Candace and Jo took up the front seats, Candace driving. Noa and the others sat in the back. The van was silent as they drove the thirty minutes to the first home. When they arrived, the house was in pitch black, secluded and perfect for a retrieval. Dinah met Noa’s eyes and nodded.
They climbed out of the van and rushed through the shadows toward the house. Candace and Jo stayed behind, as was their role, and Noa, Dinah, Naomi and Beth moved to the back door. Dinah checked for alarms—there were none. Noa reached into her pocket and pulled out a needle. In seconds, the lock broke and they all piled in, silent as night itself. Noa and Dinah broke away from Naomi and Beth. The former pair ran upstairs to the priest’s bedroom, the latter to the cellar where the Brethren tended to hold their victims.
As Noa silently entered the bedroom, her lip curled in disgust at seeing the priest on the bed, asleep, his peaceful slumber not disturbed one bit by the fact that he loved to abuse and fuck up kids’ lives.
Noa felt her anger rise. Reining it back in, she took the gag from her back pocket and kneeled on the bed. At the movement of the mattress, the priest’s eyes flew open, then widened when he saw Noa hovering over him.
Before he could even open his mouth to scream, she tied the gag over his mouth, taking sick enjoyment from the terror that took over his expression as he drank in her hood and her half-covered face. But Noa met his eyes straight on—she wanted him to look into the eyes of one of the sisters who knew he existed, who knew who he really was and what fucked-up sect he belonged to.
The priest began to struggle as Dinah tied his ankles together with cable ties. Noa moved to his hands, which reached up to try to remove her face covering. But before he could, Noa whipped the back of her hand across his face, silently screaming glory when blood spilled from his lip and seeped through the gag.
The priest’s eyes turned from fearful to livid in a flash. This was the man Noa was used to seeing on nights like this. The arrogance of the Brethren priests. The belief that they were above anyone else, especially women.
The priest bucked, trying to throw Noa and Dinah from his bed. But Noa reached for the taser on her belt, pressing it against the priest’s throat and sending a mass of volts right into his neck. His eyes rolled and his body went limp underneath her.
Her heart sang.
“Let’s move,” Dinah said, but Noa just stared down at the priest, frozen with rage. “Noa!” Dinah said, harshly enough to rip Noa from her murderous thoughts. Her hands itched to smother his mouth, so he couldn’t hurt anyone else, but the haunting shadow of her past creeped up her spine and dampened that craving. A gentle hand on her shoulder chased the chill of hatred from her bones and soothed it with light. “We have to go,” Dinah said, clearly sensing where Noa’s mind had gone.
Noa inhaled deeply, then dipped her thumb into the priest’s blood and used it to write an “H” on his forehead, an echo of an insult given to her and her sisters for too many years by men just like him. If anyone in the world were heretics, it was the Brethren.
Liars. Murderers. Tormentors, every one of them.
Noa wiped the blood on the priest’s bed linen, then quickly left the room behind Dinah. She went out of the house and into the waiting van. The second the doors were closed, Noa saw the small boy beside Beth, no more than ten, looking half dead with an upturned cross seared into his skeletal bare torso. He wore no shoes, and ragged white pants over his too-thin legs. His hair was shorn, and his skin was pale and marked with too many scars and cuts to count. His lifeless brown eyes stared at nothing, face sunken, lips chapped, and his cheekbones were razor sharp. Noa wasn’t even sure if he realized he had just been freed from the demon who paraded as a priest in the nearby house of horrors.
It wasn’t the first time she had seen a victim this numb, this removed from real life. In fact, it was more normal than not. The haunting shadow from her past wrapped itself around her again—Noa could hear the rabid fury of that little boy, the savage growls that had ripped from his mouth as she had focused on the Brethren priest. Her stomach sank, and she briefly closed her eyes. She couldn’t go back there right now, couldn’t plunge herself into that raging fire of guilt and shame.
She was a different person now. She was on a new path. Although in her gut, in the deepest part of her soul, she knew that no matter how many of these young boys and girls she saved, nothing would erase that night, the young boy’s glazed eyes, or the regret that had since congealed in her heart.
Noa opened her eyes, away from the boy, and refocused on the task at hand. They had other homes to hit tonight and more victims to save. They had to move quickly; she and her sisters knew only too well how cunning the Brethren were, how efficiently their network worked.
So Noa kept her face forward and prepared for the next house attack, letting the Coven’s purpose fill her every cell.
Chapter 3
Diel’s foot tapped an erratic beat on the van’s floor. His body vibrated with excitement for what awaited him. He loved this moment best. He fought so hard to keep back the monster each day. It was exhausting. Day by day, minute by minute, always fighting to chase away the dark control it wanted to exert until it was all that Diel would be.
He fought it for his brothers. He did it for Gabriel. But this moment, right now, when the monster was pacing, readying to be freed, to kill, to sate its constant bloodlust, was what Diel lived for. The blissful moment when Gabe turned off the collar and Diel gave himself over to the darkness—no pain, no fight, no guilt, just the hedonistic abandon of any good that remained hidden inside his body. He knew Gabriel had his back, and he could abandon the fight, the struggle, and just sink into evil.
There were no windows in the back of the van. Gabriel sat in the passenger seat as Winston, the manor’s driver, drove them to the first house.
Diel’s lip curled and he fought back a snarl at the thought of the house. Of who lived inside. One of the Brethren. Gabriel had finally set their sights on the Brethren. Diel closed his eyes and thought back to Maria and Gabriel gathering the brothers and informing them things were about to change.
Diel’s head twitched as he sat at the dining table. Sela sat beside him, twirling a drawing pencil in his hands. Bara and Uriel sat in front of Diel, Bara smirking at Gabriel and Maria as they took up their position at the head of the table.
They both stood, while the rest of the brothers sat. Michael and Raphael walked into the room last. Michael sat down, casually sipping on a glass of blood, his lips stained a deep crimson. Raphael moved to Maria, and Diel’s eyes were fixed on them as Raphael wrapped his hand over the front of her throat and pressed his lips to hers. Maria’s eyes closed, and a small moan left her mouth.
Diel tipped his head to the side as he wondered what that would be like. To want someone like that. Diel’s only love was of killing, of stabbing, of choking and ripping people apart. He had never experienced any kind of romantic love.
Diel was in his twenties and had never even been kissed. He had never even looked at a woman the way Raphael looked at Maria. He had asked Raphael once what it was like to fuck. Raphael was a lust killer and had fucked a woman on his very first kill. His brother needed it, was controlled by it. As Raphael had described it, it had been nothing that Diel craved. No one had ever captured his attention enough to want to fuck their pussy. His monster had seen the very few women he had ever encountered as weak and a waste of his time. He had no time for someone who would cower whenever he was close.