Ilona Andrews - Fate's Edge

Kaldar laughed.

KALDAR passed the binoculars to Audrey. They were parked out of the way, in the back lot of Vans, a large grocery store, their stolen car just an anonymous vehicle among all the others. A few hundred yards down, a large brown-and-beige building sat in the back of a parking lot, couched in large California sycamores and flame trees, blazing with bright red flowers. The Church of the Blessed. Sturdy, solid, brand-new, with large, spotless windows and a large portico before the double-doors entrance. The building had no steeple, no bell tower, nothing to mark it as a church. If anything, it resembled a small convention center.

Audrey took the binoculars. Her fingertips brushed his hand. In his head, he was kissing her, tasting those raspberry lips. Of course, in his little fantasy she loved it. Idly, he wondered if she wanted him to kiss her. Would she pull back, would she melt into the kiss, would she . . .

“Children,” she said, passing the binoculars back to him.

He looked. A throng of adolescent boys made their way to the doors, each carrying something pale . . . Kaldar zoomed in. “Flyers. They’re carrying flyers.”

Audrey reached for the binoculars, and he let her have them. “They’re a skinny lot,” she murmured. “Probably runaways. It’s warm here. The city is full of them. He’s using them as walking advertisements.”

A man in his early thirties, carrying a placard, followed the kids. The doors opened, and two women brought out a cart filled with sandwiches. The children lined up. The man thrust his placard into the lawn and joined the end of the line.

“Come to Jesus and live an abundant life,” Audrey read. “He’s a prosperity preacher, all right. Ugh.”

“I meant to ask you about that,” Kaldar said. “What is a prosperity preacher?”

Audrey took the binoculars from her face. Her eyes were huge with surprise and outrage. She looked hilarious.

“You don’t know what a prosperity preacher is, but you took the job anyway?”

“I have you to explain it.”

“Kaldar!”

He leaned closer. “I like the way you say my name, love. Say it again.”

She plucked a paper map off the dashboard. “No.”

“Auudreey?” He toyed with a lock of her hair. His voice dropped into the quiet intimate murmur that usually got him laid. “Say my name.”

She leaned toward him, her eyelids half-lowered, her long eyelashes fanning her cheeks. She tilted her face to his, close, closer. Her lips parted.

Here it comes.

“Dumb-ass.”

Ouch.

She tapped his forehead with the map. “Focus on the job.”

The woman drove him crazy. “I would focus, but I’ve been rejected and must now wallow in self-pity. So prosperity preachers. What are they?”

Audrey sighed. “How much do you know about Christianity?”

“I’ve read the Bible,” he told her. “The good parts.”

“Let me guess, the ones with wars and rich kings and women?”

He gave her an innocent look. “We’ve barely met, and yet you know me so well.”

“The New Testament, that’s the one with Jesus, in case you didn’t know, doesn’t care for rich people. There is a story in the Gospel of Matthew, where a rich prince visits Jesus and asks him how he could get into Heaven. And Jesus tells him to keep the Commandments, and if he really wants to ensure his place in Heaven, to give away all his possessions to the poor. That’s where that famous verse comes from, ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’ There are more things in the same vein. Mark and Luke and James, all of them basically said that the richer you are, the harder it is to go to Heaven because rich people fall into temptation and surrender to their greed.”

“ ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.’” He had read the Bible, and the quote had stuck with him. He took it as a warning.

“Timothy 6:10.” Audrey shrugged.

“From the way I’m looking at it, poverty doesn’t lead to love and happiness, either.”

She waved her hand at him. “Bottom line is, Christians are supposed to be rich in spirit, not in money. Well, if you’re doing well for yourself and you’re a Christian, that kind of leaves you with two choices: either you can keep giving away your money to get into Heaven, or you can pretend that everything will be okay anyway and hope you won’t go to Hell. Prosperity preachers prey on that fear: they preach that God wants us all to be rich and happy, and it’s okay to have extra money and live a good life full of luxuries.”

“It’s a good gig,” Kaldar reflected. “Nobody wants to go to church and be condemned every Sunday, and the congregation is either rich already or—”

“Hoping to get rich,” Audrey finished.

“Good works aren’t necessary—besides giving generously to the church, of course.”

“Of course.” Audrey wrinkled her nose. “The church needs money.”

Indeed. “All that guilt and all those assets, wrapped in a lovely package.”

“Delicious, like a chocolate truffle.” Audrey licked her lips, and he had to yank his thoughts out of the gutter and back on target. “Outside a hard shell of moral decency, inside creamy, decadent bank accounts.”

Kaldar tapped the wheel. “Sign the check, send it to the business office.”

“Better yet, give us your account number, we’ll do the heavy lifting of withdrawing funds for you.”

“Easy money.”

“Yep. The whole church full of suckers.”

They looked at each other and grinned.

“If we joined forces, how quick do you think we could clean out this town?” Audrey asked.

Kaldar calculated in his head. “We’d be millionaires in six months. Faster if you did your Southern bit.”

They both looked at the church and the children in front of it. “So does the Mirror pay you well?” Audrey asked.

“Not enough to buy any mansions,” he said.

They looked at the church some more. “Being good guys sucks sometimes,” Audrey said.

“Would you really go through with it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “No. A church should be a place of solace. For some people, that’s all they have to lean on when tragedy happens. You’d have to be a special kind of scumbag to prey on that.”

There was an echo of something personal there; but he knew if he probed, she’d slam all her doors shut.

“Plenty of scumbags out there.” Kaldar started the car. A plan had formed in his head.

“Yes, we never seem to have a shortage of those.”

“We need someone on the inside to figure out how this whole Yonker dog and pony show works.”

“You want to pull off a Night and Day scam and use the boys for the Night team, don’t you?”

The way she picked up his train of thought was uncanny. The two kids were the perfect age to blend in with the runaways.

“They can handle it.”

“And if they can’t?”

“Those kids have been through more than most adults. I ran cons at their age. Don’t tell me you didn’t.”

“You and I had no choice,” she told him.

“I will ask them. I won’t order.”

“Right, what fourteen-year-old would turn that adventure down?”

He understood exactly where that worry was coming from. Audrey felt used by her family. It had left scars, and she was trying to make sure the boys weren’t exploited. She didn’t realize both kids had been in combat training for the past four or five years. She didn’t know that Jack killed game on a regular basis, and George could sever a body in half with a burst of his flash. To her, they were children, and she looked at them through the prism of her own experience.