Deliver Me from Temptation (18 page)

He would have smiled but for one small fact: They all sat in the loft collecting dust. He’d seen the beautiful artwork at Jessica’s apartment. None of them had the same style as these.

Why? Why didn’t she display any of her sister’s paintings?

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?” She crossed her arms as she fortified herself for war.

“Why don’t you like these?” He gestured around the loft.

“My sister’s paintings?” She shook her head. “I do like them.”

“Really?” He shifted into her space, holding her with his gaze when he thought she might run. “If you like them, then why aren’t they on display? Why don’t you have a single one on the walls here or in your apartment?”

She sucked in a breath, her back going ramrod straight. “I don’t see how that is any of your business.”

He shook his head, taking in again the waste he saw around him. He didn’t understand it. If he had a sibling with a talent like this, he’d beg to have them on display. “Do you and your sister get along?”

“We were best friends.”

Logan drew his attention away from a particularly poignant portrait of a child offering up a flower. Jessica’s voice was wistfully sad, but her eyes burned with an unholy anger. “Were?”

“She was murdered. Six years ago. Frat party. She got in the wrong car and ended up in some ditch. She died there, hours later. Result of a violent gang rape and subsequent beating.”

Oh, God. That explained her passion for justice. Explained, too, why she abstained from life for her job. He was almost afraid to ask but needed to know. “Did they catch the guys who did it?”

Her mouth curled into a twisted smile, hatred burning in her eyes. “Yes. Twenty to life. And if they ever get out, you can be sure they won’t live long enough to enjoy their freedom.”

The blood chilled in his veins, constricting around his heart. This was what was going to kill her. Not old age. Not his enemies targeting her as collateral damage. But the hatred she held so close to her heart.

She took a deep breath; let it out as she stretched her neck. “Sorry. I don’t mean that, not really. Just, being here among her paintings, it hits closer to home.” She gave him a slim smile, rather fake he thought. “I guess that’s why I don’t display any of them. Remembering her, to see them day in and day out, it would drive me crazy.”

He could understand that. He had no idea how the fuck he was going to go on when she died. “Is your sister why you became a cop?”

Her eyes drifted past him to the dusty painting that still sat on the easel. A beach scene, the outline of a single feather drifting on the surf. Even unfinished it was beautiful and revelatory and lonely.

“Yeah, it is.” She lifted haunted eyes. “We were twins. She was the passionate one, I’m more methodical—tenacious as my mother called it. They had all sorts of hopes for me. Law school. Med school. Didn’t matter as long as it eventually ended up with a whole bunch of letters after my name. But all Julia dreamed about was painting.” Her mouth quirked at the corner. “So I disappointed my parents and went to business school. I was going to make her a huge success.”

“I’m sure with your help she would have been.”

Jessica nodded, her knuckles cracking as she fisted and released her hand. “Instead, she died. And now I hunt down bastards who destroy other people’s dreams.”

And she did so under the mask of a badge and cold, hard laws. It reminded him a lot of his father. His father had learned to hide his emotions better, though not his prejudices. It scared the shit out of Logan. He’d watched the order fall further and further into ruin; adhering to traditions that no longer made sense or, quite simply, didn’t work. Their enemies were winning, and his father wouldn’t bend enough to change strategy. And now, on the crux of change, his father refused to take any help that wasn’t “pure.” His father saw the world in black and white and considered his own daughter and her mate to be just short of the enemy. They were vampires and vampires killed Logan’s mother. Oh, Logan knew his father’s prejudice and Jessica’s obsession were not quite the same, but they both held roots in hatred, and hatred was never the path to His realm.

“I don’t suppose I need to tell you that holding onto hatred isn’t healthy. That it can eat away at your humanity.”

She just glared at him.

“Jessica, I understand. When my mother died, I was devastated. It took me a long time and a lot of focus on other things to keep that anger from consuming me.”

“Yeah? And how long was that exactly, Logan? Because frankly I don’t think I have a hundred or more years.”

“Damn it, Jessica. You can’t hold this so close to your heart. You can’t let anger drive the course of your life.”

