The Demon King (41 page)

And it was
wrong
.

All around the two-story mansion, thunder
rolled.

Chapter Fifty-Four

Apollyon chose to transport to the only
location he could conceive of where no one would come looking for
him. It was a deserted shack on a grassy hill in the middle of the
North Dakota plains, and no human had stepped foot in it since the
Civil War. He kept its original appearance on the outside, but of
course changed its interior to suit his needs. He had everything he
needed inside. Well, almost everything.

Some things, he was still working on.

A sharp pang in his chest drew Apollyon’s
attention, and he looked down to see blood spreading across the
shirt he had just changed into. It was a smaller amount than
before; the wounds were healing. But the fact that the injury was
present and visible was enough to bring Apollyon’s teeth together
in a terrible gnashing grip.

When the new king had attacked him in that
parking lot, he’d done more damage than was at first apparent.
Apollyon had used the life force of his chosen victim in Las Vegas
to heal the wounds. Or so he’d thought. Given a few hours, they’d
begun to open back up again. Granted, they were smaller than they
had at first been. But they were bleeding and they hurt like
hell.

The demon had been forced to drain two more
victims that night. By the time he’d finished, the sun was coming
up in the mortal realm. That was when he’d come here and changed.
Now it looked as though he would have to do so again.

He should have seen this
coming. Lazaroth was different. If there hadn’t been so much
jealousy involved, Apollyon might have admitted that the present
Akyri King was also the most powerful
Demon
King the realm had ever known.
He possessed all of his father’s strength and then some. Of
course
anything he did
would carry incredible impact.

The wounds Apollyon had sustained would
probably take a few days to completely heal. For now, he was going
to have to accept the fact that bandages were necessary.

Apollyon shut his eyes as a spike of anger
bolted hard and hot through him. He’d spent the better of that slow
burning anger destroying a portion of the Strip in Las Vegas and
murdering three innocent victims. So now there was only enough left
for him to spin around and hurl his glass of liquor across the
room. It slammed into the wall on the opposite end full force and
shattered, sending glass flying everywhere. It was satisfying, just
enough so that he was able to breathe again.

Damn it. That’s the second glass.

It was. He’d crushed the first in his fist
because he’d been thinking about Dahlia Kellen and everything she
could have done for him. She had been perfect.

“
Fuck,” he hissed when he
realized he was headed down the same dark channel of thoughts yet
again. He needed to move on. He needed a new approach. His original
plans had fallen through like water through a sieve. Kellen was out
of the picture now. He needed to
think
.

He couldn’t go home, that
was certain. He’d attacked the king and made a play for the queen.
He’d orchestrated an attack on Tenebrom, the stronghold castle of
the Demon Realm. He’d crossed every “t” and dotted every “i” on his
death warrant. He wouldn’t be able to come within a hundred miles
of the realm’s borders without Lazaroth’s armies capturing him.
They wouldn’t take him out. They would
definitely
capture him – so the king
could kill him slowly, just as Astaroth had promised his son
would.

But that realm had never been his home
anyway, not really. When the magic of the Curse had chosen his
uncle over his father as its king, the Demon Realm had become
foreign to him. How could a man feel comfortable in an environment
that had rejected him?

Lord Astaroth had taken
over. He and his brother had always quarreled about how the realm
should be run. Apollyon’s father, Mammon, believed it should be run
with an iron fist and little to no mercy. They were demons, after
all. But his laws didn’t sit well with Astaroth, especially where
they concerned females. Mammon felt women were ill-suited for rule,
or for
any
positions of power in fact, and would have strictly forbidden
them from entering their armies, running the Demon Realm’s
businesses, and would have minimized the role of the queen once he
claimed one.

Astaroth felt differently. He believed
female demons actually possessed limitless potential and swore to
allow women immediate access to the positions solely held by men
all these years. Mammon lamented such a choice, and when Astaroth
was made king, he rallied against him.

Astaroth branded him a trouble maker and
moved Apollyon’s father to the outer reaches of the kingdom,
delegating to him the rule of some paltry and sparse bit of land
and people. Apollyon knew it was something he’d always wanted to do
to his brother. He knew it had been Astaroth’s way of getting back
at Mammon for not only their disagreements, but for something
personal, for some slight of sibling rivalry, for something petty
and insignificant. It was done so easily and quickly, it might have
even been a joke to Astaroth.

But it was a joke that
lasted a thousand years, and one in which Apollyon was born into.
His entire life had been about that joke. And his entire life had
hence become about getting revenge for it. The ironic thing was
that once Mammon found a woman he wanted to make his mate, he began
to question everything he had previously believed about females. He
began to
value
women. Especially this one. So much so that when she ran from
him after Apollyon was born, he went looking for her, and had been
doing so for centuries. Apollyon hadn’t seen his father in more
than a thousand years.

Apollyon ran a hand over his face and made
his way to the liquor cabinet to re-pour a drink. Casually, he
waved his hand behind him, and the glass from the broken tumbler
lifted from the floor, swirling together to reform the glass once
more. That glass then floated through the air and replaced itself
amongst the other glasses in the cabinet above Apollyon’s head.

As the cabinet door closed, seemingly of its
own accord, Apollyon lifted his second glass to his lips and took a
long, hard pull. He was so damned grateful that at least the Curse
hadn’t ruined this for him too. Fortune – or perchance misfortune,
depending on how you chose to view it – had decided to leave demons
with their ability to get completely plastered on mortal liquor. It
was something he would be ever grateful for.

He gritted his teeth as the
liquid burned like acid on its way down. But his gaze was distant
and unseeing, locked in a world of seething hatred. Astaroth and
his bloody descendant had robbed him of his home. They’d robbed him
of his birthright, his identity, and his kingdom.
Everything, that man took from
me
…
And
why?

