by Cole, Tillie
“I’m Jegudiel, a Fallen,” he said, voice low and rough and thick with honesty and lust. “And you are Noa, a witch of the Coven.”
Noa stilled, pressing her hands down on Diel’s shoulders to halt his thrusts. “I can’t be a witch,” she hissed. His words had struck her as harshly as a cat-o’-nine-tails lashing at her back.
Diel pulled her closer. She felt his heart racing against hers as their skin kissed. “You can.” His cock pulsed inside her. “That’s your heritage, your birthright. They can’t ever take it from you.”
Noa went to argue, to refute his claim. She wanted to move away from him, give herself space from too much emotion, from a past and a legacy she had tried to remain distant from. But as she did, she heard the fire crackle and pop behind her, heard the thrashing wind rattle the windows, heard the rain pouring down outside … and then she felt something else, something that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.
As Diel held her close, skin to skin, brand to brand, scars against scars, she felt a deep sense of completion. Not in the sexual sense, but as though some missing part of her had been found, some aspect of her wounded soul had been patched over, the beginning phases of healing set in motion. And as she looked into Diel’s eyes, sapphire eyes that were no longer tormented by two halves of one warring soul, she knew he had been that missing piece.
Noa took hold of Diel’s hand and entwined his fingers with hers. She felt an invisible cord wrap around their tightly clasped hands, creating a sacred bond. A flood of light seared through her, cleansing and reviving.
And as she looked up at Diel, she saw it mirrored in his gaze too. The invisible cord pulled tighter, as if it was their very own handfasting ceremony. Noa closed her eyes. She could almost see her grandma dancing around the fire in celebration, arms stretched out, long gray hair whipping high with the wind as she sent the elements to her surviving granddaughter. Her granddaughter who had met someone who both shared and understood the heavy burdens of her soul. Someone to lighten to the load.
Noa rocked back and forth on Diel’s lap, feeling every inch of him move inside her, feeling him in her soul. When she opened her eyes, he leaned in and kissed her, their hands never breaking. And after they had both reached their silent climaxes, Noa lay over Diel’s chest and listened to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Minutes later, his breathing evened out in sleep.
Lifting her head, she stared at his pretty, relaxed face, his mass of messy hair, and she knew that invisible cord remained around them, keeping them bound together.
She thought back to what they’d talked about—her past, her spirituality, her beloved family. And her heart shattered. She had known her family. She mourned them, missed them every single day. But she had known them. Known that people had loved her.
Diel had no memory of life before Purgatory. He didn’t know if he had a family beyond his Fallen brothers. He didn’t know where he came from, how he came to be taken by the Brethren. Dinah had learned from Gabriel that Diel’s history had never been in any records; he had never existed on any database. At least not one that they could find.
Noa held his hand tighter, silently vowing that she would discover who he was. And as she pressed a kiss to his chest, over the brand that they shared, she knew she would never give up until she had found out. Until they found out just who Jegudiel, her fallen angel, used to be.
Chapter 17
“Again!” Father August shouted, and he watched as his Witch Finders started the drill again. He shook his head at their ineptness, their lack of understanding of the complex moves. Auguste marched forward, grabbed the newest priest by his arm, and threw him to the ground. “Get up,” he spat. The fledgling priest crawled to his feet. His face was pale, and Auguste could practically smell the fear pulsing off him, as putrid as week-old milk.
Auguste sliced his hand across the back of the priest’s cheek, and with a kick to his stomach, the young man fell to the ground, groaning in pain. Auguste’s fists shook with disappointment and rage. He looked at the rest of his Witch Finders. Father Quinn had sent more recruits for 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 his back. The minute the weapon was in his hand, he felt something within him stir to life, a beast awakening from a forced hibernation. A feeling that was becoming addictive to him, a feeling laced with delicious darkness that he craved more and more each day.
It was a little voice that whispered in his ear nightly, telling him to destroy those who hurt him and the girl. It was an invisible hand that guided him toward weaponry, guided him to practice in secret in the woods behind his house. Taught him how to wield knives and chains and guns to destroy people, how to strike a human target clear and true.
