Mortal Sin Read Online Free PDF

disguised the bitter taste with six packets of sugar.
    There was no use sending Lily back to school because it was after two in the afternoon. But she didn’t want to leave the girl alone, and she needed to get into Jared’s house again. She sent Jared, Lily’s boyfriend, a message to meet them at The Bean Bag ASAP.
    Lily was sipping a watery iced green tea, the sight of which made Moira cringe. They sat outside, and Moira watched the street. She’d been jumpy all day. Maybe because Rafe had been up all night with a migraine and she hated that she couldn’t help him. He’d finally fallen asleep at dawn. Moira could only sleep for a couple hours before being drawn to the cliffs.
    Something was brewing. As Lily said, something bad was coming. Bad was such an all-encompassing word. They had faced bad already; it had nothing on what they would soon face. Moira felt it, an electric tingle over her skin, both alluring and terrifying.
    She’d called Rico yesterday, her trainer at Olivet. Olivet, the training ground for St. Michael’s warriors. Rico had never liked when Moira called him part of God’s special forces, but if the shoe fit. Still, Rico was—for lack of a better word—her boss. He’d trained her, he sent her on assignments, he debriefed her. He gave her tools and weapons and had created a clean identity in case she had to bolt from the country in a hurry. So when she got these odd sensations, she called him and shared her thoughts. He’d said she was antsy because there were no big hot spots, nothing to signal where the Seven were active. Said to be patient, they were doing all that they could.
    She’d told him to pound sand.
    Okay, maybe she’d sounded the false alarm a couple of times, but patience had never been her virtue, and dammit, the Seven were still out there, claiming souls and leaving destruction in their wake. Why couldn’t they see it? Was humanity so broken they couldn’t decipher the difference between human destruction and supernatural destruction?
    And then there was the matter of her mother…
    “We need to put a bell on you,” Moira muttered.
    “Excuse me?” Lily said.
    She hadn’t realized she’d spoken out loud. “You can’t just wander around. You left the school at noon and two hours later were on the cliffs. It wouldn’t take longer than an hour to walk there—what were you doing for the other hour?”
    Lily frowned as if she had never considered that before. “I don’t know.”
    “If your mother realizes you’re having these blackouts or whatever we’re going to call them, she might be able to use them to her advantage.”
    “Maybe she’s causing them.”
    “I don’t think so.” She’d checked up on Lily far more than she would have under any other circumstances. She was over-protective of the girl, and Moira didn’t know why. Instincts? Guilt? Her promise to Father Philip? What she knew was that she hadn’t felt any spells over Lily, nothing magical on her person, no hex bags or even a simple memory loss spell. Moira didn’t know whether to be more worried about the memory loss or by the dreams where Lily thought Father Philip was talking to her.
    What if Father is talking to her?
    Her phone rang. It was Rafe.
    “You’re awake,” she answered.
    “Anthony is here. Bertrand was murdered.”
    Her sense of foreboding deepened. “What happened?”
    “We don’t know yet,” Rafe said. “But after yesterday… ”
    He didn’t need to spell it out. Anthony had confronted Bertrand as a distraction so Rafe and Moira could search the hospital for clues as to what Bertrand had done to Rafe during the ten weeks he was in a coma. All three of them would be on security cameras. “We have to be ready to bolt,” she said.
    “That’s extreme.”
    “Is it? This smells like a set-up.” Her phone beeped. She glanced down and sighed. “Rafe, it’s Rico. I gotta go.”
    She didn’t give Rafe a chance to argue with her. She hung up and answered Rico’s call.