The Demon King (7 page)

But Dahlia had lived a lot of those
countless years, and she’d noticed something else. There was no
such thing as an absence of dysfunction. There was no such thing as
a perfect childhood, a spotless familial resume. Every single
person on the planet was scarred by something. What made the
difference – all the difference in the world – was what they chose
to do once they’d been scarred.

You could do one of two
things. You could reveal your scars as angry and red, still
smarting despite the separateness of life, the individuality of
experience and time, and you could share that scar with all the
honest world. Or you could reveal it for the wound of the
past
that it was. You
could reveal it as something that is done and finished, and you
could learn from that scar, treat it for the lesson it had the
potential to be, and make certain not to repeat history’s
mistakes.

The latter was the more difficult choice to
make. The former was a knee-jerk, instant, and soul-deep kind of
response to pain, even old pain, and it made people into bullies
and created new scars. But the careful, the empathetic, the
sensitive and the truly kind ones were the scarred people who
either made the latter choice, or made that knee-jerk first choice,
realized they’d done wrong, and then took a step back. They took a
deep breath. They admitted that what they’d just done was a
mistake, and they never repeated it. They vowed to make the world
better, not worse.

And a chain was broken.

It was easy to blame one’s
problems on someone else. It was easiest to blame them on
everyone
else. It took a
bit more courage and a lot more strength to own up to your own
decisions, your own mind, and climb out of history’s tired grooves
and onto a fresh path.

Hence, Dahlia had a hard time feeling sorry
for the perpetrators of evil. To her, evil was the result of one of
two things: apathy or weakness, and usually it was both.

“
I realized that I was full
of a mortal’s blood and that Roman would smell it on me, and I did
what anyone in my situation would do. I turned to Lalura Chantelle
for help,” Evie said, continuing with her story.

Dahlia almost laughed when
she mentioned Lalura. But she was right; it
was
what anyone in her situation
would do. Anyone smart, anyway.

“
She hid the scent for me.
No small feat I imagine; Roman is observant. But she also told me I
either needed to get over my need to partake… or learn to be more
careful.”

Well, clearly she didn’t
stop ‘partaking,’
thought Dalia,
since she told me she’d killed twice as many as I
had by this point.

“
I decided a bit on both. I
wasn’t going to stop what I was doing, but I did become more
careful. I learned to use my strength and powers to even out the
bad guy – good guy numbers on the planet without ingesting my
victims’ blood. I couldn’t go running to Lalura after every
encounter. So I just….”

“
Became a
vigilante.”

Evie smiled a small smile. “Pretty much.”
She finished off her tea and returned her cup to its saucer.

“
You know… you
are
the Vampire Queen.
If you want to kill people and drink their blood, Roman shouldn’t
have any say in the matter,” Dahlia told her friend. She was being
frank, but the truth
was
frank. That was its nature.

“
True enough,” said Evie.
“That’s why I eventually told him what I was doing. He had to deal
with it. I am what I am and he is what he is, and we’ve accepted
it. Besides, as members of the Thirteen factions, we have a lot of
crazy shit to deal with. Getting rid of scumbags pales in
comparison. But for what it’s worth, these days I’m sort of more
busy writing than bringing dark justice to the world. My deadlines
have become ridiculous. I have to release a book every three months
to keep up with the competition.” She shook her head.

“
Lucky for the bad
guys.”

Evie’s grin was filled with
fang. “Indeed.” She picked up a cupcake from the same tray Dahlia
had taken hers, and began to unpeel the bottom. Dahlia had simply
taken her bite from the top; she’d wanted the icing immediately.
She smiled at the thought as Evie finished with the wrapper and
pulled the pastry apart with long, slim fingers. “So what
was
your
first?”
she asked conversationally.

It was almost eerie to be
asked about such a thing in such a way. But, then again, being a
vampire
was
eerie. Things were different now on a fundamental
level.

“
An asshole who cheated on
his wife.”

“
Was that all he did?” Evie
asked. It wasn’t an accusatory question. It was more like Evie
already knew the answer, and she was just urging Dahlia to tell her
more.

“
He cheated on his wife of
forty-three years. Then he refused to help support her as he
divorced her. She became depressed and sank into a shell of the
vibrant, beautiful woman she once was, which just killed her
daughter. Her daughter’s name is Nora. They’re mortal, but Nora is
still a close and personal friend of mine.”

“
We always go after the
ones who hurt those we love first, don’t we?”

Dahlia nodded. “It gets
better.”
Or worse
, she thought.
Worse,
definitely
. “The man began steadily dating
the twenty-eight year old woman he’d originally cheated on his wife
with, and as soon as the divorce went through, he married the
tramp, giving her all of the money he’d originally promised his
wife. His wife became so distraught over everything he was doing to
her, she grew unstable. One morning, with Nora in the other room….”
Dahlia closed her mouth and swallowed hard. She realized she was
shaking. It was quite sudden.

“
She killed herself, didn’t
she?” Evie asked softly.

Dahlia met her gaze. “She had just been on
the phone with him. She begged him to at least help her find a job
so she could support herself. She was pushing sixty. He hung up on
her. Nora heard her mother crying as she hung up the phone. And
then she heard a gunshot.”

“
Oh Christ.”

Dahlia watched Evie shut her eyes and knew
the woman felt the same foreboding hatred that Dahlia had felt upon
hearing the news.

“
Nora rushed into the room
just in time to pull her mother into her arms as she died. In the
weeks that followed, Nora tried to at least obtain the items her
mother wanted to leave to her in her will. But her father made it
impossible, giving all of his late wife’s jewelry and material
possessions to his new young wife instead.”

“
Oh fucking hell,
no.”

