Dark Secrets: A Paranormal Romance Anthology

by Colleen Gleason

  “Bible quotes?” Sara looked confused. “Rafe? I don’t think so. Though I wasn’t there for the majority of the trial. Why?”

  That was interesting. Too random to ultimately be random, given the complexity of the quote from Rafe Marino that Gabriel had read in the paper. “I just read an article where he was quoting the Bible, referring to living a righteous life.”

  “Really?” She looked skeptical. “I never thought of Rafe as a religious kind of guy.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Maybe it was the stress of the trial. But Sara, I’m sorry, I really am, that the case has gone cold. But maybe there will be some new evidence, maybe they’ll solve it still. You never know.”

  Her head tilted. “Come on. Do you really believe that?”

  If they had taken a man to trial and he’d been acquitted, then no, he didn’t believe they would ever locate the killer. Maybe the man they’d tried really had done it. Maybe he hadn’t. But the odds were very much against the police and the prosecutor ever accumulating enough evidence to actually try someone else for the crime at that point. So he told Sara the truth. “No, I don’t really believe that. I think it’s done, and you’re left trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that there will never be justice for your mother.”

  Sara stroked her cat’s head steadily, looking out the window behind him. “Yeah. That pretty much sums it up. And I appreciate your honesty. I get tired of people giving me ‘look on the bright side’ speeches. There is no fucking bright side. Even if they convicted someone, what does it matter? My mother is dead, and her last minutes on earth were torture. And yes, I have to figure out how to live with that, how to go forward.”

  The curse from Sara surprised him, but he actually took it as a positive sign. She was venting, in a controlled way. She was letting it out, without losing it. That was a good thing. “Yes, you do.”

  “Do you know that there’s no such thing as instant death? That if a person’s throat is slit, they are still conscious, unable to make a sound, as their arterial artery bleeds out enough volume of blood to cause death. So they’re aware, on some level, as the killer stabs them in the chest, the stomach, the face, and they can’t do anything about it. They’re helpless.”

  “I know.” It was another layer of his guilt, that he could not die, but mortals did and could, painfully and slowly. That Anne had suffered that way while he had slept in a pleasure fog. “I know a lot about murder.”

  Suddenly she laughed, rubbing her face with the palm of her hands. “God, we’re a pair, aren’t we? Call us Gloom and Doom.”

  “Okay. I’ll be Doom, you can be Gloom. Though you’re going to have to ditch the kitten if you want people to believe you’re macabre.”

  Her eyebrow went up. “What’s wrong with Angel?”

  “That. You can’t be depressed and sour with a kitten named Angel. It’s an oxymoron. And I refuse to wear leather pants, by the way, so I think we’re going to have to give up our plan.”

  “We’ll have to be happy?” Her mouth tilted up in the corner.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I guess there are worse fates.”

  Indeed there were.

  Sara’s phone rang. “Do you mind if I answer that?”

  “Go right ahead.” He put his headphones on, classic rock blaring, so he wouldn’t hear her private conversation, and turned back to study the breakdown of the ingredients in absinthe. Ethanol- definitely psychoactive. Wormwood, arguably, though it was virtually impossible to determine how much might have built up in an absinthe abuser. Especially since it could be toxic in high levels, yet Gabriel had been immortal. So there was no telling how much had been in his bloodstream at the time of the murder. Nor had he been drinking quality absinthe at that point. He hadn’t cared enough to spend top dollar when a cheap substitute would get him drunk just as fast. It probably had been filled with lead and other filler metals.

  It was disgusting to consider what he had put inside his body.

  Gabriel reached for a spoon from his collection and tapped it on his desk.

  Yet part of him would always crave the comfort, would always remember fondly the beauty of pouring water over the sugar laden spoon and that moment of erotic anticipation as the absinthe turned from brilliant emerald to cloudy lime.

  Part of him was still an addict, and until he conquered that once and for all, he was still cursed.

  To be addicted to the addict. It was a terrible fate, and he would have to be careful he didn’t ensnare Sara into such a horrific ending.

