Both Grant and Rafe were staring at her. Then Grant asked, “Why is it so important to know where she died?”
“Because if this is the ritual Rafe thinks it is, there will be five sacrifices. One on each equinox, and the last on the anniversary of the first, the autumn equinox, which is Baphomet’s feast day. And if we don’t stop the fake Tessa Standler before tonight, she’ll be exponentially stronger, and after facing her, I don’t think I can fight her if she gains more power, short of shooting her in the head. And honestly, I don’t want to go to prison for murder. Last time I checked, the criminal justice system doesn’t allow psycho-bitches to be killed because they’re summoning demons from Hell.”
Grant ran both hands through his hair and closed his eyes. “I’ll call Fern Archer and have her meet us there.”
o0o
Fern was at the morgue by the time the three of them arrived.
“I’m not going to ask,” Fern said in greeting. “Just don’t do anything to get me fired. And put on these.” She handed them foot coverings and gloves.
Rafe didn’t know how he was going to find Amy again, or if she was still here. “Where is her body?” he asked Fern.
“She was released to her parents. The mortuary is picking up this afternoon, so the body is probably bagged and ready for transport in the main crypt.”
Fern led the way. She checked tags on all the bagged bodies. “Here.” She gestured to the fourth body in the row.
Rafe stood next to the gurney, mindful that Moira was watching him closely. He didn’t see or feel Amy’s spirit anywhere. Maybe she’d already gone to the afterlife in peace, knowing that her parents knew what had happened to her.
“Well?” Grant asked, impatient.
Rafe asked Fern, “Could I be alone for a minute?”
Fern hesitated. “I really can’t do that.”
Rafe looked at Moira and Grant. “I think if you both leave, she’ll come.”
Reluctantly, Moira left with Grant, saying to Rafe as she walked out, “Don’t break the rules.”
“What’s going on?” Fern asked.
Rafe smiled. “I thought you weren’t going to ask.”
“Changed my mind.”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
She didn’t say anything.
Rafe continued. “You work here. You’re a comfortable presence to any lingering spirits. They know you. They appreciate how you treat the dead. They’re not scared of you because you’re not creeped out by their physical bodies.”
“It would be hard to have this job if the dead freaked me out.”
“Moira is...sensitive,” Rafe said, not knowing exactly how to explain her fear of the morgue. He didn’t fully understand, and he didn’t think Moira knew, either. He suspected it went back to her past. “And Grant is angry.”
“What are the rules?”
“We’re not supposed to communicate with ghosts, but if they choose to talk to us we can listen and ask them about their lives—often, if they can’t move past the astral plane to the afterlife it’s because of a powerful unresolved issue before they died. With Amy, she was trapped with her body because she couldn’t leave without her parents knowing what happened to her. Her love for her parents and their well-being kept her anchored to her body until it was identified.”
“Then she’s gone.”
“I don’t think so.” I hope not. “But I can help her.”
“And that’s the only rule? Don’t talk?”
“Don’t question. Don’t ask about the future. Don’t ask for any favors. That’s forbidden, because it opens a portal to the underworld, and your soul is at greater risk. It’s why going to psychics and asking what your future holds is a sin in the Church.”
“I’m not Catholic.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“To me it does.”
Then Rafe qualified, “For me, it’s a grave sin.” He didn’t need to explain further. “There’s also the problem of opening oneself up to possession. The more talking, the more opportunities you give a poltergeist—a bad ghost—from getting inside.”
“So all ghosts aren’t bad?”
“Ghosts are lost souls, not demons. Some are bad, some are simply...lost.”
You came back...
Rafe turned around. Amy stood behind him, surprised and smiling. “Yes,” he said.
Fern asked, “Is she here?”
Rafe asked Amy, “Do you want to say something to Fern?”
Tell her thank you for being so nice to my parents.
Rafe smiled and said to Fern, “Amy appreciates that you were kind to her parents.”
Fern looked freaked a moment, then she shook it off. “Well, it’s part of my job.”
She sings when no one is around. She has a very pretty voice. I can’t hear everyone, but I can hear her sing.
“I have a couple questions about what happened to you.”
Amy’s face twisted and she started to fade.
“Please, Amy—stay with me.”
I don’t want to think about that.
“I can help stop who did this to you. Do you know that Beth Milner went missing three months ago?”
Amy shook her head, but Rafe suspected she had sensed it.
“Tori Schaeffer is missing. She disappeared between midnight and six a.m. She’ll die the same way you died if we can’t find her.”
Tori? Amy came back into full focus.
