She swallowed, and almost choked on the dryness that had formed in her throat. She coughed, licked her lips, and averted her gaze quickly when he turned at the sound. She pretended to be studying the ground, looking for a place to sit.
But when that goddamn tee-shirt of his was the next thing to come off and get tossed onto the ground next to his jacket, Dahlia’s head snapped back up, and her eyes again locked on his figure.
Oh holy fuck, she thought. Her cheeks and chest grew warm, her mouth watered, and a strange feeling blossomed in her gut. For the moment, it distracted her from the sick feeling the Lifeblood had left her with.
She swallowed again and cleared her throat. The sound drew Lazarus’s attention. “You alright?” he asked softly, and damn it all to hell if he didn’t sound genuinely concerned.
She tried to act casually curious. “Do you honestly plan to go jumping in there?”
“Yes.” He bent to unlace his boots, stepping out of them one at a time.
“I seriously thought you were going to use magic. If you want, I can even try to find it myself,” she said. Though that was actually a bluff. In truth, she was hoping he would get valiant and do it himself. Spells like that were actually harder than one would think. “Simple” finding spells were anything but simple. They required a skill that bordered on time bending, and they weren’t warlock magic either, so they weren’t part of her training. She hadn’t ever worried much about it because she knew enough people who did know the spells that whenever she lost something, someone else always had her back. “Not that it matters,” she added as a thought occurred to her. “The phone will be useless by the time it’s found. Electronics normally shy away from baths.”
“Magic won’t work this time,” he told her. He pulled his badge off his belt, bent to place it in his jacket pocket, then began undoing his belt.
Dahlia’s eyes heated further in her face, and her stomach churned in all sorts of strange ways. Her gums ached. She touched her forehead gingerly. “Why not?” she asked, her voice cracking a little.
“You forget,” he said, and she looked up. He gave her a gorgeous smile, and Dahlia’s breath hitched. He dropped his pants. “My magic is warlock magic as well. You know damn well you can’t find that phone – and neither can I. One thing I can do however, is swim.” He turned away and moved to the edge of the river, staring down. His ass was a wonder to behold in his tight black boxer briefs. “I won several competitions in school.”
“High school?” she asked. Her voice now sounded like a teenage boy’s right smack in the middle of puberty.
“Junior year at Boston University,” he corrected. Then he raised his arms, revealing a master’s grace and technique that made Dahlia dizzy, and dove into the river like a pro.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
He’s been down there a long time. How long could a human hold their breath? He’s not human, remember? She thought about what Steven Lazarus was: Part human, part Akyri? Part human, part demon? He was like a supernatural mutt.
So am I.
That was true. Tuath fae warlock vampire, and now… what? she wondered. Will I be a demon now? She thought about that as she stared at the surface of the water.
At that very moment, the reality of her situation hit fully home. She’d been chosen as a queen. An honest to goodness queen. She knew she should feel fortunate.
I feel like I’m changing.
It was a thought that cut like a knife through her mental turmoil. She blinked and touched her forehead again. Her fingers came away wet. I’m sweating? Since she’d become a vampire, she hadn’t perspired at all. She had guessed it was simply something vampires didn’t do.
Her stomach churned, her eyes shut tight, and this time, she couldn’t stop the rise of sickness that took her over. She leaned to the left, got on her hands and knees, and retched into the grass. The act was surprisingly violent and wholly unpleasant. She had never vomited before. Not once in her whole life. Tuath fae didn’t get sick like that. She’d always wondered why humans hated it so much. Now I know, she thought miserably as she tasted the sour tinge in her mouth and it made her want to throw up again.
Somehow, she moved past the initial instinct to let loose once more, and swallowed a hundred times. When she opened her eyes, she saw that what she’d vomited was purple and slightly sparkling. Every ounce of it was Lifeblood.
What the hell? she thought. What was happening to her? I really am changing. I woke up during the day. I threw up the Lifeblood. I don’t even… I don’t even feel hungry any more.
Am I no longer a vampire?
That couldn’t be it. Surely there was an explanation. She must have woken up during the day in the Demon Realm because their time was off from hers. And she was probably not hungry because she’d just vomited. And she’d most likely done so because the batch was bad. Maybe the demons had tried to make it themselves, and it was a very delicate process. And Lalura… Lalura wasn’t there to make it any longer.
Dahlia sat back on her knees and put her face in her hands. She felt a stinging in her eyes and a pressure to the front of her head, and she knew what was threatening to happen. So she squelched it. She was not going to cry.
She remembered with crystal clarity what she’d done just after her house had burned down when she was a child. They’d stood on a cliff side, Dahlia in her least favorite outfit, watching the smoke in the distance. And Violet had looked over at her. Her sister was wide-eyed and pale, silent and still, shaken to her core by the same loss Dahlia was feeling. But Dahlia knew Violet was thinking her sister had gone insane. And maybe she had gone insane. Because rather than cry or wail or moan, Dahlia was giggling.
