Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls) Read online

  Lucy propped herself up on her elbow, resting her head on her fisted hand. “Convince me.”

  Their kiss was simple: a slow drawing of lip over lip, not sparking heat, but definitely wet and enticing. When Riona pulled back, her heart flubbed. The look on Lucy’s face was indeterminable, as though she hadn’t exactly gotten what was promised.

  “Convince me better.”

  The second kiss was a world away and dusted with starlight. Within seconds, Riona’s hand laced through Lucy’s black hair, pulling her mouth hard against Riona’s own. A fire flamed where their bodies connected, and as Lucy surrendered back to the horizon, Riona covered it with her own. They became entangled, a confusion of exploring hands, sloppy endearments, and little kitty-cat-like sighs. When Lucy’s hand began snaking its way under Riona’s shirt, she didn’t try to stop the action. The desire that burned within her was all-consuming and insatiable.

  “Not exactly what I was expecting her to call us over for, but I’m game.”

  Dee’s voice landed on them like a bucket of ice water. The lovers froze, jerking their heads in the direction of the door, and taking in the sight of the two men gawking at them from the other side of the room.

  Riona shot off Lucy, who in turn, quickly scrambled to her feet and smoothed her Flaming Lips tee back down to her midriff.

  “Please, ladies,” Dee continued, stepping further into the room, grinning, “don’t let us stop you. By all means, pretend like we’re not here. Right, Marc?”

  It was then that Riona noticed Marc in detail. As far as impressions of corpses whose last earthly moments were recorded with a look of bewilderment and disgust, the priest’s was pretty spot on. His eyes were wide and glassy as his skin took on the shade of craft glue, and his muscles were tight, clenched.

  Classic rigor “mortified.”

  As Riona rose to her feet, Lucy cleared her throat. “Thanks for lunch and… yeah, well, everything else. I’ll, um… I’ll catch you later.”

  She swept past Dee en route to the nearest exit, as anyone would when having two complete strangers, one of them wearing a priest’s collar, walk in on you and your date’s first make out session.

  The second she was gone, Dee whipped back to Riona with a look of utter intrigue. “Oh, no fair, you’ve been holding out on us,” he whined as the door closed behind them. “All this time we’ve been building you up on your girl-on-goblin routine when we could have been partaking of some girl-on…”

  “Dee!” She cut him off, both with words and a knock on the chest, hitting muscles that may have been made of stone. “My romantic life is not for your entertainment. Oh, my God, doesn’t anyone knock anymore?”

  “We did knock,” Dee countered. “Perhaps very, very lightly, once we heard the moaning, but we did knock.”

  “Marc?” She snapped her fingers two inches in front of the priest’s face, trying to drag him from his stupor. “Father Angeletti! Are you in there? Don’t you need to be invited inside by the owner of a house or something? Or is that just vampires?”

  Finally, he fidgeted, his eyes blinking wildly as he turned to her. “It’s a ... ssssss…” he hissed beneath his breath.

  “Huh?”

  Marc’s eyes closed, his words now burning with rage as his face went from chalk to chimney. “It’s a sin!” he bellowed, his fists clenched.

  Hip cocked, hand waving wildly in the air, Riona went into full oh-no-you-didden mode. “Ex-cuse me, Father, but who are you to come into my house and lecture me on morality?”

  Eyebrows raised, both Marc’s index fingers pointed immediately at the ring of white, linen-covered cardboard around his neck.

  “Not of my church,” Riona retorted. “This is who I am. You don’t have to like it, but you do have to accept it if we’re going to work together.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course, you think it’s about you. Listen, Keystone,” the title coming out like an insult, “I don’t give a rat’s left nut what you do or whom you do it with. Just … don’t let me see it again.”

  “Fine.”

  As they stared each other down, Dee clapped his hands together. “Well, this is quaint. What do you say we take the powder out of this here keg by getting down to business? Riona, you had something to tell us?”

