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The question hung between us, gentle but pointed. I’d tried praying since my transformation—the words burning my tongue, my skin smoking where I clasped my hands together. God’s silence had been my only answer.

“I was taught that confession to another person is unnecessary,” I said, softening my objection. “That it puts a mediator between the sinner and God.”

“Scripture suggests otherwise,” Father O’Malley replied.

“In James 5:16, we’re instructed to ‘confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.’” He turned slightly to face me.

“And in John 20, Christ breathes on the apostles and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.’”

I’d read those passages before, but Daddy had always explained them away—contexts, metaphors, temporary instructions for the early church. Hearing them now, in this place, they carried a different weight.

“Confession isn’t a burden, Alice,” Father O’Malley continued. “It’s healing. There’s something powerful about speaking our sins aloud, about naming the darkness within us so it loses its power over us.”

I thought about the secrets I carried—the people Silas made me hurt, and worse. The weight of those deaths pressed on me daily.

“How could saying words change any of that?” I asked, genuinely curious rather than defiant.

“Words have power,” he replied. “God spoke the world into existence. Christ is called the Word made flesh. The words we speak shape the reality we inhabit.” He gestured toward the confessional, a small wooden booth near the side of the church.

“In confession, we speak truth about ourselves and hear truth in return—that we are forgiven, that redemption is possible.”

I studied the confessional with trepidation. “And you believe this would help someone like me? Someone who can’t even say God’s name without pain?”

“I believe it might be the final step to removing that pain,” he said carefully.

“The sacraments work through the barriers we construct around ourselves. Your guilt, the sorrow you feel over the things you’ve done for Silas, it’s eating away at you.

It’s clinging to the darkness that the pain is trying to purge.

It continues to hurt when you pray, when we apply the holy water, because you are holding on to that darkness like a life raft.

Confession is about letting it go, and letting grace take its place. ”

We sat in silence for several minutes, the only sounds the soft footsteps of the sexton as he finished his duties and the occasional crack of candle wax. Outside, snow began to fall, tiny flakes visible through the stained-glass windows as they caught the light.

“What would I have to do?” I asked finally.

Relief flashed across Father O’Malley’s face. “Enter the confessional. I’ll sit on the other side of the screen. Begin with ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’ and tell me how long it’s been since your last confession.”

“I’ve never made a confession,” I pointed out.

“Then say that,” he replied with a gentle smile. “The formula isn’t what matters—it’s the honesty behind it.”

I rose slowly, my body suddenly feeling heavy with the prospect of what lay ahead. Father O’Malley led the way to the confessional, pointing to one side of the wooden booth.

“Take your time,” he said. “I’ll be waiting when you’re ready.”

The interior of the confessional was small and dark, with a wooden kneeler facing a screen that separated it from the priest’s side.

The space smelled of old wood and decades of whispered sins.

I knelt, feeling strangely vulnerable in this tiny, enclosed space.

Through the screen, I could see Father O’Malley’s silhouette as he settled on his side, head bowed slightly.

“Bless me, Father,” I began, the words feeling foreign on my tongue, “for I have sinned. I’ve never made a confession before because Daddy said it’s sacrilege.”

“Go on,” he encouraged when I fell silent.

Where to begin? With the killings? With my transformation? With the doubt that had plagued me even before Mercy Brown had turned me?

“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted. “There’s so much...”

“Start with what weighs on you most heavily,” Father O’Malley suggested. “The sin or regret that comes to mind first when you lie awake at dawn.”

Without hesitation, a name rose to my lips. “Mercy Brown.”

“Tell me about her,” Father O’Malley said quietly.

I took an unnecessary breath, steadying myself.

“She turned me into this. A vampire. She was dying of consumption at the sanatorium. Her father asked me to pray with her, to save her soul before she passed.” The memory was vivid—Mercy’s fevered eyes watching me as I read scripture by her bedside.

