Henry climbed the stairs to his second-floor office, completely aware of the monster that hovered behind him, breathing fetid breaths on his shoulders. He'd taken to wearing a hat because if he didn't, her drool would run off her needle teeth, onto his head, and into his eyes. Since her drool had some kind of venom in it, it burned his eyes something terrible when he didn't protect them.
       He went through hats pretty quickly.
       At the landing, two lovely women stood talking. There was a dentist and a mortgage company that shared the second floor of the building with Henry's business. The two women had to be from one of those since he couldn't keep anyone employed in his front office to save his life.
       No one wanted to work with someone in his business.
       One of the women stopped mid-sentence when she saw him standing there with his monster hanging in the air behind him--shredded gray shroud sagging, bulging white eyes and gaping mouth set in a toothy scream, and bone-thin arms with spidery hands tipped in jagged black claws.
       It was always the same. One screamed and scrambled backward while the other stood locked in place like some poor deer stunned into paralysis by the headlights of an eighteen-wheeler.
       Henry sighed and kept walking.
       He slid his key into the door to his office, pulling down the taped notes written in thick red and black letters threatening him, complaining, saying he made everyone uncomfortable and should close-up shop permanently.
       The chipped letters on the door read "Henry Tebeau, Sin Eater."
       If they understood what that meant, how important his work was, they'd never leave another note or nasty message on his service. But they didn't understand. They wouldn't unless they needed his help.
       And he'd never wish such a thing on anyone.
       The phone rang at the empty receptionist desk, but Henry didn't hurry. He hung up his jacket and walked through the shabby waiting room into his 'operating room.' He liked it better inside that room. He'd spent a pretty penny buying a comfortable set of recliners for the ritual. He'd painted the walls a soothing blue and hung shaman-made fetishes and Buddhist-blessed weavings around the room. His monster backed away into the corner he'd made comfortable for her, where her puzzles and games waited.
       She enjoyed Sudoku and Tetris the most.
       He lowered himself into his recliner and watched her spindly fingers flying across the iPad's screen, spinning and placing the shapes that fell in time with Korobeiniki, the theme song of Tetris. She whistled happily around her long teeth as she worked. He smiled and let himself nod, knowing she'd be at it for hours if--
       The trill of the phone broke through the peace. She started growling again, dropping the iPad to claw at her face.
       "Henry Tebeau," he said, turning away to the pad of paper he kept by the phone.
       "Is this the sin eater?"
       He hated this bit. Either this was a real customer with cash and pain to be given, or it was--
       "Sin isn't something that can be eaten. It's engraved on the soul. Shame on you."
       Ah, a true believer.
       "Ma'am, I'm offering a service. If you don't like what I do, well... why don't you pray about it."
       He put the phone down, wishing he had a nastier comeback. Wishing he could say something so cutting that she'd hang up the phone, bloodied and wincing, but when he looked at the monster, what he'd grown from the sins of others, he knew that he'd done the right thing with his gentle answer.
       The beast floated there, mouth gaping and miserable.
       He wasn't sure when he'd become aware that she was so sad. Maybe it had been during one of the long nights of her weeping quietly under Henry's bed, shaking and sniffling until the bed vibrated, and he had to sing to get her to stop.
       Currently, she liked 'You are my Sunshine.'
       The office's front door rattled open, and a woman crossed the creaky bare floor. He hadn't seen her yet, but a woman's sins smell different than a man's, so he knew it was a she right away. She paused at the partially opened door. He imagined her frozen there, weighing her options, scared to knock because it meant admitting she couldn't live with what she'd done.
       "Come in," he said, knowing that his words would soothe her enough. She needed them to help her. What sat on her shoulders stank.
       When she pushed her way into the room, his stomach twisted. If he didn't act quickly, the sin would root itself in deeper, and she'd leave with it tearing her up. Maybe die of it. He had to break it off of her soul.
       Henry knew the woman needed some sanity, some expectation before the horror that would come, or she'd twist away and never get the relief she needed. He pushed out of the chair and invited her to sit at a countertop with pens, flowers, and two stools. It looked like something out of a doctor's office. He'd made it to be that way purposefully.
       It put the clients into the calmest frame of mind possible... with a drooling monster staring from the corner.
       He gave her forms to fill out. Nothing too complex: contact information, allergies, family history. She wrote on each sheet of paper confidently, which is what the papers were designed to inspire. The expected made the chaos that came after easier.
       "The procedure will take about an hour. There will be no memory of the act--"
       "Do I have to tell you what I did?" Her forehead wrinkled with worry and her back got rigid.
       Henry shook his head. "That's not necessary."
       Because he'd know as soon as he ate it.
       She glanced over at the chair and then to the corner where the monster hovered.
       "It's horrible," she whispered.
       Henry stayed quiet, letting her process what she was seeing. After a minute or two, he asked for payment.
       "That will be $1200," he told her.
       "Oh, that's a lot," she said, still staring at the monster in the corner. She distractedly handed him her credit card.
       "But it really isn't. It's based on the sin. I've eaten much more expensive sins than yours."
       She shivered.
       "That's what the sins become?" She pointed at his monster.
       Henry gave her the receipt but not an answer. "Have a seat here," he indicated the chair on the right.
       "Will I feel it?"
       He shook his head as the monster flowed over and hovered behind her. "You'll sleep."
       "Sleep? I'm not--"
       The monster touched the client's forehead. That alien touch alone was enough to knock aside any client's consciousness into a safe, deep sleep. Sleep kept them from feeling the ugliness rip right out of their souls. To do that awake... Henry shivered just thinking about it.
