Free Wicked Souls by Misty Evans Page A

don’t have that kind of power.”
    “But you could.” A silver amulet, engraved
with some kind of voodoo symbol went into the pot next. “You have
to fight this, Amy, and to do that, you may have to come out of
retirement. Channel Luc’s power and tap into mine.”
    Use my magic? Channel Luc? In my state, I’d
end up self-combusting, right after I’d sex-hexed him to death. “No
way.”
    “You want Eve to control your thoughts and
emotions?”
    Of course not, but she couldn’t, could she? Now that I thought about it, the logic wasn’t there, even if she
was a shape-shifting witch. Having control of another’s mental
processes and emotional state of being would take super powerful
mojo. Keisha’s voodoo dolls couldn’t even extract that kind of
long-term control. The level and intensity of the magic working on
me took Donald Trump-type supernatural power. Angel-type power. “It
has to be Gabriel. He owns half my soul.”
    Keisha opened a corked jar and sprinkled a
white powdery substance into her pot. Began to stir. “And Luc owns
the other half, right?”
    A new, insidious thought occurred to me,
complete with Luc’s face proudly displayed on top of it.
    Satan’s balls. It wasn’t Gabriel or Eve
messing with my magic or my mind. “Luc’s sabotaging me.”
    The moment I thought it, said it, knife-like
pain exploded behind my eyeballs. I grabbed my head with both hands
and bent at the waist, falling out of the chair. Keisha was at my
side in a heartbeat. She cupped my head in her hands, one at the
front and one at the back, shouted some words in her priestess
language I didn’t understand, and the pain eased a smidgen. I
rolled onto my back and opened my eyes, only to find her angry face
staring down at me. “Call him,” she said. “Bring him here right
now. I have a few words I want to say to him.”
    There were too many coincidences, too many
unexplainable circumstances. They danced around my psyche, but like
a lab rat avoiding the button that produced a shock instead of
food, my brain refused to linger on any of them or unwind the
tangled logic waiting for me there. Luc’s presence would only cloud
the issue more and I wasn’t sure what my magic would do if he
pushed me even further than he already had. “No,” I whispered. “I
can’t be anywhere near him. Not right now.”
    Keisha helped me back into the chair,
concern and aggravation clear in her clipped but considerate
movements. She repositioned the lighted candles to bookend the
caldron and raised her hands in prayer. While she chanted over me,
her potion began to bubble and smoke without the aid of a heat
source. Mesmerized, I watched it while I picked up the phone to
call Father Leonard.
    “How do I get my soul back?” I asked without
preamble when he answered. “All of it.”
    I could hear the smile in his voice as he
spoke. “By exactly what we’ve been discussing for the past several
months, Amy. You surrender your will to God and ask that your sins
be forgiven.”
    Back to that. I sighed and rubbed the base
of my skull where a dull pain radiated up into my head. “Why do I
have to give my freewill to anyone? Why can’t I be in charge
of it, one-hundred-percent?”
    He cleared his throat, spoke with patience. “That’s not how it works, my dear. You’re human. You were created
by God and to him you must return.”
    Honestly, I’d never thought about God
creating me. A sperm and an egg met, liked each other and boom, Amy
Atwood at your service. There was little thought put into my
conception and even less thought put into raising me. My father
left my mother before I was born. My mother left Emilia and with
our aunt before I was a year old. If that was God’s version of
creation—to give life so haphazardly and then toss it out of the
nest to fly or splat on the ground without a care—then in my not so
humble opinion, he needed a new vocation.
    “Ain’t gonna happen. Think of something
else.” I glanced at the clock