the Fallen and the Coven had piled into the back, there was room left over. If everything went to plan tonight, they would be bringing back the Brethren’s sacrificial children with them.
Noa gave Maria a nod as she closed the van doors behind them. Maria’s worried gaze ran over them all, stalling a fraction too long on Raphael. Then they were on the move.
Noa checked the knives in her belt. Bara, true to his word, had a flame thrower strapped to his back. They were loaded with an array of weapons—knives, guns with silencers, chains, bladed knuckledusters, and of course, Michael’s devastatingly brutal claws over his leather gloves.
“We stay as a unit as practiced,” Dinah said. “Listen for my commands. From the ledger we know there should be no more than fifty here tonight, and that’s being generous.”
Noa stared down at Diel’s hand wrapped in her own. His gaze was on the floor of the van. The cords in his neck were taut, and Noa didn’t have to be a psychic to know what was running through his head. His severe head tics and heavy blinks told her that he was thinking of Finn Nolan, the little boy he used to be. He was thinking of Cara, the sister he didn’t know the location of. Noa’s stomach sank. They didn’t even know if she was alive.
Noa squeezed Diel’s hand. He looked right at her. She expected to see rage and wrath blaring in his eyes. But the look of sheer sadness was almost her undoing. In the days since the regression, he had grown more and more forlorn, as if the reality of what he went through, what the Brethren took from him, was wrapping around his heart, barbed claws sinking in deep and refusing to let go.
Noa brought their gloved hands to her mouth and kissed each of his fingers. She held them to her chest and said, “We make these fuckers scream. We make them pay for what they’ve done.” The sorrow on Diel’s handsome face gave way to sadistic excitement. It didn’t stop Noa’s heart from shattering. She was a loyal person. When she loved someone, she would do anything for them. And she wouldn’t stop until whatever plagued them was rectified.
Noa had to find Cara. And if she couldn’t, she would make those responsible pay—slowly, painfully. A red mist descended over her eyes.
She had never been so excited to kill in all her life.
Noa could still hear Diel’s broken voice in her head, the voice of the man watching his life play out like a movie in his mind. And it was a tragedy. No part of it was light or hopeful in any way.
“When the priests have been … apprehended,” Gabriel said, his voice tightening on the last word, “we get back to the van as quickly as possible. We don’t want any mistakes that will get one or more of us caught.”
Everybody nodded their heads.
The rest of the journey passed by in heavy silence. Even Bara stayed quiet, the prospect of killing clearly keeping his sarcasm in check. The van stopped, and Gabriel’s driver tapped on the partition to let them know the coast was clear.
They were to enter through the secret tunnel system that the Coven knew all too well. Years of living underground, staying out of sight, had made the Coven privy to what many would never know—that a large percentage of Massachusetts boasted a labyrinth of tunnel systems created by War of Independence spies.
The Brethren meeting was being held at an abandoned barn deep in the fields of an old Catholic priests’ retirement home. It was a surrounded by cluster of trees, boulders of rock, and scrubland. It was a perfectly blended mixture of rolling green pastures and rough terrain. And below ground, those very tunnels that the Coven had used exclusively as their own secret refuge over the years.
The van would remain in the cover of a small copse of trees that Dinah, Candace, Jo and Noa had discovered on one of the many covert visits they had made over the past several weeks to scout the location. Just a few yards away was a natural spring, and behind it a small cave leading to the tunnels that would take them directly into the vipers’ nest.
Dinah placed her scarf over her nose and mouth and opened the van doors. With her nod as a silent command, the rest of the Coven and the Fallen covered their faces, becoming ghosts, and