The Demon King (6 page)

Dahlia cut her gaze to
Evie, peeling them off the cookies with something like a vengeance.
Could she seriously have forgotten that Dahlia couldn’t eat
anything? How
could
she forget, as a vampire herself? Sure, Evie’s warlock magic
made it possible for her to eat whatever she wanted, but of all
people, Dahlia had expected her to understand that Dahlia was
different. She wasn’t that kind of vampire. She wasn’t half warlock
and half Akyri, like Roman’s vampires were, and she couldn’t eat
food!

Was Evie delusional? Or was
she just teasing her to be intentionally cruel? That
couldn’t
be it. It
wasn’t something she’d have expected from Evelynne D’Angelo, not in
ten lifetimes. The woman was practically composed of
empathy.

“
You’re teasing me, aren’t
you?” Maybe she was trying to toughen her up or
something.

“
Not at all. It’s truly
better than the croissants, which Roman hasn’t yet
perfected.”

Dahlia blinked. Confusion
ran rampant through her brain. “
What
?” she finally asked.

Now Evie grinned, and this time, Dahlia
could see her fangs, all pretense gone. Evie picked up a chocolate
chip cookie, held Dahlia’s gaze, and took a massive bite. Dahlia
watched in fascination as she chewed – and then swallowed. “They’re
made for people like us, Dahlia. Dig in.”

Holy….

“
Yeah,” said Evie around
her toothy grin. “This one’s just as good as I
remember.”

Chapter Five

Dahlia had never dived for anything so fast
in her long life. The first cookie she downed, she barely tasted,
though there was a lingering deliciousness across her tongue that
melted into the background of her consciousness as she took three
big bites of her second cookie.

There was a sound coming from her, some kind
of cross between a low growl, a sort of moan, and an inkling of
pig-like scarfing. She couldn’t have cared less.

Evie leaned forward, resting her head in her
hands and her elbows on the table. “I would have brought you here
right away after you’d been turned, but Roman was worried about a
transformation backlash.”

Dahlia looked up. A transformation backlash
sometimes occurred when someone was turned into a vampire. At least
with Roman’s breed, the dark magic that caused the transformation
could sometimes overwhelm a mortal’s mind and… well, bad things
happened.

Since none of Roman’s vampires had even been
aware other vampires existed, Dahlia could understand Roman’s
concern that being turned by no less than the Entity himself would
cause one hell of a backlash in Dahlia. But it turned out she
wasn’t that kind of vampire. And that the transformation itself was
damn well bad enough as it was.

Dahlia finished chewing, swallowed another
warm, gooey, chocolaty bite, and had a decision to make. Ask the
question resting on her tongue? Or have another pastry?

She picked up a cupcake and took a bite so
big, it left multi-colored frosting all over her nose. Evie
chuckled. “You’re quite the picture. A drop-dead stunning woman
with an even more stunning body devouring more sugar than every
model in the world has ever ingested in all of their lifetimes
combined. You know, there are a lot of guys out there who would get
really turned on watching you right now.”

Now Dahlia laughed as well, nearly spewing
chocolate crumbs across the table. She had the forethought to close
her lips and even cover her mouth, however. When she swallowed, she
glanced at the tea pot and its two delicate tea cups and gave Evie
a questioning glance. Evie nodded.

Dahlia grabbed the pot, poured herself a
steaming cup, and then dumped a bunch of milk into on top of it.
When it was good and creamy, she lifted the porcelain to her lips
and inhaled slowly. The tea’s delicate scent was perfect. She took
a sip.

“
Oh my gods.”

“
I agree. He did a
particularly good job on that,” said Evie. “Though I suspect Lalura
had something to do with it as well, since she likes to visit Roman
for tea.”

Dahlia slowly lowered her
cup. “Roman made
all
of this?” she asked gesturing to the entire tabletop of
delights, but really she meant not only the stuff on the table, but
also all that lay beyond it in the cavern.

