Kiss of Pride

by Sandra Hill

  “Cult?” he asked hesitantly. “No, vangeldom is not a cult.”

  “Mind control is so not my thing. There has to be a reason why I let you do”—she waved a hand at the bed—“these things.”

  “There is mind control, and then there is mind control.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That is such a bullshit answer.”

  “Well, I can tell you for certain that Jim Jones is not going to jump out of the woodwork.”

  “Is that your idea of a joke?”

  “You told me you liked my sense of humor.”

  “I take it back.”

  He sighed, no doubt because he saw prospects of sex going out the window. “When a human is bitten by a vangel . . . or a Lucipire, for that matter . . . the body goes into stasis,” he explained with a blush that told her he was either lying or withholding something important. Since he was supposedly on God’s team, she imagined lying was not in his repertoire.

  “And . . . ?” she prodded.

  With a grunt of disgust, Vikar slid off the bed and walked barefoot over to a dresser, where he opened a door that hid a compact fridge. He still wore only jeans, which rode low on his hips, drawing attention to his tight butt.

  Aaarrgh! I am not looking at the moron’s butt.

  Taking out two bottles of water, he came back and handed one to her, which she declined, and uncapped the other, drinking deeply. Bloodsucking apparently didn’t satisfy thirst totally. Personally, she intended to quench her thirst in a different way later . . . with about a quart of vodka.

  Unable to avoid her questions forever, he sat down on the edge of the bed where she still sat propped against the headboard, her arms wrapped around knees she’d drawn up to her chest. When she saw the direction of his startled stare, she made a tsking sound and covered her knees with a sheet.

  “I deliberately aroused you each time I took blood from you to make your stasis engage more quickly and with more intensity.” His eyes—blue now, not the silver they’d been when he was aroused—held hers with an honesty she couldn’t deny.

  She jerked her head to the side as if he’d backhanded her and blinked her eyes rapidly to stem the tears that welled there.

  Seeing her dismay, he reached out a hand to her.

  But she shook her head in rejection. It was all a ploy. He doesn’t love me, she thought, then immediately added to herself, Of course he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t even know me. Just like I don’t love him. Of course I don’t. And I definitely don’t know him. But all that was beside the point. “You manipulated me, sexually,” she accused him.

  He looked as if he’d like to argue the point, but nodded instead. “I did.”

  His admission crushed her. No woman liked to know a man had been putting the moves on her for some ulterior purpose, not overwhelming attraction. “I’ve been so confused about what’s happening here. I can’t understand why I stay. Have you manipulated my mind, too?”

  “No, not specifically, but your brain is dazed by the Lucipire taint and the cleansing rituals. So, in some ways, I may have inadvertently altered your thinking. Just a tiny bit.” He held up a thumb and forefinger about an inch apart to demonstrate.

  Well, that does it! The jerk has stuck his wicked fingers not just in my libido but my mind, as well. “I hate that you’ve done this, Vikar. I trusted you.”

  He finished his water and tossed the empty plastic bottle on the floor with disgust. “I never lied to you. Whatever else you may accuse me of, dishonesty was never in play.”

  “That’s debatable,” she said. “I really want to leave here, Vikar. I need to be in my regular surroundings to clear my mind.”

  “It isn’t safe for you. Not only is your demon taint still there, though to a lesser degree, but the Mexican cartel is after you, too. Even your boss agrees with me that you should stay.”

  “Yeah, well, I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I’m a big girl. I got along fine before. I will in the future, too. Besides, I’ll take precautions.”

  “Like what?” he scoffed. “How will you repel Lucipires? With a fly swatter? Or that pistol you have in your luggage? Just so you know, regular bullets are as useless as throwing rice at a Lucipire.”

  Really? “Aren’t you being a little dramatic?”

  “You know I’m not. You saw what happened in that restaurant parking lot. You saw what happened to Harek, and he is a highly skilled warrior.”

