The Demon King (15 page)

He pinched the bridge of his nose, not
because he had a headache or anything remotely like one, but
because it seemed the right thing to do at this juncture. Then he
took a second deep breath and waved his hand almost dismissively at
the hearth Lalura stared so intently into. Flames instantly leapt
to life within the fireplace, dancing and crackling merrily.

Lalura looked at him over her bent shoulder.
She smiled a thanks, and he returned it silently.

Then he said, “You can’t continue like
this.”

She slowly turned to face him.

“
Not for long,” he went on.
“How much more do you think the human body is meant to
endure?”

Lalura chuckled softly, then sighed heavily,
and he could practically see the weight of thirteen worlds settle
itself across her bony shoulders. “Well, when I find out,” she
said, “at least that question will be answered.”

The first attempt on her
life had been a poisoning. Lalura, however, was infinitely picky
about her tea. To say that she was a connoisseur of the beverage
would be an understatement of worldly proportions. She knew
something was wrong, not even by the scent of it and definitely not
by the taste of it, seeing as how she never took a sip. She knew
something was wrong by the look of the
steam
.

The second attempt on her
life had nearly taken two mortals down with it and had left a
crater in the middle of Fifth Avenue, Manhattan, that news crews
and the police department were chalking up to a sink hole. Roman
had a feeling that cover story had a lot less to do with the truth
and a lot more to do with some of the men working for the NYPD,
namely one of their detectives, Michael Salvatore. He’d only seen
the man in passing, but the power radiating from him had been
unlike anything Roman had ever felt. It wasn’t necessarily stronger
– Roman knew some very strong people. It was just…
different
. What
Salvatore was, he had no idea; new supernaturals were cropping up
every day, and he didn’t have the leisure at the moment to study
them all. But it was reassuring to know that a fellow supernatural
was influential in the police department in such a big city.
Salvatore was more likely than not going to do everything in his
power to cover up the truth and hide the paranormal realms from the
human world. Their secrets were more or less safe.

The third attempt on Lalura’s life had left
a portal rip between two worlds that had taken six mages to close.
The attacks became worse each time, yet Lalura seemed strangely
unbothered by them. She was honestly unfazed, as if they were
inconsequential to her because the attacks were nothing in
comparison to something else – something she wasn’t sharing with
him.

He wondered if the first attempt on her life
had really been the first. He wondered if there were secrets, not
only amongst the Thirteen Kings, but between the kings and the
mother hen witch who had taken them all under her wing long
ago.

Roman’s phone chimed. He pulled it from his
front suit pocket and stared down at the small message scrolled
across the top of his screen. “We are required elsewhere,” he said
calmly as he slipped his phone back into his pocket. “Steven
Lazarus is in need of a clean up.”

Lalura chuckled, and as always, Roman was
reminded of leaves skittering across an autumn landscape. “You make
it sound like we’re the mob ready to move in with acid and
shovels.”

Roman smiled, letting his fangs show. “Been
there, done that. This is less messy.”

Chapter Seventeen

The growling from
below
demanded
Laz’s attention. It was one of those kinds of growls that
managed to cut through any kind of tension or silence because it
meant death – if it wasn’t tended to immediately. It was a warning
growl to be sure, but it took a very long time for Laz to pull his
gaze from the dark-haired woman and finally look down.

The growling was coming from a mix breed dog
with a good deal of pit in it. The animal had suddenly appeared
next to them and now bared its teeth at Lazarus in a
none-too-friendly manner. It was also edging its way carefully and
threateningly in-between the two of them, its back to the woman,
its menacing snarl to Laz.

Every nerve in his body was
alive with something he’d never felt in his entire life, and had
been from the moment he’d transported into the warehouse. It had
taken him split seconds to analyze the scene as he’d stepped onto
it: his men piling through the door on the opposite side, several
robed figures unconscious or dead on the unfinished floor, strange
symbols drawn into the cement, and the air thick with the mixed
smells of different kinds of magics, dark, powerful, and
even
wrong
. His
instincts told him something bad had been going down in the
warehouse and that someone else had stopped the
proceedings.

Probably
her
.

She stood in the midst of it all like a
figure from a comic book dream. He had never seen a creature so
stunning. Not as a cop, not as a king, not as a man.

She had hair so dark, thick
and lustrous it looked like someone had woven obsidian into silk
strands. It cascaded over a tall, lithe body that was frankly
impossible for humans to accomplish without the help of cosmetic
surgery. It was exceedingly obvious to him that she wasn’t mortal.
The magic of her movements, the sway of her hips, the taunting and
delicious lilt of her voice as she spoke to the officers in the
room weren’t even the dead giveaways. It was her
power
, flowing out from
her like candy and alcohol and sex all wrapped into one.

But when she turned around to face him, Laz
entered another world altogether. It was a world entirely different
from the one he’d lived in for thirty years. It was still his, but
would now be forever changed. In a pivotal heartbeat, he knew who
she was. He didn’t know her name or where she was from or why she
filled the immense room with an even more immense power. But he
knew her.

Oh, he knew her.

He’d made a quip about her biting, but when
she turned around, he realized just how accurate his sarcastic
assessment had been. The creature before him was one from
fairytales, probably literally. She was a being of perfect fair
skin with a fevered blush to her cheeks and lips that any man would
give his right arm to kiss just once. And then there were her eyes,
a green that transitioned from emerald to jade. They were
impossible. No woman had eyes like this. And if he wasn’t mistaken,
there was just a hint of something sharp revealing itself when she
spoke. Vampire? Akyri? She felt like both and neither. Not that it
mattered. All that mattered to Lazarus at that point was getting
her out of that warehouse and to some safer, less conspicuous place
where they could be alone.

