Chapter 41
Forty-One
Mercy
One minute I’m staring down the flames of an orange-and-gold blade, aiming for a black button mid Cisco’s chest. The next, I’m staring at Hannah’s wide brown eyes.
I try to pull my strike, but it’s too late. The heated blade meets her sternum and enters her body like butter.
“No!” I shriek, reflexively releasing the hilt.
It wobbles, embedded in her chest, purifying flames already licking outward from the puncture site. She glances down, then up and locks wide eyes with me. Her lips part as she tries to speak, but all that comes out is a mouthful of blood.
Behind her, Cisco roars. Suffocating power explodes in the atmosphere, a melding of divine and infernal, and then it’s gone.
The swarming storm cloud of flies dissipates. Blue sky filters in. Birds chirp, and the Piazza del Popolo is empty and all around us under the baking midday sun.
“Maria,” Cisco croaks. “Angelo mio, what have you done?”
He tries to gather her into his arms, but the sword is in the way. She ends up slumping to the side and awkwardly against him. Flames rapidly spread across her body, but he’s heedless of the danger to himself. I reach for the sword, but her eyes lock with mine, and she shakes her head.
“I think I . . . have more,” she gurgles. “Needs to . . . stay . . . until nothing . . . left.”
She coughs and more blood spills from the corners of her lips. Black veins appear on her flesh, bubbling to the surface. Each razor-thin line changes color, turning molten. She cries out in agony.
“Take the sword out,” Cisco orders me. Something dark and evil flashes in his eyes. I gasp, stepping back. His face crumples and he lets out a sob. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I’m so sorry.”
I’m not sure if he’s talking to Hannah or me, but he gathers her closer to him.
“No, Maria,” he growls. “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Body spasming, she tenses in an attempt to hide the pain.
I see the struggle in her face as her insides slowly catch fire.
She’s still trying to be the tough one, still trying to hide her pain behind a mask.
She raises a palm to Cisco’s stubbled jaw and murmurs, “I was a cunt to you. Don’t mourn me. ”
“You are my family!”
She laughs. Spits blood. “You killed our family.”
He locks up in shock, in guilt, in grief.
“Don’t do that,” Hannah gurgles. “You eradicated . . . devils . . . bloodline.”
His eyes widen as he realizes the same thing as me. All that business with Paolo—she orchestrated it so the entire family was at the osteria when Cisco lost himself.
Hannah sees it dawn on our faces and smiles weakly.
Then, with an almighty effort, she shoves him away.
He flings backward and lands hard on his butt, palms out to break his fall, hair disheveled.
Hannah looks at me and mouths something—four words I don’t quite register—and then she erupts into flames.
“Maria!” Cisco bellows.
He launches for her, but I intercept, tackling him back to the ground.
“Leave her,” I say.
“No!”
“Don’t shit on her sacrifice.”
He fights me with everything that he has, but I manage to keep him at a safe distance.
I try to angle our bodies so that he can’t see his sister burning, can’t see her body collapse, but I can’t protect him from the sound of her wet, crispy body landing on the cobblestones.
I’ll never forget that sound for as long as I live.
Eventually Cisco slumps over me, and our battle becomes a desperate, sobbing embrace. He clutches me so hard that I fear my ribs will crack.
“Why would she—it makes no sense—nothing left—why—” He continues to babble incoherently into my neck.
There are no words to soothe him now. There is no sense. All I can give him is this, the comfort of my arms. My love.
A flash of red and purple over his shoulder grows closer through my blurred vision. I blink the tears away and see Bianchi and Cardinal Sharma approaching behind Hannah’s charred and smoking corpse. My sword still sticks out of it. The fire is now doused. The blade is dead.
In the distance, I see flashing lights. Emergency services have arrived and already set up a perimeter, keeping the public back. More clergy. People with their phones out. Tourists. Children.
A cloud passes over the sun, washing us with brief shadow.
Cisco goes taut in my arms, muscles tensing like bowstrings. A choking sound gasps out of him against my throat.
“Mercy,” he groans out.
It sounds wrong, deep and foreign. Strangled.
