by Sandra Hill
Kiss of Surrender
A Deadly Angels Book
Sandra Hill
Contents
Dedication
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Epilogue
Glossary
An Excerpt from KISS OF TEMPTATION
About the Author
Romances by Sandra Hill
Copyright
About the Publisher
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the twenty-two brave SEALs who died in August 2011 when their Chinook was shot down by Taliban insurgents outside Kabul. They and all SEALs . . . in fact, all our special forces . . . are the silent warriors putting their lives on the line every day so the rest of us can be free.
God bless America but especially those soldiers of all the military branches, along with their families, who sacrifice so much.
Prologue
In the beginning . . .
In the year 850, in the cold darkness of the Norselands, Trond Sigurdsson snuffled and snored and burrowed deeper into his bed furs. He was a man who held a deep appreciation—some might say an unnatural appreciation—for his creature comforts, and that included rest. Lots of rest.
In truth, he would not mind sleeping the winter away like a graybeard, which he was not at only twenty and nine, but a shiver passed over his body as he noticed that even the hair on his head felt frozen. Despite his druthers, he started to twitch and awaken. Which was a shame because, as jarl of these estates, there was naught he had to do.
So why bother rising? This time of year, the gods graced them with only an hour or more of sunlight, and he was not about to go out to the barns or stables and engage in menial labor. For all he knew, or cared, the teats had already frozen into icicles on his milch cows. Who needed milk anyhow?
Of course, there had been those pleas from the villagers yestereve—and the day before, truth to tell—begging him to come rescue them from an impending Saxon assault. Or was it the Huns? How ridiculous! Surely, even Saxons were not so demented as to engage in slaughter on a cold, dark winter’s day. And Huns were more like to attack the keep itself. Still, he should go check, or send a hird of his soldiers to check. Trond might be lazy in many regards, but he was a far-famed warrior when the mood favored him, and he did have responsibilities as jarl of this region.
With a sigh, he contemplated his choices. He would have to rise, clothe himself, rouse his soldiers who were no doubt suffering the alehead, break his fast on cold fare, have horses readied, and ride through the blistering wind through withers-high snow for a half hour and more. All for foolish, no doubt unfounded fears.
Mayhap later.
Trond stretched out one bare toe to the left, and found naught but cold linens. And to the right. More cold linens. He understood now why he was freezing; ’twas the lack of body heat. Frida and Signy must have slipped out to their own bed closets off the great hall during the night. No swiving to while away the waking hours, he concluded with a jaw-cracking yawn. Then immediately recoiled at his own stale mead-breath. No wonder his concubines had left his presence. No doubt he had let loose ale farts in his sleep as well, as was his habit, or so some maids had dared to complain. Should he get up and rinse his mouth with the mint water he favored? And wash the night sweat from his odorsome body? Nay. Best he stay abed and rest.
And so he drifted off to sleep once again.
When he awakened next, the room was alight with the brightest sunshine. How could that be? At this time of the year? Sitting up, he let the furs fall down his naked body and blinked against the blinding light. Only then did he notice the stranger standing in the corner.
He jumped off the mattress and stood on the far side of the bedstead, broadsword in hand. A tall man stood there, arms folded over his chest in a pose of impatience. He wore a long white gown, tightened at the waist with a rope belt, like a woman’s gunna or a robe worn by Arabs he’d met in his travels. Despite the loose garment, Trond could see that he had a warrior’s body. And he was a beautiful man, Trond observed, though he was not wont to notice such things about other men, being uncommonly handsome himself. In this case, it was hard not to admire the perfect features and long black hair hanging down to his shoulders. Or the strange light shimmering about his form.
“Ah, at last the slugabed rises,” the man observed.
Trond had felled men for such disrespect, but that would require more energy than he was ready to exert. “How did you get in here? Where are my guards? Who are you?” Trond demanded.
