The Sinners of Saint Amos - Logan Fox Page 0,253

That’s how we’ve trained her, how we’ve taught her. Despite the emotion whirlpooling inside your head, when you’re with a Ghost, you don’t show them anything.

All we saw back in the basement was lust and hedonistic pleasure plastered on grown men’s faces as they played out their sickest, most depraved fantasies with our small, unresisting bodies.

It was sickening, terrifying, but in its own disturbing way, it was beneficial too. Those faces told a story. How much the Ghost would hurt us that day. How long they’d take with us.

How much we would bleed.

Before Trinity came into our lives, we’d spend hours planning our revenge on each and every Ghost. How we’d torture them, what we’d yell at them, whisper in their demonic ears.

How we’d exorcise them, Apollo used to say. Which was funny, because he was never a religious type. Not like Zachary, who loves the old testament almost as much as he loves taking the bible out of context.

Definitely not like me.

Trinity holds up the hunting knife she’s been clasping for over half an hour already and turns it so that the man bound in the chair in front of her can see it clearly. What little light comes from the single lamp in the corner of the room casts most of the room into shadow, except Trinity’s face. Her nose, her chin—a stark relief, an unrelenting silhouette that’s never looked this hard…this clinical before.

I’m nothing like Zach. I don’t get off on other people’s pain. But even I’m getting a semi watching her work. This girl, this woman is one of us now.

She was broken, just like us.

She scarred over, just like us.

And now she’s out for revenge…just like we are.

But tonight it all ends. The final chapter in an epic saga that’s taken us five years to complete. Because that man, that disgusting creature of Satan, he’s the last.

Not the last pedophile in the world, of course. I doubt we could even put a dent in their population. But the last of the Ghosts.

Our Ghosts.

Trinity leans forward, pressing the hunting knife’s blade to the outside of the Ghost’s thigh. His legs are already riddled with slashes and oozing cuts, a few of them showing wet bone, but there’s not much blood pooling on the floor under his chair.

Because Zachary applied a tourniquet to his legs and his arms. And while that might have slightly desensitized his limbs, we didn’t take his sight. More than that—we taped his eyelids up so he can’t even blink if he wanted to. He has no choice but to watch as we slice off pieces of his diseased limbs and toss them into the fireplace.

Even when Cass and Apollo are both smoking a cigarette—Apollo spending more time watching out the window than watching the Ghost, of course—the stench of burnt flesh hangs thick in the air.

Once you get over the urge to try and rationalize it, to give it a name, then it’s not so bad anymore. It’s only when you start confusing the smell with too-sweet pork that stomach’s turn.

Well, mine and Cass anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zachary was craving a fucking BLT right now.

He’s beside Trinity, skin sheened with joy, eyes ablaze with sadistic enthusiasm. He’s in his fucking element, and it’s never been more apparent. Not from his face, not from the way he watches our girl with obvious pride, chest puffed out and mouth in a smug curl.

“Tendons,” Zachary grates, his voice rough and quivering with excitement.

“Now?” Trinity glances up at him, eyes wide and so youthful it makes my heart pang for her loss of innocence.

And God was she innocent. But that was years ago now. When all she’d experienced was violent death and a man sticking it in her without her consent.

That was back then.

She’s nothing close to an innocent little lamb anymore. Her white wool is stained with blood and piss and shit.

I’d like to think that there was a different future for the five of us. That, maybe once, a few months after we’d buried Keith alive and moved on with our lives, as the reports began to roll in about the hundreds of pedophiles that were facing trials for their depraved acts, that we could become…normal.

Satan has a sick sense of humor.

That first year, almost fifty percent of the cases were thrown out for processing errors. But we gritted our teeth, and we tried to find gratitude for the meager few that ended up facing prosecution.

It’s sickening, how few were actually