The Demon King (31 page)

“
I think it would be best
if we turned around and headed back into town,” she
said.

Laz glanced at her, slowed the car, checked
the rearview mirror, and turned the car around in a clean
one-eighty. “I was thinking the same thing.” He straightened the
car out and took it to cruise control. Dahlia felt strangely warm
having him agree with her. It was nice not having to defend an
idea, especially to a man.

“
I know just the place
too,” he added. “Somewhere crowded enough we’ll hopefully blend in,
but shady enough that if a fight starts, it’s no big loss of
innocent humanity.” He flashed her a killer smile, and she felt her
cheeks warm. She looked away to hide the blush and stared out the
window at the passing darkness.

They drove for a moment in silence before he
said, “By the way, about your question earlier… I think I’m
probably a little bit of both.”

Dahlia frowned. “What?” She blinked a few
times. “What question earlier?”

“
You asked whether I was a
good cop or a dick cop.”

Dahlia’s eyes widened. “I totally didn’t
mean that question.”

Lazarus laughed. It was a
beautiful sound, easy and relaxed despite the situation. “I know.
But I also know you kind of did.” He shrugged. “There’s a lot of
shit going down. Tension is high. The truth is, I think a lot of
us
are
dicks. Too
many people in general are dicks, cop or not. But some of us?” He
took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh that sounded weary and
real. “Some of us are genuinely good. Or at least we set out
to
do
good, and
it’s why we join the force in the first place.”

“
Is that why you
joined?”

He looked at her and
nodded. “My adoptive mother was on the force. Her father before
her. My grandfather was one hell of a man. He was the only African
American officer in his precinct – the
first
in his precinct. I was named
after him, Steven Dixon. Both died in the line of duty and neither
one of them would have changed a thing.”

Dahlia was silent a long
time. Her head was spinning. She’d just learned more about Steven
Lazarus in the span of a few seconds than she was guessing most
people learned about him
ever
.

“
My adoptive mother, Rosa,
was an Episcopalian in a family of Baptists. She was the black
sheep of her family. She used to joke about being the black sheep
in a black family and wondered if she should call herself a white
sheep instead.” He chuckled, and Dahlia could hear the pain lacing
the edges of his quiet laughter. He missed her.

He grew quiet, and the air in the car filled
with memories. “She was a cop my whole life. I was a latch-key kid,
but having grown up as one, I can tell you there’s nothing
inherently wrong with that. She taught me to be careful, what to
do, where to go, how to cook. She called me constantly, and she was
never late getting home, not without warning. We had a support
system of friends all around us, and I never went hungry and I
always had clothes that fit. She helped me with my homework, and
when she couldn’t, she found someone who could.” He smiled.
“Usually someone else on the force. Her partner was particularly
good at algebra. He tutored me sometimes.”

He fell silent again before
he said, “My mom came home one night and her eyes looked strange to
me. I was seven. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened at work,
would never talk about it. But that night, she tucked me in and
told me that there was evil in the world. And it wasn’t The Joker
or Darth Vader. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t cool. It was
just
wrong
. And
that if I was going to become a cop like I’d always said I wanted
to, I needed to know that I would one day come face to face with
that wrongness. And it wouldn’t back down. So neither could I.
Because that was what wearing the badge was all about.”

Dahlia swallowed hard. Her throat felt
thick, and her lungs heavy. She knew that wrongness. She could only
imagine what Rosa Dixon had seen that night. There was so much
wrong in the world… especially the human world.

Lazarus glanced at her. “She was right, of
course. I’ve faced that wrongness a hundred times in the line of
work. A hundred reasons to be afraid, to quit, to leave the mess to
someone else. You have to make a choice each time. And those of us
who don’t back down, I guess you could say we’re the good cops. But
I’ve been known to be a dick from time to time too.” He grinned,
and it was like whiplash.

Dahlia’s lungs instantly felt lighter, and
she inhaled, laughing and shaking her head.

