The Sinner by Amanda Stevens Page A

the tree trunks. Nothing floated up into the branches. Whatever I’d glimpsed earlier had fled with Darius Goodwine’s disappearance. Or perhaps Detective Kendrick had once again chased away the watcher.
    I glanced up at him, my gaze settling unexpectedly on his mouth, which was not as aesthetically pleasing as Devlin’s. But the bloom of his bottom lip cast an intriguing shadow in the hollow of his chin and softened the harsher line of his upper lip and jaw. It was a purposeful mouth and there was sensuality in the resoluteness of its lines.
    I tore my gaze away with a shiver. Where on earth had that come from? I didn’t like having such thoughts about Lucien Kendrick. They were foreign to me and I didn’t trust they were my own rather than another of Darius Goodwine’s manipulations. Why he would want to foster an attraction between Detective Kendrick and me, I couldn’t imagine, but I put nothing past him. Maybe he wanted to prove how easily he could control me, or more likely, he wanted to drive a deeper wedge between Devlin and me so that I would be more receptive to him. I could be reaching, but it was the only way I knew to explain my feelings.
    Unless the manipulation came from Kendrick himself. For all I knew, he was as masterful at head games as Darius. He was certainly no ordinary cop. My instincts had warned me from the start to keep a safe distance, and now that I knew he had a connection or at least an acquaintance with Darius Goodwine, I would be even more careful.
    Darius’s negative reaction to Kendrick’s name should have fostered a kinship with the detective if for no other reason than the old adage the enemy of my enemy is my friend . But Kendrick was just a little too slippery, a little too mysterious, and I couldn’t shake the notion that he had already known about those cages before he arrived on the scene.
    His stillness now was so absolute, his silence so intense, that I couldn’t help wondering if he was trying to slip past my defenses. Was he inside my head even now?
    It seemed as though the quiet had stretched on forever, but only a few seconds had passed before Kendrick turned back to me. “A couple by the name of George and Mary Willoughby once lived in that house, along with their young daughter, Annie. By all accounts, they were a close family. God-fearing, church-going, salt-of-the-earth types. Then seemingly overnight, George became delusional. He told his neighbors that his wife was not who she seemed to be. She’d gotten involved with some very bad people. Satan-worshippers, he said, but there was never any evidence of the practice in this area. He insisted he’d caught them conducting the devil’s business right in his own home.”
    â€œWhat did he mean by the devil’s business?”
    â€œSéances. Rituals.” Kendrick’s gaze darkened. “Who knows what else? He claimed they were trying to raise the dead.”
    Raise the dead.
    I felt the dart of cold apprehension in my veins. I wanted to take all this in calmly, but it was hard to keep a neutral expression in light of my conversation with Darius Goodwine.
    â€œRaise the dead...how?”
    â€œThere were ceremonies. Certain spells and incantations. The leader of the group was a root worker named Atticus Pope, who claimed to have descended from a powerful witch doctor. Willoughby swore he saw Pope change forms right before his eyes. From man to beast and back. Like the loup-garous my grandmother used to tell me about when I was a boy.”
    â€œ Loup-garous? As in werewolves? Shape-shifters? You don’t believe that, surely.”
    â€œPeople see what they want to see,” Kendrick said.
    Or were persuaded to see by the likes of Darius Goodwine. I thought about how easily and subtly he had planted the notion of corpse beetles in my subconscious so that I’d manifested one on my arm and another on my neck. If the root doctor named Atticus