She arched her brow. “You want to bet?”

He cursed, running his hands through his hair. “Jessica—”

“I thought you were leaving,” she interrupted, then emphasized her point by stepping into the loft and grabbing his phone from under an easel. “Here.”

He refused the phone, folding his arms across his chest. Two could play at being obstinate. And there was no way he was leaving. It was bad enough that her association with him made her a target, but now that he understood what the true consequences could be? If his enemies sensed this stain of hatred on her heart, they would realize she was an easy mark. They wouldn’t just want to kill her, they’d want her soul. Which meant she’d be more lost to him than if she actually died.

He would not let that happen.

Her eyes hardened, her nose flaring. “Take it.”

“No.”

“If you think I’m going to discuss this further, you’re wrong. And if you think I’m going to allow you to lecture me on subjects you know nothing about, then you’re doubly wrong.”

“Nothing?” he asked softly, allowing his own grief to swallow most of his voice. The strike, though not intentional, hit home. She sucked in a breath, her gaze skittering away.

When she remained silent, he figured it was the only apology he would get. Didn’t matter. What mattered was that she seemed to accept that he did understand her grief. If she’d allow him to tell her of his hatred, too, then maybe there was a chance.

He opened his mouth, ready to tell her about the day when over a dozen female Paladin were slaughtered, but was interrupted by the vibration of his phone in her outstretched hand.

“Crap.” What timing. And awkward considering she still held it due to his stubborn power play. He could just ignore it, but very few people had his number. And every one of them were important—well, except perhaps his father. He’d blocked the man from his mind the moment he left his presence yesterday, unwilling to answer any more questions about his sister or the human whose memories he’d had to shield.

Jessica arched her brow, lifting the phone higher. He gave her a chagrined look as he took the phone from her, grunting as he recognized Roland’s number.

“I’m sorry. I have to take this.”

She nodded, turning her back on him as she wandered around the loft.

“This better be good,” he said, letting his annoyance show in his voice.

“Karissa just got an interesting reach-out-and-touch-someone from your dad.”

Logan’s hand tightened around the phone. He hoped the call was about his father trying to mend fences with his estranged daughter, but having just come face to face with the reminder of what obsessive hatred could do, he somehow doubted it. “What did he want?”

“He wanted to know where Karissa and I are.”

“Did you tell him?” Logan shifted his grip on the phone, his eyes going to Jessica. She was pretending not to pay any attention, her back toward him as she made busy work of picking up the scattered paint brushes. She was “holding her mad in” as his sister would say. Mad at him, mad at the world. He didn’t blame her for either, and though the first stung at his heart it was the second that made him afraid. She had to let her anger go. Even if he could keep her out of direct danger, to hold that sort of burning hatred so close would be akin to having a terminal disease. Only in her case, it would not endanger her body but her soul.

“Not at first, but then he explained the reason,” Roland said, answering Logan’s question.

That brought his attention back. There were few things that Logan could think of that would cause Roland to tell his father their location. Not after the way he’d treated his daughter. “You going to enlighten me?”

“There was a notable wrinkle in the shielding around Haven. Your father concluded that something unpure had somehow managed to slip through.”

“And he thought it might be you and Karissa.” Asshole. Logan rubbed his forehead. His father’s stubborn refusal to accept that both Roland and Karissa were as much His warriors as any of the other Paladin was getting old. Though damn it was not the time for him to go toe-to-toe with his father.

“Aren’t you even going to ask me what it was that breached the shields?”

Logan stiffened at the same time his heart sped in his chest, the beginnings of adrenaline surging through his system.

“I assumed it was a glitch.” Or even a misread by his father.

“Nope.”

“What was it then?” He looked back at Jessica. She’d stopped playing at mad and was watching him with concern in her eyes, having obviously picked up on his growing tension.

“Get out your knife, Brother. Haven is under attack.”

