Wicked Souls (8 page)

But probably not.

A new thought occurred to me.
“If you hadn’t
left me with half of my soul, I never could’ve broken up with you,
could I?”

He took a step toward me and my magic
stopped purring and roared instead.
Pleasure beat on my skin.
Across his face, I saw a play of emotions mirroring mine.
“Freewill
is a funny thing.
It draws strength from love and hate.
Combine
those two together, and no matter who controls your soul, your
passion, what you really want, will win out in the end.”

Discussing passion with him was risky.
“Don’t you regret leaving me any freewill?”

He didn’t even hesitate.
“No.”

My own emotions went
awww
, and a wave
of lust ran over me.
Dangerous territory
, my brain cried.
If
I couldn’t get hold of myself and my magic in the next two seconds,
I was going to…

Without further ado, my magic leapt across
the two feet separating us, slamming into Luc’s.
In the next second
my body followed suit, my chest crashing into Luc’s chest.
His arms
reflexively went around me, while one of my hands grabbed the back
of his head and pulled his lips to mine.
The other gripped his
shoulder with all my strength.

The force of my body backed him up against
the wall.
Fabric tore.
Lips bruised.

I didn’t care.

My magic screamed
yes
.
My body as
well.
And the two combined together completely drowned out my
brain, which I think was screaming
what the what?

As the physical sensations ripped through me
from Luc’s touch, catapulting me toward the mother of all orgasms
once again, I heard, through the heavy fog in my brain, a sound
that brought me up short.

A cat’s meow.

Not any cat’s meow.
The same one I’d heard
at the fire station in the locker room.

Every cat sounds different and each one
conveys a host of emotions in their cry.
They can communicate
effectively with nothing more than elongating the sound and
emphasizing specific parts of it.
Feed me.
Pet me.
Leave me
alone
.
As a cat owner, I’ve heard them all.

This meow was a laugh.
A very cunning,
self-satisfied laugh.
I broke free of Luc’s arms, whipping around
in the direction it came from, and found the golden eyes of a
beautiful calico cat staring back at me.
She was sitting at the
opening of the alley.

“Eve,” I gasped, sounding as if I’d run a
marathon instead of attacked the Devil.
“What are you doing
here?”

Her response was to stand up and arch her
back in a slow deliberate stretch.
She rippled her gorgeous fur
coat and flicked her tail back and forth a couple of times, eyeing
me with scorn.
Then, as if bored, she daintily trotted out of
sight.

The back door of the shop opened and Keisha
held up the feather, now dripping from its bath in her cauldron, by
a pair of tongs.
Her big brown eyes bounced between me and Luc as
she tried to ascertain what was going on, but dismissed whatever
came to mind and stuck the feather in my face.
“Get this out of
here.”

“Why?”
I asked.

Keisha shook the feather at me, anxious to
get rid of it.
“The thing that’s on this puppy?”
She shuddered in
distress.
“It’s not a spell or a curse or any kind of hex I’ve ever
seen.”

I glanced at Luc, but his face was a blank.
“Then what is it?”

A wave of heat sidled up next to me as Luc
reached for the feather.
He took it from the tongs, turned it over
in his hand.
“God’s will,” he said.

How did he know that?
Guess I should have
asked him to touch the feather in the first place.
“God’s
will?”

He gave me a resolute nod.
“Apparently our
Father is punishing Gabriel.”

Keisha frowned and shifted one hip against
the door frame.
“Punishing him for what?”

A shadow passed over Luc’s face, almost as
if he felt sorry for his heavenly brother.
“Insubordination.
Rebellion.
Defiance.”
He glanced up at Keisha.
“Take your
pick.”

Lucifer knew all about rebelling against
God.
At times, I forgot he’d once been good and lived among the
angels in Heaven.
For the first time in all the years I’d known
him, I wondered if he ever regretted his mutiny.

I laid a hand on his arm in support.
It just
felt like the right thing to do.
“God found out Gabriel sent Adam
back to Earth.
That he wanted to be a god himself.”
Like
you
, I didn’t add.

“God loves mankind more than His angels.
Like me, some angels become jealous.
Confining one so high in the
angel hierarchy to walk the earth among humans is considered a
punishment worse than Hell.”

