Read Online Blood of Angels by Marie Treanor - Free Book Online Page B

smoothed his hair away from his face. Asleep, he looked like a little boy exhausted after a busy day’s play.
    It came as a bit of a shock to her, but she still liked István.
    ****
     
    Of course that didn’t stop her going through his pockets.
    Wallet, phone, stake, a small instrument that she took to be a vampire detector, and a slightly larger instrument with lots of tiny holes and dials. Using her own mobile phone, she took a photograph of the last and picked up the final object, which looked like some kind of fishing reel or sewing reel, except it had two buttons on it. Insatiably curious, she pressed one and saw the reel whizz as the thread—it was thin nylon rope, not thread—propelled itself across the room and buried itself in the bedroom wall. An instant later, it flew out of her hand and clattered against the wall.
    Glancing uneasily at István, she went to retrieve it. The thread was still held somehow into the wall. When she picked up the reel and pressed the other button, a tiny claw disengaged from the wall and the rope wound itself back in under a second.
    Angyalka began to smile. So that was how he got up the stairs so fast. She’d sensed hunter when the trouble was in full swing—right before György had returned to deal with it. And only seconds later, István had walked in on his damaged, still-recovering legs. He’d obviously been making good use of his time when he couldn’t walk.
    She put all the things back in his pockets and laid his clothes in a neat pile on her dressing table chair. Then she left the bedroom and glided downstairs to the club. The human staff had all gone home, leaving the club in readiness for the next shift—tomorrow’s daytime customers, they thought. In reality the next customers would be in the second part of the night—vampires only. The hour off between was like Ireland’s once-famous “holy hour,” the one hour in the day when the pubs were shut. The Angel shut for an hour at two a.m., cleaned up, and reopened at three, without the loud music. Sometimes they didn’t get any customers, but they were always open.
    Béla was pacing about in his leather jacket, desperate to get out and hunt. But he paused long enough to say, “Who killed him so close to us?”
    “Um, I did,” Angyalka admitted.
    Béla frowned. “Well, what did you kick him outside for? It’d have been easier to get rid of him from the gallery.”
    “I didn’t kick him outside. He was outside. With his pals. They had another go at our hunter friend.”
    Béla stared. “What, and you went outside and bit him?”
    “I did,” Angyalka said, her pride only half mocking. “I fought for the hunter—should score us some brownie points to stock up on.”
    “Not if you did it in front of the hunter,” Béla said dryly. “They’re ungrateful bastards to a man and would rather eat their own stinking socks than admit a debt to a vampire. Shouldn’t you tell him ?”
    “Saloman? Probably,” she said with deliberate vagueness. She gestured to Béla to carry on. “It’ll be fine.”
    He got all the way to the door before he glanced back at her. Béla was the only being, besides the hunter István now, who knew she didn’t go out. He often brought her prey, but he never asked questions.
    “How did it feel?” he asked curiously. “To go out in the night again?”
    An echo of the awful fear and helplessness hit her so that it took an effort of will not to hold on to the bar for support.
    “It felt shit,” she said truthfully. Béla’s lips stretched, and then he was gone.
    Angyalka enjoyed the peace of the “graveyard shift” as much as she enjoyed the noise and excitement of the early evening. For decades, there had been no need of a bodyguard during the predawn spell: not only was Angyalka known in the vampire community to be fast and fierce, but to be barred from the club had become distinctly uncool for any vampire. So György’s chief function was checking for humans outside while