Page 62 of Kiss of Light

She sighed.

“You know whatIthought? I thought it was retribution.”

He frowned.

“For what?”

“For the things I’ve done.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s simple. When you kissed me, I allowed myself to feel happy. Just for a moment. And when the pain slammed into me, I thought it was karma for my sins.”

“Whatever you’ve done, your sins don’t compare to mine.”

“That’s not true. You heard what Ravij said. You didn’t kill that girl.Hedid. He made you do it.”

“But I could have stopped it. Part of me knew I was doing something terrible and wrong. I should have stopped myself. I just didn’t want to. I’m a monster.”

“Listen to me,” Tala said fiercely. “Ravij is old. Far older than me. That makes him powerful. I’ve never heard of a shaitun possessing a Vetali before. If he’s strong enough to do that, then there’s no way you could have resisted him. You’re not a monster, Lemar.” Her eyes dropped. “I am.”

He sighed and tightened his arms around her.

“I refuse to believe that.”

“It’s true.”

He slipped a finger under her chin and made her look at him.

“Then as one monster to another, tell me.”

She paused for so long, he thought she simply wasn’t going to speak. Then she cleared her throat.

“When I was a young shaitun, my master would send me to retrieve those who had left Nush’aldaam. In those days living among humans was strictly forbidden. But many wanted to explore the mortal world. Youngsters looking for adventure. Criminals trying to escape punishment. It was my job to bring them back.”

“I expect you were very good at it.”

“I was exceptional. I had a talent for body-hopping. That’s what we call swift possessions, one after another. Leaping in and out of humans to see what they know. It allowed me to track and find a good many of my compatriots. Jinn, fae, sirens, shifters… I could trace them all.”

“So what went wrong?”

“I encountered a human who was able to resist possession.”

Lemar’s eyebrows shot up.

“Ahuman? How rare is that?”

“Incredibly rare. It was the first time I was unable to fully enter and control a body. It was deeply frustrating for me. So I treated it as a personal challenge.”

“What did you do?”

She swallowed and dropped her gaze again, not wanting to see his expression for the next bit.

“The human in question was a Catholic priest. He could feel me fighting to possess him and assumed the Devil was trying to steal his soul. I suspect now he was partially psychic, that he had what humans call a sixth sense. Whatever it was, I spent days,weeks, trying to bring him under my control. And he resisted me every step of the way, right to the end.”

“The end?”

“He hung himself. Rather than fail his God and give in to evil, he took his own life. In my relentless determination to prove I was stronger than some human, I drove him to suicide.”

---