Page 49 of The Sinner and the Scholar
“Tell me about your uncle and why you joined Team Saint.”
I meet her stare, see that she’s genuine in her interest, and talk.
“My mother was pregnant when she and my father died in a car accident. I survived. My uncle took me in. Then, as I mentioned, I witnessed a demon dragging my uncle to hell during a summoning gone wrong. They put me in an asylum. Eventually, I decided to bite my tongue, and they let me go. I was put in foster care, but I ran away. I lived on the streets for a while. I often snuck into churches to get out of the rain and eat biscuits and coffee at AA meetings. The cantankerous old priest pretended not to notice me. I liked him. He was safe. So I followed him home like a stray cat.
“When he heard my story, he didn’t call Child Protection. He introduced me to a nun who lived at a small house that I soon learned was a convent. He told her I was the new gardener. They housed me, fed me, and sent me to school. Looking back at it now, I’m sure it was illegal, but they never mistreated me or called the authorities. I think they believed what I saw was real, believed my nightmares about Vepar coming to finish the job.”
“Vepar?” She frowns. “You mentioned that name before.”
“The demon who took my uncle. I found its name in my uncle’s notes. As soon as I approached the end of high school, a representative from the Vatican turned up, and I was offered a dual scholarship to Oxford and a Pontifical University in Rome.”
“PontificalUniversity?”
I shrug. “Anywhere I could get information on Vepar, I went.”
“So that’s your driving force? Your uncle?”
Other factors are at play now, but I guess I can talk about this.
“I tried to save him and couldn’t. So I’m obsessed with figuring out how to—”
“Get revenge?”
“Stop it from happening again.”
“And what did you find?”
She faces me with her arm resting across the length of the back seat, her eyes bright and attentive—my pulse quickens. The need to shuffle closer feels like a hot wave pulsing against my skin. I want to keep surprising her, so she continues to look at me like that.
“She came to me in my sleep,” I say. “Sometimes she was a mermaid, sometimes a confident, calm woman. Sometimes she tried to lure me into a storm.” My mood darkens as I recall the waves and rough seas in my nightmares. Images of my uncle getting dragged under by a fishtail or tentacle.
“Do you think you’re still connected to her somehow?” she asks, frowning. “Were you marked in any way with her symbol?”
I look at my palm, at the half-formed scars from when I grabbed my uncle’s hand as he was dragged under. Even now, knowing everything I know about demons and the mystic arts, that night seems impossible—like one of my nightmares. My uncle was pulled through a wooden floor like it wasn’t there. The smell of sulfur still burns my nose. Screams from the pits of hell still echo in my ears. My mark isn’t clean like the one on that severed hand Thea had brought home. It’s messed up. Broken.
Ink-free tattoos of arcane symbols weave around burn scars from when I was in the asylum. Suddenly I’m back there, my skinny childish body being strapped to a bed, screaming and bucking against the orderlies as they drug me with sharp needles. Then I’m walking down the hallway at night, listening to a voice in my head. I’m so lonely. It’s easy to believe her taunts. That I’m unlovable, that I’m wrong inside, and that’s why my entire family has died around me. Not even the pets survived. The cats ran away. The dogs got sick. The goldfish floated.
So over it all, I wanted the despair to end.
Thea takes my hand, holding it to the moonlight to see better. I let her because the need to be touched drowns out everything else. It’s been so long since someone touched me like this. My whole body aches and yearns. I try not to think about her warm, steady contact. How it feels strong yet tender. How it’s sorealand pure—nothing like that demon who invaded my reason. How I never want her to let go despite all those old fears lingering.
“What happened?” she asks, tracing her fingertip around the mangled lines of my flesh.
A deep, cold, hidden part of me warns me to keep my secrets.
“Wes?” she prompts, and that familiar use of my name undoes me. “What’s the burn mark from?”
“Vepar demanded that I do evil things. If I refused, she threatened to cover me in putrid wounds that would take three days to kill me. She lured me into the asylum kitchen.” My gaze turns distant at the memory, but Thea’s warm touch grounds me. “It all felt so surreal. It was a secure asylum, yet she told me to do things at certain times like she knew everything. She guided me through the place like a mermaid guides sailors through a storm but then crashes them on rocks.” I shudder. “I ended up in the kitchen with a pot of boiling water in one hand. She wanted me to pour it on this kid about to be released. I wanted to pour it on myself. Better me than him, right? I was everything Vepar said: a burden, a fuck up, a waste of space. But all I could see was the flame on the gas burner. All I could think of was the burning flames of hell. And somehow, I knew I had to slam my sigil-marked palm on the burner.”
“You broke her influence,” she whispers. “That’s how you got away.”
I nod. “How I knew, I’m still not sure, but I like to think I had someone watching out for me. Some divine intervention.”
Thea still has my hand, and I refuse to pull away. Her brows pucker as she traces her finger over the fine lines of an inkless tattoo.
“They’re for casting spells,” I explain, my voice a little thick.
“Spells?” She hasn’t looked up. “I didn’t think the Vatican would be into sorcery.”
