She took another threatening step, but the Stag only turned its head slightly and seemed to watch her with even more interest. Moonlight shimmered on its multicolored gems, a dazzling display of otherworldly beauty. She was half tempted to just stand still and stare at it, to take in all of its exquisite splendor. She’d been wanting to see one forever, after all.
But there was too much fire in her blood, and she was fueled by magical pastries and tarts, and there was so much sugar running through her at that moment, it just had to go somewhere anyway. So she bared her teeth, allowing her fangs to extend and fully show. She let the dark power into her eyes and felt them begin to glow.
“I will not be your puppet,” she hissed. Her power-laden voice echoed eerily in the dark forest. Her voice dropped to nearly a whisper, but rang out like tendrils of power. “I’ve been there and I’ve done that.” She shook her head, just once. “You’ve chosen the wrong queen.”
Now the Stag lifted its mighty head, and she saw the snowflakes in its gaze twist and spin in a new flurry wind. She felt something brush against her in the moonlight, something almost solid in its magical weight. But rather than the anger she expected, the retaliation she was all but certain she would receive from the mighty beast, the contact felt almost pleasant. For just a few strange moments, the world became surreal. She felt light. She felt… good.
She felt, even, accepted.
Then the beast turned and did what she’d been trying to make it do from the moment it had appeared. It leapt to life, bounding over the bushes on one side of the path, and disappearing into the forest beyond.
Dahlia had no idea what to make of the last few seconds. But she sure as hell knew what to make of the encounter altogether.
She wasn’t queen material, and she didn’t want to be. She didn’t even know any of the remaining kings personally! Hell, some of them she had never even met! She would not be tricked into running a nation she cared positively nothing about. “I am not one of the Thirteen,” she told the world forcefully. “You’ve got the wrong girl. And I’m going to prove it.”
Chapter Ten
You’re insane. That was what Laz wanted to say to the man. That was the instinctive sentence that formed on his tongue, but was never released into the air. He kept it immobilized, just resting there on his taste buds, because it didn’t make any sense. It would have been a lie. There was nothing insane about the man before him. His short cropped hair was bright orange red, and the brown-red velvet blazer he was wearing was definitely distinctive and – different. But he wasn’t crazy. Laz would recognize that.
There was simply something very, very inhuman about the guy.
“Give me a reason to believe you,” Laz demanded plainly. He didn’t of course – believe him. But this man Bael was something magical, and as one of the Thirteen, it was more or less Laz’s duty to get to the bottom of any supernatural mystery. And he was a detective.
“I can give you many,” Bael said, opening his hands. “But if one is all you require, then take this.” He waved his right hand as a magician would, and a white card appeared between his thumb and forefinger. It looked to be a business card.
He held it up and waited patiently.
Laz weighed his options. In the end, he lowered his gun and slid it back into his shoulder holster. It might have seemed immediately silly to many supernaturals that he had chosen to aim his gun at a paranormal threat in the first place. What good was a bullet against a vampire or a fae? But the bullets in his gun’s chamber were not what you would call strictly regulation.
Laz stepped forward and took the card from the man’s outstretched hand. Bael smiled and lowered his arm. “The message I’ve actually come to deliver is that you’re in danger, Detective. Your father has many enemies, some more powerful than others. One in particular has been a thorn in Astaroth’s side for millennia. Now despite your father’s best efforts, his enemy has learned of your existence. I suspect your becoming one of the Thirteen Kings had something to do with that. Regardless, he knows who and what you are, and he will do anything to destroy your father. Destroying you would be a very good start. Be on your guard. I will be waiting should you have any questions, Detective. You need but call my name.”
With that, the man who claimed to be a messenger in a demon king’s court stepped back – and vanished. He didn’t sink into the shadows as a vampire or unseelie or warlock would. He didn’t transport away in a swirling, color-melting portal. One second he was there, and the next he wasn’t. Poof.
Laz blinked and took a slow, deep breath. Then he looked down at the card. It was an address to a place in Boston. He flipped the card over. There were no names and no decorations. There was nothing else but the address, typed in simple Times New Roman.
So why was it that when he looked at it, his gut tightened and his insides felt funny?
The words the disappearing man had just spoken to him swam like lightning fish in Laz’s head. His guts felt heavy and his ears were ringing; his cop instinct was telling him something loud and clear, and what it was saying made no sense. It was telling him that everything that had just happened was real. And that everything the man had said was true.
“Very well,” he muttered with an outward calm he didn’t inwardly feel. He would go to the address on the card. A bizarre lead was better than no lead at all.
*****
Boston was set up on very old streets. Nothing was symmetrical, because the roads had been carved by horses and their carriages in the late eighteenth century. You had to wind to and fro and dodge inordinate amounts of angry traffic to get where you needed to go – but if you’d grown up in and around Boston, this was par for the usual course, and not as much a source of high blood pressure as it was for tourists.
Lazarus’s car was unmarked, so it fortunately did nothing to slow traffic as he made his way through Cambridge and Back Bay, passed the Public Gardens of Boston, and headed into Boston’s tiniest neighborhood, the historical Bay Village. Siri had been directing him on his iPhone, which he’d erected on his dashboard. But when he realized this was where the address on the card was taking him, his curiosity, already piqued, went ahead and stood at attention.
