Trond shivered, despite his best intentions to appear unintimidated by Zeb’s words. “Where are we, by the way?”
“Caribbean island, too small to have a name.”
“Isn’t your headquarters in Greece? In the honeycombed chambers of some volcanic ruins, as I recall.”
“It is. Gloom is the name of my home there, deep in the ashy chambers under the old volcano. But this is where I go when I want to be alone . . . or not so gloomy.”
“Why are you telling me this? Revealing Lucie secrets has to be a no-no, punishable by at least a flogging.”
“Lots more than that,” Zeb said ominously. “I figure either way it won’t matter what I tell you now. If I deliver you, you’ll know anyway. If I don’t deliver you, telling tales out of school, so to speak, will be the least of my offenses.”
“I won’t go willingly,” Trond told him.
“I never thought you would, but you’ll go. I’m older than you, and stronger. Plus, I have a trump card.” He glanced out onto the deck where Nicole was straightening and wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her gown.
“What do you want, Zeb? What will be the deciding factor?”
“I want you to kill me,” he said.
Now, that stunned Trond. “You’re already dead, lackwit.”
“I don’t mean kill kill in the usual sense. I mean, kill me with your special weapons so that when I dissolve I won’t go back to being a Lucipire anymore. I am tired, so tired, of the endless killing and needless torture. Plucking out eyeballs loses its entertainment value after the first hundred times.” Zeb’s jesting tone was belied by his sad eyes.
“Yeah, but you’d still be a demon, wouldn’t you. Just in a different place. You’d have to go to . . . oh! You would prefer to go to Hell? Do you have any idea how Lucifer would punish you? It would be beyond horrific.”
“I know. Better that than this endless evil I’m engaged in now.”
Trond knew how Zeb felt about the endlessness of their existence, but at least Trond’s killings were for a greater good. “Ironically, because you’ve asked for this, I can’t do it.”
“Why the hell not?”
“If we’d been engaged in battle, I would have killed you . . . demolished your Lucipire essence . . . in a heartbeat. But because you ask me to kill you, it would be murder. Suicide by vangel just isn’t—forgive my jest—kosher.”
“That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Does any of this make any sense?”
They sipped at their beers before Zeb spoke again. “I’ve always wondered, why did you . . . and your brothers . . . get a second-chance penance while so many of us sinners got condemned to this other sentence?”
“I don’t know. Truly, I don’t.”
“Maybe my sins were so much greater.”
Trond shook his head. “I don’t think so. Ours were as bad as sin can get. Somehow, I think it was related to our being Vikings.” He noticed Zeb’s incredulous expression and said, “Go figure.”
“I could be a Viking,” Zeb decided, half joking.
At least Trond hoped he was joking because if this was a backward way of saying he’d like to join their ranks, Trond would have to disillusion him quickly. Through all the years only Vikings or those of Norse descent had been made vangels, and never had a demon been turned angel.
Sensing Trond’s skepticism, Zeb sighed. “On second thought, I would make a piss-poor Viking. I’m not vain enough.”
Trond would have reached over and punched him on the arm, but they were too far apart. Besides, Nicole was walking into the room, and she was not a happy camper, rather happy harem houri, considering she still wore the Arab gown that clung to her form but was raggedy along the edges, with one sleeve almost torn off. Her blonde hair was raggedy, too, and she had a bruise mark on her face from the melee that had occurred after the explosion. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her nose and mouth were red from her excessive vomiting.
Trond thought this brave woman was nigh glorious.
She paused in front of the two of them, glanced meaningfully at their recliners and the beers in their hands, and concluded, “Dumb as dirt, both of you!” Then she stomped off to open a door off the kitchen. It was a broom closet, which gave Trond ideas. Sensual ideas. When he saw Nicole blush, he knew she shared the same sensual memories.
Slamming the door shut, she tried another door, but it led to a walk-in, climate-controlled wine closet.
“You have a wine collection?” Trond was both surprised and impressed. “Holy clouds! There must be a thousand dollars’ worth of wine in there.”
