Allison Brennan - Carnal Sin

“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 at 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.”

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.