by Cole, Tillie
“We’re meant to destroy them,” Bara said. Uriel nodded in agreement with his best friend. “We escaped Purgatory to kill them. I know it. And I know you do too, Angel.”
Gabriel sighed, shutting down the topic, then looked back at Diel. “Are you okay now? Are you calmer?” Diel gave him a curt nod, but it was a temporary peace between him and his monster; everyone in the gym knew that. Gabriel knew that most of all. Despite the collar’s current effectiveness, Diel understood that the monster’s need to kill was only growing stronger—the need to kill the Brethren, to finally claim the ones who’d hurt them, who still lived in the world, free and unpunished. Diel was a ticking time bomb. He knew Gabriel understood that too by the obvious worry in his blue eyes.
The Brethren were going to die by Diel’s hands, sanctioned by Gabriel or not.
* * *
Gabriel sat staring into the fire. The grandfather clock ticked a hypnotizing rhythm beside him. The room was in complete darkness but for the orange flames that climbed up the chimney in front of him. He was dressed back in his clerical suit, showered and shaved after the nightmare that the gym session had become.
Gabriel had thought letting Diel exorcise his frustrations would help; instead, it seemed to have had the opposite effect. Gabriel knew his brothers. He knew their every emotion, knew how to read them better than they could read themselves.
And Diel was breaking.
The night they saved Maria from the Brethren had set off a chain reaction in Diel that Gabriel had no way of stopping. All that they had built at Eden Manor since their breakout from Purgatory as teens was crumbling to ruins, and Gabriel could feel his soul breaking too, his tight hold on his brothers’ salvation slipping away like sand through his fingers.
Gabriel had seen his brothers the night they’d confronted the Brethren. He’d seen the elation on their faces as they’d torn down their tormentors in cold blood, as they’d looked the men straight in the eyes as they ripped them apart, as they’d attacked their abusers, living and breathing their reckoning as they simultaneously sated their darkest desires.
And Gabriel had been guilty of that too. The flames before him taunted him, swaying as they climbed from the hearth. They danced seductively, mocking him for his own sin. His moment of wickedness when faced with his old guardians.
Gabriel closed his eyes and saw Father Quinn on the floor of Purgatory, looking up at him as if Gabriel was nothing but filth. And in that second, Gabriel had been weak. In that moment, with gasoline poured all around the underground building that was riddled with abuse, Gabriel had met the old priest’s eyes and lit the match that let that underground prison burn.
Along with Father Quinn.
Gabriel shifted, feeling the cilice around his thigh bite into his flesh, just as the door to his office opened. He looked up, and Maria walked through. She crossed the room and switched on the two tall lamps, bathing the office in light. She moved silently to the liquor table and poured out two glasses of brandy, then came to the fire and handed Gabriel a glass.
“Thank you,” Gabriel said as Maria sat in the chair opposite him. She was dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt. Her hair was down, falling to the backs of her thighs. Gabriel knew she would never cut that hair. It was hair that Raphael obsessed over, had broken all of the Fallen’s strict rules to own.
“Has he told you?” Gabriel took a soothing sip of the brandy, praying it would bring him some reprieve from the headache that was pounding at the back of his skull.
Maria sat back in the armchair, and Gabriel finally met her eyes. She nodded. Raphael had told her what happened in the gym. And he had no doubt told her what his brothers had asked of Gabriel.
Maria leaned forward. “How is your neck?”
Instinctively, Gabriel raised his hand to his dog collar and the bruise that was burgeoning underneath. He recalled Diel’s face as he’d slammed Gabriel against the gym wall. As he’d wrapped his hands around Gabriel’s neck and started to squeeze. In that moment, Gabriel had witnessed the evil in Diel’s eyes. He had come face to face with the monster that Diel said lived inside of him, the one that his victims would see as they fought for their final breaths. The blue in Diel’s eyes had been eradicated, blackened by his dilated pupils. His teeth had been gritted, and Gabriel didn’t know if Diel knew it, but he had chanted a name over and over again.
