Original Sin

by Allison Brennan

  The wind howled around the cabin, the boarded-up windows providing a break from the damp salt air.

  Rafe had no idea how he’d found this cabin when he fled the chaos he’d caused.

  Intellectually, he’d known that it wasn’t his fault that the demons had been released. He hadn’t started the deadly ritual; he would never have even flirted with the dark arts or any form of magic. It was antithetical to everything St. Michael’s Order stood for. He was one of the chosen few who was charged with stopping the spread of witchcraft, of sealing breaches between this world and the underworld. Even within St. Michael’s, he’d had talent—special gifts in their fight against evil.

  Yet he’d had no part in any of the battles of late. He’d been most recently at St. John’s, hoping to become a priest but unable to say his vows. His mentor told him he should look deeper, try to better discern his calling. He’d thought helping the tortured priests at Santa Louisa de los Padres Mission was the answer.

  He was wrong.

  In his heart, he feared that somehow, he was just as culpable as the coven for what happened last night. When he stopped the demons from possessing the girl’s body, the arca, he’d known exactly what he was doing. Now? He tried to remember, tried to find the words, or at least understand their meaning, and nothing. Nothing but pain, in his head, in his heart, in every muscle of his body.

  And now the demons were on earth, free. He had to find them, stop them. Demons could only be sent back to Hell; they couldn’t be killed.

  Yes they can.

  He frowned, trying to chase the words in his mind, to find the solution to the problem. If demons could be killed, how?

  A sharp pain shot through his ear and his hands grabbed his head. Make the ringing stop! His stomach retched, but there was nothing inside, nothing to throw up, and he dry heaved until his gut ached.

  He closed his eyes.

  God, help me.

  He slipped into sleep, or unconsciousness, or death … but the dead didn’t dream or remember, did they?

  THIRTEEN

  Skye watched the security tape twice without comment.

  Rafe Cooper had been recorded four different times on three different cameras. The first was outside the elevator bank closest to his room—he’d shuffled by, wearing a hospital gown and appearing disoriented, confused, and in pain. A few minutes later he was seen entering the staff lounge at the opposite end of the floor. He seemed steadier, as if walking had given him strength, but he was still slow.

  When he emerged—a good fifteen minutes later and in hospital scrubs he’d stolen from an employee locker—he still looked pale but walked with purpose, slow and steady. He was neither looking at the camera nor trying to avoid detection.

  The last camera that caught him was mounted just outside the emergency room doors. He walked right out of the hospital.

  “How does someone usually wake up from a coma?” Skye asked Cooper’s doctor, Richard Bertrand.

  “There’s no typical way. I’ve seen a coma patient wake up after eight days with no side effects, ready to walk out the door. Mr. Cooper has received daily physical therapy and quality care, but his muscles would still have atrophied some after ten weeks, and he’d be too weak to walk. It normally takes weeks to fully recuperate. But Mr. Cooper’s unconsciousness—while technically a coma—was uncommon in itself. As I explained to you when he first came to me in November, he had no head trauma. No tumor, no aneurysm, no brain damage. His brain waves showed signs of REM sleep, but little activity during his so-called waking periods. It’s an atypical case, and while not the only such documented case, certainly rare.”

  Skye was ticked off and worried. Where did this put her investigation? She had to talk to Cooper; he was still technically a material witness to the murders at the mission. She couldn’t very well put in her police report that a demon had been involved.

  District Attorney Martin Truxel was going to be the biggest problem. The D.A. had made it clear that Cooper was his suspect, and when she reminded him that he was a prosecutor, not a cop, he told her flat out that she’d fucked up the entire case and it would cost her the election.

  The D.A. had made it no secret that he was supporting Assistant Sheriff Thomas Williams, who’d recently filed to run against Skye for Sheriff. The election was five months away, and right now it was between Skye and Williams. With Cooper waking up—and walking out of the hospital—the murders at the mission would once again take front and center in the local media. The Santa Louisa Courier covered a small territory, but the four-person staff was dogged. Everyone in town read the paper daily, commented on the popular Courier website, and believed what was printed. If The Courier wrote it, it had to be true.

  And on top of all that, she had daily messages on her desk from a Los Angeles crime reporter who was writing a damn book about the mission and the murders. It was enough to make Skye throw her hands up and take a full-page ad out in the Courier telling everyone exactly what happened—demonic possession and all.

  Then Williams would win the election; her best friend, Detective Juan Martinez, would be either in prison or a mental hospital; and she’d probably be sued for wrongful death by the family of the deputy who had died on the cliffs, not to mention prosecuted for gross negligence. Because no one would believe that a demon—let alone witchcraft!—had been involved in the murders at the mission or the fire on the cliffs two nights later.

  “No one saw him?” she asked Dr. Bertrand, incredulous that a formerly comatose patient could walk out of the hospital without anyone trying to stop him.

  “A nurse checked his vitals at eleven p.m. before the shift change. At one a.m. the new shift was in, and the nurse who did rounds assumed he’d been taken for tests or moved, because his chart was missing. We’ve moved him a couple of times. And while tests aren’t common at night, because of tight budgets I run some of the scans then, when there is less demand on the equipment. I had been running REM tests on Mr. Cooper, trying to figure out what was causing the coma. The only answer is psychosomatic. He’d experienced a major trauma. His brain just shut down.”