  “Assuming the sermon is done and Elvis has left the pulpit?” She glared with the animosity of a ticked-off honey badger. “Marc?”

  The priest refused to meet her gaze. It wasn’t until Dee dope-slapped the back of his head that he rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m done.”

  “Good.” Riona jerked her head in the direction of the love seat and matching armchair that consumed fifty percent of her living room. Her guffawing guests seated themselves side-by-side on the sofa. “Ramiel has given us marching orders. Marc, you know anyone at St. Cecilia’s School?”

  Recognition filled his features. He stumbled with his answer, like he was responding to a magician’s ability to know what card he had in his pocket. “One of my mentors in the priesthood is the principal.”

  “Great. We need to get in there. There’s an evil at the school, a demon presence we need to track down and eliminate.”

  Dee chuckled. “You mean, besides a whole bunch of horny teenagers?”

  Riona’s gaze turned steely. “Teenagers? Hell, I’m not worried about them. I’m more annoyed at the overly righteous, tight-assed priests.”

  Chapter 10

  It smelled like chalk. Which was odd, given that there was, in fact, no chalkboard. Instead, a smudge-plagued white expanse stretched the width of the room, marked over in random intervals with blue formulae, green announcements, and blood-red prayers to the saints.

  “You sure you’re up to this, Ms. Dade?”

  St. Cecilia’s principal, Father Hector Hermosa’s hand landed reassuringly on Riona’s shoulder. For such a senior clergyman, she was shocked to learn that he bought the whole fabricated story so easily.

  Ramiel had gotten a special dispensation for the witch to cast a sickness hex over three nuns who were on the teaching staff as they walked into school. Ordinarily, the use of darker spells on innocents was a big no-no, but as long as it didn’t leave scars or induce vomiting, she was given a pass for the sake of the mission. Marc, who sometimes actually did sub or volunteer at the school, suggested his two “colleagues” as qualified and ready-to-serve stand-ins. It had taken all of them a little by surprise that the principal agreed without hesitation. Marc’s powers of magical manipulation must have been further developed than he led on, Riona thought.

  She looked at the faces of the innocent teens before her, swallowed hard, and answered. “Sure, what could possibly go wrong?”

  Riona once heard that you shouldn’t show fear to either dogs or children. Apparently, they could sense it. Or was it, smell it?

  Maybe fear smelled like chalk.

  Hermosa shook her hand like an old friend and left her in her classroom unarmed.

  With a cough, Riona cleared her throat and tried not to feel overwhelmed by the twenty-two sets of eyes boring into her. “Good morning, class. I’m Miss Dade. Sister Mary Alice is out sick and I…”

  “You’re not a nun.”

  Shit. She told Dee this wasn’t going to work. She might have all command over magic and dominion over demons, but teenagers were one type of monster she knew she had an ice cube’s chance in hell of standing up against. Clearly, they saw right through her façade. When Dee suggested going into the school undercover, Riona thought he meant perhaps as janitors or with her dressed as a secretary. Riona, a teacher? Like trying to pass off Lady Gaga as a well-mannered IRS agent.

  The petite, blonde-haired girl with tweed-covered arms and a face partially obscured by a pink bubble threw out the words like an accusation, putting Riona immediately on the defensive. What? Was she sixteen agai
n? Was she going to let herself be intimidated by a bad attitude and a worse dye job all wrapped into size two skinny jeans? Hell-to-the-no.

  But, as Riona cocked her hip and plastered on a conspiratorial grin, the confirmation of just how much a fisher-of-men out of water she was in front of the parochial school classroom slipped out before she could stop it. “A nun? Ha! Honey, I’m not even Catholic anymore.”

  The declaration earned a sly nod of approval from the bubble blonde, but the yin to that yang was the jittery shift of the stick-figure-in-student’s-clothing behind her. His pasty arm shot right up in the air like it was spring-loaded.

  “Wait, are you even, like, a credentialed teacher?” he spat back when Riona called on him. The anxiety in his eyes rated right up there with a fretful mother asking if her hard-partying teen had survived the crash.

