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.
A lapsed Catholic, she decided that going to church again might be a good idea. And holy water . . . she was going to get a gallon first chance she had. Where did one buy holy water, anyhow? And did holy water repel demons, or was that vampires? How about stakes? Oh Lord! She didn’t think she could ever stake anyone, even Satan himself.
And there was another thing. Mordr definitely regretted having told her about his children. The poor man! How could any person witness such atrocities having been done to his children and not be warped for life? Not that Mordr was warped. Just a little bent out of shape. Or a lot, she conceded, given his grim, no-smile demeanor.
Except she had made him smile, she thought with inordinate pride, remembering their kisses. Both times. Before her world came crashing down.
She followed Mordr into the house, where they found the children were all safely asleep, and Mordr’s brothers were watching some Bourne Identity flick on the TV in the den. Mordr exchanged a meaningful look with Harek and Cnut, and she knew that they knew she now knew their big, dark secrets. Well, some of them.
She went into the kitchen and sat down at the table, waiting while Mordr walked his brothers to the door. The sound of their soft conversation drifted her way, but she couldn’t hear what they said. She couldn’t think about that. So many other things riddled her brain. Questions, question, questions.
Mordr came into the kitchen, took one look at her face, and put two cups of water into the microwave.
“What are you making?”
“Tea. My sister-by-marriage, Alex, always drinks tea to calm her nerves when Vikar does something outrageous or dangerous or just annoys her.”
She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Honey, a gallon of tea and a pigload of Prozac wouldn’t calm me down now.”
“Do not call me . . . endearments,” he said.
Of all the things to home in on, that was the least important. “Why not?”
“Because it denotes a relationship, which we do not have.”
“Really? Honey, you don’t kiss a girl ’til her toes curl and her bones melt and then tell her there’s nothing between them.”
Before he could stop himself, Mordr’s glance shot to her toes, which were exposed in her high-heeled sandals. A grin tried to tilt his rigid lips, but he held firm. Darn him!
The microwave pinged, and he put a tea bag in one mug and placed it on the table in front of her, along with a slice of lemon and some honey, a combination he must have seen his sister-in-law make. He then eyed the other mug, seemed to consider whether to put in a tea bag, or not, then dumped the water into the sink. Instead, he reached the cabinet high above the fridge and got a bottle of Scotch whisky which she’d received from a client one Christmas and never opened. “Ah, uisge beatha.” He poured it into his mug, half full. “Did you know the Scots invented this particular brew? Water of life, it was called.”
When he sat down at the table across from her, she switched mugs and said, “I need this more than you do, babe.”
She saw him consider whether to chastise her for the “babe” endearment, then shrug as if it weren’t worth the trouble.
Mordr sighed in resignation. “You have questions?”
“That’s an understatement.”
He took a sip of the tea and grimaced, taking back his cup of booze. She didn’t care. Scotch tasted like medicine to her, even the good kind like this one apparently was.
“Assuming I believe all this demon/vampire/angel crap, how old are you?” she asked.
That question caught him off guard. He’d obviously been expecting something more important. “I was thirty-one when I crossed over in the year 850. So, that would make me roughly one thousand, one hundred, and ninety-five years old.”
Her eyes widened. “And here I was worried about being an older woman, thirty-four to your thirty-one.”
He appeared puzzled. “Why would that matter?”
“Things like that bother women. Like being taller than her lover. Or older. Or fatter. Or smarter.”
“I am not your lover.”
“Yet.”
His jaw dropped.
“Oh, get a life! I was just kidding. You have a serious case of commitment issues, buddy. If you’re interested, I have a group that meets about this problem every two weeks.”
“You have a group about everything,” he groused.
“Tell me how you came to be a . . . you know, angel with fangs.”
“It is a long story.”
“I have time.”
“God was angry with the Vikings. Too proud. Too vain. Too vicious. Too many bad things. He was especially angry with my family because I and my six brothers each committed one of the Seven Deadly Sins in a most heinous manner. My sin was wrath.”
“Surprise, surprise!”
“Your attempts at humor fail to impress me.”
“Big, fat, hairy deal!”
He almost laughed.
She waited for him to explain more.
“In my fury over . . . you know . . . I killed many people. Many!”
She didn’t think she needed to know more about that. Not at this point, anyhow. “So, God just decided one day that He would punish you all by making you vangels for eternity.”
“Not exactly. Originally, he sentenced each of us to seven hundred years to make up for our sins, but being Vikings we have difficulty being pure. Every time we sin, more years are added to our original seven hundred.”
She let out a burst of laugher. The idea of Viking men trying to be pure did pose funny possibilities.
She yawned. A combination of shock and information overload was finally catching up with her.
“Come. You need to sleep,” Mordr said. “We can discuss everything in the morning.”
