Page 67 of The Sinner and the Priest: Part Two

Their faces.

They’re hiding something from me.

Blood rushes into my ears, a violent, roaring buzzing. The heavy, suffocating heat of a childhood summer sun beats down on my neck. Flies, thousands of them, crawling over the memory of my sister, lost somewhere in the sea.

“Cisco.” Warm fingers wrap around my bicep.

My head snaps to the side, and I lock eyes with Mercy. The swarm in my mind slowly subsides and disappears into the icy blue depths of her worried eyes.

“Are you okay?” she whispers in English.

“I don’t know.” My brain misfires, struggling to fit the puzzle pieces together. A mark. A fly on a little girl’s leg. The Lord of the Flies. Beelzebub. A demon with a soul, complaining in a catacomb. An angel and a devil.

Jasmine was not the only sense of “other” at the abbey.

Hannah was there too . . . so were the flies.

No. I shake the thought away before it forms. It is too ridiculous to comprehend . . . my sister, alive? Me—the angel and not the devil? Preposterous. I have the curse, and it is not a holy thing. There is no mistaking this.

Yet, as I think this, a small voice in the back of my mind asks, What is holy these days? What is evil?

It all mixes up into one giant, confusing maelstrom.

At least Marco and Vince are now settled. Vince yawns loudly, scratching his thick mustache, but Nonno leans forward, fiercely debating the semantics of ancient family history with Nonna.

“I tell you, it was called the mark,” she insists, her walking cane thumping the tiles. “When the family moved north, they refused to speak the name because every stone in the street knew. They called any man-of-misfortune a man with the mark.”

“No, no, no.” Nonno throws his hands up in a gesture of absolute defeat. “You are confusing the stories, woman. You are talking about the Sign of Cain.”

Nonna slowly turns her head. She levels a blank, devastating look at her husband. It’s the kind of look that reminds a man that he’s survived this long only by her grace. “Yes, I know, my heart. That is exactly what it is.”

Cain.

The first murderer.

A man whose brother he killed was an angel in comparison—Abel.

A violent shudder rips through me. Mercy locks eyes with me. She mutters an excuse to the table and pulls out her phone. Her fingers fly across the screen as she holds it beneath the table. A message to her team. Good.

This all must be linked.

I hate to admit it, but Asmodeus said I needed to know about my genealogy. He was right. This family curse goes back farther than we’d ever imagined. Perhaps . . . the Angelotties are descendants of Cain.

Twenty-Three

Cisco

The tomato timer detonates on deaf ears. My family still argues about semantics.

I feel like the ringing lives inside my head, louder and louder until it becomes a buzzing roar like the waves the day Maria drowned.

Too many things don’t add up, and my hungry devil keeps scraping his claws against the inside of my ribs, wanting a way out to feed.

I rise abruptly, and my chair nearly falls backward. I take Mercy’s hand and lift her to her feet. Sweat prickles on the back of my neck, but she is perfectly composed.

Silence descends on the table. Everyone watches me, waiting for a fight or a blessing. I don’t know. A few glance at Mercy and my hands, our fingers intertwined.

I clear my throat. “Forgive us. The novena devotion continues. We must go.”