The Demon King (8 page)

But Laz really knew better.
An affinity for magic was not something you learned, it was
something you were born with. The idiot part for this guy must have
come later. It was obvious the man had never felt comfortable
exploring the magic inside him; he was unschooled, and for good
reason. The bitch about dark magic was that if you weren’t smart,
you couldn’t control it.
It
would control
you
.

Out of a mixture of curiosity and resigned
hesitation toward what he was going to have to do, Laz waited to
see exactly what spell the young man was trying to cast. The perp’s
eyes were wide. His expression was uneasy and far too uncertain.
The words coming from his mouth were a little garbled, as if he
wasn’t sure he was pronouncing them correctly. Little did he know,
it was impossible to pronounce them incorrectly. Dark magic didn’t
make it into your mouth until it was fully formed. In fact, the
only reason you spoke at all was because the spell wanted out.

It was the young man’s uncertainty and lack
of practice controlling the magic that were going to make things go
wrong. Laz had two choices. He could either stand there and wait
for the shit to hit the fan and clean up the magic mess, or he
could just eat the guy and be done with it. It had been a while
since he’d fed anyway. Maybe this was just fortuitous.

“
Fuck it,” he hissed. Then
he raised his hand, and his palm tingled. A symbol was forming
across his skin, swirling in ominous red. The words coming from the
young man’s mouth faltered, stumbling to silence. “Sorry,” said Laz
insincerely. “You’re out of time and I’m hungry.”

The red mark on his palm expanded,
enveloping his entire hand in bloody light. It flashed, and Laz
closed his eyes in dark satisfaction as a sudden influx of warlock
magic fed the Akyri King molecules in his body.

Akyri were an ancient race of creatures that
fed on the magic of warlocks. They were supposed to have originally
formed of stardust. One Akyri that Laz knew of in particular seemed
to verify that theory. Chloe Septeran was the Warlock Queen, and
ironically an Akyri. She was ancient, one of the first of her kind.
She also happened to be literally made of stardust.

As one of the eight queens
that now sat at the Table of the Thirteen, she enjoyed the same
luxuries Laz did at the Table. The most important of which was the
fact that she didn’t have to wait or beg or ask for the magic she
needed in order to survive. As a queen, she was more powerful even
than her exceedingly powerful husband, the Warlock King, Jason
Alberich. When she wanted his magic, she simply took it. Not that
he didn’t willingly give it to her at every opportunity. Laz was
betting Alberich enjoyed giving her a
lot
of things.

Laz, or Steven Lazarus as
he was known in polite society, was the most powerful Akyri alive.
As their king, he was
also
capable of taking whatever magic he wanted or
needed from warlocks. After all, it wouldn’t do for the Akyri King
to be beholden to anyone.

He even had to be careful
not to take the magic when he didn’t mean to. He could just imagine
accidentally sucking some down from one of the warlocks sitting at
the Table of the Thirteen. That wouldn’t go over well, seeing as
how one of the warlocks was the
king
of warlocks, and the other two
were queens. All three would kick his ass or die trying. He made
sure never to go to a meeting hungry.

But right now? He frankly didn’t care how
much magic he inhaled or how quickly he scarfed it down. He was out
of patience. There was someone on the ground near death. He could
sense the life creeping away from the young warlock’s victim with
each passing second.

The energy he absorbed infiltrated his
bloodstream, carried through his heart, and poured out into the
recesses of his body. When he was done feeding, he opened his eyes,
the red light faded, and the warlock who’d fed him dropped to the
ground beside the unconscious man who was already there.

Laz strode to the victim in the suit and
bent to take his pulse. He was alive, but barely. Blood covered his
clothing, drenching the white shirt beneath his suit coat the
worst. A chest wound was the very minimum of what he’d sustained;
he’d been shot. But his head was bleeding too, and heads tended to
violently hemorrhage. His blood soaked the ground beneath him. He
would bleed to death shortly if Laz didn’t get him some help.

