The journey to Verweald General was quiet. Darius took the keys but handed them back without a word when I asked if I could drive. The late afternoon sun was an obtrusive spectacle hovering above the western horizon that ignored my efforts to block it with the car's visor. Darius retrieved his sunglasses from his shirt's collar and slid them onto my nose.

I took several breaths to begin a conversation—but I couldn't find the will to discuss the inanities I conjured up. The Sin's gaze wandered to follow the progression of traffic or, occasionally, to rest upon me. I ignored his attention and refused to ponder what murderous thoughts were filtering through that head of his.

Verweald General nestled among the foothills in the city's northern reaches, west of the hills hiding Evergreen Acres and yet south of Verweald City International. Roadway congestion thickened as we passed by the highway junction leading toward the airport, but soon the roads cleared and we reached the hospital with frightful celerity. The manic part of my mind had hoped the car ride would last forever.

"Look grief-stricken," Darius said as we exited the car and started across the hot, crowded parking lot. The sprawling white buildings of the hospital glowed in the setting sun, so alabaster and clean next to the weedy, parched hillside and the freshly paved stretch of the lot's asphalt. Ambulances cluttered the roundabout while patients or nurses in colored scrubs sat on the benches to smoke or eat an early dinner.

"I'll try my best," I responded as I matched the Sin's pace. I don't think he heard the dry humor in my words.

When we entered the main building and approached the front desk, I did as Darius said and sniffled as my shoulders drooped. The woman behind the desk was sympathetic and helped us find the room for our "father," Michael Strauss. We were handed sticky nametags to paste to on our shirts with the names Sara and Darius Strauss on the labels.

Darius scoffed once we were in the elevator headed for the hospice on the third floor. "Your acting is terrible," the Sin goaded as he took his own sunglasses from my face. "Thank the King below we didn't rely on you to bluff our way into any cult buildings."

I said nothing. I plucked at a loose thread in my sleeve until it began to unravel.

Strauss had been shuffled into a small room in the far corner of the quiet third floor. Darius and I found it without further assistance from the hospital staff, and Darius swiftly slid the door shut once we were inside the room, sealing us in with the scent of death and lingering antiseptic. I hardly recognized the withered man sleeping on the bed without his tailored suit or Martha at his elbow. Light poured through the uncovered window to splash gold and orange colors over Strauss' clammy countenance.

Darius snatched the clipboard at the bed's foot as I looked over the chipped end tables flanking Strauss. No flowers or cards. It seemed the man was alone in his end.

"Pancreatic cancer," Darius intoned as he flipped through the pages. "He's had it for a while but it was recently...exacerbated. I imagine Balthier and his predilection for worsening diseases had something to do with it. He does so love to toy with human frailty."

I snorted as I sat in the plastic visitor's chair. "I'm sure there's some sort of dark humor in this situation, but I don't care to see it."

Darius hummed in distracted agreement as he moved to the medical contraptions keeping Strauss alive. He thumbed a dial and several switches with knowledgeable ease. "There's no need to be gruesome. Honestly, ending the man now is a mercy he doesn't deserve...." Darius' hands hesitated as his questioning eyes rose to my face. "Do you wish me to do so?"

I didn't think myself capable of mercy after everything I had experienced, but looking upon Strauss as he lay struggling to breathe on his deathbed, I could only wave Darius on to continue what he was doing. Strauss had always been kind to me. Even if that kindness had been disguised mockery, I did not have to respond in kind. I was not a cultist. I was capable of benevolence and did not wish suffering upon the man when all I wanted was his life in restitution for taking Tara's.

As Darius finished adjusting various levers and the machines keeping Strauss alive whirred to a halt, the wasting man inhaled a wet, rattling breath. His milky eyes fluttered open to waver first upon the shadowed demon, then upon me.

"You," he rasped.

I rose from the chair and stood at Strauss' bedside. "Me," I responded.

His cracked lips worked together, pulling and tugging the exaggerated wrinkles crumpling his face. I expected him to yell for security or to fling insults, but the elderly cultist surprised me by beginning to cry. Fat, unabashed tears leaked from the corners of his creased eyes and pattered upon the starchy pillow.

"You've come to take me, then?"

I tilted my head and allowed my fringe to fan across my eye. "Take you?"