  * * *

  Rafe’s name was on her phone screen so Sara answered it. “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me. How are you?”

  His ears must have been burning. And for some reason, Sara felt guilty having discussed him with Gabriel, however vaguely. It still felt like she hadn’t been staunch enough in her support of Rafe during the latter part of the trial. It felt like she needed to make that up to him, over and over, by reminding people of his innocence.

  “I’m doing good,” she said. “You haven’t left Florida yet, have you?” She really did want to see Rafe before he went to California.

  “No. It will be at least two weeks. I have to tie up some loose ends.” He paused, than asked, “Are you really in New Orleans, Sara?”

  She closed her eyes briefly. She hadn’t wanted him to know, hadn’t wanted him to worry. “Who told you that?”

  “It’s in the friggin’ paper. But I know how capable they are of printing lies, so I wanted to check with you. Warn you that if you are there, they know.”

  They. The mythical they who had followed her, photographed her, called her, asked rude and insensitive questions. Disrupted her mother’s funeral. Uncovered her brief stint in rehab and splashed it all over gleefully. The media.

  “Yeah, I’m in New Orleans. Thanks for letting me know.”

  “Can I ask what you’re doing there?”

  That was a loaded question, and one she couldn’t really answer in its entirety. “I just needed to get away. I’m sightseeing. I took a three month lease on an apartment.”

  “An apartment? In the French Quarter? The Garden District?”

  “No. Kenner.”

  “Never heard of it. So sightseeing, huh? Okay.” He didn’t sound like he believed her, but neither did he pry. “Make sure you check out the cemeteries. Everyone says you have to see them.”

  Not that she would normally seek out a jaunt through the cemetery, but in this case she could answer in all honesty. “I’ve already been there. Very interesting.”

  “Eat some gumbo for me, and come home safely, alright?”

  “I will. Thanks. And if you need any help with the move, let me know.”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine. That’s what moving companies are for. Call me next week, okay?”

  She could do that. He sounded worried about her, and that was a nice thing to have. “I will.”

  “Good. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  Sara hung up and glanced over at Gabriel. He didn’t seem to be listening, but would he think it was odd for her to say she loved her mother’s boyfriend? But she did, in a truly platonic sense, because Rafe had made her mother happy. He had loved her mother, calmly and consistently, and that wasn’t an easy feat for anyone. Her mother had been volatile and difficult to live with. But Rafe had been a calming influence on her.

  No one would even think twice about it if Rafe had been sixty to her mother’s forty-six. But because he had only been thirty-one, everyone had doubted the legitimacy of their relationship. Doubted that any man could love an older woman without an ulterior motive.

  Gabriel was spoon tapping again. He seemed to have a spoon collection, though they weren’t souvenir spoons. She wasn’t sure what they were exactly, but he had at least twelve of them, lined up on the wall, hanging from nails that he hooked through the holes in the bowl part of the utensil. He had a different one in his hand then he’d had the other day, and he flicked it
on the desk to the rhythm he was obviously hearing through his headphones. He was musically talented, given the ease with which he held the rhythm, while reading his computer screen. Which wasn’t surprising, given that he played the piano. Or had played the piano.

  She wondered if he associated the piano with alcohol.

  That would be a good reason to distance himself from music. If not, she thought it was terribly tragic that he didn’t hear music anymore.

  Adjusting her laptop on her legs on the couch, Sara checked her email. She had a lot of spam, and some forwarded jokes from her friend Jocelyn, as well as a personal email from Jocelyn inquiring how her sightseeing trip was going. Sara felt a little guilty for misleading Jocelyn as well, but she hadn’t been able to tell her why she was coming to New Orleans. It had just seemed too odd, too desperate, for anyone else to understand.

  Sara dashed off a brief reply that said a whole lot of nothing. Clicking through the rest of messages in her inbox, she paused at one.

  The subject header was “Questions Remain In Michaels Case”, and the sender was not an address she recognized.

