Sana: A Saint x Sinner Story
A short story set within the Saint x Sinner universe I have been developing. This vignette focuses on the first meeting of Rosemary and Sal, to characters integral to the history of the main story and the Katherine character.
This was written as the final submission for my Fiction Writing Workshop. I hope you all enjoy it and I look forward to hearing your feedback.
The rain had followed Rosemary all evening. It drummed against the rooftops and turned the narrow, winding streets of the Hellfire District into a neon web of reds, violets, and electric blues that bled in puddles beneath her feet like stained glass. Thrumming music spilled from distant clubs like a broken hymn; laughter echoed through stony alleyways, chittering almost obscenely. The entire district felt wrong to her—too alive, too loud, and too warm; a saint, raised from birth within the cloistered walls of New Babel’s most sacred institution, did not belong here. Rosemary straightened her collar and hastened her pace.
Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack.
The briefing had been straightforward enough: the same incubus, sighted thirteen times by second and third-class patrols in less than a month. It appeared as a young man, they said, hood pulled tight around dark, tousled curls, snaking through the alleys and passages near the waterfront and vanishing from sight before anyone could get too close. In cases of prolonged possession like these, there wasn’t any point in trying to perform an exorcism; to put an end to the violation of an innocent mortal body, rather, would be a mercy to the soul whose life it had stolen away.
Locate. Eliminate. Simple. As a first-class saint on her first solo assignment, that should have been a comfort to her, but it wasn’t. Being the only daughter of the prestigious Heller family, she’d trained her entire life to be the church’s perfect instrument—practiced, controlled, certain. She had something to prove to herself as well as her father; indeed, there was as little room for doubt as there had always been for the High Cardinal’s daughter. To fail now, on what should be an easy charge for someone with her pedigree, would be an unforgivable stain on an otherwise spotless legacy. Rosemary bit her lip until it bloomed red—then, she froze.
There, standing beneath the waning light of a flickering neon sign, was a figure; shoulders squared, dark curls damp and clinging to the contours of his—its—face. For the briefest moment, their eyes met. It saw her. It recognized her. It ran.
Rosemary’s pulse jumped and her hand lurched for the silver cross around her neck.
“Hey—stop!” Her words vanished beneath sheets of rain as the figure slipped further from her reach and darted around a corner. Rosemary gave chase, breaking the clasp where her crux clung to its chain and whipping it outward with conviction.
“Forma, Michael!”
Her voice boomed with borrowed authority and Michael answered—shafts of blinding white-gold light flared between her slender digits and the smooth metal of the silver cross elongated into a sword that hummed softly against her palm. Puddles splashed beneath her heels as she sprinted after it, the neon and rain blurring into a sea of white noise around her. Her mark was fast, sure, but Rosemary had spent her entire life training for this. She would not fail now.
The figure glanced over its shoulder and fear flashed across its stolen face.
Not hatred. Fear.
Were demons capable of fear?
Rosemary blinked the thought away and thrust her blade forward.
“Projecta, Michael!”
Again the archangel answered, and a burst of light erupted from the tip of her sword that split the rain like a thunderbolt, striking her target in the shoulder with an audible crack as a pained cry tore from its throat—the demon tumbled from its footing and collapsed headlong into a trash can, scattering debris that clung to the wet pavement. The distance between them narrowed, and Rosemary slowed; her heart pounded beneath her ribs, rainwater dripping down long, straight strands of platinum blonde hair that glistened like spun gold and spilled over her cravat. The end of the alley was dead ahead—there was nowhere left to run.
The cornered incubus slumped against a rain-slicked brick wall as Rosemary closed the space between them. It clutched its shoulder, hot blood running in thick rivulets down its arm and over its quivering fingers in a way that almost made it seem vulnerable.
For several seconds neither of them spoke until, finally, it laughed; a broken, nervous, human laugh.
“Well,” it said matter-of-factly, “I suppose that's that, isn’t it?”
Rosemary raised her weapon to its eye-level with silvered resolve.
