—†— CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR —⸸—
When The Dam Breaks.
Breakfast wound down quietly, and I could feel the tension building the whole way through. Sarah picked at the last of her food without really eating it. When Mabel came to clear the plates, the smile Sarah gave her was forced; I could tell.
She knew we were holding back. If I were being honest with myself, I think she’d known something was off since the day she walked into my office.
She was sharp that way. She noticed things. Every day since, she had been patient with me, giving me room, waiting for me to come around to it on my own. And I had spent every one of those days finding reasons not to. But I could tell, in the silence during the walk home, that she was done waiting.
The walk back to the office was three blocks, and Sarah didn’t say a word the entire time. She walked beside me with her chin down and her hand in her jacket pocket.
Az was sitting on my shoulder as Remy hovered nearby. They could see the building tension too, and even if Sarah wasn’t talking to me, I knew this wasn’t going to be a quiet walk home.
“You’re going to have to tell her,” Remy said.
“I’m aware,” I thought back to him.
“Then why aren’t you doing it?”
“Because I’m thinking.”
“You’ve been thinking since Mabel’s,” Az said.
“I can’t tell her,” I thought, and I felt the frustration sharpen into something harder. “Do you understand what that would do to her? Finding out that she’s responsible for a hundred years of somebody’s suffering? That she’s the one who pulled the trigger, over and over?”
“That wasn’t really her,” Az said.
“Don’t,” I thought back at him. “Don’t give me that. And don’t think I’ve forgotten what you put me through either. A hundred years, Az. I relived that shit for a hundred years.”
There was a beat of silence. Then, surprisingly, it was Remy who spoke.
“Jay,” he said. His voice was measured and quiet. “What happens inside a loop isn’t controlled by anyone. Not even Azazel. A hell loop is a manipulation of the trapped soul’s own memories. The torment inside it comes from within. It is built from what you carry.”
He paused.
“What you saw in that loop came from you, not from her and not from him.”
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t bear responsibility,” Remy continued. “His own greed and self-serving ways both saved and condemned all three of us. He captured your soul before you ended up in Hell. He was trying to see if he could somehow unbind the Trinity blade from your soul and take it for himself.”
I glanced over at Az, still riding on my shoulder.
“Well, how’d that work out, you little shit?”
“Well, sure as hell not the way I thought it was going to be!” Az said through a toothy grin. “On a positive note, I did get to watch you stab Astaroth in the face over and over, so there’s that.”
I looked over at Sarah. She was staring straight ahead. I could see her frustration and anger growing with every step. She’d been holding it together since the diner. The effort was showing in the set of her shoulders and the line of her mouth.
“All right,” I thought. “I’ll tell her as soon as we get inside, and we’ll let the cards fall where they may.”
“Good,” Remy said and went quiet.
Sarah’s pace had quickened as we approached the door, and I could see real anger written all over her face.
“Be careful, Jay. There’s a reason one of the oldest sayings is, ‘Hell hath no fury.’”
I held the office door open. Sarah walked past me without a word, and I came in behind her. I shrugged off my coat and hung it on the rack near the door, then set my hat on the desk. I had just turned around when the front door swung shut hard enough to rattle the glass in the shop window.
She had stopped in the middle of the office, and she turned to face me. Whatever had been holding her together all the way from Mabel’s had finally come apart.
“I am so tired of being managed,” she said.
“Sarah—”
“Don’t.” She held up a hand. “Don’t say my name like that. I know what that tone means. It means you’re about to say something careful, and I am done with being careful.”
She started to pace, moving between the desk and the couch with her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
“I walked into your office because those children were missing their father. I didn’t know where else to go. And since then I have watched two men be killed, and I stabbed a demon in the back, killing the very person who was missing. Jay, I orphaned those children.”
Her voice cracked on the last word, and she pushed through it.
“And with everything that’s happened, I’ve been putting my faith and trust into someone who wants to continue to lie to me.”
“Sarah—”
“I said don’t, Jerrick Donati! I don’t even—”
“Sarah!” I raised my voice just enough to cut through.
She stopped. Her jaw was tight, and her eyes were bright, and she was looking at me like she was daring me to say something.
“I am not the man you think I am.”
She waited.
I pulled the chair out from behind my desk and sat down, leaning forward with my forearms on my knees. I held her gaze and didn’t look away because she deserved that much from me.
“Frank Weber was already dead. You saw the state he was in. You didn’t do that. Astaroth did.”
“Jay, please,” she pleaded as I took a deep breath.
Then I told her.
I told her what I was. Not what I’d become here—what I’d been before. The work I did. The kind of jobs I took, the kind of men I answered to, and what I did when they pointed me at someone.
I kept it plain, and I kept it honest.
She stood very still while I talked. She had drifted back toward a chair without sitting down, one hand resting on the back of it. The anger hadn’t left her face—but something more complicated had moved in behind it.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“That’s the future,” she said slowly. “That’s what you’re going to do?”
“No.” I held her gaze. “That’s what I did. It already happened. Sarah, I don’t know if I can ever do enough to wash the blood from my hands.”
I watched her work through that, and I could see the exact moment it landed.
“You’ve already done all of those horrible things.” Her voice dropped. “You let me trust you knowing all of that. You let me—”
The anger came back full, and the volume came with it.
“You lied to me.”
“I understand completely if you don’t want to be here anymore.” I didn’t dress it up. “But there is something I’ve needed to say to you since the first moment I saw you, since I looked into your eyes for the first time.”
