Read Online The Demon King by Heather Killough-Walden - Free Book Online

the Warlock Queen, and
ironically an Akyri. She was ancient, one of the first of her kind.
She also happened to be literally made of stardust.
    As one of the eight queens
that now sat at the Table of the Thirteen, she enjoyed the same
luxuries Laz did at the Table. The most important of which was the
fact that she didn’t have to wait or beg or ask for the magic she
needed in order to survive. As a queen, she was more powerful even
than her exceedingly powerful husband, the Warlock King, Jason
Alberich. When she wanted his magic, she simply took it. Not that
he didn’t willingly give it to her at every opportunity. Laz was
betting Alberich enjoyed giving her a lot of things.
    Laz, or Steven Lazarus as
he was known in polite society, was the most powerful Akyri alive.
As their king, he was also capable of taking whatever magic he wanted or
needed from warlocks. After all, it wouldn’t do for the Akyri King
to be beholden to anyone.
    He even had to be careful
not to take the magic when he didn’t mean to. He could just imagine
accidentally sucking some down from one of the warlocks sitting at
the Table of the Thirteen. That wouldn’t go over well, seeing as
how one of the warlocks was the king of warlocks, and the other two
were queens. All three would kick his ass or die trying. He made
sure never to go to a meeting hungry.
    But right now? He frankly didn’t care how
much magic he inhaled or how quickly he scarfed it down. He was out
of patience. There was someone on the ground near death. He could
sense the life creeping away from the young warlock’s victim with
each passing second.
    The energy he absorbed infiltrated his
bloodstream, carried through his heart, and poured out into the
recesses of his body. When he was done feeding, he opened his eyes,
the red light faded, and the warlock who’d fed him dropped to the
ground beside the unconscious man who was already there.
    Laz strode to the victim in the suit and
bent to take his pulse. He was alive, but barely. Blood covered his
clothing, drenching the white shirt beneath his suit coat the
worst. A chest wound was the very minimum of what he’d sustained;
he’d been shot. But his head was bleeding too, and heads tended to
violently hemorrhage. His blood soaked the ground beneath him. He
would bleed to death shortly if Laz didn’t get him some help.
    One really convenient thing about warlocks
was that they possessed the ability to bring the dead back to life.
There were contingencies: the warlock had to be more powerful than
the person they were resurrecting, there had to be a fire, some
sort of crystal, and so on. But despite this obnoxiously enormous
gift, the strange thing was they couldn’t heal. They couldn’t take
away a person’s wounds while that person still breathed. They could
only bring them back once they’d crossed over. It was odd to
Laz.
    Especially since he did have the ability to
heal.
    It wasn’t something he’d chosen to
advertise, not to the Thirteen Kings, much less to Roman D’Angelo.
He wasn’t sure why he kept this newfound ability to himself. There
was just something about the skill that didn’t sit right with him,
not the least of which was the its uniqueness among his kind.
Warlocks didn’t have it either, so it wasn’t something he absorbed
while feeding. It was his and his alone.
    Regardless of where it came from or what it
meant, in his line of work, it was an ability Laz was grateful to
have, and one he used now. He placed his hands to the victim’s
bloody chest and concentrated. In the sidelines of his vision, he
noticed the young stupid warlock beginning to stir. Without
glancing away from the man he was healing, Laz sent a sharp spike
of power at the warlock. It hit the young man like a rock to the
forehead, and he was once more unconscious.
    A white light grew beneath Laz’s pressed
palms. He imagined that light filling the bullet hole in the
victim’s chest and infiltrating the man’s bloodstream. Then