anyway. And that
woman’s strength blew Dahlia away. Dahlia may have been a Tuath fae
warlock vampire, but she knew damn well that she could never hold
her own as a human. Those fuckers were tough.

Okay, so maybe you don’t have to be
destructive. Just get someone’s attention.

With that in mind, she finally settled on
Boston, Massachusetts. Massachusetts was a place linked at its core
to magic, and Boston was the busiest in that area, so it seemed
like a more obvious choice anyway. Plus, as far as she knew, none
of the Thirteen factions were housed there. Right? She hoped she
was right.

She pulled her magic like a swaddling cloak
around her body, watched the world melt into swirling shades and
shifting time, and transported out of the desert and into New
England.

She could sense the change even in the
portal; the air was full of life now, filled with moisture and
coolness. It was June, six months after the Winter Queen had taken
her place on her icy throne, and Dahlia could smell the perfume in
the air that came with late spring. It was much more obvious here,
where trees and plants abounded than it had been upon entering the
arid atmosphere of the desert.

The portal vanished, and Dahlia was alone in
what appeared to be a park. She turned a slow circle, taking in the
lack of litter and the smell of aster, spider lilies, and helenium.
Those were flowers normally found in private and small gardens. She
was in the suburbs. She cocked her head and shrugged. The Boston
suburbs would do.

She smiled to herself, spotted a large
building in the not-too-far distance, and made her way toward it at
a fast blur.

Chapter Twelve

Laz came out of his reverie to realize he
hadn’t yet moved from his spot on the dark sidewalk in front of the
house he’d been led to by the address on the card given to him by
Bael – the demon. The card bore no indication of who owned the
house, and neither did the house itself. It was a small two-story
brownstone, built maybe two centuries ago and, as mentioned, well
maintained. It was set apart from its neighbors just as every
brownstone in this part of the tiny Boston neighborhood was. Each
little plot of yard had a bit of very green, trimmed and edged
grass, and if it had any other vegetation, it was a single tree a
hundred and fifty years old. One after the other each house
repeated the last, all of them laid out on a plotline as if to
remind their owners that they were nothing special. They were just
people, like everyone else.

They just happened to be people who could
afford historical houses in one of the most expensive neighborhoods
in all of Boston.

The house could have
technically belonged to anyone. But now Laz knew. Especially after
that memory, and with this feeling moving through him, he
just
knew
that
this particular house was his birth mother’s home.

Maybe it was
exactly
that the home
was nondescript and “normal.” It seemed to melt into the area
around it like a puzzle piece that fit so smoothly, the lines
dividing it from its partners were invisible. The house
was
invisible. That was
what it was. There was nothing to make it stand out from the world
around it. It might as well have been non-existent.

Just like his birth mother had been for all
these years. And… like his father had been too.

At that thought, Laz
laughed. He laughed because he realized he was being a whiny baby,
and he laughed because when he pictured his father, he pictured a
giant beast of a man with red skin and horns and cloven hooves –
and that was hilarious. Because he knew it was more likely wrong
than right. Humans had their imaginations, and those imaginations
fed stories and tales and legends and myths and made them grow and
expand into ridiculous things that could
only
exist in said imaginations. The
reality was that supernatural beings were usually far less
spectacular. And far more complicated. And in some cases, humans
interacted with them on a daily basis without even knowing it. All
in all, humans were idiots. He should know; he’d been one for
thirty years.

Lazarus looked down at his boots and ran a
hand through his thick hair. When he did, he realized it was
shaking. So he lowered the hand and stared at it. “Really?” he
asked himself. He was going to be the man who faced down bullets
and vampires – but was afraid of his mother? “Jesus.” He bent to
open the latch to the white picket fence. His phone chimed with a
text alert. He straightened and pulled the phone from his front
jacket pocket.

Trouble in Dorchester – Four Corners.
Possible cleanup required.

Laz hit the microphone
button on his phone and dictated a quick response. It was worlds
faster than trying to type anything in with his normal sized thumbs
on the toy-sized “keyboard.”
On my way.
Contact D’Angelo.

He re-pocketed the phone and glanced up at
the silent house. Whatever waited for him inside would have to keep
on waiting.

