Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Noa rippedthe man’s hand from her throbbing throat, coughing as she scrambled off his limp body. Dinah raced to where Noa lay and crouched down beside her. “You okay?”

Noa went to answer, but her eyes were fixed on the unconscious man. What the fuck was he? Her eyes drifted to the priest, to the remnants of what was left of him on the bed—just a mass of blood, bones and torn-up flesh. Then they moved onto the collar around her attacker’s neck. The thick, smooth metal seemed to have no seam.

He wears it all the time, she realized. He wears a collar …

“Noa, we need to go.” Dinah tried to pull Noa to her feet. But Noa was fixed on the man on the floor. She could still feel his hand around her neck. Her skin burned, but she knew the damage didn’t even come close to the scars that ringed his neck underneath his collar. His collar had shifted to expose red, raw, ruined skin underneath.

Just like …

Noa’s eyes burned, and she closed them to relieve the sting. The darkness took her back to a few years ago. To the only other time she had seen a scar like that, as severe as that, underneath a much less impressive collar. Her stomach rolled and her heart squeezed, guilt and shame plaguing her.

The smell of the blood of the slain priest on the bed only made the memory stronger. Blood had been on her hands that night too—it had been there ever since, no matter how much she tried to wash and scour it away. Rage and hatred had clouded her vision in that moment.

“Noa!” A hand gripped Noa’s face, and she opened her eyes. Dinah had pulled back her hood and lowered her scarf, exposing her face. “We need to leave.” Dinah glanced at the bed and the dead Brethren priest. “Beth and Naomi have got the kid. We need to move.”

Noa’s eyes found the man’s chest. Her heart started racing. “His chest.” She crawled forward until she was crouching beside him. He was coated in blood, but she knew what she was seeing. Noa ran her hand over her torso, over the pentagram … over the small upturned cross in the center of her chest. The brand that had been seared into her skin as a child. She reached out and lowered her hand to the man’s chest. She stopped breathing—the black body of the sword was rough underneath her fingers. His skin was ruined there.

“Saint Peter’s cross,” Noa whispered, then closed her eyes and traced the rough skin with her fingertips, searching for a familiar pattern. Her pulse thudded in her neck as her fingers found, underneath the inked wings-and-sword design, an upturned cross. She opened her eyes. “He wears the mark,” Noa said breathlessly and looked up at Dinah, who was regarding her Coven sister as if she were insane. Noa’s eyes widened. “He wears the Brethren’s heretic mark, just like us.”

Dinah looked at the man’s chest, and Noa saw her swallow in shock. Dinah quickly composed herself. “We have to leave, Noa. It’s too risky to have been here this long.”

Dinah got to her feet and took hold of the ledger they had found hidden in a safe behind a picture in the priest’s room. She placed it into a folded-up shoulder bag she had brought with her just in case they found anything of worth. And worthy it was. If they’d retrieved what they thought they had, they had just discovered a small section of the Holy Grail when it came to hunting these Brethren pricks. “We need to get this back to the tunnels. We need to make sure it’s kept safe. When they realize it’s gone, there’ll be hell to pay.”

Noa got to her feet, but they were as heavy as lead when she tried to go to the door. She cast her head back toward the man on the floor. He was huge. Tall and broad and stacked with taut muscles. But that collar, that scarred neck, that upturned cross on his chest …

“No,” Dinah said. “We can’t take him.” Noa looked at her sister, but the words slid off her as if she were made of Teflon. “He’s a fucking psycho, Noa. Did you see what he did to us? What he did to the priest? Do you remember that he tried to choke you the fuck out? And on top of all that, he wears what looks like an electric collar. A grown-ass man wearing a collar. I mean, what the fuck?”

“Get his arms,” Noa said, ignoring Dinah’s rant and reaching into her waist belt. She removed a needle that was filled with a drug that would keep him knocked out cold. Dinah shook her head in frustration, but when Noa glared at her, she cursed under her breath then grabbed his arms, slinging the bag containing the large ledger over her shoulder. Noa injected the drug into his arm, then stowed the empty needle in the pouch attached to her holster. She moved to his legs.