“
Why?” he asked softly, to
no one and nothing. It was a question he had asked a million times.
There was never an answer forthcoming.

“
Because you would have
made a simpering king.”

Apollyon spun around. The rest of his drink
sloshed out of his glass, and his eyes went wide. There on the
opposite end of the room stood Astaroth. He seemed casually at ease
with his hands at his sides, but Apollyon felt his power at once.
It was cold. Which was strange for a demon.

His black and gray pin-striped suit was
perfectly tailored and crisp, his black shoes were shining, and not
a single wavy hair was out of place on his handsome head. The man
seemed different somehow. It was more than the fact that he’d
managed to get past Apollyon’s protective magic. There was
something off about his eyes. Or maybe it was his smile. He seemed
taller, his hair darker, his shadow… longer.

The sight of him was beyond
startling. “Astaroth!” Apollyon hissed. How the
hell
had he found him? And how had
he made it past all of his wards? No royal blood but the present
king’s was supposed to be able to cast any harmful magic on another
member of royalty. Negating protection spells counted as
harmful.

“
How the fuck did you get
in here?” Apollyon hissed, his gaze narrowing. He’d had just about
enough of Astaroth and his family. At the moment, that anger was
enough to dull his instinct, instinct that should have been
screaming at him in the wake of all that was wrong with this
picture.

“
It was like stepping over
a puddle, Apollyon. You always have been a mewling milksop. I fully
regret spending so many years worrying about any damage you might
have caused my family. It was time sorely wasted.”

Apollyon felt Astaroth’s words spear through
him like red hot pokers. His fury spiked. He dropped the glass he’d
been holding, and fireballs erupted in each of his hands. The
crackling blazes spun in place in his open palms like snowballs
rolling down a hill. Their flames cast dancing shadows on the walls
of his secret home.

But Astaroth was safe from
his attack, and they both knew it. As much as the former king could
not touch
him
,
he
could
not touch the former king. Only Lazaroth could harm either one of
them.

“
That’s where you’re
wrong,” said the former king.

Apollyon felt the ground beneath his feet
rumble. The glasses in the cabinet began to chink together, shaking
in their places. The blinds over the windows clacked against one
another. The floor lurched, and Apollyon looked down, crying out in
surprise. His fireballs went flying aimlessly when he stumbled and
reached out to keep from falling.

He hit the nearby hutch and the fire he had
thrown fizzled out, shrinking and turning to smoke that wisped up
into the shadows near the ceiling and vanished altogether. But
Apollyon never saw that happen. He was too busy watching the floor
beneath his feet.

It cracked violently, splintering through
the living room like a centipede. He stumbled again, his arms
splayed wide. Then the floor separated, and he jumped in an attempt
to clear it, but it opened slowly at first before yawning wide with
sudden aggression. Apollyon seemed to lose height unnaturally
quickly, and ended up hitting the opposite end of the rift, his
chest impacting violently with the ground’s edge.

He felt ribs crack, the pain stealing his
breath before he was yanked straight down. Terror gripped him and
despite the pain, he screamed. Magic words tried to form on his
tongue, but he was unable to line them up coherently as he
plummeted. The chasm became narrower the further he fell, and the
last thing he saw above him was Lord Astaroth’s handsome face
peering down at him.

The former king’s face flashed into
something else, something featureless. And then it was Astaroth
again. He smiled.

Then the walls began to close up on
Apollyon, and his final moments of life consisted of a torture torn
between the panic of a man who knows he is dying, and a body being
slowly crushed to death between two rock walls.

Up above, in the living room of a private,
magically created house hidden within the crumbling wood façade of
an old Dakota shed, Lord Astaroth the former king of Tenebrom
stepped to the middle of the room and looked down. He watched in
silence as the ground sealed itself up. The floorboards came next,
mending together down to every last splinter of wood. At last the
plush carpet sewed itself together good as new.

He raised his chin and took a deep breath.
Then, with cold eyes filled with an eternity of secrets, he
vanished from the room, leaving it whole, empty and very, very
quiet.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Roman D’Angelo looked out over the table of
kings and queens stretched before him and found himself running a
hand over his face in quiet exasperation. “Okay, what the hell
happened to you three?” he asked.

The Dragon King, the Time King, and the
Shifter King glanced at one another. Each of them seemed to have
the same injury. They all wore their left arms in a sling or cast.
Roman knew the chances of three people at the same table having the
same injury were nearly nonexistent unless they’d all done the same
thing together, and these three particular kings were not close
enough socially for that to have happened. The chances of them
having the same injury by accident went down considerably when you
considered that the three people in question were a dragon, a
shifter, and William Balthazar, the Time King. Who Roman was fairly
sure was indestructible.

Darius, the Shifter King, sighed and sat
back in his chair like a big, well muscled cat. His eyes flashed.
At the moment, they were blue, but as a shifter, he possessed the
ability to make them any color he wished. He smiled ruefully. It
was a killer smile. “It’s nothing serious,” he said. “A hunting
accident. It’ll be all better by the end of the day.”

All
right
, Roman thought begrudgingly. That
one, he supposed could believe easily enough. Shifters were very
strong, very fast, and lived hundreds of years. But they weren’t
immortal, and they did sometimes get hurt, especially since they
tended toward the carnivorous side, because carnivores hunted. As a
vampire, this was something Roman could readily identify
with.

Shifters healed faster than humans, but it
was not an immediate mending, as it so often was for werewolves or
some of the other species whose kings sat at the Table of the
Thirteen.