He waited, as if Astaroth would agree. But of course, the demon said nothing.
“We are both very powerful,” he continued. “And we both want revenge.”
Now the former king of the demons raised his head, just a little. The “R” word was one he had unfortunately never been able to ignore. It was part of the Curse, perhaps, part of what made him who and what he was. There was an ever-burning need in the heart of a demon. It was almost an ache, prevalent and incessant. The anger that fueled it was the foundation upon which the Demon Realm was built.
Vengeance. To a demon, it was simply a dish best served.
However, if the stranger didn’t get to his point soon, Astaroth was going to enjoy a little right now. The magic in his hands was reaching the boiling point. It wanted a place to go, and something to destroy.
The stranger tilted its oblong white head. Again, Astaroth attempted to make out his features, but failed. The shadows were too deep, perhaps. He narrowed his gaze, and the fire in his vision began to spread. He was losing patience.
Suddenly, lightning flashed outside the windows, casting the room into stark black and white contrast and sending the shadows scurrying. For a split moment Astaroth saw the stranger’s face.
But he never had a chance to react to the sight. The stranger blurred, moving so fast toward Astaroth, time lapsed around his black, elongated figure. The impact as he struck home was deadly.
Astaroth saw stars. He saw oceans of light and endless chasms of darkness. He was floating, sustained in time and space as if it were a jelly-like miasma. He sensed nothing but a vague curiosity as to how he’d gotten there.
And then the stars and chasms of time and space were gone, and Astaroth was once more standing in his living room.
Thunder rolled overhead, low and long. The chandelier flickered several times before it came back to life, bathing the room in a soft, expensive glow. Slowly, Astaroth turned to face the mirror he had been looking into only minutes earlier.
Lightning crashed a second time, causing his reflection to shift in darks and lights. A regally handsome man gazed out from the mirror, lustrous pitch black hair with gray stripe, strong chin, dark eyes filled with hypnotism and magic and ringed with fire. The reflection’s lips curled in a smile that revealed strong, sharp fangs. It was a beautiful smile. It was confident. It was charming.
And it was wrong.
All around the two-story mansion, thunder rolled.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Apollyon chose to transport to the only location he could conceive of where no one would come looking for him. It was a deserted shack on a grassy hill in the middle of the North Dakota plains, and no human had stepped foot in it since the Civil War. He kept its original appearance on the outside, but of course changed its interior to suit his needs. He had everything he needed inside. Well, almost everything.
Some things, he was still working on.
A sharp pang in his chest drew Apollyon’s attention, and he looked down to see blood spreading across the shirt he had just changed into. It was a smaller amount than before; the wounds were healing. But the fact that the injury was present and visible was enough to bring Apollyon’s teeth together in a terrible gnashing grip.
When the new king had attacked him in that parking lot, he’d done more damage than was at first apparent. Apollyon had used the life force of his chosen victim in Las Vegas to heal the wounds. Or so he’d thought. Given a few hours, they’d begun to open back up again. Granted, they were smaller than they had at first been. But they were bleeding and they hurt like hell.
The demon had been forced to drain two more victims that night. By the time he’d finished, the sun was coming up in the mortal realm. That was when he’d come here and changed. Now it looked as though he would have to do so again.
He should have seen this coming. Lazaroth was different. If there hadn’t been so much jealousy involved, Apollyon might have admitted that the present Akyri King was also the most powerful Demon King the realm had ever known. He possessed all of his father’s strength and then some. Of course anything he did would carry incredible impact.
The wounds Apollyon had sustained would probably take a few days to completely heal. For now, he was going to have to accept the fact that bandages were necessary.
Apollyon shut his eyes as a spike of anger bolted hard and hot through him. He’d spent the better of that slow burning anger destroying a portion of the Strip in Las Vegas and murdering three innocent victims. So now there was only enough left for him to spin around and hurl his glass of liquor across the room. It slammed into the wall on the opposite end full force and shattered, sending glass flying everywhere. It was satisfying, just enough so that he was able to breathe again.
Damn it. That’s the second glass.
It was. He’d crushed the first in his fist because he’d been thinking about Dahlia Kellen and everything she could have done for him. She had been perfect.
“Fuck,” he hissed when he realized he was headed down the same dark channel of thoughts yet again. He needed to move on. He needed a new approach. His original plans had fallen through like water through a sieve. Kellen was out of the picture now. He needed to think.
He couldn’t go home, that was certain. He’d attacked the king and made a play for the queen. He’d orchestrated an attack on Tenebrom, the stronghold castle of the Demon Realm. He’d crossed every “t” and dotted every “i” on his death warrant. He wouldn’t be able to come within a hundred miles of the realm’s borders without Lazaroth’s armies capturing him. They wouldn’t take him out. They would definitely capture him – so the king could kill him slowly, just as Astaroth had promised his son would.
But that realm had never been his home anyway, not really. When the magic of the Curse had chosen his uncle over his father as its king, the Demon Realm had become foreign to him. How could a man feel comfortable in an environment that had rejected him?
