Bad Influence (Seven Deadly Sins #2) ✅ Completed

Chapter Six: Leave the Winchesters Out of It

Leave the Winchesters Out of It

Dante pulled up to Chase’s house in exactly nine minutes. I could see Chase’s jaw clench down hard at the sight of Dante’s vehicle pulling into his driveway. He’d insisted on waiting outside with me on the porch even though I tried to tell him it wasn’t necessary. He still seemed unconvinced about Dante’s role in everything. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really been able to explain much in the limited amount of time I had. All I’d really been able to tell Chase was Dante had helped me remove the sin Aunt Celeste had tricked him into taking. Without Dante’s help I would never have been able to take Lust back, bargain with Asher and buy us all a little more time to get out of the mess we were all in.

Chase looked back at me now and spoke, the wariness in his voice as clear as the cloudless Missouri sky, “I don’t trust him, Eliza. He’s not…normal.”

I snorted, “You don’t know the half of it.” Dante was as far from normal as the scale allowed.

But he just shook his head like I was the one not getting it. “You don’t understand, Eliza. He’s not human, at least not like us. I think he’s like your aunt or maybe something else, something worse,” he insisted.

My stress level ratcheted up another degree. I knew he wasn’t anything like Aunt Celeste – she’d been twisted and rotten to the core but she’d also been human once. According to Dante, he wasn’t anything close to being human. Considering he was brothers with a creature like Asher, I tended to believe him. What I hadn’t really expected was Chase figuring out something was more than normal about Dante, though it did explain the weird tension between them.

I’d told Chase as much as I could about what had happened since arriving, but managed to stay away from anything specific about Dante himself. Heck, even I didn’t know much about him really, and I’d spent the most time with him over the last couple of weeks. Now I wondered what had Chase figured out on his own? He’d been in Blackwater all his life – plenty of time to figure some things out. Then again, Aunt Celeste had bewitched the whole town so she could do what she did best without any of the locals marching to her shop during the middle of the night, complete with torches and sharpened pitchforks.

Dante laid on his horn loud enough to make me jump. I glared back at him before turning back around, “Listen, Chase. I know you two have some kind of weird history…”

“I watched him get stabbed, Eliza. And I don’t mean with a pencil or a pocket knife. I watched a girl stab him with a pretty big kitchen knife. He died. I saw it – then the girl just...disappeared. I think I passed out after that, but when I came to my mom was there with your aunt. So was Dante. It was like nothing even happened – there wasn’t a scratch on him.”

“Maybe you imagined it. I mean, how old were you back then, Chase?”

“No,” Chase snapped. “I didn’t imagine it. I know exactly what I saw.”

Dante honked the horn again, this time twice and for a really long time.

I sighed, “Ok, I believe you believe what you saw, but I need his help. We need his help. He’s been around a lot longer than any of us combined and he knows all about these sins. Not to mention he saved my life…”

“More than once. The last time against you,” Dante remarked, coming to stand beside us. He must have gotten tired of waiting for me in the car. He glared at Chase before glancing in my direction, “We don’t have time for this, Eliza. We have to go, now.”