Brady … Brady … Brady …
In his head, Diel had been in Purgatory. He wasn’t killing Gabriel; he was killing one of the Brethren priests.
“Gabriel?” Maria’s voice tore him from the haunting memory. “Are you okay?”
Gabriel stared at her. He thought about how Raphael was with her now. He always held her hand at dinner, always stared at her whenever they were together, as though he couldn’t believe that she was with him, as though she was the prize for enduring all those years of hell.
Gabriel recalled when she had been smuggled into Eden Manor. As soon as she’d been discovered, Gabriel had known she would die. And Maria had. Just not in the way he’d believed. Her life as a nun had come to an end; her life of seclusion and prayer had been replaced with one as Raphael’s soulmate and only love. Raphael, Gabriel’s brother and a born killer, had found someone who loved him for exactly who he was. Maria’s old purpose was discarded, and she had been resurrected as Gabriel’s right-hand woman, someone to share the burden of being the Fallen’s leader.
“They want the Brethren.” Gabriel downed the rest of the brandy.
Maria sighed, then moved to the wall where they planned who would be the next target for the brothers. But then she went to the smaller section of the wall, where Gabriel had compiled a small list of Brethren he knew were still alive—names, parishes and where they lived. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had been able to gather. Gabriel had made sure he and his brothers were wiped from the map for the sake of their safety; the Brethren had clearly done the same. There were thousands of priests in Boston alone. He had no idea how many of them subscribed to the Brethren’s teachings.
“You and I both know this isn’t the sum total of how many Brethren are out there,” Maria said, folding her arms across her chest.
Gabriel rose from the chair and stood beside her. Maria was petite, yet somehow she had managed to contend with Raphael’s lust for her death with the strength of David facing Goliath.
He looked at the grainy pictures of the five priests on the wall. “How would Raphael kill them now he has you? His …” He paused, carefully thinking of how to phrase what he wanted to say. “His preferences are very specific.” Raphael was a lust killer. He had always gained sexual gratification as he killed his victims, had often been inside them as their hearts ceased to beat.
Maria stilled, but then explained, “The strangulation is enough for him now.” She cleared her throat, and her cheeks blazed. “He has me for the rest. To fulfill the rest of his … needs that come with his kills … afterward …”
Gabriel closed his eyes and breathed slowly. He didn’t know what that entailed. But he knew Sela had designed and crafted a coffin for Maria, a coffin Raphael kept in their room. And he knew that Maria often lay inside it for Raphael’s pleasure.
Gabriel would never forgive himself for allowing Maria to be brought into this life, for not freeing her from Raphael when he had the chance. Yet, at the same time, he could see the intense, all-consuming love she had for Raphael in her every breath, her every move. He could see how happy she was. The way she looked at Raphael, the way he looked at her as if being with her was like touching heaven itself. In truth, Gabriel envied them, despite his lack of understanding of how they had found their way to love when they were so different, both morally and spiritually.
An ache broke out in his chest. In his entire life he hadn’t experienced anything like that kind of love. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like … to have someone who loved him with that kind of fierceness, that kind of understanding and unwavering faith. His mind drifted to Michae
l, and he felt warmth in his chest as he remembered how Michael had bitten Diel to get him off Gabriel. He had pushed Gabriel behind him to protect him. Michael rarely showed any emotion over anything but blood and the thought of exsanguination. He certainly didn’t speak to Gabriel like a normal brother. He never had done. But Gabriel fought a small smile when he remembered just how fiercely Michael had hovered over Diel when he’d been lost to his dark thoughts. Gabriel may not have had eros, a love in his life like Maria and Raphael did, but he had his family, and for him, that would be enough.
Maria sighed, pulling his attention back to her. “You know I believe I was meant to be here, Gabe. You are a man of faith just as much as I am a woman of it. We both believe the world works in ways we will never understand—mysterious and magical.”
