The Demon King (33 page)

But it came again, this time closer. “You
guys, there’s a Ninetails!”

The second time, he stiffened and irritation
combined with curiosity ebbed its way into his circle of pleasure.
He heard a low growl – realized it was his own – and felt Dahlia go
still in his grip. Slowly, he pulled away, breaking the kiss. She
stared up at him, her emerald eyes glassed over.

“
Apparently there’s a
Ninetails,” he said softly.

She blinked and straightened in his grip. He
turned his head to glance behind him as a crowd of people continued
to rush out of the bar. Every single one of them, tattooed, leather
dressed, and unshaven, was staring down at their phones.

“
A Ninetails?” Dahlia asked
softly.

The group turned in circles and fanned out,
and one woman looked squarely at Laz and Dahlia. “Do either of you
have it on your screens? The radar says its really close!”

Laz of course knew what
they were talking about, and one day he would look back on this and
realize that the woman had
expected
him to know what they were talking about – and
that was pretty phenomenal in and of itself. They were talking
about Pokémon Go.

He let his arm slip loose from Dahlia’s
waist and stepped back to pull his phone from the inner pocket of
his leather jacket, but before he even had it half-way out, Dahlia
was exclaiming excitedly next to him.

“
Oh my god, it’s here! It’s
here!
It’s right here!
” There was a general shuffle of movement in the crowd nearby
as they scuttled closer, their phones held up in front of them.
“Holy cow, did you realize that this bar was a Pokéstop?” she
asked. A Pokéstop was a location on the game’s map where players
could spin for prizes that helped them get ahead in the game. And
that explained why the woman on the back of the bike earlier had
been doing something on her phone before putting it in her back
pocket.

Dahlia had beat him to it on every front,
having already located her own phone, pulled it out, and called up
the ap. She was now staring down at her phone in wonder, and Laz
could see her finger shaking nervously as she went through the
motions of trying to catch what was admittedly a fairly rare
Pokémon.

The crowd that had exited
the bar was hurrying toward them. “Where?
Where?!
”

But one by one, they stopped and froze in
place as the creature appeared on their screens, gold and glowing
and glorious, and they stared in awe and shook in anxiety as they
attempted to capture it.

For the first time since
he’d begun playing the game, Laz slid his phone back into his
pocket and simply watched those around him. Rather than join in,
which he admittedly wanted to do, he stood silently and observed.
It was moments like this that made an impression on a person. It
was moments like this that were worth noticing. This was something
to see –
bikers
playing Pokémon Go.

He looked over at the beautiful fae whose
cheeks were flushed and eyes were narrowed in adorable
concentration. He had to agree with Dahlia’s assessment. Learning
something new every day certainly made life worth living.
Especially when the kiss of someone you were beginning to care
deeply for was still tingling on your lips.

Chapter Forty-Two

“
Holy crap, now there’s a
Jigglypuff!” someone shouted.

Dahlia had just finished
catching the Ninetails when the Jigglypuff appeared on her radar
and someone in the crowd called it. This was the one she’d lost
earlier when Lazarus – should she still be calling him that? She
blushed and her lips tingled. When
he
took her phone from
her.

She really wanted this one. She looked up
from her phone to find him watching her.

“
Let’s go get it,” he told
her solidly as he pulled out his own phone.

She grinned, and they broke into a run
together. They’d taken all of ten running steps when like a bolt of
lightning from a clear sky, an explosion rocked the parking lot
behind them, the blast so large, Dahlia felt it against her body
rather than heard it. She sensed an impact, as if a brick wall had
slammed into her right side. Pain erupted along her spine and into
her neck, but there was no time to register it fully. The world
blurred past her, was turned upside down, and then something
wrapped tightly around her like a cocoon.

She felt a second impact, but this one was
much less violent than the first. She couldn’t tell what it was or
where she was, as everything was dark. A loud hum in her ears
blocked out most of her second sense, and she was left only with
touch, taste, and smell.

Smell was the first thing she noticed.
Leather and sandalwood. Smoke and gasoline or oil – she could never
tell the difference between the two.