She agreed and let him lead her up the stairs. “The only thing that matters, or the most important thing, is that my children are safe.”
“Agreed,” he said, opening her bedroom door and steering her inside. “I give you my solemn vow. The children will be safe. I failed to protect little ones under my shield once before. It will never happen again.”
“Oh. Mordr, that wasn’t your fault.”
“It most definitely was my fault. If I had been there to protect them, they would not have suffered such violent deaths.” He put up a halting hand. “No more! That subject is closed.
She
sat on the edge of her bed and removed her shoes. He stayed in the open doorway, watching her. His posture, leaning one shoulder against the door frame, legs crossed at the ankles, was one of lazy indifference. But the light in his silvery blue eyes said something entirely different.
“Are you afraid I’ll tackle you to the bed if you enter my bedroom?”
“I am afraid I will tackle you to the bed,” he replied with uncommon humor, for him.
“And that would be a bad thing . . . because?” She couldn’t believe she was being so aggressive.
“Oh, lady, tempt the lion and it will bite.”
“Are you the lion?”
“Wouldst like to hear me roar?”
Miranda liked this light banter with the usual dour Viking. Just then, something more important occurred to her. “In the midst of all this stuff about a demon vampire threat, I forgot the biggest threat to my family.”
He arched his brows at her.
“Roger.”
“Of course.”
“Is it possible . . . I mean, this will sound insane . . . but is it possible that Roger is a Lucipire?”
Lemonade, anyone? . . .
Roger had been in Las Vegas for a week and he was ready to kill someone. Miranda, of course, once he got his hands on her. But first of all, Clarence, who was the biggest, most disgusting pain-in-the-ass Roger had ever met, and there had been plenty in prison.
Among Roger’s many complaints against his self-proclaimed, new best friend, none of which he had the nerve to voice, were these facts:
—Turned out Clarence’s friend Lamar was actually his second cousin, maybe third. No one seemed sure, or cared.
—Turned out Lamar was a pimp and his apartment was a two-bedroom dump above a pizza shop where skanky women came and went as if there was a revolving door. Clarence offered to share the double bed in the guest room—a glorified closet—with Roger, but Roger had declined and spent his nights wrapped in a blanket on the dirty floor.
—Turned out Clarence had a violent temper that could ignite at the least little affront. A guy at the gas station who’d commented on Clarence’s gold tooth ended up with a broken jaw and black eye. A bouncer at the cat house they visited on the way from Ohio got a bullet hole in the thigh, up close to his hairy balls, because he’d accused Clarence of unnecessary roughness with one of the “girls.” Roger had no idea where or for how long Clarence had been carrying a weapon. Scary! And he’d made the cook in a diner shit his pants by lifting him off the floor and banging him against the wall, all because he’d burned Clarence’s burger.
—Turned out Clarence’s habit of openmouthed, loud eating was not confined to ice. Hard pretzels, potato chips, carrot sticks, apples, popcorn, and bread sticks also fit the bill. Crunch, crunch, friggin’ crunch. The only time Clarence wasn’t crunching was when he snored like a locomotive.
—Turned out Clarence was addicted to porn. Child porn. The younger the better. Now, Roger had nothing against porn. He’d jacked off to Anna Nicole Smith a time or two or twenty. But kids? Yuck!
Just then, Clarence walked in, a big smile on his face. “Whatcha doin’?” He’d gone out with Lamar earlier for breakfast at a McDonald’s down the street. In fact, he carried a big-ass container of soda in one hand. Roger knew what that meant. Ice.
Roger was sitting at the kitchen table. The apartment had been empty for once, but then it was only eleven a.m. By late afternoon, it would be a zoo, once again.
“Balancing my checkbook. I’m running out of cash, fast.” The minute he’d left the halfway house, Roger had taken two thousand dollars out of the account he’d once shared with his wife, which left a balance of five thousand and some dollars. Not enough to even buy a car. His own vehicle had been repo’ed while he was in prison. Another thing he could blame on Miranda.
“Well, you know where we can make good money,” Clarence said, slurping the last of his soda, and opening the lid.
Lamar was looking to expand his business and had offered to set them up as pimps on the other side of town. All they had to do was work the bus terminals and homeless shelters for desperate women to start their own stable of hookers. “Easy as fucking a blind monkey,” Lamar had assured them.
Nice picture! “No offense, but I’d rather get a job as an electrician.”
“Rog, Rog, Rog! How much can you earn as an electrician?”
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
Roger shrugged. “Twenty-five, thirty-five dollars an hour.”
Clarence laughed and crunched some more. “We could earn a thousand dollars a night, each, on the street. Fast money.”
Where Clarence got this “we” business, Roger wasn’t sure, but he hesitated to point out that they were not a team. Honestly, he wondered how long it would be before Clarence landed back in prison. He was a walking cop magnet.
