The Demon King by Heather Killough-Walden Page B

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