Dracula's Desires by Linda Mercury

Author:Linda Mercury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2012-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Disgusted, Valerie placed her hands on her hips. Pocket dimensions were supposed to be horrifying. Perhaps a steamy overgrown jungle swarming with deadly fauna. Or a mass grave crammed with the rotting bodies of her dead.

But the glossy, expensive shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas? She sheathed her machete. Shopping was not a torment. At least the place was pretty.

The desert sun gilded the caryatids who held up the ceiling into lushly robed angels. The domed ceiling of the three-story mall was painted with Renaissance-style beasts and dancers. Their vivid colors were reflected into the spotless plate-glass windows. The spiraling escalator echoed lightly against the empty hall.

An eight-hundred-dollar bra and panty set pranced in front of a curtain of flawless crystals. Dresses of gleaming silk and intricate hand-stitched embroidery draped on tufted seats as though waiting for a lover. Everything luxurious and sensual that had been forbidden by her when she had to be a man. The desire for such things had been beaten out of her by her parents long ago. Besides, her mission to punish war criminals had no place for expensive and delicate things that would get torn as she climbed mountains and decapitated monsters.

Resolute, she turned away, only to fall headlong into . . . lipstick.

Orange and brown and red and pink. Glossy. Matte. Sheer. Semi-sheer. Sponges on sticks filled with sticky, shiny gloss. Tubes of color. Pots and brushes and glitter.

Clank. Her machete beat against glass. Valerie shuddered to a halt, her hips pressed hard against a display case and her fingers coated in slippery color. She wiped her hands and stood at disdainful attention.

“Lipstick? You thought you could distract me with fucking cosmetics?”

Disgusted, she kicked open one of the mall’s exit doors.

Instead of the concrete river of Las Vegas Boulevard, she landed on a plain surrounded by stark mountains. Dry yellow dust coated her shoes. This was the interior of the Anatolian peninsula.

Not here. Not this hell.

“Mom?” the child asked.

“Don’t watch this.” Valerie cradled her belly as though she could blindfold the baby. No innocent should see what was about to happen.

“Tell me why.”

Valerie did not know much about child raising. But then and there she swore she would answer all her child’s questions, no matter how difficult.

“I was eleven. I had been sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court by my parents. It went . . . badly.”

Living through it had turned her into a hate-filled killer. Watching helplessly, unable to stop the past, was true torment.

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