Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls)

a note from the author:

c-sharp.

but seriously.

i want to take a moment and put out this disclaimer. the romantic hero of this little tale is a catholic priest. no, that’s not a spoiler. you’re going to pick up on that in the first twenty pages. because of this fact, there are certain passages which include mentions of church dogma or regulations/expectations placed by the church on its clergy. please note that nothing in PURE & SINFUL is meant to be a commentary on the author’s view of religion, catholicism, or the church’s policy or history. it is not my intention to demean this faith in any way, or to call into question its practices. it is merely a story of an individual for whom these considerations have an effect, both in his own life, and in the life of those around him.

please don’t burn me in effigy.

sincerely,

k.

p.s.: this book is dedicated to melissa perea, laura bradley rede, jamie mcguire, lisa sanchez, el james, laura kaye, and tina reber. i almost gave up writing for good recently. each of these incredible ladies played a part in convincing me not to.

also, i would like to acknowledge the awesomeness of my pre-readers, the editing fairy, and the ladies of the twenty-one.

Chapter 1

A priest, a witch and a demigod walk into a bar.

No joke.

In fact, laughter’s chances of scoring an appearance were slim, though the probability of tears still stood at fifty-fifty. Riona Dade was as prepared as a box of uncooked spaghetti for something like this. Every corpuscle-ridden, wart-covered, occasionally-horned, Hell-born head in Dante’s Inferno swiveled in her direction as the door swung shut behind her, sealing out the daylight, city noises and any option to bail.

Oh, yeah, they knew who she was. There were more bared teeth and threatening glares thrown her way than if she’d been a biker walking into a ballet class. Which meant, there was a good chance they knew why she was here.

She inhaled deeply, hoping to cleanse her thoughts and focus her mind. Their stink, acidic and yet sickly sweet, burned her nostrils. Demon stench could give Sudafed a run for its money any day of the week. She felt her stomach turn, and her body and mind almost followed. The frustration at having to go through with this ordeal turned to anger, her face burning almost as red as her hair. If not for the two men flanking her, she’d have been out that door quicker than a jack rabbit on speed. Riona knew, however, that Dee would use his megalodon-magnitude muscular mass to manhandle her back into place the moment he saw her lunge.

Only the warm, gentle squeeze of the demigod’s hand on her shoulder from behind gave her the courage and patience to remain, and shattered the feeling of ice that had crept over her skin from the demons’ compassionless auras.

Running wouldn’t have been a bad option, though. After all, the odds weren’t pretty. In her
non-magical, it’s not your job to save the world from paranormal scum, you cannot wield the powers of the universe
life, Riona earned a paycheck as a statistician. She knew numbers. The 8-to-1 ratio of demons to Pure Souls hardly encouraged her.  While not a wet noodle, neither she, Dee, nor the priest that rounded out their demon-hunting trio, Father Marcello Angeletti, stood to compare with the collective destructive potential of this bunch of Marilyn Manson wannabees on steroids. Brawn would not win this fight; victory lay in the ability to flex magical muscle. That part didn’t concern her so much, though. She knew the spells, knew the hexes and counter-hexes. She never would have been sent on this mission if their appointed adviser from the Council of Seven, Archangel Ramiel, didn’t think she was ready.

Unless this little tete-a-fret was another of his practical jokes, that was. In which case, he was so off her Christmas card list.

A demon horde was no laughing matter. Riona was an equal-opportunity vanquisher of scum, and each of these minions’ numbers would be called soon enough. The VIP floating somewhere in the crowd was her target, however. Her gaze scanned the room and found his Mediterranean blue peepers fixed in her direction, joined farther down his face by an irksome grin, one corner of his devilish mouth curled.

“Didn’t know it was ladies’ night,” he grumbled.

Riona flexed her hand, cracking her knuckles like a string of firecrackers. “If there’s one thing I’ve never been accused of, it’s being a lady.”

Even without his bronzed-skinned and brawny-shouldered glamour, Riona recognized Jerry from twenty paces. He wore smugness like a well-tailored shirt, and, oh, how she wanted to rip that from him and toss it to the floor. This green-skinned, yellow-freckled, damned-soul-incarnate sipping a pint of Bavarian brew was the reason she was here, after all, and the sooner she toasted his ass and sent his soul “disembodied” back to Hell and into the unloving embrace of Papa Satan, the better.

Demonstrating that he had a bit of backbone left, Jerry didn’t make a run for it. He gave her one pulse-spiking wink, and turned back to the bar. A demon who drank lager with one raised pinky off the stein would have gotten his ass kicked if he’d been any other evil minion. Not Jerry. As one of Lucifer’s top agents earthside, she’d recently come to learn, Mr. Romani had been spreading evil since before the calendar flipped to A.D. The almost unheard of longevity and ability to outmaneuver demon slayers made him a bit of a legend in these circles. The reverence gave him airs. Jerry thought himself a demon of decorum and class. Riona had always said his eccentricities made him look like a friend of Dorothy in public.

But damn it all, if he hadn’t disproven that association to her time and time again in fervent, pulsating, speak-in-tongues and curl-your-toes demonstrations of lust and pleasure against her burning flesh.

