Mimi's Demons

Chapter 81: How to Train Your Father

Mimi recoiled. "This—this has to do with demons?"

"According to whoever is killing these men." Duke closed the picture, pulling up one that was less gruesome. The man's slashed neck was hard to see because his head was turned and the blood had poured off the step behind him. For all it looked like, he'd just passed out on someone's doorstep.

Duke circled the cursor around the sigil carved into the stone step next to the man.

"All these victims were killed with a single, deep slash of varying widths and depths and left with this sigil by them." Didn't take a genius for him to guess who was trying to get his attention. It was rather overt. But since this was Mimi, "This doesn't mean it's necessarily the work of demons."

"How?"

"Well, if a serial killer decides to let loose in my turf, I'm obligated to do something about it. For every killer caught by the law there is a lord of the underworld handing him over."

Despite looking a bit pale, Mimi snorted. "Lord of the underworld."

"What? It's what I am."

"No you're not. You're a fancy suit who sits in a chair and looks scary why other people pass around drugs, steal stuff, and shoot anyone who annoys you."

...Duke took offense to that.

"I worked hard to get here," he started.

"Your dad died and handed it over."

"After I proved myself." And just to rail it home, he pulled up his shirt sleeve up to his shoulder. "You see these muscles? Do you know anyone outside of Omen who has muscles like these? What do you think I use them for?"

"Ew, gross."

"Gross?!"

"Papa's showing off his muscles, you're such a dork," her nose was scrunched up cutely in an effort to not laugh.

He found himself imitating her expression and chuckling through his teeth.

He went to close out of the folder, but Mimi stopped him.

"Can I see the rest?" she asked.

His smile slipped away. "Now you're the one being gross."

"No, it's not for that. I've seen plenty of stuff like that before, besides the guts one—that was cool—but like, blood and stuff—no, I want to see if there's anything else."

"Oh? Playing detective?"

Her humor gave way to a familiar scowl. "I'm not playing! I know demons, so maybe there's something else!"

Duke already knew it was, indeed, a demon, a particular one he and the one in his basement were keeping an eye out for, but Mimi looked so serious with her one wheat pigtail now molded into a cork screw curl from his playing. And, for all he knew, maybe she would see something.

So he opened up the first picture and let her peruse it.

Yeah, this would probably disappoint all the authors of the parenting books Omen dropped onto his desk. But that's why Mimi was his daughter and no one else's.

They were halfway through the pictures, all which Mimi circled the sigils with her fingertip on his screen (he didn't mind the fingerprints she left behind), when a knock came at the door Mimi had left open halfway.

A head wearing a no nonsense black turban poked in. One of Omen's men who'd healed from Omen's second purging after the kidnapping. It was a face Duke readily recognized, even if he didn't bother to remember his name.