Page 54 of Sinful Crimes for the Artistically Inclined
“I only have to say ‘Dormio’,” Joe said.
“They are not in thrall to you. They will not sleep for you. They will only sleep for me.”
The slippery bastard.
“Now stop stalling. If you were really working for the Church, you wouldn’t be worried about me taking you back upstairs.”
A very good point. Joe, taking a few more steps towards the exit, decided a complete change of course was in order. “Your church is ugly.”
He heard the man’s shoes pull up hard against the stone. “My church is not ugly.”
“It’s ugly,” Joe doubled down. “What stone is it made from?”
“I don’t?—”
“You don’t even know, do you? Someone painted over it. Your church is so ugly they had to paint the stone and it’s still ugly.”
“Ah, I understand why you’re saying this.” The bishop smiled angrily. “You want me to shoot you? You want me to make it a quick death because you’re a coward?”
“My church,” Joe went on, “is spectacular. Blue stone. Not painted at all. Slightly warm to the touch, even on a winter’s day. My floorboards are hundreds of years old. My pews?—”
The man’s body remained infuriatingly distant, though his words were hot and fierce. “We all know how you got your church, Bruno.”
The response caught him off guard, but he worked to keep up his game. “I got it by being better than you. That’s why I can help you get out of this godforsaken eyesore if you do as I say.”
“You got it by murdering your priest.”
Joe’s stomach turned in on itself as the hideous words slithered over the bishop’s malicious lips. The acid rose into hischest and he swallowed it down hard. Joe felt the weight of the priest’s decapitated head in his hands even then. He had loved the man. Like a father. Better than a father, because Joe hated his own true father bitterly, and that made killing the priest that much more horrifying. How well he remembered the eyes. How well he remembered the fear, the sickening torture just for the fun of it, the slow, painful death he had to watch his own hands inflict when the demon took possession of his body.
“I didn’t do that,” Joe whispered.
“We all know what you did,” the bishop spat. “And that’s why I don’t like you. That’s why I will not do a deal with you. You got your nice church through murder, and the only reason you remain where you are is because your congregation is assailed by demons and no one cares if you die.”
Joe stood perfectly still, the sweat of terror, not heat, now breaking out on his skin. He barely heard the bishop’s words. He never, never let himself think about the murder, and he never admitted the reality of it to himself, except at night when he awoke to the replay of the man’s screams and his last pleas for his life. Those mornings, Joe would crawl out of bed and throw up, then make himself try to forget again with denial and Valium. He’d lived that way for months until Percy. Percy who pulled his strong arms tight around Joe at four a.m. and stroked his hair until he fell asleep again, and even if it didn’t fix anything, it made him feel the closest he had to some sort of recovery since that dark day.
And where was Percy? He looked around again. Nothing. No Percy, and increasingly, no hope. There was only torture waiting for him, and if he survived that, only demons and death back at home. The end.
He had done good. A lot of good, he thought, in his life, but in that moment, it suddenly didn’t feel worth the effort to do any more, and so he simply stood where he was, trying to decide if he should just die now.
“Out!” the bishop shouted.
He reached his resolve. “No. I’m not going up there to be tortured. So you’d better aim well, because if I get to you before you shoot me, you’re dead.”
The second the words left Joe’s lips, the bishop let out a deafening scream, dropped the gun, and fell to the floor, his Achilles tendon severed. An immediate and all-consuming glow of happiness fell upon Joe as he discovered Percy’s exquisite forearms, his strong shoulders, one hand still gripping his bloody knife, all muscles flexing magnificently as he pushed himself up out of an oubliette.
“Percy!” Joe stomped a boot down on the bishop’s fingers as he reached for the gun. “What took you so long?”
Percy dusted and straightened himself with his usual easy grace. “I was waiting for you.”
“Waiting for me to do what exactly?” Joe cried.
“I don’t know, go upstairs or something. And then I would come and rescue you.”
“Rescue me? You can do that here.”
“Yes, but,” the man attempted to struggle to his feet so Percy kicked him hard in the stomach, flattening him in one blow, “I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to kill this guy, or just get you out of there before he started torturing you.”
“Consurgo!” the bishop yelled.