Keisha rolled her eyes, but a surge of
unexplainable relief spilled over me, like a prisoner on death row
who’d been given a stay of execution.
Gabriel’s confinement to
Earth was a Heavenly matter, not a witchy one.
I was off the hook.
“That’s great.
All we have to do is call Gabe up and let him know,
right?”
I looked at Lucifer for confirmation.
He wouldn’t meet my
eyes.
My voice rose, a niggle of panic in it.
“Right?”

“Let me look into this.”
He stuck the
feather inside his jacket.
“I’ll get back to you.”

He didn’t shimmer out of sight this time,
instead walking down the alley with his head hung low and
disappearing around the corner.

“Can you talk to him before tonight?”
I
called after him.
“I don’t want anything to mess up my six month
ceremony!”

There was no response and Keisha and I
exchanged a look.
The worry in her eyes reflected my own inner
turmoil.

The good thing about Keisha?
She knows when
I need a milkshake and when I need a hug.
She threw her arm around
me, guided me back inside and started opening windows to air out my
office.
Together we cleaned up her cauldron and put her supplies
away, the whole time me stewing about Luc and Adam.
She was digging
out a couple of scented candles when she finally said, “You going
to tell me what’s going on between you and Luc?”

The skunk smell was diminishing and none too
soon.
It had given me a headache.
Or maybe Gabe’s science
experiment was doing that.
Who knew?
I kept my back to her while I
searched for matches.
“Nothing really.
Just Gabriel screwing with
me.
He’s controlling my willpower and making my magic go all
Exorcist on me.
I keep throwing myself at Luc, but it’s only
because Gabriel’s making me do it.”

“Why?”

My fingers touched the matches.
I grabbed
the pack out of the desk drawer and tossed them to Keisha.
“Isn’t
it obvious?
It’s payback for me supposedly putting a spell on him.
He wants me to use my magic.
He wants me to break my Witches
Anonymous oath.”

“Kind of petty for an archangel.”

I let out an impatient sigh, but then
thought about it.
It did seem petty, even for such a prima donna as
Gabriel.
Inside my head, the metal door pressed on my brain.

Great.
Here we go again.

Keisha lit a candle and blew out the match.
“Seems like if he could control your willpower, and he thought you
were responsible for keeping him on Earth, he would simply force
you to lift the spell.
He likes to play games, but not to his own
detriment.”

My brain reluctantly agreed and for its
trouble received a heavy door slam, as if someone had dropped a ten
pound weight on my head.
I pressed a hand to my forehead, willing
my brain to bench press the weight back off.
“Gabriel
hasn’t…exactly been…acting…rational.”

Keisha leaned over the desk, examining me.
“What’s wrong?”

“Every time I—” The pain and pressure
increased and I moaned softly, squeezing my eyes shut and pointing
to my head.
“Too much pressure.
Can’t…tell…you.
Can’t… think.”

Grabbing my hand, Keisha snatched it away
from my head and checked my pupils.
Her forehead wrinkled in a deep
frown.
“You get a headache every time you try to figure this
out?”

Headache was pure understatement.
My head
was in a nutcracker and the nutcracker was in the hands of a
three-hundred-pound wrestler.
I moved my head in some semblance of
a nod.

She placed her open palm on my forehead and
closed her eyes.
Her lips moved in a soft chant.
The pain subsided
and the pressure eased.
I laid my head down on the desk and
breathed a sigh of relief.

“You’ve been bewitched,” she announced a
minute later.

I popped one eye open, having closed them
while she was chanting, and looked at her.
She stood, hands on
hips, still frowning.
“By whom?”

She began dragging her supplies back out of
the cabinet.
“That über witch flying under the radar we thought was
after Gabriel?”

“Yeah,” I said, not liking where this train
of thought was headed.

“She was never after Gabriel.”
She set her
cauldron on the middle of my desk and picked up her athame.
“She’s
after you.”

Chapter Nine:

Witch Hunt

I popped my other eye open and sat up.
“Eve.
She’s been hanging around in cat form.
I heard her meow at the fire
station right before Gabriel showed up, and she was outside in the
alley with me and Luc.”

Without asking for permission, Keisha
grabbed my hand and pricked the end of my index finger with her
athame.
I winced and tried to yank my hand back but she held it
over the cauldron to drip blood.
“Eve?
She’s not a witch.
She’s the
mother of mankind.”

She might be the mother of mankind, but…
“She can turn herself into a cat, Keisha.
She’s certainly more than
your average human.”

