Bonds of Flame & Desire

Prologue

I always knew I didn't fit in.

As a child, I felt like an outsider to the world around me. The few friends I ever made never lasted long. They always found out what I was deep down inside and ran as fast as they could.

I grew up lonely.

And there was a man who saw my loneliness and preyed on it. He tried to lure me to him with promises of trinkets and shiny things, like I was a magpie.

Like I was my human mother who sold me to a man decades my senior, all for money she did not need.

The flames were hot as they crept in around my body. Smoke filled my lungs, my eyes watering and burning. I was curled into the wings of the devil, his marble eyes staring down at me with his brow furrowed as if in concern for the child in the burning cathedral.

I should have died that day. I should have succumbed to smoke and burned into ash alongside the ruins of the cathedral in the destruction I caused, all from a fit of rage.

It was too late for me to leave. I had remained far too long, drawn to the flames consuming pew and altar and pillar. Beams collapsed, crushing the confessional where I had struck the match.

Paul DuPlessis' sins reeked within the thick smoke, suffocating me.

I left the embrace of the devil and the heat seared into my shoes. As I walked to the door, a shadow descended over me and the flames seemed to retreat, like the devil of marble had descended his podium to walk me from the wreckage. I didn't dare look for fear that if I did, the flames would gobble me up.

The doors hung on their hinges and I slipped out. Somehow, no one saw me. I stepped into the brisk night, distant shouts alerting the neighborhood of the fire. It was a frenzy of sobs and despair and prayers.

I watched from the shadows as the steeple caved in. There would be no saving this building. No restoration of the place where a man was safe to tell another he thought of my adolescent body.

His sins were purged by empty words that the angels taught us. And I purged this world of his sanctuary.

I had burned the place where the man who lusted after me confessed his sins to seek me out again and finally succumb to his temptation.

I was born to destroy. It was all I had ever known. I felt no remorse for what I had done, even as the wails erupted around me.

And as I witnessed my destruction, I felt that shadow around me, like wings tucked around my body. A starling feather fluttered to the ground, landing at my feet.