A waiter balancing a teetering stack of plates on an overburdened tray arrived at our table some minutes later. He slid most of the plates in front of Darius, who only moved to mutter harsh words in the waiter's ear before the dazed man disappeared into the kitchens. Once gone, Darius checked around our section of the diner for any prying eyes, then fell upon his meal with a ravenous hunger that had me both fascinated and repelled.

I picked at my grilled cheese sandwich, stomach too upset to accept anything more substantial than a sip of beer and maybe some water. Darius finished two substantial hamburgers, a mountain of greasy fries, a slab of breaded chicken, and a dish of meatloaf in minutes, not pausing to examine the texture of the food or to chew, really. It surprised me how he could remain so quiet while devouring enough protein and carbohydrates to satisfy six men much larger than himself.

That's disgusting but bizarrely fascinating.

When the last fry disappeared and the cleaned plates were stacked at the table edge, I slid my own dish in front of the Sin, and Darius took the sandwich, scowling at a globule of cooling cheese pulling apart from the soggy crust. He'd scowled at all of his dishes, and though he evidently found them disgusting and unpalatable, he ate everything nonetheless. Color returned to his startling gaze, and the peculiar, alien sharpness honing his features filled out once more. No longer convinced I sat across the table from a man on the brink, I relaxed and released a gusty sigh.

Grimacing, Darius dropped the halved sandwich and cleaned his hands on a napkin. "I suppose you are due some type of explanation."

"I suppose," I repeated, distant, exhaustion corroding my willpower. "Doesn't matter."

"It matters," he retorted, though his tone lacked its usual cutting bite. "After the...exceptional evening you've experienced, I can only assume the eccentrics of my behavior are an additional, unnecessary stressor. Your patience is unexpected, for a human. That in and of itself deserves a...reward."

Darius sneered, baiting me, and yet I only narrowed my eyes, forcing the Sin to continue.

"For all intents and purposes, and in a bid to keep my explanation somewhat brief, assume my body is mortal. It is, in a technical sense; my lungs must inhale to keep oxygen flowing to my brain, my heart must pump blood to my limbs, and I sweat when I exert myself, piss after I drink, sleep when I am tired. The parts, as it were, are not all the different from a human's. What is vastly different, however, is the whole." Darius's mouth twitched as he considered his words. "For all the death my kind reap, we are the embodiment of actualization—of existence. You could say we are enamored with it, acting out life's intricacies while never finding true meaning to the farce. We have...broken lives. Lives broken and spent desperately seeking all that we are bereft of."

He paused, turning to the window as he gathered his thoughts, and I folded my cold hands together on the table. Whatever contemplative mood had seized him passed when he faced me again. "I digress. A human consumes food for energy. The body stores it, converts it. It's why humans can survive without constantly eating and fueling their bodies."

"Of course."

The Sin flipped his hand. "As a human body starves, his muscular system and skeletal structure begin to degrade, cannibalizing themselves for nutrients. I expend and store energy in a manner different than a human does, but for the sake of this analogy, the mechanics are comparable. After I burn the immediate energy provided to me by my environment and the sustenance I eat—." He flicked the bread of the sandwich. "—I reach into the energy I store within the Realm and begin to burn through that, much like a starving human begins to burn stored lipids, but as I pull that energy to me from the Realm, my body degrades and my mental faculties lose acuity. I revert to primitive drives and forget my learned moralistic behaviors."

Darius pursed his lips. "The energy we Sins strip from our hosts' souls is the energy stored within our seats in the Realm." He made a sharp, cutting gesture before the question forming on my lips could be uttered. "I will explain the Realm momentarily. Do not interrupt. The energy of souls is what we pull into ourselves when we find it necessary to expend vast amounts of energy not provided by portions of food or available from the atmosphere—such as the copious energy necessary to heal after enduring a direct bomb blast."

The image of his ravaged back, protruding bones, and charred flesh bloomed in my mind, and I swallowed. I would've been so many scraps of mincemeat drifting in the harbor if the Sin hadn't thrown himself between me and the explosion.

"My own stores are somewhat...lax of late. I must, ah, scrape the barrel, as it were. The deeper I pry into the Realm and the wider I open my soul to its influence, the quicker I assume my more primal nature." He pointed to his eyes, his now normal teeth, then swept his knuckles along his jaw. "It is pouring an unearthly, corrosive power into a shell ill-formed for its reception. What you saw was a glimpse of a hungry Absolian, the creature I was before I became what I am now. That is my primal form, the one capable of handling the energy, and the natural state my body attempts to revert to even as my soul rebels."

