Wicked As Sin (The Accidental Exorcist #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

Evil didn’t need an engraved invitation to slip inside a home. It just needed an opening.

Unfortunately, so did I.

I stepped onto Mrs. Klein’s front porch and wrongness settled over me like a wet blanket. The air was too still, too quiet. There were no birds or traffic sounds humming in the distance. Even the daylight seemed dimmer, as if what crouched inside this house was infecting everything around it.

I knocked on the door again, harder this time, and eyed the cracks spidering out from the tiny decorative windows that stair-stepped up the peeling red paint.

There’d been a lot of crashing around behind this door as I’d jogged up the concrete steps to 1865 Whippoorwill Lane, the kind I’d gotten used to whenever Mordechai worked. But the old man was supposed to wait for me.

He’s holding you back. You don’t need him anymore.

“Yeah, I fucking do,” I muttered, used to my inner monologue getting mouthier right before an exorcism went down. But my shitty self-talk needed to take a break, for once. I had enough to deal with.

I lifted my hand to knock again when I heard the chain drawn back. Squaring my shoulders, I stepped away from the door.

A thin, worn-out face peered at me, watery eyes squinting, voice quavery. “Yes?”

I gave the woman who had to be Mrs. Klein my seriously capable smile, the one that clocked me at way past my actual age of twenty-five years. To be fair, though, they’d been a hard twenty-five years. “I’m Delia. Delia Thompson? I’m here to help Rabbi Mordechai. He should have told—”

“Oh, thank goodness.”

The woman’s hand trembled as she gripped the door. Noise started up again behind her, a loud BANG! that, once begun, didn’t stop. BANG! BANG! BANG!

“The rabbi, he’s coming today?” Mrs. Klein straightened a little, hope momentarily supplanting fear. Her frail body crackled with that hope. “He—I thought he was coming tomorrow.”

“Really?” I slid a hand into my hoodie pocket to pull out my phone. It was, of course, dead. The damned thing couldn’t hold a charge for half a minute anymore. “I’m sorry, I—”

The BANG! BANG! BANG!ing continued behind Mrs. Klein. Hope died in her eyes, replaced by something else. Dread. Despair.

I frowned at her. “Are you going to be okay until tomorrow?”

Her face shuttered, the resigned old-lady smile plastered on it once more, creasing powdery skin. “He’s coming tomorrow,” she said, almost like a mantra. “It will have to do.”

She shut the door in my face.

If anything, the commotion on the other side seemed to get louder. I heard Mrs. Klein speak sharply, her shout almost a command, but not quite.

Good. I smirked. That was how you had to talk to them.

Approval ribboned through me on the heels of my judgy thoughts, as if I’d scored well on some demon-hunting exam.

I gritted my teeth against the sinuous warmth of that approval, hating how my body responded to it.

Because under that praise was something else, something slick and wrong, pulsing in time with the banging inside the house. A banging that didn’t stop.

I pursed my lips and rocked back on my heels to scan the shuddering house. It was today I was supposed to meet Mordechai here—wasn’t it?

It was definitely today.

I’d skipped my Thursday psych class at UIC for this.

Mrs. Klein had called Mordechai about her sister ten days ago, hearing about the unorthodox exorcist the usual way—a cousin of a friend of a brother.

He hadn’t been formally ordained in years, but people still called him Rabbi Mordechai, and he rarely corrected them.

Ex-rabbi, former consultant to the Catholic Church, and quiet neighborhood legend, Mordechai operated well outside any official order now. He didn’t even need to advertise.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The afflicted found him.

I stepped off the porch, glancing at the neat little yards on either side of the Klein residence, taking it all in and knowing I was seeing more than I should—feeling more.

I’d always had a knack for noticing the dumbest things, picking up on people’s emotions no matter how hard they tried to hide them.

Fear was copper and ash. Lies were bitter, like burnt coffee.

Love—the few times I’d encountered it—was either thick and sticky or light like rain.

Most of the time, I said nothing, because the kind of things I noticed weren’t the kind of things anyone wanted to hear about. I also didn’t generally like to advertise that I was a freak.

But here on Whippoorwill Lane, the cracked paint and weeds didn’t just stink of neglect.

The houses on this block all carried the same faint odor of injury, hunching over the chopped-off lane.

It was a street full of old people, or the grown-up children of people who’d gotten old when they weren’t paying attention.

The kind of street no one expected to find themselves living on, at least not on purpose. And certainly not for very long.

BANG! BANG! BANG! Bang-Bang-Bang-Bang-BANG!

I glanced back at the house. Stupid bitch.

Well, if she wanted to wait for Mordechai, she could enjoy another 24 hours of suck.

I stalked away, timing the cadence of my walk to the crashing going on behind me. Mrs. Klein screeched out another sharp word.

Only this time it ended on a scream.

“Iris!”

I heard the old woman’s fear, shocked and high, sounding not only panicked but terrified. Then steps were running through the house as another voice’s laughter surged forth on the trailing edge of her cries.

