Of Ash and Spirit_Piper Lancaster Series Read online

  I shook my head. “I’ve got nothing.”

  “A priest, Piper. Catholic priests perform exorcisms.”

  Crap. She was right. Most of the hits I’d gotten for my search on demons last night had been for exorcisms.

  “I’m going to make a few calls and see if we can get an appointment to interview a priest before we go to the McNamaras’ place. Good idea, right?”

  I sat up straighter. “Yeah. A great one.”

  “Good. And don’t look so surprised.” She motioned to the doorway to the living room. “Now go take a shower so the priest doesn’t think you’re a homeless person who needs psychiatric attention. You still smell like whiskey.”

  I started to stand, but first I leaned over and gave Rhys a hug. “Thank you so much for sticking with me through this. It would be really easy for you to chalk this up to mental illness and write me off.”

  “Piper, you and I may not go back quite as far as you and Hudson do, but when we met, we just clicked, you know? It was like we’d been friends for decades. I’ve got your back.”

  “Thanks.” But I had a feeling she and Hudson would need me to protect theirs, and right now, I was nowhere close to being up to the challenge.

  Chapter Eleven

  The temperature had cooled off to the upper eighties, and since we had a professional appointment, I put on a pair of nice black capris and a black and white paisley patterned top. I added a pair of black flats and called it good. I left my mid-length, light brown hair down to dry naturally and put on some light makeup.

  When I walked back into the kitchen at one thirty, Rhys gave me the once-over.

  “Good. You’re ready. We need to go.”

  “You got an appointment?”

  “Yeah, but it’s at two, so we have to hurry. He squeezed us in.”

  Since Rhys was parked behind me, we took her car. I sent Hudson a text telling him that Rhys and I were running an errand before we went to my clients’ house. Then I sent him the McNamaras’ address in case we ran late—a possibility given that they lived in Biltmore Forest and the priest’s office was downtown.

  Or so I had thought.

  Rhys drove onto 240E, and I gave her a look. “Aren’t we going to the Catholic church downtown?”

  “Well . . .” Her voice trailed off and then she grimaced. “It turns out that most priests are a little skeptical about having a chat with non-Catholics about demons and exorcisms.”

  “Who did you find?”

  “Oh, we’re talking to a priest,” she said in an upbeat voice.

  I groaned. “Please tell me you didn’t make an appointment with some kind of voodoo priest.”

  She perked up. “Hey! That would have been a good idea!”

  “Do we even have voodoo priests in Asheville?”

  She tipped her head to the side and grinned. “Good question. More research for me.”

  Rhys was having far too much fun with this. “So who are we meeting?”

  “Father Owen at St. Philip’s down by the Biltmore. It’s closer to where the McNamaras live, anyway.”

  “St. Philip’s? That’s Episcopalian.”

  “So?”

  “Can Episcopalian priests perform exorcisms?”

  She waved her hand in the air. “Sure they can.”

  I narrowed my gaze at her. “Why don’t you sound more certain about this?”

  “Well,” she said, drawing out the word, “I had to change my technique a little by the time I got to Father Owen.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She shot me a quick glance that told me everything I needed to know.

  “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  “Well, he thinks we want to talk to him to get more information about the Episcopal Church, which”—she hastily added—“is technically true.”

  “So he has no idea we’re about to ask him about demons?”

  “We’ll work our way up to it, but he’s literally squeezing us in, so I don’t know how much time we’ll have . . . which means we can’t waste too much time working our way up to it.”

  “Great.”

  Ten minutes later, we pulled into the parking lot and walked up to the church entrance. Signs pointed down the hall to the church office, so we headed in that direction and found an elderly woman sitting at a desk overflowing with paper. The name plate on her desk read: Anita Dunkley, Church Secretary.

  “Can I help you, dears?” she asked in a friendly tone.

  “We have an appointment with Father Owen,” Rhys said. “At two.”

  She glanced up at the clock and grimaced. “Oh dear. Father Owen is running late, and I knew he was shoehorning you two into his schedule. If you’d like, you can find him in the sanctuary. He’s fairly new here, but I’ve found he sometimes needs to have his memory jogged a bit. Besides, he tends to get lost over there.”

  I gave Rhys a dubious glance. He sounded like some doddering old guy with dementia. I hoped he could remember whatever he’d learned about demons in seminary a few decades ago. Even so, I doubted he’d be of much use as a demon vanquisher.

  “Thank you so much, Mrs. Dunkley,” Rhys said with a big smile. “We’ll do just that.”

  We turned around and headed toward the entrance.

  “This is going to be a waste of time,” I whispered as we marched side by side.

  “Okay, so we might not learn much, but we might learn something, and something is better than nothing.”

  “That sounds like a ridiculous riddle,” I said.

  She grinned. “And yet it’s no less true.”

  I shook my head as I reached for the door to the sanctuary. I hesitated for a second after opening it, expecting . . . I wasn’t exactly sure. Maybe another inexplicable gust of wind or an army of angels ready to guide me with their harps . . . or something . . . but all I saw was an empty church.

