Kiss of Pride Read Free

Jasper wished he were.
    Still, Jasper nodded, knowing that he had no choice but to give up his collection soon. The last time had been two hundred years ago. This latest delivery was long overdue. “Grieves me, it does, to release my ‘babies,’ only to start all over. It will take us twice . . . no, thrice as long . . . to replenish the supply, what with the vangels hindering our efforts.” Vangels were vampire angels that Michael the Archangel had created specifically to fight Jasper’s legions.
    He could not think at the moment of Michael, who had once been his friend. If he did, he would fall into the pit of despair that had held him the first hundred years of his exile.
    Instead, Jasper gazed fondly around him at the life-size killing jars that held the newly dead human souls who fought wildly against the glass sides, to no avail. Once subdued, they were placed on display slabs with a two-foot pin through the heart holding them down. Like butterflies, they were, especially when they flailed their arms and legs in a wing fashion. Undead human butterflies that fought their confinement, eyes wide with horror at their fate. Jasper’s own personal human butterfly collection. Playthings, really, that he liked to take out from time to time and torture. Thousands of them.
    Most special of all was one of the few vampire angels they’d been able to capture, and that only a lowly ceorl, David, who was stretched out on the rack at the moment whilst imps and hordlings, Jasper’s foot soldiers of grotesque appearance characterized by oozing pustules, danced about the body, piercing the skin with white-hot spears, wrapping barbed wire around the always erect phallus, jamming odious objects up the anus, stuffing imp offal in the mouth. “Good work, Fiendal,” he said, patting one of the hordlings on the head as he passed. “Do not go too far, though, lest the vangel get accustomed to the pain.”
    Fiendal nodded, his excessively long tongue lolling out with dripping drool.
    Jasper continued his pacing, trying to think. As he walked, fury turned his face into icy shards that flaked off like scales. His eyes glowed bloodred, his fangs hung down almost to his chin, and his tail dragged behind him on the stone floor. He hated that his once-renowned beauty could be turned into this travesty of ugliness. Oh, he could transform himself into the most beauteous of humans, male or female, when prowling the earth. But this monstrous carcass was his true self now. And he blamed Michael for this most odious fate.
    Long ago, before the world was created, he had been one of the chosen archangels until he’d been expelled from Heaven, along with Lucifer and all the rest of his rebellious followers. And it had been Michael, a fellow archangel, who had been the one to kick their unholy butts out of the celestial presence of God. Forevermore.
    Now Michael was after him again.
    For centuries Jasper had been sending out his special creations, demon vampires, to the earth to bring in more doomed human souls in a faster, more efficient fashion than just waiting— ho-hum — for bad people to die. Horror was just a way station on the journey to Hell, but it was Jasper’s own special playground, and now Michael threatened to take even that away from him by creating vampire angels to fight him. At the same time, Satan was demanding his due.
    “We cannot continue at our present pace, one soul at a time. We must needs speed up the process. Bring in hundreds, no, thousands of doomed souls at one time.”
    “Like 9/11?”
    “Holy Hades, no! God sent legions of His angels to Manhattan afore we could even arrive. Instead of Satan or I or any of the Lucipires being able to grab them, angels led them right and left to that holy place of which we do not speak. There were so many feathers flying about that day, it was a wonder the news media did not notice.”
    “Smoke,” Sabeam remarked.
    “Huh?”
    “The feathers were hidden by the smoke,”