  A chill ran over her arms and she clicked to open the email reluctantly. It was a link to the Naples Daily News online articles. She scanned it quickly.

  The murder of Jessie Michaels is not a closed case, according to the Naples police. Despite the fact that Dr. Rafe Marino was acquitted of the July 2007 murder of his girlfriend just last week, prosecutor Daniel Smithton has indicated there is a new lead in the year old murder. Despite accusations in the media that the indictment of Dr. Marino was botched, the prosecutor maintains the case against him was strong. The drawn out and highly publicized trial has been devastating to Smithton’s reputation and former conviction rate of one hundred percent for homicide cases.

  Smithton theorized during the trial that Marino and the victim’s daughter, Sara Michaels, had been engaged in an affair, and together plotted the murder of mother and girlfriend. Given that Dr. Marino cannot be tried for the same crime twice, Smithton’s dogged pursuit of a closure to this case would suggest that attention may be turned to securing a conviction of Sara Michaels for complicity to commit murder.

  Shit. Taking deep breathes, Sara willed herself not to be sick, not to read the rest of the article, which was just a recap of everything she already knew. Arresting her was all just speculation, the media trying to draw out a trial that had garnered them a great deal of attention. There was no evidence to prosecute her. Rafe’s attorney had assured her of that over and over again. There was no evidence at all of a relationship between her and Rafe, and the evidence against him presented in court had been purely circumstantial. It had hurt him that he hadn’t had an alibi, but she herself had been at work that night. But despite a lack of alibi, no one had seen him at her mother’s that night either. No one had seen anyone entering the house, or seen his car parked in the driveway, or on the street.

  The basis of their prosecution had been the hair and clothing fibers, and a single fingerprint on the window in her mother’s bedroom that matched Rafe’s left index finger. But he and her mother had spent virtually all non-working hours together, mostly at her house, so that meant nothing as far as Sara was concerned. In the end, the jury had agreed. It hadn’t been enough to convict him.

  And there wasn’t anything to convict her on. She had to remember that. She had never spent time with Rafe without her mother present, and there had been no phone conversations between them other than when he was at her mother’s house. No one had any reason to believe or any proof that they had been involved with each other and could have done something as heinous as plot her mother’s murder.

  Besides, why would they have needed to kill her mother to be together? It was completely illogical. Rafe was a doctor. He didn’t need her mother’s tiny insurance policy or house.

  Sara was tempted to delete the email, just to get rid of it, but she knew she really should keep it. She should pursue who had sent it to her, try to determine if it was a random person or if it was the newspaper trying to coax a response from her. But she wasn’t up for an investigation at the moment. She wanted Florida to stay in Florida. And the only murder she wanted to think about was Anne Donovan’s, leaving her mother’s for Gabriel to deal with for the book, so she moved the email to a folder labeled Misc. and closed her browser.

  Then she opened up a Word document and started typing. There were questions she wanted to answer about the Donovan case, whether they could ever reach a conclusion as to what happened or not. There were things she just wanted to know, so she typed them to organize her thoughts:

  Where did John Thiroux come from?

  Where did he go after his acquittal?

  Who was keeping Anne Donovan’s child?

  And there was the ultimate question, which she found difficult to even type in black and white, that tied present to past, Florida to Louisiana. She had never spoken it out loud, never told anyone. They would think she was either insane, making it up, or look at her like she was a complete and utter freak. Because there was no way around the truth, the question to which she had no answer:

  Why were my great-great grandmother, great grandmother, grandmother, and mother all murdered? Was it a coincidence? A curse? Does someone know about the first two murders and decided to perpetuate it with the last two? Could it have been my grandfather?

  Am I next?

  The last was a small question, but one which held all her fears, encompassed the very drive behind everything she had done in the last year. The very real terror that it would be her turn at any given moment.

  “Want to go to lunch?”

  Sara jumped at the sound of Gabriel’s voice. Not wanting him to read what she’d written, to know what she’d been thinking, she slapped the computer lid down hard and blinked at him. He had turned around in his chair and was looking at her curiously. She knew immediately she had overreacted, though he didn’t call her on it.

