Dark Secrets: A Paranormal Romance Anthology

by Colleen Gleason

  “If you care about Sara so damn much, why did you kill her mother? That nearly destroyed her.” And Raphael had clearly lost his mind. He was eerily calm, melancholy, unfocused.

  But Gabriel’s words made Raphael’s head snap up. “I didn’t kill Jessie. Gabriel, I swear by all that is holy, I didn’t kill Jessie. I loved her… we had a good relationship. Together, we were helping each other be better, if that makes sense.”

  Gabriel did understand that. It was the very way he had thought of his relationship with Sara. But he couldn’t wrap his mind around Raphael being innocent. All evidence pointed to his guilt. “Then who did? You were the last one with her. Your DNA was found on her. There was no forced entry.”

  Raphael waved his hand, in dismissal. “And like my attorney said in court, we were in a relationship. There was reason for my DNA to be on her. But I don’t want to run through all the forensic evidence. I can’t stand the thought of it any longer. I can’t stand what was done to her. I came here to kill myself, you know. To end it. Where it began.” Raphael stacked up the pile of papers neatly and held them out. “My last will and testament, if you please.”

  Still unsure of what exactly was going on, Gabriel took the papers, feeling like the last piece to the puzzle was still missing. “Why did you kill Anne? She did nothing to you, and if it was to punish me in some way, why did you testify for the defense in my trial?”

  But Raphael just shook his head. “I didn’t kill Anne either. I was upset when she chose you over me because I was fond of her, but I was willing to recognize that you had more money than me, and a prettier face. I also realized that Anne didn’t appreciate my love of the French ménage a trios. I couldn’t resist one last visit to her though that night, but you arrived early and Madame sent me packing.”

  Not bothering to hide his disbelief, Gabriel crossed his arms over his chest, crumpling the papers in the process. “So you’re telling me that you had nothing to do with any of these women’s deaths? That you’re just an innocent little lamb prancing around the fucking meadow?”

  “I never said I was innocent, any more than you are innocent. We are fallen angels, you know. We’ve sinned, over and over, you and I. But yes, I am telling you that I did not kill those women. But clearly, I am responsible ultimately for their deaths, because in the last one hundred and fifty years, every woman I have had an intimate relationship with has been murdered.” He gave a short laugh. “It rather ruins the ardor.”

  “You’re a crazy mother fucker, Raphael… you’re killing these women and you know it.” Gabriel didn’t understand who it could be if it wasn’t Raphael and it wasn’t him. No one else had ties to both Anne Donovan and Jessie Michaels, and it clearly had to be an immortal.

  It couldn’t just be a sick and weird coincidence. “Why did you send those pictures to Sara?”

  “What pictures?”

  “And the absinthe?”

  “Absinthe? What are you talking about?” Raphael frowned. “I thought you stopped drinking that swill. Don’t tell me you’ve fallen off the wagon. I thought you were better than that these days.”

  Gabriel stared at his fellow demon. Either Raphael had completely lost his grip on reality, or he was telling the truth. Unfolding the stack of papers Raphael had handed him, he glanced at the will, a quote towards the bottom of the page leaping out at him.

  I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin's; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.-Michelangelo

  “What’s with this sudden obsession with Michelangelo?” he asked as he stuffed Raphael’s will in his back pocket, angry that he couldn’t make sense of what was going on.

  Raphael gave a slight smile. “Michelangelo saw angels. ‘I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.’ Don’t you think it’s odd that these women, the women I cared about, the women I loved, the women I wanted to help, Gabriel, were carved? Carved until set free… sent to heaven.”

  A cold sweat broke out over Gabriel’s flesh. That was the most appalling visual, the most horrific metaphor, he’d ever heard, and he almost choked on his disgust. Raphael had done it, had killed those women, and he was sitting there in his suburban doctor clothes with a stupid smile on his face.

  Gabriel reached for his knife without hesitation. “Raphael, stand up so I can send you back to our Maker.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jocelyn pulled the door to her apartment open immediately. “You’re back early.”

  “Rafe’s not home.”