“Eve is the mother of witches, too?
Whoa.”
Keisha’s eyes widened momentarily as she considered the idea.
I
nodded and she accepted the idea after a moment of contemplation.
Then she pinched her lips together in an angry line, awe at our
discovery short lived.

Releasing my hand, she searched her
collection of glass vials, selected one with a clear liquid in it
and added the entire contents to the caldron.
“Personally, I don’t
care who she is, she messed with the wrong person this round.
You’re a strong witch.
You can take her.
With my help,” she added
giving me her resolute African priestess face.

“Ex-witch,” I corrected, my lips sucking at
my injured fingertip.
“And I’ve never shapeshifted into a cat or
any other animal.
I don’t have
that
kind of power.”

“But you could.”
A silver amulet, engraved
with some kind of voodoo symbol went into the pot next.
“You have
to fight this, Amy, and to do that, you may have to come out of
retirement.
Channel Luc’s power and tap into mine.”

Use my magic?
Channel Luc?
In my state, I’d
end up self-combusting, right after I’d sex-hexed him to death.
“No
way.”

“You want Eve to control your thoughts and
emotions?”

Of course not, but she couldn’t, could she?
Now that I thought about it, the logic wasn’t there, even if she
was a shape-shifting witch.
Having control of another’s mental
processes and emotional state of being would take super powerful
mojo.
Keisha’s voodoo dolls couldn’t even extract that kind of
long-term control.
The level and intensity of the magic working on
me took Donald Trump-type supernatural power.
Angel-type power.
“It
has to be Gabriel.
He owns half my soul.”

Keisha opened a corked jar and sprinkled a
white powdery substance into her pot.
Began to stir.
“And Luc owns
the other half, right?”

A new, insidious thought occurred to me,
complete with Luc’s face proudly displayed on top of it.

Satan’s balls.
It wasn’t Gabriel or Eve
messing with my magic or my mind.
“Luc’s sabotaging me.”

The moment I thought it, said it, knife-like
pain exploded behind my eyeballs.
I grabbed my head with both hands
and bent at the waist, falling out of the chair.
Keisha was at my
side in a heartbeat.
She cupped my head in her hands, one at the
front and one at the back, shouted some words in her priestess
language I didn’t understand, and the pain eased a smidgen.
I
rolled onto my back and opened my eyes, only to find her angry face
staring down at me.
“Call him,” she said.
“Bring him here right
now.
I have a few words I want to say to him.”

There were too many coincidences, too many
unexplainable circumstances.
They danced around my psyche, but like
a lab rat avoiding the button that produced a shock instead of
food, my brain refused to linger on any of them or unwind the
tangled logic waiting for me there.
Luc’s presence would only cloud
the issue more and I wasn’t sure what my magic would do if he
pushed me even further than he already had.
“No,” I whispered.
“I
can’t be anywhere near him.
Not right now.”

Keisha helped me back into the chair,
concern and aggravation clear in her clipped but considerate
movements.
She repositioned the lighted candles to bookend the
caldron and raised her hands in prayer.
While she chanted over me,
her potion began to bubble and smoke without the aid of a heat
source.
Mesmerized, I watched it while I picked up the phone to
call Father Leonard.

“How do I get my soul back?”
I asked without
preamble when he answered.
“All of it.”

I could hear the smile in his voice as he
spoke.
“By exactly what we’ve been discussing for the past several
months, Amy.
You surrender your will to God and ask that your sins
be forgiven.”

Back to that.
I sighed and rubbed the base
of my skull where a dull pain radiated up into my head.
“Why do I
have to give my freewill to anyone?
Why can’t
I
be in charge
of it, one-hundred-percent?”

He cleared his throat, spoke with patience.
“That’s not how it works, my dear.
You’re human.
You were created
by God and to him you must return.”

Honestly, I’d never thought about God
creating me.
A sperm and an egg met, liked each other and boom, Amy
Atwood at your service.
There was little thought put into my
conception and even less thought put into raising me.
My father
left my mother before I was born.
My mother left Emilia and with
our aunt before I was a year old.
If that was God’s version of
creation—to give life so haphazardly and then toss it out of the
nest to fly or splat on the ground without a care—then in my not so
humble opinion, he needed a new vocation.

“Ain’t gonna happen.
Think of something
else.”
I glanced at the clock above my coffeepot.
Two hours and six
minutes until show time.
“And hurry.
I need control of my soul
before the Witches Anonymous ceremony tonight.”