“You’re too old for me,” I say. It is a ridiculous outburst, one I should have kept to myself. It reveals my desire for him, that mad sexual impulse that makes me want to run my tongue over…
“Too old for you for what?” he asks the question with a smirk.
“God, I don’t know. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep.”
He walks toward me, prowling down the hall like the predator he is. He stops less than a foot away from me, looking down at me with those smoldering eyes. I can smell him. He has a musk that is nothing like other men I know. Jonah just stinks like boy to me. Bryn smells like a man.
“Girls who stay up late end up in trouble,” he says softly. “You’ll be cranky in the morning.”
“I won’t be,” I promise him. “I don’t do cranky.”
“You had better not be late for church at 9:00,” he continues. I think he is teasing me, though I’m also fairly certain he is serious. “I’d have to turn you over my knee and spank you again. Harder this time, long enough to teach you a lesson.”
I feel a flutter of excitement low in my belly. Is he trying to seduce me? Or am I desperate to be seduced?
He reaches for me again, his powerful fingers stroking lightly beneath my chin. “You’re a pretty little thing, and innocent enough to not deserve anything that is happening to you,” he says. “I don’t deal well with innocence. I need to see it defiled. I must watch it turn from nervous anticipation to screaming need.”
His words make sense, but only in the most abstract of ways. They are apropos of nothing, but they envelop me in a haze of sexual energy. His energy.
I don’t know what to say or do, but I know I don’t want to move. I want to stay with him. I want him to keep touching me. I want the heat from his wild body to sink into my tender skin. I want him to take some of those words he’s toying with and turn them into rough action. I want to be defiled.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you,” he says. “A good girl would fear me, having seen what I’ve done, but you don’t fear me. You want me. You yearn for a certain kind of defilement that you will find nowhere else in the world.”
How does he know? Am I so transparent? Or is there a thread of connection between us, something that binds us so deeply it is as though my presence here is no accident, but rather the net of fate drawing close around me, snatching me from the flow of life and pulling me toward inevitable destiny?
I do not know how long we stand in this dark hall looking into one another’s eyes. I do know that the hunger between us is mutual and natural and probably unavoidable. When I look at Father Bryn, I feel destiny wrap itself around me.
A shriek interrupts this moment. It is not an audible sound, more like the rending of a soul, nails on a chalkboard I feel in my very core. Bryn’s dark head shoots up too. He wraps a protective arm around me. I wonder if he is concerned that evil will approach here in the heart of an abbey. Surely, he is more powerful than that. Surely a place of this age and hallowed nature will repel anything remotely demonic? I find myself pressing close to him, trusting him to keep me safe.
“What is that?”
“Not so much what," he says. “Who.”
“Who, then?”
“I don't know. One tormented wail is much like another.”
He truly never answers a question directly. He makes me work to know anything, and I feel as though I now know nothing at all.
“What am I hearing, Bryn?”
“Hell,” he says.
“We're in an abbey. How could we possibly be hearing Hell?”
“This building was built on the site of an even older building, and that building was built at a nexus of what some people call ley lines. A better term would be fault lines between earth and Hell. This is where the veil is thin and sometimes where it fails to exist at all. These buildings were constructed like spiritual plugs, designed to keep what might ail the world out.”
“I thought they were places of peace.”
He laughs at that notion. “Anybody who has ever been in a proper church knows that peace is not what lurks within. It is power, hoarded, misused, and corrupted. It is the effort of man to touch the nexus of the divine and the damned. It lures the sick just as strongly as it attracts the virtuous.”
We can still hear the screaming, though it is fainter now. Not exactly quieter, just muffled. Like someone put a nice soft pillow over Hades and apologized for the inconvenience.