Demon Night

at all.”
    He smiled, and she smoothed her thumbs over the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Oh, it’s an ugly little thing,” he drawled. “But they have their charms. And I reckon that one sings ‘ Nessun dorma ’ on his way back to his cave and his belly full of mosquitoes.”
    She couldn’t help but picture that, and fell against him, laughing. He was still smiling when she finally got ahold of herself, and her gaze fell to his scar. Her amusement faded.
    “You going to kiss me now, Miss Charlie?”
    “No.” Her fingers traced the line of his upper lip. “I was just thinking—Caleb gave you this?”
    He stood motionless beneath her touch. “That he did.”
    “When you were in the desert.”
    “Yes.”
    She hesitated for a moment. “What happened between the two of you and Sammael?”
    He brushed her hair behind her ear. “You’re wondering how it is that I like it out here, if I also died out here.”
    “No. I can see why you enjoy it. But because there is a connection, it made me think of what Jake told me about you…and what he didn’t tell me. But maybe I shouldn’t have brought your brother up.”
    Ethan shook his head. “It’s no problem, Miss Charlie. And I’ll give you the choice between the long version and the short one. Just remember I ain’t much of a storyteller—”
    “Long,” she said.
    “Well, hell,” he said, but she didn’t hear any real displeasure behind it. He turned, began walking again, and she fell into step beside him. “All right, then. So you know my ma and da bought a place outside Leadville?”
    “Yes.” She watched him pick up a small stone, skip it across the sand as if it were water. “After your dad got out of a P.O.W. camp.”
    Ethan’s brows rose, and he glanced over at her. “Jake dug that up?” At her nod, he chuckled a little and continued, “Hell. Well, yes. And it changed my da, so as he couldn’t tolerate being hemmed in or the crush of people in the city. So we headed on out west.”
    “That must have been hard on your mom.”
    “I reckon so. But you’d never have known it.” Ethan shook his head, smiling. “You saw my da at Cole’s, Charlie. So it won’t come as a surprise to you when I tell you she was an Amazon of a woman. Both Caleb and I favored her—though Caleb, he wasn’t quite so tall.”
    Charlie pulled at his dangling suspender. “She must have been a handsome, sexy woman.”
    “You hush.” He grinned at her. “And she sure as hell was. My da, he loved her more than any woman had ever been loved, and she did him more than any man. I figure that’s what got them through some of those early days. We had a big spread of land, and didn’t do much with it—we had money, so we didn’t need to work it to live off of—but still, them first years were hard, with a lot of adjusting. And then Ma took on our schooling after Caleb and I ran into some trouble in town.”
    “What kind?”
    “Just the kind that boys get into when they talk in a way that sets them apart from the other boys,” Ethan said. “We weren’t so big then, and we got into one fight after another. Usually lost, too, due to numbers. So Caleb and I both figured if we couldn’t beat ’em, we’d just fit in—but the first time she heard us talking like that, my ma took us out of the school.” He slanted a glance at her, then skipped another rock across the sand. “Of course, Caleb and I still practiced, and it came in right handy when I was working later. I couldn’t disguise my height, but I could cultivate the image of a dude with all of the newsletters and stories that were spread about me—and so when I rode into a town looking for someone, dressed like this and talking real simple-like, folks often caught on too late as to whom they was speaking to, and I got the information I needed before they clammed up.”
    Charlie stopped, and sized him up. “I’m trying to imagine you on a horse. I just can’t. But the wings look right.”
    “The wings suit me fine.” He sent another rock skipping, and looked back at her, the humor slipping away from his expression. “In those years, most everyone near us was invested in mining somehow—either working the mines, or depending on the money from it for their businesses. One company owned by a man named Billings approached my ma and da, and there was some prospecting done on the property. They found one hell of a lode running up our side of the mountain. Billings made an offer, even