Page 37 of Heart of Thieves

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I was killing him. But I was so desperately, ravenously hungry. I could not have stopped even if I had tried.

I did not try.

I drank his soullight into every vein, every tendon, every nerve.

His spectral hands tried to pry me away, but that voratium fused us like a shackle.

I began to laugh through my tears, a sound too high, too loud.

“Lorenzo!” a voice bellowed from the door, breaking through my reverie. I stumbled back, tearing the voratium from the man’s throat. He collapsed, but it made no sound, for he was as much a ghost as I had been.

But, filled with his soullight, I was whole. I blinked, clutching the metal tightly in my hand. It glowed a blinding blue between my fingers.

My father strode up the aisle toward me, priest’s robes flapping. His face was drawn with fatigue, but his eyes were wide with anger, the pale blue irises barely a ring around dilated pupils.

“Get out.” His voice speared me like an icy blade.

“I need your help,” I said, desperate.

“You need,” he snapped, “to be arrested. What have you done with the priest?”

I glanced at Plinth’s invisible form, still crumpled on the floor. Had I killed him? Had I banished him to a fate worse than that—an eternity of wandering the world as nothing more than a whisper?

Unlike how I had been, he still glowed faintly with that soullight only I could see. Which meant that, in time, he likely would return to corporeality.

But me? No. Soullight siphoned away from me in wisps with every exhale. A trickle of fear slipped through me, and even my relief over finally being alive, finally feeling, finally being seen was dwarfed by the terror of being plunged back into that abyss.

I needed to stop it from happening ever again.

“Please.” I grasped Father’s lapel. If anyone could help me, he could. Even if he believed the stars were gods, that didn’t negate the fact he likely knew more than I did about soullight, about magic, about whatever had happened to me at the temple. And maybe he had known about the moonshard. Perhaps he had helped perpetuate the lie that it could not exist so people like me wouldn’t go looking for it. “Help me, Father,” I pleaded.

“You are no son of mine.”

The words hit me harder than any blow he had ever delivered with paddle or hand or belt. I staggered back. The world tunneled, as though I’d been plunged underwater. Sounds distorted. Sensations dulled.

When he grasped me by the arm with not an ounce of tenderness or remorse and dragged me from his parish, I did not feel the pinch of his fingers that left purple bruises I would discover later. When he threw me into the gravel, the bite of the stones drawing blood from my palms did not sting. And when he cursed my name from the doorway, calling to the gods to forgive him for bringing such depravity into their precious world, I barely heard his voice.

The echoes of his words bludgeon me as though he’s still alive, as though he’s here now, and I force the memories back, the terror, the hunger, the shame until the parish swims back into focus once more.

“I never thought I’d see you in this church again, Lorenzo Sinclair,” Plinth says.

Wheezing, I raise my head and look into his eyes, which are as full of terror as they were the day I nearly killed him.

“Seren,” I say, uttering the title for zenithic priests in a hushed tone and tipping my head in respect.

He stares at me for a long time, and though he holds his jaw steady, his breath quavers and his glance flits toward the exit. He remembers that morning as vividly as I do.

“Look,” I say with a grimace. “I owe you an apology.”

He considers me for several long, slow, rattling breaths. “What do you want?”

“You’re not going to kick me out of the parish?”

“Not yet.” But he crosses his arms as though in challenge.

“I, uh . . . I’m trying to remember someone—a priestess—who used to come here on occasion.” I keep my distance, running my hand through the curls at the back of my head. “Maybe twice a year.”

The priest frowns. “Was this an older priestess or a young one?”