“It is not a question of how I got here, Viking, but why.” He said Viking as if it were a foul word. “Do not concern yourself with who I am but what I will be . . . the thorn in your backside. Forevermore.”
“What? You speak in riddles. Are you a god?”
“Hardly,” the man scoffed.
“Did Odin send you? Or Thor?”
“Do not blaspheme, Viking. There is only one God.”
Trond nodded his understanding. Actually, he practiced both the Norse and Christian religions, an expediency many Norsemen followed.
“I am St. Michael the Archangel,” the man informed him.
And I am King David. “Is that so?” Trond replied skeptically. “An angel, huh? Where are your wings?”
To Trond’s amazement, a set of massive wings unfurled out of the man’s back, so large that the snowy white tips touched the walls on two opposing sides of his bedchamber, and feathers fluttered to the rush-covered floor. “Convinced, Viking?”
Trond just gaped. Was he in the midst of some drukkinn madness? A dream, perchance?
“You have offended God mightily with your sloth,” the angel pronounced. “You and your brothers have committed the Seven Deadly Sins in a most heinous manner.” He shook his head as if with disbelief. “Seven brothers . . . seven different sins . . . what did you do, divvy them up? Or did you draw straws?”
Trond assumed that was some attempt at warped angel humor. He did not laugh. Instead, he glanced at the doorway and asked, “My brothers? They are here?” Last he’d heard, his six brothers were scattered throughout the Norselands on their own estates, hunkered down until springtime when they could go a-Viking once again. When the angel declined to respond, Trond went on, “What’s so wrong with a little sloth, anyhow?”
The angel’s upper lip curled with disgust at his question, but then he pointed a finger into the air betwixt them where a hazy picture appeared. ’Twas like looking into a cloud or a puff of swirling smoke, and what Trond saw caused him to gasp with dismay.
“Because you were too lazy to get up off your sorry arse, this is what happened today,” the angel told him.
It was the nearby village being besieged by marauding soldiers. Saxon or Hun, ’twas hard to tell. They were covered with furs and leather helmets. More important, his people were being slain right and left, heads lopped off, limbs hacked away, blood turning the snowy ground red. Women and children were not being spared, either. It was a massacre. One soldier even impaled a still wriggling infant onto a pike and raised it high above his shoulders.
Gagging, Trond turned aside and upheaved the contents of his stomach into a slop bucket.
&nb
sp; “And that is not all,” the angel said. “Look what pain your indifference has caused, over and over in your pitiful life.”
Now the cloud showed Trond as a youthling watching indifferently as other Viking males beat Skarp the Goatman almost to death. Skarp had been a fine archer at one time, but later became the object of ridicule due to a head blow in battle that had rendered him halfwitted.
Then there was a view of himself not much older, fifteen at best, though already a soldier, observing his comrades-in-arms raping a novice nun in a Frankland convent following a short bout of pillaging, short because it had been a poor convent with little of value to pillage. Although he had not engaged in the sexual assault, he’d done naught to intervene, despite the blood that covered the girl’s widespread thighs. Odd how he could recall so vividly the red splotches on her white skin! And the screams. Now that he thought on it, there had been much female screaming. And male laughter.
“Was that the beginning, when you first began to hide behind your shield of apathy? For surely, you followed a path of indolence thereafter. Like a slug you are, slow to move, except for your own wants and needs.”
One image after another flickered through the mist. Him ignoring a fourteen-year-old dairymaid who claimed to be carrying his child. Later, he’d heard that her father had turned her out, and she’d died of some fever or other.
Then there was his mother seeking a boon from him, which had been inconvenient at the time. The expression of hurt on her face showed clearly, as did the coldness in his. Had that favor been so important to his mother? Why had he not bothered to find out? She’d died soon after of a wasting disease whilst he’d been off a-Viking.
Trond felt sickened when he saw himself and all his sins. What was wrong with him? Why didn’t he care? About anything or anyone? It was selfishness, of course, but more than that. To his surprise, he felt tears wet his bearded face.