“I failed. Or maybe she failed. I don’t know anymore. ”

I paused, gathering my thoughts. “Someone showed up, a vampire, and turned her into one. I think it was arranged as a way of saving her life, since she was dying. After that, well, I tried to stop her. I was trying to help. The people from the Order said I’d be safe, that my faith protected me from her. But it didn’t work.”

“She bit you.”

I nodded. “Drank my blood. When I woke, I was... this.” I gestured at myself, though Father O’Malley couldn’t see the motion through the screen.

“I hate her for what she made me,” I continued, my voice cracking.

“But I can’t stop thinking that if our positions were reversed, I might have done the same.

I hate her, but I feel bad for her. Maybe it’s that I hate myself more for not being able to save her until—“

“Until what?” the priest asked.

“Until it was too late.”

“What else bothers you, Alice?”

Now that the big one was out of the way, the rest flowed rapidly like a river after three days of rain.

The Order finding me, me waking strapped down with Silas looming over me.

Silas training me, using me to hunt “witches” who may have been nothing of the sort.

The blood I’d drunk, the lives I’d taken, the growing suspicion that I’d been manipulated into becoming the very monster I feared.

When I finally fell silent, the confessional seemed to hold my words, cradling them in the darkness like precious, terrible things finally given shape.

“Your anger toward Mercy is understandable,” Father O’Malley said after a long moment. “She violated you in the most fundamental way, changing your very nature without consent.”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting the harm done to you,” he continued. “It means refusing to let that harm define your future. It means releasing the power that person holds over you—the power to make you bitter, to make you become like them.”

I considered this, turning it over in my mind. “Forgiveness is a kind of freedom, then?”

“Exactly so,” Father O’Malley agreed. “Not for her sake, but for yours. And forgiveness is a process, not an event. It happens gradually, in layers, as you continue to choose it day by day—or in your case, night by night.”

“And the others?” I asked. “The women I killed for the Order? How do I seek forgiveness for that?”

“By living differently now,” he said simply. “By using whatever time God grants you—be it hours, days, years or centuries—to bring healing rather than harm. True repentance isn’t just feeling sorry; it’s changing direction.”

He guided me through an act of contrition—a prayer asking for forgiveness—speaking the words for me when they burned too much for me to say myself. Then he pronounced words of absolution, his voice taking on a formal cadence that seemed to resonate in the small space.

“God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son has reconciled the world to himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

The words seemed to settle over me like a mantle. Not miraculous transformation—I still felt the hunger, still knew what I was—but something had shifted, a weight lifted that I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying.

And it didn’t hurt. Not even a little. It was like I was new again. I was still… well… a vampire. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t human, too. It was like God’s image was restored in me. Like I had another chance.

“Thank you, Father,” I said quietly.

“Your penance,” he continued, “is to perform an act of kindness each night for the next week. Something small, something that brings light rather than darkness into the world.”

I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “I will. But is my forgiveness contingent on that? Like how do I know if I’ve done enough?”

The priest billowed a hearty laugh. “The absolution was already spoken, Alice. There’s more to sin than your personal guilt.

Sin has a double-effect. It also wounds your soul.

This penance isn’t about earning forgiveness.

Think of it as a prescription, a way to heal in your soul.

To live out your forgiveness in a meaningful way. ”

When I emerged from the confessional, Father O’Malley followed a moment later. He moved to the font of holy water near the church entrance and beckoned me over.

“Try it again,” he suggested.

Hesitantly, I dipped my fingers into the water, braced for the familiar burning sensation. To my astonishment, the water felt cool against my skin—uncomfortable, like touching ice, but not agonizing. My fingers remained wet rather than burned.

Father O’Malley smiled at my expression of shock. “Progress,” he said simply.

“How is this possible?” I whispered, staring at my dripping fingers.

“Grace works in mysterious ways,” he replied. “The sacraments are channels of that grace—confession, communion, baptism. Each connects us to Christ’s saving power in a different way.”