“At once, my liege! Now you must leave here!”
He knew the other man had no idea what to tell him and that the situation was hopeless. Bael only wanted him to leave the premises so that he wouldn’t be tempted to try to heal anyone else. Laz knew there was no cure for what he was going through. Apollyon had been lying when he’d said Dahlia could have helped him. He’d been baiting him again. There was no way to stop this pain from happening. He just had to suffer it.
Laz willed himself away. Where he went, he could barely surmise. Time and space moved him and he felt the ground beneath his knees and the coolness of the night air before he doubled over, clutching at his own body as if he could peel it away from his soul.
This was what happened to demons who didn’t know they were demons. They went through the change. They became what they were born to be. And for the males, the cursed ones, it wasn’t a pretty metamorphosis.
He could feel it in his bones, this ancient Curse coming to pass. The story was being told to him as the pain took hold: Long, long ago, two men had gone head to head in a battle of morals and wills. One man stood firm, despite the consequences. He hadn’t backed down, and the demon had come away cursed. Forever, his kind would know the suffering of the other’s wrath.
There was so much more to it of course… but at the moment, it didn’t matter. For him, just then, the entire demon world was encased in a single potent drop.
And that little drop was eating Lazaroth alive.
Chapter Forty-Five
Astaroth stopped before her and closed his eyes. She felt a hiccup in his power, and then it was back again. He opened his eyes and settled them on her. “Lazaroth has made the transition. He is now the Demon King.”
Dahlia blinked. Her dizziness was coming and going. She felt strange, almost high. She had no idea what she even was any longer, so she had no clue whether she needed blood like a vampire or needed to suck some dark magic from a warlock like an Akyri would or have sex like a Tuathan fae would. She was utterly lost. The strangest thing of all was that she barely cared. She was a hell of a lot more interested in what Astaroth was saying about Steven.
“But you’re the Demon King,” she said softly.
“No,” he said, shaking his head once. “I was.” He turned and waved his hand a little, and the air parted, revealing a vision of another place. It was obviously a throne room. The two thrones at one end were massive and ornate, carved of something like onyx and ruby, black with shimmering red crystals within its darkness. Both thrones were empty, and from the dust gathered atop them and the cobwebs in the corners of their angles and spaces, it was clear they had been for some time.
“My throne has been empty for nearly thirty years. And the queen’s throne… it has lain empty always.”
Dahlia looked at the thrones and then at the king. Or the man who had once been king. “Did you not have a queen?” What about Steven’s mother? she wondered.
“Lenore was always my queen. But she was not destined to be the Demon Queen. Hence, she never made the transformation. You, on the other hand…” his words trailed off and the vision vanished, leaving the air cold and empty. “You are the Demon Queen, Dahlia Kellen. And as such, you are making the change even as we speak.”
But she wasn’t hurting. Nothing in her body hurt, in fact. She felt a little weak, a little dizzy, but there was no pain. From what Apollyon had said to Steven, shouldn’t she be writhing right now? “But nothing hurts,” she countered.
“Only males suffer the agony of transformation, and nothing can halt that pain. It carries through until the change is complete.” Astaroth explained. “And so my son has learned.”
“Learned?” she repeated. “You mean he’s done… changing?” That felt like a very stupid question, and she regretted it the moment she’d asked it. But he nodded as if the question hadn’t been stupid at all.
“Now comes the dangerous part.”
Now? she thought incredulously. After the pain?
“The real Curse of the demon is not the discomfort of its transformation, Dahlia. It is what being a demon does to the mind. He will now be faced with a choice, though he will not see it as such. He can either hold on to the part of him that was once kind, or he can give in to the half of him… that is not.”
Astaroth paused and his eyes became distant, as if he were looking into another place and time. “I chose to become the Curse. And I have done some terrible things in my life.”
Dahlia felt a chill. She had a very good imagination. And she could just imagine a whole lot of “terrible things.”
Astaroth was silent for bit. Then his eyes were back on her, and they were focused. “Only you can stop my son from following the same path.”
“How?” She felt helpless. She didn’t even know what she was any longer. How was she going to help someone else figure that out?
He smiled, but it was a gentle smile, one she frankly would not have expected to receive from a man who claimed to have forgotten the good in himself. “Help him to remember the man you have come to know. Help him to remember the man that you are falling in love with.”
A stillness moved through her, and an acceptance.
Suddenly, the former king’s expression changed. His gaze became distant once more, and again she felt his power hiccup. His deep blood red eyes began to glow. “Only you can save him now, Dahlia Kellen. Time is short. Go to him before that man is lost forever and my son becomes the monster I have always been.”
Dahlia looked down at the ground and thought fast. Was Steven still back at that bar beside the road? Had he transported somewhere else? How did she find him?
“By the way,” said Astaroth, drawing her attention. “Did you know that the Dahlia flower is known as Les Etoiles de Diable?”
Dahlia translated in her head. “The Star of the Devil,” she whispered.
Astaroth smiled. Then his smile vanished. “It may be too late. He is already on the hunt.” He raised his hand in an upward motion, and Dahlia felt a rush of magic swirl over her like a tingly tornado.
