We drove in silence—cutting across the island using the back roads instead of the main highway. I appreciated the detour; it gave me time to get my thoughts in order and review the plan the team had gone over this week.
A few years ago, most people on Tulare started referring to The Better Day Church as a cult. Including myself. Of course, this certainty was never anything anyone could prove. It was just rumors and conjecture based on the odd beliefs of its parishioners.
The lack of concrete details was why Devlin outlined that our objective today would be to determine if the church was in fact a cult, and if so, secure an invitation to join. If not, we would have to keep digging and find another way to verify if the Young family was using blood magick. We all doubted their true purpose would be revealed to those who attended church services occasionally—so we’d also have to show an interest in all their activities.
I was not looking forward to purchasing more useless clothes like I did when I got the job at Tribec Insurance. And I drew the line at elaborate hats and white gloves. There was no way in hell I would ever wear some extravagant hat. Especially in this heat.
I turned to Kara. “I can understand why Jonah is part of this recon mission. He is a faith mage.” I paused. Maybe asking why she chose to come today would sound unappreciative. Fuck it. She knew me. “Why did you decide to join us today?” I sounded like a damn self-help guru. Why did you decide to join us today? Seriously?
She laughed. “Did you just say, ‘recon mission’?”
“Devlin’s words. Not mine,” I said, smiling. “I think he’s wearing off on me.” Was she stalling?
Kara blew out a noisy breath and shrugged. “You…” She trailed off, then glanced at me. “I knew you were struggling. I saw it in the way you kept staring off into space, wringing your hands like you needed something to take the edge off. I’m surprised you didn’t buy any cigars.” I let out a bitter laugh. I had been entertaining the idea of buying a pack for a while. “And,” Kara continued, “I wanted to be there in case you needed me.”
I rubbed my temple and looked out the window. “Yeah, this is going to be hard.” I stopped short of telling her why. No one knew about my past dealings with a religious cult and now was not the time to go into it. I needed to stay focused on the job at hand or I’d breakdown into a useless puddle of emotions. “Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“And Nicole,” she said, drawing my attention to her. “Try not to be cynical.” She smiled. “Make it a mantra: I will not by cynical.”
“What about questions? Can I ask those?”
She laughed. “Of course. It would show interest. Just”—she gave me a look, her eyes dancing with humor—“try not to add any cynicism to them.”
Her suggestion was eerily similar to the advice she had given me when I was applying for a job at Tribec Insurance. Kara knew I had a hard time not peppering people with questions. Truthfully, I’d been this way since I was a child. It used to drive my mother crazy. But the cynicism came later, when life had dealt me a shitty hand, and the only way I could cope with it was by using an unhealthy amount of sarcasm at the wrong time. I was working on it. Well, at least trying to work on it. But until I did manage to deal with the lemons I refused to make into lemonade, I had Kara to keep me grounded.
Kara crossed the border from Pleasanton into Alice, and I shifted my focus.
My limited abilities with magick disturbed me. It was a constant reminder of my parents and Luisah’s betrayal of not teaching me the things I needed to know about my own abilities. Ones that had been locked away behind a black mass of energy that had been destroyed weeks ago. Now, my body had this thrum of power running through it—waiting to be used. Only, I had no idea how to use it. Sure, I understood all the rituals and even knew about the roots and herbs used in earth magick, but I didn’t know how to wield my power to make a spell work.
When the team started teaching me, the right way, about magick, they gave me a strange analogy. They said to look at my magick like I had a green thumb. While two people could use the exact same methods to care for plants, it was always the person with a green thumb who managed to keep the plants alive and thriving—able to connect on a cellular level and assess the plant’s needs. While the other person, time and time again, would end up with dead vegetation.
Magick was in the blood. In our very DNA. And surprisingly, everyone had it to some degree. However, like the green thumb analogy, only a few could access and wield its power.
Devlin considered those who couldn’t use magick as having none. During his entire career in law enforcement, he had refused to use his own magick against those who didn’t have any active magick of their own.
I had a strong suspicion this rigid belief would change eventually.
Given this, I decided to start off small by working on viewing the human aura. It was where the first indications of someone’s magick resided. I’d first seen this when we fought the people at the Sinclair at-risk youth facility. Alek had been bathed in a rich orange that looked like the sunset, Rachel a dark green, and Devlin a vibrant, lush blue. Using Jonah as a test subject, I was able to see his aura consisted of a white-goldish color tinged in black. My own had a green hue, representing earth, but it also had striations of red running through it. Which could possibly explain the anomaly in my magick. Kara, being an earth practitioner, had a dark green aura. But she also had blue ridges cutting into the green. The more vibrant the color, the stronger the magick. Only earth and mind practitioners had the ability to see the magick in others.
