Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls) - By Killian McRae Page 0,38
Dee’s face using Biblical proportions.
“What the Jim Dandy fuck, Angel?”
A sly grin filled Ramiel’s features as he resumed his seat and pulled out a pack of Marlboros from his jacket pocket. “Oh, so you did feel that?”
“Hell, yeah, I felt it! You just tried to introduce my jaw to the wall. And put your damned cancer sticks away. This is a smoke-free facility.”
Ramiel pulled a long, satisfying drag off his lit cigarette, blowing the smoke out in a continual stream until it was long enough to hang laundry on. “It’s just for a moment there you looked like an arrogant, unfeeling prick that was going to let the past repeat itself needlessly.”
“This is nothing like me and Clare. Nothing.”
“It’s not yet, but they’re going to end up the same way if we don’t take action now.” He leaned in across the desk. “Think you can take on the forces of darkness with a Keystone who’s barely broken in, and train a new pillar simultaneously? I don’t think so. After all, you’re only human.” Ramiel took another drag, then let the smoke filter through his clenched teeth. “Half-human, anyhow.”
The pounding fist on the desk came down hard enough to make the windows shake. Dee’s chair went crashing into the pock-marked wall as he shot to his feet. “What the hell do you want me to do? Castrate Marc so he doesn’t want her? Seduce Riona myself to distract her?”
“Well, seducing her yourself would put our pickle into an entirely different, though no less dangerous jar, so no.” Ramiel kept silent a moment as he sat in contemplation. “The castration thing, however…”
Dee’s eyes went wide. “He’s not a dog, he can control his urges.”
“But he’s falling in love with her.”
And there it was: the cursed, fucked-up truth that no one yet had the balls to say aloud.
Dee’s mouth did the dummy-with-laryngitis routine for a moment, but he just couldn’t find the words to argue what was so obvious to everyone. Except to Marc and Riona, that was. Finally, he slipped out, “It doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Ramiel shouted back, complimenting the outburst with an eye roll. “How can you say that? You, of all people?”
Dee shook his head. “Marc understands what would happen if he gave into temptation and slept with her. He can give his heart to whomever or whatever he likes, but he’s already turned over the deed on his soul to the church. If he breaks his vows by committing one of their cardinal sins, and given the fact that he’s a Pure Soul, he goes straight to Hell and becomes a demon. A demon who will have slept with our Keystone, to top it all off. And if Riona does love him, there’s no way she’ll vanquish him once he’s reincarnated in demon flesh. Hell, she ended up hating Jerry in the end, and even then she’s still so fucking compassionate, she was barely able to pull off his return-to-sender ceremony.”
“You’re missing the bigger danger here, chief.”
Dee’s eyebrow arched. “Don’t fucking call me chief, flyboy.”
The angel ignored the jab. “Yeah, it’s pretty clear-cut where Marc’s morality lines are drawn. If he does try the old in-and-out with Riona, he’s doomed. Thing is though, Riona’s lines aren’t as clearly cut. She’s not stupid, she knows that priests are forbidden to indulge in physical love. But if she falls for him too, and they both get caught up in a moment of weakness that she takes advantage of… Well, let’s just say it’s two birds with one stone for my dear fallen brother, Lucifer.”
Dee turned over the scenario in his mind. It wasn’t that hard to imagine. After all, someone who had as much in the way of indulging in the flesh as he had knew how a little ember could grow into a raging inferno in no time flat. Dee had never been much of a fan of the male-squared type of lovin’, despite his Grecian heritage, but he couldn’t deny that, to the interested eye, Marc came across as one fine cut of a man. And Riona… Hell, even he had experienced a few dimly lit moments in the privacy of his bedroom where his imagination had come in handy, in the literal sense, when they first met. History had taught him the dangers of actually pursuing, let alone loving, another Pure Soul, and he wasn’t about to volunteer for that kind of suicide mission again. Then, if you added actual, passionate, romantic emotions to it…