“I…uh…” He took a hard draw on his beer. “Well, Fisch was just telling me about the sins appearing on people.”
“Mm, yeah. Did you get snaked?”
“Maggots,” he answered.
Lincoln made a face at his white pizza slice. “I don’t know who got off worse on that one.”
“So, you see them too?” Bastian was staring at Lincoln’s pizza slice.
Taking a sip of beer, he nodded. “Yep. And I can see dishonest words.”
That confused Bastian. “Dishonest words?”
“Contract negotiations,” Lincoln said. “The words go all crazy on the pages and I can see every devious, greedy intent in them. I’ve shredded a bunch of contracts since it started.”
We all chewed our dinner in silence for a moment, and I finally broke it. “Have you been hearing the whispers, too, Linc?”
He nodded as he took another bite of the pizza. “Oh yeah,” he spoke around the mouthful, then managed to chew and swallow quickly. “Ouch, hot. Yeah, the whispers picked up after we found Ben.”
“Picked up?” Bastian asked.
I nodded. “Remember I said I see a lot of things? I hear them too. Not as much as I always saw them, but there has been a definite up tick.”
Lincoln stared at him. “What did you hear?”
“One of my patients…” Pausing, he picked at the label on his beer. “I’ve been treating him for a few months for sexual violence. Not that he goes out and beats random people for sexual gratification, but… He’s a sadist. He doesn’t express it in a safe manner. He’ll have random bouts of it, in the middle of sex.
“I thought it was an impulse, something he had trouble controlling. But today when he was in, there was…a whisper in my brain that sounded very much like his voice, and it was plotting on how to he was going to choke out his next sex partner and get away with it.”
“You have the absolute worst clients, Bas,” Lincoln took a drink from his bottle. “Just the worst. Do you attract the nuts?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “But if this guy is lying to me about the randomness, I have to do something.”
Nodding, I opened another box of pizza and pulled out a slice. “I think I have a situation too.”
“What’s yours?” Lincoln asked.
“I had a client, who I dismissed because she wasn’t cooperating,” I explained. “Well, she was seeking. I don’t do that. I—”
“Seeking?” Bastian asked.
“Pill seeking. They don’t want to work on their problems like they do with you and Wren. They want a pill, and the problem gone. Those are the less annoying ones. The bad ones are seeking to sell. Those, I call the cops on.”
“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never experienced it,” Bastian said.
“The joys of being able to legally prescribe narcotics.” I sighed. “So, this patient has come crawling back and I accepted her as long as she complied with the routine we set. I even brought her daughter in on it. And it’s working. Except…”
Bastian and Lincoln both stalled with the beer bottles halfway to their lips. I let out another sigh.
“Pretty sure she’s still banging the pool boy and giving him diseases on the regular. I’m also pretty sure this isn’t the first time she’s cheated on her husband, and possibly in a swinger’s group without him.”
Bastian turned his lip up. “Gross.”
“The problem is that the whispers I heard were how she was planning on sleeping with him again, even though he said no more.”
“She’s raping him?”
“I can’t say that yet, but she’s definitely assaulting him.”
“Can you do anything?” Lincoln asked. “Tell someone? Get the police out there?”
Shaking his head, Bastian swallowed his bite of pizza. “And tell them what? Hey, officer, I hear voices in my head telling me that this woman is abusing her pool boy. No, it’s a regular occurrence because I’m one of the Seven Sins.” Bastian toasted us and took a swig of beer. “Yep. We’ll be hauling you out to Horsham.”
“Lily?” Lincoln asked.
“Her hands are full with other stuff,” I said, shaking my head.
Lincoln ran a hand over his chin, and a moment later his eyes narrowed in thought. “What if… This is going to sound a little insane, but hell. We’re all sleeping with the Devil’s twin sister. So. What if this is our job? Side hustle?”
My eyebrow lifted of its own accord. “Do what now?”
“Fisch, you’re supposedly sloth, right? Before you met Wren, you were terrible at doing anything that was more than the minimum required.”
I nodded. The guilt still weighed on me for all the people I could have helped if I had just gotten my head out of my ass. “I was.”
“And when you met Wren, you realized what you were doing. Being a jackass about a lot of stuff. You’re still slothful, but you laugh about it and it’s really mostly just lazy now.”
I squinted at him. “I don’t know if you just insulted me.”
“I did, please try to keep up.” Lincoln grinned. “And when I met Wren, I started to realize that all the rules I had weren’t much of anything because my greed was nothing compare to the greed of some of the people who were using me. So, I started to employ different tactics to keep the truly greedy from benefiting from my talent.”
Bastian raised his hand. “I was in a monogamous relationship since age nineteen. And if I’m Lust, then that kind of screws the dynamic, doesn’t it?”
Lincoln slumped a bit and twisted his lips. “Huh.”
“No, wait.” I, leaned forward. “It still works. We were the personification of the negative traits, right? He was the personification of positive ones. Wren’s name is Temperance. With Lust, it would be controlling your appetites, not locking them down.” I flicked a finger between them. “You two, and you and Wren. You’re still pan, but this arrangement keeps you in check without denial.”
“I loved Victoria—”
“No one saying otherwise,” I said, cutting him off. The deaths of his wife and children were still raw. All of us had found him crumbled in tears in corners or on a chair. We all knew it was going to be a long time before he could really process it and settle it in whatever way he needed to deal with the grief. “That’s not what I was going to suggest at all. What I was thinking was that because you were monogamous, maybe that was the problem. You needed to not be so…single minded.”
Lincoln nodded. “That makes sense in the context we’re talking about here.”
“So, maybe this is our side hustle,” I said. “We’re supposed to take what our…uh…”
“Powers?” Sebastian asked.
“Natures,” Lincoln offered, and I pointed at him.
“What our natures give us for information and solve the problems. Balance things. Temper it, if you will.”
“Like a Scooby Sin Sleuth gang or something?” Lincoln asked.
“Let’s see who’s really behind this!” Bastian crowed, and mimicked pulling off a mask. “Why, it’s our brother-in-law, Lucifer!”