How to kill.
Right now, whatever it was that lived inside him encouraged him to lean into those dark thoughts; it wrapped around him in an obsidian embrace. “Let her go,” he said again, stepping even closer to the man, the knife’s handle held tightly behind his back.
The fear in the girl’s eyes was all the kindling the boy needed, but the sardonic laugh from the man he hated most of all, paired with his releasing of the safety on the gun at the girl’s head, was the spark.
In a split second, the boy launched forward and drove the long blade straight into the man’s throat. The sound of flesh splitting apart was a symphony to his ears. He met the man’s eyes and smiled, making sure to stare directly at the prick as his mouth dropped open in shock. The man began to gurgle on the blood clawing up his throat. But the boy didn’t relent. He pulled out the knife, then struck again and again, following the directives of the voice in his head that told him to take more, take more and more and more …
Diel gasped, eyes opening as he bolted upright in his bed. His skin was drenched in sweat, and his heart was an exploding grenade in his chest. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe. The girl’s face was there, before him, like she was real. He reached out into thin air, tried to hold on to the image. He searched his brain to discover who she might be, but the nightmare quickly began to fade and so did the girl’s face, until her features disappeared from memory and Diel was left with only an X-ray of what she looked like, questioning if he even saw her in his nightmare at all.
But something in his gut told him he did, told him that the repeated nightmares were important somehow. They were growing more and more frequent over the eight weeks since Noa had removed his collar, and with every single one he grew more and more frustrated as they disappeared into vapor just minutes after he awoke.
Something inside him told him he had to delve deeper. What did they mean? Who were the people in them? And why did Diel keep dreaming of them? Of death? It was fucking with his head. It was a hundred daggers plunged into his brain at once, the sharp steel telling him to think, to make sense of it all. But he couldn’t. His thoughts were scrambled; they were mush.
He couldn’t make sense of anything lately.
A hand on his back shocked him from the dark and endless pit he kept falling into. But the warmth of the soft touch made him breathe deeper. The hand moved up and down in a soothing, hypnotic rhythm.
“You’re okay, baby.” Noa’s sleep-ridden voice hit his ears, and his frantic heart calmed. She shifted to her knees and moved in front of him, cupping his cheeks with her hands. “Do you remember anything this time?”
Frustration hit Diel hard and strong, blanket bombs dropping on his frantic thoughts. He shook his head, and Noa nodded in understanding. He lifted his hand to his hair and pulled. Pain from his scalp splintered down his spine.
He wanted to hiss in relief. Pain made things better. Pain always made things better.
Before Noa could stop him, he threw back the sheets, stood from the bed and paced before the hearth. “What the fuck is wrong with me?” he spat. His muscles were tense, and he could feel the darkness within him begin to spread its ink along his veins. He was fucked in the head. So motherfucking messed up in his head.
He always had been. But this time … this time … he couldn’t get a fucking handle on it. He couldn’t think or calm himself down. Something, some weight was crushing his chest. He didn’t know what it was or how to get it off. He couldn’t think clearly enough to find a solution. He just kept getting crushed and crushed, the nightmares never-ending. They’d begun by sinking into his sleep every now and again; now they were a thousand-strong army, attacking every time he even closed his eyes.
He was tired. Diel was so fucking tired. He was sick of fighting. His entire life had been about fighting.
On a loud roar, Diel hit the side of his skull with his fist with as much force as he could muster. He paced faster and faster, back and forth, until every turn felt like a blur.
“Ever since the collar was taken off me, I’ve been fucked!” He grabbed the fire poker and slammed it over the large mantel. Several shattered chunks fell to the floor, then he threw the poker into the flames with a bellow of uncontained wrath.
He needed to kill. He needed to kill people, one after the other until the cavernous pit in his stomach was filled, until enough blood had been spilled to sate the monster within. His monster was pushing to the surface, breaking from the perfect meld between monster and man that came when Noa had freed him from the collar. Inside him raged an Armageddon, war and fire and fury. Death and pain and evil.
