Page 45 of The Sinner and the Scholar
I survey the rest of the marks and find smudges everywhere he’s walked. The clever fuck was working at breaking free all along. Come to think of it, while we were distracted by his package every time he thrust, he’d created tiny gusts of wind and more little smudges across the chalk and salt.
“Drug her,” Asmodeus answers Raven. “Keep her in a coma.”
Wes moves forward, ready to end the summoning, but I ask one more question.
“Why are demonic possessions on the rise?”
He cocks his head at me and chuckles as though it’s obvious. “Don’t you know? Hell is overcrowded. Sin has exploded. The gatekeepers are gone, and the seals are breaking. The angels are silent. God is playing truant. Probably off to toy with a new creation. If it weren’t for the Deadly Seven turning sin around in Cardinal City, the gates would have burst open by now.”
A shudder quakes through me. What the actual fuck.
Alarmed, we dart glances at each other. If Asmodeus is telling the truth, it would explain why none of us has felt the presence of the Almighty—no wonder we feel deserted. Maybe God’s been missing for centuries.
Maybe the demon is lying, distracting us. The instant I think it, Asmodeus lunges for the chalk to brush it with his feet but fails to hit.
We’re out of time. One more question needs to be asked. “What’s the demon’s true name inside Prue?”
He ignores me and creates wind. It starts slow, a lazy lift of his hair, but then picks up in intensity.
“Shouldn’t he do what I say?” I flick the pages of the unfamiliar book, looking for an answer. “We know his name. We summoned him.”
“Unless it’s not his true name,” Wesley points out.
“Fuck.”
Real panic fills my bones. My heart thuds. My mouth dries.
Asmodeus smirks.
But then Wesley moves forward, tosses liquid, and kicks the arcane circle, smudging it until it breaks. Asmodeus shimmers and starts to fade. He glowers at Wesley and snarls something, but it’s lost to us as his visage dissipates.
When the lights return to their usual luminosity, it’s clear we’re all quietly freaking out.
Then Mercy says, “Well, the book got one thing right. He’s definitely got a dragon between his legs.”
We laugh. It breaks the ice. This is how we deal with our depressing fate. We joke. We fight. We fuck.
We’re the last line of defense against this bullshit. We won’t give up even if things don’t go as planned.
Sixteen
Thea
It’s midnight, and I’m back in my cell and packing for a trip.
For most of the day, we worked with Team Saint to subdue Prue and administer a drug we found in our well-stocked medicine cabinet in the infirmary. Some of our nuns are trained as emergency response officers. Our organization’s namesake, Sister Hildegard, was an academic hundreds of years ago when it was frowned upon for women to be. Today, these sisters carry on the pursuit of knowledge here at the abbey.
We have chapters around the world that are dedicated to this and have nothing to do with Sinners.
Sister Mary Theresa gave us a rundown of how to induce a coma. She wrote instructions because of her vow of silence, but I picked up what was necessary. It’s one thing for the Magpies to treat wounded Sinners after returning from a mission, but I can’t have one of them in harm’s way when a demon is involved, especially when we’re still learning all the ins and outs. Those demon marks had already appeared on Prue and me. What if mine comes back? What if it jumps to one of our nuns?
They are our backbone. We must protect them.
After Prue was sedated, the appearance of flesh rotting from her bones remained, meaning she was still possessed despite others thinking she was only sleeping. We set up an around-the-clock watch—always with a Sinner included. Team Saint offered to take over, but we didn’t accept it.
Prue is one of ours.
I take hasty pictures of the prophecy on my cell phone so I have something to study on my trip. I couldn’t sleep, so I stayed up researching all my favorite places on the internet where I thought a relic like the staff would be.