One really convenient thing about warlocks
was that they possessed the ability to bring the dead back to life.
There were contingencies: the warlock had to be more powerful than
the person they were resurrecting, there had to be a fire, some
sort of crystal, and so on. But despite this obnoxiously enormous
gift, the strange thing was they couldn’t heal. They couldn’t take
away a person’s wounds while that person still breathed. They could
only bring them back once they’d crossed over. It was odd to
Laz.

Especially since he
did
have the ability to
heal.

It wasn’t something he’d chosen to
advertise, not to the Thirteen Kings, much less to Roman D’Angelo.
He wasn’t sure why he kept this newfound ability to himself. There
was just something about the skill that didn’t sit right with him,
not the least of which was the its uniqueness among his kind.
Warlocks didn’t have it either, so it wasn’t something he absorbed
while feeding. It was his and his alone.

Regardless of where it came from or what it
meant, in his line of work, it was an ability Laz was grateful to
have, and one he used now. He placed his hands to the victim’s
bloody chest and concentrated. In the sidelines of his vision, he
noticed the young stupid warlock beginning to stir. Without
glancing away from the man he was healing, Laz sent a sharp spike
of power at the warlock. It hit the young man like a rock to the
forehead, and he was once more unconscious.

A white light grew beneath Laz’s pressed
palms. He imagined that light filling the bullet hole in the
victim’s chest and infiltrating the man’s bloodstream. Then he
imagined it was sewing the gash in his skull, infiltrating the skin
around it like a glowing needle and thread.

When he opened his eyes again a few seconds
later, he found the man’s wounds sealed, though they were still
covered in drying blood, and he was still unconscious. When a
person was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, it was
because they’d received a concussion. People were so accustomed to
watching television shows or movies in which characters were
“knocked out” only to wake up with no ill effect, they had utterly
no idea how completely wrong the medical aspect of the event really
was. In truth, the character would require immediate medical
attention and on-going supervision, or risk permanent brain damage
or death.

But that was Hollywood for you. It would
never be a friend to reality.

Laz could have tried to get into the
complicated workings of the man’s brain to deal with the
concussion, but he wasn’t a neuroscientist, nor was he a natural
born healer like Dannai Caige, so he didn’t want to chance it.
Instead, he pulled a cell from his jacket pocket and dialed a
number, making an “anonymous” call to the nearest police
department. Then he hung up, cast his usual “erasing” spell on the
phone so the call could not be traced in any capacity, and
stood.

He looked over at the warlock. “Now to deal
with you and your friends.”

Chapter Eight

Everyone is ignorant of something. What that
something is just depends on who you are and where you’re from. The
man who called himself Steven Lazarus was ignorant of something
pretty big. Bael had been assigned to rectify that, among other
things. He’d been wondering about the best way to approach the
subject. Ultimately, he’d reasoned that watching the man for a
while – figuring out his nuances, idiosyncrasies and such – before
approaching him would be best. Then it would also be smart to limit
the information he gave to Lazarus. A little at a time. That was
what he was going to do.

And he’d been right.
Detective Lazarus was one hell of an interesting individual. It was
more than a little surprising to Bael that the man hadn’t yet
figured the truth out for himself; he was a
detective
, after all. But people
tended to see, hear and know what they
wanted
to see, hear and know, and
ignorance more often than not fed itself.

The detective made a call on his phone, cast
some sort of basic and crude spell that wiped out the technology
capable of tracking the call, then took off at a run down the
alley. Bael waited. When he sensed the detective’s next stationary
position, he stepped back into the shadows and disappeared.

His kind didn’t transport the way other
magic users did. It seemed the entire world of supernatural beings
used portals to send themselves from one location to another.
Whereas Bael and others like him, by comparison, would simply
vanish from one location and reappear in another.

He wondered if Lazarus had
relegated himself to using rudimentary portals. Probably. Once
you’d figured out one way of doing something, why try to improve
upon it? People were also lazy. Even men with remarkable
bloodlines. Perhaps
especially
men with remarkable bloodlines.