“More like twenty thousand.”
Trond had to laugh. “A demon wine connoisseur?”
At Trond’s amusement, Zeb shrugged. “I have so few opportunities for enjoyment these days.”
Trond understood that.
As Nicole slammed yet another door, Trond got up and inquired as sweetly as he could, “What are you looking for, Nicole?”
“A bathroom with a shower. And some clean clothes.”
Zeb got up, too, and pointed to the left. “Second door on the right is the bathroom. There’s a Jacuzzi tub if you want to relax your muscles.”
Nicole said something foul about relaxing that caused Zeb to grin.
“And there’s clothing of mine you can pick through in my bedroom across the hallway. Don’t think anything will fit you, but you could try the jogging pants or the spandex bike shorts.”
“You bike?” Trond asked. He was the one grinning now. Somehow, the idea of a demon riding a bike just didn’t fit. A demon bike-riding wine connoisseur. Who would have guessed?
“I tried biking, but my tail kept getting in the way. Hey, I have to do something to keep in shape. We can’t all be Navy SEALs.”
Nicole was gaping at the two of them, as if they were lunatics. “What are you two?”
“I’m a vampire angel,” Trond answered with a sigh of resignation. “A vangel.”
“I’m a demon vampire,” Zeb answered, not at all resigned. Just sad. “A Lucipire.”
“You guys are weirding me out.” Nicole shivered.
“Hey, I weird myself out sometimes,” Trond said.
“Me too,” Zeb said.
Nicole studied each of them. “I thought angels and demons were enemies.”
“We are,” Trond and Zeb replied at the same time.
She glanced at the beer bottles in their hands, the way they stood so close together, the his-and-his recliners, and shook her head with disbelief. “Beer-drinking buddies, more like. So, what happened to the fake fangs?”
She didn’t believe a bit of their story, Trond realized. Why would she? It was too fantastical for anyone to believe. So he and Zeb did the only thing they could. They flashed their fangs at her.
Swaying on her feet, she held up a halting hand when Trond reached to help her. “Forget the beer and wine, I need a whiskey. Straight up. Make that a double.”
On those words, she did in fact faint. He caught her just in time and carried her to the bathroom. If he was lucky, he might get a chance to take a bath with her in what turned out to be a very inviting blue-tiled Jacuzzi with a panoramic view of the tropical sea. Holy hot wings! Where did that idea come from?
Her eyes blinked open as he set her on her feet, and she got her first look at herself in the one mirrored wall. Letting out a little yelp of shock, she glared at him, putting her hands to her head. “You could have told me my hair looked like a haystack that went through a wind tunnel.”
“Huh?” He hadn’t even noticed her hair, which, now that she mentioned it, was a little mussed up and tangly.
Then she put both hands on her hips and gave him what Cage was wont to call the stink eye, according to his Cajun mawmaw. “You are in such trouble, buster. Are you even a member of the Norwegian Jaegers?”
“Not exactly,” he admitted.
From the open doorway he heard Zeb chuckle at his discomfort.
Then she narrowed h
er eyes at him. “More importantly, are you or are you not gay?”
Nineteen
The news was not good . . .
Two hours later, Nicole sat on the edge of the bed in a room at the far end of the hallway that she’d picked for her own. She would have to come out sometime and face the two bozos who kept knocking every five minutes to see if she was okay.
No, she was not okay.
Aside from being in bizzaro-land with the two woo-woo princes, she didn’t know how she’d gotten here, or how she would get out. She’d tried going out one of the back doors and found there was some kind of invisible force field surrounding the property. Almost like one of those electrical fences they bought for dogs. Every time she tried to jump through, she got a shock and was jolted back inside the perimeter.
Then there was the mission, and her job as a WEALS back in Coronado.
Most of all, there was Trond. If he was not gay, he had a lot to answer for, and she already suspected why he’d told her that particular lie. His secret . . . if it could be believed . . . was out. The one he’d used gayness to cover. The black belt liar! He was dead, so to speak. A freakin’ vampire angel. Putting that unbelievable story aside, if he was not gay, how was she going to be able to resist him?