  Skye spoke to the nurse who’d found Cooper’s bed empty, the nurse who last checked his vitals, and everyone still in the building who’d been on duty between 12:07 and 12:29 a.m. while he’d been moving around the hospital before walking out of the building. No one remembered seeing him.

  She finally said, “If he shows up back here at the hospital, call me.” She wrote her cell phone number on the back of her card and handed it to Dr. Bertand. “I’ll put an APB on Cooper, and anyone who finds him will be instructed to bring him back here for medical evaluation, under guard, until I know what’s going on. You good with that?”

  “Of course,” Dr. Bertrand said.

  She glanced at her watch. “Damn, I’m late.”

  She’d spoken on the phone to the high school principal earlier this morning about the death of Abby Weatherby, and had asked to address the entire school in an assembly before lunch. Someone there knew something, and dammit, she wanted to find out what had really happened out on the cliffs—supernatural or not.

  Anthony didn’t scare easily but when he’d learned more about the ritual that brought the Seven Deadly Sins forth, he was terrified for humanity.

  At his desk in one of the two rooms left standing at the mission, poring over ancient texts and other research materials, he paused and contemplated the worst that could happen. It was a situation as dire as it could be.

  Dr. Franz Lieber, a wheelchair-bound ninety-year-old theologian from Switzerland whom Anthony had met many years ago, had sent St. Michael’s a copy of all his notes. As far as Anthony knew, he had the only copy in his possession, the original still with Lieber, who was more reclusive than anyone Anthony had ever met.

  Lieber doubted whether the Conoscenza still existed, but he had written at the beginning of his notes on the book:

  There is very little information or rumor about the Conoscenza. The book itself is unna
med, given “Conoscenza” circa 1520 by Bishop Paulo Giovanni of St. Michael’s Order. Prior to then, it had been called both “The Book of Knowledge” and “The Book of Death,” depending on whether the speaker was a magician or one of the righteous.

  The Conoscenza was most likely destroyed in a deadly ritual in 1698 in France, where there was a powerful coven led by High Priestess Tara Rafferty and her common-law husband, Detrich Ehrenbach. Neither Rafferty, Ehrenbach, their coven membership, nor the six priests and demon hunters from St. Michael’s Order survived. Everything in the immediate area was destroyed—obliterated. To this day, some believe that those grounds are either haunted or cursed. No one lives on the desecrated site, all attempts to do so end in violence.

  Though Lieber didn’t believe that the Conoscenza still existed, he knew a lot about what was within its evil covers. It was a grimoire—a book of spells. These dark spells were specifically aimed at conjuring spirits, summoning demons, and controlling both.

  The origin of the book was in dispute. Some scholars felt it had been compiled over time with contributions from multiple generations of magicians, the spells evolving and gaining strength. Others believed that it had been written many thousands of years ago during the time of Moses in an ancient language that could not be understood without demonic guidance. And still others, including Father Philip, believed that the book had been written in demon blood only a few generations after the fall of man, in the language of the fallen angels, unreadable to all except the few who had been chosen by Satan himself.

  But it was certain, at least during Anthony’s five hours of intensive research, that the Conoscenza contained the ritual to unleash the Seven Deadly Sins into the world.

  And he’d yet to find any theorizing on how to send them back. Lieber opined:

  The one certainty we know, should the Seven be freed, is that, according to the legends, they will disperse, spread themselves far apart. Logic dictates that they would be stronger together, but in truth they gain their strength from psychic unions with humans. They cannot compete for the same person, for the victim would die without fueling the demon. This seems to be the antithesis of all we know and understand of the adage of strength in numbers, but for the Seven they are equals and cannot share the same space without devastating results for them and humans. They seek the weak and are lured by sin. Sin makes them stronger. Lust finds lust; greed finds greed. The longer they are free, the more powerful they become.

  The Seven are not demons who can be exorcised using traditional ritual exorcisms, because they do not need to possess a body to survive. They are spirits. They laugh in the face of the Faithful and do not obey orders of those who summon them. They are the Tricksters of Hell, Fallen Angels, among the highest order of angels who plummeted during the Great Battle. Woe to the world who sees the Seven on earth.

  Anthony learned two important things.

  The first was why Fiona’s ritual had taken place at the ruins on the cliffs. In a handwritten diary of an Olivet graduate nearly three hundred years ago, shortly after the book was thought destroyed, he read:

  Any place where the blood of the righteous is spilled in the battle of good and evil, heaven and hell, and where also a human being is sacrificed, weakens the protective barrier between earth and the netherworld. At such a place, with the proper ritual, training, desire, and power, a fearless magician can open a gate for demons to pass through. Some magicians believe that they can move freely between the demonic world and our own, a deadly proposition. Many things must align for all the elements to be in place for such a gate, and there are only a few known gateways over the last millennium, all of which have been sealed and consecrated. But there will be more. Magicians will continue to create these openings when possible, and the greater in number, the weaker the entire threshold. Some believe that a great battle on earth will ensue, spilling the blood of the righteous and leading to murder and desecration. The battle will weaken the barrier between earth and Hell until the End Times, allowing free movement of demons through the membrane. Chaos will reign. This will, some believe, be the signal of the Second Coming.

