Auguste to train; fear of another attack plagued his mentor’s mind.
But these men …
“Is this it?” Auguste said, arms held wide. The recruits were sweating, gasping for breath. They were unfit and right now did not have what it would take to withstand an attack from the Fallen. Father Quinn’s ruined face was evidence of that. “Is this the best we Brethren can offer against evil?”
Auguste felt his lip curl in disgust. He would not let his little brother’s fellow heathens best him and the centuries-old organization that had secretly stopped the world from going to shit too many times to count.
Auguste was the Brethren Witch Finder General of Massachusetts. He had been given the much-coveted position due to his devotion to the Brethren cause. He policed his city against sinners, protected it from the devil and his many, never-ending demons.
He would not fail now.
“Again!” he shouted. The rain started to pour on their heads, dark clouds circling above like vultures. Auguste didn’t care if they all got pneumonia. He wasn’t letting them go until they could fight, until they could ensure the Brethren victory over its enemies.
Let God spare the strong and rid the world of the weak. Because he knew the Fallen were coming again. And this time, when they attacked, the Brethren would not be caught off guard. They would be ready, God’s agents armed with truth and good on their side, and hearts that would see the denizens of hell sent back from where they came.
“I said again!”
Chapter 18
A gunshot sent him running from the driveway and toward the house. He dropped the dead rabbits he’d just hunted—dinner was forgotten. The sun was scorching and his hair was sweaty; drops fell down his cheeks as he approached the old, dilapidated house. His young heart beat furiously as he climbed the broken wooden steps and burst through the front door, running toward the sound of screaming.
He knew that scream. He knew he had to protect the one who was scared.
“You ugly little shit. Did you think you could protect your bitch of a mother? She was nothing but a drugged-up whore.”
The air grew still, but the rushing blood echoed in his ears as loud as Fenway Park on game day. He edged toward the kitchen, but he stopped when he slipped on something under his feet.
He looked down, and fear seized control of his body. Blood. Blood was flowing from under the kitchen door. He fought to breathe, fought to hold on to the rage that was building inside of him. The same rage that had been growing for years and years, festering. It was getting harder and harder to control. He didn’t want to control it any longer.
Then he heard the scream again, and he flew into the kitchen.
The sight that greeted him was a horror scene. A woman lay on the cracked and moldy tiles. Her eyes were open, and blood gushed from a hole in her head. She wasn’t breathing.
She wasn’t alive.
But it wasn’t the woman on the ground that made him lose the battle with his raging anger. It was the man in a dirtied white tank and age-faded jeans holding a gun to the head of the girl he had pushed over the countertop that broke him. A port-wine birthmark covered half of the young girl’s face, and one eye was blind, the milky pupil a mismatch to the striking sapphire-blue eye on her seeing, unmarked side.
“Let her go,” he threatened the man. The man whipped his head to him. And laughed. The man stank of body odor, alcohol and cigarettes.
He smelled of imminent death.
The man smiled at him, a cold, vindictive smile. Half his teeth were missing, and the ones that remained were rotting, yellow and black. He pressed the gun to the girl’s head, his fist wrapped around her long dark hair, which was matted and dirty.
The boy edged closer, feeling along the countertop for something to grab. He hated this prick. He’d hated him for years. Hated him almost as much as he did the woman already dead on the floor, who the man had finally snapped and killed. The boy’s finger stumbled across something cold and long. A quick glance down saw a carving knife in his hand, discarded from where someone had tried to make some kind of food.
Victory pulsed in his veins. As the man glanced away, the girl still thrashing under his hold, the boy swiped the knife off the countertop and hid it behind