Chapter 22

Chapter 22

Noa trudgedup the stairs in the manor, Diel at her back. Her muscles were weak and her spirit … it was broken. She followed her feet to Diel’s quarters and opened the door.

She kicked off her boots and stared at the early signs of dawn out of the window. The dusky blue sky was lightening into a deep pink. Noa felt Diel behind her, waiting. She knew he was waiting for an explanation. He was waiting to find out what had happened tonight. Why she broke from the phalanx for that boy.

Noa took a steadying breath, then slowly turned. Diel was sitting on the end of the bed, watching her. She checked him over. Dried blood clung to his leather clothes, but it was the slashes on his arms and legs she noticed most.

She went into the bathroom and retrieved supplies. She kneeled before him, drowning cotton balls in rubbing alcohol and pressing them onto the wounds. Diel didn’t even flinch at the sting; he was too busy watching her in silence, his blue eyes burning twin sapphires that desperately sought answers.

Noa’s heart raced. She felt small. She felt vulnerable. She didn’t like feeling vulnerable. But this was Diel.

She covered all of his wounds, then stood. Diel’s hands were immediately on her waist, his fingers gently rubbing her lower back. Her gaze fell to his neck scar. The scar made by his collar. The one he’d had in common with the young boy tonight. The one he’d had in common with …

“It happened a few years ago,” Noa said quietly, staring at nothing over Diel’s shoulder, unable to meet his eyes. If she did, she would fall apart. Her vision blurred as she was propelled back to the past. To the days when she had given herself over to the alluring darkness within. She had allowed rage and anger and bitterness to be the emotions that led her, that governed her every move. She had followed Priscilla into blackness, idolizing her older sister as if she were the Triple-Headed Goddess herself. Trying to be like her, joining her in her mission to rid the world of the priests who had destroyed them and their families.

“It was just another night of hunting the Brethren,” Noa said, her voice little more than a broken whisper. The fire in the hearth was unlit, and Diel’s bedroom felt cold and stale, oppressive. “As always, I joined Priscilla in the hunt for the priest. My sisters would look for the children in the homes we raided.” Noa remembered arriving at that godforsaken house. That fucking house of horrors.

A chill ran down her spine. It had been an old nineteenth-century house hidden from view—they were always out of sight, rural. It was large, built from oak wood and nightmares.

Noa inhaled a shaky breath. “We went in as usual. Dinah, Beth, Candace, Jo and Naomi looked for the child we knew would be inside. From her scouting missions, Priscilla had flagged that priest as being particularly devout to the Brethren cause, one to watch. One we had to break.” Diel’s hands tightened on Noa’s waist. He knew too well what that kind of dedication would have meant for the child in the priest’s home.

Noa shook her head, refocusing. She laid her hands on top of Diel’s. The warmth from his skin flooded into her body like an undercurrent of strength. “But when we went inside …” Noa’s voice quivered. “When we went inside, it was worse than anything we had ever seen.”

Noa could see the inside of that house as though she were standing in its doorway again. The house was clean, and furnished with elegant wooden furniture. But … “There were children in every single room,” she said, her head turning as if looking around the priest’s foyer. “They were tied to crosses, cut and bleeding, some starving because the priest believed they represented the deadly sin of gluttony. There were children whose faces had been mutilated beyond recognition by knives because he believed they had been vain.”

Noa felt it then; she felt the same wave of fury sweep through her that had engulfed her that day. The need to punish him for what he had done. The need to rip him apart for playing God and ruining the children’s lives.

“We hadn’t been out of the Circle too long at that point,” Noa said. “The tortures they’d inflicted on me and my sisters were still fresh in our minds. The final scars they had given us were still obvious on our bodies.”

Noa’s eyes shimmered. “If I was fury, then Priscilla was wrath incarnate. She had always been that way, but that night, seeing all those children, more than we could have ever expected, in worse condition than we could have ever dreamed up in our nightmares …”

Diel laid his forehead on her chest. She felt his breath ghosting over her shirt, feeling its comfort even through the leather.

“Darkness truly overcame me that night.” Noa saw herself so clearly in her mind’s eye. She saw the living demon she’d become. If revenge had ever had a physical form, that night, it would have been Noa. “And I snapped,” she said, breath hitching. “I searched for revenge … and in the end, it brought only pain.” Noa’s eyes closed, and whether she wanted it or not, she was thrust back to that night …

Noa gripped her knives at her sides, the metal vibrating with just how livid she was, with how much anger surged through her veins, potent as poison.

She watched Dinah and Candace pull down a boy from an upturned cross. Naomi pulled a child from a cage laced with razor blades, her efficient healer’s hands instantly going to work on the infected wounds the serrated blades had caused on his broken dark skin.