  She nodded. The way Harek had looked when Vikar carried him in would stay in her mind forever. One arm clearly broken since it canted at an awkward angle midway between wrist and elbow. A deep wound in his thigh exposed by the torn fabric of his jeans, possibly caused by a sword. Skin lacerations. Fang marks. Bruises. On a human, those injuries taken as a whole would prove fatal. They still might, depending on what fatal meant to an already dead person.

  Luckily, they’d had Sigurd here, soon after their ritual blood healing. A physician, no less!

  “I live in a secure high-rise, Vikar. There’s a doorman, and dead bolt locks, and alarms.”

  “And how will you prevent a bullet from entering your heart when you leave your home?” He put a hand to his own heart. “I could not bear to have you taken by those evil creatures.”

  “It’s not your problem.”

  He shook his head. “You were sent here to me.” He held up a hand to halt her protests. “Hear me out, please. Mike influenced your employer to send you to Transylvania.”

  What? No! Never! That did not happen. “You’re delusional.”

  “Then, the moment I saw the fang marks on your neck and smelled your scent, I had no choice but to invite you inside.”

  “Invite? You are definitely delusional.”

  “From then onward, I have done only what was required of me. No, that is not true,” he conceded. “I have done more. I could not help myself.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Explain yourself.”

  He reached over and unclenched her fingers that were still clutching her knees. Taking both hands in his, he said, “You say you are confused. Well, you are not the only one. Ever since you arrived, my emotions have been banging against the walls, and, believe you me, Vikings do not do emotion well. I do not know if this is a test Mike is tossing my way, or a punishment of some kind.”

  Alex tried to pull her hands away, but he held fast. “I’m a punishment, like a whipping? Or a test, like a freakin’ angel SAT?”

  “You missay me. It would be a punishment if you entered my life, bringing it light and joy, and then left. The dark place where you’d leave me would be the cruelest punishment.”

  She could feel her anger fading. If I’m no longer angry, who knows what I’ll do? Jump his bones, probably. I can’t have that. “And the test part?”

  “Mayhap you are a temptation Mike sent to test my resistance to . . . um . . . uh . . . to you.”

  Stutter much, baby? “What you are trying so hard to avoid saying is that you equate me with sin . . . that you need to resist sin, i.e., me.”

  He shook his head. “You deliberately twist my words. Why can you not understand?”

  “Oh, I understand, all right. Bottom line: When are you going to let me leave?”

  He stared at her bleakly, raised both her hands to his mouth, where he kissed one set of knuckles, then the other, before setting her hands back on her lap. “My first inclination is to say never, but—”

  “Now see, Vikar, you say things like that so lightly. Women take such words seriously, but you toss them out like popcorn. How can you say that you might not want me to leave? What does that mean? In what capacity would I stay? As your lover? Or near-lover? Wife? Girlfriend? Friend friend? What does never mean to you?”

  His jaw dropped at her tirade.

  And Alex was mortified that she’d reacted so strongly. She was behaving like a teenager with her first crush.

  “It does not matter what I want. I suspect the decision will be taken out of my hands once Mike arrives.”

>   “And that will be when?”

  “About two weeks.”

  “And what about my wishes? Don’t I have any say in my future?”

  “You do. You will.”

  “I just don’t understand,” she said for about the hundredth time.

  “Trust me. Just for a little while longer,” he pleaded. The mistiness in his blue eyes might have been tears.

  And that was almost her undoing. “How can I? Especially after what happened here with your brother?”

  “I should have notified you first.”

  “Now there’s a left-handed apology. You aren’t sorry you did it, just that you failed to inform me ahead of time.”

  He blushed. The big brute actually blushed.

  “If I stay, and I’m not saying I will—Ben will have a heart attack if I leave without notifying him first—do you promise not to bring anyone else into the bed?”

  “I promise, if you will agree to let me further cleanse you once I am pure.”

  She nodded hesitantly. “How much longer is this blood thing going to last? I mean, how many more times?”

