The Demon King (3 page)

Then again… it could just have been the fact
that Rosa hated the word “ma’am.” To her, it felt that when she was
called ma’am, the word was substituted for other things. Like
“crazy lady,” or “irritating lady,” or even and most especially,
“bitch.”

And the use of the word
could just mean they were trying to be polite, even if they
were
nervous. The truth
was, cops could be dicks. People had a right to be nervous. Having
worked with a few bona fide dicks herself, Rosa knew that first
hand.

She sighed, feeling suddenly very tired.
“Here,” she said softly, reaching out to take the baby. The girl
hesitated just a slight, slight moment. And then she placed the
baby in the police officer’s arms and took a step back.

“
Thank you,” the blonde
said. And then, like a flash of yellow and blue jeans, she was
spinning around and running full-tilt to the front door. She
slammed into the release bar and hurtled out into the twilight
beyond without a hint of slowing or a second glance.

Rosa called after her.
“Whoa, wait!
Hey wait!
You can’t leave, you have to fill out – ”

But the girl was gone.

The police officer stared at the front door
and the empty space beyond it. On the upside, she could almost
certainly mark the woman off the list of possible moms now. That
had been some Olympic-style running for a brand new mother. But on
the downside, there were a thousand things to do. There were
protocols to follow. And….

The police officer looked away from the door
and down at the infant in her arms. Acting on instinct, she pulled
the blanket away from his face again, once more revealing those
beautiful blue eyes.

Why anyone would want to be
rid of you
, she thought,
is beyond me.

“
Hey little guy,” she said
softly, offering her finger for him to clutch. He did, making a
soft cooing sound as he gripped it. She felt a tugging at something
inside her, and suddenly her eyes felt strange and her throat felt
tight. She smiled at the infant. “Don’t you worry. Everything’s
gonna be alright.”

Chapter One

Present Day, Meeting of the 13

Time had a funny way. A lot could be said
about it, most of that conjecture: Time was fleeting, Time was
cruel, Time flew when you were having fun, and Time healed all
wounds. Time was apparently bipolar.

But in the end, which was
an ironic thing for Time to think, there were a few things that it
truly
did
know.

It knew what sand felt like, not just in its
infinitesimally small form, but in its infancy as a mountain. It
knew the sounds of birth and of death and understood that they were
often the same. It knew how to forget, and how to remember. It also
knew how to recognize when it was staring at something that had
seen a lot of it. A lot of Time.

That’s what William Balthazar was fairly
sure he was doing right now. He was gazing at something very
old.

His gaze sharpened, honing in with
supernatural adeptness. Colors brightened and contrasts grew
sharper. Normally when Will did this, the imperfections carved upon
a mortal by nature became starkly clear to him. But though Steven
Lazarus had been born a mortal and hadn’t died to become the Akyri
King until his thirties, he showed no visible signs of having aged.
Not even to William.

Lazarus was as handsome as any man who sat
at that table, which was saying something. He was tall and
perfectly proportioned, broad shouldered, narrow-waisted. His voice
resonated like magic, and his jaw was strong. He was rakishly
barely shaven, which William chalked up to being busy more than any
actual desire to appear rakish. His teeth were straight, white and
perfect, and of course he had a full head of lustrous hair. That
hair had strangely enough darkened several shades since he’d become
king, and was now a medium to dark brown rather than blond. But it
seemed to suit the blue-eyed man somehow, as if what was on the
inside was finally showing on the outside.

However, like the others,
it wasn’t physical appearance alone that lent the king his majesty.
Lazarus had the
aura
as well. It was an unmistakable aura of power… and that was
very strange to William.

The Akyri King was a
relatively new addition to the Table. He was a fledgling at being a
king, and yet, there was that
power
emanating from him, pulsing with every beat of
his now inhuman heart as if he’d been born with it.
Well, I suppose he
was
born with it,
Will told himself. If what they said was true –
and Steven Lazarus was the bastard child of Marius, the previous
Akyri King.

But not even Marius had ever felt like this.
Not even close.

No, there’s something more
to you,
Will thought, and his green gaze
narrowed further. He wondered just how
much
more there was to the good
detective. Was there enough there that the man could be trouble? If
it
was
something
old he was detecting, then that was a distinct
possibility.

He knew he was staring, but that was
something else about Time. It could do whatever the hell it wanted.
And the Akyri King was distracted anyway; he had no idea he was
being so closely observed.

Quite suddenly, the Akyri King looked up and
met William’s gaze. A hard stillness moved through them both, and
Will felt the man’s power move in front of him like an invisible
wall.

William’s brow
lifted.
Interesting
.

*****

Laz had barely hit his thirties, but he
genuinely felt ancient just then. It didn’t help that he didn’t
even have a place to go home to, where he could take off his
jacket, grab a beer, and switch on the VIVE to disappear into some
3d real-as-hell fairy world. His partner was currently staying with
him. Ray Baxter was a shifter, and his girlfriend was a human. Most
times, the discrepancy wasn’t an issue, but apparently they’d begun
fighting about something else entirely, and of course the obvious
differences in a couple – race, background, parents, and in
Baxter’s case, species – always came into play eventually when
lovers were pissed at each other. The fight had escalated, and now
she was in the process of moving out. While she did that, Baxter
was crashing at Laz’s place.

