Page 66 of Two Sides of Sin

“You know, you should really think about it, Jules,” Noah said, not looking up from his notepad. The stub of his pencil scratched loudly in the cavernous quiet of the nave. “Settling down. Getting out of this hellhole. You can’t play bullet-catcher forever. A guy needs a home.”

I kept my eyes fixed on the weapon in my hands, a bitter ache expanding in my chest. A home. Little did he know, that was all I had wanted for the last hundred years. But not with just anyone. Never with anyone else. Only with her.

“I’m not the settling type, Noah,” I countered, my voice a gravelly rasp that still sounded too much like my brother’s.

Noah snorted. “Right. The lone wolf routine. I’m just saying, one day your luck’s going to run out.”

If only he knew the cosmic joke of that statement. My luck had run out the night Cain drove a silver blade through the only person I had ever loved.

I spent the first few decades after June’s murder out of my mind. My sanity was completely pulverised under the weight of the grief.

I was thrown into a madness so consuming I didn’t know what was real and what was a hallucination. I would see her in the corner of my room, wearing that blood-soaked dress. I would taste her on my tongue. I spent years trying to follow her into the dark, trying to undo the Ritual the only way I knew how.

I stopped trying to kill myself when I realised the failed attempts were more depressing than her dying. The final straw had been pulling the pin on a frag grenade in an empty field. I hadn’t thought, even Cain’s dark alchemy could knit a man back together from that. I was wrong. I woke up hours later, my flesh sealing itself over broken shrapnel, sobbing into the dirt because the universe wouldn’t even grant me the mercy of a grave.

After that, I made a choice. If I couldn’t die, and if I was cursed to wait an eternity for her soul to reincarnate, I was going to be ready. I spent years traveling the globe, studying everything she had ever loved. I spent decades in the quiet halls of museums, learning art and history, mastering the brushstrokes of the masters she used to read about. I walked the ruins of the old world, cataloging its lingering beauty so that one day, when she finally came back to me, I could lay it all at her feet. I wanted to tell her about the world she was robbed of.

But as the years bled into decades, the hope began to thin. The waiting felt like rotting from the inside out. I felt dead, and I needed a place where being a dead man walking was an asset.

So, I joined the military. I figured if I was indestructible, I might as well put this cursed body between the innocent and the gunfire.

Noah was the only real connection I had made since I cut myself off from the world. Most of the backstory I fed him was fabricated, a patchwork of lies to explain why I had no family, no home, and a face that never aged. We parted ways, Cain and I, only a few years after the night at the cabin. His need for control and power had only festered and deepened with his immortality. For years after that, ending him was the only thing I could think about. I was consumed by a relentless, desperate obsession to kill my brother—and to take myself down with him. I tried everything, driving knives and iron into his flesh and my own, day after day, only to watch our bodies stubbornly piece themselves back together. It became a sickening routine. Cain woke most mornings with a blade rejecting out of his neck, a cold, heavy reminder of another failed attempt to find peace.

I saw him maybe once a decade, usually in passing—two ghosts acknowledging each other across a crowded room before fading back into our separate hells. I chose to keep my distance. I couldn’t look at him without seeing her blood on his hands.

Noah, though, was a good man. Loyal to a fault. He had his suspicions about me, of course. He regularly joked that I was “invincible,” calling me a “war machine” whenever I walked away from blasts that should have left us both in body bags.

He knew I was hiding something massive. Three months ago, during a frenzied ambush in a tight urban alleyway, I had thrown myself over him. He saw the sniper’s bullet hit me directly in the side of the head. He saw the blood. He saw me drop. And then, he saw me stand back up ten seconds later, the wound already smoking and sealing shut, to return fire.

When he was recovering from his own wounds in the field hospital, he confronted me about it. I gaslit him without blinking. I told him he was hallucinating from the blood loss and the severe trauma of the fight. I watched the conflict in his eyes—he knew what he saw, but the reality of it was too monstrous to compute. He was too good of a friend to push it, choosing to accept the lie rather than lose the brother-in-arms who had saved his life more times than he could count.

Noah folded his letter and tucked it securely into his tactical vest. “Alright. Perimeter check time. You want the west transept or the eastern chapel?”

“I’ll take the chapel,” I said, standing up and slinging my rifle over my shoulder.

“Keep an eye out,” Noah warned. “Some civil asset group moved in this morning to assess the structural damage to the relics. Art restorers or something. Try not to scare them away.”

“I’ll try,” I muttered, turning away.

I walked out of the nave and pushed through the heavy doors that led in the direction of the eastern chapel. It was supposed to be a routine sweep. A quick walk through a ruined sanctuary before the sun set.

The heavy doors of the eastern chapel gave way with a mournful groan, kicking up a cloud of old dust and pulverised sandstone. I stepped over the threshold, my combat boots silent on the damaged marble floor.

The cathedral's roof had been partially blown out during an air strike months ago, leaving a gaping hole where the grey heavens bled into the sanctuary. Columns of late afternoon sunlight slanted through the skeletal framework of the ceiling, painting the debris in streaks of rainbow and gold.

It was supposed to be a quick sweep.

But then I inhaled, and my immortal body simply stopped functioning.

Beneath the scent of burned stone, there was a hyper-specific, terrifyingly familiar fragrance. Vanilla. Coconut. The sharp, clean scent of a coming rainstorm. It was a smell I hadn’t breathed in since a dark, blood-soaked night decades ago.

No. You’re hallucinating again, Julian. The madness is back. I gripped the tactical strap of my rifle so hard my knuckles popped, my jaw clenching as I forced my eyes towards the shattered altar.

There was a labyrinth of steel scaffolding erected against the surviving back wall, framing the towering, empty stone tracks of a destroyed stained-glass window. Standing on the second tier, about ten meters in the air, was a woman.

Her back was to me. She was reaching up, delicately clearing debris from a surviving piece of medieval stonework. She was wearing a loose, oversized white button-down shirt that was covered in grey plaster dust and soot.

My lungs stopped working. The oxygen simply vanished from the room.