2. Darkness in the Blood Master copy MS 5 by Vicki Keire Page B

his friends race after their ball.
    I wished for a time machine. I’d give just about anything to be nine years old for just one afternoon again. As I picked up my knapsack and tried to wipe the dirt off my palms, I felt about ten pounds lighter. 
     “What happened to you?” Logan asked when I hopped across the threshold of J. Roth, Bookseller.
    “Lost a fight with a soccer ball,” I huffed, collapsing into the nearest chair. Ethan leaned against a sturdy mahogany table stacked high with books and papers. I grinned at him. I hadn’t been able to get the dirt off my palms and I could feel the blood pounding in my cheeks. He took the chair opposite mine, bringing the stack of newspapers he’d been holding.
    He stared at me. The air between us felt charged, electric. My breathing was speeding up instead of slowing down. He stared at me with a blend of curiosity and hunger. My lips felt swollen. “You have leaves in your hair,” he said at last, removing the offending objects with shaking fingers. I bit my lip. It didn’t mean anything. His hands often trembled these days. “You look…”
    “Messy?” I sighed, trying to smooth my hair.
    “Wild,” he corrected. The papers spilled off his lap and onto the floor. Neither one of us made any move to pick them up.
    Logan cleared his throat. Loudly.
    “Right.” Ethan shook his head, the spell broken. He scanned the fallen papers and grabbed two of them. “We think we found two more. We’ve only gone back a month, and this is still sticking to the Southeast, but even so, it’s pretty disturbing.” He leaned into me, our shoulders touching, and laid the papers across our almost-touching knees. I stopped myself from taking his slightly trembling fingers in my own. Instead, I scanned the front page of the first paper.
    The story was gut-wrenching. “Newlywed Missing; Feared Dead.” I read. Malinda Brooks, age twenty two, had turned up missing two weeks after marrying her childhood sweetheart in one of Nashville’s nicer suburbs. She had been six weeks pregnant at the time. I flipped to the next paper, dated only a few days later. “Husband Suspected of Murder,” the story proclaimed, and then went into a gruesome confessional tale in which the husband admitted, after days of interrogation, to years of abusing Malinda. Neighbors and church members admitted, after being questioned by the police, to “always suspecting something,” but no one had ever felt strongly enough to interfere. Malinda’s few so-called friends admitted to seeing bruises on the young woman, which she always explained away.
    After a few minutes of reading, I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my temples. “This is horrifying. But it seems to be a case of spousal abuse and murder, not…” I sat up suddenly, looking around the store. “Not a case of Nephilim abduction,” I added in a whisper.
    “Calla’s in the back, doing inventory,” Ethan said in a more normal voice. “It should be ok.”
    Calla? So they were working together today, then? I told myself to quit being stupid and focus.
    Logan produced a third paper. “David Brooks Convicted and Sentenced to Institution,” it said. Horror and sick cold fear marched up and down my spine as I read. Malinda’s body was never positively identified, but after days of questioning, David Brooks spewed out a fantastic tale. “ ‘Malinda wasn’t human,’ Brooks told police. ‘She could do things. Crazy things. I’ve seen her heal the sick. People so sick they were almost dead. It got worse after we were married. There was a darkness to her that I couldn’t cleanse, no matter how much discipline I used.’” Logan read softly. I clutched Ethan’s hand convulsively at the word ‘discipline.’ There was a roaring sound low in my ears as Logan read on. “Brooks never confessed directly to his wife’s murder, but he did admit to handing her over to what he described as an ‘angelic being’ who claimed he would cleanse her of