“I suppose you have come to take me to your Christian hell in payment for my sins,” Trond said with resignation.
“Not exactly,” the angel replied. “God has other plans for you.”
Trond arched his brows in question.
“Satan has put together an evil band of demon vampires to roam the earth harvesting human souls before their destined time. Lucipires, they are called. Our Father has charged me with formation of a different type of band to fight those evil legions. Vikings, to my eternal regret.”
Trond’s brow furrowed with confusion. “You are going to lead Viking warriors in battle against some demon vampires?”
“Not exactly.”
Trond didn’t like the sound of that. “What exactly?”
“Viking vampire angels,” St. Michael explained. “Vangels.”
Trond started to laugh. “You are going to turn Vikings into angels? You would have better luck turning rocks into gold.”
The archangel was not amused by his laughter. “Viking vampire angels,” he emphasized. “For seven hundred years, you and your brothers will lead the fight against the Lucipires.”
“With your magical powers,” Trond said, waving a hand at the cloud picture and at the shimmery light that surrounded the angel, “why don’t you just annihilate the demon vampires yourself?”
“That is not the way God works.”
Trond mulled over everything that the angel had told him. “Seven hundred years is a long time.”
“It is. Or you can spend eternity in Satan’s fire.”
Death by fire was ne’er a pleasant prospect. He’d seen Olaf the Bitter consumed by fire from a pitch-lit arrow. Yeech! And eternal fire? “Not much of a choice there.”
St. Michael shrugged. “Do you agree?”
Trond was no fool. He could tell that the archangel would just as well see him on a quick slide to Hell. “I agree.” But then he asked, “What exactly is a vampire?”
The archangel smiled at him, and it was not a nice smile. Before he had a chance to ponder that fact, Trond’s body was thrown onto the rushes. Pain wracked every bone and muscle in his flailing body, especially his bleeding mouth and shoulder blades, where it felt as if an axe was hacking away at the bones.
“It is done,” the archangel said after what seemed like hours, but was only minutes, and disappeared in a fading light.
Done? What is done? Trond felt himself rise above the floor, viewing his dead body, which lay on its one side, curled in a fetal position. Fangs stuck out of his mouth, like a wolf, and there were strange bumps on his shoulder blades.
But then in a whoosh of movement Trond was back in his body, and he was flying through the air, out of the keep, into the skies. Where he would land, he had no idea. He was fairly certain Heaven was not his destination. Nor Valhalla.
One
You could say he was a beach bunny . . . uh, beach duck . . .
If it looks like a duck, and walks, like a duck . . . hey, Easy, can you give us a quack? Ha, ha, ha!”
Trond Sigurdsson, best known here in Navy SEAL land as Easy, gritted his teeth and attempted to ignore the taunts military passersby hurled his way, especially when he noticed that the bane of his current life, Lieutenant Nicole Tasso, was standing there, along with Lieutenant Justin LeBlanc, or Cage, who’d been the one teasing him this time. Cage was LeBlanc’s SEAL nickname, appropriate considering his Cajun roots. Cajuns were folks who lived in the southern United States—Louisiana to be precise—and were known to eat lots of spicy foods, drink beer, play loud rowdy music, and be generally wild. A little bit like Vikings, if you asked Trond, which no one did.
He didn’t mind the teasing all that much, but no red-blooded male—and, yes, his blood was still red, and, yes, he was still a man—wanted a good-looking woman—even one Trond absolutely positively did not desire or even like—witnessing him down on his haunches, walking around like a friggin’ duck, making an absolute ass of himself. A duck’s ass!
“You’re working Gig Squad? Again!” Nicole just had to remark.
As if it is any of her business! But then Nicole was a nosy, bossy, suspicious woman who’d made it her goal in life to uncover Trond’s secrets, or improve him, or both. As if!
