Page 103 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part Two

It is white.

It is blood.

It is the desperate plea, the voice of a lost aunt, and the sins of an uncle.

They’re not who I’m hunting for, so I move on. I find another. I consume. I take. I devour.

If she’s in Hell, I’m coming. I’ll chase my escaping sun until tomorrow is here, in my arms.

A small, deathly certainty zips across the room toward my skull. I feel it leave the barrel, feel the man behind it decide. Shadows peel off my flesh and close around it like a fist around a fly. The certainty halts, falls, and clatters on the floor.

“Stop! Enough!”

A glinting signet ring flings up. I know it. I know the hand it’s on. I know the man who tapped it against a wine glass hours ago, or a lifetime, or never. He is not the one I’m hunting. So I take what is inside him, and I move on.

A cane cracks the tiles. A shawl. Milk-blind eyes that told me always two, always two, and then they tell me nothing, because I take the telling out of them.

Not her. Move on.

A grin I saw at a green door.

“Cousin! Please!”

I take the grin.

Not her.

They are all not her now. That is the only thing they are: a whole room of not her. I gorge on the difference between what they are and the thing I cannot find.

Other names I know come loose while I feed. Father slides off first. It was only a collar, and the collar is on a table in a room I will not see again. The Judge goes next, a good suit somebody stitched around my murders. Francesco—a woman’s son⁠—

The woman.

“No, Cesco, No!”

Eyes I know. Eyes that hurt, that tried to fill the space. Maybe. Once. Did she once look at me with adoration? Did she once look at me with fear and hate that day the sea roared?

I blink and see her cradling a baby girl in her arms, rocking her to sleep. A smile touches gentle lips as she sings a lullaby, as she beckons me closer and sings to me as well. I see her praying at an altar, a daughter and a son behind her in the pews. She begs the One Who Never Answers for her guardian angel to find the strength to protect her devil daughter. To save both her children.

I go into her to find the thing I am hunting, a sign of my sun, and for one held breath I am certain—here, it lived here, this was the warm thing once—but then there is nothing.

The void.

I have swallowed the warmth, and now I cannot quite remember what made it warm in the first place. Who made it warm. When.

All my life I was the man who could see evil—the shopkeeper’s oily eyes, the chill up my spine, the gift they aimed. That man is gone. I am not the one who sees anymore. I am the dark that is looked into.

Yet, still I hunt.

Still, I gorge.

Somewhere in the hungry cavern of emptiness, is a notion that something filled this void once. Something smiling and safe, yet fire and fury all rolled into one. Something that felt alive. Something that sings like a sun and promises a tomorrow that never comes.

I am hunting for it. I have always been hunting for it. Take enough, empty enough, and I will find it, and I will⁠—

I will what?

The thought thins and lifts out of reach. I grasp after it, chase it outside into the swarming fresh air, and my hand closes on smoke.