[ The monster takes her hand in her perfect own. She could take it off her wrist with all the ease of twisting a leaf from a branch, but she does not, and Mercy's traitor fingers are curled sticky and small against the lovely palm. She heaves silently as the creature takes her due of what comes of her eyes, wretchedness in all the fibers of her.

She wants to deny her, once, twice. A thousand times over, as she denied her before, and conspired to cast her away, contemptible thing that she is. She cannot bear it, or cannot bear down on it - cannot set her weight against the fulcrum to move the world.

But she must, and she has always been a child of necessity. ]

I want the truth...the real truth, after all of this time...if there was ever anything true.

[ Her hand is hot and itching in Annabel's hand. Someone's nails dig into her skin, and she does not know whose. She beholds the perfect, hideous face, the death mask stretched across God's unnamed, unbelieved sin. ]

We were wounded - we were lost - and you condemned us, you hated us, you stood in accusation - and we hated you for it. We hated you so badly, for knowing our sin...I couldn't stand for you to look at me, so I would not look at you.

[ It had been so much easier to look to John, their God and friend and confessor. They had loved him as desperately as they hated her. He had been human, and her a horror, the misbegotten sentimental token of an old, dead time. So they looked to him, and they believed.

Cristabel's lovely eyes look up at Alecto, at the glass in her hair like stars, at the splatter of Mercymorn's blood along the graceful arch of her throat. Her voice is very small, and very frightened. ]

I would look at you now, if you would let me...I would listen.