Lord Astaroth had taken over. He and his brother had always quarreled about how the realm should be run. Apollyon’s father, Mammon, believed it should be run with an iron fist and little to no mercy. They were demons, after all. But his laws didn’t sit well with Astaroth, especially where they concerned females. Mammon felt women were ill-suited for rule, or for any positions of power in fact, and would have strictly forbidden them from entering their armies, running the Demon Realm’s businesses, and would have minimized the role of the queen once he claimed one.
Astaroth felt differently. He believed female demons actually possessed limitless potential and swore to allow women immediate access to the positions solely held by men all these years. Mammon lamented such a choice, and when Astaroth was made king, he rallied against him.
Astaroth branded him a trouble maker and moved Apollyon’s father to the outer reaches of the kingdom, delegating to him the rule of some paltry and sparse bit of land and people. Apollyon knew it was something he’d always wanted to do to his brother. He knew it had been Astaroth’s way of getting back at Mammon for not only their disagreements, but for something personal, for some slight of sibling rivalry, for something petty and insignificant. It was done so easily and quickly, it might have even been a joke to Astaroth.
But it was a joke that lasted a thousand years, and one in which Apollyon was born into. His entire life had been about that joke. And his entire life had hence become about getting revenge for it. The ironic thing was that once Mammon found a woman he wanted to make his mate, he began to question everything he had previously believed about females. He began to value women. Especially this one. So much so that when she ran from him after Apollyon was born, he went looking for her, and had been doing so for centuries. Apollyon hadn’t seen his father in more than a thousand years.
Apollyon ran a hand over his face and made his way to the liquor cabinet to re-pour a drink. Casually, he waved his hand behind him, and the glass from the broken tumbler lifted from the floor, swirling together to reform the glass once more. That g
lass then floated through the air and replaced itself amongst the other glasses in the cabinet above Apollyon’s head.
As the cabinet door closed, seemingly of its own accord, Apollyon lifted his second glass to his lips and took a long, hard pull. He was so damned grateful that at least the Curse hadn’t ruined this for him too. Fortune – or perchance misfortune, depending on how you chose to view it – had decided to leave demons with their ability to get completely plastered on mortal liquor. It was something he would be ever grateful for.
He gritted his teeth as the liquid burned like acid on its way down. But his gaze was distant and unseeing, locked in a world of seething hatred. Astaroth and his bloody descendant had robbed him of his home. They’d robbed him of his birthright, his identity, and his kingdom. Everything, that man took from me… And why?
“Why?” he asked softly, to no one and nothing. It was a question he had asked a million times. There was never an answer forthcoming.
“Because you would have made a simpering king.”
Apollyon spun around. The rest of his drink sloshed out of his glass, and his eyes went wide. There on the opposite end of the room stood Astaroth. He seemed casually at ease with his hands at his sides, but Apollyon felt his power at once. It was cold. Which was strange for a demon.
His black and gray pin-striped suit was perfectly tailored and crisp, his black shoes were shining, and not a single wavy hair was out of place on his handsome head. The man seemed different somehow. It was more than the fact that he’d managed to get past Apollyon’s protective magic. There was something off about his eyes. Or maybe it was his smile. He seemed taller, his hair darker, his shadow… longer.
The sight of him was beyond startling. “Astaroth!” Apollyon hissed. How the hell had he found him? And how had he made it past all of his wards? No royal blood but the present king’s was supposed to be able to cast any harmful magic on another member of royalty. Negating protection spells counted as harmful.
“How the fuck did you get in here?” Apollyon hissed, his gaze narrowing. He’d had just about enough of Astaroth and his family. At the moment, that anger was enough to dull his instinct, instinct that should have been screaming at him in the wake of all that was wrong with this picture.
“It was like stepping over a puddle, Apollyon. You always have been a mewling milksop. I fully regret spending so many years worrying about any damage you might have caused my family. It was time sorely wasted.”
Apollyon felt Astaroth’s words spear through him like red hot pokers. His fury spiked. He dropped the glass he’d been holding, and fireballs erupted in each of his hands. The crackling blazes spun in place in his open palms like snowballs rolling down a hill. Their flames cast dancing shadows on the walls of his secret home.
But Astaroth was safe from his attack, and they both knew it. As much as the former king could not touch him, he could not touch the former king. Only Lazaroth could harm either one of them.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said the former king.
Apollyon felt the ground beneath his feet rumble. The glasses in the cabinet began to chink together, shaking in their places. The blinds over the windows clacked against one another. The floor lurched, and Apollyon looked down, crying out in surprise. His fireballs went flying aimlessly when he stumbled and reached out to keep from falling.
He hit the nearby hutch and the fire he had thrown fizzled out, shrinking and turning to smoke that wisped up into the shadows near the ceiling and vanished altogether. But Apollyon never saw that happen. He was too busy watching the floor beneath his feet.
It cracked violently, splintering through the living room like a centipede. He stumbled again, his arms splayed wide. Then the floor separated, and he jumped in an attempt to clear it, but it opened slowly at first before yawning wide with sudden aggression. Apollyon seemed to lose height unnaturally quickly, and ended up hitting the opposite end of the rift, his chest impacting violently with the ground’s edge.
