The priest tried to restrain Anna, but she spun and punched him in the nose. He released her, more from shock at the action than anything else. Her hand flew to her mouth, surprised at what she’d just done. Then she ran.
It was a couple of blocks before her pace slowed. Then headlights shone around the corner as a car came nearer. She didn’t have to see the face behind the wheel to know it was Father Jeffries with Caroline.
Small towns didn’t allow for much in the way of a night life, and all the shops on main street had closed their doors hours before. She ducked between a couple of buildings to force them to pursue her on foot.
She knew now that she would always run to Luc. She just hoped she could get to him this time.
Anna panicked for a moment, realizing she’d backed herself into a corner. The only freaking dead end alley in the whole of Golatha Falls and of course she had to be in it. That meant climbing.
She shimmied up the fire escape onto the roof of the Java Junkie. The roof sloped down in back, making it not quite a one story drop. A cluster of bushes below could break her fall. It was only one story after all. How bad could it be?
She dropped into the bushes and stifled a cry. It really did work out better on TV. She wasn’t going to be able to suspend her disbelief if she ever watched another action flick. Her ankle was hurt, maybe sprained.
Dry leaves crackled under Father Jeffries’ boots as he rounded the corner. “Anna?”
She maneuvered herself behind the bushes as quietly as possible. It was too open here.
“Anna?” The flashlight blinded her momentarily, but the foliage was too dense for him to make out her shape. It didn’t matter if he found her; she’d claw and fight him like a wildcat to get home.
“Call the rest of the parish. We need to find her. Get them to her house. We’ll head her off,” he said. Caroline’s footsteps trailed off as she tried to find a spot that would pick up her cell phone signal.
There was no way Anna would be able to fight them all off if they got to the house before her, and with cars she knew they would. She was still several blocks from her house with a hurt ankle. Why not hail and lightning next?
She felt around on the ground and found a tree limb that had fallen in the last storm. Some god was smiling down on her. Maybe not the one from this dimension, but one of them at least. She watched Father Jeffries through the bushes and felt the feral grin light her face.
When the branch struck his head, he crumpled to the ground. She was oddly pleased with herself. Then her eyes met Caroline’s. The woman was too frightened to move. She still held the cell phone stiffly, not yet having made a call.
“Give me the phone, Caroline. I don’t want to have to knock you out, too.” She raised the branch like a baseball bat and readied her stance.
Caroline’s hand shook as she held the phone out. “Why are you doing this?”
Anna slipped it into her pocket. “You can find a pay phone and call whoever you want once I’m safely back inside my house. Then you can bring whoever you want to try to drag me out of it. I dare you to.”
“Why would you do this? You must be possessed after what he did to Sara,” Caroline said.
“It’s not what she thinks. I saw it . . . in dreams.”
“Then he tricked you.”
“He didn’t.” Anna had never been more sure of anything.
Caroline was flustered. “Still, that’s no reason to go to him. You don’t owe him anything.”
“I love him.” It was true. She wasn’t falling in love with him; she did love him. And now that the bond was gone she couldn’t say it wasn’t real.
The priest was starting to come around. As satisfying at it would be to hit him in the head again, she didn’t feel like pressing her luck. She ran, ignoring the pain in her ankle and didn’t stop until she was safely locked inside the house. Her weight pressed against the front door as she panted, catching her breath.
The harem was clustered around the television in pajamas, all of them but Susan. They turned to stare at her.
“Where’s Luc?”
Renee smirked. “Where do you think? He’s having dinner with Susan.”
“Cute,” Anna said with an eye roll.
When she reached Luc’s room, she could hear soft moans coming from the other side of the door. She steeled herself and took a breath.
In about fifteen minutes they were going to be under siege by a religious mob trying to save her from herself and from Luc. Now wasn’t the time to be squeamish. But she couldn’t bring herself to turn the knob. It was bad enough to hear it, to know it was happening. She wasn’t sure she’d ever recover from seeing him with another woman.
He’d be angry with her for doing the ritual and causing the trouble in the first place. Very angry. Wouldn’t it be better for him to be mad on a full stomach, so to speak, than on an empty one? Anna ignored the voice in her mind that said she was a coward for not facing him.
She still felt dirty from her encounter in the church and needed a shower to wash the feeling off. It also might be good if Luc couldn’t smell the priest on her. She didn’t want him to know what had happened before she could break it to him gently, assuming the parish didn’t arrive first to beat her to the punchline.
A few minutes into her shower, the bathroom door clicked open. “Luc?”
Great. He’d heard her downstairs. So much for stealth. She finished cleaning up and grabbed a bathrobe. She was still tying the robe around herself when she walked into the bedroom.
“Luc . . . I . . . ” She looked up.
Cain sat on her bed with a self-satisfied smirk on his lips. “You’re a very stupid girl, Anna.”
“Don’t scream,” Cain said. It wasn’t a request. “In fact, don’t talk or move, either.”
Anna stood like a great oak tree whose roots had burrowed underneath the floor while the demon prowled around her, looking at his prize. He trailed a hand over her back and across the nape of her neck. If she could have moved, she would have cringed away.
She was painfully aware that nothing more than a flimsy bathrobe shielded her. Note to self: showers in the middle of a crisis? Not the best plan.
“I bet you’re wondering how I happened to be here at just the right time.”
She stifled the urge to say, Not really, I was more wondering about my current choice of outerwear.
“How do you think Father Jeffries got the book to do the ritual? Never trust a book from a neighboring dimension. You never know the motives of those who wrote it or those who chose to share it.
“Not that you’re much brighter. Though you are a stubborn one. I had to put a suggestion in some of the witches to get them to scare you enough to break the bond. I see it finally took.”