Suddenly Noa was in front of him, an angel in a fiery halo pushing him backward by a firm hand on his chest until he fell back on the bed. Diel scrambled back to his feet, his body braced to pounce, to fight. He needed to fucking tear something apart with his bare hands. He needed to purge the hell inside him.
He tried to push past Noa, to get out of this fucking torture chamber of a bedroom. He would find Gabriel and tell him he needed a kill. He didn’t give a shit if destroying the Brethren was their family’s new focus. He needed some fuckers to ruin. Gabriel could get him that. He had to get him that, or Diel feared he’d turn on one of his family members, one of their staff … or worse, a sister from the Coven.
But as Diel raced for the door, Noa pulled him back, swiping his legs from underneath him in one fluid, well-practiced move. He crashed to the floor, ribs aching from the contact, and Noa straddled him where he lay. Her thighs were like steel, keeping him in place as she planted both of his hands above his head.
“Get the fuck off me,” he hissed.
Noa’s smirk was only more fuel to his inner fire. His monster bristled at their woman taunting him, pushing him. He tried to buck her off, but she held him down firmly. “We have training,” she said calmly, and Diel fought against his violent tics—his incessant blinks, his jerky head movements. He looked over to the large bay window, to the rising sun that was cresting over the horizon. Day was breaking, but he felt like he hadn’t slept in weeks.
The Coven and Fallen were due to attack the Brethren this week, at one of their precious fucking meetings. Days. Diel only had to wait days until he could kill someone, many someones. Then he could fully embrace the monster he was inside, finally kill, and release all the tension that had been slowly building over the past two months.
The light from outside pierced his skull like a stiletto blade through his brain stem. They were beginning their war on the motherfucking Brethren this week. And he was completely fucked.
Diel pulled his hands from Noa’s hold, but he made no move to get up. He just gripped his head again as his temples throbbed, as his throat grew dry and nausea curdled in his stomach.
“I’m fucked in the head.” Diel’s face screwed up in pain and frustration. It was like being back on the rack, like he was back in Purgatory and the priests were tearing his body apart with their medieval apparatus. He couldn’t defeat the pain, couldn’t calm the racing of his heart, couldn’t stop the throbbing in his temples, the pressure behind his eyes.
He was losing. Whatever this battle was, he was losing it badly.
Diel lowered his hands. His arms felt like ten-ton weights as they landed on the wooden floor. All strength fled from his body. But then he looked up into Noa’s brown eyes. Simply by looking at her face, he could breathe. As he stared at her beautiful face, he felt the some of the pain fade … barely any, but enough to breathe.
The world was foreign to him; madness swarmed his black soul. But she was the calm, the eye to his fucked-up storm.
Over the past eight weeks, Noa had become Diel’s entire life. His air, his water, his fucking everything. But he was falling apart, fragments of his very being breaking off one by one, leaving him open and exposed to the insanity that was waiting to possess him. It came for him in his dreams.
And he was getting too exhausted to defend himself against it.
Diel stayed fixed on Noa’s eyes, trying to keep grounded enough to whisper, “What’s happening to me?” His voice sounded like broken glass, betraying the shattered emotions within.
“Diel …” Noa whispered back, sounding just as fractured as him. She lowered her body to lie above him, running her fingers down his face. He silently pleaded with her for help as he tried to absorb her warmth.
“What’s … what’s wrong with me?” Diel moved his hands to the scar that years of wearing the collar had left on his neck, more a deep red trench than a raised white mark. It was thick and rough and permanently engraved into his flesh.
He thought back to the perpetual inner crusade he had fought against the monster while wearing that collar. It had been torture; it had incapacitated him. But he knew that life, knew how to navigate its choppy waters. He knew how to cope with that kind of pain, that lack of control.
This … ? The nightmares, the gaps in his memory, the feeling that he was going slowly insane … he didn’t know how to deal with any of it. He didn’t know how to live like this. He was the opposite of paralyzed. He was feeling too much, all at once, and the attack was greater than that of any weapon he’d ever encountered.
