A knock on the door of Rev. Jackdaw’s rented room made him lift his weary head from his prayers. After his days of repentance, had an angel finally arrived?
Taking advantage of the spring weather, he’d walked up and down the streets of the burnt district. “REPENT” written across his slate in large chalk letters. People snickered at him. Still, he’d marched in front of their pleasure dens, the cheap cribs and the houses with red lights in elaborate windows. Until a gang of young men in caps, with the same trouble in their eyes as he’d seen in Skeet’s, approached him. Most of whom were already infected, he was sure, and didn’t even know.
The jeering spiraled around him like the torment of his brothers in childhood. The months of failing to make any progress on a church, the hunger in his o
