Page 24 of Sinful Crimes for the Artistically Inclined
Eyes almost popping out onto the pillow, Joe captured his gaze. “Criminals?”
“Thieves, certainly. Lowlives. Nothing to worry about. I just thought I should let you know, it’s um… best if you stay at the hotel. While I’m at work. Is all.”
A barely audible whisper of, “Right…” scraped out of Joe’s throat.
“Or you can go sightseeing or something. After I leave thehotel. Maybe a few hours after I leave, to be safe. Just that, those days I have to work… I’ll be, um, busy, and… It would be best if I can’t be traced back to you. You know?”
An ice finger of warning slid down Joe’s spine. But that was right around the time Percy reached out and shifted a lock of hair back from his eye. A simple movement, but an intimate one. One like a boyfriend might use. A boyfriend Joe so desperately wanted. One that Joe wasn’t going to throw away so easily. So Joe put on his best show of bravado and joked, “Who knew art history could be so exciting?”
“Handsome,” Percy chuckled, lying back and stretching his delicious arms behind his beautiful head, “you have no idea…”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
DEPARTURE
For Joe, there was little to do before the trip. His higher ups were well aware of his recent possession and murderous rampage. They had paid for his therapy, for a time, and they knew he all but lived off valium. It wasn’t an unfamiliar story for an exorcist. So when he asked for a holiday, leaning heavily on his trauma as the reason, he was granted all his available leave readily, under the proviso he still attend an upcoming Church meeting that he’d already agreed to go to.
That meeting would take place three weeks hence in Libya, which also happened to be where the sheath Percy so desperately wanted was kept. Not that he was about to tell Percy that. Percy had been there in the past, failed to discover it, and concluded it was a lost cause, so he would simply let that lie. And their holiday would be all over and done with by then, anyway.
Another priest was brought in to replace him for the duration of his leave. That man would live in Joe’s house by the church until his return, so all there was left to do was make him familiar with the day-to-day routine, then pack.
Percy, on the other hand, had stronger ties to the town. Hismother lived there with his other brother, Michael. He needed to say goodbye to them, but it wasn’t a task he relished. He put it off and put it off until just hours before he was due to fly out, when he finally made himself swing by his mother’s house en route to the airport.
He knocked on her door. The same rundown cottage she’d always lived in, and insisted on remaining in, no matter how many times Percy had tried to buy her somewhere nicer. He’d made changes to the place to make it more comfortable than it was when he was growing up there, but they were small. She’d let him install split system air conditioning, complaining all the while about her wall being damaged for the purpose. She let him replace the threadbare carpet when the breeze through the floorboards became too much, but this she accompanied with a lot of talk about how the replacement carpet wasn’t exactly the same, even if it was the closest Percy could find. A few months earlier, when his brother Michael moved in with her, she had let Percy buy all the comforting things he deemed necessary for the boy, but she watched the lot with a wary eye.
She resented Percy’s money. She saw it all as the influence of his rich father, who’d left her for another woman when he was small. She failed to see that the man never gave Percy a penny—just flung money at his education and called it a day. This was the schism of Percy’s upbringing. Half of it here in this tiny, broken-down house, half of it in the gilded halls of the elite, and either one despised and looked down upon by the opposing parent. Both places he hated with a passion, but while he hadn’t spoken a word to his father in over a decade, and knew not whether he was even dead or alive, he still adored his mother.
“Percy!” On first sight, she hugged him warmly. But then her eyes searched about with that blurred, vague look they’d had for as long as he could remember. She ran them over his hair and his clothes with that familiar distance which suggestedhis navy trench coat need not be cut quite so sharply, nor was it necessary for the shirt underneath to be tailored so exactly.
His clothes weren’t loud, and at Sotheby’s, where he felt so much more at home, his outfit would have blended into the background. But any eye could see the ensemble was costly, and hers hid little of her disdain for it.
Nevertheless, she pulled his arm and brought him inside, making the kind of pointless small talk a parent makes when they have little idea of what to say to their grown child.
Michael was on the couch in a darkened living room playing Yoshi’s Island on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System that Percy had bought him. “Hey, Percy.” His eyes remained glued to the screen.
“Hey, Michael.” Percy leaned over and kissed the top of his head, making light conversation about the game while waiting for his mother to return from the kitchen with tea.
Michael was difficult in his own way, as one might expect for a man of thirty-three trapped in a child’s body. He’d spent most of his life with his picture on the side of a milk-carton, until Percy, with Joe’s help, had finally found him chained up in a dark basement, alive only due to the demon who had shared his body for more than two decades by then.
Yes, the town was essentially fucked.
Naturally, that past had left Michael in a strange way. He was still, in essence, the boy who went missing all those years ago, childlike, stuck in time. But he was also a grown man who knew things demons knew.
He wasn’t dangerous. But he was odd.
Their mother set the tea down on the table, spilling a little over the edge of Percy’s cup.
The liquid pooled briefly on the wooden table, then sucked itself into a ball, and splashed back into the cup.
The boy was telekinetic, too.
“Thank you,” Percy said. Michael made no reply, and theirmother worked hard to keep the sadness out of her eyes. Even if he came back different, he came back, and that was the main thing.
Percy led the conversation, as he usually did, trying to stay on cheerful topics, asking about work, and the great strides Michael had been making in reading. He kept this up for a good hour or so, learning all about the neighbour’s tree growing over the back fence. He offered to do something about it, was rebutted as usual, then finally he came to the reason for his visit. “I’m going away for a while. For work. And I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Maybe a long time. So I just wanted to check you have everything you need.”
“We’ll be fine,” his mother replied, all too quickly.
Percy pulled a note from his pocket, placing it down on the coffee table. “I know. But if you need me, call Leo. His number’s here. And in case you can’t get in touch with him, I’ve put Eve’s number down too?—”