I took another deep breath, gathering myself for a moment.
“I’m sorry for everything you’ve been put through since you walked through that door, and for everything before it. I’m sorry.”
She stared at me.
“Sorry?” Her confusion cut through the anger for just a moment. “You couldn’t have known any of this was going to happen to me. So what are you sorry for?”
“Jay, what did you do?”
She opened her mouth, then closed it. Her eyes went to my desk, still covered in scraps of paper and tools.
It all left the surface at once.
Papers scattered across the room, and a jar that had been filled with salt shattered against the baseboard below the shop window.
She stood there angrily over my desk. A thin line of blood ran from her nose and started to drip.
She turned on her heel without a word and went straight for the stairs. I heard each step on the way up, and then the door to the apartment closed hard enough that I felt it.
I put my head down into my arms, hoping that I hadn’t just ruined everything.
Upstairs, I could hear Az’s voice, low and steady, but I couldn’t make out the words.
Sarah was on that ugly green couch, her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them, staring at the window that looked out over the street.
Az materialized on the cushion beside her, his small arms crossed, his expression stripped of the usual performance.
“He did some awful things,” Az said. “And you think he ought to be punished for them.”
“Don’t you?” she said.
Az was quiet for a moment.
“He has been punished, and he’s still punishing himself.”
She looked at him.
“Jay didn’t just travel back to 1920,” Az said. “Jerrick Donati died. He died trying to save a family from the same demon that possessed Frank Weber.”
“Before he ended up here, he spent over a hundred years in Purgatory reliving his own death. The same three minutes, over and over,” Az said, meeting her eyes. “Sarah, you can’t change what happens in one of those loops. All you can do is relive those moments. Hell uses those loops as a form of punishment and torture.”
He let that sit.
“A hundred years, Sarah.”
The room was quiet.
“How did he die?” Her voice came out in a small whisper as she tried to wipe the tears from her eyes.
Az hesitated. It was long enough that she noticed.
“Az, please.”
“You shot him,” he said. “You put a shotgun to his face and pulled the trigger.”
He held her gaze when he said it.
“The last thing that he saw before he died was your eyes looking down at him from across the barrel.”
She didn’t move for a long moment.
“That’s how he knows me,” she said quietly. It wasn’t a question. “He was tortured for a hundred years, and I was his punishment?”
“Yes.”
“And he never said a word to me.”
“He didn’t want you to carry it,” Az said. “That’s all it was. Think about what it means that he stayed quiet. For over a hundred years, the last thing he saw before that loop reset was your face. Your eyes, right before you pulled the trigger. Over and over, every single time, and he never once held it against you.”
“He was afraid that if you knew, you’d carry that weight for the rest of your life. He didn’t want that for you.”
She was quiet for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice was low.
“When that moment comes,” she said, “I won’t do it.”
Az looked at her with something that might have been genuine sadness.
“You’re going to do it,” he said. “It’s a fixed point. It can’t be changed. And if you don’t—if you had never pulled that trigger—Jay never ends up in Purgatory. We never get bound together”
“Sarah, those angels would have murdered you in the street. Those hellhounds would have still moved through the aperture and rampaged through this town.”
Remial appeared on the couch on the other side of her.
“And Samuel and I would have completed our mission in the cathedral. The spirit would have destroyed itself and everyone in this town to keep us from that relic.”
She sat with that and didn’t say anything.
Az looked down at the floor between his feet.
“Don’t tell him I told you,” he said quietly.
The apartment was still after that.
Sarah stayed on the couch for a long time, her knees pulled up, staring at nothing in particular. Then she set her feet on the floor, smoothed her skirt, and stood up.
She came down the stairs without a word.
I heard each step and didn’t look up from the desk until I heard the blinds on the front door pulled down and the lock turn.
I watched her cross the office toward me. She had been so angry. I could feel the fear rising in my chest. I couldn’t help it. Again, I was staring into those green eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
She stepped around the desk and climbed into my lap, straddling me, and before I could say anything, she kissed me.
I kissed her back, and for a moment, the weight of everything that had been sitting on my chest lifted.
When she pulled back, I could see that she had been crying. Her eyes were still wet.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she leaned forward and pressed her lips to my forehead, soft and slow. When she straightened back up, she held my face in both of her hands.
“I know,” she said quietly. “I know everything.”
I opened my mouth, and she shook her head.
“I don’t ever want you to look at my eyes and think about that,” she said. “I don’t want you to see me and go back to that place.” Her voice was unsteady, but she held my gaze without flinching. “I want you to look at me and remember this instead.”
She kissed me again, and this time there was nothing tentative about it. Her fingers moved to the buttons of her blouse, and I felt her breath catch.
I don’t know how much time passed. Long enough that there was warm light coming through the back window.
I lay there watching her as she moved around the bedroom, gathering her things and stepping into her skirt. There was a grace to the way she moved, and she seemed completely unaware of it.
She picked up her blouse from the floor and pulled it on. She turned and caught me watching her.
A flush came into her cheeks, and she looked down, working the buttons with her fingers.
“You can take what just happened however you like,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t have to be anything more than what it was.”
I reached out and caught her hand.
She looked up, and I pulled her back down gently and kissed her once more before I let her go.
The corner of her mouth turned up slightly as she worked to regain her composure.
“I’m going to go put some water on for coffee,” she said.
And I watched her step out of the room.