. 02

Chapter 43 Part 2

ANGELS & ORGIES

Later Evening Day 24

"Anyone? We still have to find Cherry's body." I shuddered.

"The dive team can't be here for a day or two," Bishop let me know.

"Can we wait that long?"

He shrugged and stared off into the distance. "She's been down there for a while, a day or two more shouldn't hurt."

Morbid but true, I guess. I wasn't ready to talk about my underwater experience yet. It seemed like a dream. Finding her body would tell me if it was real or not. I looked at Jonny. "Jess?"

Jonny looked at Diego.

"Jess is a Succubus," Diego informed me, finally.

"Like you accused me of being?" I narrowed my eyes at him.

The corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk. "Like a real one."

A real-life Succubus. "Chef was under her...influence?"

Diego tilted his head toward the book. "It has a recipe to keep Succubi away."

"Really?" I shuffled through the pages.

Diego gingerly lifted the book from my hands, he flipped to the page and I read, "Licorice." I didn't want to think about the connection between this and the potion that cured Jonny. Just a coincidence.

I knew I wasn't a Succubus. At least I was pretty sure. I walked to a bookshelf in the kitchen area, still holding Chef's collection of dried herbs. I pulled out a large glass jar, labeled Licorice Root, almost empty. I placed it on the island and looked over the rest of the herbs needed, pulling them from Chef's shelf. He didn't have everything.

"We'll have to restock." I pulled out the empty jars and placed them next to the others. "Explains why he was always eating black licorice." I gagged a little. Disgusting. "So, Jess is a Succubus but Chef was able to keep away from her Magic."

"Chef's journals say he loved her," Diego said. "That they loved each other," he said forlornly.

"So how does a Portal come into this?"

Bishop exhaled. "There's a Portal under the Lodge." He put his hands on the counter like he needed to brace himself.

We all looked at him, surprised.

"There's been rumors, some old stories in Elenora's books, but it was vague. I didn't believe it."

"As far as we know, Jess wants access to the Portal," Jonny added.

"Why, how?"

Jonny handed me a big binder and I opened it on an empty table. The article about me falling from the sky. I shrugged not understanding.

"Chef had suspicions about you, he thought you might be able to close it." He turned to a plastic sheet protector in the middle of the thick binder.

I gasped and jumped back from the binder. "Fuck no." I opened the kitchen drawers frantically searching for tongs. My heart beat in my chest rapidly. I used the tongs to gingerly pull out the large, pristine, white feather and held it up.

Bishop looked horrified, properly so.

I turned it to face the lamp, it became translucent and sprayed a rainbow of colors around the room. "Fuck." The tongs loosened and the feather slipped, scratching the back of my hand. The cut was tiny but a stream of blood ran down my arm.

"We need to bury it." Bishop rushed to open the door.

I hurried through the doorway and threw the feather onto the ground. I pushed over a giant pot with a dead tree and quickly covered the feather with dirt. "We need to go deeper." I was frantic.

Jonny grabbed a shovel and started digging.

I looked at him relieved. I shuddered and rushed back inside, under the cover of a roof. It just felt safer that way.

Diego wrapped a black bandana around my bloody hand and pulled it tight. Too tight if you asked me and helped Jonny dig.

"What was that?" Ben looked over my head at Jonny and Diego digging.

"An Angel's feather," I whispered to him and looked at the sky. I shuddered again and watched the hole get deeper. "Three feet, at least three feet."

When Jonny reached the right depth I ran back outside and pushed the dirt pile into it, checking the feather was at the bottom of the hole. I stomped on the dirt covering the hole, making sure it was well packed, and then covered it with more dirt.

"I thought Angels are good?" Jonny asked quietly.

I shook my head and looked at the sky. I pulled Jonny back inside with me, Diego following, and locked the door. Not that any of it would help. "I had a dream once when I was younger, God pulled back the curtain in my bedroom window and watched me sleep from behind a cloud." I got a glass of water, my mouth suddenly so dry. I gulped it down, my hands leaving dirt and blood around the glass. "Was the creepiest thing I had ever experienced.

"Don't you deal with Demons?" Diego asked.

If you counted Keiran forcing me to summon one and one just popping in during Maracella's ritual then, "Kinda." I didn't elaborate. Maybe I would be sleeping with Jonny for a while, not that it would help. It would probably just put him more in harm's way.

But Jonny wasn't just any run-of-the-mill man. He was constantly watching his back. Always on the lookout for danger. If anyone had a chance of surviving my curse, it would be him.

I rinsed the dirt and blood from my hands, wringing out the bandanna. The cut had stopped bleeding and scabbed over. I took off my muddy boots before I tracked in more dirt on the newly installed wood flooring. "Chef thought I was an Angel and Jess, what? Wants my blood to do something with the Portal?"

The men were wide-eyed.

"I'm not an Angel. I'm just human," I informed them.

"A human that just happens to know how to do Sex Magic and summon Demons?" Diego crossed his arms over his chest, disbelief across his face.

"I was trained to do Sex Magic-"

They looked at me surprised again.

"-and a lot of humans deal with Demons. Priests, Shamans." I gestured toward Bishop. "I'm sure your ancestors talked about that, they probably didn't call them Demons but it's all just energies." I shrugged.

He nodded. "True."

"Jess thinks you're an Angel though," Jonny reminded everyone, "she's going to try and get to you, use your blood-" He didn't finish his sentence.

I pulled off my second boot and stood up. "What does a Succubus want with a Portal?" I mumbled more to myself than anything as I grabbed Chef's old straw broom and swept up my dirt trail.

Bishop shrugged. "Maybe she wants to amplify it?"

"To what end? More chaos, spells going wonky, random Demons?" Anything seemed plausible at this point.

"Maybe she wants to bring something through?" Ben suggested as he painted the trim he finished installing.

"Hopefully it's not more Demons, cause there's plenty of those around." I shook my head. "I don't know anything about Portals. We needed more information. Going into this blind will...backfire, but maybe I can counteract whatever Jess is doing."

"How?" Jonny asked.

I sighed. "A good old-fashioned orgy." I looked around at the men. "We're going to need more women."

It was their turn to blush.

I smiled. "Do we know when Jess will try to do this?"

"Dia De Los Muertos." Diego answered.

"A couple of days." Not much time. I needed to gather ingredients and brew a special tea to help during the Sex Magic ritual.

"Full moon that night too," Bishop informed us. "Does Chef have everything you'll need?"

I shook my head. "Is there an herbalist in town? I don't think we have enough time to order anything." I looked over the mostly empty jars.

"I've been growing some plants for Chef." Jonny grinned. "You'll have to come with me to look at them."

I smiled back and nodded. Jonny's plant house was one of my favorite places on the property. "Let's go." I grabbed a wicker basket from under the counter. "Diego and Bishop should read through the journals. We need to find anything written on the Portal. Chef must have something in his books and the more eyes the better."

I didn't kiss anyone this time and walked out the door, expecting someone to follow me.