“
In all honesty, I think
part of the problem is that so many of us on the force are just too
damn young,” he said, switching on his turning signal to make an
upcoming turn. “If I had my way, I’d make the minimum age for
joining around thirty, maybe a little higher. Think about it. We
have a minimum age for presidency, and we have it for a reason. We
realize that humans just haven’t been through enough of life’s
misfortunes to be capable of making empathetic or wise decisions
before a certain age. So a candidate has to be thirty-five before
he or she can even try to run our country. But down here in the
thick of it, we take kids straight out of high school, give them
guns and badges, and set them loose on an unsuspecting population.
Which one is really worse? Which situation is potentially more
dangerous? In the heat of a crime, cops don’t have a congress to
stop them from making stupid decisions.”

Dahlia couldn’t argue with much of that
logic. There were always exceptions, of course. Some really bright
kids graduated high school at the age of twelve, after all. But in
general, he wasn’t far off the mark. Age paved the way for
wisdom.

What
did
surprise her was the fact that a
police officer himself was admitting any of it. She was learning
more about Steven Lazarus with each passing breath. And the more
she learned about him… the more she liked him. He had a past, he
had depth and character, and he used his brain. In the thirty or so
years he’d been alive, it seemed he’d done more thinking than a
number of the Tuath fae men she’d bedded had done in their
lifetimes.

“
Wisdom takes time to
develop, like good liquor. A seasoned captain is a century-old
bottle of Scotch.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “An unfortunate
number of rookies I’ve had to deal with are like Coors Light in
comparison.”

“
Is Coors Light so bad?”
she asked, never having had the beverage.

“
I’m so glad you asked me
that, darling,” he said as he parked the car and she looked up to
find them in front of what looked like an honest to goodness
roadhouse bar. “Because that’s probably about all they serve in
this place.”

Chapter Forty

“
So tell me about Boston,”
Dahlia said. She looked down dubiously at the drink he’d set in
front of her. She’d told him about the reaction she had to the
Lifeblood beside the river only a few hours ago and mentioned that
the strange thing was, she was thirsty, just not for blood. He was
wondering whether the fact that she was becoming the Demon Queen –
it was possible – meant that the vampirism was fading away. Or if
perhaps the vampirism had been temporary. He had theories and
wanted to test them. It was a detective thing.

So he’d ordered her a soda, figuring the
bubbles would feel nice on a sore throat. That, she’d downed easily
with no repercussions. Laz had then upped the stakes, ordering her
something a wee bit stronger.

But she fingered the shot glass in front of
her and peered down into it as if it would reveal something
magical.

“
It’s just tequila,” Laz
chuckled. “You’ve had tequila before, right?”

“
Honestly? No.” She looked
at him sheepishly.

That was surprising. “Aren’t you something
like several thousand years old?”

She shot him a reproachful
look. “I know your mother taught you never to mention a woman’s
age. But it’s three thousand, nine hundred and forty-four. Give or
take a few months. Most fae stop counting.” She shrugged. “For some
reason I kept doing it. But that’s beside the point. A butterfly no
doubt thinks a human has done everything. When in truth, there is
too much for
anyone
to do.”

Laz studied her profile, momentarily lost in
the wonder of her. “So when is your birthday?”

She glanced at him again, and he didn’t fail
to notice she still hadn’t tried the shot of tequila. “Well, in the
Unseelie Realm, we count time differently than you do. Our calendar
is not really anything like yours. But in the human world, this
year it would be around the fourteenth of November.”

He mentally filed the date
away in a bright red file folder marked
Vital
. “Good to know,” he said as he
lifted his own glass, one filled with the same kind of soda she’d
had earlier. He wasn’t going to chance dulling his senses right
now. But he sure as hell wouldn’t mind if Dahlia did, just a
little. “To new beginnings,” he said, quoting what was probably one
of the oldest toasts in history. But he meant it.