“Do you remember a girl at your camp last summer who called herself Tessa Schaeffer?”
Yes. She was in our cabin. But she left early. Is she missing too?
“She killed you.”
No. It was him.
“Does he have a name?”
She frowned. I don’t remember. Everything is fuzzy. Tall. Long blond hair. So nice, so kind. I went with him, I don’t know why. I just—did.
“I think you were under a spell. Sort of like hypnosis. He said the right words and you went with him as if it were your idea.”
She was thinking.
Rafe pushed. “I need to know where you were when they took your blood.”
I died in the mountains.
“There was an altar. Candles.” As he spoke, he unzipped her body bag. He put his hand on her cold body. Amy’s ghost flickered in front of him and she stared at him, shocked.
I can feel you. How did you do that?
I don’t know.
He had a psychic connection with her now, he didn’t need to speak out loud. What he really needed was to see what happened to her, to filter her memories and fear through his experience and knowledge of the Baphomet ritual. He dismissed the fact that he, personally, had never witnessed a blood ritual like this, that until yesterday he didn’t even know it was possible.
Let me see, he said to her.
She trusted him, he felt it, and she let him into her memories. They revealed what happened when she died, but backwards.
Cold. Stars through leafy trees. Not a park, but a private backyard. Lights on one side, far away; a house closer. Candles. She was elevated, she didn’t feel anything. A pinch. She slept. She was dying.
The house itself. She was in the house for hours of preparation. She wasn’t scared. She was lethargic. A scented bath. Candles. Oils. Chanting. Someone lathered her with lotion. Lavender and something she couldn’t identify. Big house.
She’d been drugged, or under a spell. The coroner hadn’t found known drugs, but he wouldn’t have been looking for most of the herbs used in black magic rituals. The oils or lotion could have been made with any number of herbs that would relax her to the point of near unconsciousness. The bath, the candles, everything together was part of the purification ritual.
He was so pretty.
Rafe pulled his hand from the body, the connection lost. He’d seen Rex from Defiance in a car, picking Amy up after school. He’d called her over and asked for directions, then said:
“There is a blood moon tonight.”
Then she’
d gotten into the car and kissed him. Driven her to a house on Alonzo Drive. He’d seen the road sign with her eyes.
She had never met him before. He’d been a complete stranger.
Amy saw the truth as Rafe saw it.
It wasn’t my fault.
“No, Amy, you were murdered. It wasn’t your fault, you didn’t know what you were doing.” She’d been hypnotized at the camp—all the dark energy Moira had sensed. Her vision at the willow tree.
Amy’s ghost shimmered in front of him, expanding in a bright light. Peace filled her face, the guilt that had she had been responsible in some way for her death gone, and her spirit was free to leave. For a moment Rafe wanted to touch her body and feel the same peace. To receive the knowledge and truth that Amy had at that moment.
But that knowledge would condemn him. He’d get but a taste of the truth, then it would be ripped away. Some rules could be bent, and some rules could be broken.
This rule was rigid.
Thank you, Raphael Cooper.
Then her mouth was moving but he couldn’t hear anything.
“What?”
She was worried. She was trying to warn him about something, but all he heard was one word.
Judas.
“What just happened?” Fern asked.
“She’s gone.”
“Just like that?” Fern seemed disappointed.
“It was beautiful.”
Fern hadn’t seen what he had, and Rafe should have felt lucky that he’d witnessed Amy’s ghost leaving the astral plane in a state of peace.
She knew his full name. She had been trying to warn him about something, but what? Tessa Standler? Rex? What was happening to Tori Schaeffer?
Or was it about him?
Fern zipped up the body bag. “We should go.”
He followed her out of the crypt, concerned that something was very wrong with him. He’d had this fear ever since he woke up from his coma two months ago and walked when he shouldn’t have been able to walk. The fear only increased when he knew things he’d never remembered learning, like knowing what Tessa was planning with the Baphomet ritual.
Was he the Judas? Was he going to betray the people he was supposed to love and protect?
Grant was on his cell phone in the small office used by the intake clerk. He hung up a moment after Fern and Rafe walked in. “Good news, bad news. Good news first—we have an ID on the woman from Defiance off her fingerprints. Smart move of your girlfriend giving me her cameo last night. It kept a clean print. Gwen Simmons, wanted for the murder of her boyfriend. And the bad news? She’s supposed to be dead. Eighteen months ago, her car went off a cliff in Oregon and her body was never recovered. She left a suicide note confessing to killing her boyfriend, and her blood was found on the steering wheel.”
Fern gave a low whistle. “She faked her own death?”
