Lex frowns at Lucy.“You look like you’ve seen a family member’s shade, what happened?”
Lucy drags her gaze to me.“I knew you were off.But I’ve been so distracted.Oh gods… How long have you felt the kind of tired that sleep isn’t helping…?”
I swallow hard.“Since?—”
But she doesn’t wait for an answer.Lucy drags me from the table and out the apartment door.
“Where are we going?”I say, trying to slow her down.
“Just… oh gods.You need to come with me.”
She leads me back to Mortis church and into the dungeons, which are beyond grim.I can’t believe Ignatius kept Lucy in here, fucking bastard.
The stone cobbles beneath my feet are damp and the chill in here eats away at me, seeping under my jacket.
It’s dim, the sconces barely providing sufficient light.I shrug my jacket tighter around my shoulders and hurry to follow Lucy.
I am weary.
Beyond, if I’m being honest.Lucy is right, I am exhausted in a way that defies words.I need to sleep.My skin is dry and flaky, and my joints ache.
It’s how I imagine the elderly feel, weary right through to their very soul.Ready for it to end.
“I wondered when I’d see you,” Ignatius says, but not to Lucy, to me.
He’s curled in the centre of a cell, the same one he trapped her in, cuffed in the same chains.I do love a sense of poetic justice.
The sight of him shivering and dirty is not as satisfying as I expected.Apparently suffering, even for those who deserve it, isn’t gratifying.His clothes are torn and the cell has a ripe stench: a vile mix of body odour, stale piss, drying faeces and metal.
My nose wrinkles.
“Yeah?Waiting for me to come so you could gloat?”
He tilts his chin at me.Despite being the one imprisoned, he still can’t let go of his ego, but then, I suppose he does have the upper hand here.
“What did you do, Father?”
He keeps his face aimed at me but flicks his eyes to Lucy.
“I did what any devil does.I made a deal.”
“Are you intending to elaborate or do I have to play twenty questions to figure out what’s wrong with me?”I say.
Lucy moves to the cell bars and grips them, her knuckles white.“Did you overwrite the original deal?Or did you add a subclause?”
Her voice is strained and tight.I slide against the dungeon wall.The weight of realisation hitting me before he even responds.This is not going to be good.
“The original deal was old.Really old.At least in human terms,” he says.
“Father,” Lucy hisses.“Answer the fucking question.”
His chains jangle as he moves position and gets comfortable, but he makes no move to elaborate faster.“While our new deal affected the old one, the original one was cemented into your marrow.”
“What does that even mean?”I say.
“It means he lied.He didn’t make a new deal with you.He added a subclause to the original one.So the original deal was never replaced.The clause just sat on top of it.”She leans her head against the bars, her shoulders heaving up and down with the weight of whatever this means.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