Noa felt Priscilla’s wrath from beside her, talons of hatred crawling over Noa’s flesh in search of an ally. Noa risked a glance up at her sister and almost swore there was fire blazing in her omniscient black eyes. But Priscilla didn’t look at Noa. She just grabbed her knives and said, “Find him.” Then Priscilla took off into the nearby rooms, searching for the priest who had done this to the children.

He would die tonight.

Noa cast one more look around the hallway, at the children, one after the other, that her sisters were retrieving from every hidden crevice in the old building. Dinah’s gaze drifted to Noa. Her eyes were filled with tears of despair and disbelief.

And it had been the thing to make Noa break.

Noa broke into a run. With her hood in place and her scarf covering her face, she climbed the stairs, turning right when she hit the landing. She kicked open door after door. Wide, sunken eyes of abused children looked blankly back at her. They had been drained of life, of hope, veritable zombies, existing but not living. That only fueled Noa’s inner fire further. Poured more gasoline onto it until it was an unstoppable bonfire of anger and rage and the need for blood.

Noa left those rooms, knowing the children would be rescued by her sisters soon enough. She had a priest to find. She had a priest to kill.

She couldn’t stop.

She moved from room to room, every step making her burn hotter and hotter, until she reached the attic. The minute she stepped inside the dusty, dark room, she sensed that he was in there, hiding like the piece of shit he was. Noa’s footsteps weren’t silent or subdued. She was as loud as thunder; she wanted the priest to know that she was coming for him. That her footsteps were a countdown to his demise.

Then, Noa heard the sound of clanging metal coming from her right. She swerved, and her eyes fell onto a boy tied to the wall by a chain, a thick, tight metal collar around his neck. Noa’s heart dropped to the pits of hell as she looked at him. His small body was just skin hanging off bone, with bruises covering every inch. He was filthy, hair matted and greasy. But it was his eyes that obliterated her heart completely. They were wide, and brimming with so much pain and hurt that Noa could physically feel it in her chest. But they were also eyes that promised pain and savagery if she even took a step toward him. It was as if he hadn’t any remaining humanity in his soul.

He began to pace on all fours, on his callused palms and soles. Back and forth, again and again, along the tiny patch of floor the short chain allowed him. He growled at Noa as if he didn’t even know how to speak. Cold settled into the marrow of her bones.

He had been raised like this, she realized. Raised without a glimmer of positive attention, raised as a nothing more than an animal, a beast. A monster ripped straight from children’s nightmares.

Noa choked on a sudden and crippling wave of sadness. She held out her hands and took a small step forward, trying her best to be non-threatening. But the boy just paced faster, growled at her again, his pupils dilated, his body poised to strike, to attack, to kill.

Just before she reached him, Noa caught a flash of black out of the corner of her eye. She turned, and the priest froze, instantly captured in Noa’s snare. Anger swept through her like a tidal wave, eliminating anything in its path. And she charged. With a guttural roar, Noa knocked the priest to the floor. She punched and pummeled him with all her strength, over and over again, for what he had done to the children on the lower floors.

Noa absently heard the boy in chains going berserk behind her, noises of distress echoing in the back of her brain, alarm bells trying to break through her fog of hatred, but nothing could. Noa was lost to bloodlust. Years and years of rage for what had been done to her, her sisters, the children, so many fucking children, poured out of her and sought revenge through her blades. So, she stabbed the priest. She stabbed and stabbed and didn’t stop until he was nothing but fragments of bone and flesh underneath her.

Still, it wasn’t enough. She shook, needing to kill again, needing to push all of her pent-up rage into one of the Brethren. She needed to fucking wipe them out so that people who were different would no longer be punished in their fucked-up, sadistic world.

“Noa!” Noa could hear her name being called, but she couldn’t stop stabbing. The darkness controlled her, became the entirety of who she was. “Noa!” The sound of her name off familiar lips tried to penetrate through her blood-spattered shield. But she deflected it. She ignored it until someone wrapped their arms around her and physically yanked her off the priest.

She was pinned to the floor, wrists fixed over her head by firm fingers. Noa jerked her body, trying to throw whoever it was off her, but they held firm. “Noa. Stop!” the voice said, and Noa’s heart began to slow; the rage in her veins began to lessen. She was breathless, sweating, and she could smell the metallic scent of blood all around her—in her hair, on her skin, on her lips.

“Calm down, sister,” Noa heard, and she blinked, clearing her tunnel vision until she saw Dinah above her. Noa focused on her sister’s deep brown gaze and allowed Dinah’s steady breaths to be her guide. Dinah nodded, silently telling Noa she was coming back into herself.

