Page 6 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part 1

“With the Entity—” Wesley cuts himself off, jaw tense as they stand together. He glowers at me. “Zeke and I are as much in danger as you lot are. Believe it or not, we’re on the same side.” He darts a glance at Dom, who is halfway down the steps. “We all are.”

“You sure about that?” I raise my brows. “Has your priest explained his role yet? Has he even given you an ETA on the Entity’s arrival?”

Wesley hesitates. “No, but⁠—”

“Nothing is set in stone, scholar,” I reply, gaze firm.

He adjusts his slipping glasses. “Which is why I’ve renewed the protection wards around the estate, spent hours teaching you all arcane spells, and continue to do everything in my power to keep us safe.”

Thea steps closer to her man and tells me, “They’re on our side.”

“So you keep saying.” I hold the door open and stare after Raven. “But it seems we’re not all on their side.”

Three

Cisco

The sun lingers well past its due here, but once it clears the hill, the tree line gobbles the rest. Night arrives fast, and by the time I’m halfway up the hilly path to the walled garden, I walk in darkness.

While waiting for Zeke to catch up, I stare down at the abbey’s monolith shadow and think about how much has changed in the few short weeks since I arrived from Italy.

Then, I was simply an exorcist for the Vatican. Now, I am the spiritual shepherd to a flock of assassins, heretics, and … heroes? The abbey is quiet, but it’s the silence of a held breath. Still shaken by Asmodeus’s influence, and now from the threat of Famine, the nuns move like ghosts through the halls. My own team is fractured. The Monsignor is dead. Wesley and Zeke have chosen their sides, and Dominic is lost in a crisis of faith, leaving me isolated in my duty.

My superiors expect a report and a strategy for dismantling the Hildegard Sisterhood. But how can I condemn them when I spend my days listening to their confessions?

I have heard it all this week. I have heard tales of righteous murder, of seduction for the greater good, of pain inflicted and endured. I have listened to the sins of every woman in this abbey, and the experience has not hardened my resolve; it has corroded it. These are not the unremorseful reprobates I was led to believe them to be. They are soldiers, broken and remade by a cruel world, fighting a battle I am only now beginning to understand. My faith in God is absolute, but my faith in His Church, the institution that hid Mary’s gospel, that would see these women destroyed, has never been more fragile.

And then there is her. Mercy. The one Sinner who has refused to come, despite her promise at her last confession a week ago. I don’t know whether to feel relieved or concerned.

When penitents come to me, they usually kneel. They clasp their hands. They whisper their transgressions in a voice kept small, as though God might not hear if they speak quietly enough. They confess to missing Sunday Mass, to a sharp word said to a mother, or to coveting a neighbor’s car—things like that. I absolve them, assign their Hail Marys, and send them back into the world lighter.

Mercy did none of that. She dropped into my confessional booth like a grenade with the pin already pulled, and then she let herself explode. The low, husky timber of her voice filled every corner of the cramped space while I sat very, very still on the other side of the lattice and tried to remember I was a man of God.

She spoke of urges, of the lengths she goes to silence them, of how she punishes herself so she doesn’t punish others. And then she pulled her yoga pants down, innocently, to check a wound. But I saw her bare legs through the lattice … and for one unforgivable moment, I thought about opening her door. Stepping inside. Putting my fingers inside her⁠—

I stop walking and drag a hand across my face. Heat crawls up the back of my neck and settles in my cheeks when I think of Mercy staring at me from across the dinner table that night, eyes a challenge, a promise of damnation. She is the living embodiment of every temptation I renounced, a walking, breathing test of the vows that are the bedrock of my soul.

My past as an enforcer taught me to recognize a predator, and she is circling me, waiting for a moment of weakness.

An owl hoots somewhere, reminding me we’ve been at this security sweep for hours. I swing my torch downhill behind me. The light beam illuminates the weeds and bushes, shrubbery, and grasslands. A misty, moonlit lake, a forest behind it, and the dark silhouette of an opinionated gunslinger struggling to keep up.

“The prophecy,” Zeke pants, “is a loophole, you see.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s like God”—another breathless pant—“just shrugged and said, ‘Go on, son. Have at it.’”

He is remarkably unfit for a man whose cancer was miraculously eradicated by a holy relic weeks ago. But I suppose healing from lung cancer isn’t the same as returning to his fitness level. I must remember to increase his gym time.

He arrives at my side, wincing, bends over at the gun-holstered hips, and catches his breath.

“I mean,” he pants, “if you really think about it⁠—”

“I don’t.”

“—you can have your pussy-cake and can eat it too.”

My mental translation from English to Italian stutters. “You make no sense.”