“We have a cage back home,” Noa said, feeling the disapproval that pulsed off Dinah. “I’ll keep him in there.”

“He’ll fucking kill us when he wakes,” Dinah said.

Noa stilled, and she stared at her sister until Dinah looked up at her. “He has the mark. He came to kill a Brethren priest, Dinah.” She let those words hang in the air between them until it grew heavy with their importance. “He’s like us.”

Dinah raised an eyebrow. “He’s far from being like us.”

“Is he?” Noa felt that dark stirring within her, that part of her she had fought hard to repress, worked hard to overcome.

Dinah sighed, and sympathy filled her face. Noa didn’t want to see it. “Help me move him to the van,” Noa said. “I’m taking him back with us. I want to speak to him. I want to know where he came from, who he is. I want to know why he has the brand and why he came for the priest. And why he wears that collar.”

Dinah focused on his neck. “A collar. He wears a fucking collar. Like a dog. And this one is fancy too. It’s electrical or some shit. High grade.”

“He’s not the first person we’ve seen with a collar though, is he?” A stab of pain cut right through Noa’s heart, rendering her breathless.

“Noa …” Dinah said softly, all tension dropping from her tone.

Noa cleared her throat and looked anywhere but at her sister. She focused on the man’s face again. Dark hair, blue eyes. Even drenched in blood, he was beautiful. He looked around the Coven’s general age, maybe a little older. “Let’s move him. He won’t be a danger to any of the others. I’ll make sure of it.” Noa lifted her head to face Dinah. “Let’s go.”

Dinah lifted the man’s arms off the ground, and they carried him unsteadily down the stairs and out into the van. Naomi’s and Beth’s eyes widened when Noa and Dinah reached the van’s back door.

“Who is that?” Beth asked, voice slightly high-pitched as she stared at the big, bloodied body. But she shifted on the bench seat to make room for Noa and Dinah as they hoisted his half-naked form into the van and laid it out on the floor.

“Long story,” Dinah said. “But he’s coming home with us.”

Noa jumped into the back and shut the doors, knocking on the wall of the van to signal to Candace to move on out. Bypassing what she knew would be the gaping faces of her other two sisters, Noa let her eyes fall on the five boys they had found, huddled in the farthest corner of the van.

She inhaled slowly through her nose as she took in the boys’ gaunt and lifeless faces. Then she stared at the crosses branded onto their chests. One of them turned and caught her gaze, showing he had some kind of life left in him. The others were numb, ruined and destroyed by what had been done to them for so long, completely unaware that they had been saved. The depravity, the cruelty, the incessant abuse by the Brethren had made them void of life, forced them to retreat to a place of numbness and detachment. The young boy’s eyes latched onto Noa. They were green, and even though his head was shaved, she could see a hint of red hair coming through on his scalp.

Noa forced herself to smile. The boy didn’t smile back, just stared at Noa, then finally moved his gaze to the man. He stared at the body, head tilting as he focused on the tattoo and the obvious brand in its center. The boy lifted his bony hand and ran it down his own chest, over his own upturned cross. He looked at the other boys beside him and the upturned crosses on their emaciated chests too.

“We are all like you,” Noa said, her quiet voice like a scream in the silence of the van. She laid her hand on her sternum, where her cross was too. The boy looked into Noa’s eyes, and she saw it. Her throat clogged with emotion when a spark of what appeared to be hope burst into his olive gaze. The boy then looked at the man, and a frown came onto his face.

“He’s okay, kid,” Dinah said, because Noa couldn’t speak. She was being crushed by a dangerous cocktail of rage and intense sorrow for what these kids had gone through at the hands of the Brethren bastards. “He just needed rest. He’ll be okay.” Dinah met Noa’s eyes, unspoken words passing between them. They didn’t know if he’d be okay. He was a killer, that was for sure. But Noa didn’t see the blood coating his body or think about the way he’d stabbed the Brethren priest. All she saw was the collar, the scars around his neck and the brand that had been seared onto his chest.