*****

A smashed window
maybe,
she thought,
and some motion-activated alarms, or possibly one or two easy
to return stolen items
. This was her plan,
at least initially. But as she drew nearer to the building, several
things became rapidly apparent. The first was that this was not the
high-end suburb she’d originally thought it to be. She had
transported into a green space with trees, but it hadn’t been the
park she’d pegged it for. Instead, it seemed it was a small empty
lot in-between houses in what looked like a trailer
park.

The plethora of blooms she’d scented were
actually coming from a single yard a block away that was
miraculously and stubbornly tended amidst rows of dilapidated
houses with peeling paint, curling siding, metal barred windows,
and alleys full of junkyard remnants.

A thin dog wandered un-chained between the
houses. Dahlia stopped to watch it a moment. It was a mixed breed,
mostly pit, brown with a white spot over its left shoulder and
white “socks” of fur on all four paws. It sniffed at a pile of
rubbish, found nothing interesting, and moved on toward the
opposite end of the next house.

Dahlia called out to it, sending it a quiet
mental summons laced with magic. The dog made a soft whining sound
and turned to face her. Upon seeing her wave it over, it trotted
across the street and stopped in front of her to sniff her
outstretched hand. Up close, Dahlia could see it was a female. She
had one blue eye and one brown. Dahlia smiled. “Like Bowie, eh?”
she said softly.

The animal wagged her tail.
Dahlia was happy to see that she still
had
one; many humans took it upon
themselves to butcher pit bulls by chopping them off. To Dahlia
this was on par with other equally unnecessary displays of
barbarism such as cropping a dog’s ears or declawing a
cat.

“
Where do you live?” she
asked. The dog had no tags, nor even a collar. But before Dahlia
could magically acquire an answer from the dog, a scream of
unnatural proportions split the night.

Dahlia straightened from her stooped
position at once, and the dog let out a second soft sound, this
time of curiosity and concern. The neighborhood around her remained
stiffly quiet. No porch lights went on, no doors opened. It was as
if the scream had never happened, and Dahlia began to wonder if
she’d imagined it.

She looked down at the dog. “You heard that,
right –”

A second harsh cry cut through both her
sentence and the darkness. This time, Dahlia could tell where it
had come from: The same large building she had been headed for
moments earlier.

“
What the hell?” she
wondered aloud. But she was already moving, having broken into an
unconscious run toward the structure. The dog ran beside her, the
animal’s canine speed a natural match for Dahlia’s Tuathan agility.
She didn’t know why the dog had decided to tag along, but it was a
much less pressing concern than the flood of darkness she suddenly
experienced as she neared the building.

It felt like being hit with a wave as you
were making your way into the sea. If you didn’t brace yourself for
the onslaught of water, it would knock you on your ass. This was
the same. She hadn’t been expecting it, and she certainly wasn’t
prepared, so the sudden contact with it caused her to stumble. She
took a miss-step, and in a manner entirely un-Tuathan, she keeled
to the side.

As if to catch her, the dog moved its body
alongside hers, and its sturdy pressure against her leg kept her
just balanced enough to maintain her footing. She came to a full
stop and glanced down at the dog, who panted happily back at
her.

“
Thanks,” she said softly.
Then she returned her attention to the building.

The thing about what Dahlia
called “darkness” was that she simply didn’t know what else to call
it. “Darkness” was admittedly not the best term. It was used for so
many things these days, especially among supernaturals, and most
especially among supernaturals who were also warlocks. But the
ability to sense this
thing
was fairly new to Dahlia, and she hadn’t had time
to give it another name.

It wasn’t the same thing as
dark magic. Not by a long shot. It also wasn’t the same as night,
which was just the absence of sunlight. It was something she’d been
able to pick up on since she had been turned into a vampire, a kind
of
feeling
mixed
in with the sense that everything in the proximity of that feeling
was suddenly encased in a miasma of fog-like darkness.

There was that word again – darkness.

But it truly did seem as though the building
ahead of her, and the parking lot and sidewalk and crabgrass around
it, were all at once miss-colored and shaded as if by a dark red or
black camera lens filter.

“
This can’t be good,” she
muttered as she prepared herself for whatever she was going to find
inside. She considered the building’s unassuming façade for a
moment. No windows. One metal door, no doubt locked. Around the
side, she had earlier spotted a set of much larger double doors for
truck loading and unloading, but again no windows. There must have
been something inside the owners wanted to keep safe.