“One year before Amy Carney died,” Grant said. “Did you learn anything?”
“She was killed in the backyard of a large house in the hills. I would know it if I saw it—it’s on Alonzo Avenue. Do you know where that is?”
“That’s in Encino,” Grant said, pulling out his cell phone to map it. “Damn, it’s near where her body was found.”
Rafe suspected Gwen Simmons had made a deal with the demon Baphomet. Her death was faked on the Equinox, and one year later Amy Carney died, her blood taken. Moira would know more about how the deal would have worked.
“Where’s Moira?”
“She went outside, said something about a blood moon.” Grant shook his head. “The moon isn’t even out yet, I don’t know—”
Rafe ran outside and searched everywhere. Moira had disappeared.
Chapter Ten
Moira’s head ached, not from the mind control but from being hit over the head when she emerged from the morgue.
You were such an idiot!
She had a call, but it was a wrong number. Then she had an urgent need to go outside and look at the blood moon. So urgent that she believed, for a moment, that if she saw the moon, all her questions would be answered.
But even as she stepped out, she knew something was wrong. She was on alert, waiting for something, and she turned just as Rex from Defiance stepped away from the building and hit her with a gun. He had a friend, the bouncer from the night before, who handcuffed her and they lifted her up and carried her to a waiting car. Her scream was cut short by a hard slap across her face, then she was in the back seat of a car and it started moving before Rex even closed the door.
She realized what Rex had done the night before. While she had a face-off with the fake Tessa, Rex had hypnotized her. It was subtle, and because she’d been so focused on the powerful woman, she hadn’t thought the weaker Rex could have gotten through to her.
She’d underestimated him because she hadn’t thought he was a threat. Her ego had defeated her.
You have to get out of this mess.
“Search her,” the woman behind the wheel said. It wasn’t blondie, it was a dark-haired witch.
They took both her knives, her gun, her holy water—which Rex tossed out the window—and the blessed oil, which he pocketed. He tossed her phone out the window. It shattered on the pavement.
Plan B.
She had no Plan B. She’d have to wing it.
“April, did you tell Gwen that we have her?”
April laughed and glanced at Moira in the rearview mirror. “She is extremely pleased.”
Rex put his arm around Moira’s shoulders, leaned over so his face was practically next to hers and whispered, “I haven’t seen a bounty so high before. You’re worth a lot dead, but a fortune alive.”
Moira butted her head hard against his. She winced, satisfied only in that Rex yelped in pain.
He grabbed her face with his hand and squeezed so hard she heard her jaw pop. “Do not forget you are worth something dead.”
She jerked her head out of his grip and stared out the window.
Once, she’d been a powerful witch. Trained in magic by her mother, Moira thought everything they did was contained in their own world. As a child, she didn’t know that most of what Fiona did was evil. That she’d been conceived in a black magic ritual, a daughter bred specifically to liaison between her mother’s growing coven and the underworld. She was to be sacrificed on her eighteenth birthday to become Fiona’s counterpart in Hell, walking the astral plane to facilitate her mother’s ascension as the head of all united covens, to give her mother direction to the tree of life.
That she’d turned her back on it, renounced her birthright, and ran away only angered her mother. The first time she escaped, Moira had been punished her so severely that even now, she was terrified of being underground. The second time, she’d begged to die.
But the third time...Father Philip found her, saved her, trained her.
She closed her eyes. Ten years ago she would have been able to destroy the three people in this car with little effort. That ability had nearly cost her her soul. She still didn’t know if she’d earned it back. All the damage her mother had done, all that she’d had Moira do as a child...before Moira knew that her actions had terrible consequences.
She couldn’t use magic now to save her life. And maybe that was the only thing that would save her soul.
April took the freeway north, then east. Two, three freeways. They drove for nearly an hour because of traffic.
Rafe and Grant had to know she was missing by now. Surely there’d be video surveillance. Someone got the plates of the car. Maybe the police were already following at a discreet distance.
Moira didn’t like cops. She had some legal issues of her own. But she’d rather risk the criminal justice system and deportation to Ireland than face Baphomet’s puppet, Gwen Simmons.
Finally they turned onto a road called Big Tujunga Canyon that wound through a valley in the mountains, then up a long, private driveway. So secluded that she could scream and no one would hear.
They stopped outside a pa
thetic house falling apart from disrepair. Magic, dark and evil, surrounded this place and threatened Moira specifically. It was like the spell had been created specifically for her. It was Gwen, the blonde from Defiance. Moira would recognize her magical signature anywhere now.
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