“
To new beginnings,” she
repeated, hesitantly lifting her own shot glass and clinking it
against his tumbler. “And to not throwing up anymore. That
is
not
fun,” she
added in a mumble just before she put the glass to her lips, threw
back her head, and swallowed the contents down in one practiced
gulp.

His eyebrows hit his hairline. “I thought
you said you’d never had tequila.”

She gritted her teeth. Then
she licked her lips and smiled. “I haven’t. But I never said I
hadn’t done shots. You should try some of the stuff we have
in
my
realm. This
is fruit juice in comparison. Thenobrian Black would curl your
toes.” She didn’t have to ask for a refill; the bartender was in
front of her in a heartbeat, pouring amber gold liquid to the
brim.

Laz shot him a warning look, and the burly
man lifted his chin a little, but stepped back. Laz had a feeling
the badge on his belt had more to do with that than Laz did
himself. The room was filled with men like the bartender – and
women too. The establishment was one solid wooden structure,
unpainted and undecorated but for the cobwebs in the far corner
rafters, the neon lights above the bar, and the remnants of peanut
shells, tobacco spit, and cigarette butts on the cement floor. It
smelled like smoke and sweat and the slightly sour tinge of old
alcohol.

Laz counted a good three dozen people
filling the space between the walls. They were either seated at one
of the six large round tables or at the bar, or stood against the
walls in laid back groups. Most joked with one another, gave in to
a little rough housing, or stood quietly to drink. A lot of them
were actually looking at their smart phones. Four old speakers sat
visible, wired and dusty, in the four corners of the room. The
Steve Miller Band filled the moments between laughter and friendly
shouts with sweet melody and guitar riffs.

“
I love this song,” said
Dahlia before she threw back her second shot without hesitation.
She swallowed hard, banged down her glass, and sang along. “I’m a
joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker….”

A spike of alarm went through Laz. “Hey, how
are you feeling?” He didn’t want her going Mount Vesuvius all over
the bar if the liquor didn’t agree with her any better than the
Lifeblood had.

She smiled and turned a brilliant green gaze
on him. “I actually feel… really good,” she said, nodding to
herself. “In fact, it’s been a while since I felt this good. Like,
since the last time I had coffee.”

That’s
right
, Laz recalled. For some fae, coffee
had a nearly opiatic effect. Did that mean she was feeling high?
Buzzed? Was the alcohol actually working on her? Was the vampire in
her gone? Or being replaced by something else?

She put her hand over the top of her glass
and said, “Maybe I should slow down a little.” The bartender looked
disappointed, but he had plenty of other customers to deal with.
“So… is this a biker bar?” she asked softly, leaning into him so no
one else would hear her. The scent of cherry blossoms washed over
him, and he almost closed his eyes to inhale.

“
I guess you could call it
that,” he admitted. Lynnard Skynnard took the place of Steve
Miller, and a woman at one of the half dozen round tables in the
room began dancing in her seat. She had thirty tattoos if she had
any, and there was enough leather in the room to give an entire
ranch back its skin.

Plus, the domino-line of
bikes outside was a dead give away. His was the only vehicle with
in the parking lot with doors. In his defense, the car
had
been missing one of
its doors only hours earlier.

“
I’ve never been to one,”
Dahlia said innocently. Her eyes were glittering like green
diamonds as she took in her surroundings. “It’s pretty cool! Great
taste in music!” She started moving on her bar stool as well. Then
she slid off of it and simply swung her hips back and forth in a
full-on dance. It was mesmerizing, enticing, and mouth
watering.

The girl who’d been bouncing in her seat saw
Dahlia. Hell, everyone did. “That’s it, honey!” the woman shouted.
“You shake that thing!” She stood up to join her.

The guy behind the bar started moving with
the music as well. Laz watched in fascinated silence as like a
ripple of happiness, one after another, all fifty or so of the
bar’s patrons began to dance. Most lifted their drinks when they
stood, and expertly placed their thumbs over the bottle mouth holes
to keep the beers from spilling.