I, Death

Sin Eater: Chapter 16

“You’re sorry?” Sarah said, laughing. “Oh, Peter, don’t be. That was the best orgasm I’ve ever had. I love you.”

Peter shook his head, the tears that had been streaming down his face shaking off like water droplets off of a dog that had just gotten out of the water.

“I . . . I don’t understand,” he said. “How can you still be alive?”

“Oh honey,” Sarah said. “You still don’t get it, do you?”

“Get it?”

“I think,” she said, “that it’s time for me to tell you my side of the story. Perhaps then you’ll understand.”

“Understand?”

“There’s nothing more to understand than how this lying cunt has tricked you, me, and everyone!”

Peter and Sarah turned to see Brecht standing in the doorway of Sarah’s apartment.

“This woman is the assassin we’ve been looking for, Peter,” Brecht said. “She is the one who has been taking out the members of our family.”

“What?” Peter said, getting up from the couch. “What is going on?”

“Kill her, Peter!”

“Don’t listen to him,” Sarah said, standing naked in front of him, one hand gently placed on Peter’s chest. “Brecht is a liar and a cold blooded killer. He is pretending to be a vigilante seeking justice, but he is nothing more than a low life drug dealer who needs to be stopped.”

“Lies from this despicable whore!” Brecht yelled. “I can see it all over her, just as plain as day. Her soul is black with it.

“She has used the power of temptation to lure men in, and then kill them. You saw it yourself earlier this evening with Dave. That was what awaited you, Peter. She was about to kill you before I burst in. I can read that in her lying face. Step away from her, quick!”

Peter immediately took a step back, noting the look of horror on Sarah’s face when he did so. He looked from Sarah and over to Brecht, then stood stunned, suddenly confused over what to do.

He took another step back, away from the two of them. Then another, and another, until he was a full six feet from Sarah, and eight feet away from Brecht.

Brecht was the one person Peter had come to count on, to depend on — someone who knew about the strange power he possessed; who held his own unique power to see through deception.

But he was asking Peter to kill the only woman he had ever loved; and she had just told him she loved him.

She’d meant it, hadn’t she?

She did love him.

But it did seem strange, all of a sudden, for her to behave like that — particularly when, for the longest time, Peter had tried continually to reach out to her and she had simply turned him away.

Perhaps her words, her actions, were another trick, a simple yet horrible lie.

“You need to kill her, Peter. Show her no mercy. Mercy is for the weak. She is an enemy. An enemy deserves no mercy.”

Something about the words Brecht had just spoken struck Peter as strangely familiar. He shook his head, trying to push away the feeling of why they sounded so familiar; why they seemed to poke at his memory.

Mercy is for the weak.

There was something about those words.

An enemy deserves no mercy.