When Bael snapped back into existence at the
second location, he kept himself cloaked in invisibility and
watched through the murky veil of vision it afforded. The detective
had caught up with one of the escaped gunmen and he had the man
pressed up against the wall. He was grilling him for information.
When the captive wasn’t forthcoming, the detective let loose with
another string of power and extracted the information from the
forefront of the man’s thoughts.

He then let the criminal drop to the ground.
Apparently, having thoughts ripped from your brain was rather
painful. What the detective probably wasn’t aware of was that it
wasn’t a warlock spell or warlock magic that did it. It was
something much more… special.

Bael sighed a rather weary sigh when the
detective turned, peered down the dark alley, and took off at
another run, no doubt to catch up with the third and final
perpetrator. But Bael had really had enough of this all-too-human
game of crime fighting. It was time to tend to real business.

He followed Lazarus to the end of the alley,
then got close enough to be heard before he cleared his throat.

The detective skidded to an impressive halt
and spun, pulling his firearm and flooding his hands with readied
offensive magic at the same time. Bael dropped the invisibility
around him, which also cleared up his own vision. He stepped out of
the shadows, and Lazarus gazed at him down the barrel of his
gun.

“
Good evening, Detective
Lazarus,” said Bael. “I wonder if I might have a word with
you.”

The detective eyed him with careful
scrutiny, and Bael could sense himself being sized up from head to
toe.

“
Akyri?” Lazarus asked
plainly, but he didn’t lower his gun, and that magic of his was
still throbbing at the ready.

Bael chuckled low and glanced at the ground
as he smiled a smile of secrets. “No, I’m afraid you’re a touch off
there, detective. But you knew that already. If I were an Akyri,
you wouldn’t have to ask. You are, after all, their king.”

The detective grew dangerously silent. Bael
felt the stillness about him, so quiet, so razor-sharp, it was
beyond obvious to him that the man was masses more than he appeared
to be.

“
Fair enough. But you’re
definitely not human,” Laz said. His blue eyes flashed with
knowledge.

Bael smiled, revealing beautiful white teeth
much like the detective’s; his incisors were slightly elongated,
and decidedly sharp. “No,” he said. He moved from his position to
approach his subject, but at a few feet from Lazarus, the air grew
troubled and wrong. It was a palpable warning not to come any
closer. Bael drew to a stop, swallowing past a dryness that had
suddenly formed in his inhuman throat. He decided to talk fast.
“I’ve come to deliver a message, Detective. It’s about your
father.”

Those ocean blue eyes
narrowed on him, pinning him to the spot he’d stopped in.
Immense power indeed
,
Bael thought uncomfortably. As his king’s Messenger, he was
supposed to possess special immunities to this kind of thing. They
should have given him at least a fighting chance against the
detective’s inherent magic. Yet Bael felt very literally glued in
place and sluggish in general. He even felt afraid. Maybe he’d lost
his messenger immunities. Or maybe Steven Lazarus was a force to be
reckoned with.

“
You’re speaking of
Marius,” Lazarus plied slowly. Marius was the late Akyri King.
Lazarus had killed him and taken his place at the Table of the
Thirteen.

“
No,” Bael shook his head.
“Not quite. Think bigger. Think
badder
.”

The detective raised his chin, just
slightly. He said nothing, which urged Bael to continue. So he went
on, still frozen to the spot. “Feel free to stop me at any time,
but I’m guessing that you’re finding your position as the new Akyri
King more and more difficult to justify of late.”

There was a long pause
before Lazarus spoke very slowly and carefully. “What makes you say
that?” What Lazarus
wasn’t
questioning was how Bael knew he was the Akyri
King. He didn’t question how Bael knew of Marius, the
former
king. In fact, he
seemed to accept everything that was happening as if it were simply
another facet to his life. As one of the Thirteen, it was possible
this
was
just
another facet to his life, and maybe he was just very good at
making adjustments.