Chapter 13
Thirteen
Mercy
Just as I’m about to wade back to the cliff, a bomb drops a few feet away from me, throwing water in my face. I stumble backward, but manage to keep my footing.
I almost lose it again when a tall, broad-shouldered shadow barrels into me and starts checking me for injury.
“Are you hurt?” Cisco asks gruffly. Water still pours down his face, reflecting the sparks like twinkling stars.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not bleeding?”
“Maybe.” My palms are kind of sore. It’s probably a gravel rash.
“Where?” Frantic hands fumble over me. “Don’t play games with me.”
“Stop.” I shove him with my shoulder, freeing my arm so I can lift the sparking sword he’s ignoring. “I have the relic. We’re alive. Relax.”
His breath hitches, and he eases away from me, the whites of his eyes showing.
“I thought . . .” He makes a pained sound. “I thought something bad happened.”
“I told you I was fine.” I soften my tone. “Didn’t you hear me?” I gesture upward, to the cliff we can’t see. “Wait. I heard you shout from up there. I never had a chance to pause and think. Did you jump . . . on purpose?”
For me?
“You went quiet,” he growls, wading around and searching for something. “Hold the sword higher so I can see better.”
“Yes, boss.” I lift it higher.
“The bag must be here somewhere. Cazzo! The phone—the book. They will be ruined.”
My arm suddenly feels heavy. I lower the sword. The cold temperature drills into my bones, triggering a slow, creeping numbness. Self-preservation instincts kick in, and I wade for the shore.
The sparks dim to a ghostly light when I emerge onto a sandy bank. No, it’s not sand. White powder adheres to my wet robes, turning the black to mottled gray. I think it’s chalk.
The air feels thick and frigid, like I’m breathing in a freezer. Before I know it, my teeth are chattering. I shiver and sit down hard, stabbing the blade into the chalk so I can hug myself.
Just before the light completely winks out, I glimpse the remains of a vaulted ceiling high above us.
Splashing in the water tells me Cisco is wading closer, but I can’t muster the effort to care.
“Found it.” Something heavy and wet squelches beside me.
I sense him move in the dark, and then he’s by my side, large hand on my shoulder.
I shrug him off. Say nothing.
He exhales in a rush through his nose, reminding me of a snorting bull. But if he’s irritated at me, he’s more mature than I am. He keeps it buried in the darkness.
“We need to stay warm.”
Deep, smooth, and accented. God, I love the sound of his voice. I hate that it’s my kryptonite, especially in the darkness like this, like inside a confessional booth, where his word is my anchor.
I hide my face in my knees and hug them closer.
“Can you make the sword spark again?” Cisco asks.
I pull the blade from the sand, but now it only splutters and hisses with smoke. I toss it aside with disgust.
“Your exorcist friend lied to us,” I say.
“No.” His reply is instant. “Bianchi would not do this. More likely, the passage is just old.”
“Blind faith will get you killed.”
“Then you are safe, Mercy. You have no faith to lose.”
“Fine with me.”
His heavy sigh makes me feel small.
“Will you try the sword again?” His voice travels in the darkness.
Half-heartedly, I grope around in the darkness until I find it and lift it. Nothing happens, so I drop it again. Even though he can’t see me, I give him a disdainful look that says I told you so.
“It’s done sparking,” I announce.
“It’s okay.” He sounds too compassionate. Too forgiving. “I will check my bag.” His voice grows muffled as he turns away from me. I hear a zip opening. Objects squelch and shuffle. Then a flint strikes but doesn’t catch.
“My exorcist kit,” he explains, “always has a flame maker.”
“A cigarette lighter?”
“Sì. I forgot the word.”
He mumbles under his breath in Italian, shakes the lighter, and blows on the flint. I know because I feel the air displacing, rudely brushing my rapidly numbing skin with icy temperature.
“Come on, you bastard. Do this for me.” Two more flint strikes and flame sputters to life on his flip lighter, casting his face in flickering yellow. He’s two feet away. “Wait here. Don’t . . . don’t pass out.”
“I’m not going to pass out.”
He stares at me for a long moment, then spins, shoes crunching, and heads off into the ruins to hunt for kindling.
I should help him. But my limbs won’t move beyond shivers. I can’t tell if I’m in shock or if this is something else.
My palms sting, so I’m not numb.
I just don’t know what I’m doing, and I hate that he’s doing all this caring bullshit.
Every time he returns and drops another handful of kindling—driftwood, dried roots—the hate in me grows.
At some point, he lights a torch made from a long pole wrapped in a rag.
At another point, he turns a pile of flammable ancient items, dried roots, and some kind of fabric into a crackling campfire.
I look down at the ground, counting the small grains of sand and stone beneath my feet.
“Come closer to the fire,” he orders.
“I’m warm enough here. Besides—” I crinkle my nose. “It smells sour. Like old wine.”
He bends and picks up something. A wine bottle. “I found these in a pile up there.” He tries pouring some on the fire, but it fizzles and sputters. “No. That doesn’t work.”
“Not enough alcohol to ignite.” A full body shudder rolls through me, and I hug myself harder. “Weird that there’s wine down here.”
“Communion wine. Probably from the Basilica.” He drops the bottle. Glass thuds on the chalk almost soundlessly.
I kind of wish he would give me some instead of letting it drain, but I’m too stubborn to ask. It’s probably rancid anyway.
“Mercy.” His clipped, authoritative tone lifts my gaze, and I hate it. I hate the way my body does what he asks of me when he speaks like that. It’s as though no matter how hard I grow on the outside, how thick I build the walls, the inside is still a soft, squishy blue and white ice cream.
