Dying for Mercy with Bonus Material Read Online Free PDF Page B

but what on earth was he doing in there?

CHAPTER 13

    I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.”
    Innis heard the saint’s words over and over in his head.
    “I have been all things unholy.”
    He picked up the knife and gripped the handle. He held it for a moment and closed his eyes, trying to summon the courage.
    “I have been all things unholy.”
    He had to do this. He couldn’t think of another way to repent, to make things right. Innis was sorry about the things that were going to come out, sorry to reveal such grave sins—and who had committed them. And he didn’t feel right about what Valentina was going to have to face.
    It couldn’t be helped.
    He could have left a written account of everything that had happened, laying the whole sordid story out at once. Instead, Innis had chosen a puzzle as his method. As each part of the puzzle was revealed, a little at a time, each guilty party would have a chance to come forward, confess, and repent.
    “If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.”
    He wouldn’t exit this world without leaving a record of all that had happened. What transpired after his death was in God’s hands and he hoped Eliza Blake would be the instrument used to make things right.
     

    As the blood oozed bright red against his pale flesh, Innis knew he wasn’t part of the select group of holy men and women who had been chosen by God, the ones who had experienced the mystical appearance of the wounds. There had been over sixty of them, St. Francis being the first, with no logical explanation for the angry tears in their skin at the carefully chosen spots on their bodies.
    Innis wasn’t like them. There was nothing mystical about what was happening to him. He was doing it to himself.
    He had read that the fluid that flowed from their cuts and punctures might not have been blood, but Innis was certain that it was blood leaking first from one foot, then from the other as he plunged the hunting knife into his extremities. He cried out with pain that shot through his mutilated body. Perspiration dripped from his brow and tears seeped down his cheeks.
    Innis heard himself groaning loudly again as the knife he held pierced his left palm. He forced himself to repeat the process on his right hand.
    “Dear God, dear God, help me,” he prayed. “Help me get through this. I need your help, Lord, to make things right.”
    Switching grips again, and breathing heavily, Innis took the knife and leaned over awkwardly. He had practiced getting into position before, but it was a much different situation when both hands were bleeding and throbbing. Innis reached around and found a spot between his ribs on the left side of his body and pushed the knife through.
    As he lay on the ground in the greenhouse, life draining from him, Innis wondered if St. Francis had felt this way when he had experienced the stigmata. Did the unexplained marks corresponding to the wounds of Christ that had appeared on the saint’s body six years before he actually died hurt as much as the ones Innis had inflicted on himself in the very same places?

CHAPTER 14

    E liza was standing by the fireplace admiring the beautiful carvings that decorated it when she heard the clock on the mantel begin to chime. She glanced at the Roman numerals edging the face. Ten o’clock.
    She was ready to go home.
    As she tried to find her hosts to thank them for a lovely evening, Eliza was stopped several times by people who complimented her on her work on KEY to America.
    “If the percentage of people at this party who say they watch our broadcast was representative of viewers nationwide, we’d have nothing to worry about with the ratings,” she told them, laughing.
    “But I really do watch your program,” insisted a diminutive woman with steel gray hair arranged in a classic chignon style. She wore a simple navy dress with a vintage Hermès scarf tied loosely at the neck and sensible