Page 75 of Kiss of Wrath

“No, I am not a demon vampire. I am a vangel, as I told you afore. A Viking vampire angel.”

“But . . . but you killed those . . . things.”

“I did. The first two were the man and women you saw in the Valhalla casino. I recall you saying they were a beautiful couple, that he was a gorgeous hunk.”

“No!” she said with utter disbelief.

“Yes,” he replied on a sigh.

“Do you enjoy doing this kind of thing?” She was still clearly in a state of shock.

“Get in the car, Miranda. I’ll answer any of your questions when we are not out in open view. Where there is one Lucie, there may be others.”

She scurried over and into the passenger seat so fast her dress rode up her thigh, giving a clear view of an almost transparent undergarment. Apparently, she was red all over, as he’d already surmised. Not just on her head.

Once in the driver’s seat, he turned to her. “No, I do not particularly enjoy killing, even when it is ridding the world of demons whose evil is beyond human comprehension.”

“Then why—”

“It is my job.”

“You didn’t just kill that last one. You were like a madman, hacking away when he . . . it . . . was already dead. Why?”

He swallowed several times. He should not reply. He really should not. But did he listen to good sense? No. “The demon mentioned something horrible, something particularly offensive to me.”

“Words? You let words rile you to that extent? Clearly, you are in dire need of anger management, Mordr. I did my master’s thesis on rage resolution. You need help. Believe me, I know about out-of-control anger issues.”

He felt the anger rising in him again. He waited several seconds before turning to her. “You know nothing,” he spat out. “That demon, Quintus by name, told me that he spoke with the man who murdered my children. How he repeatedly raped my little Kata, only six years old, and watched her bleed to death. How he cleaved my five-year-old son Jomar’s little skull with a broadaxe like a melon. A melon!”

To his mortification, Mordr felt tears well in his eyes. “Even after all these years, I am shattered by the memory of their bodies as I found them on first coming home.”

He could not face Miranda in his weakened state, but then he heard a soft sound and had to look. She was openly sobbing. For him? For his dead children?

This was just too much. More than he could bear. He was about to open the car door and call for Harek or Cnut to come get Miranda, but before he could get his cell phone out, she launched herself at him and somehow wedged her body between his chest and the steering wheel. Her ass sat on his lap.

“Oh, Mordr,” she said, gazing at him through green pools of sympathy. “I am so, so sorry.” Tucking her face into the crook of his neck, she wept voluminous tears. No one had ever cried for him before.

To his shame, his own tears streamed down his face and over his chin and blended with hers, a precious sharing of sorrow.

A proverb came to him of a sudden. Something he had heard one time in the Arab lands. “You may forget the one with whom you laugh, but you will never forget the one with whom you cry.”

That was what he was afraid of.

Thirteen

Here a demon, there a demon, everywhere a demon . . .

Miranda was shocked and stunned. In a walking daze. Alternately disbelieving and convinced she had entered some other universe. And scared to the bone.

How could she ever walk down the street again without wondering if this or that person was a demon in disguise? Did the cute bag boy at the grocery store have scales and a tail? Did her hairdresser drink blood after dark? What about the people she worked with? Especially that slimeball lawyer Jerome “Call Me Jerry” Daltry. But, no, if demons could take any human form, they wouldn’t pick an overweight, bad-breath, balding persona. Would they?

“I’m losing my freakin’ mind,” she muttered as Mordr pulled into her garage and turned off the car lights. The interior garage lights went on automatically, so she could see him clearly.

“It happens to the best of us,” Mordr replied, back to his old dour self.

She could tell that he regretted having taken her to town and revealing the dark underbelly of casino life. As if its underbelly wasn’t dark enough already! And besides, these creatures were apparently everywhere, not just Las Vegas. It was enough to make a person live in a bomb shelter and never come out.

She’d always been a pragmatist, wanting to know what she was facing so she could prepare for the worst. Now she was thinking Pollyanna syndrome had a certain appeal.