At the funeral, 15

Blood loses its power when the heart that pumped it is no longer beating. There is a scar on my – no, there was a scar, high up on my thigh where no one would notice. Horry used a very sharp knife, so sharp I barely felt it pierce the skin. Then he dug deeper, to nick the artery and get a good flow going – and that, I felt. Hearing my own blood dripping into the bowl was almost as uncomfortable as the cut itself.

I would rather spend the rest of my life spilling blood for that damnable spell than be caught up in the atrocity that this man has committed against me, against God. I trusted him, oh God, I believed him, how could I have believed him? It could have been the drugs, it could have been desperation, it could have been a particular scripture passage that he read at a vulnerable moment – I was so weak, in such misery, that I would have done anything to give my girl another chance at communion with God. I thought then that it might save her. I was wrong.

Now she goes one way and I go another – her friends, her chosen family around her, and I pray, yes, I still pray to God despite the betrayal of His priest, I pray that they can keep her safe. If I have to endure this torment then please, God, don't let me see her die. Please let me go to my rest before I witness that. Please.
And if You deliver your justice to this priest for the trap he has laid for my soul, a soul that belongs to You and always has, I vow I will not take pleasure in it. She has seduced him; she has caught him up in her false promises, just like she caught John. But Father Blackwell has no family, no human ties to the world, no one to pull him out of her grasp. I pity him, I do. But I am ashamed to admit that in this moment, trapped between this world and the next, gripped still by the agony I felt at the moment of death, I pity myself more. How I live in that endless second of the last beat of my heart, the last strangled exhalation, when my body is even now being lowered into the ground, is something I cannot understand. Some hellish magic of the fiend, no doubt.

God, please let her find me. Please, show her how to let me go.