Carnal Sin

by Allison Brennan

  Rafe turned to Julie. “You said that Wendy changed the ritual on Tuesday?”

  Julie nodded. “We wanted to give Kali more power so she wouldn’t leave after one, um, soul. I thought that if she didn’t get Grant last night she’d go back to the underworld, but Wendy said she’s still here and stronger than before. She nearly broke out of the spirit trap last night!”

  “Don’t we know it,” Moira murmured. “Rafe, they had to have trapped the demon Lust. We knew it was Lust, but didn’t know how or why it was here. Now we do.”

  She turned to Julie. “Get out. I don’t trust you, and we have to figure out how to save the man you claim to love so much you planned to kill him.”

  Rafe pulled Moira out to the balcony and whispered, “We can fight this thing. Especially since it’s trapped in a body.”

  “We tried it last night, but it didn’t work. We’re not dealing with a succubus—we’re facing one of the Seven. I think it’s too powerful to be trapped in the chalice—remember what Jackson said? The demon goes back through the portal it came from. Lust has no connection to the chalice. I think it’s like a, a—” She couldn’t think of the word.

  “A red herring.”

  “Yeah. Maybe Lust got trapped because of the spell, and is required to fulfill the terms of the agreement in order to be free.” Moira blanched. “When that happens, it’s loose.”

  “We have to find it before sunset.”

  “If we can believe her.” She glanced through the half-closed door at Julie. She sat slumped in a chair, head in her hands. She looked beaten and defeated. But Moira didn’t feel an ounce of pity. She had brought it on herself.

  Rafe said, “You know as well as I do that most rituals are most effective at night.”

  “I don’t trust her.”

  “She wants to save Grant Nelson. Moira—I don’t trust her completely either, but she can find out who the demon is possessing. If we have that information, we can set a trap. We can control where Grant Nelson is at sunset.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then we need to weaken it, just like we did with Envy.”

  “How?”

  Rafe shuddered. “We’ll find out from Anthony.”

  “And Rico. He’ll have some tricks up his sleeve, I’m sure.”

  Rafe didn’t want to call Rico, because he feared that it was Moira’s life that Rico would put on the line. But Rafe had no choice. Especially if he couldn’t get ahold of Anthony. “Does this sound like a workable plan?” he asked Moira.

  She nodded.

  They stepped back into the room.

  “I don’t understand,” Julie lamented. “For five years we’ve been prosperous, we’ve never had any problems, no one ever died, but then Nadine—”

  “No one died? What about the men you killed?”

  “I mean, nobody who didn’t deserve it.”

  “Get out.”

  “No! Please, you must help me. Help me save Grant!”

  Moira felt Julie silently working a spell. She held out her dagger to reflect any energy sent her way. “Don’t even try it, or I’ll slit your throat.”

  Julie looked stunned. “How’d you know?”

  “Like I’m going to tell you that.” She said to Rafe, “We need to find Nelson.”

  “Oh, thank you! I can help reverse the spell. We can do it right now—”

  “No. I’m not a witch.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I don’t think you’re in a position to call me a liar.”

  “But everyone says you’re one of the most powerful magicians in the world.”

  “That would be my mother.” Moira tensed. “Who’s everyone?”

  “It’s well known. It’s why—”

  “Why what?”

  “Wendy has been trying to get into Fiona’s good favor. When Nicole was invited into her coven and not Wendy, Wendy went a little crazy. She thought if she delivered you, it would give her the in.”

  Rafe stepped toward Julie, his gaze narrowed, and said in a low voice, “Are you setting up Moira now?”

  “I swear I’m not. In fact, I’ll tell you exactly how Wendy is going to do it.”

  “I’m not concerned about Wendy,” Moira said.

  Rafe raised his voice. “Moira, you need to be concerned!”

  He was worried, and Moira didn’t want to worry Rafe. If he changed his focus from fighting the demon to protecting her, they’d lose. Of course this relationship of theirs, or whatever it was, was a terrible idea. She couldn’t afford to lose Rafe as her partner. Together, they had a chance. Apart? They’d both end up dead.