  “Good. Well, not good, but I’m glad you’re back, because I really want to talk to you about your samples, but I didn’t want to hold you up when you got here earlier. You seemed really eager to see Rafe.”

  She had been. Not so much anymore. “So what did you find with the samples?”

  “Well, your samples were tainted or mislabeled.”

  “What do you mean?” Sara was still unnerved from the encounter with Rafe’s girlfriend, and the quasi fight she’d had with Gabriel the night before when she’d left New Orleans. She wasn’t sure she could wrap her mind around deciphering how she could have screwed up the samples.

  They sat down on Jocelyn’s sofa and Sara pulled her legs under her skirt. She was tired. Numb. Jocelyn, who was a six foot tall brunette with funky retro glasses and more energy in one minute than Sara had in an entire day, had a glass of red wine in her hand. “Do you want a drink? You look worn out, Sara.”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks. I just had a weird thing happen. I’ll tell you about it after I hear the lab results. You’ve got me curious. I don’t see how I could have mislabeled those samples.” But then again, she had sent the samples overnight to Jocelyn when she had been distracted and irritated with Gabriel. She supposed anything was possible.

  “Well, here’s the thing. I found the markers matching your blood sample to the sample you said came from your ancestor. So that made sense. There wasn’t a lot to work with, given the age and size of the sample, but I did a DNA comp to the first hair sample you gave me and there was no match. So whoever that hair belonged to, it wasn’t his blood on that knife. Which again, makes sense since you said it was a woman’s blood on the knife, the victim. But then I compared the two hair samples to each other, since you said the two men are related. Only they’re not related.”

  “They’re not related?” But then why the hell had Gabriel said he was a descendent of John Thiroux if he wasn’t? Or did Gabriel just think he was, but he wasn’t?

  “No.” Jocelyn gave her a shrug. “They’re better than related. They’re the same guy.”

  “What?” That made absolutely no sense whatsoever. “That’s impossible.”

  “Nope. There’s no doubt about it. Those two hairs came from the same dude, Sara.”

  Sara wished she’d said yes to the wine. She sat back against the couch cushions, mind racing. How could she have wound up with two samples from Gabriel? That was just impossible because she was sure there had only been one hair on her pillow, and the other hair had come from Gabriel’s sample of John Thiroux. Unless the hair Gabriel had given her as John Thiroux’s was really Gabriel’s all along and he had known that. But why the hell would he lie about something like that?

  “That’s just so weird… I don’t see how they could have gotten mixed up like that. Maybe he’s just a close match to his relative.” Even as she said the words, she knew that wasn’t possible. Jocelyn knew what she was doing and she would be able to tell the difference between mere markers and a match.

  “DNA doesn’t lie, honey. For whatever reason, you wound up with two samples of the same guy. And I’m hoping after I’m done telling you the rest of my findings, you’re going to illuminate me as to who all these samples belong to, and what exactly it all means. I thought you were in New Orleans on sabbatical.”

  That was a polite way to explain what she had been doing. “I’ll tell you everything, I promise.” God knew she neede
d to talk to someone. “But first tell me what else you found.” Not that it was going to matter if she had screwed all the samples up. Which infuriated her. She didn’t like to mess up, couldn’t explain how she could have done that.

  “That patent print you sent me? I entered it in AFIS and got a list of four possible matches. Patricia ran through them last night for me, which means you owe her big time for doing that on a Saturday night, but anyway, she made a conclusive match. Twelve points.”

  Sara narrowed her eyes at Jocelyn. “Wait a minute. I only sent you one fingerprint scan. How the hell could that match prints in AFIS?”

  “Because it’s the same person.” Jocelyn looked at her blankly. “What do you mean? Why did you send it if you weren’t looking for a match?”

  What she meant was that the print she’d sent Jocelyn had been the bloody fingerprint on the sketch of Anne Donovan, left there in 1849. Almost a hundred and sixty years earlier. She’d sent it merely to ask Jocelyn if she thought there was any possibility of extracting DNA from the bloody fingerprint on the original sketch, but she’d never actually gotten around to asking that of Jocelyn, so her friend had obviously assumed she wanted to search for a match. Which hadn’t occurred to her as even a possibility because of its age. “It’s an old print. There’s no way there should have been a match.”