Jessica’s hands gripped the wheel, the windshield wipers slapping furiously at the streaming rain. She strained her eyes as she kept her focus firmly fixed on the road and the bumper-to-bumper traffic ahead of her. Looking in the review mirror wasn’t going to show much of anything beyond the bus that kissed her bumper since she hit the RFK bridge. There was no silver Audi back there. Logan was already gone when she’d left the beach house. Something about a breach of Haven’s walls. She hadn’t asked what or where Haven was but she gathered enough from what he said to know it had something to do with the Paladin warriors he claimed to be part of. Some sort of safe zone from their enemies.

Forcing her attention on the erratic driving of the cab ahead of her, she ruthlessly ignored the choking hold that bore down on her chest since leaving the beach house. Logan had actually tried to command her to stay put, and then, when she’d responded with an
oh-really?
look, he’d practically begged. Saying that he needed to know she was safe. That he wasn’t going to be able to keep his head in the game if he wasn’t sure.

No, not a game. A battle. Good versus evil. Angel warrior against Lucifer’s evil hordes.

It would be laughable except that she couldn’t because, damn it, she was actually worried about him. And she shouldn’t be, because yeah, she’d been coming around to believing him back at the beach house when he produced that freaky ball of light, but the farther away she got from what must have been some sort of tricky illusion, the more she realized that he was positively certifiable.

Angels didn’t walk on the earth. People didn’t live to be over a hundred. The knife tucked away in an old filing tube on her passenger seat had
not
been forged by a simple twist of
His
will. And the memories she had of that creature in the garage? Well okay, she didn’t have a great explanation for that. Though obviously it was what Logan wanted her to be thinking about. Namely in terms of how helpless she was against it. Which was why, after having strapped on his own badass knife, Logan gave her the knife currently riding shotgun in her car. As long as her forearm and etched with symbols along the entire length of the curved blade, it was a wicked-looking thing that, yeah, did look really, really fricking old.

Probably stolen from someone’s private collection. And even if it wasn’t, the damn thing should be in a museum. Though she wasn’t going to worry about that right now. She had other things to do today.

Edgy and on her last nerve, she made the series of turns that took her to Bruckner Boulevard and pulled into the lot behind the station. Normally she had to park in the way back, but Luck smiled on her and she managed to score a spot near the door when someone else pulled out.

She turned off the engine, fiddling with the keys in her hand before finally stuffing them into her pocket. Stalling wasn’t going to help. Other than maybe chipping away at her resolve. She did take the time to stuff the tube under the seat, then, shoulders straight, exited her car and marched into the station.

Despite the traffic that had slowed her, it was still early and she caught the third shift desk clerk passing off the unfinished business to the day shifter. She waved to them both, and proceeded through to the back of the station house. Rancid coffee, sweaty men, tapping keys, and curses: This was the place where the real work got done.

The busy hustle and intense focus of a roomful of blues inventing new insults for their computers allowed her to pass through the room without anything more than an absentminded “hey Jess.” Mike wasn’t at his desk, though she figured he’d be in any minute. Her boots scraping impatiently on the gritty floor, she began to shuffle through the Post-it notes and loose papers on his desk. At first they were nothing more than a jumble of words, but then a name, Logan, jumped out at her.

She shifted through the notes again, quickly scanned each one. They weren’t organized, more a puzzle for her already overtaxed brain, but it wasn’t hard to see that Mike had done background checks. Fairly in-depth ones, too. There was actually an amazing amount of notes on Karissa Donovan, enough to raise Jess’s eyebrows and then lower them when she saw a pair of circled words
No
Siblings
. What the heck? Though, Logan did say she was a half-sister, maybe she was the illegitimate kind. Lips pursed, she shuffled through the rest. More on Karissa, Roland, Alexander Hastings, Alex, A.H. Mike had gotten tired of writing his name at the top of each note. Though despite the amount of paper, Mr. Hastings was what he appeared to be, nothing more. Jessica was left with three Post-its. All with L.C. on the top. Logan’s job—expert on religious artifacts. Figured. Relatives—no known living relatives. She frowned. Police record—none. She gnawed on her lip, flipped through the papers again to see if she missed something. Nothing.