  She said, “Okay, I’ll watch out for Wendy. Happy? Right now, we’re late for our meeting with Detective Nelson, and now that we know he has a demon’s mark, we’re also running out of time. We’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t.”

  “What do you mean?” Rafe said.

  “Grant was cursed by Wendy’s coven, but the demon’s mark is on him because he’s susceptible to lust. Julie said it herself—Grant played the field, slept around. That means he’s prone to attack and go postal like Kent Galion—or, if he fights it, he might end up like the basketball player in Santa Louisa, dead of an aneurism. If he can fight it until sunset, great. After that, his soul is demon food.”

  Julie was incensed. “How can you save Grant if you won’t reverse the spell?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Moira answered.

  “I can’t believe this.” Julie sank down on the edge of the bed, holding her head in her hands. “Grant’s going to die.”

  “Not if I can help it. He may not be a saint, but he doesn’t deserve to die or lose his soul. He had no part in this except he pissed off a couple of jealous witches. Honestly, you don’t deserve him.”

  “I love him!”

  “Funny way of showing it.”

  Rafe touched her on the arm. “Moira, we need to go.”

  “We take everything with us,” Moira said. “If she could track us down, Wendy can, too. We’re not coming back.”

  “What are you going to do?” Julie asked.

  “First, find your boyfriend. Then, stick with him until the demon comes for his soul. Then—we’ll play it by ear.” She wasn’t about to share any of her ideas, however weak they were.

  “Let me explain something,” Moira said, crossing over to Julie and standing over her. “You are on the wrong side. I don’t care what you believe, what you think, or who you are, but you are toying with dark forces, and when you play with the powers of darkness, you lose. In the end, it’s Hell. We went to Wendy’s in the hopes of stopping the demon from possessing another person. Unfortunately, we lost that battle, but we gained the chalice. Nicole almost killed Rafe. To say I don’t like the Donovans is an understatement. The chalice must be destroyed.”

  “But that’s how she brings the succubus to us!”

  “You idiot! Even now you don’t admit that you were wrong. Only when the demon threatens someone you care about do you feel a tinge of remorse. I think if the demon does get to Grant first, you’ll feel bad for a day or two and then go back to your old ways.”

  “You’re wrong, I won’t—”

  Moira put her hand up. “Don’t lie—not to me, not to yourself. But I’ll tell you something: if we can’t save Grant, we can’t save any of you. In Wendy’s thirst for power or revenge or whatever stupid idea she had, she screwed up big-time because she got a badass demon, not the sweetly evil succubus she expected. And when the demon Lust is relieved of her imprisonment, who do you think she’s going to go after?”

  For the first time, Julie didn’t try to justify herself or argue. Moira let the dire reality of the situation sink in, then said, “I need one thing from you, other than to stay out of my way. I need to know who’s possessed.”

  “I don’t know! After what happened to Nadine, Wendy said she was going to find someone outside of our coven.”

  Rafe tensed, and Moira felt the anger that had been simmering a
t Julie’s revelations start bubbling beneath his skin. “You gave the demon an innocent woman?”

  A flash of the night before: the poor possessed woman’s body rising to the ceiling and dropping with a sickening thud. It turned Moira’s stomach.

  Julie had the decency to avert her eyes and for the first time look sincerely guilty.

  Moira stepped forward and poked her in the chest. It felt good to get out her frustrations, so she poked her again. “Find out who it is and where she is, then call me. If you really want to save Grant’s life, I don’t want any surprises.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Grant had slept like shit. As a result, his migraine was even worse now than it had been last night. When he’d woken up in Julie’s apartment, she was gone and the night was a blur. Unable to figure out what was wrong with him, he chalked it up to exhaustion and a bitch of a case—though deep down he suspsected something far different was the cause of his migraine and fuzzy memory.

