The Demon King Read Online Free PDF Page A

teach, and Neve was a perfect teacher
and companion. Plus, she was very much a fan of the new queen. A
lot of them were. The Winter Queen was, after all, Poppy Nix,
Dahlia’s best friend.
    Or at least she used to be….
    It isn’t that she’s not
still my best friend , Dahlia reminded
herself. It’s just that she can’t possibly
understand-
    “ Come on,” said Evie as she
stood, not waiting for Dahlia to answer. “I know the smell of this
coffee must be driving you nuts.” She leaned forward over the table
and lowered her voice. “And I also know you have no real need to
down an entire mug full of Lifeblood. So let’s head someplace where
you can be yourself, and you can tell me what’s really going on
with you.”
    She knows.
    “ Yeah,” said Evie. “The
funny thing about Roman’s breed of vampire,” she whispered, “is
that we can read minds. And yours happens to be wide open to me
right now, despite all your supernatural badassness. Plus, I can
smell them on you, sweetie. I’d be willing to bet a lot of the kinds of
people you and I hang around with will be able to.”
    Oh shit.
    But of course she’d known there was that
danger. Right? That was why she’d stayed away from all of those
people – the werewolves, the other vampires, the shifters – the
ones who could have scented this secret on her. Dahlia’s heart
hammered; she could hear and feel it in the side of her neck. It
banged against her rib cage like the beat at a rave. Amazing the
damn thing was still working after all she’d put it through.
    And then she’d just had to invite Evelynne
D’Angelo for coffee. Coffee .
    Of all things? And now ?
    “ Admit it, Doll. You wanted
me to know. You need to get this off your chest. Now, get your
things and let’s get the hell out of here and go somewhere a lot
more comfortable for us both.”

Chapter Three
    The room was empty when D’Angelo left his
place at the end of the Table, circled it a bit, and approached
Lazarus. Laz waited for him like a lighthouse waiting for the
wave.
    D’Angelo stopped a few feet away and slipped
his hands into his pockets. “I’ve never been one to beat around the
bush, Lazarus, so I’ll come right to the point. You smell like a
hell of a lot of blood.”
    “ Being a cop is sometimes a
dirty job.”
    “ Not this dirty.” D’Angelo
shook his head a little, and a touch of a smile hinted at the
corners of his mouth. “Would you like to tell me about
it?”
    Laz wasn’t stupid. He knew
good and well that what that meant was, “Do you want to tell me, or do you
want me to find out another way and then we’ll have this
conversation again at another time?” Not that he couldn’t put off a
conversation with D’Angelo. It was just that there was no point to
putting it off. They were in this together.
    There was a pretty big evil something out
there, and if the lot of them wanted to defeat that evil something,
they needed to work as a team. As much as Laz might not like it,
that meant sticking together and being honest with each other.
    For twelve of them that’s what it meant,
anyway. For one of them of course, that meant absolutely nothing,
because he was the traitor.
    Laz took a slow, even breath and turned away
from D’Angelo to approach the window. He’d had two showers since
the last time he’d apprehended someone on the streets of Boston.
But he hadn’t so much apprehended him as slaughtered him, and of
course the Vampire King could scent the blood on him anyway.
    “ You vampire types sorely
try my patience,” Laz admitted, his voice barely more than a
whisper. It was odd on two levels for him to say such a thing. For
one, his patience didn’t normally feel so tried. And for another,
this wasn’t the way he spoke, not usually. It felt like someone had
suddenly injected his grammar with a dose of blue blood.
    Maybe D’Angelo was getting to him. The
Vampire King was older than dirt.
    D’Angelo fell silent, as if letting that
settle in, and Laz