Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls) (16 page)

“Riona?”

Looked like he wasn’t the only one taken off guard, either. Marc tore his impure thoughts away from Riona long enough to take in Dee’s gaping mouth and wide eyes. The demigod beheld their Keystone with a mixture of awe, disbelief and lust. Which shouldn’t have surprised Marc in the least, given that Dee was one of the most imminent lotharios of the northeast corridor. But the spike of jealousy that pierced through him was something unexpected and new, something he had never felt in his life. At least, not over something so impossible. And that spike spread when he saw Dee slip his arm playfully around Riona’s back side and spin her around in his arms like she was Ginger-fucking-Rogers to his Fred Astaire.

“Boy, do you ever know how to let your hair down,” he laughed as his eyes did another scan of her from tip to toe, lingering momentarily on the break line of her cleavage. “Holy hari krishnas, Riona. I’d say you look like a prostitute, but that would be insulting to prostitutes.”

Even through the layers of makeup, her blush burned. “I figured we’d get further if we blended in.
And
t
hat’s if the demon happens to be male in his orientation; we’d have a better chance of exposing him if there was a lack of blood going to his head.”

“And if the demon happens to be female?” Marc ground out through gritted teeth. He couldn’t explain the anger threatening to consume him, nor the urge to rip one of the leather coats from one of the nearby college asshats staring at Riona’s backside like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet and wrap it around her defensively.

“Well, Marc,” she spat his name out like a curse word, with a glare that all but smacked him across the face. “If you recall correctly, I can entice those types too. But in case they don’t swing that way, between you and Dee—” Her eyes narrowed as she gave him a closer inspection, before turning towards the line of people outside the club. “Well, at least Dee is here for that.”

The bouncer looked like he was picked out of a Goons-R-Us catalog from the “particularly fear-inspiring and highly-tattooed” section. The bald-headed behemoth stocked more ink on his arms than an industrial-sized printing press, and towered even over Dee’s six-foot-four frame. At least fifty pounds of muscle had been squeezed under each mesh shirt sleeve. He wore silver chains around his wrists and the biggest dog collar Riona had ever seen on a human.

“Back of the line, sweetheart,” he spat when she moseyed up to him, Dee and Marc in tow. “Getting into this club is a democratic process.”

Marc watched in titillating horror as Riona, unfettered, raised her hand to the bouncer’s cheek — she almost had to curl up on tiptoe to achieve the feat — and ran a finger past his lips, over his chin, and all the way down his chest.

“Is that because everyone gets a turn at the polls?” she teased. Her right arm rose over her head as her hips swung from side-to-side and her other hand went over her chest. She pivoted and put her backside to his, slowly sliding down his front seductively. “Don’t you want to give me a chance at the pole? I think you’d find I could be quite a swing vote.”

But to Riona’s dismay, he grabbed her at the hips and pushed her away. “You think every piece of sweet ass that wiggles itself in front of me gets through these doors?”

Marc’s fist was loading more magic by the minute. If this hire-a-thug didn’t start showing some respect, he’d be coughing up gophers in a moment. Riona was a freaking witch, Marc inwardly cursed. Why the hell wasn’t she just charming this guy with magic instead of debasing herself like this?

Looked like Dee wasn’t going to let Riona go undefended either. He stepped warily in front of their witch and growled. “I’d watch where you put your hands there, Daddy Whorebucks.”

The bouncer’s head lashed sharply right, sending off a series of pops like a string of cheap fireworks. “You want to dance out here, sweetheart? My pleasure. One condition, though: I always lead.”

Marc pulled Riona behind him as both muscle men got ready to present arms. Baldy Bouncer’s fist was loaded and cocked when a shout from behind them froze everyone.

“Chipper, stop! They can come in!”

The drop-dead gorgeous blonde who stood at the doors of the club was clearly more than human. Either that, or she had the best plastic surgeon this side of the Hollywood Hills. The tall, leggy bombshell had curves in all the right places to make men think all the wrong things, as though she’d been sculpted by Hugh Hefner’s imagination. She wasn’t as provocatively dressed as the patrons of her establishment, but even a potato sack would have looked seductive on her. She broadcast sexy on all channels, and everyone in her vicinity picked up the signal.

Both Riona and Marc were a little dumbfounded when Dee rounded the clock tower of hulking body with the affectionate name of Chipper and took up the bodacious blonde in his arms, swinging her clear off her feet.

“Steph?” he asked in an unbelieving tone when he put her down, cupping her face in his hands as though he was on verge of kissing her.