  After leaving Julie’s he went home, showered, and changed, arriving at headquarters after eight, with an extra-large coffee, four aspirin, and a quart of milk.

  His partner was at work on the computer, but before checking in with him, Grant detoured into the break room, swallowing the aspirin down with half the quart of milk. He added milk to the coffee more to cool it down than for taste, and went back to his desk facing Jeff Johnston. Grant growled, “Tell me Cooper and O’Donnell are sitting in an interview room waiting for me.”

  “Haven’t seen them.”

  “I knew it. I should have put them both behind bars until I figure out what the fuck is going on at Velocity.”

  Johnston looked glum. “We got another problem. Nadine Anson’s suicide is all over the Internet.”

  “What?” Grant booted up his computer and Johnston said, “Over here; I’m already online.”

  Grant walked around to Johnston’s desk.

  “At least four people posted their cell phone videos on YouTube. Another blogged about it with a series of still pictures. The major networks posted the videos on their websites. I can’t believe you didn’t hear about it.”

  “It happened twelve hours ago; I had shitloads of paperwork and crashed after an eighteen-hour day. Didn’t think that an asshole or four would post a woman’s suicide for the fucking masses to enjoy.”

  Johnston clicked Play on one of the videos and Grant stared at the screen for the next minute and forty-nine seconds. The recording caught Nadine midscream as she pulled out a clump of hair.

  Johnston swore and said, “I can’t believe that jerk recorded this instead of trying to help her.”

  Grant’s anger went from hot to boiling. Someone could have saved Nadine’s life, but they’d done nothing except film her breakdown. Grant was generally a pessimist—two decades on the police force did that—but he still believed in the relative goodness of people who weren’t career criminals. Watching the video squashed that myth.

  People were bastards, all of them.

  Grant watched the video until Nadine stepped off the curb, then he averted his eyes. He didn’t want to see it again.

  “Wait,” Johnston said. He took the mouse and rewound the video ten seconds. “Grant, watch this.”

  “I don’t want—” He sighed and reluctantly looked. He didn’t see anything except Nadine fall and the bus that ran over her bump up and down. He heard the screams of the crowd, Moira’s cry from the sidelines.

  “There!” Johnston said.

  Grant said, “It’s just a reflection. Probably a flash.”

  Johnston rewound it again. “Look right next to the bus, before the ad for Disneyland.”

  Grant focused on the spot Johnston told him to. It was a flash, but … it looked like a woman stood there. A pale, dark-haired beauty. She was there for a second, then was gone.

  “No one could have been standing there,” Grant said. “There was a car right there a moment before. It’s probably a ghost image, left over from other tapes.”

  Johnston glanced at him. “Boy, you’re a dinosaur, Nelson. This is digital. Watch one more time,” Johnston said. “I’ll pause it.”

  “I don’t know what you think we’re going to get out of this,” Grant said, a sick feeling in his stomach.

  The woman looked familiar.

  An irritated, very Irish voice behind them said, “I can’t believe you’re watching that damn video.”

  Moira was beyond furious. What was the cop doing watching Nadine die like that? Like in a movie. It was sick.

  “Should I bring you some popcorn?” she added.

  Rafe had his hand on her back. Right. Watch the sarcasm. Maybe she was going too far, but she was ticked off.

  Grant turned around and said, “I’m conducting an investigation. Lay off.”

  Moira had been forced to watch variations of that video on the television in the hotel coffee shop until Rafe stood on a table and turned it off because the manager had refused to do so. Then the desk sergeant was watching the news when they arrived, and Moira had snapped at him, too. But even if Grant was just doing his job, the circus of the video still irritated her.

  Rafe rubbed the back of her neck and whispered in her ear, “Easy, my love.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him and narrowed her gaze to lecture him about how to address her, but his half-smile told her he’d done it on purpose. Some of her anxiety drained away.

  Johnston said to Grant, “I took a snapshot of the image and used that image program thing to sharpen it.”

  Moira turned to where Grant’s partner was sitting at the computer and looked at the picture. The color drained from her face. She knew exactly what they were seeing.

