Wicked Souls Read Online Free

her time in the spirit world, hanging out with Elvis
and downing Jack Daniels when she had to return to reality. Every
time I walked into Father Leonard’s office, I had to fight the urge
to start straightening, tossing and cleaning. Childhood habits and
all that.
    With shaking hands, I dropped to my knees
and hastily shuffled the papers back into the manila folder. Damn
angel. No way was I letting him shake me up bad enough to blow my
six-month magic-free streak.
    The moment I set the folder back on the
desk, the office door opened and Father Leonard hustled in. He was
grinning like he’d heard a good joke seconds before, but when he
saw me his grin fell and his forehead creased in a downward
squiggle. Keeping his gaze on me, he closed the door behind him and
started unbuttoning his coat. “You look like you just saw a ghost. What’s wrong?”
    “Cliché.” I pointed at the jar on his desk. “And it wasn’t a ghost. Try angel.”
    He tossed his coat on a nearby chair and
followed it with his hat. He scratched his short black hair and
eyed me suspiciously. “Which one?”
    “The big blonde guy. You met him at
Christmas.”
    It took a second for the cogs in his brain
to click into place, but when they did, he looked stunned. “Gabriel? What in the Lord’s name did he want?”
    “He tried to kill me, claiming I put a spell
on him. He couldn’t get the job done, though, thanks to…” I
hesitated to admit Lucifer had helped me out of situation. “Outside
help. Instead he took a piece of my soul.”
    The squiggle on Father Leonard’s forehead
shot up to his hairline. “He did what?”
    I started pacing again, my own brain cogs
running in circles. “I don’t get it. My soul belongs to Lucifer, so
how could Gabriel take a piece of it? And what does he want with
it? Is he going to turn me into his holy bitch and force me to do
things—like hand out religious tracts at the airport—I don’t want
to do?”
    Father Leonard moved toward the desk,
pulling his wallet out of his back pocket to stick a dollar in the
cliché jar as he pondered my story. After a minute of watching me
pace, he gave up figuring it out and tried to reason with me. “You
seem more concerned about Gabriel having a piece of your soul than
about the fact you gave your soul to the Devil.”
    Really? That was the best he could do? I
rolled my eyes. “Lucifer’s never tried to kill me. Gabriel, on the
other hand, is a freak who’s tried to kill me twice now. You do the
math.”
    Chuckling under his breath, he took my elbow
and steered me toward the couch. “Your soul is tied to your
freewill, you know. Highly unusual for an angel of God to seek a
soul. In fact, I’ve never heard of such a thing. I’m sure you’re
blowing this whole thing out of proportion. What exactly did
Gabriel say to you?”
    We sat and I told him the story from the
beginning, leaving out unnecessary details, like my raging
horniness and the fact that when I thought I was going to die, the
person I thought of was Luc. “Why Gabe thinks I put a spell on him,
I don’t know. First of all, I’m not strong enough to do that.”
    His blue eyes mocked me, and a probe, like a
finger, poked at my magic. “You did it before, didn’t you? You sent
him back to Heaven at Halloween last year.”
    It wasn’t the first time Father Leonard had
poked at my magic, nor was it the first time I’d considered the
idea he was more than a priest. Unlike Lucifer’s full body scan,
however, the priest’s was more like a needle drawing a sample. When
I’d called him on it once before, he denied being psychic or having
any kind of supernatural abilities. One of these days I was going
to figure it out, but at the moment I had bigger things to deal
with.
    “I was still a powerful dark witch at the
Witches Anonymous meeting at Halloween,” I explained. “My magic was
fueled by all the emotions in the room that night, which were
pretty intense, thanks to Emilia trying to kill us all. Plus