But that was before. In his magically-engineered facade, he appeared to her as a black-haired, blue-eyed, Italian-American underwear model, sleek, shiny and sinfully lustable. The glamour, and their ensuing hot and heavy relationship, all amounted to an ingenious scam. Jerry was on a mission, and it wasn’t to win her heart. Lucifer had somehow gotten a heads up that Riona was next up on the roster to be vested as the Keystone Witch of the Pure Souls, she figured.  Hell dispatched Jerry to assess her corruptibility, and feel her out (feeling her up was just a bonus). At some point, the need for the game evaporated and it nearly cost Riona her life. No one could have predicted that it would be at that particular moment that her powers would manifest, allowing her to walk through a solid wall and escape. It had to be a one in a million chance, right?

Riona actually knew. The chances stood at 3,456,783 to 1. She had been the power ball winner in the supernatural lottery.

Jerry chuckled from across the silent, tension-locked room. “Of all the bars in all the netherworlds, she has to come walking into mine.”

Riona put up a false front of confidence in her best attempts at a bluff. “Why, hello handsome. Fancy seeing you here.”

He took another swig of his beer before gently placing the bottle on the counter and pushing himself off his barstool. With a swagger that still melted her internally, despite the less than desirable exterior she now beheld, she still remembered the delectable ways in which those hips could swing. He made each step golden as he crossed the room. When they stood face to face, that unique mixture of anticipation and disgust only he could instill took up residency among the butterflies in her stomach. Despite the fact that his demon physiognomy was now clear as day, those azure discs that undid her so often during their short-term fling excited her in ways that weren’t proper for a Sunday.

“I take it you’re not here for a drink, so I can only assume this is that long overdue booty call you know you’ve been hankering for.”

Her breath went jagged as his scaly hand reached up and stroked the flushed alabaster of her cheek. She closed her eyes and tried to regain the locus of control. She would not, could not, let him get the better of her.

“What can I say?” she bantered back, opening her eyes, now brimming with code orange vigilance. “Once you go demon, it’s them that you’re needin’.”

“Cute. We should print that up on t-shirts. I know why you’re here, witch,” Jerry declared as he pulled back and sauntered a few steps. Marc and Dee took advantage of his retreat to tighten their formation behind her. “It’s a sort of a rite of passage for you, isn’t it? Your first demon slaughter.”

“How do you know it’s my first?” The self-effacing admission escaped her lips before she could recall it.

“Because you’re making small talk. I’m not Oprah, sweetheart. Despite what you’ve seen in every Joss Whedon fantasy, we’re not exactly the speechifying type. If you had come through those doors and I wasn’t here, you can bet legal money that they’d have you chicken-wired to a mattress out back by now. Probably Thing One and Thing Two, too, because your pillar Pure Souls do happen to be some fine specimens of men...” He shrugged dismissively. “… you know, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

A rustle of cloth made her hope Dee was getting ready to land one squarely on Jerry’s jaw. When she looked back, however, she saw the boiling pot about to blow was actually the not-so-good Father. The very man who had made this whole having-magic thing a pain in the sarcastic ass.

Jerry continued, unfazed. “But how exciting for you! Oh, you should really slow down and savor this. I can already picture you at home later, making up the latest addition to your scrapbook, plastering a severed incubus horn in with silver-foiled borders and fluffy poodle stickers on the side. Tell you what, for old time’s sake, I’ll make the chicken wire optional. I know you prefer to be restrained with leather straps, but I’m negotiable.”

Jerry gave that lustful smirk he had mastered so well during their liaison, the one that always bypassed her brain, shot down her spine, and landed squarely in her hoo-haw.

And damn, he knew how to tie up a woman proper, achieving just the right balance of tension and slack.

Marc leaned in and whispered into her ear. “Watch yourself. Remember, he’s sampled your flesh, he knows your thoughts.”

His proximity and concern both disturbed and surprised her, leaving her more confused than a Republican at a Pride Parade. When he added a reassuring squeeze of her elbow, embarrassment engulfed her at the way her checks flushed. Usually, the good priest was a conceited ass. Things must look really bad from his vantage point if he was ministering to her.

“He’s sampled a lot more than just my flesh.”

Riona felt the familiar frustration tug at her again. How was she supposed to know that lying with a demon gave him the ability to read a human’s mind? No wonder he had been such a good lay, though. He could anticipate her every desire the moment she felt it.

“You can block him, you have the power,” Dee reminded her. “You just have to decide to do it. Resist your urges. Use your strength as the Keystone.”

She nodded and closed her eyes again, momentarily blocking out the hum of the chattering demon crowd, the clinking of glasses at the bar, and clanking of bottles on the tables. Pulling her self-control together, she recalled the facts of the matter.

Fact: she was a Pure Soul, one of the trinity entrusted by the Council of Archangels to ferret out and fight the minions working on Lucifer’s behalf to corrupt men’s souls and spread evil and hate. She’d also heard that they moonlighted at the DMV. Demons represented the enemy: the souls of mortal men damned to Hell for their sins, given new bodies to house those corrupt souls while they walked the earth. A demon’s physical body could only be destroyed by magic, which released his soul and returned it to Hell. Riona as the Keystone could wield this power to its full extent, assisted by Marc and Dee. Both her partners, her
pillars,
had spent years learning the ways of witchcraft through perilous training and dedicated study. Riona had been given a Red Bull and sent to read the Cliffs Notes version.