The Demon King (2 page)

But the cop continued forward, and on
reflex, Thane held up his hand. The Anime stopped at once, blinking
in confusion and looking down at his body.

That was when Thane
realized that this particular Anime had taken on an incredibly
solid form. It happened every once in a while; a spirit’s anger or
desperation was strong enough that the energy it possessed made it
a good deal more tangible. But in this case… it was almost as if
the detective had simply been reformed.
Whole
.

Thane squinted at Lazarus’ broad chest. He
couldn’t see through it. Not at all. Not even when he really
tried.

“
Shit,” he muttered,
speaking more to himself than to Lazarus, who was clearly confused
as to why he’d stopped in his tracks when Thane had raised his
hand. The detective tried to move, tried to come forward again, but
remained glued to the spot with Thane’s magic.

“
You’re a live wire, aren’t
you?” Again, Thane was talking to himself.

But this time, the detective’s blue eyes
narrowed on Thane, shooting aquamarine sparks. “If I’m dead, where
the hell am I?”

“
Purgatory,” Thane told
him. He wondered what he was going to do with this one. The really
pissed spirits often caused problems for him. Not that he minded,
really. Life got incredibly boring without the occasional rabble
rouser to deal with.

But there was something wholly, entirely,
and uncomfortably different about the man who stood before him now.
And the wheels in Thane’s head were spinning furiously as they
tried to figure out exactly what the hell that was.

“
And the demon who killed
me?”

Thane blinked. “Demon?” His attention
focused.

“
The demon who is after my
girlfriend!” the detective hissed.

If Thane hadn’t been the Phantom King and
well aware that demons actually existed and that they did tend to
go after people’s girlfriends, and if he hadn’t been staring at the
spirited evidence of demonic foul play standing before him then and
there, he might have automatically labeled the cop as crazy.

But Thane knew better.

“
You were set on fire by a
demon who killed you to get to your girlfriend.” He was working
things out in his head, thinking out loud more than
anything.

The detective glared at
him. “You didn’t answer me,” Lazarus told him, his white teeth
gritted in furious impatience. “I shot him in the head point
blank,” he said. “
Eleven
times
. So where the fuck
is
he
?” The
detective raised his arms and gestured to the garage and the
dust-filled ghost town beyond. “Is he here somewhere
too?”

Thane wasn’t sure how to
answer that question. The truth was, he’d never dealt with a spirit
as animated as this, he wasn’t sure what kind of demon he’d been
fighting with, and for that matter, no one had any real idea what
happened to demons when they died.
If
they died.

And that darkness that
Thane had sensed earlier wafted around the detective like black
pixie dust. Thane could actually
see
it now. It was truthfully rather
beautiful.

But it was also ominous, and Thane’s insides
felt heavy with trepidation.

Suddenly, the detective
shook his head and dropped his hands at his sides as if giving up.
“Fuck this,” he spat. “Siobhan needs me. She’s alone and it doesn’t
take a first class detective to figure out that you’re not
answering me because that god damned demon is still there – right
where I left him.” He shook his head, his expression fiercely
determined. “
Fuck
this,” he said again.

And then, for the first time in the history
of the desolate realm and its Phantom King, Thanatos watched as one
of his Anime stepped back in his garage and the air behind him
cracked open once more.

Detective Steven Lazarus retreated right
into this newly born crack and was at once surrounded by fissures
of light and magic.

Thane was rushing forward before he knew
what he was doing. He wasn’t even certain what it was he was
witnessing, but he knew that he needed to do something about it.
Whatever it was.

However, he was too late.

That beautiful, sparkling darkness that had
been growing around the detective wrapped around him now like a
tight blanket of starry night. As Thane closed in on it, that
blanket sucked Detective Lazarus through the crack in the air,
smothered the hole until it shrank like a fire devoid of oxygen,
and then whipped outward in a strange, black flash.

The air thundered, as it always did when it
sealed itself back up, and Thane skidded to a halt. He stared at
the space where a newly formed spirit had entered his world – and
then escaped it once more.

Such a thing had never happened before. Not
ever.

“
Lazarus,” Thane whispered,
letting the name and its historical significance roll off of his
tongue. Then he took a slow, deep breath and ran a hand through his
thick black hair. Life for the Phantom King had just gotten a hell
of a lot more interesting.

Prologue

A small town in West Texas, 1982

For perfection, it really should have been
storming. If this had been a movie, lightning would have split the
sky, slicing it up on its celestial chopping block. Thunder would
have echoed a mourning song, rolling up and over the mountains to
slide low over the valley below. But this wasn’t a movie, and
naught but the dark of night, the quiet of the desert, and the
distant yipping of a coyote pack accompanied the ill goings-on in
the warehouse of the all-but-abandoned southwest mining town.

The heat was sticky with that impending
storm that wasn’t quite there. The air was unmoving, unstirred by
the air conditioners that buzzed from peeling paint windows further
down the road. This was one of the older buildings, unkempt,
unused, and left to rot as much as anything can rot in the desert.
The cracked cement ground was dusty. The pointed rafter beams
overhead were dotted with pigeon shit and tied together by spider
webs. Nests dripped hay and grass here and there, but the nests
were empty right now. No animals stirred in this torrid darkness;
animals can tell when there’s wrongness about.

It was the humans who stirred. And something
else.

Candles and melted wax marked the layout of
the chalk-drawn circle. There was no pentacle or pentagram or any
of that nonsense Hollywood would so like viewers to believe had
something to do with the devil. Stars were symbols of
enlightenment, power and healing, not devils. So they had no place
here.