  Riona bit her lip and shied away her eyes. “Um, no…” But wanting Mr. Teacher Screener and the others to be certain she wasn’t a complete heathen off the street, she immediately followed with, “but I am a certified statistician, which makes me more than qualified to teach calculus.”

  “Hardly!” her student critic exclaimed, rolling his eyes. With a flip of each finger, he read the list of charges against her. “If you don’t have a credential, you’ve never studied instructional pedagogy, multiple learning perspectives, or educational child psychology, let alone classroom management. Assuming you have some innate ability to keep us all in line — which, judging by your hair, you do not — how do you expect to get through this class without causing us serious, long-term, psychological damage? Or stunting our intellectual growth by structuring content knowledge into a form which our young minds can’t properly digest?”

  Boy, kids really took their education so much more seriously than she remembered.

  “Can I ask your name?”

  “Damien Johannes.”

  Of course. “Well, Damien, I certainly admire your concern, but let me assure you of this…”

  The speech in her head went something like: “…in the last two weeks, I have derived a positive-feedback loop relationship between a consumer’s taste in pasta sauce and which toothpaste he’ll prefer, got a son of Zeus and a son-of-a-bitch priest to agree to park in a handicap space at a twenty-five dollar an hour parking garage, and figured out how to set up my DVR, the directions of which were written in Ancient Greek, for reasons I don’t even want to begin to explain, to record True Blood so I can be here on this fine day and teach you about differentiating integrals.”

  But what actually came out was a hefty sigh, followed by, “You can rest assured, you’re in fine hands.”

  As Damien sat perplexed, Riona straightened, a sense of victory stiffening her spine. Which then turned back to gelatin when she remembered that beyond teaching, there was still a demon to sniff out between classes. With a groan, her fists landed on her hips as, once again, Damien’s hand shot up in the air.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know CPR?”

  With gnashing teeth, she hoped this would finally shut him up. “If you ask me one more stupid question, you better pray that I do.”

  “Miss Dade?”

  She hadn’t even noticed Marc come in. She was too busy staring wishful hopes of acne and flatulence to Damien. When she spun around and caught the priest’s WTF expression as he glared at her from the door frame, she knew the showdown must look ridiculous to anyone over the age of five.

  “Father Angeletti?”

  His finger motioned a come hither or else. “A word in the hall?”

  Trying to shake off the nerves, she asked the class to open to page seventy-six and read the first three paragraphs at the top. She really hoped that whatever was on page seventy-six had three paragraphs at the top.

  The priest’s angled eyes took her by surprise. He really had this whole authority thing down, leaving Riona feeling a little like a naughty student who was being called out by the principal for mouthing off to the teacher.

  “What?”

  His face screwed up in confusion as her acidic tone hit. “Okay, Keystone, don’t get your panties in a bunch. Remember, they’re just kids. Have a little patience.”

  “Rather opinionated for teenagers, if you ask me.” She chewed the words like leather. “Is this a Catholic thing? Being overly annoying?”

  “No, I think it’s more of a witch thing, being easily annoyed.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was trying to piss her off on purpose, or if it was just a side effect of his hissy attitude. Riona was so not in the mood to be the bigger person and just eat up the insult.

  “Oh, you mean like being sexually frustrated is a priest thing? After the locker room, I couldn’t help but wonder if you had… Ah!”

  When she found herself pressed by Marc’s hard body into the bank of lockers behind her, the sensations that filled her from tip to toe overwhelmed her. Confusion, fear, lust, and relief competed for dominance. One of Marc’s hands was a vise around her wrist, holding her left hand high over her head. The other was shifting through motions right before her throat, as though it was trying to decide of it should strangle her or hold her chin in place for when he leaned in to claim her lips. His eyes locked onto her mouth, but hers took in the full mask of desire and arrogance covering his face.

  “Don’t confuse frustration with abstention,” he warned as his hip shifted, pressing his substantial priestly vestments against her.