Bay Village had become one of the most expensive areas of Boston, filled with houses built in the early 1800’s, and unchanged by time due to strict historical regulations. Because it was tiny, it was fought-over and sought-after, and what had once been a lower to middle-class population had eventually become a middle to upper middle-class one.
He knew there wouldn’t be any available parking, especially if the address was one of the famous row houses of the neighborhood. So he readied himself to prop the police light on top of his Buick just in case and wound his way through the last few streets Siri directed him down. It was only a little irritating that he was ending up within walking distance, less than a half a mile away, from where he’d been that morning at the John Hancock.
A few minutes later, he was standing outside the small redbrick house that matched the address on the card. It had a redbrick fence and a single front lot tree, and he was shaking his head. He was pretty sure this particular house was actually registered with the historical society it was so old. It was well cared for though. The white paint on the shutters was fresh, the windows were spotless, the house wasn’t leaning in any particular direction, and none of the steps leading up to the tiny porch were bowed or warped or splintered. Effort had been put into maintaining the home’s 19th century feel while adding a touch of modern amenity.
He had no idea what to expect as far as its inhabitant was concerned. Why had Bael directed him here? Who was inside?
He steeled himself to go knock on the door when he spotted the sundial in the tiny front lot. It was decorated Art Deco style. Seeing it set off the mechanisms of his memory with sudden, fierce clarity. The vision that came to mind was so vivid, he stopped in his tracks, paralyzed by the sights and sounds of the past. Gears were shifting, his surroundings were altering, and
all at once he was a child again.
His adoptive mother was sitting with him on the edge of his bed. She was wearing her uniform, but her stud earrings were sterling silver placed at the triangle and rectangle angles of art deco style. She’d always favored that.
Laz had just asked her why she’d chosen to be a cop.
“Steven… what do you do every day, child?” she asked in her gravelly, sweet voice.
Steven’s young brow furrowed. What did she mean by that? What did anyone do every day? “Wake up?” he asked.
“Okay,” she nodded. “Then what?”
“Eat breakfast.”
“Good. What do you eat?”
“Different things.” He looked down at his plate. “Today it’s eggs and toast… ham… apple slices and orange juice.”
“Okay. What do the eggs come in?”
“Shells.”
His mother laughed. “Okay, that’s true.” Her laughter trailed off, and he found himself smiling. “But what are the eggs and their shells put into when they’re sold?”
“Styrofoam,” he answered readily. This time he knew the answer easy. His teacher re-used the Styrofoam containers for arts and crafts.
“That’s right. Do you know what Styrofoam does to the earth?”
Actually, he knew that too. His science teacher had recently told them that it took just about forever for Styrofoam to dissolve… was that the word? Dissolve? It was d-something. “It stays around for a long time,” he said.
“Yes, it does. A very long time. And that isn’t good for the planet. Your orange juice sometimes comes in a plastic container. That’s not good for the planet either. That plastic often ends up in the ocean, choking animals and plant life. The ham comes in plastic too. And so does the bread.”
“That’s a lot of plastic.”
“Mmm-hmm.” She nodded. Then she sighed and leaned back into the bed, lacing her fingers together behind her head. She was still in uniform, and he could tell she was tired and that laying back for a bit felt good. “What do you do after breakfast?” she asked, staring up at the ceiling.
“I get dressed.”
“In clean clothes?”
“Sometimes,” he answered honestly.
His mother laughed again, flashing those beautiful white teeth he adored so much. “Okay, fair enough,” she said through her laughter. “But when you do get dressed in clean clothes, it was water and detergent and electricity that got them that way.”
Steven frowned. He had a feeling he knew where this was going. “Aaaand… those aren’t good for the earth either?”
Rosa Dixon shook her head. “Nope. The detergent winds up in the rivers and lakes, electricity is created by huge factories that blow toxic things into the air, and we only have so much fresh water to go around, Steven. One day, it’s gonna run out.”
Steven thought of all the water in the oceans. “No way,” he said, shaking his head and smiling.
“You’re thinking of the oceans, aren’t you? That’s salt water, child. We can’t drink that. We can’t water our plants with it. We can’t grow things with it. We’re stuck with the tiny bit of water that already exists on the small fraction of the planet that isn’t covered by ocean.”
Whoa, he thought. “You mean like rain. And lakes and rivers.”
She nodded. “Exactly.”
Still, it seemed it would take a long time. But then again, there were a lot of people. He remembered how many lanes of cars there had been during their trip to Disneyland two years ago. There must have been twenty lanes, at least. And all those people needed water for their clothes, and to drink, and to take showers. That was a lot of water.
“After you get dressed, you go to school. Gasoline fuels the bus that takes you there. That gasoline is burned and more toxic fumes are sent into the air. Factories made the bus, too. And those factories have to have energy – and that energy is used up and coughed out.”
“How many factories are there?” he asked, thinking of Willy Wonka and how different these sounded from his candy factory.
“Lots,” she said softly. “Lots and lots and lots.”