Gig Squad was a SEAL punishment that took place every evening in front of the Coronado, California, officers’ quarters where Navy personnel leaving the chow hall could witness the humiliation of the punished trainees. Squats. Push-ups. And, yes, duck walks.
His infraction? Jeesh! All he’d done was hitch a ride on a dune buggy when told to jog this morning in heavy boondocker boots for five lackwitted miles along the sandy shore. What was wrong with the ingenuity of taking the easy way to a goal? “Work smarter, not harder,” that was his motto. The SEAL commander, Ian MacLean, apparently did not appreciate ingenuity. Not this time, and not when he’d slept through an indoctrination session, or yawned widely when a visiting admiral came to observe their exercises, or complained constantly about the futility of climbing up and over the sky-high, swaying cargo net when it was easier to just walk around the blasted thing.
Truth to tell, he was not nearly as slothful as he’d once been now that he was a vangel . . . a Viking vampire angel. Nigh a saint, he was now. Leastways, no great sinner. But Mike—as he and his fellows vangels rudely referred to St. Michael, their heavenly mentor—kept hammering away at him that sloth embodied many sins, not just laziness or indifference. Supposedly, Trond was emotionally dead, as well. Insensitive. Ofttimes apathetic and melancholy. “You have no fire in you,” Mike had accused him on more than one occasion, as if that were a trait to be desired. “Your foolery and lightheartedness mask a darkness of spirit. You are sleepwalking through life, Viking. A dreamer, that is what you are.”
So here he was, more than a thousand years later, still a fixed twenty-nine years old, still trying to get it right. Before vangels were locked into modern times, a recent happenstance, their assignments had bounced them here and there, from antiquity to the twenty-first century and in between, back and forth. He’d been a gladiator, a cowboy, a Regency gentlem
an, a farmer, a pilot, a ditch digger, a garbageman, even a sheik. A sheik without a harem, which was a shame, if you asked him, which no one did.
And now a Navy SEAL, even as he continued to be a VIK, the name given to him and his six brothers as head of the vangels. He understood the VIK mission and how it applied here, as it did with all assignments . . . killing demon vampires and saving almost-lost human souls. Still, many of the SEAL training exercises were foolish in the extreme, if you asked Trond, which no one did. Walking around like a duck . . . Was that any way for a thousand-plus-year-old vampire angel to behave? And a Viking at that!
It was demeaning, that’s what it was. And PITAs like the always bubbly, always on-the-go, always mistrustful “Sassy Tassy” didn’t help matters at all. By PITA, he didn’t mean a pet lover, either. More like a Pain in the Ass. He tried ignoring her presence now, but it was hard when Cage added to his embarrassment and Nicole’s amusement by further taunting in that lazy Southern drawl he was noted for, “Why dontcha fluff yer feathers fer us, Easy?” He was referring to the exercise where a detainee not only waddled around like a duck but flapped his elbows at the same time. Twice the pain and twice the humiliation. To Nicole, Cage added with a shake of his head, “That Easy, bless his heart, is the laziest duck I ever saw.”
The final insult was Nicole’s smirk at Cage’s remark. Oooh, he did not like it when women, especially Nicole, smirked at him. Then she added further insult by telling Cage, loud enough for Trond to hear, “Maybe he should just ring out and save us all a lot of trouble.”
SEAL trainees could “volunteer out” at any time by ringing the bell on the grinder, the asphalt training ground at the compound. Actually, huge numbers of those who started out in SEAL training dropped out. Quitting was not an option for Trond.
Once Trond managed to control his temper and the huffing of his breath—it was hard work, waddling was—he duckwalked toward the woman whose back was to him as she continued talking, in a lower voice now, to Cage, who idly waved a hand behind his back for dismissal of the Gig exercise. At the same time she was standing in conversation, she bounced impatiently on the balls of her boots, as if raring to get off to something more important. The blasted woman had the energy of a drukkinn rabbit.