But now? Now he was staring down at a dog,
of all things, and one that was clearly ready to rip his leg off.
Dogs weren’t something he would have pegged as a companion for a
creature like the woman before him. Dragons maybe. Or some sort of
unicorn-bunny-kitten mix. Something sparkly, at the very least,
with really big eyes. Not mutt dogs. And he was pretty sure this
one had fleas.

Confusion joined the vexation of his growing
impatience. He forced himself to remain calm. “A friend of yours?”
he asked, looking back up. Locking eyes on her was like an
immediate reward. But the dog’s growl intensified.

The woman’s brow furrowed. She blinked as if
she were coming out of something, and his fight or flight instincts
kicked in. He prepared to do the former – because he was afraid she
would do the latter.

“
Yes,” she said, and her
expression changed. Fierceness slipped into her eyes, and her jaw
set. She looked from the dog back up to him. As she did so, she
placed her hand tenderly on the dog’s head. The animal let out a
soft whine, licked its lips once, then slid back into warning mode,
baring its teeth at Laz. “So if you don’t mind, we’ll be leaving
now.”

Laz’s attention spiked. “Oh, I won’t argue
with that,” he said. She would be leaving, just not without
him.

His double meaning was read loud and clear
by the green-eyed angel across from him. And as if the dog, too,
understood what he meant, it chose that moment to attack.

Laz jumped back as the animal jolted
forward, jaws snapping. They closed millimeters from where his
thigh had been the moment before, and Laz’s instincts took over.
Magic flooded the air around him. Without conscious direction, his
power acted primally, encasing the four legged beast in a crackling
bubble that sparked black and red. The animal cried out, a howl
that was both high-pitched and growling, and the woman in front of
Lazarus was suddenly a blur.

Something hit him square in
the chest. The impact was so sudden and so solid, he felt
and
heard his sternum
crack away from the ribs surrounding it. The pain was immediate and
immense, and he was airborne. By the time he realized fully what
had happened, he was hitting the opposite wall of the warehouse and
sliding once more to the floor.

She’d hit him with some kind of magic,
point-blank, and remnants of it encircled him. Chaos was now
reigning in the warehouse. The cops on the other side of the room
seemed to snap out of whatever spell the woman had previously had
them under. Laz heard them remobilizing, shouting orders to one
another – just before the sound of guns going off filled the space
with reverberating death.

Fear ripped through him. The thought of the
woman being shot was unconscionable to him; it was something so
wrong, he could not even fully process it. He only knew the
knowledge of the possibility was more terrifying than anything he’d
experienced up to that moment in his life. For just a heartbeat, it
paralyzed him.

Then he was up and moving
so fast, time slowed down around him. Ahead of him, in the fray of
the battle, the black-haired woman dodged bullets that he could now
somehow, impossibly,
see
carving through the air. As she spun, magic
poured from within her and into her hands, pooling into a dark,
crackling fire he’d never seen before.

The dog remained by her side, now free from
the painful red magical shell Laz had encased it in. As one of
those errant bullets neared the animal, the woman’s magic arced out
like a shield to protect it. It covered the dog’s body like a
purple, sparkling glove.

Fury seemed to wrap around the woman as
surely as her power. He could feel her anger; it was palpable. It
was a warning, but even though time had slowed down for him, the
warning came too late. Her magic swelled again, building up like a
violet bonfire before it lashed out with seething wrath toward the
officers who had opened fire.

He’d fully expected to lose a few men in
that moment. He was a split second away from her, and he was still
too late. Her magic was faster even than their bullets had been,
fueled by vehemence, or perhaps something stronger – the need to
protect, the need for revenge. It didn’t matter. The bolt of purple
fire reached the crowd of policemen like a torpedo zeroing in.

Lazarus watched in that
slowed-down time, and knew he would see his men fall dead beneath
the onslaught. But rather than strike any of them dead-on as he’d
thought it would, the magic moved
between
them, almost wrapping around
them as if it
meant
to miss. It hit the wall behind them and the ground beneath
them and exploded.

The explosion was so strong, it knocked
every officer off his feet and sent him flying in a wave of
aftershock. The world blacked out for a moment, and Lazarus ducked
his head against the brutal backlash of her power as his body
impacted with his hers. At once, his arms wrapped tight around her
lithe form, caging her against his own body as he took them both to
the hard, cold ground.

Chapter Eighteen

She was immediately fighting him, struggling
against him with inhuman strength. “Let me go!” she yelled as they
rolled, and it took every ounce of his training and a good deal of
his own supernatural strength to gain the upper hand and straddle
her into submission. Once he was above her, he wasted no time
taking both of her wrists and pinning them to the cement.

“
Stop fighting me!” he
growled, leaning in close. “I mean you no harm!”

Her fangs were fully bared now, sharp and
white and unnervingly sexy against the plump red of her sultry
lips. She stilled and glared up at him. And then she smiled.

Suddenly, the solidness of
her wrists in his hands began to dissolve. Before his very eyes,
she slipped from tangible form into sparkling, swirling purple gas,
and he recoiled. “Oh
hell
no!” he swore. Still driven by instinct, his
power pooled in his right hand. With all his strength, he thrust it
forward as if to grab hold of what was left of her. His only
coherent thought was,
solid
.

There was a jolt in the
atmosphere around him. Something slammed against his hand, but
he
felt
it in his
heart. The air crackled and zapped, light faded and came back, and
when it returned, his right hand was wrapped tightly around the
woman’s throat. At once, he loosened his grip, and shock moved
through him. But he stayed where he was, intent on maintaining
control.

The woman’s impossible emerald eyes were
huge in her face. A split second passed before both of her hands
were clawing at his arm, and her body bucked beneath his. He could
feel her magic swirling inside her as if it were madly banging
against the walls of its prison in search of a way out. It was
trapped.