  “Only a few. I am being extra careful with you. Most times I can cleanse a sinner on one try.”

  “And then when I’m ‘clean’?”

  “And then I hope you will not commit that great sin you were . . . are . . . contemplating.”

  “Back to that again.”

  “We never got away from that. It has always been about the sin taint.”

  “There are evil people in this world, Vikar.”

  “You think I do not know this?”

  “I’m talking about human people. Ones who deserve to die.”

  He shook his head sadly at her. “That is not for you to decide.”

  “They took everything from me. Everything. They are monstrous . . . as monstrous as the demons you kill.”

  “That may very well be, but vengeance is not yours, sweetling. Yes, I know it is hard to accept, but you must. You must!”

  “If I stay, are you going to try to stop my writing a magazine article about everything I see?”

  He hesitated. “You can write whatever you want. Whether you can publish it remains to be seen. The matter is not up to me entirely.”

  “St. Michael the Archangel again?” she scoffed.

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, tell me this. Will I get to meet the guy?”

  “Unfortunately, I think you will.”

  “Why unfortunately?”

  “Your life will never be the same.”

  She started to laugh. Hysterically. “Oh, honey,” she said finally, using the edge of a sheet to wipe the tears off her face. “Meeting you has already altered my life forever.”

  Doing the devil’ s work . . .

  Chaos reigned down in Horror, but that was nothing new at Lucipire Central. Satan’s acolytes thrived on pandemonium.

  Jasper paced his cave lair with its new bank of computers set up to coordinate the Sin Cruise. What a job it had been for him to find ten geek Lucipires! The imps and hordlings claimed to be all thumbs . . . or claws . . . when it came to typing. And the mungs kept dripping slime onto the keyboards and shorting out the hard drives, so he’d had to sacrifice full demons, taking them from their regular trolling duties. But it was worth it. This would be the biggest event for mass annihilation ever planned by Lucipires.

  Even so, he could not ignore regular work. There were a dozen naked humans pinned to his life-size butterfly boards, a small start to replenishing his supply of playthings. “How’s it going?” he asked Sabeam, who was putting a final two-foot pin through his latest addition, a financier who had bilked hundreds of senior citizens out of their retirement money.

  Sabeam stared up at him through rheumy red eyes, fighting to control his lolling tongue that dripped drool. “This one is a fighter.” Ernie Randolph, the fiftysomething man, who was hardly recognizable without his thousand-dollar suit and Italian loafers, flailed widely, screaming with outrage at his fate.

  “Not for long,” Jasper predicted. “In the old days before modern torture technology, it took years to ‘ripen’ new Lucipires, to bring them to an understanding that they should reject God and all that He preached, and accept Satan as their savior. Today, humans are weak. They have low thresholds of pain,” he explained, though Sabeam should know this after four hundred years in his company, but then mungs were dull-headed betimes.

  “But some of our ‘recruits’ never reach that point,” Sabeam pointed out, “like that vangel who died from our tortures.”

  Jasper backhanded Sabeam for reminding him of that failure, but then he regretted his action when he had to wipe the poisonous slime off his knuckles. Drawing on his dwindling patience, he elaborated, “There is a fine line Lucipire torturers must follow, excruciating and unending, of course, but never too much at one time. Ah, well, we live and learn. Ha, ha, ha. Great cliché, that, about living.”

  “What’s a cliché?” Sabeam wanted to know.

  Jasper just rolled his red eyes.

  Before departing the curing area, Sabeam patted the man’s head. Not appreciating the comforting touch and too new to understand the consequences of his behavior, the fool spat a wad of mucus up at Sabeam.

  “Now, now, we cannot have that,” Sabeam said sweetly, then reached down and ran his sharp claws over the man’s flaccid penis, causing the man to arch up on his pin, screaming with pain.

  Sabeam patted the man’s head again after he fell backward to the butterfly board. This time the man did not spit.