They had found one. They had finally found someone like them. Someone who had escaped the Brethren’s clutches too. He had to be like them. There was no other possibility.

Noa became lost to her thoughts, only waking from them when the van stopped and Jo got out of the cabin and opened the back doors. Jo’s eyes immediately fell on the man, and she blinked slowly. “Well, this is new,” she said. “Bit old to have been kept in a priest’s basement, isn’t he?” She raised her eyebrow. “Care to share your piece of muscled show-and-tell with the class?”

Candace rounded the van and stopped beside her girlfriend. She blinked in surprise, then looked at Noa, question in her gaze. “Long story,” Dinah said. She climbed out of the van and walked toward the house and Katie, who was opening the door and making her way toward them.

The middle-aged woman stopped when Dinah reached her. “How many this time?”

“Five,” Dinah said. Beth and Naomi started helping the boys from the van. They took the pile of blankets from the bench and wrapped one around each boy’s shoulders. Noa climbed out too, her gaze drifting to the home that had become the too-young Brethren victims’ salvation. In the top-floor windows, she saw several faces looking back at her. They all had longer hair now, had filled out, but despite their physical changes, she still recognized every one of them. Remembered exactly where they’d been found, and what had been done to them.

Noa smiled at them; very few smiled back. Her heart broke. Because although they were safe, these kids were forever haunted by the demons wearing red dog collars. Just as she and her sisters were.

Her gaze fell on the man in the van, still unconscious, breathing calmly. Was he haunted by them too?

“We have no more room,” Noa overheard Katie telling Dinah as Naomi, Beth, Candace and Jo walked the boys into the house. Katie smiled at each one as he passed. Her smile fell as soon as the boys had entered the house and could no longer hear the women’s conversation.

“We just got some more money,” Dinah said, hooking her thumb in Noa’s direction. “Noa managed to retrieve a huge amount this week.”

Katie sighed. “There’s no more room in the house,” she repeated. Her eyes filled with sorrow. The Coven had found Katie when they had begun hunting Brethren priests. She had been a housekeeper for one at his parish. He’d beaten her, abused her too, but she had stayed regardless. She had stayed to care for the boy she had discovered in the priest’s basement.

When the Coven had retrieved the boy, they had freed her too. But then the sisters had only found more and more victims. So Noa had started to steal from the Brethren’s secret benefactors, and they had secured Katie a house in the middle of nowhere. From that day on, her home became a safe place for the discovered Brethren-abused boys. But that had been a few years ago, and now, too many victims later, she was stretched too thin.

Katie sighed and rubbed her forehead. “I love all my boys. You know I do.” It was true. She was the most maternal person Noa had ever met, and the boys loved her too—in their own unique ways. “But there’s so many of them now, I’m struggling to cope with this alone.” She frowned. “And some of them are different. They like pain and …” Katie breathed deeply. “I’m not scared of them, but with some of the things they do, the dark things they say … I’m scared for them.” Sadness engulfed her face. “I think what has been done to them by those men has changed them, made them have preferences for the darker side of life.”

Noa looked back at the man in the van. She thought of the way he had killed the priest, how violently. How savagely he had knocked out Dinah, and how Noa had seen death in his blue eyes as he smiled and squeezed her throat.

Then her mind drifted to thoughts of Priscilla, the Coven’s seventh sister. Something sinister lived in her soul. Some kind of darkness that Noa knew she had inside herself too. But where Noa had fought to turn from it, to keep it locked away, Priscilla relished in it, bathed in its heaviness.

Noa recalled Katie’s words: I think what has been done to them by those men has changed them, made them have preferences for the darker side of life … That was Priscilla. That perfectly described her wayward sister.

“We’ll think of something,” Dinah said, pulling Noa from her chaotic thoughts, and hugged Katie. “I promise. We’ll save these boys. You know we will. We’ll never let those sadistic bastards win. We’ll find a way to help you all.”