Page 2 of Reapers Don’t Ride

“You’re an angel.” I sucked on my blood bag, wishing I could force the words back. I should observe, not engage.

He nodded, and then I noticed the white at his temples, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and the scent of responsibility and power that rested on his brow.

“Because you have wings,” I added, like it was possible to miss the enormous things.

“Actually, because I have angel blood. It’s the blood, not the wings, that makes the angel. Won’t you sit?” He gestured with one hand towards the small gray chair identical to the one he was sitting in, but he made his look like a magnificent throne.

I shook my head. “That won’t be necessary. Whatever you want, the answer is no.” I sipped my blood and tried not to notice his heavenly scent. Literally, angels always smelled the most delicious of all possible blood donors, like a specialty bread shop for humans that always wafted appetizing aromas.

He leaned back and tilted his head slightly, thinking over my answer as though it weren’t as simple and straightforward as possible. “Your records are very thorough on the many murders you committed, including details that are entirely unnecessary.”

“I know,” I said, then took another slow sip. I was getting to the end of my stale blood, and I wanted it to last through this 1interview. My skin was starting to itch, a psychological reaction to being in great danger from a creature that would take a great deal of luck and skill to kill. Also, I wouldn’t kill him because he was entirely uncorrupted. I could smell corruption, and his skin smelled of determination, minty toothpaste and cinnamon, not corruption.

He smiled slightly. “You aren’t curious why I came all this way to see you? I might be able to get you out of jail.”

“I’m done making deals.” That was the raw, unvarnished truth. My first deal had been with a demon who had owned me for almost a hundred years. He’d agreed to the deal thanks to the traces of angelic I had in my blood. Tralcon was obsessed with corrupting angels, and there I was, smelling angelic enough to tempt him. I’d traded that master for Mr. Good, the lesser of two evils, bound to his knife and his will so that I could take that knife and end the demon. The second deal was by far the more palatable, but that wasn’t saying much.

He nodded slightly. “Then let us talk of redemption.”

I bared my teeth in a smile and made some sound that might have been a laugh if I weren’t an undead monster. “I’m a vampire. There is no redemption for me.”

His brow twitched. “Spoken like you believe it as a truth. But I’m an angel. Redemption is for everyone.”

“Angels are delusional.” I certainly had been.

He smiled, and for a second I almost choked on my blood. He was beautiful, holy, and terrifying, eyes lighting with an inner flicker of heavenly gold that could consume this entire prison into a glob of burning beauty until it melted into the sea. Perhaps I shouldn’t insult angels while I was sitting across from the most dangerous one I’d ever seen.

“I’ve killed angels,” I said, like I didn’t understand the threat he represented to me. I did. But being destroyed by an angel would be quick and painless.

“You wrote down several angels you claimed to have killed in the last hundred years, all of whom had left the ranks of the HOST’s and were involved in far less holy work.”

“Does it matter if they were corrupt when I killed them when, according to you, they could all be redeemed?”

“Did you begin on the path of light and then choose to turn to darkness and evil?”

I stared at him. That’s exactly what I’d done. I’d turned to the epitome of darkness and evil in Tralcon the demon, when I’d made a deal, selfishly, to save the life of my fiancé. “Everyone in this prison started out innocent.”

“And your parents?”

I sucked on my blood bag, giving him my flattest look. I wasn’t going to talk about my parents. It wasn’t any of his business that I’d never met my father, not when he’d abandoned my mother during the war in the old country before she moved across the sea to find something better. She could have stayed and waited for him, or she could build a new life for her baby. Those memories before I turned were foggy and precious, even after my mother died, when I’d lived my uneventful life as a clerk in a small bookshop next to a bakery.

“You’re so open about your murders and so closed about everything else,” the angel mused, rubbing his chin.

“There is nothing else. Are we done here? I have my cell to get back to.”

He opened the folder on the table to a picture of the most gruesome death I’d seen in a very long time, then leaned back, studying my reaction. I moved towards the table, leaning over to pore over the details of the image, pushing it aside to look at others. Five scenes with multiple pictures of each, and every scene in the precise style of my old demon master, Tralcon, when he was summoning strength, growing his followers, feeding the evil inside of him.

“How old are these?” I demanded, looking up at the angel to glare into those dangerous eyes, my own probably glowing red like the coals of the underworld.

“They all occurred in the past year. If you don’t care about redemption, what about vengeance? You worked for a demon for a very long time. I found your name when I was researching this particular case, all of these deaths. You killed Tralcon, but demons don’t always stay dead.”

I dropped into the chair, going over the pictures even though I’d already memorized them down to the smallest detail. I’d known that today was ill-omened, but I hadn’t imagined that the worst possible scenario had come about. It had taken everything to kill him the first time. But I’d do it again.

“You need me to help you destroy the demon threat,” I said clearly, conveying as much confidence as possible. However, if he hadn’t stayed dead, how could I be assured in my capacity to deal death? How could I kill him again? You didn’t find a cursed ruby blade capable of killing a demon every day. “No one knows him as well as I do, and he’ll be looking for me to take back what’s his. You can use me as a killer as well as use me as bait. You’ve seen my record. I don’t kill unless forced, and never harm innocents. I’m not a threat to the greater good, but this demon is a threat to everything. At the rate he’s going, he’ll be full-power before the year is out, and then…”

He held up a hand, shaking his head. “You don’t have to convince me that you’d be an asset. That’s why I’m here, Miss… You didn’t put down a name.”

“They call me Ruby. That’s good enough.”