She gasped and looked down to find that her clothes had been magically changed. Her eyes widened. “The hunt for what?” she squeaked.
“Why, for you my dear.”
Her head snapped up, but she didn’t even have time to meet Astaroth’s gaze again before she was being transported against her will. The Seattle Underground vanished from around her as the transport spell pulled at her insides. She gave a cry of surprise, but squelched it half way through, afraid that she would end up somewhere she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself.
But she needn’t have bothered squelch anything, because she wouldn’t have been heard anyway. Music instantly accosted her senses, so loud it vibrated her limbs and made her already knotted stomach feel even stranger. She looked up and around, slowly taking it all in.
As the fae loved to dance, the Unseelie Kingdom was ripe with its fair share of dance clubs. They were usually packed, loud, and hypnotic. Coffee was the drink of choice, and the club wouldn’t close until the sun was rising.
By and large, this didn’t appear to be much different. The beat of the music coincided with the flashing of lights, which caught on the multitude of crystalline chandeliers overhead and the mirrored tiles around the large room. Other tiles, including the large squares on the floor, seemed to be made of light, fiber optic and ever changing in color. Reference points could be easily lost in such a location, allowing the body to move and the mind to freely spin.
Coffee wasn’t necessarily the drink of choice in such a place in the mortal realm, but there were coffee drinks in the area; she could even smell them. There was a large variety of drinks, in a rainbow of colors, and people held them aloft casually in one hand as they made their ways between tables. The atmosphere was one of slightly drugged, highly glamorous ecstasy, and the music matched to perfection. The lights strobed and lasered so heavily that this was perhaps the only place in the world just then Dahlia Kellen could ha
ve blended in without drawing too much attention to herself.
She looked down at the dress Astaroth had so brazenly dressed her in. A chill went through her at the sight of it. It was dangerous.
The dress was a scarlet red velvet brocade mini dress, embroidered with thousands of tiny blood red dahlias. It was sleeveless and body hugging and came to a mere six inches below her bottom. She was all leg from there, to the bright red velvet, five inch heeled pumps he’d put on her feet. Though her arms were bare, Astaroth had wrapped them in velvet red ribbons that crisscrossed up the length of her arms and tied around her biceps in bows that hung their ends to her knees. Her hair was loose and fell in thick shimmering black waves around her shoulders. When she turned her head, she could feel it brush against her bare back.
The outfit was stunning to say the least, and when she looked up it was to find she was not the only person who thought so. Little by little, a buzz seemed to be passing through the building. A nudge here, a nod there, a whisper later, and groups of people were staring at her across the fiber optic floor.
The music continued to rave, but it seemed to grow more hollow by the moment as fewer people swayed their bodies to the beat and more eyes fell on Dahlia’s figure. She swallowed hard, her heart hammering. She was a Tuathan Fae in the human realm in a dance club filled with high and drunk and horny mortals, and she was wearing a killer red dress.
She was racking her brain, trying to figure out why Astaroth would send her to such a place looking like she did, and was considering transporting away – when the music faltered altogether.
There was none of the scratching and tearing of a record suddenly ripped into silence. It wasn’t a record the DJ had been using. Instead, he’d been playing an ongoing backbeat to which he added a multitude of different sounds at different intervals so that the music was changing at a constant pace.
All at once, however, the changing stopped. The lights and strobes stopped. The backbeat alone continued unhindered for a few seconds despite the fact that no one was dancing any longer – and then it, too, was halted.
Dahlia hugged herself gently. She had never felt more conspicuous in her life.
But it wasn’t her who had stopped the music. All around the dance club, sets of eyes were shifting. They were moving from her to the club door.
Dahlia slowly turned, following their gazes. In the doorway to the establishment stood a man in a fine dark tailored suit. His hair was the color of shimmering pitch. His jaw was strong and clean shaven, his shoulders broad, his build tall and graceful. His tie was missing, and his white shirt had been unbuttoned casually at the collar. His eyes were so blue, they nearly glowed.
He looked like every kind of money. And he looked like all kinds of power. He oozed control and confidence. He was everything a woman would ever dare to desire.
Pleasure incarnate. A lord of darkness. The point of no return.
“Steven…” she whispered breathlessly.
He locked his blue eyes on her and they were cold. There was a hardness to them that had not been there before. Unyielding. Unrelenting. He held her gaze as if with chains and smiled the same cold and unrelenting smile, flashing sharp white fangs.
Chapter Forty-Six
Dahlia felt frozen and overheated at the same time. He held her there to the spot, the power of his gaze as strong as if he’d cemented her feet in place. With the stares of every patron in the club on them both, Lazaroth the Demon King closed the distance between them. The sound of his shoes on the tiles counted out her doom. Every step was as calculated, cold and hard as the king himself.
By the time he was standing before her, the entire world had gone quiet, and she wasn’t breathing.
“Join me,” he told her. His voice was a soft and sensual command. It felt like the slide of cool silk along her skin, but strong as steel in her soul. It was also enigmatic. Join me. What did he mean by that?
