Page 3 of Mortal Heart

Ronan turned just in time to see a burly, bearded man take a swing at a shorter, dark-haired man holding an empty mug that had probably contained the beer now soaking the burly man’s clothing. The shorter man backpedaled to avoid the punch and crashed into a table, spilling the drinks of the three other men sitting there. The men at the table jumped to their feet and started swinging.

Several patrons sitting at the bar burst out laughing. Others jeered or egged the fighters on. Mireille swore and ran for the back office, presumably to get Carl, the bar owner.

Ronan sighed and turned back to his drink. As he did, he caught sight of the blonde woman watching the scuffle, her chin in her hand. He interpreted her expression as the mild interest of someone who’d seen lots of better fights but figured they might as well watch this one for lack of other, more interesting entertainment.

One of the brawlers took an impressive uppercut to the chin and stumbled back toward the blonde woman’s booth. Just before he collided with her table, she raised her right foot, planted the sole of her boot right in his lower back, and sent him sprawling. Ronan got the distinct impression that was a move she’d used a number of times before. His interest ratcheted up another couple of notches.

She glanced up and caught Ronan’s eye before her sharp blue gaze flicked to something going on behind him. The back of his neck prickled.

He half-turned and caught a badly thrown bottle less than a second before it smashed into the side of his head. The man who’d thrown it blinked at him, stupefied. Even as drunk as he was, the bottle-thrower seemed to realize Ronan shouldn’t have been able to catch that bottle, much less sense it coming. The bottle-thrower backpedaled into another man who’d picked up a chair, probably intending to use it as a weapon. Both men went down in a tangle.

Ronan spotted the demon minions get up from the bar and head for the back door. They probably figured they could duck out during the fight and avoid paying their bar tab.Nice. Just when he thought his opinion of them couldn’t possibly get any lower.

Carl, Mireille, and a man Ronan didn’t recognize finally emerged from the back office. Carl and the other man carried baseball bats that looked like they’d seen their share of action.

“Cut this shit out!” Carl shouted at the brawlers, brandishing his bat. “What’s going on, Gerald? Logan? You assholes forget you were on your last warning?” He and his male companion started breaking up the fight, applying judicious whacks of their bats to the brawlers who were too drunk or defiant to stand down immediately. Many patrons seemed as entertained by this part of the proceedings as the fight itself.

Meanwhile, Ronan stuck some cash under his glass and ambled to the front door as if he’d simply had enough for one night. Mireille already had a broom and dustpan in hand. She’d be busy with cleanup at least long enough for him to follow the minions out to the parking lot. After he got some answers out of them, he’d have to choose whether to continue babysitting duty or go bust some heads.

Just before he went outside, he glanced at the corner booth. The blonde had vanished like smoke. The only signs of her presence were an empty glass, cash on the table, and the man she’d kicked, who sat slumped in a chair massaging his back. Dirt in the shape of a boot print marked his T-shirt in the area of his left kidney.

The moment he’d locked gazes with the blonde, Ronan had figured out two things. The first was that she knew who he was, somehow, though strangely he had no recollection of ever meeting her. That raised the disturbing possibility that he’d suffered some kind of memory loss during his imprisonment.Yet another reason to hate Michael, he thought.

His second—and much more pleasant—realization was the blonde’s interest in him wasn’t entirely professional. She’d tried to hide it, but he knew that hungry look. He’d seen it often enough over the millennia in the faces of human women and men he’d encountered, and in the mirror during the centuries since his Fall. And despite his anger, bitterness, and hollowness, his body responded in a primal way.

Michael had always mocked humans’ desires for food and sex as pathetic pleasures of the flesh, but long ago Ronan had figured out the truth behind Michael’s sneering. It was the concepts ofneedingandwantinganything that the archangel of archangels dismissed as beneath contempt for one as great as himself. Such a being desired nothing, or so Michael wanted others to believe. The truth was, Michael needed and wanted many things—most especially the obedience and devotion of all angels.

Twice Ronan had disobeyed Michael’s laws, and for all his faithful service he’d never shown true devotion. In either punishment or retribution, Michael had sentenced him to live a long mortal life, subject to pain, hunger, grief, want, and need.

Ronan wanted the blonde, and that was as much a part of Michael’s punishment as his bound wings and unusable celestial sword. And with that thought, Ronan’s desire shriveled on the vine.

He still needed to find out how she knew him, so he could ascertain whether he’d lost memories. Once he had that answer, he had no more use for her.

“Wait, Johnny!” Mireille called.

Ignoring her, Ronan shoved the door open and went outside, letting it slam closed behind him.

2

ARKADY

Arkady Woodall,former PsyOps special forces soldier turned private investigator, sat cross-legged on the hood of a two-tone rust bucket in the parking lot of the Rusty Pelican. She took a swig from a bottle of mid-range tequila and smiled in the way her business partner Alice Worth called “predatory.” Generally that smile made people with even the slightest sense of self-preservation run in the opposite direction.

She didn’t want her prey to run, though, so she switched to a much friendlier expression, let her hair down from her ponytail, and waited.

As for the names of the driver and passenger of this car, she’d taken a page from Alice’s book of standard operating procedures and given them nicknames: Ren and Stimpy. Really she supposed it was insulting to the cartoon characters they were named after, but it was the first pair of names that popped into her head when she spotted them and it had stuck in her brain.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long for the dipshits to appear. They’d snuck out the bar’s rear door without paying their tab and then gone into the trees out back to take a piss and hide long enough to make sure the coast was clear. That had given her plenty of time to get situated before they appeared in the parking lot.

Ren, the driver, stood five-ten, looked to be about thirty, and had shaved his head to disguise a receding hairline. Stimpy seemed a few years younger, about six-two and wiry, with long hair that would benefit from a cut and some conditioner.

When they saw her, they both licked their lips without seeming the least bit apprehensive about her presence, or angry that her ass had dented their car’s hood. She supposed they’d probably stolen the car. She’d also taken off her shirt and sat drinking tequila straight from the bottle in tight jeans and her second-best bra. She had it on good authority she looked really fucking fantastic in this bra. In her experience, men’s brains ceased to function when they saw a fine pair of tits.

The dipshits didn’t seem to have a whole lot of brains to begin with. They grinned from ear to ear as they approached. So far, so good.

“Hey,” she said in a breathy voice.

“Hey yourself, sugar.” Ren punched his buddy’s bicep and chuckled. “Looks like we’ve got some company for the evening.”

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