Steph
smiled in high-fidelity Technicolor. “Well, well, well… If it isn’t my little brother.”

“Brother?” both Riona and Marc exclaimed as they too rushed passed Chipper, unchipped.

“Are these your other two stooges, Dionysus?” the blonde asked, but in a tone that clearly marked the comment as a joke.

“Hell ya, and best team I’ve ever worked with!” Dee exclaimed, maneuvering the woman under his arm. “Marcello Angeletti, Riona Dade, this is my sister, Persephone.” 

“Well,
half-
sister, actually.” Persephone presented a hand bearing five highly polished fingernails to the other Pure Souls in turn. “But you know what Dad always says, ‘If you have to have a sister—’”

“ —‘might as well be a
half-
sister,’”
Dee finished off with a chuckle.

Riona’s mice apparently were running the wheel in fine fashion. “Wait, a minute,” she said, examining the blonde with newfound curiosity. “Dee’s half-sister, Persephone? Are you the Persephone? Like,” Riona leaned in closely, Marc following suit, “Persephone, Queen of the Underworld?”

“Oh, yeah, only…” Persephone pointed back over her shoulders at the pulsating club behind them. “I’m retired from the whole royalty thing now. Our holdings were bought out in an aggressive merger-and-acquisition a few thousand years ago, as you might have heard.”

“Why didn’t you let me know you were in town?” Dee continued.

“I didn’t know you were here. Last I heard, you were living in the bottom of a bottle outside of Rio. But that must have been, what, twenty years ago?” Persephone’s eyes tracked to Riona. “But I see you’ve recovered finally.”

“Oh, no, it’s not like that.” Dee actually blushed. “Riona’s not with me.”

“Really?” Persephone’s gaze grew hungry as she sized up the witch for consumption. “So she’s open game, then.”

Most of all to his own surprise, Marc’s arm lashed out protectively in front of Riona like a shield. “Actually, she already has a girlfriend.”

Persephone’s face fell, while Riona’s masked surprise.

“Your grace, we’re here on assignment,” the priest continued in a dead-on impression of stoic Joe Friday. “Intelligence says you have a demon presence here.”

Likewise, Persephone grew serious, her smile fading. “Yes, I tipped off the network to get some help. Gods and angels, as you know, can’t fight any human-based entity, like a demon, directly. Luckily, my little brother here had his human mother, so he’s exempt from that restriction. But I didn’t know the current pod of Pure Souls was in the area. Makes a lot more sense now, all the chatter going on in the underground these days.”

Dee made a mental note to ask more on that later.

Persephone continued, “I don’t know who it is — a regular, a member of my staff, one of the dealers who sweeps in and out of here a few times each night?”

“Maybe we’ll have a better idea if you tell us what’s going on,” Marc suggested.

“Wild, crazy sex,” Persephone answered. Dee grinned, but Marc broke down coughing. Riona had no reaction. “Look, anytime you get a whole bunch of under-thirties, booze them up, have them all dress like dancers in a Kanye West video, and give them a dark room where anything goes, there’s going to be some nookie. But lately, I don’t know what’s changed. It almost turns into an orgy. Even people I know from experience who only come here to let off steam and dance get pulled in. At the end of the day, if everyone seems willing, I don’t get involved. But the other night, Chipper had to pull guys off a girl three separate times when they couldn’t accept that the girl wasn’t with the program.”

“So you still cut the line at rape,” Riona spat out with a hostility that Marc thought was a little too harsh, even given the sin.

“I have experiences being forced into a situation against my will,” the club owner spat back. “If two people or, hell, more than two people are doing what they’re doing willingly, I don’t give a fuck. Sometimes I even join in, if the invitation is extended. But no one, no one, while in my club is a victim of violence. And even those who try,” her hands pointed high above the club, to where a sign fashioned to look like a cave entrance hung on the building. Marc could see several skulls worked into the frame like they were part of the motif. “Well, we have ways of dealing with the wicked that don’t require magic.”

Persephone wasn’t kidding. Inside, the dance floor pulsed with bodies that groped, grabbed, gyrated and pivoted in a thousand divergent expressions of desire. At tables, college students kicked back drinks that came in every color of the rainbow, some eerily glowing in the glass. The walls seemed to be moving, until Dee sharpened his gaze and saw the movement was human-based. Or, more appropriately, human
-
debased.
At random intervals, couples made out with no care for how many could see them. Based on movements at the midline, Marc thought a few were even beyond the point of foreplay.