  “How old?”

  “It was from 1849.” A chill went up Sara’s spine. Something was very wrong, only she had no idea what it was.

  “What? That’s impossible. Patricia doesn’t mess up like that. She’s an expert fingerprint tech and she’s been doing this for fifteen years. She found twelve fucking points of comp, Sara.”

  “That’s why it doesn’t make any sense!” Sara rubbed her temples. Nothing made sense. “Who did the match come up as? Just some random petty criminal?”

  “No. It’s a woman who was arrested in Louisiana in 2003 for running a prostitution ring. Her name is Marguerite Charles. Does that ring any bells?”

  It did. Sara sat straight up. That’s what the woman outside Rafe’s had said her name was. Marguerite. But she hadn’t told her a last name, so why did the whole name Marguerite Charles sound familiar?

  “I don’t know… maybe. I went over to Rafe’s before I came here and some woman was there getting his mail. He had obviously moved out of his condo. This woman said she was his girlfriend… and that her name was Marguerite.” She had also mentioned Gabriel. Say hi to Gabriel.

  Oh my God. Sara suddenly remembered where she had seen the name Marguerite Charles. In the court records of the trial of Jonathon Thiroux. Marguerite was the congressman’s wife who had posed nude for him.

  “Since when does Rafe have a girlfriend?” Jocelyn looked as offended as Sara had felt. “It’s a little soon to be moving in with another woman. It’s been three weeks since his acquittal. God, that’s tacky.”

  “Thank you.” Sara couldn’t agree more. “That is exactly what I thought, but I figured I was totally biased.” She either had to be wrong or it was some kind of monstrous and weird coincidence that a woman arrested for prostitution in Louisiana could be the same woman who Rafe was dating. And it was flat out impossible that she could be the same Marguerite in the court records, or that she could have been physically present at the scene of Anne Donovan’s death.

  But now she was curious to know if Gabriel knew a Marguerite, and how.

  “Well, I guess that’s typical for a man,” Jocelyn said. “But it’s still rude.”

  “She invited me to dinner with the two of them.”

  “Eew.” Jocelyn wrinkled her nose. “I hope you told her to go fuck herself.”

  Sara laughed. God, she loved Jocelyn, and she had missed her. “Not exactly, but I doubt she was serious. She was just trying to be territorial and prove a point.” And in lieu of everything else, Sara no longer really gave a damn that Rafe had a girlfriend. What concerned her was who the girlfriend was, and what relevance she had to Gabriel or herself.

  Everything was too strange, too circular, too oddly familiar and overlapping, and it was disturbing, unnerving.

  “I think I’d like that glass of wine. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to give Gabriel a quick call.”

  Jocelyn’s eyebrows went up. “Who the hell is Gabriel and why did your eyes go soft when you said his name?”

  “Oh. Didn’t I mention him?” Sara felt a burn race up her neck to her cheeks. “Let me call him really quick and then I swear, I’ll tell you everything.”

  But first she had to find out what he knew about a curvy and seemingly wealthy brunette named Marguerite.

  * * *

  Raphael just shook his head at him. “I don’t think so. If I’m going to die, it will be my own hand.” He frowned. “Besides, I thought we were friends. We used to go to dinner at the club together. I did my best to steer the jury to a non-guilty verdict in your trial. Why would you want to kill me?”

  Gabriel couldn’t imagine what was so hard to grasp about the concept. “You’ve killed what… four women? The first of whom was under my protection. It’s my responsibility, fallen or not, to vanquish you.”

  “I told you, I didn’t kill them.” Raphael fell backwards onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? This has been my punishment… that if I care for a woman, if I have sexual intimacies with her, she is killed.”

  “But…” Gabriel lowered the knife in his hand. That didn’t sound like a legitimate punishment. Death to a mortal wasn’t something even a Grigori demon would condone. “Why so long into your relationship with them? And why wasn’t there a evidence of intercourse with either Anne or Jessie?” It was crude, but he felt like he had to ask.