Then, too, there was the issue of her sister and her ex-husband. Time was ticking for her to be able to help. If she could.
“Nicole, come out and eat,” Zeb urged her. “I made seafood paella.”
Nicole’s stomach rumbled with hunger. She couldn’t remember when she’d eaten last. Plus, the aromas wafting through the air were scrumptious. “A demon gourmet cook?” she said on a laugh. Why that would surprise her on top of all the other surprises boggled the mind.
“I watch a lot of Food Network in between . . .”
When he didn’t finish, she finished for him, “ . . . in between fanging people?”
“And other things.” The tone of his voice bespoke some unpleasant things. In fact, unpleasant was probably too mild a word.
She heard footsteps and it was Trond who spoke now. “Stop being so childish and come out now before I break the damn door down.”
“Oh, that’s charming,” Zeb said to Trond. “She’ll never come out now.”
The two of them whispered together and then Trond said, “Never mind. Zeb and I will just be watching CNN to see what they’re saying about the mission.”
She had to leave her room then, of course. When she entered the kitchen, she found the two nitwits sitting on stools at the counter serving themselves from platters of paella swimming with shrimp, scallops, and lobster, a green salad, and fresh-baked bread. Bottles of beer sat next to their plates. From this vantage point, they could see the TV screen in the living room—in fact, the big-ass man toy of a TV could probably be seen in Chicago—which was set to CNN, but a commercial was on at the moment.
Helping herself to the food, she sat down and said to Zeb, “Where did you get fresh lettuce out here?” She assumed the bread and everything else had been frozen.
“I have a little garden on the side. Salad greens, carrots, tomatoes, herbs, just a few things. And grapes, lots of grapes. I like to garden.”
“A garden?” Trond choked on a sprig of lettuce and rolled his eyes.
“I could tell the tomatoes were fresh-picked. My grandmother always had the best plum tomatoes. We would eat them right off the vine with nothing but salt.” She hadn’t thought of her grandmother in ages, one of her early good memories she seemed to have buried along with Cyndee and so many other things under the weight of those harsh three years of marriage.
“I like tomatoes,” Trond said.
She just ignored him.
Trond did not like being ignored. Not one bit. “Do you feel better since your bath?” he asked. Although he preferred her normal brown hair to this blonde, she looked fresh and healthy with a ponytail and no makeup, wearing Zeb’s sweatpants rolled up to the calves, a short-sleeved T-shirt hanging down to her elbows and the bottom knotted at her waist. The toes of her bare feet curled around the side rungs of her stool.
He was wearing a pair of Zeb’s jeans and a T-shirt, following his own shower, but he didn’t look half as good as she did. And that wasn’t vanity, either. It was a fact. Vikings were uncommonly handsome men.
When she didn’t answer his question but instead conversed with Zeb about his recipe for paella, ignoring him, he found himself getting annoyed. “Why is it you talk with Zeb but not me?”
“Because I’m mad at you.”
“What did I do?”
“You told me you were gay.”
“Oh.” Of all the things that had happened today, that seemed the most unimportant. Still, he had to say, “How do you know I’m not gay?”
She gave him a not-very-complimentary head-to-toe scan before disclosing, “Because Zeb told me you weren’t.”
He flashed Zeb a wait-till-I-get-you-alone, you’ll-be-sorry glare.
“Busted!” Zeb hooted, but then he put both hands in the air. “She asked, and I couldn’t lie.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Just out of curiosity, what lamebrain reason did you have for telling her you were gay to begin with?” Zeb wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Nicole agreed. “Tell us what your lamebrain reason was, lamebrain.”
He did not like Nicole and Zeb getting so chummy. “You kept bird-dogging me, Nicole, asking about my secret. How could I tell you that I was there as a Viking vampire angel on a mission to save some SEALs?”
“Huh? What SEALs?”
