Page 92 of Of Sins and Sacrifice

“What illness causes this? These scars look as if someone burned the flesh off your body,” I ask before I realize that my words might be construed as rude.

He licks his lip and I can sense some hesitation.

“My family is not originally from the United States,” he starts.

“You’re French, no?” I interrupt. I’d heard some people refer to him as the Frenchman—not that I paid too much attention to what was being said about him.

“You could say so.” He chuckles. “Where we’re from, there are…divisions in society.”

I frown.

“What do you mean by divisions?”

“The government was even more fascist than Hitler’s. It wanted to achieve spe—uhm, racial purity. My mother was pureblood, but my father was considered the enemy.”

“What does that have to do with your illness?”

He sighs.

“The government devised a disease that would affect only those with my father’s blood. By some miracle, he did not catch the illness. But I did.” He pauses. “I almost died.”

“Is such a thing possible? A disease that targets only a specific group of people?”

He nods grimly.

“What happened?” I ask, barely in control of the tremor in my voice.

“The disease was killing me from the inside out. My parents tried everything they could to eradicate it from my body. These”—he points to his facial scars—“are a result of those efforts.”

“They…hurt you?” I whisper.

“No. They were trying to save me.”

“But… How…” I bite my lip. “Did it work?”

He gives me a sad smile.

“Nothing worked.”

“I don’t understand. You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

“Only a part of me is,” he answers cryptically. “The only way for them to keep me alive was to get rid of the part that was poisoning me.”

“Your father’s blood?”

He nods.

“Your medicine is that advanced?”

I’ve never heard of anything like that before.

“Let’s say they used an alternative type of medicine,” he mentions with a chuckle. But the flex of his abdominal muscles causes his wound to contract and he winces from it.

I grab his hand and squeeze it in an attempt to give him something else to focus on other than the pain from his wound.

His hand is warm, comfortable. His big palm engulfs my smaller one. Though I was the one with the initiative, he ends up being the one leading the encounter. Somehow, that makes my heart skip a beat. Why, I do not know. It’s an odd thing, really. Almost every atom in my being vibrates, jumps around, and does odd somersaults in the air.

“Is that when you started seeing the spiritual world, too?” I clear my throat as I slowly pull my hand out of his. I’d like nothing better than to keep it there, but every time we touch, I seem to lose my focus. Not only that, but my mind becomes blank. All my thoughts disintegrate until all I can do is stare athim like a damn fool. Quite a peculiar thing. I’ve never heard of such a condition before, where one is rendered an idiot by a simple touch.

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