Laz was just betting the
other detective was enjoying the hell out of the VIVE. Laz had
saved up for four paychecks to buy the virtual reality device. For
short, he called it
virtuality
. For a cop living on a
cop’s wages, even that of the BPD’s head detective, his VIVE was
one of Laz’s most prized possessions. Of course… it didn’t have to
be. As an Akyri, and as the king of the Akyri, Laz could have
conjured up all the money he’d wanted. He didn’t even have to make
it a material conjuring. He could just switch the numbers in a few
electronic bank accounts, and voila – he was filthy, stinking rich.
Anyone started to ask questions, they could be dealt with by order
of a few mind control and mind erasing spells. All in all, Laz had
the world in his hands, just as did every king sitting at the Table
of the Thirteen.

But first and foremost in Laz’s mind, he was
a cop. As a police officer, not to mention a leader of an entire
nation of supernatural beings, what kind of example would he be
setting? Besides, there was little Laz really wanted in the world.
Little in the material sense, that is.

A queen….

Like so many thoughts these days, that one
came without warning and without invitation. He was not a lonely
man. His bed was kept warm most nights, any night he felt like
having it warmed. So what the hell did he want with a queen? Why
would it be important to him? He had enough to deal with at that
moment, without having to impress some woman that fate decided he’d
be saddled with.

In short, the world was
going to hell. As a cop and as a man and as one who’d been
human
most his life, Laz
felt disillusioned, tired, and weary of all that was around him. He
was somewhere in-between the stages of being genuinely disgusted by
the state of things and giving up on caring about it altogether.
Was he
supposed
to feel this way? So young? Wasn’t it usually the
eighty-year-old man who poked people in the chest with his cane and
said “bah humbug?”

The truth was he couldn’t
even stand to glance in the mirror any longer. In the mornings, he
used his electric shaver to shave without looking, going by touch
and feel rather than sight. He just… didn’t like what he saw in his
own eyes. He couldn’t put his finger on it exactly. Was it a hard,
jaded edge setting in far too soon that made him so uncomfortable?
Or was it something else he saw there? It was almost as if when he
dared to look into those blue, blue eyes, he saw someone
else
looking
back.

Was he going mad?

Detective Steven Lazarus, king of the Akyri,
ran a strong hand through his thick hair and sighed quietly. The
Table he sat at was getting pretty big. In addition to the kings of
thirteen different supernatural nations, there were now eight
queens sitting among them. Plus Lalura Chantelle the ancient
“human” witch sat down at one end, watching the goings-on with eyes
far too bright and far too perceptive for the human she claimed to
be.

If this had been a meeting
of twenty or so
normal
humans, there probably would have been some trouble hearing
everyone when they spoke. Attendants would be bored, texting, day
dreaming, maybe sleeping and even drooling. Possibly playing
Pokémon Go. Hell, he liked the game himself. Cops weren’t even
supposed to like the game, apparently. They were supposedly up in
arms about people playing while they drove or walking out into the
street without looking both ways. But the truth was, people did
that
without
Pokémon Go. They got into wrecks while they were drunk, while
they were on drugs, or worst and most prevalent of all, while
texting. And that had been around a lot longer than Pokémon
Go.

Personally, Laz felt the benefits far
outweighed the detriments. In his apartment complex, his next door
neighbor’s kid had been on insulin since he was eleven. But now,
just after his thirteenth birthday, he was back off it. All signs
of diabetes were gone – because of that game.

Laz was almost
22
^nd
level, and he’d reached it without the cheating use of magic
and without having spent a nickel. It was sort of nice to have
something he could do as a regular guy and still progress.
Sometimes it was nice to be reminded of the fact that human beings
were capable of pretty cool things.

But they
were
distracting things,
and if humans had been sitting in this meeting rather than the
ridiculously powerful men who were here, no doubt someone would at
least be on their phone. However, magic took the place of doldrums
here, magic that amplified voices, fluxed like a pulse around them
all, and tingled against the skin. It was anything but boring. That
same magic supplied the top of the Table with coffee, tea, soft
drinks, wine, water, an assortment of beverages unheard-of in the
mortal realm, and a variety of snacks that would make any culinary
master both drool and seethe with envy.

Laz was just considering taking one of the
pastries, if for no other reason than to have something to keep his
hands busy, when he felt the weight of someone’s eyes. He froze and
looked up, managing to locate and zero in on who it was on his
first try.

William Balthazar Solan, the Time King, had
fixed him with an intense green-eyed gaze.

Again
.

This wasn’t the first time Will had looked
at him like that. The expression was hard for Laz to pin down. It
was a perceptive look, but there was something else too. Since he
couldn’t tell what it was, Laz made assumptions. Maybe it was
fear.

Maybe William Balthazar Solan was afraid of
Laz. Maybe he knew that as a detective, Laz stood a good chance of
figuring out that Solan was the traitor that sat amongst them, the
one who’d made life difficult for the lot of them for the last year
or so. Solan hadn’t yet found his queen, and rumor had it he was
acting out of character. Word in shadowy circles was that William
was using magic these days. That was an odd turn of events, wasn’t
it?

Suddenly, Laz wanted to
laugh; all at once it struck him how imbecilic his thoughts had
been. Fear was definitely not a part of that gaze. The Time King
was absolutely
not
afraid of Lazarus. And besides, Laz hadn’t found his queen
yet either. In fact… was that why it was suddenly so important to
him, even subconsciously, to find one?

In any case, the look the Time King was
giving him was more shrewd than anything else. It was a look that
said Solan knew something about Laz that Lazarus didn’t know
himself.

Does he think it’s me? That
I’m the traitor?
It wasn’t like he hadn’t
given William plenty of reason to think such a thing. He had no
queen and was new to the Table. He had nothing to lose; there would
be no love lost between himself and the others if he were to go.
And maybe that was exactly what William Solan was
thinking.