The thing was, she’d felt there was nothing else for it. Sometimes, you just had to laugh. Sometimes life was so ridiculous, so confusing, so horrible, crying would only give it the satisfaction of beating you. So you had to laugh instead.
Dahlia remembered that after a few baffled moments, Violet had begun laughing as well. Things were a mess. It would take centuries for their family to restore their estate, and life would always be slightly different. In the cosmic scheme of things, she guessed it was kind of funny that her doll house, her drawings and paintings, her books and plush animals and all of her favorite outfits could just go up like that in a puff of smoke. It was kind of funny. Her wearing terrible clothes and all.
Now as she knelt in the grass in the dark beside a river she didn’t know, Dahlia felt her shoulders shake and heard a slightly familiar sound. She was laughing once more. Things were a mess again. She was confused. She was scared. But crying would only give fate the satisfaction. So she laughed.
After a moment, she dropped her hands and threw back her head, allowing her laughter to ring out into the night. The world heard her. She knew fate raised a brow. And that made her laugh even harder.
With each passing second, she felt stronger. Each laugh renewed her will a little more. Before long, she was beginning to believe the laughter. She started to believe she was actually happy.
She had reason to be, didn’t she? She was alive. These days, that was saying something. She was powerful. She was beautiful. And she may have been saddled with a man she’d had no say in, but the truth was she couldn’t have picked anyone better than him on her own anyway. He was pretty awesome. After all, he hadn’t had a choice in this matter either, but he wasn’t whining about it. Instead, he was in his skivvies at the bottom of a cold, deep river, trying to find her phone.
He was either insane or he was actually trying. For her.
After several minutes, Dahlia allowed her laughter to drift off, and she lowered her head.
Her mouth tasted terrible and there was a pile of grossness on the ground. She smiled and called up a bit of good, old fashioned fae magic. The fae were very good at cleaning things. Personal hygiene was a must with her people. She used the magic to rid the ground of every last molecule of Lifeblood and then used the same magic on herself, cleansing her mouth, her face, her e
ntire body until she tasted nothing but sparkling winter green and smelled like cherry blossoms.
For some reason, that made her laugh too, so she let out one last chuckle and stood up. She’d felt sorry for herself long enough. Now it was time to take matters into her own hands. She turned toward the river and concentrated on her phone.
It had been on and playing an app when he’d thrown it into the river, so it had probably fried out in short order. Now the screen would be black and impossible to find in the mud. She may not be able to find it either, but she could reach out to it. Using a simple fae glamour, she urged the phone to come to life. As she did this, she realized that if she’d lost it above water somewhere, she could probably have used the same magic to make it ring. That would be akin to “calling one phone with another,” and finding it then would be a cinch.
Or she could have had anyone else with a phone call her. That too.
But this was underwater, and turning it on would require bypassing circuitry that had been destroyed. She would need to repair it. Once she did, turning it on again was only going to fry the phone once more. She would need to protect it.
Dahlia took a deep breath. Then she got to work, closing her eyes to pull up her magic. She pictured the phone in her head, then pictured it whole. It was said Healers could do this with people’s bodies. The most she could do was fix something broken, but she was happy for that ability now.
Once she was certain it would be whole, she sent out an extra tendril of magic to prevent it from frying in the water by coating the wiring with a protective layer of plastic. She wasn’t sure it was going to work, but at this point, she just didn’t care. She didn’t care that she was using magic she wasn’t supposed to, and she didn’t care if her phone ever made it back in one piece. Lazarus had been down there too long, and if she was reading the man right, he was just as stubborn as she was. He wasn’t going to come up until either he was unconscious or he had a phone in his hand. So she went ahead and cast the spells, letting her magic move through her body and reach out into the night.
*****
I’ll be damned if I’m going back up without that phone. But he was beginning to become uncomfortable. When he’d been younger, he’d learned to hold his breath for nearly four minutes. It was something he’d wanted to do just for fun, a goal to reach, a personal victory sort of thing. Now he was extremely grateful for the work he’d put in, because he was having a devil of a time finding the phone.
It was dark down here, it was cold, and he’d gotten water in his mouth. If he’d been purely human, he would most likely have contracted some type of disease with that mouthful. Right away, he’d cast a light spell, and fortunately for him, light was one of the things a warlock could cast despite warlock magic being “dark” magic. It was also fortunate that the spell didn’t require words.
The problem was, the light only stretched so far in this strange environment. It was clearly meant for air, not water, and he’d had to re-cast the spell several times as he moved along the riverbed.
The bottom of the river was slimy with algae and bumpy with discarded remnants of humanity. He’d come across a car bumper from the fifties, an old writing desk, several toilets, Coke bottles from every generation since Coke’s inception, and numerous secured trash bags that he could only hope had nothing but trash in them.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, he thought as he swam a little further and his head began to throb. This is absolutely insane. What the fuck am I thinking? But that’s how he’d felt lately, wasn’t it? Insane? On the edge? This was just par for the crazy course. It must have been, because it felt ridiculously important to him. It was positively vital to him that he get back the phone he’d taken from Dahlia. In all the world and of all the things that could be important, this stupid, stupid thing was what ranked highest on his list. It was imperative that he prove he could right this wrong.
