“Who among us can dwell with the consuming fire?” Father Salazar’s booming voice echoed through the church rafters. “Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?”

Aunt Cely’s bony elbow jabbed into my shoulder. “So help me, Raul,” she hissed in a faint whisper.

I flicked the switch to turn Tetris off and tucked my Gameboy back inside my jacket.

Miles gave a quiet whimper of protest and squirmed in Cely’s lap, craning her head back to look up at my aunt’s face, which was swiftly growing pink with embarrassment. And anger.

My almost two-year-old sister disliked going to church as much as I did. Watching me play Tetris was the only thing that kept her quiet and occupied during Sunday sermons.

“On,” Miles babbled. “Tetris on!”

It sounded more like “Dedriss” whenever my little sister said it, but the popular game’s name was recognizable enough that people in our pew started to giggle behind their hands when Miles continued to whine, “Dedriss back on.”

Aunt Cely tried to shush her to no avail, and I chewed the insides of my cheeks to keep from laughing myself.

Five minutes later, I was following behind Cely’s stomping heels as we made our way through the packed church parking lot. I was making silly faces at Miles, who was perched over my aunt’s shoulder and grinning excitedly down at me. I gave her a thumbs-up for her part in sparing us another hour of misery.

Cely’s big push for us to become churchgoers was a joke anyhow. Back in Ohio, Mom had never made me go except for on holidays. By her own admission, Aunt Cely had never been much of a churchgoer herself. But when Cely had moved us to Santa Cruz, she’d insisted Miles and I grow up with religion. She’d even enrolled me in Vacation Bible School, ruining my first summer in our new town.

It took three tries, two swear words, and a lot of fist-pounding on the dashboard by my aunt for our car to start up, which did nothing to improve Cely’s mood.

I sat in the back distracting Miles, who hated being strapped into her car seat when we weren’t moving. I didn’t blame her.

When Miles began to fuss, I smushed her chubby baby cheeks together between my palms, creating extra rolls of face fat, and causing her nose and lips to push out and her eyes to droop down in a way that looked completely ridiculous. It never failed to make me laugh. And whenever I laughed, Miles would start giggling like mad too.

“Here, now you give me a manatee face.” I took her little hands in mine and helped her to smush my cheeks together. “Like this, see?”

“Man-tee!” She squealed and kicked her legs with delight at the comical sight my smushed face presented. “Man-tee!”

“Raul, stop getting her wound up,” Cely scolded as we pulled out of the parking lot at last. “I’m trying to listen for engine noises, and I can’t hear anything over all the giggling and shrieking back there.”

“Pretty sure it’s running,” I sassed.

She threw her pointer finger straight at the ceiling. “You are on thin ice, mister!”

The car behind us honked twice, and I cracked up so hard that tears sprang to my eyes. Miles started laughing along with me, as she often did—even though she had no idea what was so funny. She was in good company, because neither did our Aunt Cely.

“What the—? Why’d that guy honk at me? What happened? What the hell’s so hilarious now, Raul?”

“He thinks you gave him the finger, Cely.”

“He does not think …” She let out a gasp as she looked in the rear view mirror. “Shit, he does. He just gave me the finger back, that jerk.”

“Whoop, whoop!” I held my hand up for my sister to give me a high five. “That’s four more quarters for the swear jar in just this drive home from church. Aunt Cely’ll be taking us to Disneyland in no time.”

Miles mimicked my “whoop” and wacked her little fist against my palm.

We drove another several blocks before Cely spoke again. When she did, her voice wasn’t angry or indignant. It was simply sad. Resigned. “Raul, you have to stop calling me that around Milena. She’s getting old enough that she might remember later on. Besides that, she mimics everything you do. She already calls me Ma-Cely. She’s confused. We have to change that.”

My gut wrenched. It felt like the time Billy Duncan had kicked me in the stomach on the football field.

“I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to, but you need to call me Mom. You’re the bee’s knees to Milena … the pied piper …”

My eyes burned, despite how hard I fought not to get upset. And still I rolled those eyes at my aunt’s idiotic choice of old-person expressions.

Mom never would’ve said anything so lame. How had they been related, let alone twins? Aunt Cely was constantly saying stupid, humiliating things that embarrassed me—in a new town where I didn’t completely fit in and was trying to make friends.

It was bad enough I had to pretend she was my mom and call her that in front of my new teachers and the kids in the neighborhood. It already felt like a betrayal of my mom’s memory. But calling her Mom in front of my sister?

“Man-tee!” Miles squealed and giggled. She was smushing her own cheeks together now, trying to get me to laugh.

Letting my sister think Cely was our mom felt wrong. It was too great a lie to tell.

Mom always said lies divided people. It was why she’d told me the truth about Mateus being my dad, even though he’d never wanted me to know.

But now that Mom was gone, all Mateus and Aunt Cely wanted me to do was lie—about everything.

And they wanted me to lie to my sister most of all.

“Raul?” Aunt Cely sighed. “Can we please talk about this?”

“I’m not doing it.”

“Honey, I know I’ll never be your mom. I’m not trying to replace her for you. I’m just trying to keep you and your sister safe.”

“Father Salazar says it’s a sin to lie.”

She huffed out an embittered laugh and muttered something under her breath. But her tone was more playful than annoyed as she asked, “Since when do you pay attention at church?”

“I can play Tetris and listen to someone talk at the same time.” Duh!

“Then what did Father Salazar mean about those who could dwell with the consuming fire? Did you hear that part today?”

I shrugged. “Yeah. I heard it.”

“Do you understand what he was talking about? What it means?”

Another shrug. “It means that everyone’s gonna burn in hell because nothing we ever do is good enough and God hates us all?”

Cely gasped, jerking the steering wheel to the right and nearly driving us off the road. “No! Raul, what on earth? Of course not. Where did you ever get such an idea?”

Was she kidding? “Church. The Bible. Stuff Father Salazar says all the time.”

“Jesus, Raul,” she swore, then caught herself with a groan. “Fine. That’s another quarter for the swear jar.” She shook her head at the road.

“Raul, that passage isn’t about damnation. It’s about redemption. It’s about those who will be saved. He who is to ‘dwell in the devouring fire’ is the pure soul, Raul. He who is able to withstand ‘everlasting burnings’ is the righteous—the one who has known darkness, but can now walk with the light.”

Every time I entered one of Sloane’s recurring nightmares, I thought about what Aunt Cely had told me that day on our drive home from church. I wasn’t sure why. It never once helped me to feel better about the horror I was about to witness a little girl face.

Fire surrounded me—as always—in Sloane’s nightmare of her previous death (as Maribel) in Madrid. I’d missed the explosions, but the evidence of their impact was everywhere I turned. Unseen beings were screaming. Wailing.

The black cloud of smoke in the air was so thick as to partially obstruct my supernatural vision as the once-magnificent, castle-like structure in Madrid proceeded to crumble around me.

I found Sloane in the same place I always did: at the epicenter of the destruction—a lost beacon amid the madness—trapped in a ball of fire she couldn’t escape from.

Dwelling with the consuming fire.

The little girl stood there calmly, her body aflame, her eyes fogged over with confusion. And pain.

Sloane may have been able to withstand “everlasting burnings,” but the gruesome scene never looked anything like redemption to me.