Page 118 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part Two

“Cisco?”

“I feel—” His eyes bulge, and a pained sound escapes him. He lifts the hem of his shirt and looks down at his abdomen. “Mamma mia.”

Thorned ribbons of shadow ripple under his inked flesh, pulsing, trying to find a way out . . . or a way to sink deeper.

Shit.

He shoves me away, and I fall back and hiss at the gravel stinging my palms. Every muscle and tendon in his body is tight and pronounced. Sweat dapples his skin. He twitches and grunts like an animating corpse.

Somewhere in the piazza, somewhere close, I hear the ghost of a laugh.

Soon, I ride . . .

“Mercy, go,” Cisco groans. “I feel myself being eaten away.”

“No. This isn’t happening.” I stagger toward Hannah’s charred corpse. “The Saint must devour the Sinner to slay the starvation of the world. She was the true devil. This isn’t part of her plan.”

“Her plan failed, ” he snarls, and it’s a deep, inhuman sound that drains the blood from my face.

I stop, inches from Hannah’s smoking body. The sword is within reach, but I can’t move, can’t claim the final distance. Everything that happened repeats in my head, looking for another way, a clue, a sign—and then I remember what she said to me before she combusted.

“Left side subclavian area.”

She wasn’t talking about herself. She meant that I should stab Cisco and purify him while he was weakened with grief. Maybe if I don’t hit anything vital, we still have a chance to save him, to heal him after the purge. Maybe she only burned completely because she was the true, marked devil.

“Mercy, leave!” That commanding voice hits me in the chest. “Save yourself while you can.”

Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to breathe.

Cisco is becoming a demon, and I . . . I need to stop him one way or another.

“Suora!” Bianchi’s voice breaks through my mental haze. I look up and see him pointing to the sword, eyes wild and desperate. “You must use it.”

“I can’t!” I cry at the very same time my hand reaches for the blade’s blunt, cold handle.

“You must,” he shouts back.

Fuck! My body moves without my permission, and I hate myself. I hate that a part of me is still doing this. I hate that I now have the sword and am stumbling back to the man I love. The steel tip sparks along the cobblestones, but still no fire ignites. My sore feet drag with every step. My palm tingles with power eager to be used.

It doesn’t feel holy now. It feels like torture. Like Hell.

Like this is why the archangel got rid of it.

When I reach Cisco’s side, I’m sobbing so hard that I can barely breathe. The only sounds coming out of me are choked grunts and whimpers. Snot and tears drip from my face.

Still on his knees, he looks up at me through spiked eyelashes. The spiked black veins are worse, crawling over his sweat-dappled face, pulsing and spreading, digging in deeper. The whites of his eyes are losing ground to the black. Soon the brown irises will be gone, and I know this time, I’ll never get them back. Cisco’s tattooed fists are clenched in his lap, shaking and trembling as if he’s holding back the urge to reach out for me, or to take me with him.

The sword buzzes and thrums with an urgent, holy energy, and a need to be used. But I can’t summon the will to ignite the flames. I can’t watch my lover burn. I can’t let him be consumed by evil when he’s spent his entire life fighting it.

“It’s okay,” Cisco croaks, then shudders. “You should do it. Or we bring the apocalypse.”

“I can’t!” I fall to my knees beside him. “I can’t lose you.”

Don’t leave me, too.

“Then we will do it together, no?” Cisco grunts and brings the sword tip to his heart with jerky movements.

We lock eyes.