  “Uh, sure. Lunch would be good.” It was a little late for nonchalance, but she faked it anyway.

  “Cool. Let me know when you’re ready.” He started shutting down his computer, and hung the unusual spoon back up on its hook next to its brethren.

  It was really very nice that whatever Gabriel thought of her, he didn’t seem to think she was a freak, which was frequently how she felt. He didn’t so much as blink at any of her odd behaviors, including the utterly random act of staring wide-eyed at him at four in the morning as he tried to sleep. Nor had he made her feel uncomfortable for doing that, or anything else.

  “Does it bother you that I’m in your space?” she asked him as she stood up and stretched. “I realize I could probably do all of this at my place if that works better for you.” She did feel guilty for invading his apartment, his life. She hadn’t realized how much time she would actually spend reading documents and sorting them. It wasn’t something he really needed her to be on site for, at least not on a daily basis. She wanted to give him the opportunity to lose her if he really preferred to be alone.

  “This works for me.”

  That’s all he said, and all he needed to. Sara accepted everything Gabriel said at face value, because for whatever reason, she trusted he spoke the truth, and didn’t waste words where they weren’t necessary.

  And she was oddly relieved he wanted her to stick around. Or maybe it wasn’t so odd, really. She liked him. She was attracted him, even though he had given her no encouragement, no real flirtation, no sexual innuendoes. Yet she still enjoyed his company, and in a small, quiet way, knew she was hoping that at some point they would cross the line and explore a physical relationship. She didn’t want anything permanent, not a real relationship, but sex she really could use.

  But it was probably a good thing that he wasn’t hitting on her. The complication was something she really didn’t need, even if her body disagreed.

  “Will the cat be okay here?”

  “Sure. Let’s just close her in one room so she doesn’t get in
to anything. We can put her in my bedroom. She can’t get into trouble there.”

  Gabriel scooped Angel up off the couch and held her with one hand against his chest. His fingers scratched behind her ears. Sara followed them, wanting to make sure Angel was settled.

  Then was sorry she had. When she walked into Gabriel’s bedroom, the first thing she saw was an oblong red streak of blood on the outside of his window. “Oh my God! What is that?”

  He moved towards it, dropping Angel onto his unmade bed. “A bird must have hit the window. It’s probably down in the courtyard.”

  Sara shuddered. She worked with, or had until the past year, blood samples in the lab on nearly a daily basis. Her entire adult life had been spent knee deep in blood, by choice.

  But now she was starting to wonder why it seemed to follow her everywhere.

  Chapter Eight

  Gabriel opened the results of the fingerprint analysis on Monday, before Sara was due to arrive. The email was long and convoluted, but the conclusion was that the fingerprint, preserved in blood, on the sketch of Anne’s hand that he had drawn the night of her murder, was not a match to the right thumbprint of the set of fingerprints he had submitted for comparison.

  His fingerprints.

  So that wasn’t his finger in blood, which surprised him, because he remembered picking the sketch back up after he had thrown up. After his fingers had been wet and sticky from touching the blood on the mattress. So it should be his fingerprint. But it wasn’t. Which meant his memory of events was unreliable.

  Which did not make him happy.

  What else did he remember inaccurately?

  There was only one other person still walking the earth who had any knowledge of the events of that night, and the months that followed, but Gabriel refused to contact Raphael. Didn’t even know where he was at this point.

  Gabriel had spent the last century cutting off all ties with the Grigori, denying the truth of his status, pretending that he was, in fact, just another mortal. But he wasn’t. He had been an angel. Sent to watch, guide, and protect mortals. And like Alex and the other Watchers before him, he had succumbed to human vice, to one of the seven deadly sins. For Alex, it had been lust. But for Gabriel, it was gluttony, the over-consumption of drugs and alcohol. Addiction was the ultimate form of gluttony, the inability to stop consuming even after it was dangerous, detrimental, destructive.