I chewed my lip to keep myself from interrupting, but with every word the Sin spoke, the more entrenched in my mire of questions I became. Darius threw a handful of convoluted puzzle pieces in my face and I scrambled to right the shapes and judge their integrity. His words echoed from the conversation we had in the car ride to Verweald Harbor; "I can only surmise starvation drove me to such an act of sheer stupidity." Starvation. A lack of stored energy. An unexplained scar. The small facts painted the image of an unstable creature skirting the edge of a greater problem unknown to me, and there were so many whys behind those tidbits of information. Presumably an immortal being, why was Darius shirking the fine line between control and degradation? Why was he so hungry he willingly accepted any contract—even a messy one such as mine?

I took the empty amber bottle and tipped it from hand to hand as I pondered Darius's words, and the sheen of lights moved on the scratched glass. Meanwhile, Darius twisted the silver caps off the salt and pepper shakers and began to draw two lines upon the table, one black, one white, before he returned the pepper shaker to its spot by the window. The salt shaker remained behind the solid white line.

"I suppose you're bright enough to have surmised that I am not of this world?" He drew a finger along the demarcation between the pepper and salt, blurring the edges together.

"I had guessed as much."

Darius nodded. "As a Sin, I originate from here, Fanethbirna, a realm known only as the Pit, or Nither." He pointed at the bottom line of black pepper. "Here is your realm, what you would call Terrestria." He tapped the remaining shaker. "And here is what is officially known now as Gertenbirnavas mir Faurla'birna, more commonly called Fatennabirna—or, for you mortals, the Realm of Sin."

He finally gestured at the salt line marred by invading rills of displaced pepper. "The Realm surrounds Terrestria, a sort of transitional barrier which allows menial, one-sided permeation. A Sin without a host can step from the Pit through the Realm to Terrestria—but the Sin will be pushed back into the Realm, where his anchor—or his Seat, the vessel of his soul—originates. Now, a Sin with a host has an active anchor tied to Terrestria, a linchpin, and can thus step into the Realm of Sin and use it to swiftly move across barriers present in this realm, though he too will be pushed back to his anchor's origination—in this instance, his Terrestrian host.

"Matters of physics and existence are...blurred within the Realm. There are not words in your tongue to precisely describe the phenomenon, but it wasn't always the Realm of Sin, and certain events distorted the parameters of time within the Realm, and thus cause transitional movement through it to feel...instantaneous. Your kind would call it teleportation. It compresses minutes or perhaps hours of travel time into seconds, capturing the intangible existential existence of matter, time, space, and movement into a mere iota of thought and energy." Darius shrugged, brow furrowed. "But that's not important. Not to you, anyway."

I considered the mess on the table, and even assuming Darius's example to be more simplistic than the truth, it still presented some adequate understanding for me. The other realms existed somewhere beyond here with this...Realm of Sin acting as a barrier between them, like a border separating two foreign nations. You could hop across that border and run into the opposing country—but you would soon be forced back to your homeland, a metaphoric anchor holding you back. Cosmic checks and balances.

"So this Realm...." Hesitant, I pointed toward the salt line. "It's that...place?"

"Place?"

I remembered the sudden inhalation of cloying smoke and abrasive heat, the blind desperation squeezing my lungs, burning my eyes. "That...hellish place we stepped into to get around the gate."

"It is not Hell."

"No," I conceded, crossing my arms as I shivered. My hand touched my side and came away tinged with pink. "Not Hell. But filled with fire and darkness all the same."

He was angry again, though I couldn't say why. "You haven't a clue what you're talking about. You know nothing of fire." Darius snatched his glasses from the table and stood, obviously finished with our conversation. "Come."

I rose and, feeling guilty about dining and dashing, grumbled, "I'm not a dog," under my breath. I hurried after the Sin of Pride as he strode from the diner and crossed the dismal lot before I cleared the doorway. The light caught on his jacket, outlining hard, unyielding shoulders from the surrounding darkness.

You know nothing of fire.

I jogged to catch up and glared at the capricious creature as I took out my keys, giving the dusty diner a final look over. A damp wind brushed the landscape, promising another summer storm in our future, and as I drew the humid air into my lungs, I called out the Sin's name.