He felt ribs crack, the pain stealing his breath before he was yanked straight down. Terror gripped him and despite the pain, he screamed. Magic words tried to form on his tongue, but he was unable to line them up coherently as he plummeted. The chasm became narrower the further he fell, and the last thing he saw above him was Lord Astaroth’s handsome face peering down at him.
The former king’s face flashed into something else, something featureless. And then it was Astaroth again. He smiled.
Then the walls began to close up on Apollyon, and his final moments of life consisted of a torture torn between the panic of a man who knows he is dying, and a body being slowly crushed to death between two rock walls.
Up above, in the living room of a private, magically created house hidden within the crumbling wood façade of an old Dakota shed, Lord Astaroth the former king of Tenebrom stepped to the middle of the room and looked down. He watched in silence as the ground sealed itself up. The floorboards came next, mending together down to every last splinter of wood. At last the plush carpet sewed itself together good as new.
He raised his chin and took a deep breath. Then, with cold eyes filled with an eternity of secrets, he vanished from the room, leaving it whole, empty and very, very quiet.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Roman D’Angelo looked out over the table of kings and queens stretched before him and found himself running a hand over his face in quiet exasperation. “Okay, what the hell happened to you three?” he asked.
The Dragon King, the Time King, and the Shifter King glanced at one another. Each of them seemed to have the same injury. They all wore their left arms in a sling or cast. Roman knew the chances of three people at the same table having the same injury were nearly nonexistent unless they’d all done the same thing together, and these three particular kings were not close enough socially for that to have happened. The chances of them having the same injury by accident went down considerably when you considered that the three people in question were a dragon, a shifter, and William Balthazar, the Time King. Who Roman was fairly sure was indestructible.
Darius, the Shifter King, sighed and sat back in his chair like a big, well muscled cat. His eyes flashed. At the moment, they were blue, but as a shifter, he possessed the ability to make them any color he wished. He smiled ruefully. It was a killer smile. “It’s nothing serious,” he said. “A hunting accident. It’ll be all better by the end of the day.”
All right, Roman thought begrudgingly. That one, he supposed could believe easily enough. Shifters were very strong, very fast, and lived hundreds of years. But they weren’t immortal, and they did sometimes get hurt, especially since they tended toward the carnivorous side, because carnivores hunted. As a vampire, this was something Roman could readily identify with.
Shifters healed faster than humans, but it was not an immediate mending, as it so often was for werewolves or some of the other species whose kings sat at the Table of the Thirteen.
Roman looked from Darius to Arach, the Dragon King. “Was yours a hunting accident as well?”
Arach gave him an exasperated look. “Iceling accident,” he said with a shrug and then a wince. His green eyes flashed with pain and he let out what sounded like a truly weary breath. “This is the last time I volunteer to help with summer training.”
Roman considered his words. Summer training was the quarterly practice of introducing dragons just coming of age to their breath weapons, inherent dragon magic, and battle tactics. A second training session would be held to welcome anyone new and anyone needing further work at the beginning of fall. Winter and spring followed, of course, and usually meant all new dragons. It was a difficult task, and often the more powerful and experienced dragons were brought in to help out. Arach was one of those more powerful and experienced dragons. This was not his first time getting involved with the training, and despite what he was currently claiming, it probably wouldn’t be his last.
An “iceling” was a dragon who breathed ice crystals, sharp as kniv
es and pointy as needles, fast as a tornado, and entirely deadly. Roman had seen iceling injuries before, and they could completely destroy an appendage – or an entire body. Fortunately for Arach, dragons also healed quickly, but again not as quickly as some others. Iceling injuries in particular were gruesome enough to take great care, medicine, and a lot of time. It was no wonder Arach was less than amiable at the moment.
Now everyone turned to regard the Time King. Like the Dragon, he also had green eyes, and they stared back at the other kings with bright, keen intelligence.
He smiled. “Would you believe me if I told you I’d managed to piss off a menstrual dinosaur?”
The entire room fell silent.
It was Damon Chroi, the Goblin King, who laughed first. It was the softest chuckle, one clearly meant to be kept quiet. But they heard it anyway.
“I would totally believe you,” said Poppy Nix.
Everyone looked at her. Poppy’s expression was dead serious.
Damon Chroi’s laughter became boisterous, and this time everyone joined him. Poppy was the only woman at the Table who might have actually known William Balthazar to any real degree, as William enjoyed spending time in the Winter Kingdom with her and Kristopher, the Winter King. So when her lips slowly slipped into a smile as well, it was clear she was teasing William.
He winked at her.
Roman had a chuckle himself, which admittedly felt good, and when the laughter finally died down, he took a deep breath. Very well, he thought. If William didn’t feel like sharing, he certainly didn’t have to. Roman had been curious more than anything. Who wouldn’t be?
“Okay, let’s get to why we’re here tonight,” he told everyone, wanting to move things along.
“We’re here to welcome our new queen!” said someone at the Table, beating him to the punch. He glanced over to find Violet Kellen rising from her seat and stretching out her hand. Dahlia Kellen rose from her chair directly opposite her at the Table, and the two proceeded to engage in a fist bump over the polished mahogany.
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