Free The Edge of Temptation: Gods of the Undead 2 A Post-Apocalyptic Epic by Peter Meredith Page B

would be able to see the need in her eyes.
    “You are helping,” she insisted. “Maybe you should poke around the house and look for clues. I’m going to wait outside, if you don’t mind.” She practically fled into the sweet air of the evening. She didn’t want to be anywhere near any spells just then. The temptation on her was very great.
    It was full dark out when Jack finally strode out of the house, heading for the Lexus. “Find anything?” Cyn asked.
    “Nope,” Jack said, climbing into the car. He stared at the clock and admitted: “I can’t get that spell out of my head. It’s growing on me. And not for the reason Timmons thinks. I don’t have to learn it. I’m not obsessed and I’m not destroying my soul…well I am, but it always grows back always stronger than before. The thing is, I feel as though I need the spell. You heard Truong…wait, did you hear him? When he said that Robert had grown strong?”
    “Yes, I did and it scared me, deeply.”
    He nodded, holding the keys an inch from the ignition. “It scared me, too. And everything that we’ve been through this last year scares me as well. It’s all building up and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. That fear is what’s pushing me. I know Robert, he isn’t sitting on his laurels. It’s why he’s in the Sudan. He is looking for stronger and stronger spells and the names of greater and greater demons.” He paused and chuckled. “And here I am feeling that I have to justify myself trying to master a simple light spell.”
    “You don’t need to justify anything with me,” she answered, truthfully. Only the night before she had been staring at him in disbelief with a head sitting next to his knee. When he told her that Truong had needed to be executed, she had agreed. She knew the score; she didn’t like it, but she knew that Jack was holding back a dam of evil and if he wasn’t around, it would fall to someone else, likely someone less noble.
    She caught a glance of herself in the rear view mirror as she buckled her seatbelt. Her blue eyes locked on her reflection. The burden would fall on her. She had helped cause the evil and she had power equal to either of her cousins. It was a power she never wanted to taste, or so she told herself.
    His smile was one of relief. “I knew I could trust you,” he said. She smiled back, but there was just the smallest edge to it. They were leaving Bob’s property behind and she felt her longing for the forbidden spells amp up in a quick flare and then the house was behind them, hidden by a battalion of trees; she breathed a sigh of relief.
    The relief was short lived. Night in Akron was dreary. The dark hid things; it hid people that liked the dark, it hid those who worshipped in the dark. Cyn could feel the evil in the air. Bob was out there and if he wasn’t captured or killed, he would only add to the misery of the dying city.
    Before the “Event” the city had been losing a thousand people a year to sunnier climates; since then, the number was closer to a thousand a month. There were entire neighborhoods that sat empty and brooding, where it seemed every window was broken and every door hung like a crooked picture.
    Downtown was still alive enough to justify streetlights, however what they illuminated was the essence of sadness: dealers on the stoops, drunks in the gutters, and hookers on the corners. Anyone with any sense of decency was inside their homes behind locked doors and barred windows.
    All save Cyn and Jack that is, and she didn’t know if they constituted decent people. She didn’t think she did especially as they pulled up to the herb shop and there came over her a sudden lust. It crept into her chest and set up a thrumming. Someone was summoning a demon; she knew the flavor of “her” spell. Her birthright had been the protection spell that dictated who or what or how many demons came through the portal from hell.
    The spell had either been used recently or was