“Devil worshiping?” Dave asked. Clearly, he too had a little Latin knowledge.
“It appears that way.”
“What’s that?” Sebastian asked, pointing at a little symbol at the bottom of the page. I squinted at the loops and curves. A circle in the center with another butted against it, but not interlocking. To the right was a curve, but broken with a straight line, like the letter G.
I blinked and my heart sank as I gazed out at the parishioners. The words on the sign outside the church suddenly made sense. “I think it’s the letters C O G.”
“Cog?” Dave asked.
“No, not cog the word. It’s an acronym.”
“For what?”
“The Children of God.”
“The sex cult?” Sebastian muttered.
“Seems like they’ve branched out into Satanism,” Dave said.
“No, I don’t believe so. This is a sloppy cover up for something much more sinister.”
“Like what?”
“These people were dead long before their eyes were removed, and the sign outside was freshly erected. This book, while creepy, I don’t believe holds any actual power to call the Devil.”
“You’d know,” Dave mumbled.
“What was that?” I snapped. “Speak clearer if you are going to start pointing fingers.”
“I said you would know what has the power to call the Devil.”
Sebastian looked between the two of us. “What is he talking about?”
I rolled my eyes. “Nothing, Dave’s being a bigot. All elementals are evil—even the one his boss is engaged to.”
“If I believed you were evil, I would have taken you out already.”
Indigo itched against my skin, she was burning to get out and show Dave exactly how outmatched he was. “Try it,” I said with a smile that was a little of me and a lot of the psycho bitch I housed inside me. Dave froze, a predator weighing up the strength of another. If he was in animal form, his teeth would be bared and his hackles would be raised. I didn’t want a fight, but I wasn’t going to back down and act the meek little elemental.
Dave inclined his head. It was a small victory, and I’m sure he had weighed up the fallout from Hudson should he try anything with his mate.
“So this is a setup?” Sebastian checked.
I shook my head. “No, not a setup, a cover up. Whatever went down here was hastily twisted into a cult-lead activity, but it is sloppy work. The Children of God no longer exist, they are now called The Family. As far as I know, they aren’t into Devil worship and never have been.”
“Why take their eyes?” Dave asked.
I stepped off the stage, passed in front of the victims, and sat in the front pew to the left. Underneath the stench of death and burned flesh, lingered the cloying honeysuckle scent. There were no other obvious wounds or causes of death. I snapped my glove off my hand. “Do you have the juice?” I checked with Sebastian.
He nodded once and pulled a juice box out of his pants pocket. Like a boy scout, always prepared. “Is this a good idea?” Dave asked, folding his arms. “We don’t know the motivation. You haven’t exactly had the best history with your gift. Blindness, psychic bombs, evil presences tracking you…”
My hand paused a few inches from the bare shoulder of a woman with ice blonde hair. She was wearing a white dress with tiny embroidered strawberries. “We can’t cover up this amount of death. This will go to the human authorities because as far as I can tell, these people are all human.”
I glanced over my shoulder and Dave gave a sharp nod as he unfolded his arms. “Agreed, what’s your point?”
“My point is—once those authorities take control, we will have lost our window of opportunity to figure out if this is something that affects us. Caleb was sent to me for a reason. The quickest way to determine what killed them is for me to do a read.”
Dave drew in a long breath. He no doubt had orders from Hudson to protect me at all costs. Hadn’t the fool learned by now that I didn’t need to be saved? If anything, the world needed saving from me. But that was another problem for another time. I quit stalling and grasped the cold flesh of the woman and closed my eyes while I waited for her death to speak to me. The seconds ticked by, then a minute, then two. I flicked my eyes open and gazed at the woman before switching my hand to the forehead of the squat man with a round belly next to her. Nothing.
