Read Original Sin for Free Online

he broke the circle.
    All eyes shot to him. Shock registered on the High Priestess’s face as he spoke.
    The words were foreign to his tongue; he’d never heard them before. But as soon as he spoke, his voice took on a deep, resonant command and the earth shook beneath him.
    “Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!” the High Priestess screamed. “Raphael Cooper! Stop!”
    She countered him with a curse that he could almost see bounce off him. Sharp pain in his chest told him she’d hit close. He didn’t know who or what was protecting him, but he didn’t have time to figure that out, just like he couldn’t reflect on how the redheaded witch knew his name.
    Rafe walked to the altar and pulled the girl, the arca , to her unsteady feet.
    The High Priestess began another chant, aided by the familiar witch in a different language. A language he almost knew. She was finishing the invocation that would make this girl her weapon. His head ached as he looked into the girl’s wide pupils. She was drugged, her eyes darting and unfocused, her face flushed. The incense burned low to the ground where the girls had lain, making her drunk with the poisonous, hallucinatory fumes. They would soon affect Rafe. If this girl didn’t escape, he would have to kill her to stop the ritual—a ritual that would have far more deadly results than the loss of one innocent life.
    He didn’t want to kill her. But if the ritual was complete, not only would she die anyway, but the coven would be impossible to stop.
    “Run,” he commanded the girl. “Run or you’ll die.”
    A low rumble and an overwhelming feeling of unbalance ripped Anthony Zaccardi out of a restless sleep at two that morning. He sat up, the sheet, damp from his perspiration, falling off his chest. It took a moment for him to recognize the cluttered room he’d been sleeping in for the past ten weeks, the lacey femininity of Skye McPherson’s bedroom so different than the no-nonsense cop she was outside of her home.
    He swung his legs off the side of the bed, squeezed his temples, and prayed for answers to questions he didn’t know.
    “What’s wrong?” Skye asked, putting a cool hand on his bare back.
    “Sorry,” he murmured. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
    “Your thousand-degree body woke me. I swear, I’ll save a fortune on heating bills with you in my bed.”
    He stared at Skye in her gray cotton tank top, her long, blond hair tangled and damp from sleep. It took a moment for his head to clear, then he touched her beautiful face. “I am sorry, mia amore.”
    He’d heard something but couldn’t remember what had awakened him. A deep sense of foreboding filled him. It was the same fear that had built in him more than ten weeks ago when he’d first arrived in Santa Louisa from St. Michael’s in Italy. The closer he’d gotten to the mission, the more apprehensive he’d become. For good reason. He’d been able to save only one man from the horrors at Santa Louisa de los Padres: Rafe. The others, all twelve priests, had died.
    Could he have saved them if he’d arrived earlier? He studied demons, he didn’t hunt them; he could exorcize weak demons from inanimate objects like buildings and artifacts, but he was ill prepared to battle demons who had a plan.
    Skye frowned, her brows knit with worry, her cop eyes sharp and focused in the dark. “It was a joke, Anthony. What’s going on?”
    “You’ll think I’m being foolish.”
    “Never.” She sat up next to him, her bare thigh pressing against his shorts.
    He touched her again, needing to ground himself. Despite being together a short time her love gave him great strength. He soaked in her presence and said, “I want to go to the house again.”
    They both knew he meant the empty lot on the cliffs where once a house had been, before it burned and tumbled into the pits of Hell, just three days after the slaughter at the mission. Skye thought he was obsessed with the ruins, but he still went out