Page 35 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part Two

“Then you are safe, Mercy. You have no faith to lose.”

“Fine with me.”

His heavy sigh makes me feel small.

“Will you try the sword again?” His voice travels in the darkness.

Half-heartedly, I grope around in the darkness until I find it and lift it. Nothing happens, so I drop it again. Even though he can’t see me, I give him a disdainful look that says I told you so.

“It’s done sparking,” I announce.

“It’s okay.” He sounds too compassionate. Too forgiving. “I will check my bag.” His voice grows muffled as he turns away from me. I hear a zip opening. Objects squelch and shuffle. Then a flint strikes but doesn’t catch.

“My exorcist kit,” he explains, “always has a flame maker.”

“A cigarette lighter?”

“Sì. I forgot the word.”

He mumbles under his breath in Italian, shakes the lighter, and blows on the flint. I know because I feel the air displacing, rudely brushing my rapidly numbing skin with icy temperature.

“Come on, you bastard. Do this for me.” Two more flint strikes and flame sputters to life on his flip lighter, casting his face in flickering yellow. He’s two feet away. “Wait here. Don’t . . . don’t pass out.”

“I’m not going to pass out.”

He stares at me for a long moment, then spins, shoes crunching, and heads off into the ruins to hunt for kindling.

I should help him. But my limbs won’t move beyond shivers. I can’t tell if I’m in shock or if this is something else.

My palms sting, so I’m not numb.

I just don’t know what I’m doing, and I hate that he’s doing all this caring bullshit.

Every time he returns and drops another handful of kindling—driftwood, dried roots—the hate in me grows. At some point, he lights a torch made from a long pole wrapped in a rag. At another point, he turns a pile of flammable ancient items, dried roots, and some kind of fabric into a crackling campfire.

I look down at the ground, counting the small grains of sand and stone beneath my feet.

“Come closer to the fire,” he orders.

“I’m warm enough here. Besides—” I crinkle my nose. “It smells sour. Like old wine.”

He bends and picks up something. A wine bottle. “I found these in a pile up there.” He tries pouring some on the fire, but it fizzles and sputters. “No. That doesn’t work.”

“Not enough alcohol to ignite.” A full body shudder rolls through me, and I hug myself harder. “Weird that there’s wine down here.”

“Communion wine. Probably from the Basilica.” He drops the bottle. Glass thuds on the chalk almost soundlessly.

I kind of wish he would give me some instead of letting it drain, but I’m too stubborn to ask. It’s probably rancid anyway.

“Mercy.” His clipped, authoritative tone lifts my gaze, and I hate it. I hate the way my body does what he asks of me when he speaks like that. It’s as though no matter how hard I grow on the outside, how thick I build the walls, the inside is still a soft, squishy blue and white ice cream.

A muscle in his jaw flexes, but there’s no sign of his curse crawling behind his skin. It’s just him who’s angry at me, a man with a cut on his cheekbone and gravel rash on his neck, leaking blood onto his white collar turned gold in the firelight.

“Come here.” He points to a spot on the ground beside him.

He must see the refusal in my face, because he’s up and walking toward me before I can speak. He bends at the hips and growls in my face.

“You want to blame me for this? Fine.” He points at the fire. “But you do it there where you will be warm.”