Demon Night

don’t imagine so, Miss Angie. She’s just been turned.”
    Cora slipped into a silk robe, but didn’t bother to tie it before sinking onto one of the elegant sofas and resting her right foot up on the cushions. “Word is you slew a handful of rogue vampires a few evenings back. That have anything to do with it?”
    Ethan had no idea how word spread when there hadn’t been anyone but him, Sammael, and the nephil as witnesses—but it always seemed to spread, right quick. “Yes’m.”
    Angie slid onto the sofa alongside Cora, pillowed her cheek on the other woman’s ample belly. “You see, Manny, that’s what you should be doing. I could get excited if I was with someone who acts like a leader instead of just calling himself one.”
    Ethan suppressed his grin; these women could work Manny over better than his fists could, but it wouldn’t do Ethan good if it clammed Manny up. “I ain’t much of one, Miss Angie. I’m just doing my job,” Ethan said before he turned to Manny. “I got a few questions about Vladimir and Katya, and you’ll need to be warning your community about a new kind of demon in town. He wears black feathered wings, and he’s targeting vampires.”
    Manny’s brow creased. “Why?”
    “Don’t rightly know—except that he killed one of those rogues, turning her upside down and slashing her throat open to drain her. And he’d have gone after another last night.” Ethan frowned; Manny’s thumb had begun working the ring around his middle finger, and the vampire was darting uneasy glances at the two women. “That sound familiar to you, Manny?”
    Manny clenched his teeth, his brows shooting skyward as he gestured with his head to a door leading out of the room. Cora and Angie didn’t take his hint to leave, and a moment later, Ethan was fighting back impatience and following the vampire into the kitchen.
    If the bastard hadn’t been naked, Ethan might have already been laying into him, but he sure as hell didn’t feel like starting off his day by touching anything Manny had on display. Instead, he just stopped in the middle of the room and breathed slow and long. The counters weren’t needed for food preparation, and either Cora or Angie had filled them with long rows of flower beds. The room smelled of sweet perfume and rich potting soil.
    Manny put the spell up at the door, then sucked the blood from his finger, his mouth in a sullen frown. “Drifter, man, why you gotta do that? Coming here asking about Vladimir and Katya, then letting Cora and Angie know it wasn’t me that killed them.”
    Ethan didn’t let his surprise show. He’d suspected Manny hadn’t slain the couple, but he hadn’t thought it was connected to the nephilim. Letting his instincts guide him, Ethan hardened his voice and said, “So you wasn’t ever going to tell me that’s how you found them—tortured and bled out?”
    His mouth twisting, Manny walked over to a flower bed and snapped off the head of a tulip. “For ten years I was their enforcer, always doing what they asked, and coming home to, ‘You’re the strongest, Manny, why don’t we live in a place like that?’ You know what that does to a man, Drifter?”
    Apparently, it made him whine a whole lot. “You found them here?”
    Manny pointed to the corner of the kitchen. “Right over there.”
    “Anything out of place? Broken?”
    “This table knocked over. If I hadn’t smelled the blood, I wouldn’t have realized anything was wrong until I was on them.”
    It must have killed them quickly, then. No time to fight. And the kitchen was situated in the center of the house. Had the nephil shape-shifted to be let in, and come after them then? “But you never saw it.”
    “No.” Manny hesitated. “You gonna tell the girls?”
    Ethan figured they’d always known. Not what had killed Katya and Vladimir, just that it hadn’t been Manny—and the brief conversation they’d had outside the kitchen likely clued them in on the what , too. “No. But you tell them if they encounter something they ain’t sure about, they should get off the streets and behind the spell as quick as they can.”
    “All right.” Manny nodded. “That all?”
    “No.” Ethan pulled a picture of Mark Brandt in from his cache. “You seen this one anytime in the last year?”
    Manny studied it, shook his head. “No.”
    Ethan replaced the photo with the senator’s. “What about him?”
    Nervousness spilled from Manny’s psyche before he began blocking