I pictured the frail Mrs. Klein I’d seen in the doorway, racketing around her tiny little home, about to break a bone or shatter a hip.

Her fear pierced through my sneering dismissal, and before my brain could conjure anything else, I ran back up the steps and did my own banging, pounding once more on the front door.

The moment my fist hit the thin wood there was silence inside, like children caught acting out at bedtime. Then came the swift shuffle of feet approaching, the equally fast swipe of the chain being drawn away.

“Oh.” Mrs. Klein took me in, once more glancing behind me. Her face fell.

Nope. Still no rabbi.

“Can I come in, Mrs. Klein?” I asked in a rush. “I might be able to—do something. About Iris.”

Mrs. Klein didn’t even hesitate as she opened the door. At that point, she probably would have taken help from the Easter Bunny.

I stepped inside with my shoulders back, my chin high, acting like I knew what I was doing.

Of course you know. You’ve known for a long time.

Heat prickled along my spine as my inner voice whispered its support, leaving me unsteady, unsettled…

needful. I shoved those feelings away and looked around Mrs. Klein’s living room.

The afghan-covered couch pressed against one wall, glaring at the dead eye of a silent TV.

The gleaming grandfather clock hugged another corner, slightly off center, as if hoping to escape unnoticed when no one was looking.

The whole place crouched with an air of expectation, and I exhaled slowly, steadying my nerves.

I could do this.

Once again, the softest brush of sensation slipped along my neck, a prickling of awareness, a murmuring of a thousand voices and none at all. I barely kept from letting my eyes drift closed, wanting to lean into that dark invitation, to slip away on its lies, to immerse myself in—

“You can help her? Today—without the rabbi here?”

Mrs. Klein’s desperate plea sliced through my warm haze, and I jerked my gaze back to her. She stood wringing her hands in the center of the living room, but she was alone.

“Where’s your sister?” I asked abruptly.

She flinched, and even I tensed a little at the sound of my voice. It sounded too clipped, almost angry.

“In her room.” She waved vaguely toward the back of the house, and I nodded, working up a reassuring smile.

I was doing this all wrong, dammit. I needed to slow down.

Mordechai always treated the family of the afflicted as if they needed as much help as the victim.

The more wounded the family, the more ceremonial he got.

“To each according to his needs,” he’d always say.

Mrs. Klein seemed pretty traumatized, but I couldn’t brandish an ancient shofar or suddenly whip up ten holy men and all their whispering chants.

So I did the best I could. Blowing out a calming breath, I set my pack on the ground and pulled out the small metal mezuzah case I’d tucked carefully inside, offering it to her.

She took it almost sheepishly, a thin stain of color warming the ash away from her cheeks as she stared down at it.

“We had one years ago, but we just—it got stolen, I think. Or fell off. But there seemed no reason to…” She sighed. “I never expected anything like this.”

“It’s okay.” I folded my hands over gossamer-light fingers, absorbing her tremors while she held the small cylindrical case. “Rabbi Mordechai created this himself to bless your home. When you’re ready, after I leave, put it up, okay? It’ll make you feel better.”

She began to nod, then a new sound issued forth from the back of the house. Not the BANG! BANG! of something big anymore, but a low rhythmic thump, like a piece of furniture thudding against a wall.

Mrs. Klein clearly knew what it was because her face tightened into an anxious mask, and she turned away from me.

With almost exaggerated care, she set the mezuzah on a small, doily-covered table.

Then, with quick, shooshing steps, she led me toward the back of the house.

I didn’t miss the fact that my inner voice and all its brash confidence had now gone silent, just when I needed it most.

Thump. The house shuddered again with the force of whatever was being shoved against the wall.

I swallowed. Unlike Mordechai, I had no more scrolls, no jewelry bearing a Hamsa hand to add to my gift of the mezuzah.

But the ex-rabbi had taught me long ago that true exorcists didn’t really need their vials of holy water, their beads or symbols.

Such tools and totems had been created over the centuries to represent the essence of God, so that everyone could tell themselves it was God who had the power. God, and not the exorcist.

Thump.

Still, as far as an actual vanquishing of evil went, those tools weren’t truly required, Mordechai had always said. All you needed was words, faith…and an exorcist too stubborn to fail.

Thump.

Mrs. Klein started crying as she shuffled closer to the door at the end of the hallway. I huffed a shallow breath, suddenly wanting to cry too.

I couldn’t fail this test. Not even a little. Once challenged, a demon either fled—or it killed. There was no other option.

Thump.

Demons were only instruments of trial, Mordechai always said. When they trespassed into God’s sons or daughters—pressing against the souls of the weak and forcing a choice between fear and faith—an exorcist merely had to send them on their way. And we could, he insisted. We always could.

Thump.

We could.

I walked down the dark, narrow hallway toward whatever was waiting in the back of Mrs. Klein’s house and dearly hoped that he was right.