  An astral projection of Julie Schroeder.

  “It looks like Julie,” Johnston said.

  “It’s a reflection or something,” Grant said. “Julie wasn’t there. We would have seen her. She couldn’t have been there.”

  Johnston shrugged. “You’re probably right. But it’s weird.”

  Moira wasn’t going to explain it to them. They wouldn’t believe her, for one thing, but the realization that Julie Schroeder had left her body and projected herself at the scene of Nadine’s breakdown changed everything. Dammit, Moira had known that Julie was lying about something! Why did this deception surprise her?

  She said, “I don’t know what you both are talking about, but I have places to go and people to see. So let’s get this over with.”

  She still hadn’t figured out how she and Rafe were going to save Grant’s ass, but the one thing she did believe after her bizarre encounter with Julie this morning was that the witch really didn’t want her boyfriend to die. Maybe Julie thought that if she killed Nadine she could break the spell. But that made no sense—the demon had already left Nadine before she died. It was the departure of the demon that sent Nadine over the edge.

  Maybe Julie hadn’t known the demon had jumped out of Nadine’s shell. Yet she had to have seen how Nadine was suffering, even if she’d been observing from the astral plane. Julie might not have been able to hear everything, but she’d have seen the physical violence Nadine had done to herself. Maybe she’d wanted to save her.

  Or she was following Grant. To protect him, expecting that the demon would be going after him next.

  One thing was clear: Moira couldn’t trust her. Worse, though, was that Moira had believed her when she said she didn’t want Grant to die. Normally, Moira was an expert at spotting the lies. Was Julie playing both sides? Trying to save Grant Nelson while turning Moira over to Fiona?

  “Let’s go to the interview room,” Grant said.

  “Here’s fine. Nothing formal. I’m helping you. You obviously watched the video—you have Nadine’s confession and it’s clear we both tried to help her. You have the marks to prove it.” She pointed to the Band-Aid on his face. Then she gestured to the bruise on her cheek. “So do I.”

  The plan Moira and Rafe had come up with on the drive over no longer seemed like all that hot
an idea. Moira was going to suggest that she tag along with Grant while he finished his interviews, giving him her assessment of “the cult” while keeping an eye on him. Rafe was going to contact Anthony about the chalice and whether it could be used to trap the demon Lust, and if so, how they could keep that wench trapped.

  “Take a seat,” Grant finally said, rubbing his temples.

  “Headache?” Moira asked.

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night.” Grant scowled at his partner. “Stop it with that damn video. Either finish up the paperwork or listen.” He turned to Moira and Rafe.

  “First,” Grant said, “I typed up the statement you gave yesterday. You’ll need to read and sign it.”

  “Of course.”

  “What I want to know is why did Nadine say to you, ‘I know you.’ Had you ever met her before yesterday?”

  “No,” Moira said. She didn’t know why Nadine had said that, though it likely meant that Nadine—even within her possession—still remembered everything. Which means that she’d seen Moira in the alley. Demons could impart memories and information to their human victims, if they were powerful enough and had a reason. The demon Lust was certainly powerful enough, but why would it share anything with Nadine about Moira?

  “You’re sure about that.”

  “I’m not answering questions twice. Why did she tell you that she hated you?”

  Grant just shook his head. “I’ll be the cop.”

  “Fine.” Moira bit her thumbnail, pretending to be disinterested, but she watched Grant closely. She knew he had the mark on his back only because Julie had told her. She wanted to verify it, but she could hardly demand that he strip. And she remembered that when Deputy Hank Santos had been affected by Envy and unconsciously battling the demonic virus, he had a badass headache, as Grant Nelson obviously did now. Still, a killer migraine wasn’t proof positive of a demonic infection.

  “Yesterday,” Grant said with a long sigh. “What happened in the alley?”

  “I told you.”

  “You lied to me. Sheriff McPherson promised that you’d tell me the truth. Dammit, I want the truth!”