But he released her from his gaze long enough to glance at a concave U-shaped booth against the wall not far from where they stood. There were people in the booth already, half a dozen if there were any at all. But the moment he turned his attention upon them, they jumped into action, gathering up their drinks, jackets, and purses and scooting their bottoms along the leather as if they could not get out fast enough.
Their actions seemed to neither surprise nor affect Lazaroth in any manner. He simply looked back at Dahlia and gestured to the now empty booth. “Shall we?”
A scent washed over her, clean, masculine and spellbinding. She felt dizzy again, caught in the grip of something bigger than her. But somehow she nodded anyway, just once, and found the will to move. He walked behind her, and she could feel him at her back, the predator waiting for the prey to bolt and make a run for it.
But she didn’t. She made it all the way to the table and even managed to slide into the booth. Given the circumstances, given Lazaroth’s appearance and the stillness in the club and the dress she was wearing and the profusion of unnatural power coming off the Demon King, Dahlia was actually quite proud of herself. She was still there. That was saying something.
He slid gracefully into the booth across from her and casually placed his hands on the table to lace his fingers together. Dahlia noticed his fingernails were manicured, all the same short length, all neat and perfect. Everything about him was perfect now. His change had created the most beautiful creature she had ever beheld, and she knew with all her being that it was a façade for something deadly. It was the grace of a black widow spider, and the color of a poison dart frog. It was something magnificent – and magnificently fatal.
He watched her in silence as she took in these details, and when she realized she’d been quietly drinking him in with her eyes, she felt her cheeks grow warm. She pressed her hand to her right cheek and forced herself to look away, dropping her gaze to the tabletop. It was glittering marble, decorated with candles at its center. Upon close inspection, the candles were electric. But their clear plastic flames had been so delicately manufactured, they flickered with intense realism.
Lazaroth reached his arm up, adjusting his sleeve as he did so. He waved his hand over the faux candles – and suddenly smoke swirled up from them in black tendrils. Dahlia leaned in. Like Pinocchio, the candles had become real, as had their flames.
“You’re going to set off the fire alarms,” she whispered.
He chuckled, deep and smooth. In a voice filled with dark promise he said, “No, my love. It’ll be you who does that.”
Dahlia’s head snapped up. His blue eyes were sparkling. But there was something very different about them now. They were no longer oceans of blue that invited a swim and threatened a drowning. Now they were ringed with red, and while the blue was cold, that red burned like the candles on the table. Very, very hot.
“I think you should have a drink,” he said.
Dahlia swallowed hard. The truth was, she could still feel the tequila she’d had earlier swimming through her system, not to mention the beer she’d had afterwards. She knew she’d either made the transition into demon or she was nearly there; it was an instinct kind of thing. She’d chosen the right Pokémon team for sure. And it would seem demons were as susceptible to mortal alcohol as mortals were. Perhaps that was part of their Curse.
She also hadn’t eaten anything in a while. There was no longer the vampire hunger gnawing at her gut and making her gums ache, but she could certainly down a Krispy Kreme chocolate glazed donut right about now.
Any more alcohol would send her flying.
She chewed on her bottom lip as the king of demons across from her stared her down. “I don’t think I should,” she found the will to say.
“I insist,” he replied simply. Then he raised his arm and turned slightly in his seat. At once, he had the attention of every waiter and waitress in the club. They jostled each other with elbows to get to his table first, and a brunette with gorgeous curves and enormous boobs won out, sending the other servers slowly slinking away.
/> Dahlia sat still in her seat, brimming with emotion. So this is what it means, she thought. This was what it meant for Steven to become Lazaroth. He was powerful and he was beautiful and he was making decisions for her like a cocky son of a bitch with no respect for a woman’s feelings. And he was so compelling, she couldn’t bring herself to argue.
What was she supposed to do against him? How had Astaroth envisioned Dahlia “saving” his son? What miracle was she supposed to perform?
She glanced down at the dress the former king had so arrogantly clothed her in, and the similarities between father and son set her nerves alight. They were both arrogant bastards. But you can save Steven, she told herself. He doesn’t have to be like that. Something you do can bring him back… but what?
She clenched her teeth together and tried to figure out what she was going to do, so absorbed in her burgeoning panic, she didn’t even hear what the king ordered. The waitress smiled, her cheeks flaming with one hell of a blush, and turned around, flipping her hair over her shoulder like a pro. She sashayed away, no doubt hoping he would watch her buxom exit.
But Lazaroth, it would seem, had eyes only for Dahlia. She felt it like a blanket of cold fire draped over her the moment they settled once more on her form. She let out a shaky breath. “It’s awfully quiet in here for a dance club” she said, desperate to get her mind off the man across from her. The music hadn’t resumed, and people were still staring, so she was making a valid point.
Lazaroth sat back in his seat, relaxing into it as if he were not only the king of the Demon Realm but of the universe. She caught another whiff of some fantastic cologne or aftershave – or just plain magic – and her throat went dry.
The king raised his manicured hand and snapped his fingers. The sound of it was quick and rang out loud, and it echoed in a strange way in Dahlia’s ears.