I don't know why I did so, other than a desire to understand what he had in mind to do next. With Mitch dead, our only lead to the cult's identity was a crispy cinder the city would eventually dredge from Verweald Harbor. Darius' sudden candor about his existence, though informative, didn't change the night's horrid progress, or my own vivid, aching need to search out the cult and see them dead.

Darius shifted—and the Realm spat him out not an inch from me in a backwash of ash and sulfur, the Sin disappearing and reappearing before my eyes could register the movement. Startled, I yelped and stumbled, catching my foot on a concrete curb, landing on my backside in a cloud of dust and dirt. I groaned at the fresh pain and cupped a hand to my throbbing left side, painting my palm and fingers red.

"Oh," I whispered, staring at the stain ruining my fresh sweatshirt, fingers perceptively red in the low light thrown by the diner's flickering sign. I'd ignored my wound for too long. Black spots coruscated before my eyes, and my chest felt tight, a sudden weight pressing against my breastbone. Darius knelt, gripped the hem of my shirt, and unceremoniously jerked it over my head, exposing my torso in the middle of the parking lot.

"What are you doing?! Stop!" I snarled, swatting at the Sin and trying to adjust my clothing. Darius snagged both of my wrists in one of his large hands and held them up, expending little effort in the endeavor as he observed the purple and red bruises arching around my ribs. The swollen marks encompassed my side and disappeared into my pants' elastic and the underside of my bra. The actual wound itself was hard to spot in the obscene bruising, framed only by frayed stitches and fresh, sticky smears.

"This shows little sign of healing," Darius grumbled, passing a clinical hand over my aching, feverish skin. Strangely, his touch didn't hurt, for all that the air itself seemed to set it ablaze—but I nonetheless struggled in his grip and objected loudly to his rough treatment. He shifted his restraining hand enough to rip one of the bandages off of my injured wrist, cleaving off some skin and hair with it, inspecting the tidy scabs and new, puckered pink scars while I called him every ugly name I could conceive of.

Darius glanced at my wound again and frowned. "...there is something...amiss."

I kept inventing clever new swears to hurl at the Sin—when Darius straightened, twisted, tightened his grip upon my arms, and hoisted me onto his shoulder as if I weighed nothing more than an unwieldy sack of potatoes. I yelled his name again kicked him in the back, but the Sin was taller than I expected, his posture unyielding despite my thrashing.

"Put me down, you ass!" I snapped as I rammed an elbow into his face. In hindsight, smacking a demon in the eye wasn't prudent to my survival, but other than a grunt of displeasure, Darius gave no indication he felt the blow.

"Gladly, you impudent wretch," he retorted, lips curled in a snarl. His stride, quick and even, didn't halt until we sidled next to my car, and which point he popped open the door behind the driver's place and shrugged his shoulder, allowing me to tumble into the backseat. Sprawled across the seat with my hair in my face, I bent over my aching middle and fought for breath as Darius plucked the keys from my hand and shut the door.

The driver's door opened, the indicator light flickering. "What are you doing?" I managed to wheeze, squinting against the swelling pain to watch Darius slide into the front seat and start the car. God, that hurts!

"Just rest," he responded as he revved the asthmatic engine and drove from the lot. The tires spat gravel in our wake.

I sat up and wanted to argue, wanted to whack the Sin in the back of the head for accosting me, but my limbs wouldn't cooperate, and my heart throbbed with fatigue, and I swallowed the anger down and hung my head. There was nothing I could say that would dissuade the Sin, so why waste the breath? I perfectly recalled Darius stating our contract was his "leash," but if he was the dog and I was the owner, I was woefully unprepared to reign in the hell-raiser that was Darius.

I never thought I could control the Sin. The one who believes himself capable of containing the waterfall after breaking the dam is the king of fools, and I had no desire to claim that title, for all that I'd made many, many foolish decisions in my life.

Leaning against the seat before me, I rested my head upon the cushioning above Darius's stiff shoulder, smelling ash and salt coming from his jacket and skin. "Don't do that to me again." I paused. "Please."

The Sin tipped his ear a fraction in my direction, the move small but deliberate. "Apologies." He shifted gears, and we delved into Verweald's waiting night.

A/N: Fanethbirna - the Pit, lit. Shadow world. Gertenbirnavas mir Faurla'birna - Realm of Sin, lit. "Desert of the World-Burners." Fatennabirna - Realm of Sin, lit. "not world" or "world of no existence."