Strauss coughed. Darius moved in the peripheries of my vision, either watching for nosy nurses or wandering doctors. "God sends his angel for me."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "You think I'm an angel?" I said, glancing at Darius to see the Sin smirk. "Oh, old man, you have to be delirious."

"The devil, then," Strauss grumbled. "It'd be the devil. The devil sending his messenger. Ah. He'd send it in your guise, I'd surmise. Send up a messenger looking for all the world like the girl I let that demon kill."

Strauss thought I was dead. Had no one from the Exordium told him I was alive? Had they bothered? Or was the man simply losing what sense he had?

"I called it up from Hell, I did. I confess. I killed you." Strauss wept and reached for my hand, but I didn't let him touch me. "Demon? Angel? Does it matter? Does it matter in the end?"

Strauss watched me, waiting for an answer. I felt Darius drift closer, a heated shadow somehow managing to displace the thrown sunlight away from himself. My lips pursed into a thin line. "Well, you know what they say about the devil you know...."

"Show me mercy, specter," Strauss wheezed as he made another grab from my hand. I retreated from the bed, backing into Darius. "Show me...mercy...."

The final cultist of the Exordium was fading fast. His eyelids were sagging as his chin was jostled by the weak rise and fall of his thin chest. He didn't have long.

"I have already given you what mercy I am capable of," I said as I turned from Strauss before he took his final, rattling breath. "Don't ask for more than you are due, cultist."

It was warm outside the hospital, but the first meandering winds of autumn were making their presence known. They roved over the hilltops and spilled over the lot in generous gusts of air scented with sage and oak. Brown leaves skittered upon the asphalt and swirled about our feet as me and the Sin of Pride and I walked toward my car.

My hands were shaking. The Exordium was finished. Our contract was complete. My story was at an end.

I stopped walking, unable to take another step. The pavement was scalding beneath my tennis shoes, heat rising through the rubber soles to singe my feet. I thought of inane things—of how I had left the coffee pot on at home, how I hadn't taken out my laundry or sorted the mail. I absorbed every detail of the world surrounding me and wished I could stay here, that I could take it all with me.

The Sin of Pride paused to glance at me, puzzled by my hesitation. "Sara?"

I was not afraid of Darius. Afraid of the unknown, yes—but of Darius? No. The Exordium had given me pain, torment, doubt, and had taken my life, but Darius had given that life back to me, if only for a short while. The Sin had shown me an underside of this world I had never known of before. That underside wasn't always pretty or wondrous, but it was exhilarating. The Sin of Pride rescued a jaded, angry girl and urged her to become an ardent, inquisitive woman.

I did not begrudge him my life or my soul. I hoped he took both and escaped Verweald before Balthier came hunting for him. I hoped he found a new host who gave him an easier, longer contract that allowed Darius to live in Terrestria and afforded him time to discover what he wanted to do with his immortal existence.

"Just do it," I whispered as I fisted my hands at my sides. I stared at the ground, seeing that I had stepped in gum, of all things. I was going to die in faded jeans with gum on my shoes. Wonderful. "It's fine. Just—."

Darius' touch brought my head up. I hadn't seen him approach.

His expression was inscrutable, lost to thoughts beyond my conception. "I've come to a decision," the Sin muttered. His left hand folded upon my jaw, his thumb cupping my exposed throat. Though Darius didn't place pressure upon my neck, it became increasingly difficult to breathe as my anxiety throttled me.

I wouldn't be afraid in my end. I had been afraid for most of my life, afraid of silly things, afraid of risks and afraid of being myself. I would be bold at the end of my life. I wanted to be bold.

"I achieved vengeance for your sister," Darius continued as though he couldn't see my visible resignation or my shivering. "I killed the man who paid for her death and the men who orchestrated it—but their attempt upon your life had nothing to do with the Exordium. Nothing to do with you. I have achieved nothing for you." The Sin's right hand rose from his side to graze my wounded ribs, somehow managing to ameliorate the ache. "I am not going to claim your soul, Sara Gaspard. Not yet. Not until I complete the contract I agreed to when I saved your life."

I inhaled, tasting ash and brimstone upon my tongue. The wind rose again. "But—." He couldn't possibly mean—?!

The sun caught Darius' crimson eyes and blazed with his resolve. "I am going to kill Balthier."

* * *