“
He did. He wanted to
create a food for vampires that it wouldn’t take warlock
protections to ingest. Say, if you’re exhausted, you’re fresh from
the fight, and you’re sapped of power. You need rest and
nourishment, and frankly, it’s times like that you need the taste
of fat and sugar the most. So he researched, studied, practiced,
made a whole lot of disgusting mush, and finally came up with a few
pretty tasty treats. Most people can’t tell the difference between
the ones he created and the real deal.”

Dahlia looked down at the table, turned to
glance out the cottage window, then settled back in her chair. “You
said Roman wouldn’t let you bring me here at first. Does that mean
he somehow knew you’d be bringing me today and suddenly agreed it
would be okay?”

Evie shrugged. “Not exactly. When you were
turned, I mentioned that you could probably use a place like the
cavern to hang out in. He immediately understood I wanted to bring
you here and suggested it might not be wise until we knew for sure
you weren’t going to go postal. That was then. This is now. I made
my own judgment call.”

Dahlia looked at Evie a long time. One of
the things she’d always liked about Evelynne was the lack of
artifice. When she smiled, she meant it. When she reached out, it
was because she wanted you to take her hands and hold on tight.

“
This couldn’t have come at
a better time,” Dahlia told her friend.

“
I know,” Evie said, and
this time, her smile dropped. “It’s a lot better than Lifeblood,
isn’t it?”

Dahlia nodded. There was no contest.

“
And it’s better than
mortal blood too, isn’t it?” Evie asked next.

Dahlia bit her lip. She flinched, slowly
straightened, and wiped her lip on the back of her hand. It came
away smeared with a small amount of blood. She closed her eyes,
sighed, and sat back again in her chair. “Okay,” she said. “Let me
have it.”

Evie poured herself a cup of tea. “How
many?” she asked, as if she were asking how many lumps of sugar one
might want in their cup.

Dahlia cleared her throat;
it was tightening a little. She looked down at her hands in her
lap. The tiny bit of blood on one of them now was a miniscule
representation of the
real
amount of blood on her hands. “Three,” she
admitted softly. “So far.”

Evie finished pouring the tea, replaced the
pot, and started with the milk. “I’m impressed,” she said softly.
“Between you and me, at your stage I’d killed twice as many.”

Dahlia realized she’d gone still, and when
she realized she’d done so, she wondered how long she’d been that
way. She blinked as Evie’s words echoed in her ears. After a few
more moments, she asked, “What?”

Evie took a deep breath and let it out as if
she were readying herself for what she was about to divulge. “You
know that feeling you get when you’re first transformed… after the
shock of it wears off and you realize that you can lift a pickup
truck with one hand and control a person’s mind and even fucking
fly across the ocean if you want to?”

Dahlia slowly smiled. Oh yeah. She knew.

“
That feeling that makes
you realize you can kick some major ass, and that the world is full
of asses that need kicking?”

Dahlia nodded. She knew about too.

“
I had that feeling,” said
Evie, “and I just had to do something with it. I couldn’t wait to
get out there and even the odds.”

“
In the fae realms, we call
that ‘going Wisher’,” Dahlia chuckled.

Evie grinned. “Do you really?” She laughed
softly. “I guess I can see that.”

“
Well, we
used
to call it that,”
Dahlia corrected with a shrug. “Not so much anymore, as you can
imagine.” The queens to the Seelie and Unseelie Realms were both
Wishers now, and though the women would probably just find the
referral amusing, the truth was, the kingdoms each loved their
queens quite a bit. So out of respect, they’d stopped using the
term.

Evie nodded. “I understand.”

“
Go on,” urged Dahlia. “You
were saying.”

Evie took another deep breath. “The first
was a woman, believe it or not. See, as a human I had human
friends. Shortly after I was turned, I was speaking with one of
them, a woman by the name of Jane. Something was off about her. She
was pale, her blood pressure was elevated – we can hear that, we
can smell that. You know what I’m talking about.”

Dahlia nodded.