No wonder Anna hadn’t liked the coven. They’d had Cain’s evil dripping off them. Tam was the only one of the group who’d taken the situation seriously enough to shield properly.
“Turn around and look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Anna turned like a zombie to face her captor. Cain had moved to sit in the chair beside the dresser. How poetic that she was about to die with an incubus sitting in the same spot she’d first seen Luc.
Cain smiled and his form shifted. He was handsome still, ruggedly so, but his eyes were harder, darker, his face more gaunt. Anna realized this was his human form underneath the illusion he created to lure women to their demise. There was a strange mark on his forehead.
“Come on, Anna. Let’s put that Catholic school upbringing to good use. Who am I? You aren’t the only one who ever had a mark of protection put on them. The difference is, I was smart enough to never try to get mine removed.”
Not possible.
“Oh, that’s right, I told you you couldn’t speak. You may whisper. We wouldn’t want Luc to hear and come up, now would we?”
Anna found her voice, and true to his word, she could only speak softly. “I hope you aren’t planning on doing the whole evil villain soliloquy now. That’s so tired.” She’d gained a bit of courage since he didn’t seem about to attack. He might rant and rave forever. She had some time.
“Is it? Well, I’m old. I don’t always keep up with what you humans find trendy.”
She wanted to say he was lying about his identity, but maybe he really was that Cain. “How old are you?” she asked instead.
“Now that’s rude, Anna.” He rolled his eyes. “Oh all right. I’m about eight thousand. Give or take a few.”
“The earth is billions of years old.” She wasn’t getting into an age-of-the-earth debate.
“Yes. Your point?”
“Your parents can’t be Adam and Eve,” she said as if she were talking to a crazy person standing on a ledge.
“Why not?”
Anna gave him a duh look.
“Adam and Eve aren’t the first people ever. They are the people the Hebrew god created when he did his little botanical garden experiment. The talking snake was his idea. The other gods found it silly.
“The Hebrew god is the youngest of the gods. Still, he had fervent followers and managed to take control of this dimension. I’m the first murderer of his children, so he made me the first incubus.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Incubi are all about sex.” She didn’t know why she was arguing with him, aside from buying herself time. If she could keep him talking, maybe Luc would come for her.
And Father Jeffries would have people banging on the door soon. She might just have to keep the demon’s jaws flapping for another ten minutes. She could do conversation with a complete psychotic for ten minutes. That’s right Anna, save the day with your conversation skills.
“No,” Cain corrected like he was talking to a small child. He stood as if what he had to say was so dramatic it couldn’t possibly be said from a seated position.
“Incubi are all about betrayal. Gain someone’s trust, betray and kill them. The gender or method doesn’t matter. Of course, my brother wasn’t the only one I betrayed. Betrayal isn’t something you outgrow. When I moved to a new town, one run by one of the other gods, the people took pity on me. I found a wife . . . and slept with everyone but her.”
He shrugged and grinned as if his behavior were cute. “I was a huge disappointment to the Hebrew god, so my punishment had to be something extra. He created a new demon breed just for me. I was special.”
“Yeah, real special,” Anna said. It wasn’t like he’d accomplished anything that you couldn’t find on a daytime talk show. Philanderers were a dime a dozen.
He’d returned to his more seductive form, and she found herself wanting him even as she knew what he was doing. She leaned into his touch, her heart hammering in her chest. A whimpering mewl escaped her throat as he stroked her skin.
“It’s a pity I don’t have more time with you. Oh well.”
Cain turned from her and sank back into the chair. Anna felt the sexual desire ebb, and she could breathe normally again.
“Everything in this dimension is about punishment, you know. There is no redemption. Not for anyone. Not even you. You’ll go to Heaven, you’ll be there for awhile, and then you’ll be sent back. You’ll never escape the loop. But I’m above it. You see, to be punished, you must have some humanity to begin with. They trapped me in my sin for eternity, but I can’t start suffering until I allow humanity to taint me like Luc has. He suffers now because he’s allowed his punishment to catch up to him. I’ve eluded mine for thousands of years. He feels remorse and has become an unhappy whore instead of the predator he was meant to be. My brother is only a shadow now.”
“You mean your clan brother.” Anna was bothered that he insisted on affecting the illusion of family when he had none.
Cain’s mouth twisted in a grotesque grin. “Is that what he told you? See, little girl? Even Abel can lie on occasion. I’m not the only bad seed. No, he’s my brother, brother. From when I was human. When I get Luc out of this house, I’ll help him remember who he was. He’ll forget about you, and he’ll forget about the witch who put him in this situation to begin with. Unless I can save him, his punishment will be eternal. Do you understand? Your life is a small price to pay for his freedom.”
“My life?” Anna wasn’t as good at stalling as she thought. He seemed to be getting to the climax of his PowerPoint presentation of evil.
“Do you know why we consider humans one of the lower life forms?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “Because you haven’t figured out how to attain physicality and immortality at the same time. When you’re immortal you aren’t physical. While you are physical you aren’t immortal. You want to live forever, and when you have that you want to come back so that you can feel. But you are immortal. You just forget and have to rediscover it each time. This is your punishment . . . this constant loop and forgetting. You’ll never escape it.”
Anna’s eyes widened as Cain took a jug of kerosene and started dripping a trail of it around the room. “You can’t light the house on fire. It won’t work,” she said, recalling Luc’s words about the magic.
“I know. That’s why you’re going to do it. Luc is too nice to push you, but you’ve always known this was what had to be done. You’ll have to burn down your beautiful house. Just think, if you’d done it sooner, you might have lived to tell the tale.” Cain put the jug of kerosene down and placed a matchbook in her hand.