But unlike other earth practitioners, I had an additional power that they had never seen or heard of before.
I could keep a dead person’s soul tethered to their body. Recently, I’ve practiced both seeing and feeling the small ball of energy pulsing in the center of an individual’s aura. Alek had graciously volunteered for this experiment. When I touched his soul, it felt like a cold orb of energy, crackling in my palm. Alek said the sensation made his fight or flight response kick in, giving him a level of fear, he never thought he would feel.
It was going to take more practice, and understanding, before I could use my strange ability in battle. And while I would have loved to continue working on it, learning about the other principles was also important. Especially given what we were setting out to do. So last week, I switched gears.
According to Jonah, faith magick had never really been about religion. Its power was meant to create. But some thousands of years ago, after creating the first god using faith magick, the practitioners also formed religion. Using mankind’s spirituality against them to garner control over the people. Today, it was the most common principle used across the world, which was why it was too easy for people to become fanatic in their beliefs and try and impose them on others—creating Zealots.
And in the wrong hands, faith magick could be the deadliest.
Given my own experience with religion, I had to agree.
Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the packed parking lot of The Better Day Church, located in Alice two miles North of Tribec Insurance, a little after eleven. The service started at eleven thirty, so we had made it on time.
Kara circled the lot as I took in the garish structure: a towering white and gold cathedral with Roman columns and white marble statues of lions on either side of the walkway leading to the building.
One Sunday, when I was younger, my mother and I had ridden by the place on our way to Sandpoint. It was a year before David and Karen Young had been killed. A massive white tent had been erected in the parking lot. Scores of people roamed about, holding plates of food. My mother had called it a revival and said most churches held them. I had been curious and asked if we could go. She gave me a look I will never forget; one so laced with fear that I’d turned away and just stared at that tent as we continued to drive by.
Looking at the giant cathedral now, I wondered about that look. Did she know something about the family? Or was it just the aversion she and my father had to organized religion?
The original church had been modest—a small white and black building with a large lot. Once Gavina and Boyd took over the church after her parents’ death, they’d turned it into a spectacle.
Kara pulled into a spot in the last aisle close to the exit and shut off the engine and, sadly, the air too. I sat there, staring, trying to build up the nerve to get out of the car.
“Are you ready?” Kara asked.
“Yeah, I just need a minute,” I said, not looking at her.
She didn’t push. I appreciated that. Instead, she turned the car back on and the air on full blast as I continued to gaze out at all the people making their way toward the large building.
The last time I’d been in church was four months after my best friend Steve’s death. Two weeks after my boyfriend Frank had been killed. After pumping ten bullets into Frank’s chest, his uncle had turned the gun on me while I lay there in a drugged-out state, unable to muster up enough willpower or concern to save myself. If not for him using all the bullets on Frank, I would have died that day.
I spent the next few weeks in so much pain, it felt as if my very soul was clawing away at me—hollowing me out until there was nothing left. My skin burned. My heart ached. And I just wanted everything and everyone to go the fuck away.
My parents tried. Especially my mother. But in the end, I climbed out of my window and ran away to stay in New Orleans with a woman who I had believed was my Aunt Delilah.
Her way of helping involved her church, a congregation whose roots came from twisted rituals and lust and power and subjugation. Pastor Jeremiah ran this small cult-like church with a zeal born from madness. Every once in a while, I still saw his dark, evil eyes staring down at me—willing me to believe in him.
Their place of worship was hidden in a deep, shadowy part of the bayou. Away from prying eyes and those who would question their beliefs. They had tried to convince me I only needed to have my soul cleansed to free myself of my pain.
Even now, all these years later, I can feel the rough, pitted texture of the concrete slab they had laid me on. Still feel the cold biting into my naked skin as the pastor stood over me praying while my aunt stood by watching. When the rest of the men surged forward and the pastor’s wife handed him a knife, I yanked free of my loosely tied bindings, jumped off that slab, and ran.