“We’d do better if we split up,” Dee shouted over the bass drone interlaced with electronic chords. “Can you guys handle that?”

Marc and Riona exchanged a heavy look before nodding. Dee and Persephone headed towards the high end of the venue, where the bar was packed with clubber clutter, while the two of them headed to the edges of the dance floor. When she was convinced that neither Dee nor Persephone’s superhuman ears would pick up on the conversation, she pounced.

“What’s with you telling her about Lucy?” Riona shouted over her shoulder and the
boom-nnddn-boom
o
f the speaker’s blast.

“Is that her name?” Marc spat back with what he hoped came across as indifference. “Why, was that a secret? You still in the closet?”

“No, I’m not, and no, it’s not a secret. But what business was it of hers?”

They caught luck and found a table with two chairs that offered a perfect visual sweep of the dance floor. Marc pulled a chair out for Riona, who seemed hesitant and eyed him warily. With a jerk of his head and a roll of his eyes, she gave in and sat on the peg-legged piece. He sunk quickly in the chair opposite. The table’s width was barely longer than the distance from his elbow to his wrist. He could easily lean over and shout in a volume she could pick up on.

“By all means, if you want to sleep with Persephone, or every resident of Mt. Olympus and Valhalla, go for it. I hear lesser divinities are particularly talented lovers. I just hope Lucy understands.”

Her steely gaze gave him a shiver. “You hate that I have a girlfriend, don’t you?”

Marc pointed vaguely to his neck. “I don’t leave the spirit of the collar at home when I dress like a layman, Keystone. It’s a sin in my world. I don’t expect you to follow suit, but I can’t help what I am.”

“I thought you were supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner?”

Loving the sinner is part of the problem,
Marc inwardly chastised. “I do. Hate your sin, I mean.”

“And the sinner? What’s your position on her?”

His tongue bit back the word, missionary.

“My calling would have me love all sinners, though you make that a challenge. Sometimes I can’t figure out if that’s the reason I care about what you do so much. I…”

He choked on his words, but it was too late. That devilish little smile of hers was loaded with knowledge and insight. Shit, was it really that obvious to her? Had Dee said something, even though he promised on the way over he hadn’t? Should he just drop the asshat façade and tell her the truth?

No, there was too much to lose and nothing to gain by admitting his feelings, or for a moment giving her any reason to hope.

“I’m a priest, I have to love the sinners the most,” he answered stoically, before adding a snarky, “because y’all are the most fucked up and the most needing of attention. Now, are we here to talk, or to find evil?”

She turned her attention back to the dance floor. They both had the same problem: sin and evil were so easily confused in the passing of a moment and to the casual eye. One was temporary, the other long term, but they looked identical in the moment. A witch like Riona, and even a lesser wiccan like Marc, however, could usually distinguish the two by getting close enough to the party in question to sense the intent of their aura. Proximity was the thing.

“Too many people,” Riona shouted, trying to sort with her eyes through the throng before them without any success. “We have to get in there, feel them out.”

Without another word, she shot up from her seat and threw her body into the hive.

Marc’s heart beat in his ears as echoes of what Persephone had said about women being attacked reverberated in his memory. The chair hit the wall behind him as he kicked it out of the way. With Riona’s bright red hair, she shouldn’t be hard to pick out amongst this crowd who looked like most had dipped their heads in coal dust or bleach. A chick who couldn’t have been more than twenty-two and who, based on her glassy eyes, was already five shots into the bar tab, locked him in her gaze and drew herself in. Marc’s body went board-stiff, resisting her urgings to move with her, as she turned her tight little frame to him and began swinging her hips right against the front of his pants. He backed away cautiously, his hands disciplined at his side, and was oddly relieved when an overly-pierced guy, bound in leather, quickly filled the impersonal void he had left.

Flashing lights made liars of color and moved in time with the music. There was plenty of sin bubbling up around him — it was so thick it left a metallic taste on his tongue — but no pure evil or demon presence that he could sense. Disheartened, Marc reminded himself that Hermosa had been his friend for fifteen years, and he had never made him out for what he truly was. How in the hell could he be expected to tell from a bunch of strangers indulging in lust at a glance which of them drew a paycheck from Hell? And though she had proven that she could kick ass when it came time, Riona still hadn’t honed her skills enough to be any better. That sort of moral perception took years to develop. A witch, however, and a Pure Keystone witch at that, would have an aura that tasted like a hit of cocaine, meth, and a Starbucks triple espresso combined to a demon. They’d pick her out in a second if they set eyes on her.