Then Noa turned her head, and she froze. With her next breath, she bucked Dinah from her and scrambled across the attic floor to the boy in the collar and chain.

He wasn’t moving.

“No,” Noa whispered, devastation sweeping though her, gutting her where she sat. She wrapped her arms around the boy’s still, frail body and brought him to her chest. She pulled her scarf from her face and yanked back her hood—she needed air; she needed to see him unguarded. “Please,” she whispered, holding his pale cheeks in her bloody hands. She turned his face toward hers … and his eyes were wide open, lifelessly staring back at her.

“No,” Noa whispered again. She lowered her mouth to his, trying to breathe air into his lungs. She laid him on the floor, pumping at his heart with her hands. “Please!” she cried louder, but his chest didn’t rise on its own; no breath was taken. “Please!” Her voice cracked. She tried and tried to administer CPR, but when she sat back, she saw there was no life left in the small boy. His eyes had glazed with the heavy veil of death, and his skinny limbs were turning cold.

“No …” she hushed out, seeing the tight, unforgiving collar around his neck. She caught glimpses of the brutal red scar underneath … and then she understood. While she had killed the priest, while she had stabbed, unleashed hell and made the priest pay for his fucked-up crimes, the boy had choked himself on that collar. He had fought his restraints in so much distress that he had strangled himself just trying to get free …

… and Noa hadn’t heard him. Too furious, too deep in her bloodlust, she hadn’t heard him fighting, hadn’t heard him strangling himself. She hadn’t heard him die.

A sob escaped Noa’s throat as she pulled his lifeless frame into her arms again, and the next thing she knew they were both in Dinah’s arms. Dinah rocked her back and forth. “Shh,” she soothed. “It wasn’t your fault.” But Noa knew that wasn’t true. It had been her anger that had killed the boy. It had been the darkness that lived within her, the bitterness, the hatred.

She had killed the boy.

He had never known kindness. Not in his entire life. And now he never would.

The rest of Noa’s sisters rushed into the attic. Their shoulders sagged when they saw the boy lying limply in Noa’s arms. Priscilla walked though last, looking first at the dead priest, then the boy, he too slain by Noa’s wicked hands.

“I killed him,” Noa said to Priscilla, and the tears poured. Something settled in Priscilla’s onyx eyes right then, something that made Noa’s gut squeeze in dread.

The guilt and shame were evident in Noa’s broken cries. All the time, Dinah held her, caring for her and loving her unconditionally. Then for the days and months afterwards, Dinah held her when she fell apart, when she didn’t sleep for fear of what her nightmares would show her.

That night, Noa had failed to control the darkness. And in turn, she had failed that little boy. The frail, lost boy in a collar and chains. The one she failed to free. She vowed never to fail again …

Hot tears tracked down Noa’s cheeks. Her chest ached with the guilt that had weighed heavily on her heart ever since. Her voice was raspy and hoarse from too much emotion. She took a deep breath, then looked down at Diel. His hands had been wrapped tightly around hers as she’d shared her story, purged her biggest sin from her fractured soul. Right now, he was looking up at her, holding her hands just as tightly as ever.

Noa was waywardly struck by his excessive beauty. She was sure there wasn’t a more handsome man in the universe. The Triple-Headed Goddess, Mother Earth herself, had made Diel solely for her. She parted her lips, gaze falling to the red scar around his neck, and whispered, “That night when you came for the priest, when I first saw you and that damn collar around your neck …” She swallowed the lump that was bobbing in her throat. “I saw you in that collar. Saw the monster, that livid being within you shining through so easily for me to identify.” She shook her head. “And I was taken straight back to that night with the nameless little boy.”

She leaned down and pressed her forehead to Diel’s. “I had to free you. As soon as I saw you, in that house to kill the priest, that collar around your neck, I knew the Brethren had done something to you too. I knew they had hurt you somehow, just as they had the boy, and me and my sisters. I knew you were there for retribution.”

Diel turned his head and laid soft kisses on Noa’s cheeks. Her legs almost buckled from the sweet, affectionate touch. She’d thought he would be angry with her. She’d thought he might push her away for letting an innocent die.

She placed her hand on his cheek and guided his eyes up to meet hers. The need for further confession burned in her soul. “I had to free you from that collar,” she said, quietly, but full of truth. “You were formidable. You were strong, tough, and a killer in the very best of ways.” Noa dropped to her knees, meeting him face to face. “But you were trapped by the collar. Plagued by a symbol of what they had done to you. The chains they had imprisoned you with. You were denying who you truly were, and I couldn’t bear to see it.” She shook her head. “I was selfish. That wasn’t my decision to make. But—”

“You saved me,” Diel said softly. Noa choked on a silent sob. Her heart began to beat harder, faster … but contentedly. “You saved me, Noa.” He kissed her cheeks, then laid a soft kiss to her lips. They were trembling. She was emotionally exposed and vulnerable. But Diel wouldn’t hurt her. He cherished her, cared for her.