When I’d returned home the next day, I didn’t tell my father what happened. But somehow he must have known. He told me Delilah was not really my aunt, but a family friend, one who they had long stopped talking to when they learned the depths of her beliefs. Only, no one ever told me this before. But then, why would they? We had moved from New Orleans when I was young. And while my father’s brothers kept in contact, we never stepped foot in our old neighborhood again.
After all, my mother had buried the man who raped me when I was six behind our house. To them, the land would forever be poisoned.
On a sigh, I pushed open the car door and stepped out into the sweltering heat.
Kara turned off the engine and got out of the car to join me. “Well, I hope we’ll be able to find seats,” she said as we started toward the church—mixing in with the other people making their way across the lot.
“The size of the building says we will. Besides—” The humidity made me gasp. Please let them have air-conditioning. “Jonah’s probably already here. And he would have saved us one.”
Kara made a non-committal noise that sounded suspiciously like a moan and continued walking.
The closer we got, the more my stomach turned. I had sworn to never set foot in another church again. But here I was, swarming to Enlightenment like the rest of these people.
Halfway to the building, my steps faltered. A man, leaning against a white Cadillac with dark tinted windows, caught my attention. Bald head, tanned skin that suggested he might be mixed with something, with a long, jagged scar tracing from his ear to the middle of his neck. He wore a pair of dark jeans and a tight gray shirt, molded to his massive physique. Even though his shaded gaze remained fixed on the church, I got the impression he was watching us. A chill ran down my spine and I reached out and stopped Kara.
She turned and gave me a questioning look. I pointed to the man. “Does he look…” I paused, unsure of what I wanted to say. All I knew was that his presence felt wrong.
“What?” she asked, glancing between me and him. “Do you know him?”
I shook my head and turned to her. “He just seems out of place,” I said finally.
She studied him for a moment, her face going pensive. “Probably just some rich guy’s driver,” she said after a while. “We should keep walking. I feel like my skin is on fire in this heat.”
I nodded. She was probably right. I was on-edge and most likely looking for danger when there wasn’t any.
By the time we reached the front entrance, my entire back was covered in sweat. My hair was plastered to my head; strands lay across my face as if they had grown directly out of my pores. My sandaled feet slid forward on the verge of slipping completely out of my shoes. And my throat screamed for water.
“Fucking heat,” I croaked. I should have brough a bottle of water with me.
“It’s like the sun was trying to cook us as we walked.” Kara wheezed, her breathing shallow.
“Please tell me you have a tissue or a bath towel in your purse.”
“A bath towel?” Kara ran her hand over her forehead. “I might just go dive in that enormously large fountain they have over there.”
I glanced over in the direction she was looking and found a marble statue of a woman wearing a toga stood in the center, holding an upturned jug in her hand. Mist smoked out as water cascaded down into the pooling water below. “You make the first move, and I promise I will follow.”
She laughed. “No, I think that’s more your speed.”
“Don’t tempt me.” I ran my sticky arm across my forehead as if that would help. All it did was add to the already gritty, clammy sheen of sweat covering my face.
I spotted Jonah standing outside the large gold and white cathedral doors waiting. An immobile force of a man wearing a short-sleeved white button-down shirt and dark green pants. Parishioners gave him a wide berth. I didn’t blame them. He was giving off this ‘get the fuck away from me’ vibe that was hard to ignore. I loved it.
He watched us as we made our way toward him. Correction, those brown eyes were glued to Kara as if she were just the spiritual healing he needed. I chuckled.
“What?” Kara asked, her eyes on Jonah as she straightened her cream-colored short dress.
I glanced at her. She had worn her long red hair down and had even curled it at the ends. Something she almost never did. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what it looked like now.
“Oh, nothing,” I said, smiling.
In the past few weeks, she and Jonah had been giving each other some extremely heated looks when they thought no one was watching. It was cute. And I really wished they would just go ahead and get down with it. Kara needed to have someone put a smile on her face.
“D, that man is sexy as hell,” Kara said.
I turned to her. “Wow, you managed to curse. Well, your version of cursing, at least, and you said hell before we even got inside.” I shook my head and linked arms with her. “You’re such a heathen, Kara.”
“Shut up, Nicole. And I’m serious. Give me some pointers.”
“Outside of church?” I asked in mock outrage.
“Forget it.” She turned to me. “Do you remember your mantra?”
“Yes, I will not be cynical.”
She nodded. “Good.”
“Welcome. Are you new?” a woman asked.