  “One more thing I would show you before we leave,” Sabeam said, pride ringing in his voice. “Our arrival from last week is coming along nicely. It took only three days in the killing jars for her to quiet down.”

  It was the female serial killer from London who had run a human trafficking ring, specializing in children. Pedophiles had a special place in Jasper’s sick heart.

  Not unattractive by human standards, Lily Durant had long blonde hair spread out over the back of her display board, like strands of gold. The nipples on her round breasts were pulled upward to elongate them by piercing wires strung from the ceiling. Every few days, the wires were pulled tighter. Down below, between her spread legs, a vibrating twin phallus did its work inside her body, both holes. Semen ran from her mouth from the many Lucipires who were permitted to use her at will.

  The woman tried to struggle when she saw them approaching, no doubt fearing some new torture. Oh, there would be plenty of that, to be sure.

  “Please . . . please . . . let me go,” she pleaded.

  “Foolish split-tail!” Jasper said. “Do you not know you are ours forever? Soon you will be one of us.”

  Her green eyes went wild with distress.

  “Have you ever fucked a man with a tail, sweetheart?” he asked just before they left the chamber. “Let’s make a date, shall we? Eight tonight. Wait ’til you see the places a scaly tail can go.”

  Her screams followed them for some time.

  “Don’t you just love the sound of a Lucipire-in-training?” Jasper remarked to Sabeam.

  “Like choirs of angels singing,” Sabeam said, then covered his head with both hands to field Jasper’s blow.

  Finally, they came to the killing jars that held six new victims, along with two Lucipires, Gregori Petrov and his hordling consort Virgana Dorset, the ones who had returned last night from their unsuccessful encounter on a Canadian mountain with vangels. Jasper unlocked the last two latches and motioned for the Lucipires to follow them. The female, who’d been wounded and untreated thus far, limped badly, but knew better than to disobey orders or be slow to follow them. The male, a high haakai, hissed and raised his chin with anger over his treatment, but he, too, knew enough to do as he was told by his leader.

  Jasper entered his private chambers where hordlings were arranging wheeled racks of cruise wear clothing for his Lucipires to choose from for the upcoming event. He shooed them out, along with Sabeam, and walked into h
is office, sitting down behind a desk, not an easy task when a tail needed to be accommodated. He did not give Gregori or Virgana permission to sit, so they stood before him in the tattered, foul-smelling clothing they’d worn in battle. A faint hint of vangel blood clung to them as well, which pleased Jasper mightily.

  “A report, please,” he said to Gregori, but before he began, he told Virgana, “Go off and have your wounds treated. You are soiling my carpet.”

  Virgana ducked her head and left.

  “Now, sit, Greg, and tell me everything,” Jasper ordered in a more friendly fashion. The killing jar was a necessary punishment when a Lucipire failed to complete an assignment, but Gregori was a good soldier for Satan and deserved his respect. At one time, he had been a henchman for Ivan the Terrible . . . during his terrible period.

  “We went to Transylvania first—”

  “The vampire town in the United States?”

  Gregori nodded. “Just a bunch of people pretending to be vampires as a tourist trap.”

  “That Twilight series will be the death of us yet,” Jasper quipped. What is it with me and the jokes today?

  “At first, there seemed to be a strong scent of vangel in the area, but it proved false. Instead, we discovered a trail outside of the town leading in several different directions. A diversion. We soon tracked them to their hideout, not here in the United States but in Canada. We found not just vangels, but some of The Seven.”

  Jasper gasped and rubbed his hands together with relish. “This is good news. Very good news.”

  “Three of them, in all, along with a few other vangels. Breaking up our ranks, we managed to find them in Canada in a mountain hiding place.”

  “And?”

  “There was a fierce battle in which ten Lucipires were lost. Only Virgana and I escaped.” He bowed his head in shame.

  As well he should! But Jasper already knew of their failure and they had been punished.

  “But I smell vangel blood on you.”

  “One of The Seven was mortally wounded and was carried off by his brothers.”