“Sly and JAM were fanged by your buddy here and were on a fast track to joining the ranks of the Lucies.”
Now it was Zeb who was subjected to Nicole’s glare.
Zeb shrugged. “It’s what I do. Fanging.” Then he gave Trond a look of one-upmanship and disclosed, “Trond fangs, too.”
Nicole’s head swiveled back to him.
“Except I do it to save souls.” Mostly. “Zeb does it to condemn them to a life of horror and sublime evil.” He sliced Zeb with a so-there! look of triumph.
“Alas, Trond is right,” Zeb said, fluttering his long eyelashes at Nicole. Since when do I notice the length of a man’s eyelashes. Maybe I am becoming gay. Aaarrgh! “But all is not lost. I am hoping that Trond will be able to save me.”
Whaaat? That was so low, bringing Nicole into their demon/angel arguments, that Trond couldn’t even speak at first. But then he didn’t have to because Nicole asked what he’d meant about Sly and JAM being his mission in Coronado.
He explained what he and Karl had done with Sly and JAM.
“I knew there was something different about those two, but I never suspected . . .” She cocked her head to the side, pondering. “Karl is one of you, too?”
Trond nodded. “He’s a young vangel, though. He died in Vietnam.”
“Good Lord!” Nicole was shaking her head, with disbelief or wonder, he wasn’t sure which.
There were a series of staccato announcements on the TV:
“News Flash: Navy SEAL mission in Davastan rescues female hostages thought to be long dead.”
“The biggest U.S. military coup since the killing of Osama bin Laden.”
“Najid bin Osama missing and thought dead.”
“Welcome, panel of experts, to discuss today’s surprising news.” The news anchor then introduced high-level military and news personnel.
Nicole, Trond, and Zeb, without speaking, picked up their plates and beverages and moved to the living room where they could better view the news report, using a low coffee table to spread out their food. For more than an hour, the network reported evolving news, had its various experts discuss the implications of the event and speculate on what the future portended in the war against terrorism. They showed graphic depictions of the Davastan geography and Najid’s compound, before and after the mission.
It was a scene Nicole could barely accept . . . her sitting in a seemingly normal living room,
eating dinner, watching TV, with an angel vampire and a demon vampire. It was a story to tell her grandchildren some day. If she lived that long.
First on the TV were the poignant pictures of the ten girls from the Swiss boarding school being reunited with their families at the airport in Kabul, preparatory to their return to the U.S. Some were on crutches. Two were in wheelchairs. One was on a gurney.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “How long have we been here? There’s no way those families could have been notified, flown across the world, and been taking their girls home in the hours since this afternoon.”
“A day and a half,” Zeb said blithely.
“What?” she screeched. All the strange happenings today were beginning to accumulate inside her. Soon she would have a full-blown panic attack, not that she’d ever had one. She blew out a few times in a huffing fashion since she’d once seen someone do that on TV, except that person had been blowing into a paper bag. “How can that be?”
Zeb shrugged and took a huge bite of dessert—a strawberry cheesecake he’d defrosted for them that was, incidentally, delicious. “Demon time is different from human time.”
That was another thing. What was this demon/angel/human nonsense? “Are you saying that you are . . . dead?” she asked Zeb.
“You could say that.” He paused a moment, pinching his skin playfully. “Yep, I’m dead. How about you, Trond?”
Trond scowled at him. He was doing a lot of scowling today, though why he should scowl was beyond her. She was the one who had reason to scowl. Big-time.
“Yes, I am dead.”
Her jaw dropped, and she just gaped at him.
She could tell he was uncomfortable with that disclosure. She had been contemplating a relationship with a dead guy. How pathetic did that make her? But then, she recalled the infamous utility closet incident and had to admit Trond sure knew how to kiss for a dead man. Probably lots of years of practice.
“What are you thinking?” Trond asked her.
“Nothing,” she said, and avoided his gaze.
But Zeb just had to remark to Trond, “Her eyes got hazy for a moment, and her lips parted. I daresay her nipples are hard. Arousal would be my guess.”