“Babe?” I push him back and hold him at arm’s length. Fissures of micro black veins move across his skin, as if oil is pushing to the surface. It’s like what happened to Hannah, only these veins aren’t igniting with purifying flames. They’re growing thicker. “Holy fuck, what’s happening?”
Stark brown eyes meet mine. In them, I see my worst nightmare. Defeat. Regret. Heartbreak. Black veins are spiderwebbing across the whites.
“Cisco?”
“I feel—” His eyes bulge, and a pained sound escapes him. He lifts the hem of his shirt and looks down at his abdomen. “Mamma mia.”
Thorned ribbons of shadow ripple under his inked flesh, pulsing, trying to find a way out . . . or a way to sink deeper.
Shit.
He shoves me away, and I fall back and hiss at the gravel stinging my palms. Every muscle and tendon in his body is tight and pronounced. Sweat dapples his skin. He twitches and grunts like an animating corpse.
Somewhere in the piazza, somewhere close, I hear the ghost of a laugh.
Soon, I ride . . .
“Mercy, go,” Cisco groans. “I feel myself being eaten away.”
“No. This isn’t happening.” I stagger toward Hannah’s charred corpse. “The Saint must devour the Sinner to slay the starvation of the world. She was the true devil. This isn’t part of her plan.”
“Her plan failed, ” he snarls, and it’s a deep, inhuman sound that drains the blood from my face.
I stop, inches from Hannah’s smoking body. The sword is within reach, but I can’t move, can’t claim the final distance. Everything that happened repeats in my head, looking for another way, a clue, a sign—and then I remember what she said to me before she combusted.
“Left side subclavian area.”
She wasn’t talking about herself. She meant that I should stab Cisco and purify him while he was weakened with grief. Maybe if I don’t hit anything vital, we still have a chance to save him, to heal him after the purge. Maybe she only burned completely because she was the true, marked devil.
“Mercy, leave!” That commanding voice hits me in the chest. “Save yourself while you can.”
Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to breathe.
Cisco is becoming a demon, and I . . . I need to stop him one way or another.
“Suora!” Bianchi’s voice breaks through my mental haze. I look up and see him pointing to the sword, eyes wild and desperate. “You must use it.”
“I can’t!” I cry at the very same time my hand reaches for the blade’s blunt, cold handle.
“You must,” he shouts back.
Fuck! My body moves without my permission, and I hate myself.
I hate that a part of me is still doing this.
I hate that I now have the sword and am stumbling back to the man I love.
The steel tip sparks along the cobblestones, but still no fire ignites.
My sore feet drag with every step. My palm tingles with power eager to be used.
It doesn’t feel holy now. It feels like torture. Like Hell.
Like this is why the archangel got rid of it.
When I reach Cisco’s side, I’m sobbing so hard that I can barely breathe. The only sounds coming out of me are choked grunts and whimpers. Snot and tears drip from my face.
Still on his knees, he looks up at me through spiked eyelashes.
The spiked black veins are worse, crawling over his sweat-dappled face, pulsing and spreading, digging in deeper.
The whites of his eyes are losing ground to the black.
Soon the brown irises will be gone, and I know this time, I’ll never get them back.
Cisco’s tattooed fists are clenched in his lap, shaking and trembling as if he’s holding back the urge to reach out for me, or to take me with him.
The sword buzzes and thrums with an urgent, holy energy, and a need to be used. But I can’t summon the will to ignite the flames. I can’t watch my lover burn. I can’t let him be consumed by evil when he’s spent his entire life fighting it.
“It’s okay,” Cisco croaks, then shudders. “You should do it. Or we bring the apocalypse.”
“I can’t!” I fall to my knees beside him. “I can’t lose you.”
Don’t leave me, too.
“Then we will do it together, no?” Cisco grunts and brings the sword tip to his heart with jerky movements.
We lock eyes.
I would go to Hell for you.
“No.” I shake my head. “You promised me you wouldn’t leave me.”
“I’m keeping you safe.” His large hands reposition mine around the tang, and then envelop them when I start to shake.
Left side subclavian area.
I shake my head, trying to force the words out, but my body doesn’t listen. My hands adjust the sword’s tip, correcting the aim to the left of his heart.
“You can do it, Mercy,” he says. “You must.”