       He climbed into the other chair and took a deep breath as the monster fluttered over him. He touched a remote that activated the cameras that hung over the chairs. He'd learned that if he couldn't prove a service was rendered, the clients and sometimes their families would accuse him of bilking them. It didn't take much to get them to leave him alone. They'd watch the video and back away, horrified by the process.
       It wasn't pretty, eating peoples' sins.
       "I'm ready," Henry said, rocking back in this chair.
       His monster didn't pounce the way she had when she was younger. She'd grown gentle over the years. She flowed over him, her shroud drifting on his skin and touching with prickles of ice. She stared into his eyes, mouth gaping as it did and eyes white, but he understood her features. She worried about him.
       Sin eating wasn't good for his health. He felt each sin like a slice, and each extraction was a piece of himself gone.
       "Just do it."
       She smiled, though it didn't look much different than her natural sagging maw. She thrust her clawed hand into his mouth, stretching his lips until they split a bit at the corners. He felt her nails scraping down his throat, nicking it even though he felt the care she took.
       Then the sin flowed through her into him.
       Most people assumed that his monster was the sin eater, but she wasn't. She was his protector. The medium connected the sinner to him. A circuit for the evil energy to travel along.
       The sin exploded into his mind, all whipping light and fiery tentacles. The monster's body wrapped around him, keeping the energy flowing from the client into him, keeping them both immobile and whimpering as she kept him safe.
       Henry's mind settled into the client's. He became the client at the time of her great sin by stepping into that moment as easily as it was to step through an open door. The client's memory took over, and he felt everything she had done. Her body was sweaty from climbing, and the view was an incredible panorama of crags and evergreens framed by a wide-open sky. Her body felt tired but exhilarated. She stood on top of a jutting rock formation with another woman who sipped water and then wiped away the sweat from her face. Massey. The name of the other woman swam up through the memory like an earworm song repeating the melody eternally. Massey, Massey, Massey. The client braced and stretched her long legs, curling her manicured fingers into fists. Her long ponytail fell across her cheek, blocking her pained features from Massey's view. She was glad.
       Glad Massey couldn't see how much what she'd admitted hurt her.
       Henry couldn't hear the words the other woman spoke because the client couldn't hear through her rage. All he knew was the woman in front of him spoke and stretched and smiled, unaware of the blinding rage building like a tsunami inside the client's mind.
       The rapid-fire plans rattled through the client's thoughts, and Henry could hear those clearly enough.
       No one would find--
       No one knew they ran together--
       She did this--
       The client shoved Massey from behind so that she toppled over the edge of the ridge and then leaned over to watch her fall. Massey cartwheeled down the sheer face of the cliff.
       The client gasped when she realized what she'd done. She hadn't meant to... it was a mistake. She wanted to pull it back. Turn back time. She scrambled down the cliff after Massey knowing she was dead. Hating her and loving her. She was a cheater. She was her love. The mess in her mind clarified when her gaze fell on Massey's body, all running blood and edges and bone piercing through skin.
       Only Massey didn't die.
       The sin's path switched to another memory when Massey lay in a hospital, paralyzed. In a coma. It's where the client found out she had been mistaken about what her love had told her. Massey hadn't cheated. When Massey slipped away, everyone thought that the two of them had been perfect, loving, and trusting. The client let them believe it had been an accident. She soaked up their love and pity like it was sunlight. She drank their care down into the hole the sin had burned into her.
       Such a sin.
       Such a big sin.
       Henry felt her guilt like holes through the muscle of his heart, gaping and beating with jagged pain. He gurgled as the horror flowed down his throat, traveling into his gut, pulsing and twisting there with a life of its own.
       Every sin he ate took hours of his life. This one might take days.
       Every sin made his monster bigger and him smaller.
       When he stabilized, and the client woke, he sent her on her way, slightly confused but happier. Cleaner. He, however, felt played out. Nearly dead.
       He collapsed to the ground, though his monster caught him and lowered him. She wrapped around him, feeling as cold as all the deaths she'd transfused and as sharp as every lie and deceit she'd fed him. She'd been so small when he found her. That day when he was just five, he'd gotten mad at his mother and ran away. He slept that night in a graveyard. Just before dawn, he saw his monster as a beautiful woman tracing all the letters on a gravestone that said, "Dottie Schultz, beloved mother." Her misty fingers flew across the edges of the letters over and over, like she was carving each letter herself.
       "Hey, lady. Are you okay?" He'd been just a kid when she touched him, and he didn't know what he was. Her sin was the first he swallowed. She'd smothered her mother when she was sleeping. Her mother suffered so, and she'd ended it, but her sin kept her at the headstone, anchored to it. When he ate her sin, she latched onto his soul and took some of the pain, and it changed her as much as it changed him.
       That had been so long ago. They'd been constantly together since.
       His monster didn't have a name. She didn't want one. She ignored him when he tried to call her anything but monster.
       Yet, she held him, using the energy she had to keep his head off the ground as he lay in a pool of sweat, twitching around the pain of the sin he'd eaten.
       It got harder to recover every time he ate.
       "Monster," he whispered, "do you think we'll go to heaven together? I don't have too long. I can feel it. It hurts so bad."
       Henry said that every time.
       She nodded and rocked and let him cry into the misty folds of her cowl.
       He eventually stood up, washed his face, and put his hat on. He set the operating room back to rights and moved back through the reception. She was right behind him, long teeth in her gaping mouth dripping venom as she hung cold in the air above him. Walking down the steps and out onto the street, he ignored all the stares and gasps.
       They couldn't understand about his monster. About what they were to each other.
       She held him up.
       She cried with him every night.
       Her teeth were long and full of venom, but he thought she was beautiful.