Kara and I whipped around and came face to face with three young girls. They stood behind us, wearing white lacy dresses that came to their ankles. Smiles stretched across their faces as they took us in. I was surprised they weren’t covered in sweat. I mean seriously, how the hell did they manage to be covered from head to toe and not be affected by this heat?
The blonde-haired girl looked like she was the oldest: maybe early twenties. She kept her gaze steady as she continued to smile, waiting for our response. She gave off an air of authority, as though she commanded the space around her and everyone else were mere obstacles in her way. Okay, yes, I was telegraphing. Honestly, while she did give off this sort of, ‘I’m in charge’ vibe, she also had an openness about her. Like she wanted to invite you in.
The dark-haired girl looked no older than eighteen. Her dark green eyes held a well of inquisitiveness that gave me the impression she was trying to figure something out about us. Her slight build looked unassuming. But then again, the dress she wore was probably meant to give that impression. The younger girl, maybe no older than seventeen with similar features, stood by her side. Her dark brown hair was pulled up into a tight bun—stretching her face into a porcelain mask. She kept her green eyes averted, only stealing a few fleeting glances at us as she pressed into the other girl. Sisters?
I felt movement behind me but didn’t look away from the girls. Jonah’s familiar spicy scent washed over me. The girls’ eyes tracked up, taking him in.
Kara smiled and I worked my mouth into a facsimile of the gesture.
“Yes,” Kara said to the girls. “We are most eager to hear the wisdom of Boyd.”
Most eager to hear the wisdom of Boyd? When the hell did Kara start talking like that? I glanced at her. She was serious!
Don’t laugh, Nicole. Please, don’t laugh. I will not be cynical. I will not be cynical.
Kara turned to me. “Isn’t that right, Nicole?”
“Yes,” I said, and immediately went into a coughing fit. Me being here was a bad idea. I’d be surprised if I managed to hold it together for the entire service.
“I’m Sara,” the blonde one said. “And this is Juliette and Bridgette. It’s very nice to meet you. All are welcome to enjoy the word of Boyd. And we’d love for you to sit with us.”
Jonah placed a hand on both our shoulders. “They’re with me.”
I smiled. Jonah sounded like our pimp.
“You’re welcome as well,” Juliette said, her voice small, as if speaking up wasn’t what she was used to doing. Interesting. Especially since she had no problem making eye contact with us.
Sara turned to me, locking eyes. “Are you sure you won’t sit with us?”
“Umm…”
Something in her eyes frightened me. It was a predatory look I’d seen before in a similar situation—the sinister hunger I received at my aunt’s church from all the parishioners as they watched me walk toward the altar.
A breeze pushed at my back and suddenly I was back at the outdoor church hidden in the thickness of the bayou. The cloying smell of dead things filled my nose. Water lapped nearby, but I couldn’t see it. All the men and women that surrounded me wore false smiles. “Welcome,” they’d uttered. “We will heal you,” they’d said as they led me to the middle of the clearing.
But I didn’t look at them. I had become transfixed on the concrete altar in the middle of the clearing. The ground appeared to have given birth to it. All the vegetation caressed its sides, keeping it cocooned. Safe. The surface gleamed in the moonlight. And the leather straps nailed into the stone had been polished, laying wide. Waiting.
I’d gone so far beyond fear and hope that I never registered the tears streaming down my face until the scene became hazy. Or the fact that they had to carry me the last few steps until my feet no longer felt the ground beneath me.
“No thank you,” Jonah said, the timbre of his voice pulling me out of the memory.
I shook myself and both Jonah and Kara looked at me. I turned away from them and swallowed the lump in my throat. “Yes, no thank you,” I whispered.
I really didn’t need to say it again. I was sure the women had gotten the message. But I needed to say something. They were all staring at me; their scrutiny made my skin itch. It was almost as if they were scratching away at the surface, digging into me. At any moment, they would see the fear building inside and the raw anguish that was taking all my strength to bury once again.
I will never let anyone tie me to an altar again.
“Yes, of course,” Sara said finally and extended her arm toward the church. “The service will be starting soon.”
Jonah’s hand went to my back, urging me forward, and I took a step. Sweat had accumulated at the base of my neck. I pulled my hair up and a warm breeze blew across my nape. I glanced up at the sky. Clouds rolled overhead. The weather had changed again. Our frequent showers were no more. It was almost as if something was holding the water back with an invisible dam. The pressure could be felt in the air, and at any moment, it would become too much. The dam would break, releasing all that water. And with it, an enormous amount of power.