She plopped back in her chair, blowing a loose clump of hair out of her eyes. She probably looked a fright. Two days without a shower. A night of bed aerobics. The whole lot of crying she did in the driveway at the beach house before she put the car in gear. Oh yeah, she could probably scare the sobriety back into any one of the drunk and disorderlies sleeping off their hangovers in the holding cells.

She grabbed a tissue, wiping at her face. Who knew what the concealer had melted into after all she put it through? Peachy-beige streaks came off on the white fiber. She grimaced, grabbed another one, and wiped some more.

“Hopeless.”

She tossed the tissues at the basket by the desk and missed. She grabbed them from the floor and went to stuff it in by hand, and stopped mid-motion. Inside rested a crumpled-up printout of a news article. The title was unreadable but part of the grainy picture was exposed and damn if it didn’t look like…

She grabbed the crumpled paper out, hands shaking as she flattened it on the desk. It was an old article from 1938 about an opening of The Cloisters, a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art located in Fort Tryon Park.

Not what she expected to find in Mike’s trash. Except…her gaze went back to the picture. Four men stood before the almost completed structure. The architect, Charles Collen, donors John D. Rockefeller Jr., and George Grey Barnard, and his collection curator, Logan Calhoun. The last man was a dead ringer for her Logan. Only it couldn’t be. That would make him…

“At least a hundred years old,” she whispered.

“Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”

Jessica jumped, her hands rumpling the already crumpled paper. She quickly shoved it into her jeans pocket, her mind spinning gears rapidly as she tried to fit in the newest wrench. Grandfather perhaps? But those eyes…

Mike grumbled something as he moved around his desk, set down his coffee cup, and sat. The wooden chair creaked as he leaned back in the seat, rocking it. He looked haggard. His eyes shadowed by dark circles, his usual meticulously trimmed whiskers grown out to the point where it was hard to discern the artful goatee.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Oh yeah. Sure. Though I suppose I should be asking you that.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh wait, I did, about a dozen times. Seven of them on your cell and another five on your home phone. You. Never. Called. Back.”

She blinked, unclipping her cell phone and flipping it open. Dead.

“Shit. I’m sorry, Mike.”

“You’re sorry.” The chair squeaked again, note papers crunching as he leaned forward on the desk, lowering his voice. “Tell me exactly what you’re sorry for, Jess? Lying to your partner? Putting yourself in needless danger? Breaking and entering into private parking garages—again without backup—or the worst in my book, not answering your damn phone for the last fifteen hours and making me sick with worry?”

She shook her head. There was nothing she could say to make it better. Instead, she reached into her blazer pocket and pulled out the evidence bag, setting it and its contents on the desk.

“What’s that?”

“Evidence. A security tape from an adult store about a block from the alley.”

His eyes lit briefly, then narrowed on the small gray tape. “Is a block close enough that we can draw a pool of suspects from its contents?”

She hesitated. In some of the busier places in the city the DA would laugh if they admitted a security tape from over a block away as evidence, but in that deserted area? “Maybe. There isn’t a lot of traffic in that area. Regardless, there is something else interesting on it.”

He picked up the evidence bag, taking out the receipt. He scanned it over, his eyes flicking twice to the date and time stamp.

“Yesterday at 6:15. About a half hour before I made my first call to you.” He nodded, as if contemplating this. Slowly, methodically, he put the receipt back in the bag and then took out the tape. “So. You just decided to go on an unplanned vacation with possible evidence in your car?”

She remained silent, Fifth Amendment and all that. Mike sighed and stood up, jerking his head for her to follow. They made their way down to a room filled with electronic equipment. It took some digging, but he found something that would play the old style VHS and did some magic with some cables to get it set up to play on the TV. Mike folded his arms, his face unreadable as he watched her follow the two men chasing the hooker down the street. She half wondered if he’d recognize her, the video quality was that bad and the angle terrible, but her uncertainty evaporated the moment he opened his mouth.

“Jesus Christ, Jess. What the hell is this?”

She took a deep breath, forcing the words out. “That’s me taking myself off the case.”

