Page 23 of Sins of the Heart
There was nothing there. Nothing behind those eyes.
Not a flicker of emotion.
Her skin prickled and the fine hairs on her forearms
stood upright. The silence stretched until she thought
it would break her.
“You killed them.” Nice. She was mistress of the obvious.
“It’s what I do. Kill the evildoer. Harvest the darksouls.” He didn’t sound contrite. He didn’t soundany-
thing.To him, the words were simply a statement of fact.
The evildoer?“What are you?” she whispered before she could stop herself. “An angel of death?”
That earned her the barest whisper of a smile.
“Death, yes.” The smile edged tighter. “Angel, no.”
He lifted his hands. They glistened beneath the naked
overhead bulb, wet and dark. He held the two hearts, one
in each fist. Like he was a butcher holding fresh-cut meat.
Oh, God.If she lived through this, she was never going
to eat steak again. She swore it. On her life, she swore it.
She saw then that he had a battered leather pouch
slung across one shoulder, and he opened it to drop the
hearts inside. Then he squatted beside Marcie’s body
and reached into the hole he’d torn in her chest. He
frowned, reached deeper and rooted around a bit.
When he pulled his hand free, he was clutching…
smoke.Smoke the color of an oil slick, the texture of
it simultaneously amorphous and greasy. It writhed
and twined up around his forearm, then down again,
only to slither away from his skin and ooze up, up, until
it hovered just above his shoulder like a bloated black
balloon tethered by a gossamer string so bright it hurt
to look at it.
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