She turned to face him, putting her hand on his arm. “I believe that all of it—my family’s deaths, my kidnapping, my rescue, my training as a nun, meeting Father Quinn and Father Murray …” Maria laughed and lifted a strand of her long hair. “Even this hair. It all led me to Raphael. Without any one of those things, we would have been ships passing in the night.” She squeezed Gabriel’s arm. “All of that, it led me to help you. To share this burden.”
Maria approached the wall. She lifted a finger and ran it over the pictures of the priests they knew were definitely part of the Brethren sect. Gabriel saw her become lost in thought, then she said, “Have you ever entertained the notion that Raphael, Diel and the others were saved, you were saved, to rid the world of this evil?” She pointed to the small list of names before her.
Gabriel stilled. A shard of ice trickled down his spine. He’d only ever felt that feeling a few times before. When he’d finally accepted what Michael really was, when he’d found that Purgatory was real, and when the true colors of his much-adored priest, Father Quinn, had been revealed. A feeling like his soul was shifting, leaning in another direction.
“The Bible has numerous examples of people being sent down a path by the divine to free people from enslavement, to rid the world of evil, to put right what has been wronged.” Maria shrugged. “Have you ever considered the idea that we were spared so we could rid the world of the Brethren, pretender priests who do nothing but bring pain and sin, polluting people’s trust and faith? That everything you have been put through was for this? For this very task? This moment?” She smiled fondly.
Gabriel and Maria had become close friends, no, more like brother and sister. “Your namesake, the archangel Gabriel, was a guardian, a protector of his people.” She nodded at him. “If those qualities don’t pertain to you, I don’t know what does.”
“Maria.” Gabriel rubbed his hand across his forehead. But her words had had the desired effect. A wave of peace and knowing washed through him. He did believe that things happened for a reason, he always had. He had always trusted his gut feelings as confirmation of something coming his way, of something big and poignant approaching. Right now, his gut was screaming at him to listen to Maria, to Diel, to all his brothers.
He had to trust in his family.
Gabriel looked at the wall, at the priests he had trusted implicitly as a child only to be hurt by them in ways no child—no person, regardless of age—should be hurt by another. “It would be a war, a holy war, that we’d be starting.”
“We haven’t started it, Gabe,” Maria said with conviction. “The Brethren started this the minute they swayed from the church, from the rightful path onto one of evil and sin.”
Gabriel knew she was right. But … “It might expose us. It might lead them straight to our door. Are we even ready for that?” His temple throbbed at the thought of anything happening to his brothers, or to Maria, or to the staff that resided in the manor.
“Not if we’re careful. Just because our gears are changing, it doesn’t mean that we need to falter on the secrecy that has protected us thus far.”
He narrowed his eyes. “You’re completely sold on this, aren’t you? I can hear the conviction in your voice.”
Maria leaned back against the edge of the table behind her. Her head fell forward in contemplation, and when she lifted it, her eyes were shining. “When I hear what they did to you all …” She swallowed back her emotion, her voice cracking. “When Raphe talks to me, about back then, what you all went through …” She looked away, and when she turned back, tear marks stained her cheeks. “When I see his scars and the brand that they forced upon him, when he wakes in the night desperately searching for me because another memory from his childhood has come back to haunt him, to plague him, to tear him apart …”
Maria sadness was replaced by a swift wave of anger. Gabriel felt as if a hole was caving in his chest at what she was saying about Raphael, about them all. “The Brethren need to be stopped,” Maria said firmly. “They need to be destroyed.” She smirked. “And you have a legion of so-called fallen angels who not only desire this war you speak of, but are capable of winning it.” She pushed away from the table, shoulders strong and chin held high. “I, for one, cannot live with the thought of this sadistic cult of delusional priests hurting anyone else. Any more children.” Maria looked Gabriel dead in the eyes. “Can you?”
Gabriel thought back to the gym, to how his brothers had fought Diel. They’d all risked their lives to try to save him from the darkness that was smothering him, rising day by day inside him. Even though Gabriel’s plan to exorcise the monster had failed, his brothers had still expressed their need to go after the Brethren along with Diel—always each other’s champions, always each other’s fiercest protectors.
