The Demon King (21 page)

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 revisiting 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.”