Mike’s gaze swiveled around to her, his eyes blinking in disbelief, but then he scoffed. “Because you went after some thugs without backup? No, that’s not it. From what the Sarge says, you do that all the time. So why are you taking yourself off this case?”

She folded her arms. Mike didn’t recognize the other two men, and she was unwilling to go into the sordid details of why that one little security tape was irrefutable proof of how much she was compromised. No, not unwilling. Unable. Just the thought of opening her mouth and implicating Logan in what appeared to be a criminal activity made her feel like she’d been grabbed by a mean grizzly, shaken, tossed around, then sat upon. She ached. Whole body, right down to that annoying organ behind her rib cage.

Mike shook his head, then focused back on the TV as he replayed the tape. He watched the woman, the two men—rewound. His eyes narrowed as the two men crossed the screen again, then straightened abruptly, hitting the pause. “Holy Christ. That’s the damn lawyer, isn’t it? I knew there was something about that guy.”

She folded her arms across her aching ribs. “Could be he was trying to track down some information for a client?”

Yeah, that’s right, Jess. If you state it in question form you’re not lying.
Right…

“In that getup?” Mike asked.

“What do you wear when you go undercover?”

Mike looked at her sharply. Goddamn it. Totally. Compromised. Why was she going out of her way to defend them? Whether their presence there was truly as altruistic as Logan claimed or not was no longer her call. Off. The. Case. With good reason, too.

Her hand slipped into her jeans pocket, fingering the crumpled article. A hundred years old. If not older. Damn. Damn. Damn.

“You’re really taking yourself off the case?”

She nodded. “I have lots of time built up. I’ll, uh, tell the Sergeant that there was a personal issue I had to deal with.”

And wasn’t that actually the truth? How fucking honorable of her.

“I really wish you wouldn’t.”

She arched her brow. “Weren’t you the one who told me to get my shit together?”

“Yeah, but I’m not sure this is the way.”

She sighed. “Mike—”

He cut her off. “Before you decide, I got something to show you.”

“You mean all the notes on your desk?”

He tipped his head.

She shrugged. “I snooped. Even pulled this from the trash.” She pulled out the crumpled article, handing it to him.

“Oh, that.” He shook his head. “That came up in my search. Obviously it’s a different Calhoun. Maybe a relative or something.”

Maybe. But that sick twist in her gut was telling her no. The article was over three quarters of a century ago and he didn’t look a day older than he did now. In another seventy-five years she’d be dead. Would he still look the same?

What the hell? She was thinking like she believed him. Which she didn’t. If she believed Logan’s devil and hell on earth stories, then she was going to have to believe in Logan’s bullshit about being an earthbound angel. And she couldn’t buy that because, see, if there were angels, well then why the fuck hadn’t they saved Julia?

Goddamn
you, Logan. Where were you six years ago when I needed you to save someone?
Julia would have been the perfect damsel for his honorable white knight routine. Would have lapped up all that angel and demon crap too. Probably would have even found the idea of immortal angel-spawn falling in love with her mortal self tragically romantic.

Love
Logan.
She swallowed. Most. Definitely. Tragic.

“Oh, good. I found you, Mike,” a voice said from the door, drawing her focus back to the room.

Oh crap. Jessica tried to ease back further behind Mike. No go. Mike leaned forward, flicking off the TV, and giving the man at the door a clear view of her.

“Jessica?”

She lifted her gaze, past the leather jacket slung over the man’s shoulder, past the stubble of five-o’clock—or eight a.m. in this case—shadow on his jaw and found herself pinned by Damon’s dark gaze.

And damn it to Hell. How could she have forgotten about Damon? Yeah, true, she’d planned on telling him that it wasn’t working out between them, but technically she supposed they were still dating. And what had she done but have a one nighter with another man? The fact that she desperately wished it could be more than one night had no bearing here. She couldn’t allow it to.

“Oh, uh, hi.” She was at a loss for what else to say. This was decidedly awkward. Thankfully, she didn’t have to come up with anything more articulate because Mike took over.