“How do you know so much about this?” he asked. He believed her – every word. She’d never lied to him. But the things she knew sometimes blew him away. How could one brain hold all of that?
She chuckled and placed her hand on her stomach, sighing deeply. “I’m just a grown up, sweetie. You learn lots of things over the years. The way you know how to brush your teeth and tie your shoes and ride your bike and read your books. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Red lights mean stop, green means go. We learn things over time. Just time.”
Steven processed that. Time was an interesting thing indeed. But… he was confused as to why his mom hadn’t answered his question. She’d taken him down another road altogether. Until she sighed at last and softly said, “All these harmful things we do, day in and day out, they need to be balanced, Steven. Or the world is like a top that’s been bumped. Instead of spinning on, it starts to wobble. Too much wrong and not enough right.” She shook her head. “One day we’ll just topple over altogether.”
“So… that’s why you’re a cop?”
She grinned now, and that beautiful smile was like a flower that had only partially bloomed before. “Yes. I see people trudging on, trying to just keep going, and some of them – they can’t anymore. Life gets to them and they wander off their paths and into the dark woods. I want to help those people, Steven. I want to help them get back on the right path again. And in the meantime, I want to keep them from pulling anyone else off the path along with them.”
“So, bad guys are just people who are in the dark woods?”
She waited a second, then nodded, and her gaze lifted from him to stare somewhere he couldn’t see. It was a grownup place. He would find it one day, he vowed. “There are lots of different kinds of dark woods, Steven. But yes. Some wander further in than others. Some can never find their way back out again.”
“I can help them get out,” he said. And he meant it. In that moment, staring at his beautiful adoptive mom who made the world balanced and helped people out of the woods – he knew he would do the same. He promised himself. “I can’t wait to be a cop.”
Chapter Eleven
Angry power surged through Dahlia when she woke from her vampire’s slumber early the following evening. When she opened her eyes, it was through a red haze that she viewed the cottage around her.
She’d been a strong warlock already, and her Tuathan bloodline had lent itself to that ability. But now she was a vampire as well, and what dark magic she’d contained within herself sat seething inside like a contained atom bomb – two glued halves of something volatile that were just waiting for some unlucky bastard to come and split them apart.
Well, that was exactly what fate had done when it had thrown the Stag her way. The atom was split, and the mushroom cloud was on the rise. She’d been toyed with enough in her long existence. This was crossing a line. She’d been so mad, she’d barely been able to sleep, even in that “sleep of death” vampires were said to get caught up in.
She would have thought she was already defective enough. I’m already a traitor. Now I’m a vampire committing revenge killings. How broken could a person get? If dangerous and insane wasn’t enough to keep fate and its expectations at bay, she would just have to go about scaring it off another way. She could top off the broken-vampire-traitor-murderer bit with something undeniably un-queenly. Maybe something ridiculous. Something embarrassing.
Like, fuck, I don’t know, she thought as she launched herself from her dark bed and transported out of her cottage and into the mortal world. I need to do something stupid as hell. Like….
She ended her transport, watched the melting, swirling colors around her dissipate, and looked up at the brilliant, enormous screen of a drive-in movie a fifth of a mile away. She didn’t even know where she was in the mortal realm. She’d transported at random, moving on the e
nergy afforded her by a mounting fury.
But the air was dry and devoid of life, the dark was ushering in the kind of nighttime cold that came with a desert climate, and she was alone. The drive-in was half deserted. The few cars parked in the dirt lot were covered in desert dust and spring pollen, so she was guessing she was in the southwest not far from some tiny shit-kicking town. It must have been in the middle of the human work week, given the sparse turnout. It was Tuesday maybe, or possibly Wednesday. She really should keep better track of such things.
The movie’s music was audible over the expanse of desert between them. On the screen, two men were talking from either side of the bars of a jail cell. The mood was serious, but Dahlia’s lips curled into a sensuous smile.
Something like going to jail. She laughed out loud. Yeah, that ought to do it. I’ll get tossed into the human slammer. Who wants a jailbird as a queen? It was strictly off limits for a member of any of the supernatural realms to alter human behavior, law, or momentum. The fae must always remain hidden, vampires were a secret, mages kept their spells under human radar, shifters remained just out of sight in the shadows of the forest. If she suddenly made a grand display of getting involved in the human realm, if she drew human attention to herself, it wouldn’t look good for her. The higher-ups would disapprove, and maybe fate would change its mind about her being a queen.
Okay, she thought. She would cause a stir and get herself arrested. When she got sick of the scene, she would simply break out. A few extra protective spells ought to keep her safe from the sun for long enough to make a sufficiently bad impression, and then she’d just transport away. If that didn’t work for some reason, she had a host of other abilities both new and old to fall back on. She could fly. She could turn to mist. She could move at blurring speeds, rather like DC Comics’ The Flash. She had superhuman strength, a good set of fangs, and – oh yeah – there was that vampiric mind control thing she’d begun to hone. That was a doozy of an ability. Granted, it was difficult to control, and a mind had to be relatively weak for her to infiltrate it properly. But there were a lot of weak-minded humans out there, were there not?