CHAPTER SEVEN

The sheriff’s office was mostly empty when Lincoln arrived, aside from the lone dispatcher in her office. The department had been suffering from budget cuts; their one sheriff and three other deputies were all working on the “animal attacks.” There just wasn’t anyone else to staff the office.

Nobody except Lincoln.

He had been truthful when he told Elise that the sheriff called him, but he had been instructed to report back to the station, not the crime scene. He was meant to cover the office while everyone else was in the field. But he hadn’t told Elise that. If he had, she would have wanted to go with him and look over files. She would have been in his office, at his desk, close to his body. He didn’t know how much more of that he could take.

Lincoln’s nerves were frayed. He wasn’t as disturbed by the bodies in the morgue as he had been by Elise’s obvious come-ons. No—not the come-ons in particular. She was an embodiment of the Devil. He would have been more surprised if she hadn’t tried to tempt him.

He was bothered by the fact that he wanted to succumb.

Lincoln had said three Hail Marys in his cruiser before leaving the hospital parking lot. It wasn’t enough to purify his thoughts.

And, as if summoned by Lincoln’s impure urges, he found the angel sitting at his desk in the office.

Sometimes, the angel appeared to Lincoln with a blaze of fiery light, accompanied by the glory of ethereal choirs. At other times, he appeared as a mere mortal. Today was one of the mortal days. He had propped his loafer-clad feet on the desk and perched reading glasses on his nose as he flipped through a manila folder.

Lincoln had fought hard for a private office with a door. It was his personal space as much as the duplex—maybe more so, since Mrs. Kitteridge didn’t have a key. He was fiercely protective of it, and it stung to see that the angel had claimed Lincoln’s space.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” Lincoln said.

The angel didn’t look up. “I sent a letter notifying you of my impending arrival.”

“Guess it got lost in the mail,” he said. Belatedly, Lincoln added, “Sir.” It seemed to be the safest way to address him.

Once, Lincoln had asked the angel for his name, and been told, “You’ll call me Orpheus.” It obviously wasn’t his real name. Lincoln had studied Judeo-Christian mythology in college, and there were no angels named Orpheus. He soon learned that it was a reference to Greek mythology—the prophet that had failed to rescue his wife from the Underworld—and Lincoln thought it was bizarre that an angel would want to go by such a pseudonym. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to ask about it.

Even when Orpheus looked like a man, he was, in a word, awe-inspiring.

Over six feet tall, with white hair and pale eyes, the angel seemed to suck all of the oxygen out of the room. The paleness of his features was in direct contrast to the black leather gloves he always wore, even on a hot summer’s day. Lincoln hoped he would never learn what Orpheus was hiding under those gloves.

“What can I do for you?” Lincoln asked, clutching the crucifix at his throat. He hadn’t seen the angel face-to-face in months. Most of their communication was via unsigned notes, oblique voicemails, and the occasional envelope of money. There was no way that his arrival could bode well for Lincoln.

Orpheus plucked off his reading glasses, folded them, and tucked one arm in his shirt pocket. “It seems that you’re having a werewolf problem,” he said mildly, as if remarking upon a sugar ant infestation.

“It’s under control.”

“Is it? Another man was found dead today, on the eve of the full moon.”

“It’s under control,” Lincoln repeated. Orpheus stood smoothly. He didn’t step back when the angel approached him.

But there was nothing that he could do to disguise the shock on his face when Orpheus spoke again.

“Did you enjoy your cherry pie?”

That cool, emotionless voice sent chills down Lincoln’s spine.

He knew .

Lincoln put his hands into the pockets of his slacks to conceal the trembling. He had allowed himself to be seduced by the Devil’s charms, taken her to the church his family had attended for generations, and tried to hand-feed her breakfast. And the angel knew .

“You told me to find her. I found her,” Lincoln said. “I sent you a message to tell you that—”

“That she works with a group called the Hunting Club. Yes, I read your email. Well done.” Orpheus swept a gloved hand toward the desk. “Your payment is in the top drawer, as agreed.”

The cold anger in his voice kept Lincoln rooted to the spot as Orpheus paced around him, slow and graceful, every movement as deliberate as though choreographed.

“But I didn’t tell you to bring her here. In fact, I’m confident that I warned you that allowing her to come here would be catastrophic. There’s a reason we’ve had everyone on the lookout for her.” Orpheus grabbed an envelope off of Lincoln’s desk and removed a VHS tape from inside. “Evidence that she arrived was left in the trash outside. But you already knew that she’s here, because you invited her.”

“The Hunting Club are the experts. I’d already been investigating them at your request, and when I realized I needed help with the werewolf, I thought—”

“You didn’t ask me before hiring them.”

Lincoln swallowed hard. “Lives are at stake. I figured…if she’s so highly regarded, if her skill is so great, then I owed it to my town to get the best help possible.” He leveled his gaze to Orpheus’s. “Even if that meant doing what you told me not to do.”

“You have no idea what you’ve done,” Orpheus said.

“It’s the full moon. She’ll kill the werewolf tonight and be gone tomorrow.”

“If she finds the werewolf tonight, you may as well consider the lives of all the ‘good people’ in Northgate forfeit,” the angel said matter-of-factly.

Lincoln swallowed hard around the lump in his throat.

Yes, Orpheus had said that Elise shouldn’t come to Northgate, but he hadn’t said it was anything nearly that dire. How was Lincoln supposed to get a sense of apocalypse from terse emails?

“I didn’t think—”

“No. You didn’t.” Orpheus stepped away from Lincoln, and it instantly became easier to breathe, as if a fist had released its steely grip from his lungs. “Clean up your mess before it’s too late to rectify, Marshall.”

Lincoln’s mouth dried. “But…”

What about the lives Elise could save?

There was no point in asking, because the angel clearly didn’t care. That wasn’t his priority.

“Remember that I still own you, deputy,” Orpheus said. “And you still owe me. This money we’re exchanging, the ‘favor’ you’ve performed for me, changes nothing.” He reached for Lincoln, who jerked back. But Orpheus’s intent wasn’t violent. He straightened Lincoln’s collar, smoothed his lapel. The touch of Orpheus’s gloved fingers was ice.

Gentle as the touch was, Lincoln knew a threat when he saw it. Orpheus was making a statement with gesture as much as words. You’re mine, deputy .

Lincoln could only respond with a nod.

“Also, you’re missing files,” Orpheus said. “Someone’s stolen them.”

He had thought that seeing the angel in his office would be the biggest shock of the day, but surprise washed over Lincoln anew. “What? Was it…?”

“No, she didn’t steal them. She can’t get into this building.”

Two more surprises. Lincoln wasn’t sure which one was more unpleasant—the idea that someone in his cozy little town would steal from him, or knowing that Orpheus had cast some kind of angel-spell over the office.

He sank into the chair that the angel had occupied, staring at the files spread across the blotter. It was as much of a mess as his town was rapidly becoming. Murders, thefts, the Devil in leather and boots with a doll-like face. Lincoln swept the papers into a tidy pile. If only Northgate’s problems could be resolved so easily.

Orpheus opened the door. “One more thing, Marshall,” he said. Lincoln looked up. “If you touch Elise again…we’ll be having words, you and I, and they’ll be far less pleasant than these.”

The angel put his reading glasses back on. He took the surveillance tape from the desk. And he left.