He loved her.

“That boy tonight, when I saw him struggle on the plinth, when I saw him fall …”

“You were back there,” Diel said. Noa nodded. He kissed her again, then said against her lips, “I was back there too. Back in that shack with my neglectful mother and her drunk boyfriend. I was weak and too young to save Cara or myself from the Brethren who preyed on us.” Noa blinked away her tears. But they fell harder when Diel whispered brokenly, “Why do they do this to us?” His face was devastated. It screamed hopelessness. “Why do they hurt us, people like us?”

“Because despite what their fucked-up little sect teaches them, they’re not the good guys,” Noa said, her voice gaining strength. She would be Diel’s fiercest protector when he was weakened. And she knew he would be hers.

Noa stared into his bright blue eyes. They were filled with sadness. “You followed me,” she said, running her hands over his stubble. “You broke from your brothers, my sisters, and you followed me to the boy. You helped me save him.”

Diel inched closer, brow pressed to her brow, slightly shaking hands on her jaw. “I would follow you anywhere,” he rasped. “To hell.”

Noa shattered apart. She felt Diel’s unshakable devotion, his love, wrap around her, cocooning her in a light she had only known as a child, as a Wiccan … as the witch she was destined to be.

Noa tucked her head into the crook of Diel’s shoulder and neck, and she cried. She cried and she cried, and she exorcised all the guilt she still retained over the boy who had died in that attic. She cried for her grandma and her family that she had so tragically lost. And she cried for Diel. She cried for little Finn Nolan. She cried for the monster that he’d had to conjure from his own soul to protect himself, to bear the brunt of the pain inflicted on him by evil men.

And she cried for Diel now, Jegudiel, the Fallen’s death-greedy monster. She cried for the grown man who had only just remembered he had a sister. A sister they had no location for.

Noa loved him. She loved him with every cell in her body. She knew the elements, how each one added to the great mystery of life. Diel was her sixth element. She needed him just as much as she needed the rest, arguably more.

Diel lifted Noa to the bed. There was not a single sound but their deep breaths as Diel carefully, and so beautifully, shed their clothes. He moved above her and sank inside her, filling her inch by inch, parted lips, shuttered eyes and roaming hands. And as he brought Noa the highest pleasure, following her over that heartbreaking precipice seconds later, Diel kissed her lips.

He kissed her tenderly and gently, then reared back his head to look her straight in the eyes. “You are charity.” Noa’s lungs stopped working. “You give and give just to save the ones you love.” His eyes shone with emotion. “And those you don’t even know.” The boys. He meant the boy in the attic and the one from the Brethren meeting tonight.

Diel entwined his fingers with hers, bringing their joined hands to lie over her chest. “You saved me. You didn’t know me either. You knew I could hurt you. Could maybe even kill you. Yet you still saved me from that collar. You freed the monster inside me.” His breathing hitched. “You freed the little boy inside me.”

A stray tear fled from the corner of Diel’s eye, and it broke Noa’s heart. “Finn Nolan created that monster to shield himself. Then you came along, a white witch from a coven of fucking warriors, and rescued us both.” Diel’s lips trembled, and Noa began to cry again at how open he was being, at what being freed from his collar had truly meant to him. “You gave me back my past. You gave me back memories of my sister.” Diel blinked the tears from his long black lashes. “You gave me back me.”

“I love you,” Noa said, feeling a seismic shift within her, a crevice that had split around her heavily defended heart, allowing Diel inside. She was his home, and he was hers. His brothers were now hers, and her sisters were now his.

Noa released one of her hands from his and placed it on his cheek. He turned and kissed her palm as if he needed to kiss her and never stop. Noa waited until his attention was focused back on her. “I swear I’ll get your sister back to you too. You won’t just have memories of her any longer.”

Diel exhaled a stuttered breath. “We can all get her back. As a family.” The way he said “family,” as if he had always craved it, as if it had always been the thing he wished for in his prayers each night, destroyed whatever was left of her heart.

Noa nodded and kissed him, showing him without words that he was her entire world. But all the time her mind raced with thoughts of how to get Cara back. And where to even begin.

She pulled back. “Let’s shower and then join your brothers downstairs in the dungeon.” She took one last kiss from Diel. “We have someone in our home who can give us answers.” Noa squeezed his hand, a bloodthirsty smirk etching onto her lips. “Let’s go find out what happened to your sister.”