“And if it breaks you?” If it breaks us?
“Then I love you anyway,” he whispers, a plea in his eyes. “Love me anyway.”
Cisco’s grip tightens like a vice over mine, and he forces me to push the sword into his body.
It starts slow, the horror, the blood, the scream building in my throat.
Inch after inch, the blade sinks into his flesh.
His mouth opens in agony, but he refuses to let sound out.
Black ribbons tear from his body and lash at the still dull sword.
I can’t summon the courage to ignite the flames.
All I can do is watch in horror and help Cisco push the sword deeper into his body.
And through it all, he refuses to leave me. Even now, he is the perfect angel, helping me shoulder the burden of this action. He keeps his hands over mine, eyes locked and unwavering until the sword’s tip clashes with cobblestones and his torso jerks.
His fingers weaken over mine, and eventually, his hands drop altogether. His head hangs. Alarmed, horrified, I freeze.
Is that it?
“Cisco?” A sob breaks out of me.
Maybe we didn’t need the flames after all.
“Cisco, is it finished?” My arms fall to my sides. “Cisco?”
“Finished?” His head whips up, eyes like black voids colliding with mine.
“You can’t finish anything if your life depends on it.
” The voice is guttural and demonic. “Why start now?” Evil flares in the atmosphere, running icy fingers down my spine, into my soul.
“You’re just a useless fucking slut of a whore. ”
I blink rapidly.
He keeps spewing vitriol and filth at me, telling me how worthless I am, how I mean nothing to him, how I’m so stupid to think I could fuck him into being saved. A part of me wants to believe him. It would be so much easier just to admit defeat now and give in.
But this isn’t Cisco. It’s Famine, the demon.
And for some reason, somehow, I recall Asmodeus’s forlorn words to me when he showed me the frescoes.
They failed because they stopped believing. They stopped fighting for it.
White-hot, defiant rage surges through me.
I lean forward, right into the demon’s face and whisper through clenched teeth, “How dare you!” Darkness swells in his eyes, but he remains skewered by my sword.
So I scream louder, closer, “How fucking dare you try to turn our love into something shameful!” Trembling with the force of my fury, I wrap my fingers around the sword’s tang.
“Keep your fucking fear. Keep your fucking weak-assed, pathetic attempts to hurt me. I’m keeping the joy. ”
With that last, final sobbed word, I let the fire out. Flames ignite along the sword in a roar of combustion.
Holy power shoots into Cisco’s body, and he releases a guttural, unholy roar. I think there’s a point he tries to fight me, but my resolve is unwavering. I keep that sword buried deep, and I refuse to let go.
No one gets to shame me for my desire. No one gets to take my joy. I promised him that I would never leave him, and I still mean it . . . even if I go down in flames too.
Bright, molten light spreads to every corner of Cisco’s body, purging the black from the veins. It streams from his every pore like rays of sunlight.
“No!” the demon bellows.
Without letting go of the sword, I fling my free arm around his neck, climb onto his lap, and press my cheek against his sweaty jaw. He tries to throw me off, but I refuse.
“Mercy—” He sounds like Cisco now. “Go.”
His fingers claw at me, rip into my hair, and scrape down my back. I’m not sure whether it’s the death throes of the demon or the angel in him trying one last time to keep me safe, but it doesn’t matter.
“I’m not leaving you, my love,” I whisper, and tighten my grip on the sword.
I pray to every divine power in existence—to God, to the archangel this sword once belonged to, and to Asmodeus himself.
I pray for the strength to hold on. I pray that the purifying flames will spare our lives.
I pray for help to keep me fighting for my love, to bring him back whole.
And if he can only be brought back in pieces, then I pray to love him anyway.
I always knew I would go down in a blaze of glory.
That I’d be fucking, living, and fighting right up until the end.
I never imagined the end would look like this—me clinging to the love of my life, to a sword I helped put through his shoulder, surrounded by a holy bonfire lit through my will alone.
Our world narrows to a ball of light, burning as hot as the sun. Except, I don’t even think I feel it anymore—the pain. I’m not sure if I felt it in the first place. All I feel is sweet relief when Cisco stops fighting me, and he starts holding onto me.
And then all I feel is peace.