A muscle in his jaw flexes, but there’s no sign of his curse crawling behind his skin. It’s just him who’s angry at me, a man with a cut on his cheekbone and gravel rash on his neck, leaking blood onto his white collar turned gold in the firelight.
“Come here.” He points to a spot on the ground beside him.
He must see the refusal in my face, because he’s up and walking toward me before I can speak. He bends at the hips and growls in my face.
“You want to blame me for this? Fine.” He points at the fire. “But you do it there where you will be warm.”
“I’m a big girl, Padre—”
A squeak slips out of me when he grips under my arms and tosses me over his shoulder. Two strides and I’m on my ass again, heat bleeding into my aching skin.
“Why do I keep letting you do that?” I mumble.
“Because you know what is good for you.”
“You?” I scoff.
He collects the sword, tosses it beside me, and then sits and warms his hands against the flames. “I do not understand women.”
“Right back at you, buddy.”
“I am a man.”
“You know what I mean.”
Flames crackle. Water drips, plinks, and echoes.
“Bah,” he grumbles. “How am I supposed to know why you are upset with me? You say one thing, then do another.”
“So do you.”
His jaw drops, and he glares at me. “I have given you more truth than you have given me.”
“Yet somehow, you’re still impossible to read.”
“I have shared more about my life than you have about yours.”
I open my mouth. Close it. He’s not wrong. “It’s not always about confessing our secrets.”
“Yes, I know this.” He laughs bitterly. “Believe me, I know.”
“It’s about action.”
“Okay, Miss Smarty Dress—”
“Pants. Smarty Pants.”
“See, you do this. Make jokes to change the subject.” He shakes his head. “I have clearly done something wrong, but Madonna mia—” He gestures at the ceiling. “You say nothing. Just give me action with no meaning.”
“Oh, you want action with meaning?” I get up on my knees and jab a finger at him. “One minute, you’re so desperate to taste my pussy that you can’t wait until we’re clear of a crime scene. You tell me I’m yours, yours, yours—then as soon as I come, you look at me as if I’m dirt!”
“That’s not—”
“I’m not finished.” I shuffle closer until I’m in his face, snarling. “You say you’re with me, you look at me like you want me, but then seconds later, you’re with the Pope. Newsflash. You can’t have us both, buddy.”
“Must be nice to live in a world so black and white.”
“Me?” Outrage. The blind, incredulous audacity. “You’re the one living it. You’re wearing it!”
“You are too.”
“I’m faking it!”
“Sì,” he mutters darkly. “Just like you fake everything, no? You do plastic. You don’t do real.”
“You’d better not be talking about my dicks,” I hiss. “Because you’re the one who packed them.”
His mouth opens. Closes. I cut him off in the porno apartments because I already know. I saw my box in his bag as we were going through security at the airport.
“I didn’t want you to suffer,” he ends up saying.
“I’m quite capable of going a few days without orgasming.”
“A few days? Try decades.”
“Oh, I see.” I shove his shoulder with two fingers. “The truth is finally free.”
He glares where I touched, as if I burned him.
The choir music no longer plays. All I hear is the crackling fire as he lifts his wild eyes to mine and asks, “And what truth is that, Sister?”
The way he spits that last word like a knife, aimed directly at the costume I wear.
“You’ve already passed judgment on me,” I accuse, lips twisting with disgust. “You can go decades without sex, but I can’t go a few days, so I must be a whore, then, right? I’m just some Jezebel you relapse with, someone you taste-test. I’m not even worth the full—oof.”
Cisco is on me, throwing me back onto the ground—my spine slams, and my head snaps back, teeth rattling. He traps me beneath his heavy body, stubble scraping my cheek as he snarls in my ear, “You think this is a game, piccola? You think you want me to snap?”
Heart pounding in my chest, I grab the sides of his shirt and grind my hips into his, moaning when I feel the hard ridge of his arousal.
“Maybe,” I moan.
His head rests against mine. “No, you don’t.”
I untuck his shirt. “Yes, I do.”
He grabs my wrists and pins them at my sides. “If I let this leash go, I don’t ‘fuck’ you, Mercy. I devour you.”
“Wasn’t so bad last time. You know, when you said I was yours.”
I flex my hips into his until he releases a strangled groan. I do it again. He punches the chalk beside my head, a fist on each side. The impact is so hard that the ground trembles beneath my spine. We stay there, staring into each other’s wild eyes, both prisoners of our secret fears.
The fire crackles. Water drips. And somewhere in the ruins, a wine bottle falls, tinkling heavily down stone.
I tense. Cisco’s head whips to the side, and he scours the darkness.
“Something’s here,” he snarls, pushing up to stand.
Something. Not someone.
Ribbons of shadow move over his skin, slithering out of his collar and sleeves. He strides into the darkness before I can stop him.
I grab the blade and chase after him, but I don’t need to go far. He stops a few feet away, where a waist-high limestone retaining wall carries a marble arcade.
Beneath the nearest archway, a hooded figure leans against a pillar. One blanket-covered leg is bent at the knee, and the other casually hangs off the ledge. Wait, is that a hooded blanket? The type you buy on late-night infomercials?
A pile of wine bottles is beside him, each filled with cigarette butts instead of wine. When he takes a drag, the blunt lights up, revealing a familiar and devastatingly handsome face.
“Asmodeus?” I gasp.
He exhales smoke and replies, “In the tawdry flesh.”