Original Sin

Fiona without magic, and now she was proven right. Her will … useless.

Suddenly a flood of images cascaded through her mind. Women. Naked, virgins, all sacrificed brutally, bloodily. Dead because Moira had escaped her fate, had run away from being goddess of the underworld, liaison to the magicians, the Mediator.

She whimpered, unable to speak. Fiona said, “Do you know how many had to die in your place? Eleven. One for each month I couldn’t find you during the year you hid from me. By the time you reached your twenty-second year, it was too late. The window was gone. You did that. To all of them. The priest was icing on the cake.” She laughed, but there was no humor, just cold pleasure. Moira tried to crawl into the corner, as far from Fiona as she could get, but the pain stayed. She was dying. She could move no more than a few excruciating inches, her nose still dripping blood. She swallowed and tasted her blood, her mouth coated with the sweetly metallic flavor.

The priest was icing on the cake. Peter. Dear God, how could you let this happen? How could you allow Fiona to hurt so many?

Fiona said, “I wish I could have shared those sacrifices with you a long time ago, but the one thing you are good at is running and hiding. You should have stayed hidden, Andra Moira, because you are incapable and weak. You will never defeat me.”

Moira’s body rose from the floor and hovered in midair before Fiona’s telekinetic magic threw her across the cell, against the far wall, where an unseen force had her pinned. Moira began to speak Hebrew through the blood in her mouth, the blood flowing from her nose. Weak, weaker, weakest … she was weakest. She began to fade, her mind mush, black then white then dark again.

Moira knew little Hebrew, but she remembered this one protective prayer Peter had taught her to hide her soul from Fiona. All her concentration went to remembering the words, and repeating them over and over. She was going to die, but she couldn’t lose her soul. Fiona would torture her for eternity, torture those she cared about.

“Your pathetic attempt at fighting me will fail,” Fiona said, and the pain inside Moira’s head exploded so she couldn’t remember her name, let alone an ancient Jewish prayer.

Suddenly the pain stopped, and Moira lay in a pool of blood. She thought she was dead, until the pain returned-throbbing, aching, bruising pain, but not the unbearable agony of before. Tolerable.

Fiona was on her cell phone. “I need a few more minutes.” She scowled and stared at Moira.

“It seems, a chailin mo chroi, that you have a temporary reprieve,” she said sarcastically. “But I will not forget. To quote a little book you may know-‘Stay awake! You do not know the day or the hour.’”

“I will kill you,” Moira whispered, trying, failing, to stand. “I will undo the damage you have done!”

Fiona whispered to Moira, barely loud enough for her to hear, “Remember the damage you’ve done.”

On a curse, Fiona left the jail the same way she came in: without incident.

TEN

Skye pulled into her parking place at the sheriff’s department. She turned off the cruiser’s engine and turned to face Anthony. Anthony put his hand on the door-worried that Father Philip was right and Fiona O’Donnell would go after Moira-but Skye stopped him.

She said, “I let my anger convince me to arrest her, and now you want her out.” She tenderly touched his jaw. It was a bit swollen and sore, but nothing was broken. Anthony was more irritated than hurt. “There’s obviously a dicey history between you two.”

“She killed a friend of mine. Seduced and murdered him.”

“Why isn’t she in prison? Is she a fugitive? Do I need to contact ICE?”

Anthony shook his head. “Peter was a monk at the monastery where I lived. She seduced him into breaking his vows. Put him in the middle of something extremely dangerous.” He didn’t know everything that had happened during the years before Peter died. He’d been in the middle of his own training that included extensive travel studying ancient architecture and artifacts. Peter was younger, sometimes annoying in his eagerness to please, and while Anthony had always considered him his little brother, he also considered him a neophyte, one of the Order who was part of the whole but not singularly necessary.

His arrogance had known no bounds then, and Anthony sincerely regretted it.

“Father Philip found Moira in Italy. She’d been running from her mother, hiding to avoid being detected by Fiona O’Donnell’s coven.” Anthony feared Father was right and Moira was in trouble, and while on one hand he didn’t care what happened to the witch, he did care what Father Philip thought of him and his decisions. “Basically, her mother wanted to sacrifice her to the underworld in a ritual that would have given Fiona’s coven more power than any other coven on earth.”

“How many of these covens-witches, whatever-are we talking about?”

She was talking the way she had before-before she’d seen evil with her own eyes. Her dismissal disturbed him, but he tried to explain. “Hundreds of covens, thousands-probably tens of thousands-of witches, some practicing alone, some in covens. Most have little or no power. The larger, more powerful groups usually splinter off but remain affiliated with their founder. Fiona controls more covens than any other magician on earth.”

“Please try to understand my position on this. It’s new to me. You’re going to have to give me a bit more before I launch a modern-day Salem witch hunt.”

Anthony waved his hand. “The fools in colonial times didn’t understand dark magic. They killed more innocent women than true witches.”

She didn’t say anything, and Anthony realized that not only was Skye skeptical, but he must sound foolish to her. The average person did not believe witches-like Fiona O’Donnell and her kind-existed, or that they had power over dark forces.

His word, his experience, wouldn’t be enough to convince Skye. Like the last time, she had to see it. That put the woman he loved in danger, because the dark arts were alive and well, thriving in these times, and now here in Santa Louisa.

“She needs to be deported,” he finally said. It was the only way to get Moira out of Santa Louisa. Father Philip trusted her, but she wasn’t to be trusted. Guilt niggled in the back of his head. He felt as if he were somehow deceiving Father. Anthony couldn’t let her roam free. Even if she wasn’t working with Fiona, Moira O’Donnell was still a witch.

“First you want me to arrest her. Then you want me to let her out. Now you want me to deport her. I suppose I could call Immigration, send them her credentials, see if they have a reason to deport her, but it’s not within my power to do so.”

“We have a crisis on our hands, and Moira O’Donnell in the mix makes it more complex and dangerous.”

She looked as confused and frustrated as he felt. “I want to believe you, but I don’t understand. I need to understand. You said the Seven Deadly Sins were released. What does that mean?”

“The roots of the Seven go much deeper than two thousand years of Christianity. The sins have been written about, with different names, different ideas, from the beginning of humanity. Ancient people told stories of the sins in pictographs on the walls of caves and pyramids and in Roman architecture. Even further back in Mesopotamic time. Most people believe sins are internal, personal battles we all must face. In one sense, that is true. Since the fall of man, all humans are capable of great evil. We want, we envy, we lust-we battle every day to keep these feelings, these primal urges, in check.

“But the Seven aren’t internal sins. They are supernatural. They are mutations. They are among the Fallen Ones.”

“You’re getting woo-woo on me, Anthony. Just lay it out for me. Logically. I trust you; I need you to be straight with me.”

Would she believe the truth? “Some of my people think that the Seven are fallen angels.”

“Fallen angels,” she said flatly. “Like Lucifer.”

“Yes.”

He read in her eyes confusion, uncertainty. She bit her lip in an effort not to tell him she didn’t believe him, or questioned him. It upset Anthony, but he couldn’t entirely blame her.