18. Petra
PETRA
Sin’s gaze on me is unnerving as I try to summon the courage to say what I came here to say. But how does one casually bring up murder?
He looks at me, expectant.
I bite my lip. “Can you . . . can you not do that?” I whisper.
“Do what?”
“Look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like that,” I repeat.
“Why wouldn’t I, when you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, Petra?” he replies smoothly.
I flush a deep red.
“The fact that you’ve graced me with your bare face humbles me. That alone . . .” He trails off with a smile. “Has no one ever told you how beautiful you are?”
I shake my head slowly.
“No? Unacceptable!” he exclaims. “You’re extraordinary. So beautiful.” He tilts his head. “My eyes almost hurt from looking at you.”
I blush and turn away. I’ve never been the object of so many praises—of any praises at all. I don’t know how to respond, especially when he looks at me like that . . . Like he would like to . . . devour me.
“We should talk about why I came.” I clear my throat.
“Yes, please,” he says calmly, though I feel anything but calm. Inside, a storm is raging—not just because of how close he is, or the fact that I’m alone with him, unveiled, exposed, but because of what I’m about to say.
“I overheard my father speaking with one of the men from his congregation,” I begin slowly.
“About me?” His brows lift slightly.
“Well . . . I think it was about you. And your mentor.”
He doesn’t speak, just waits.
“They believe you’re planning something. In two days. On the night of the full moon.”
Still no reaction. Just that steady gaze.
“They want to stop you,” I say. “They want to hurt you. Maybe even kill you.”
He continues to watch me, unreadable. Not a flicker of surprise.
“You don’t seem shocked.”
“No,” he says simply. “It was only a matter of time before your church tried something drastic.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
He shrugs. “What I am is . . . grateful. That you would risk so much to come warn me. To try and save me.”
“I—I didn’t do it just for you,” I stammer. “I’d do it for anyone. Killing isn’t right, it doesn’t—”
He cuts me off gently. “Doesn’t matter. You did it for me. That’s how I’ll remember it.”
“But—”
He smiles faintly. “You snuck out of your house, in the middle of the night, knowing what could happen if you were caught, just to come find me. You have no idea what that means to me.”
I flush again. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt. I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Now that you’ve gone through so much to warn me, the least I can do is make sure your effort wasn’t in vain.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’ll have to speak to my mentor. We’ll plan accordingly.”
“But is it true? What they’re saying? That you’re going to perform a ritual to summon . . . something? An entity?”
He hums. “What do you know about demons, Petra?”
“Not much,” I admit, shivering slightly. “Only what I’ve read in the Bible.”
“Then you know nothing,” he replies. “The demons in the Bible and the demons that exist in our world are not the same.”
“Exist in our world?” I echo. “You mean they’re already here? They’re not in hell?”
“Come,” he says, beckoning me.
He leads me to a massive wall lined with shelves—hundreds of ancient-looking tomes—and nestled between them, a large section of the wall is devoted entirely to art. One painting in particular dominates the space. It’s enormous, violent, the image it depicts resembling some kind of hell on earth.
He stops in front of it and waits until I’m beside him.
“I’ve met a demon before,” he says suddenly.
My eyes widen, but before I can ask anything, he turns to me.
“You once asked about my name.”
“Is it short for something else? Like Sinclair?” I inquire, my brows furrowed. I’d spent days thinking over our interaction and his name, and I thought he’d said it to shock me—that perhaps it was just a nickname.
He shakes his head. “No. Just Sin.”
“I don’t understand. Why would anyone name someone that?”
“Because that’s what I was to them,” he says simply. “A sin. My sin was being born.”
“What?” I breathe. “What do you mean?”
He turns away, facing the painting again. The absence of his gaze leaves me feeling strangely hollow. I watch his profile, the tightness of his jaw as he draws in a slow, steady breath.
“I never knew my parents,” he begins. “I was abandoned as a baby, left on the steps of an orphanage. They took me in, but that doesn’t mean they wanted me there.”
He pauses, his voice steady but distant.
“My only stroke of luck was that the orphanage was attached to a church. A church not so different from yours, actually. But that luck didn’t last. They couldn’t exactly toss out a child into the streets; it wouldn’t have looked good.
Still, that didn’t mean they had to like me.
And they made their dislike clear from the start. ”
“But why?” I ask. “Why would they treat a child like that?”
“Ah, Petra,” he says with a faint, sad smile.
“You’re too sweet. You see, in their eyes, I wasn’t innocent.
Every time I happened to be near someone when misfortune struck—a fall, an illness, an accident—they blamed me.
They remembered only the bad things, and I became the common thread. The bringer of misfortune.”
He exhales.
“My birth parents, well, they must have seen the same darkness in me, to abandon me like that. They must have known something.”
I stare at him, stunned.
“Still,” he goes on, “because of the orphanage’s reputation, and the need to seem like good Christians, they kept me. Took me in. Raised me. I stayed there until I was old enough to leave and forge my own way in the world.”
“That’s horrible,” I whisper, stepping forward. I reach out, gently placing my hand on his arm.
He flinches, just slightly, but then he relaxes beneath my touch. He glances at me, and in his eyes, I see sadness, yes, but also something deeper. Regret. Shame. And I can’t understand why.
“I’m so sorry, Sin,” I tell him. “You have to know that it wasn’t your fault. You were just a child. Even if bad things happened around you . . . how could anyone blame you for that?”
“And yet they did,” he replies softly.
“I can’t understand people like that,” I murmur. “I don’t want to.”
“That’s because you have a pure heart, Petra. There aren’t many like you in this world.”
“But still. You must know it wasn’t your fault.”