  Motherfrickin’…

  She dismissed his last five-star salute to her as the effects of being too close for modesty to win out. But then, what the hell was this?

  Oh, sweet forbidden fruit. Marc’s body… She had had moments of unwise attraction before, but the feel of the priest pushing against her, nothing but a few layers of cotton and polyester blends, and two thousand years of dogma between them, had her rolling both her eyes and her neck, hoping he would take the opportunity to explore the plane of flesh with his tongue. For a moment, she actually thought he might, as she felt his breath on her ear, then swore she felt his lips ghost down her jawbone.

  But just as quickly as the fire arose in her, his retraction doused her desire, leaving her feeling cold and discarded on the side of the wall.

  “Unlike some people, I’ve learned how to deal with temptation and avoid things which will lead me away from my values.”

  The victorious, smug smile on Marc’s face told her all she needed to know. He had gotten to her, on a carnal level even, and was completely aware of it. And it didn’t matter.

  Without a further word, he pointed at the classroom door expectantly. Pushing off the locker, Riona stood straight, palmed over her skirt, and took a few deep breaths.

  “Remember, we’re here to protect them,” Marc further warned. “Annoying or not, they’re innocents. Find the fucker who’s pretending to be one of them, and vanquish him. Stay focused. If you really need anything,” he pointed at the cracked wood door across the hall, “I’m right over there.”

  Swearing she wasn’t going to get flustered in his sight ever again, Riona turned back toward her classroom. “Fine, I’ll ‘stay focused.’ But you say that like it’s so easy to tell the difference between a hormonal teenager and a minion from Hell.”

  To her relief, the rest of the first class period passed without any further incidences or instigations that Riona’s qualifications were lacking. Second period delivered more of the same. By the time third period rolled around, Riona stood convinced that the difficulty of this whole teaching thing was overblown in the extreme by a bunch of whiny labor unions who didn’t think two months off a year after working only six hours a day was good enough.

  When fourth period started, and Riona saw on her schedule that the subject was now Introduction to Statistics, she felt right in her wheelhouse. Hell, she felt like the CEO of the Intro to Stats W
heelhouse Emporium, and she was opening up the market to franchisees.

  Then, the students arrived.

  Just before the bell rang, just as Riona leaned over to brush a piece of lint off her charcoal gray pencil skirt, a move which, no doubt, perked her posterior out temptingly if viewed from behind, she heard someone sheepishly clear his throat. Assuming that it was Marc just checking up on her again — and a little pissed at his general are-you-sure-you’re-okay-iness, she growled her words.

  “Damn it, priest, you can leave me alone already. I haven’t given out a single detention or vanquished anyone yet.”

  When instead she turned to find Father Hermosa, the school principal, white-faced, red-eared and wide-eyed, she prayed for a divine intervention… Holy pit bulls that went for his feet and drew his attention away from her gaping expression, for example.

  “Jesus… Christ, our savior!” she quickly recovered. “I’m sorry, Father. I thought you were… Never mind. I didn’t mean to shout.”

  “Are you certain everything is okay, Ms. Dade?” He eyed her as though he doubted her sanity. “I know it’s the first time you’ve subbed with us. I want to be sure you’re carrying through. And, despite our best efforts, I know that children at St. Cecilia’s can be little demons sometimes.”

  “Oh, I can handle demons!” she said with a laugh, adding in her head, though some demons are easier than some of these kids. When Hermosa clutched onto his stoicism, she cleared her throat, evened out her blouse with her fingertips, and stood erect. “Yes, Father, thank you. They’ve got some spirit, but so far, so good.”

  “Good.” It wasn’t exactly confidence that was etched across his face from her reassurance. It looked more like constipation. Hermosa turned to the class as he shook his finger. “I expect everyone in here to be good for Ms. Dade. We’ve always taught you to be proper to guests, and you all should be ashamed of anyone who offers anything less than complete hospitality.”