“Hot water, lavender soap and you’ll eventually stop smelling like burned flesh,” Tomin recited, eyes still fixed on the pyres. “Trust me, I have burned enough people to know.”
“And yet you cry like you’re watching your firstborn take their first steps,” I replied.
“I cry because it is beautiful. To witness a damned soul cleansed with fire. There is nothing more holy than that, my boy. Us Hunters first believed that to return a witch to the flame was to clean them of their demonic tendencies. Of course, that was a load of bollocks. Even I knew that. Burnings were rare in England, but that didn’t stop them from happening with alittlepersuasion. In Scotland our faithful brothers would strangle an accused before setting their bodies to the flames, but when I—whenitwas brought over to us, it was thought more entertaining to keep them alive.”
I was thrown off when Tomin cried harder, letting his tears fall down the sides of his face. I couldn’t remember a time when I’d seen him cry. It was the most horrific thing I’d witnessed when it came to him, and that was saying something.
“I’m well aware of what a burning is like,” I said, mind wandering to Eleanor Letcombe and how she had taken the place of Romy just to keep her alive in the trial. “There is nothing holy about it. Nothing pious. The act in itself is demonic in nature.”
“Howdareyou,” Tomin spat, sadness melting to fury in the blink of an eye. “You wouldn’t begin to understand the lengths that were taken to save the world from the grasp of true evil… the sacrifices innocent people made.”
To add someumphbehind my reply, I looked over the endless grave-site around us. “I think I have a pretty good graspof just how many innocent people have died in this pursuit of Witch Hunters, actually.”
“Go on then, enlighten me.”
My hand clenched into a bolder-sized fist at my side. “What always struck me as odd was how you preached that hunting witches and cleansing them was ridding the world of demonic activity, when it was the Witch Hunters’ pursuit of Eleanor Letcombe who drove witches to make pacts with demons in the first place.”
I’d seen my dad angry before. Many times. I’d once watched one of his initiates accidentally spill coffee over his lap which sent my father into a vortex of limbs. That poor initiate died with a cup forced between his jaw and his head slammed into the ground. But this, my dad’s reaction to me speaking about Eleanor Letcombe, was unlike anything I’d ever witnessed before.
One second I was standing, the next my dad’s shoulder had cracked into my ribs and slammed me to the ground. An inch to the left and my skull would’ve split open against a gravestone, further opening the wound that was already there.
“Howdareyou speak her name,” Tomin seethed, spittle flying down over me. “Never. Ever. Again. Do you understand me?”
His body trembled like an unspent storm raged within him. Tomin panted like a dog. I glared back into his overly wide eyes, wondering how they were still sitting within his skull at the rate he held them open. “Oh no, have I hit a nerve,Daddy?”
I wanted him to hit me. Desperately. I wouldn’t lay a finger on him, no matter how much I longed for it. My dad deserved to face Bahmet’s punishment for breaking the rules, regardless if it would actually remove him from the trial or not. Any punishment, no matter how short, would be worth it.
And yet, Bahmet did nothing. I waited with bated breath, longing to see what Bahmet would do to my father for knocking me to the floor.
The demon lord was silent.
Tomin held his fist aloft, heaving with breath as he contemplated breaking my face.
“Do it,” I encouraged like the devil on his shoulder. “Don’t hold back now. It’s never stopped you before. I dare you. Go on. Hit me.”
My body had been a playground for my dad’s fists for as long as I could remember. I’d once looked in a mirror to see the marks he’d left on my body, and thought that it was his way of truly owning me. Then, when I was seventeen, I’d left the compound, conjured an illusion of a valid ID, and convinced a tattoo artist to cover my bruised and scarred body in marks of my own choosing. Those tattoos were my way of claiming my body back. It was the first time I truly rebelled. After that, when he rained down his hate upon me, I couldn’t see the bruises beneath the dark ink anymore. Ever since then, I felt like I had won a part of myself back.
Tooka part of myself back.
In all those years of abuse, Tomin never hit my face. Never. Not with the risk of showing cracks in the poised façade he put on for his followers. It was always places I could hide. Now, however, I sensed that we were seconds away from that fact changing.
Goddess, I’d never wanted something so desperately before.
Our eyes were locked, tension lingering between father and son. I didn’t bother to close my eyes when he finally let go and drove his fist down upon me. But it wasn’t skin he punched, but the sodden earth beside my head.
I bet he didn’t even leave a mark with those pathetically small hands.
“Feeling better?” I asked, jealous of the ground he’d punched.
“Up,” Tomin snapped.
“Impossible when you’re still on top of me,” I replied, drawing on the small bouts of sarcasm that Hector had rubbed off on me. “Which, I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you, is not a good look. This type of act could get you locked up for a long time.”
Tomin scrambled off me, brushing the dirt from his trousers as he stood. We both knew I could’ve removed him myself. But alas, I wasn’t risking my position in this trial, not when Hector was still out there.
Bahmet might’ve spared my father, but I didn’t imagine the response would be the same for me.
As I unfolded my body, broadening my shoulders so my dad knew I wouldn’t take that type of reaction from him again, he was studying me. “Something to say?” I asked.