“
Dahlia!” She could dully
hear someone calling her name through the humming. Hands jostled
her, and she was moved again. She opened her eyes to find herself
staring up into his. She read his lips when he asked, “Are you
okay?” Concern etched his beautiful features – and so did blood.
He’d been hit by something on the head, and a stream of red was
making its way over his forehead toward his left eye.

“
What happened?” she asked.
Her side was throbbing; was something broken? She couldn’t even
tell where the pain was coming from. But at least the humming in
her ears was fading.

Lazarus looked from her to something up and
over her head. His expression was wrought with concern, but set
with determination. With a tight jaw and flashing eyes, he said,
“We’ve been found.”

Dahlia shifted beneath him, wincing as she
moved. She just wanted to see what he was staring at. Thirty feet
away in the parking lot of the bar, the remnants of a Mercedes lay
in wreckage, sending black smoke billowing into a blacker night.
The motorcycles that had been parked on either side of it were laid
flat like downed Dominoes, and pieces of metal shimmered where they
were strewn across the tarmac.

“
People could have been
hurt,” Dahlia said, thinking of the patrons who may have been
remaining in the bar. She pushed up to her elbows to see the
unconscious forms of her fellow Pokémon Go players. “Oh gods, they
could be dead.”

“
They’re alive.”

“
How do you know?” She
tried to push him off her, but he wouldn’t budge. “I know because I
can feel when someone is dead, Dahlia. I have the ability to heal,
and that comes with the territory.”

“
You can heal? You need to
help them!”

“
Are
you
hurt Dahlia?” he asked.
Something in his voice drew her attention directly. Her head
snapped back to him and a stillness went through her. “Tell me the
truth.”

“
No,” she said honestly.
Her head hurt, but nothing was broken. “Just bruised.”

Laz nodded and got to his feet, taking her
arms and pulling her up with him. “I want you to stay here.” He
looked over at the smoking scene.

“
No,” she told him
firmly.

Lazarus straightened, and his head turned,
his attention now completely focused on her again. It was
disconcerting, that gaze. He was intense. “What?”

But she could be intense too. “You heard me,
Detective.”

“
It’s Laz,” he said, jaw
set.

“
No…” she shook her head
and licked her lips, placing her hands on his arms. They’d been
kissing only moments earlier. She tried to go back….
“
Steven
,” she
said, this time just as firmly but with an undeniable note of
tenderness.

Steven Lazarus’s face changed. His jaw
relaxed, and his pupils dilated. She had his attention. “You heard
me,” she told him. “I’m not staying here.”

People were now yelling at one another in
the bar, and smoke was rolling up and out of its windows. Dahlia
squeezed his arms where she held him, then let go and turned to run
toward the building. She moved like a deer, fast and fleet, closing
distance with fae grace she’d never been more grateful for.

Laz bolted after her, “Dahlia!”

“
We don’t have time to
argue!” she called back over her shoulder.

The explosion had destroyed
their vehicle. Or, rather it had destroyed Baxter’s vehicle,
Steven’s partner. That was going to suck balls for Steven to
explain to the shifter. It had also caused enough of an after shock
that the motorcycles around it had literally been picked up and
moved
sideways
.

“
Where did the attack come
from?” Dahlia asked, turning in a circle, her gaze scanning the
growing crowd of humans and the metal remnants of the
car.

“
I want you to get the hell
out of here, Dahlia,” Steven told her. He grabbed her by her upper
arm and spun her around, forcing her to meet his gaze.

She stilled in his embrace
and her mind flashed back to their kiss. He’d been so hot, it was
as if he’d had a fever, and her mind couldn’t help but wonder what
other parts of him would feel like against her…
in
her. She was a Tuathan fae, and
sex was in her blood. But now stubbornness flooded that blood and
she felt her eyes turn hard as stone. “I already told you,
no
. You can’t deal with
this alone, and we can’t keep running from it. It was a stupid idea
to try to in the first place. Your cousin wants to go for a
round?”

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.