“Was it not?” he asks quietly. “I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe it was, in part. I was different. Even I can see that now. I didn’t act the way a child was expected to. I kept to myself.”
“Well, of course you did,” I argue. “If they treated you like that—of course you pulled away.”
He shakes his head. “Even before that. Something was . . . off. Something was wrong with me. And maybe they saw it. Maybe even my birth parents saw it.”
“How can you say that?” I ask, horrified. “How can you believe that?”
“It’s kind of you to care, Petra,” he says, his voice softening. “You don’t know how much it means to me. That you would be angry on my behalf.”
He looks away for a moment, then back at me.
“I’ve made peace with my past. Maybe it was as awful as you say. But no matter how terrible it was . . . it made me who I am. And everything that happened, all of it, brought me to this moment. To you.”
He turns fully now, facing me. My mouth parts, but no words come. I stare at him, stunned, heart racing.
“What are you saying?” I whisper.
“You don’t know, do you?” he murmurs, reaching out for me. “How much . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence. His hand falters midair before he pulls back, shaking his head to himself. “I was fourteen when I came face-to-face with a demon for the first time.”
He turns again to the painting, as if he can’t bear to look at me while recounting these traumatic experiences.
“First time . . .”
“It seems I have shocked you,” he chuckles. “It’s no exaggeration to say that my time at the orphanage shaped who I am. I was a pariah—made fun of, avoided. As a child, I didn’t understand why. But as time passed and their behavior worsened, I began to doubt myself.
“If I truly was a sin, a blight upon the world . . . why did I even exist? Why go on suffering, and make others suffer just by being near them? I could see it, even as a child—they believed my presence brought misfortune. So one day, I decided to end it all.”
I gasp aloud. “You don’t mean . . . ?”
He presses his lips together. “Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”
“But that’s a . . .” I trail off.
“A sin.” He lets out a dry laugh. “Yes. I decided that since they named me Sin, I might as well become one.”
He moves to a second painting, smaller but equally as striking. It shows a single, solitary column rising from a landscape of ruin—silent, detached, watching it all unfold. Weathered by time, yet unmoving. Still standing. Still strong.
“My room was on the fourth floor. An attic, really. It had been turned into a bedroom because none of the other children would share a room with me. In some ways, that was a blessing; I didn’t have to sleep in a crowded dorm.
One morning, after enduring more of their ugly words, I opened the window.
I stepped onto the sill . . . and I jumped. ”
My breath catches. The sound startles him.
“My, my, Petra,” he says with a faint smile. “From your expression, one would think you actually care for me.”
“Stop,” I say, voice trembling. “Don’t make light of it. You actually jumped? You tried to kill yourself?”
“I did,” he says simply. “I jumped. And I fell onto the pavement of the main road below.”
“But you’re . . . alive. You seem whole.”
He smiles sadly. “Now, yes. But not then. When I landed, I hit my head hard. My legs were twisted beneath me. My bones were pushing through the skin. I couldn’t move. I was bleeding out on the street, but I was conscious. I was aware of everything.”
He draws a breath.
“People saw me. Passersby. Some even stopped to look. But no one helped. People from the orphanage saw me, too. And they turned away.”
“They what?” I whisper, horrified.
“From their perspective, I wasn’t dead. But I was dying. And helping me, calling a physician to try to save me, would have cost money they didn’t have. Or didn’t want to spend. So they left me there. They waited for me to die.”
“But you didn’t,” I say softly.
“No. I didn’t. Night fell again. The lights at the orphanage went out, and I was still lying there. I heard the sounds of carriages, of people walking past. Some sneered. Some whispered. But none stopped. Not until he did.”
“He . . . you mean the demon?”
“I didn’t know what he was, not then. And maybe he’s not a demon in the way we think: horns and fire and damnation.
But he was . . . not human. He stopped, looked down at me, and asked, ‘Do you want to die?’ I couldn’t speak—I could barely make a sound—but he knelt beside me and said, ‘Blink once for yes, twice for no.’
“And in that moment, after all the pain, after being abandoned again and again . . . some part of me still wanted to live. I didn’t want to live the life I had been living, but I wanted to live. So I blinked twice.”
He pauses.
“He asked me why I had done this. I couldn’t answer, but somehow—through some kind of magic, or power, he knew. He could read my thoughts. He saw that I was of two minds. That I wanted to live but only if my life could mean something. Only if it could matter.”
He turns back to me.
“He saw that. He saw that I wanted more. So he offered it.”
“Offered what?” I ask, barely able to breathe.
“Before I could think about what he meant, he let a few drops of his blood fall into my mouth. And then . . . the pain vanished. My bones shifted back into place. The wounds closed. By morning, I was completely healed. I was alive. Whole.”
He looks down at his hands, as if remembering the moment. Mouth ajar in shock, I glance at him, too, letting my gaze trail all over his body. Save for the fresh wound on his arm, there is no evidence that he might have been hurt in the past.
He sees me staring in shock, so he comments, “If it hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t believe it either.”
“And then?” I whisper. “What did you do?”
“I left. I knew I couldn’t go back to the orphanage after that.”
“But,” I say slowly, “if that man—that thing—healed you . . . what did he want in return?”
“There it is, that curious mind of yours,” he murmurs appreciatively. “What do you think he wanted in return, Petra?”
I gulp down. I’d heard whispers in the congregation of those damned, who accept the lure of the devil in exchange for their immortal soul. It is something often said about witches, that they willingly sell themselves to the devil in exchange for power, beauty, money.
Looking at him, so distinguished, so successful, I can’t help but wonder. After all, how could a fourteen-year-old runaway get a degree from Harvard, or a professorship at St. Anselm Hall?
“Your soul?” I dare ask.
His lips curve into a sly smile.