"Don’t you dare beg for your life. We both know what you are."
“Yes,” it cast its tired eyes downward.
"Then you know why I'm here."
"I do."
That answer surprised Rosemary—it came without argument, and without denial. Her mark looked at her wearing the exhausted, olive-skinned face of a young man resigned completely to his fate; through tired, grey eyes which it seemed to her had seen this unfold a thousand different times to the same inevitable end.
"If you were just going to surrender, then why bother running at all?" Rosemary furrowed her brow, fingers tightening like rope around the hilt of her sword until her knuckles turned white. The incubus lowered its gaze again.
“I don’t—” it started, then stopped. “You should… probably just kill me.”
“What?” Rosemary blinked away the rainwater that trickled down her forehead.
Did it want to die?
“That’s usually how these things go, right?”
The aura that seeped outward from its body was weak—too weak to threaten her, certainly; not that she was sure it even wanted to now. The aura was thick—not with ego, but burdened as if the heavy hands of the High Cardinal himself pressed down upon his shoulders. The young man slid slowly down the wall until he was sitting on the wet pavement in front of her, shoulder painting the brick in a trail of blood that even the pouring rain dared not erase.
“Go on then,” he said, almost pleading. “There’s no sense in dragging it out, is there?”
The silence between them stretched from seconds into what seemed like hours.
Hand shaking, she lowered her blade.
“Y-your name,” she stammered, the words an unsure taste on her tongue. “What is it?”
He seemed surprised; that wasn’t a part of the script. He cleared his throat and answered.
"It’s...Sal." He sighed, coat stained red, and leaned his head backward against the brick wall, relieved as if the mere act of speaking his name aloud vindicated his personhood.
"I don't really blame you, you know," he spoke softly.
"You think you're doing the right thing."
Rosemary averted her eyes, the knot in her chest tightening like a vice around her heart. She found herself staring at the blood trickling down his arm and pooling onto the pavement.
The right thing.
It was a rainy afternoon in September and she was fourteen again, standing over a trembling stray dog in the back courtyard at All Saints. The High Cardinal stood tall behind her, the gnarled fingers of his hand curled inward, firmly gripping her narrow shoulder as if to fix her in that place in time forever.
"Leave it," he’d said without a drop of pity in his voice. "It is beyond saving, child. Let us put it out of its misery, and be done with it."
The dog lay there, shaking and helpless in a shallow puddle of its own blood; whining softly as Rosemary looked down at it, shaking and helpless herself. Her fingers probed for the silver cross that hung around her neck as she knelt down.
“Sana, Raphael.”
Her words carried no boom, no authority, no threat. Soft, warm golden light blossomed like honey from her palm and poured over the wound—bleeding stopped, flesh knitted, and pain soothed beneath Rosemary’s gentle touch. Sal looked at her, then at his shoulder, then back at her.
"You…healed me?"
"Yes."
"I don’t understand—it’s… never happened this way.”
He was right. It never did. It wasn’t supposed to.
“Why?”
Rosemary opened her mouth but nothing came out, because the honest answer was, she didn’t know. There were no words, because saints didn’t do this—let alone a first-class saint, and a Heller at that. If anyone from All Saints had seen this, she could be excommunicated—or worse. She swallowed hard and rose, tucking a stray strand of hair away from her forehead and behind her ear; her sword returned to the form of a silver cross in her grasp, and she slipped it into her pocket.
“My name is Rosemary,” her features softened.
“You should leave, Sal.”
"Rosemary." The corners of Sal's mouth lifted slightly.
“I’ll see you again, won’t I?” He braced against the wall and lifted himself up.
For a long moment they simply stood there, listening to the rain.
Then, Rosemary finally turned to leave. “For your sake, I pray that you don’t.”
As she walked away, the world behind her fell silent—no footsteps, no pleas, not even the rain. The frantic thrum of her heartbeat followed her into an uncertain dawn, and Rosemary realized that, for the first time in her life, she would have to lie to her father.