  Raphael stayed on his back, expression rueful. “I don’t know why it happens when it happens. And there’s no evidence of intercourse because technically I can’t, uh, finish what is started.”

  “What?” Gabriel thought that through, and was sorry he did. That was more than he ever wanted to know about Raphael. “So you’re saying that you can’t…” He used his hand to indicate forward motion. For some reason he couldn’t bring himself to say it straight out.

  Which apparently Raphael couldn’t either. “Correct. I can’t. That’s why I always have favored ménages. It’s not missed when there are enough other parts to play with.”

  Gabriel winced. Definitely too much information. He put his hand out. “Okay, I got it. But if I believe you, which I’m not sure I do, then who killed them?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

  Pacing back and forth in the narrow room, Gabriel felt the humid heat, the small space, the lack of answers pressing in on him. The floors were the original wood planks, dusty and nicked, but there was no evidence of where Anne’s blood had been in front of the bed. The stain had been sanded away. But Gabriel couldn’t make it disappear as easily. He wanted, needed, to know who would have done such a thing. If it was punishment for him, for Raphael, or a horrible sick quest that had nothing to do with either of them.

  His phone rang in his pocket and he pulled it out. It was Sara’s number. He wanted to answer it, but if she was calling, then clearly she was okay and he needed to finish this conversation before he spoke to her.

  “You can answer it,” Raphael said. “I don’t care.”

  “It’s too late. She hung up.” Phone in his left hand, knife in his right, Gabriel stared at the shutters. What the hell was he supposed to do? He knew he had to do something, knew there was a key, something he was supposed to accomplish before he would be free, but he had no idea what it was. He wanted to solve these murders but didn’t know where to look next.

  Raphael’s phone started ringing, his ring tone an irritating hip hop song.

  Pulling it out of his pocket, Raphael glanced at the screen. “It’s Sara. I’m going to answer it.”

  Feeling offended that Sara had called Raphael immediately after calling him, he glanced down at his own phone. She hadn’t even left him
a voicemail. She was clearly still angry with him. But it still made his blood pressure increase to know that the woman he loved was perfectly happy chatting with Raphael.

  Raphael had sat up and he said, “Hi, Sara, how are you?”

  There was nothing as annoying as standing there only able to hear one half of a conversation. He should be talking to Sara, not feeling like a complete outsider, in that room of all places. He was ready to leave, wanted away from the bed, the dingy walls, the lingering smell of cigarettes and rot. He was standing right where Anne’s little table and his chair used to rest, and it made him frustrated in ways he couldn’t even describe or explain.

  Raphael was frowning. “I told you I was moving out.”

  It sounded like Sara was angry with Raphael too, which gave him a petty satisfaction.

  “What? Who? Sara, calm down… no, I didn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Hold on a second. Here’s Gabriel.” Raphael shoved his phone at him. “I think you should talk to her. She’s really upset and I’m not sure why.”

  Great. Just great. They weren’t even supposed to know each other and Raphael had just blurted out that he was standing right next to him. He hadn’t given him any way to ease Sara into an explanation, but had just handed him a hand grenade.

  “Sara? I’m sorry I just missed your call… is everything okay? How are you?” Gabriel put his own phone in his front pants pocket and twirled the knife with his free hand. He had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to be a good conversation.

  “Why the hell are you with Rafe?” she said. “You said you weren’t going to come to Florida! What the hell is going on?”

  No. That wasn’t a good start. “I’m not in Florida. I’m still in New Orleans.”

  “How can you be in New Orleans? Why is Rafe there? And how do you know each other?”

  There was no easy way to explain their relationship or what was happening. So he stuck his hand in his hair and closed his eyes and said, “Um. It turns out we do know each other. I didn’t realize that because he’s using a different name now, but I just saw a picture of him and put two and two together. And I was pretty sure he was here in New Orleans, because I figured out he owns the house on Dauphine Street. Which is why I was okay with you going back to Florida, because I was almost positive he wouldn’t be there, but here. Therefore, you wouldn’t be in any danger from him.”