Rising Darkness (Game of Shadows #1)(87)

It was like sucking nectar from a flower. Her traumatized spirit, separated so abruptly from its body, hovered near the ceiling of the restaurant before it fled with a wail.

He let go of her neck. The leggy blonde body collapsed to the floor.

Smiling, he looked around. The other seven occupants were too shocked by the poltergeist activity to have realized something terrible had just happened to Ruth.

A couple of teenagers pounded at the front doors, trying to get them open. The father had shoved his son underneath a table. As various items flew through the air, the father batted them away with his hands. Hissing smoke billowed from the kitchen. The short order cook screamed as boiling liquids splashed over him. A steak knife struck one of the men at the counter. The wounded man yanked the knife from his neck. Blood jetted from the puncture. The other man slapped the counter towel over the wound in an effort to staunch the bleeding.

Yes, it was self-indulgent of him. He supposed he shouldn’t succumb to temper tantrums. You could look at it as a waste of energy when he was already stretched too thin. Still he felt that, given the strength of his anger, he’d restrained himself rather admirably. Besides, Ruth’s life force sang in his veins, a potent aperitif. And he had more than enough victims in the restaurant with which to replenish himself.

He had always identified with the fox in a henhouse. Like the fox, he might be able to satisfy his need with just a couple of chickens, but once he got going he preferred to slaughter the whole flock for the sheer frenzied love of murder.

After he had slaked his appetite, the silence of a tomb fell in the restaurant. He pulled out his gun and shot the bodies. Then he called one of his drones at Quantico. Soon Mary and Michael would become the FBI’s prime suspects in the Michigan massacre, which would be discovered by a passing state patrol car within the next half hour.

It always paid to have corruption in high places.