Rather, there was only the circle and the
candles. One hundred and fifty-one of them, blood red and
half-gone, their wax melted and re-solidified into a molded ring of
red that bound the woman within it as surely as did the ropes
around her wrists and ankles. Those ropes had dug in over the
course of hours, as she’d pulled against them repeatedly. Blood
stained the frayed bindings, a visual aid to the suffering that her
blue eyes spoke of in volumes.

She felt his hand upon her sore breast; it
caressed gently, soothing the bruises it had left there during the
night. Then she felt his whisper at her ear. “One more time, angel.
We’re nearly done.”

One more time.

Quiet, gagged sobbing
joined the silence and heavy breathing that filled the abandoned
warehouse. But when the painful process started all over again, the
woman
stopped
crying. She closed her eyes tight, shutting out all but the
worst of the feelings, the ones she could not block. Those, she
bore with mute strength, because she knew it was nearly
over.

When it finally was, her
lungs expanded raggedly and a long keening she barely recognized as
her own was released from within. She was done.
It
was done. And that realization
was the most blissful relief imaginable.

She was untied, and strong arms, those arms
that had done so much and borne so much, pulled her into their
embrace and rocked with her back and forth. She wanted to stay
there in her body, hang on to the wakefulness of her life, but she
also didn’t – so she began to fade. As she did, she had a vague
notion of being wrapped in something soft, like satin. She felt
warm.

And then she felt nothing.

*****

Two hundred and seventy-seven days later, an
African American twenty-eight year old police woman by the name of
Officer Rosa Dixon looked up from the front desk of a tiny precinct
in a small southwest town in the middle of nowhere to watch the
door that no one had come through all day. She was thinking of
moving to Boston. She had family up there. Her father was on the
force up there. Maybe she could get transferred.

At that moment, the door finally swung
outward, and a young blonde woman walked into the station carrying
a baby.

The blonde was thin, maybe
a little on the too-thin side. She wore jeans, a T-shirt and
sneakers, and all of them bore holes. Of course, that wasn’t saying
much these days. It was 1983.
Clothes are
sold with holes in them now
, thought Rosa.
A somewhat distressed look was coming into fashion, which was
distressing in and of itself. But it was harder than ever to tell
who was genuinely down on their luck and who just wanted to hide
the fact that they weren’t. Maybe the style wouldn’t last. Rosa
hoped not. She’d been waiting for years for the Art Deco craze to
come back. Fashions repeated; why not the twenties and
thirties?

The blonde’s shirt revealed her arms, which
were smooth and showed no signs of tracks or bruising. All in all,
she might have been too skinny in the officer’s opinion, but she
looked clean enough.

Intrigued, Rosa put down her pen, took off
her reading glasses – which were hung on a vintage pince-nez chain
and quite precious to her – and eyed the woman as she
approached.

“
I found him in a dumpster
outside the grocery store,” said the blonde when she reached the
desk. Up close, Rosa could see the girl was beautiful in that
mysterious kind of way that was difficult to pin down. There was
something in the sleepless hollows beneath her eyes, or something
in the way she moved her head that spoke of innate grace, though
she looked to be no older than twenty, maybe
twenty-five.

The blonde uncovered the baby’s face to
reveal eyes like the Caribbean Sea. “I didn’t know what else to do
but bring him in here.”

Rosa stared into those blue eyes for a while
before she looked from the baby to the woman holding him. The
blonde had brown eyes, the more notable thing about them the fact
that they were a little red as if she’d been crying. There was no
immediate likeness between her and the infant, at least not that
the cop could see. Then again, she’d never been the kind of person
who could tell a baby looked like its mother or father. As far as
she was concerned, that was bullshit people fed new parents to make
them feel good. A baby looked like a baby. And a baby looked like a
squat, fleshy, pink-cheeked abomination with no teeth and eyes that
took up half its face. And don’t even get her started on what a
baby looked like just coming out of the womb! That was a wrinkled,
purple mess of a thing that looked more like Benjamin Button at the
beginning of his life than anything else. No, a human baby bore
more resemblance to a Vietnamese pot-bellied pig than it did its
mother or father.

The officer pushed out her chair and stood
up to make her way around the desk. The blonde woman turned with
her, and for a moment, her hold on the baby seemed genuinely
protective. Perhaps motherly.

But again, there was no
immediate proof that she was the child’s mother. Plus, Rosa had
seen women who’d just given birth before. Her sister, for instance,
had been ripped from hole to hole. Most women couldn’t walk for
hours after, if not days. Even later the same week, they moved
slow. And ninety percent of them had at least a
little
pregnancy weight to get rid
of, usually a
lot
. This young woman on the other hand seemed to be in perfect
health other than the fact that she was a waif.

“
You say you found him in a
dumpster?” Rosa questioned calmly.

The blonde nodded. Her brown eyes focused
steadily on the officer.

“
Behind the grocery store?”
Rosa asked.

“
Yes,” replied the blonde.
“Spencer’s Farm to Market. Downtown.”

That was what she had been about to ask. She
went to the next question on her list. “How did you know he was
there?”

“
I parked next to the
dumpster to go in and do some shopping, and I heard
crying.”

She was fast to answer, which sent up a red
flag for the officer. The reply seemed almost rehearsed. There were
also those crying-red eyes to consider. Who went grocery shopping
just after a massive crying spell?

Oh hell
, she thought with a mental shrug.
Everyone does that at some point.
I
have. Life is hard
.

“
Was there anything else
with him?” she asked.

“
No, ma’am.”

The officer squinted a little, her gaze
narrowing. She’d noticed over the last four years, ever since she’d
earned her badge, that when people started calling her ma’am, it
sometimes meant they were getting nervous. And sometimes, not
always but sometimes, that meant they had something to hide.