“
I could tell she was
exhausted. There was that shadowy puffiness under her eyes, and the
whites were veined with red.” Evie shook her head, her gaze
shifting to a moment in the past. “I asked her what had happened,
and she finally opened up and admitted that she and her little girl
had recently been assaulted by a woman strung out on meth. Now, you
have to understand something about Jane. She’s a fighter. She’s
never backed down from confrontation. When she was fresh out of
high school in fact, she literally stood up to an entire gang. They
broke her nose, cracked her jaw, and knocked out a tooth. She
helped the police apprehend a group of rapists who had been
stalking her. She faced things head on and went about her
life.”

Evie took a sip of her tea, which was
miraculously still steaming as if it had just finished boiling in
an electric kettle. Dahlia loved magic.

“
But when she was
twenty-six, she became pregnant and wound up raising an autistic
child alone. She learned to avoid the kinds of situations she used
to roll up her sleeves at – because getting into that kind of
trouble posed a threat to her little girl. Her daughter means
everything to Jane.”

Naturally
, thought
Dahlia.

“
Just after I became a
vampire, Jane turned thirty-four. Her daughter Alice had been going
through some pretty intense bullying at her school. Jane of course
raised hell. Unfortunately, one of the kids bullying her daughter
had an aunt strung out on meth. One afternoon, Jane was stopped at
a light with traffic on both sides of her when a woman got out of
the vehicle in front of her and approached her car. Jane instantly
recognized her as that same aunt. The woman’s hair was a mess, her
makeup was heavy and smeared, and she looked for lack of a better
description, ‘hard lived’. She also had a tire iron in her right
hand.”

Dahlia stiffened, her gut tightening as the
story progressed.

“
Apparently, the woman
approached Alice’s side of the car instead of Jane’s, and since
Jane couldn’t swerve away due to the traffic, she did the only
thing she could think of and told her daughter to lock her door.
Thankfully, Alice obeyed, and just in time. But the woman tried
like hell to get in, and she beat the hell out of the
car.”

“
Holy shit.”

“
I know, right?” agreed
Evie. “When they finally got out of the mess, they filed criminal
charges. But Alice hid under the covers of her bed for a few days,
and any time she had to get in the car with her mom, she would take
a household item with her as a weapon.” Evie shook her head. “An
eight year old girl.”

“
She was traumatized,” said
Dahlia.

“
That’s putting it mildly,”
said Evie. “I saw what it did to her mom too. A woman who was
generally tough as nails, rendered helpless because someone went
after her kid, and that was all she could think about.”

A moment of silence passed between them as
Dahlia digested this. Then, stating what she knew would be the
obvious, she said, “So you killed the woman who attacked them.”

“
I didn’t originally plan
to,” said Evie. “I tracked her down to teach her a lesson, maybe
give her a really good scare. But when I showed up, I found her in
the basement counting money, and four dogs chained in the back
yard. They’d been used horribly.” She shook her head. “I’ve never
seen animals more scarred up. The money she was counting had been
collected for dog fights. So… I showed her what it felt like to be
attacked and used by a bully, by someone scarier and stronger than
her. And then I drained every drop of blood from her body. Despite
the fact that the meth made it taste terrible, I have never
regretted it once.”

Chapter Six

Dahlia was sure some wise
person somewhere must have been quoted as saying that every person
has a
reason
for
doing the things they do. By that way of thinking, every criminal
is there because of cause and effect. The violent alcoholic was an
alcoholic because his father beat him. His father beat him because
he was beaten as a child by a crazy mother. The mother who beat him
was locked in a school closet for every wrong-doing during the
school week and had become a manically anxious sufferer of
claustrophobia. The teacher who locked her in a closet had lost her
daughter when her daughter wandered off one day after being
disciplined and was never seen from again.

Every fault blames another, on and on
through the generations until you were left with a caveman writing
something hurtful on a cave wall in bison blood. The first abusive
human. The root of all evil. The source of every wrong-doing the
world would see in the countless years to come.