And there, in that wet murky darkness in nothing but his goddamn underwear, Steven Lazarus, aka Lazaroth the Demon Prince, realized why. Dahlia Kellen was the one stable thing in his entire universe right now. From his own family to his job to the Table of the Thirteen, the world was spinning around him, changing, being born and dying. But in the entropy and the discord, he’d been gifted with something most men would kill for, die for, then kill again for as zombies. She was his.
If he didn’t fuck it up. If he got his act together. If he somehow managed to prove that he was worth someone as painfully precious as she was, Dahlia Kellen might, just might, become his queen.
His light spell brought to view a bicycle he’d wager had been built and painted red in the seventies, a shopping cart a little too small to be modern, and several carp. He kept moving, but was beginning to worry. He hadn’t been counting, but he felt like he’d been under the water for several minutes already. He was in enough pain that his fangs were pronounced in his mouth; it happened when he was hurting. He couldn’t control or hide them. His skin was tingling uncomfortably, and there was a general burning along the inside of his limbs that he didn’t recognize. To say nothing of the burning in his lungs.
I’m not going to find it.
Just then, a blue-white light blurred to life in the darkness far up ahead, and Laz blinked several times, afraid he was now so oxygen deprived that he was seeing things. But the light remained. He kicked his swim into overdrive and drew closer to it.
There was a lit-up rectangular screen protruding from the mud in the distance. He raced toward it, his hope pounding harder and more vibrantly with every won meter. Until he was floating right over it, reaching down, and retrieving the cell phone from where it had landed in the mud. It was turned on. A Team Instinct avatar stood on an empty plane of green and blue, waiting for its owner to make it do something.
I can’t believe it, he thought as he shoved his way rapidly to the river’s surface, the phone held tight in one hand. The fact that it was on while it was wet should have killed it. But it was still working, and that could only mean one thing. When he broke the surface, inhaled sharply, and finished coughing, he laid eyes on what that thing was.
Dahlia Kellen stood at the water’s edge, an ethereal goddess of the night, her long black hair billowing around her like a cloak of darkness. She was tall and lithe, a superhero in a comic strip. Her eyes and hands were glowing a white-purple light that sent her appearance over the edge of otherworldliness. She’d obviously cast some kind of magic to help him locate the phone.
For a moment, he was so entranced by her, Laz forgot to tread water and he began sinking. He caught himself, tried not to look too surprised, and made his way to the river’s edge. Slowly, the light faded from Dahlia’s hands and eyes, and she met him at the bank as he pulled himself out.
“I can’t believe you actually did that,” she said, smiling. He stood and stared at that smile, utterly captivated. She even smelled good. He, on the other hand, was covered in slime.
But he bent down, pulled his own cell phone from the inner pocket of his leather jacket, and turned it on. He tapped the Pokémon Go symbol to turn on the app and waited for it to come to life and warn him not to trespass. Then he held both phones out to her and smiled right back. “I had to,” he said. “Team Instinct is vastly outnumbered.”
The screens each showed avatars in the traditional Pokémon Go clothing with an experience bar beneath them. What he knew she noticed the moment her beautiful eyes widened was that both experience bars were yellow – the color of Team Instinct.
“We need to stick together.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“You know, we’ve both used so much magic now, I bet we’re positively glowing on the bad guy’s radar,” Dahlia brooked casually as she watched the Detective get dressed. She’d cast on him the same spell she’d used on herself to get rid of the river water, and now his hair was even dry. She was interested to see that it wasn’t any lighter in color when it was clean and dry than it had been when it was wet. She was pretty sure The Akyri King was suppo
sed to have blond hair, but Lazarus’s hair was now pitch black.
He smelled like sandalwood and leather. He moved like the fae, all grace and muscle. A lot of women would have been sorely disappointed when he pulled back on his jeans and slipped his black tee-shirt over his head, but Dahlia had always been one of those people who appreciated men when they were dressed, too. She liked the way a well built man filled out an old pair of jeans or a new tailored suit. It was like the wrapping on a gift, and who didn’t like ripping off wrapping paper?
“I’ve no doubt,” he replied as he shrugged on his vintage leather jacket and joined her at the base of the hill that led from the river bank to the street up above.
“So… what do we do now?” she asked. He smiled where he stood so near, towering over her in darkness and demonic strength. Dahlia gazed up in wonder as his power cascaded over her and his fangs promised delightful wickedness. But she swallowed hard when his blue eyes flashed with something that looked like fire, for just a moment, fast enough that she might have imagined it.
He raised his right hand, fingers curled deftly beneath her chin. His touch was warm – almost hot. Had it been this hot before?
“We need to lie low and regroup,” he said. “Driving somewhere else is still our best bet.”
Dahlia looked up to where the car was at the beginning of the bridge. “Is that your car?” she asked.