Stuck in a world inside Jilly’s head. That hateful little girl who had led Del and the priest to them, then ambled off like she was on a Sunday stroll. Del’s manhandling of Jilly. And now Jilly was so still, slung over her brother’s back, not even struggling anymore as he carried her to that dilapidated old house in the distance.

And, of course, the priest.

Maybe she was the size of some little kid, but if he thought that meant she was easy pickings, he had a whole world of hurt coming to him.

“Child,” he told her. “Denying your holy duty is a cardinal sin.”

“So’s fucking little girls.”

She wasn’t sure which stopped him. The coarse language coming from an apparent child’s mouth, or the simple truth that what he did was wrong in the eyes of both God and man.

He gave a sad shake of his head.

“I’m afraid you need to be taught a lesson,” he said, then he smiled. “And there will be smiting.”

If that’s what you want to call it, Lizzie thought, but she didn’t bother replying.

Instead, she backed away from his careful approach, waiting for an opening. She knew she couldn’t count on much power from this child’s body she was stuck in, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t hurt him. Just so long as he didn’t use his mojo on her.

The weird thing here was that she couldn’t get past his being a priest. Oh, she knew all about how so many of them were old pervs—sometimes it seemed like a new scandal showed up on the news every second day. And she sure knew the dark side of the church’s black-robed pep squad. She and her cousin had gone to an all-girls Catholic school where the nuns worshipped the priests maybe more than they did God, and they certainly believed that a ruler on the hand or the back of the head was a far better behaviour modifier than ever a kind word might be—never mind the Bible’s teachings. And there had always been talk of which priests and nuns to avoid seeing when you were by yourself.

So, she wasn’t exactly naive about the so-called sanctity of a priest’s vows.

What was it her granddad used to say? Something about how the two main problems of the Irish were black with white collars: one you found in the church, the other in a pub in a pint of Guinness.