Gabriel had had a system in place for years, one adopted from his serial-killer grandfather. That system that had served them well up until now. But the wind the Fallen sailed on was changing and setting them all on a new course, one he prayed was divinely sent and not one that would ultimately lead to their damnation.
Gabriel stood beside Maria, his headache instantly easing as his decision was made.
“How do we do this?”
Maria smiled wide. “I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out.”
So they got to work.
Chapter 2
Noa ran stealthily through the hallway, her feet light as feathers on the plush red carpet as she aimed for the window in the fifth spare room on the second floor. The ice-cold wind drifted in as she turned into the room and climbed out of the open window. Holding the information tightly in her hand, she climbed onto a nearby tree branch and shimmied to the ground. Her long pastel-pink hair was hidden beneath the black hood and attached scarf that covered her head and most of her face. Only her brown eyes could be seen, the leather pants and long-sleeved top making her completely unidentifiable. Not that anyone would see her. Noa was the best at what she did, and she didn’t allow any mistakes.
She ran to the waiting car. She slipped into the driver’s seat and swiftly made her way from the rich suburbs of Boston to her home on the outskirts. Discarding the car in its usual spot in the underbrush, Noa ran to the entrance of her home—the old, discarded secret tunnels the American spies had used in the War of Independence. She climbed down into the hidden entranceway. The minute she was swallowed in darkness, Noa pushed back her hood and scarf, breathing in the dank air that she associated with safety. She walked down the maze of tunnels that led her to where her sisters waited.
Hearing their voices in the main section of the tunnels, she pushed through the old wooden door and blinked in the lights that illuminated the rooms.
“The wanderer returns,” Dinah said, getting up from the table she’d been sitting at, next to where Candace and Jo were working at their computers.
Noa reached into her pocket and tossed the USB stick at Dinah. Dinah’s rich dark skin and ebony eyes shone under the warm electric light they’d built into the tunnel’s ceiling as she caught it and smiled at Noa. “And she delivers again.”
“Was there any doubt?” Noa said, eyebrow raised, and walked to the refrigerator to get a bottle of water.
&nbs
p; She took a long drink, soothing her dry throat, and Dinah said, “No. But I still like giving you shit for it anyway.” Noa held up her middle finger at her friend as Dinah passed the USB to Jo.
Jo brought up the many account details Noa had managed to steal. Dinah whistled when the screen filled with a mass of passwords and accounts and the stacks of money that would be in their hands in a matter of hours. “Rich fucking bastard, isn’t he?”
“Not for long.” Noa perched her ass on the table beside Jo.
Jo cracked her fingers then turned to Candace, her girlfriend. “Ready, babe? We’ve got some work to do.”
“Always,” Candace said. Dinah met Noa’s eyes and nudged her head to the side of the room. Noa left Candace and Jo to do their thing and steal an eye-watering amount of money from the piece of filth who pumped his wealth into keeping the Brethren steeped in funds.
As Noa reached a nook in the hollowed-out tunnel, Dinah stopped and said, “We’ve got five targets next. But they’re connected, so we’ll have to do all five in one night, or they’ll just shut down and move somewhere else.”
Noa nodded and glanced down the next tunnel. Naomi was at the bottom, carrying a couple of metal bowls of blood from Bethany’s room. Noa’s chest ached. “How is she?” she asked, reaching for an apple from the fruit bowl beside her.
Dinah sighed, pushing back her long box braids from her face. “Okay. She’s coming to the end of her recent episode.”
Noa dropped her head back against the cold stone of the tunnel. “Which doctor’s next?”
Dinah sat beside Noa on the ledge of rock she was perching on and watched Jo’s and Candace’s hands fly over the keyboards like furied machines made of flesh and bone. “No idea.” Dinah met Noa’s eyes. “How many times can we be told that there’s nothing actually wrong with her before we accept it’s all in her head?”