entire family at one of our most sacred ceremonies. Because they were conducting a Wiccan ceremony. Because they dared believe something different.” Noa huffed a sardonic laugh. “Or should I say practiced something that even predated their faith.” Noa’s gaze grew unfocused on the table before her. “Nature worship has been around since the beginning of time. Paganism, for example. Women were respected, held high positions. But the likes of the Brethren stripped women of their power in favor of religions that kept them in place, kept them so meek and subdued that they would never dare rise as something else, never dare to believe religions of old once more.” Anger shimmered around Noa’s aura. When she met her sisters’ eyes, they reflected the truth of those words back at her. Her sisters were from alternative-faith backgrounds too, and persecuted for being so. “We all had to hide who we are,” Noa said, gesturing to her sisters, “just to survive. To not be hurt again.”
“That would never happen on these grounds,” Gabriel said, and the table’s ambience shifted, the tension that the Coven’s tragic past had brought to the air giving way to a feeling of acceptance, of liberation. Gabriel gestured at his brothers, Noa’s sisters. “We all believe different things,” Gabriel said. “As it should be. It’s what makes the world so interesting. No one religion should be valued above another. In this house, on these grounds, you are free to be whoever you are, no judgment.”
As Noa took in Gabriel’s calm demeanor, she could almost hear the distant sound of rhythmic drums playing in the distance, luring her closer—trying to welcome her back. She could practically smell lavender and sage permeating the air and sinking into the very fibers of her soul. If she focused hard enough, she believed she could feel the wind whipping through her hair, the earth beneath her bare feet grounding her spirit, reviving her tired bones.
Noa shifted on her seat when she felt every pair of eyes on her. Then Dinah diverted the spotlight away from Noa by saying, “You’d look good in all white and a crown of flowers on your head, Bara.” Dinah smiled. “I’d enjoy seeing you dancing around a fire too.”
“Anyone would enjoy that,” Bara said dryly, but then his green eyes drifted to Naomi. Noa wasn’t even sure he knew he was doing it—kept doing it whenever he was in her presence. Noa’s mute sister lowered her head, her cheeks blazing. Bara’s lip twitched at Naomi’s reaction; his pupils flared with … Noa wasn’t exactly sure what. Bara was impossible to decipher.
But Dinah shook her head at him, silently telling him to avert his attentions, and the conversation swerved to safer topics. Diel pulled Noa closer and guided her to look at him. “You okay?” he said, eyebrows drawn down. Panic fluttered in Noa’s chest, panic that he could read what was truly on her mind. But she nodded, dismissing his concern. He couldn’t know anything. She didn’t want him to suspect a single thing.
The sound of Dinah laughing out loud made Noa turn her head. Noa had missed whatever joke had amused her sister, but her heart melted at seeing Dinah so comfortable. So calm … so at home. Like she had found her people. When Noa looked at Beth, she was smiling too. Candace and Jo were laughing under their breaths. Even Naomi wore an amused, timid smirk.
Noa scanned her eyes over the Fallen. She watched, detached from the conversations, as Uriel and Raphael told stories of their first years of freedom, Bara throwing in his dry and cutting quips whenever he felt attention had left him too long. She watched Sela listening quietly from his seat on the other side of Diel, lip hooked up in subtle amusement. Michael never uttered a word, as always, but clutched a vial of blood in his hand, eyes on the tabletop. Then there was Maria and Gabriel. Laughing, and, although total opposites to the rest of the Fallen, essential cogs in their strange family’s wheel.
Noa’s thoughts were scattered leaves in the wind, and they drifted to Father Auguste. They flew to the Witch Finders as a whole, and then to the meeting the Coven and Fallen had attacked. How badly that could have gone if they had not been aided, she suspected, by Priscilla. They would not have been where they sat now, enjoying one another’s company. They would have been screaming in pain, forced once again into