“I can’t think about that now. I’ve got to take care of other matters first. Don’t forget, that’s why I came to Vegas.”
“The bitch,” Clarence nodded. Crunch, crunch, crunch. He emptied the cup and tossed it toward the waste can. No Michael Jordan was he! He missed, and left the cup on the floor. “I ain’t forgotten nothin’, bro. Jist look out that back window and see what I got for us to do the job.”
Bro? Roger gritted his teeth. How had he gotten himself mixed up with this guy? If he wasn’t careful, he would land in the slammer again, just for associating with the creep.
Roger stood and walked over to the grimy window. All he saw in the alley was a heap of garbage overflowing the Dumpster and a battered van marked “Harrison Plumbing. No Job Too Dirty or Too Small.” Comprehension came to him slowly. “You stole a van?”
“Borrowed it.” Clarence beamed.
“Jeez, Clarence, you’re gonna get us both arrested. Grand theft auto.”
“No prob. By the time Harrison reports it missing and the cops get around to investigating, we’ll have abandoned it outside the city.”
He was probably right.
Clarence was scratching at a red mark on his neck. No doubt he’d been bitten by one of the mouse-size cockroaches that prowled the apartment at night. “What say we cruise the bitch’s neighborhood and case out the situation?” Clarence suggested. “No one will notice us in the shit mobile.”
“Great!” That was the first good idea Roger had heard all day. He closed his checkbook and put it in his back pocket as he stood. Walking toward the door with Clarence, he noticed something odd, and it wasn’t the pistol Clarence was checking for ammunition. ”You smell like lemons.”
It wasn’t a longboat, but . . .
A week after her “date” with Mordr, Miranda awakened on Saturday morning at seven a.m. to complete silence. No shouting kids. No banging doors. No running water. Not a peep.
It could mean the children were overtired and overslept past their usual break-of-dawn risings. Or it could mean they were in trouble or were causing trouble. Probably the latter. She recalled one time awakening to what sounded like a herd of mice—i.e., barefooted children running on tiptoes from one end of the house to the other, over and over. Turned out they were chasing Ben, who held a mixing bowl full of strawberry ice cream that he refused to share. Strawberry ice cream for breakfast? A mixing bowl full for one small person?
Roger had made no contact since that call more than a week ago. That didn’t mean he didn’t still represent a danger to her, especially since her neighbor Mrs. Edmonds from across the street and down a ways—she of the nude vacuuming—had reported two strange men in a plumber’s van parked in her driveway a few days ago when she’d returned from the hairdresser. They’d had binoculars pointed toward Miranda’s house. When Miranda had tried reporting it to the police, they told her she needed more than a suspicion that Roger was involved before investigating.
Equally alarming—yesterday’s Review-Journal reported a large number of missing persons in Las Vegas. The law enforcement party line was that gamblers often disappeared for a while if they didn’t want family
or friends to know they’d bet the family farm, so to speak, and lost.
To her surprise, when she went downstairs wearing a quickly tied robe over her nightgown, she found four little souls in the den. Maggie was working on a puzzle, and the boys sat like wooden soldiers at attention on the sofa watching cartoons.
At her arched brows, Maggie said, “Mordr promised to take us on an adventure today if we were quiet for one whole hour.”
An adventure? Without consulting me first? I don’t think so! “That’s nice. What kind of adventure?”
“It’s a surprise,” Maggie informed her.
We’ll see about that!
The boys looked at her and made zipping motions on their lips, as if they couldn’t speak on pain of . . . something. So, bribery was Mordr’s secret tactic for silence. It never worked for her. Maybe she’d offered the wrong rewards.
She stomped toward the kitchen, though it was hard to stomp in fuzzy sheep slippers, a gift from the children last Christmas, but she stopped just outside the kitchen doorway at what she saw. Mordr, wearing shorts and a “Vikings Rule” T-shirt, was sitting side by side at the table with Linda. They were coloring in Linda’s new Barbie Princess coloring book. Coloring? A Viking coloring? Somehow the idea of those big fingers holding a tiny crayon just didn’t fit.
Or maybe it did.
Her heart swelled almost to bursting. You had to love—well, admire—a man who didn’t mind putting himself on level with children.
“You hafta color inside the lines,” Linda advised Mordr in a gentle reprimand.
“Why?”
“Because it looks better that way.”
“I like my way better.”
“And Prince Ken doesn’t have a mustache.”
“My Prince Ken does. Without facial hair, he looks like an untried youthling.”
Linda giggled.
“Hey, I didn’t know we had a silver crayon for Barbie’s crown. Did you hide it from me?”
“It’s not a crown. It’s a tiara.”
“You would look good with a crown . . . uh, tiara. I wonder where we could buy one.”