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same way. “No.”
    The lieutenant’s eyes stabbed through him like lasers trying to cut out the truth he thought hidden behind Antwaun’s steel mask. “Kendra Yates was not only investigating Swafford, but also dirty cops.”
    In spite of his control, the air whooshed from his chest in a painful rush. Fuck.
    Their rendezvous took on an entirely new light. The seduction. The mind-blowing sex. The pillow talk.
    Hell, he had thought he was in control, but he was a fool. She’d been using him all along, hadn’t fallen for him at all. Had she believed that he was on Swafford’s payroll? That he worked for the mob? That he might have killed Swafford? That he was dirty?
    His gaze swung back to his superior as he mentally replayed their conversations. Kendra must have had notes on him. Notes that pertained to her story. Notes on things he’d said that might have been misinterpreted.
    Holy hell.
    They obviously thought he’d killed her because of something in her notes. Something that made it look as if he were on the take.
    * * *
    E SMERALDA P ORTER , aka the Cat Lady, felt the tremble of the earth and the stench of death in the air. The whisper of danger rustled in the air as the winds rattled dry leaves from the weeping willow trees and sent them raining down onto the parched earth. In another place, it would have been a musical sound, but here the eerie, grating threads sounded like the devil’s voice, announcing his presence.
    She searched the backwoods from her porch. The rumors of the devil in the bayou taunted her—legends of faceless monsters that roamed the land. Some wore smiles to masquerade their evil souls. Damned into the darkness, kissed by the devil’s breath, they licked quietly at the blood on their fingertips as they ate away at the vestiges of man’s humanity. Those had clawed their way through the dirt and debris of their own graves to rise again as if the devil had pushed them upward through the ground with spiny fingers. They preyed on the weak, leaving tattered bodies and hearts in their vicious wake like the swamp gators after a nightly feeding, jagged teeth crunching on bone.
    Evil cannot be destroyed. Its black unbending heart beats on, old with rage, its tendrils of anger as choking as the twisted hands of lust that consumes man’s soul.
    But the battle wasn’t over. She summoned the magic to help fight off the evil. After all, she was a traiteur , a healer, a soldier for good, though not a warrior herself.
    Satan must have found a victim. A new soul to possess and carry out his vile will. Another source to spread pain and anger. She smelled his victory, a coppery scent like blood.
    Her black cat, Midnight, slithered onto the stone hearth and yowled to the heavens, and her tabby, Persimmon, bellowed in a long-winded refrain of terror.
    â€œCome here, ’tite chatte ,” she murmured, scooping up the little cat in her lap. The wind chimes hanging from the porch of her wood-frame house trembled, though, tinkling and clattering so hard one of the glass angels shattered.
    She pulled her black shawl around her shoulders, urging her arthritic body and mental will not to fail her. Though she’d been blind for years now, she saw things through the darkness. Living in a world without sight had honed her other senses, especially her sense of smell.
    She knew each feline by its odor, as well as the unique tone of its meow, the texture as she ran a fingertip across its nose. Gorgon, an orange-striped male, climbed on top of the organ and peered out the window as if planting himself as guard against the danger waiting in the bayou.
    A danger that marched closer with every passing minute.
    She mentally flipped through the recipes from her book of spells, searching for one to fend off the bad coming. Not that she had power, for the magic lay in the cats.
    Once upon a time, she had been a nonbeliever. But her life had taken a drastic turn into