  “There’s no one here.”

  “Let’s go in and see if he’s hiding. Maybe he’s in the back, behind the altar.”

  The church was old, and the gothic architecture fit with its construction around the turn of the last century. The back wall was full of stained glass windows surrounded by intricate wood molding, making a beautiful backdrop for the wooden altar in front of it. The peaked ceiling had exposed wood beams, and the pews were all made of solid wood. A blue carpet ran down the center aisle.

  “This place is beautiful,” Rhys whispered. “I’d love to study the stained glass.” Her gaze was on the side walls, and I noticed they were lined with more stained glass panels consisting of individual squares grouped together.

  “Some other time. Let’s find Father Owen and get out of here.”

  As we started down the center aisle, the image in one of the windows caught my attention.

  Rhys noticed where I was looking. “Traditionally, stained glass windows show Bible stories. Go ahead and check it out, and I’ll find the priest.”

  I nodded wordlessly, already sliding sideways through a pew. The window was a large grid of twenty squares. The top four appeared to show the creation of the world. But one of the squares in the middle depicted an angel standing on a snake with a giant mouth full of teeth. The angel held a sword over the creature’s head, ready to slay it.

  “Which one holds your interest?”

  Startled, I jumped and spun at the waist to face the man who’d spoken.

  He wasn’t much older than me and wore jeans and a pale gray T-shirt that had an image of some abstract white tree. His light brown hair was nicely styled, and his bright blue eyes immediately grabbed my attention . . . that and his very attractive face.

  Now was not the time to be checking out men’s faces. Especially in church. Even more so because I still didn’t understand my weird reaction to Abel.

  I wondered where this guy had come from, but there was a rack of votive candles behind him—the kind people could light for prayers—and several of them were burning. He was probably here saying a prayer for his grandmother. Or maybe h
is dog.

  I put my hand on my chest and took a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m a bit jumpy lately.”

  He grinned, which made him even more good-looking. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but it seemed like one of the windows had your attention, and I’m kind of a stained glass window expert.” He laughed. “Although my brother tells me it’s not so cool to admit that to attractive women.”

  I flushed. “Hey, if you love stained glass windows, don’t let your brother take it from you.” Was he a university grad student?

  He cast a glance up at the windows and then back at me. I was pretty sure he was checking me out. “I might be able to tell you something about it that you wouldn’t know just from looking at it.”

  I grinned too. “Is that some kind of bad pickup line?”

  He chuckled. “Was it that bad? I’m usually accused of being an arrogant ass, but I was going for a different vibe today.”

  “Well, if your arrogance can help me out, I’ll deal with it.” I pointed up at the window. “That one. The one with the angel and the snake.”

  “Really?” he asked, his playfulness slipping a bit.

  I put a hand on my hip. “That surprises you?”

  “No . . .” He started to say something, then shook his head. “So you want to know about this window? It depicts the archangel Michael slaying the serpent, otherwise known as the Devil, who tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Interesting choice.”

  I ignored his comment. “The sword that the angel is holding—”

  “The archangel Michael,” he said. “He’s important because the Bible says he leads God’s army. So the window pane shows the literal triumph of good over evil by showing Michael standing on the serpent’s head.”

  “What makes his sword so special? And if Michael killed the devil, why are there still demons?”

  His smile faded even more as he studied me more closely. “Well, Michael didn’t really kill Satan. This is what you could call wishful thinking, and the sword is a symbol of spiritual warfare. Some say it represents the word of God. It’s metaphorical.”

  “So it’s not a real sword to fight demons?” His expression turned warier, so I grinned to throw him off. “If people believed in such things.”

  “During the Middle Ages, people believed in angels and demons without fail. Of course, many people nowadays think they’re stories created to scare gullible people into submission to follow the Catholic Church.”

  I searched his face, which was now carefully blank. “And what do you believe?”

  He frowned as he glanced down at the altar. “I believe there is a spiritual plane most of us are unaware of.”

  I suspected he was right. But now he looked uncomfortable. He’d probably expected a question about the window pane depicting the great flood or maybe the one proudly displaying the Ten Commandments, and I’d jumped straight to demons. However, he seemed to know his stuff. I had no idea what kind of help we’d get from Father Owen, so I decided to take advantage of this guy’s knowledge.

  “Are there any other images of demons in here?”

  “Yeah,” he said, motioning to the other side of the church. “The one with the best story is over there.”

  I started to make my way to other side of the church through the same pew. Casting me a wary glance, he followed me. “So you’re interested in demons?”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked as innocently as I could manage.

  He laughed, but it sounded forced. “The fact you keep mentioning them.”

  I was scrambling to come up with an answer, but he saved me the effort by stopping in front of another large four-by-five panel window in the middle of the wall.

  “The left side of the church features biblical stories, but this side has stories associated with the Christian saints. This one”—he pointed to a panel on the upper left—“depicts Saint Anthony being hounded by a demon. Saint Anthony was Egyptian, and his life spanned the 200s and 300s. He’s considered the first Christian monk, but like many stories, it’s not quite true. There were others before him, but he had more notoriety. Anthony was very keen on becoming closer to Christ, so he wandered into the desert to be alone. While there, he was presented with many temptations from demons, but he refused them.”