Oh yes,
thought Dahlia. Just when you thought you couldn’t possibly
hate someone more, he went and proved you wrong.

“
I hope you made him pay,
Doll.”

Dahlia lowered her gaze and chose her words
carefully. “He got what was coming to him. And so did his
daughter.” She’d made sure of that. Nora now owned all of her
mother’s jewelry and personal possessions. Dahlia had only had to
destroy a little evidence, erase a few memories, and set the police
records straight on an “accident” to make it happen. Two fewer
assholes in the world. Two nasty birds killed with one “justice”
stone.

It was a while before Evie spoke again. She
blew out a sigh and shook her head. “And just think. That shit head
would still be alive if you hadn’t been turned into a vampire. Hope
comes in all sorts of dark disguises.”

Chapter Seven

He was going to do this by
the book.
I’m going to do this by the
book
, he told himself. Then again:
By the book
.

It had become a mantra of
late. It was that way when every blood vessel was expanding, heart
rate was increasing, pupils were dilating, skin was prickling with
the electric-sizzle of magic and every molecule in your body was
telling you to do it differently and
screw
the book. Throw the book on a
great big bonfire and watch it burn.

Roast marshmallows on it.

He
could
give in to it again. He could
let it consume him and try not to be so damn strong. But when he
did that, people died. Too many lately. Yes they were scumbags, and
truth be told, the world was probably better off without them in
its breeding circles. But Roman had been able to tell that he’d
gone down this road, and that wasn’t a good thing. It meant he’d
crossed a line and gone too far.

Lazarus had taken an oath
to serve and protect people, even the shitty ones.
So do it by the goddamned, mother fucking
book
. He straightened, his eyes focused
with inhuman clarity, and moved tall and calm into the darkened
alley.

It had rained most of the previous day and
into twilight, and the ground was still damp. The air was heavy
with remnants of the storm. It was June, almost summer, and the
garbage in the trash bins along the alley wall wreaked of death and
all of its symbiotic bacteria. Like a knee-jerk reaction, he longed
for the days when all of humanity’s leftovers froze solid and
stopped stinking.

Debris crunched beneath his shoes, and the
figures up ahead jostled into a frantic kind of quiet at the sound
of his approach. There were four of them, all male, but only three
were moving. Only three were conscious; the fourth was their
victim.

“
Evening boys,” Laz
drawled. “What have we got going on here?” As if he didn’t know.
“Mind if I join in?”

The restless three
exchanged glances, and one or two of them hissed a few obscenities,
both angry and fearful at his sudden presence. He wondered if they
could detect the cop in him. Or if maybe they could feel
that
other
thing
in him. Or both. Only a cop or something far more dangerous could
have the audacity to approach a bunch of men in a dark alley on a
new moon in the middle of the night in Boston. Maybe he wasn’t
making it too hard for them to guess what he was.

“
Fuck off, asshole,” one of
them finally spat. He turned to face Laz, and his body, thin though
it was, seemed to want to hide what was behind him. He stood
between them, cop on one side, criminals on the other, as if he had
a hope in hell of keeping them separated.

He didn’t.

“
I have a better idea,” Laz
said calmly, touching his chin as if he were giving it a
spur-of-the-moment thought. “Why don’t you and your buddies march
yourselves to the police station five blocks away while I call an
ambulance for the gentleman cleaning the ground with his expensive
suit?”

That earned him a good, long moment of
shocked silence from the three men, and he couldn’t help but smile.
That smile didn’t waiver when the man who’d spoken pulled a
distinctive, dark shape from his left hoodie pocket. Laz heard the
sound like a splintering of night when the asshole cocked it.

“
You know, you don’t need
to cock automatic weapons,” Laz told him, his voice weary as if he
were schooling a slow child. “They’re called automatic for a
reason. Also, your chances of hitting something when you hold it
sideways like that are about as good as the chances of you sleeping
anywhere but a jail cell tonight.”

The man pulled the trigger, a knee-jerk
reaction to the direct threat to his manliness. But Laz mentally
directed the bullets into the wall at his side, all four of them.
Not that any of them came anywhere near him anyway. He’d been right
about holding the gun sideways.

When the man finally
stopped jerking the trigger – jerking the trigger
also
lowered a shooter’s
chances of hitting a goddamn thing – Laz took a deep breath and let
it out in a heavy sigh. “Finished?”

The gun went off again, and the men behind
the shooter bolted, deciding on safety rather than valor. That was
irritating. Now he was going to have to track them all down. It had
already been a long night, so he was betting that by the time he
caught up with them, he wouldn’t be in the mood to go easy on
them.

Laz counted the shots while
the shooter emptied his chamber. Just by sheer dumb luck and
proximity, one actually went through him. He didn’t feel like
re-directing
all
of them. Fortunately, it did nothing to his immortal
body.

Some of the bullets bounced off the garbage
cans or the thicker metal of the cars parked at the end of the
alley. Laz heard glass shatter and knew a window or perhaps a
windshield had become victims. But the street was clear of
pedestrians; it was 3:37a.m. on a Tuesday night in a middle-class
part of town, and most people were just trying desperately to get
enough sleep to face another day at the office.

“
Okay,” he said when the
ringing silence finally filled the alley and the main shooter was
backing up in numb terror. “
Now
we’re finished.” He moved in, intent on
apprehending the man as quickly as possible so someone could help
the guy on the ground. But the criminal dropped his gun and raised
those hands to begin moving them in an arcane manner. The glow that
grew around his hands and the instantaneous impression of dark
magic that filled the alley were all too familiar to Laz.
He’s casting a spell
, he
realized. It was a
warlock
spell. What the hell was a sideways gun-wielding
idiot doing messing around with warlock magic? He clearly wasn’t
bright enough to handle it!