  Some will wait and watch and not impede the successes of magicians.

  Some, including this scholar, believe such a strategy sets up many for eternal death through inaction.

  Though none of the scholars Anthony read had specific knowledge of how the ritual worked, they all were in agreement that to summon the Seven at one time there was the need for not only a powerful magician, but two sacrifices: a vessel and an arca.

  The vessel, also called a “key” by Lieber, was a magician who used her powers combined with the others in the coven to draw out the Seven from Hell. Her death was a sacrifice necessary to bring them forth, as no one could survive such a violent spiritual assault. Her soul in exchange, according to Lieber, would have strength in the afterlife, which could be used by the coven as tenuous control over the Seven—in theory.

  Was Abby Weatherby the key? The means to draw out the Seven? It would appear so, but Anthony didn’t know enough about what powers she may have had. Everything he knew and understood about the afterlife put souls in two places: purgatory en route to Heaven. or firmly in Hell. There were hierarchies of angels and hierarchies of demons, but human souls with power in Hell? He had never heard such a thing, and it greatly disturbed him.

  If Abby was the key, that meant there had to be an arca.

  The girl Moira spoke of, Lily. The teenager who went to the cliffs to save her cousin, Abby.

  Anthony was poring over everything he could find about what the arca was—if in fact it was a person and not a thing—and how it was used. There were far fewer specifics about the arca than the key, but based on subtext he determined that the arca was a human ‘container’ that trapped the Seven.

  The arca must have been consecrated for the purpose. Arcas, like other warriors for the underworld, are conceived during rituals. Some believe such individuals, whether they know of their purpose or not, must be sacrificed by the just or the end result will be devastating for many, many innocent souls. Others believe such individuals can be saved. But as I live and breathe today, it remains the truth that none have been saved; once told of their position and potential for power, they grow in darkness. The allure of evil is great, and the lies of demons many.

  Moira O’Donnell.

  Anthony slowly shut the heavy book.

  None have been saved.

  Father Philip must have known the truth about Moira before Peter died. Moira had sought him out; they all knew she was a witch.

  Such individuals … must be sacrificed by the just …

  Anthony couldn’t kill Moira without cause. He wasn’t a cold-blooded murderer, and one opinion in an old book didn’t provide adequate justification. There had to be another answer. He would find it. Not to save Moira, but to save them all.

  He frowned, staring at the stacks of faded books and papers spread across his desk at the mission. He knew enough of Moira’s past, how her mother had conceived her to serve as a liaison between the covens and the underworld, but what of the arca last night on the cliffs? If Lily Ellis was the arca, she was one of the unsaved.

  He refused to believe it. God didn’t work that way. Everyone could be saved.

  None have been saved.

  That didn’t mean they couldn’t be. He opened an old, thin tome about demon traps. The Seven were not traditional demons, and Anthony needed to better understand all types of spirit traps.

  His phone vibrated and he grabbed it, startled. It was Skye.

  “Working?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You have answers?”

  “I’m getting there. It’ll take a little more time.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Skye? Are you there?”

  “Rafe Cooper left the hospital last night. Walked out, just after midnight. No one has seen him since.”

  Anthony rose from his chair. “You’re certain he left
on his own? After ten weeks in a coma?”

  “I saw him leave on the security tape. He’s gone. I put an APB out on him, and need to get him back in the hospital for tests, and I have to talk to him about the mission murders. He’s our only living witness.”

  Anthony didn’t have to read between the lines. “And your only suspect.”

  “I believe you,” she said to the question he did not ask.

  “It does not sound that way.”

  “Dammit, Anthony, I know that not everything in this world can be explained with scientific logic. But I’m also the sheriff and I need to follow through on the investigation. Rafe’s disappearing act isn’t going to help his cause.”

  “I will look for him,” Anthony told Skye.

  “I still need to talk to him,” Skye said warily.

  “Of course.”

  “Be careful.”

  “You as well, mia amore.”

  “I’m going over to the high school to talk to Abby’s fellow students. I’m hoping that one of them will feel so damn guilty that she’s dead that they’ll spill the beans as to what really happened on the cliffs last night.”

  “We know what happened,” Anthony said.

  “We think we know what happened, but someone—someone human—was also responsible for Abby’s death. I want that person—those people—in jail. Someone must be punished, Anthony. Someone here on earth. God can have them after I’m done.”

  FOURTEEN

  Even before the Santa Louisa sheriff spoke to the general assembly at the beginning of their lunch break, there wasn’t a person at Santa Louisa High School who didn’t know that Abby Weatherby had died at the ruins on the cliffs. Everyone had a theory. Some rumors were true—that Abby was naked, for example. Others were false—like one that she’d killed herself. But as Chris Kidd sat in the last row of chairs in the auditorium and rubbed his sore neck, he knew some of what had really happened.