  “How did he get rid of them?”

  His bright blue eyes held mine, and he was totally serious when he said, “The demons beat him nearly to death at the mouth of a cave. Some villagers found him.”

  I swallowed and felt the blood draining from my face. “What happened to him then?”

  “The villagers took him to the church and he recovered.”

  I snuck a glance up at the window pane that showed the monk’s agonized face. “And the demons left him alone?”

  “No, they hounded him for the rest of his life.”

  Great. Just what I wanted to hear. I crossed my arms over my chest and turned back to him. “But why did they hound Anthony?”

  “Because of Anthony’s pursuit to live the perfect Christian life.”

  “Not exactly my issue,” I muttered under my breath as I dropped my arms at my sides.

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  He probably thought I was a nutjob, not that I blamed him. “Anything else interesting about Saint Anthony? Did he ever come up with any weapons to fight the demons off? Or come up with a way to get them to leave him alone?”

  His expression faltered for a fraction of a second before he said, “He did reach a point where he could make them go away.”

  That perked me up. “He found a weapon?”

  “No. He’d become so pious and pure that he could simply rebuke them and make them go away with his word.”

  There was little chance of me ever reaching that state, and even if I did, it would take years. Judging by the barrage of ghosts and the demon that’d killed Gill, I suspected I had days, and that was probably being overly optimistic.

  “You said this window has the best story. Are there any other windows with demons?”

  “There’s one of the final judgment. After the apocalypse.”

  “Really?”

  He gave me some serious side-eye, but if he thought I was nuts, he clearly figured it was a harmless variety of crazy, because he then led me back across to the other side of the church. There was an image of several angels with swords flying above grotesque creatures and a dragon.

  “So the angels are killing the demons with their special swords, huh?”

  He held his hand out apologetically. “It’s kind of a thing in Christian art, but like I said, it’s more about the metaphor than it is about actual swords.”

  “So is there some other way to kill demons? Or keep them out?”

  I caught Rhys out of the corner of my eye.

  “I’ve looked everywhere, but he wasn’t back there,” she said, walking toward me, her voice carrying in the church. “Maybe we should head back to the office in case he went out a back door. The secretary said he tends to get lost, so maybe he’s stuck in the courtyard.”

  She stopped a few feet away and checked out the man next to me. Not that I was surprised. Rhys may have preferred women, but she could appreciate fine-looking men—especially when she thought she could hook me up with them. “And who’s this?”

  He held his hand out to her. “Jack. I saw your friend looking at the stained glass windows, so I’ve been explaining the origins of the images she’s most interested in.”

  “I’m Rhys,” she said, shaking his hand. “And what images are those?”

  “Your friend seems fascinated with demons.”

  Rhys shrugged. “Well, Piper’s always been interested in the darker side of things.” She gestured toward the entrance. “You ready?”

  “Leaving so soon?” Jack asked.

  “We had an appointment with Father Owen at two, but he wasn’t in his office. Mrs. Dunkley sent us in here to look for him. She said he loses track of time and gets lost. Have you seen him?”

  “W
hat’s he look like?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m guessing he’s an older man,” Rhys said. Her face contorted as she tried to think of a description. “Robes? Maybe a white beard? Whatever a priest looks like.”

  Jack shook his head. “Haven’t seen anyone resembling Santa Claus, and I’ve been here for over an hour taking notes on the windows in the back vestibule.”

  I took a closer look at the dim alcove and saw the outline of an open laptop sitting on a chair. So maybe I was right about him being a grad student, but as far as I knew, UNCA didn’t have a religious studies grad program. It was more likely that he was an art student.

  “Have you seen anyone else?” Rhys asked.

  “Other than you two, no.” But the side of his mouth quirked up. He seemed amused with his answer.

  “That’s so weird,” Rhys said, glancing around. “She was so certain he was in here.”

  But a horrified feeling rushed through me as I finally put it all together. “You’re Reverend Owen.” My mind was racing over our short conversation to gauge how much damage I’d caused.

  “You can’t be the priest,” Rhys said in obvious shock. “You’re hot.”

  “Reverend Jack Owen,” he said with an ear-to-ear grin. “Sorry to disappoint if you were set on seeing an older guy.”

  “Oh, hell no,” she said, then immediately clapped her hand over her month. “Oh crap, I just said hell in church.”

  He chuckled. “Considering the fact that Piper and I were checking out the demons a couple of minutes ago, it doesn’t seem entirely out of place.”

  I panicked for a moment, wondering how he knew my name, before I remembered Rhys had used it.

  He turned his attention back to me. “Since you two must be my two o’clock appointment, I want to apologize for not being there to meet you. Mrs. Dunkley was correct when she said I often lose track of time.”

  “No harm, no foul,” Rhys said. “You can help us now, although it looks like you already have been.”

  I resisted the urge to cringe.

  “Would you like to go back to my office?” he asked. “Or would you rather talk in here?”