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Wilder’s focus faltered as he realized our plan was now ruined, and he regarded the lot, taking in the number of cars and the fact all the interior lights of the building were blazing. The church being busy at this hour wigged me out.
Delphine once told me that nothing good happens after two a.m. She’d been referring to booty-call texts and online shopping. But I was willing to bet her concept extended to insane, antisupernatural cultists as well. There was no way they were in there having a predawn bake sale.
“What do you want to do?” Wilder turned his laser focus onto me. It made me nervous, like being the only student to show up to my final exam and I was naked and speaking the wrong language.
I had to think fast. My first plan had been my best, but there had to be a way we could still find out some information. I didn’t want to turn tail and run just yet. “Let’s go around the back. I think we’re looking at the lobby right now. There’s a chance we might be able to actually see inside from the ba
ck, get a better idea of what’s going on.” I was proud of coming up with a decent Plan B under pressure.
He nodded, and without waiting for me, marched ahead into the tall grass skirting the parking lot. The dry leaves rustled lightly as we moved through them, but nothing so loud I thought it would arouse suspicion. We made our way slowly but with purpose around the perimeter of the building. It took a surprisingly long time thanks to how big the place was, but we eventually found ourselves looking in through the big back windows of the church. We were situated on an angle, well outside the reach of the light, so no one glancing out would be able to spot us.
Here the glass wasn’t reflective, so we could see right inside. It was like watching a boring Sunday-morning sermon on mute. A giant gold cross was mounted in front of the window, and even from our angle I was able to see a huge metallic sun behind it.
“They really downplay the symbolism, don’t they?” I whispered as I adjusted my position, and my foot slipped into a muddy divot, my shoe suddenly wet and stuck in the ground. I grabbed Wilder and used his arm as support to pull my foot free, and the loud sucking noise the mud made was deafening in all the silence.
He shot me a meaningful glare, and I tried to apologize, but he placed a finger against my lips to quiet me.
Wilder pointed back towards the window, and I looked past the gaudy cross that was probably worth more than my house, to the gathering of people seated in pews.
They appeared like every small-town church get-together I’d ever been dragged to in my youth. I hadn’t been exposed to much religion—it wasn’t a big part of the McQueen upbringing—but there’d been a time when Callum cared about how the community perceived us. Not coming to Sunday mass made us seem strange, so we’d started to go together. As a family. Callum, Ben and myself, often accompanied by Amelia and Magnolia. This arrangement led to more confusion than benefit, and after a year we stopped going altogether.
I’m pretty sure it had something to do with Callum not wanting the single women in St. Francisville to think he and Amelia were an item.
The twenty or so people inside the Franklinton church were dressed in a variety of Sunday bests. A couple men wore short-sleeved button-down white shirts, stained slightly yellow over the years. Not one of them had a shirt that looked younger than me. Two of the men wore plaid flannel, and one had on a cowboy hat. The women were mostly dressed in plain dresses with drab colors, their hair blonde or mousy brown.
Redneck Stepford wives.
Only one woman seemed to deviate. She had blonde hair but wore a loose sweater and jeans. She sat a few rows back from the rest, and her attention was all for someone at the front of the room.
At first I couldn’t see who they were watching, but then a man came into view. I only saw the back of him, but his blond hair and lean build gave him away. Timothy Deerling. His posture exuded the same easy confidence I remembered from the video.
Wilder must have made the connection too because he stiffened next to me like he might bolt towards the church at any moment.
I placed my hand on his forearm and squeezed, just as I had when we first watched the video together. I don’t know if it gave him any comfort, but it stilled him. At least for the time being he wasn’t going anywhere.
Since we couldn’t hear what Timothy was saying, I was forced to watch his gestures and try to get a read on his audience’s reaction. The number of pews in the church could have held a thousand people, yet only twenty were there. That, combined with the early hour, told me these folks must be important to Timothy’s cause. Either he trusted them, or he needed them, but there was a reason they were all there.
None of them looked even remotely special. They were the kind of people who defined the word nondescript. I wondered what it was about them that made them so important to Timothy and his cause.
Something moved next to Timothy, and everyone’s attention shifted at once. My hand involuntarily tightened on Wilder’s arm, so forcefully he flinched. Even knowing I was hurting him I couldn’t let go.
Two men I hadn’t seen before joined Timothy at the front of the church. They stood apart from the audience in appearance, both wearing dark suits. I recognized one of them immediately as the guy who had tried to run me off the road. Now it was my turn to keep my rage in check. Between the men was something that looked, at first glance, to be a big duffel bag. Until it moved on its own and I realized what it actually was.
Hank.
Wilder growled, his whole body drawing taut like the string on a bow before the arrow is loosed. I held firm to him, although I wanted to run at them myself. We didn’t know what was happening, but I was sure it wasn’t good. We were outnumbered and out of our element, and if we barged in now, we might both end up dead, giving Deerling precisely what he wanted.
The two men shoved Hank down onto his knees in front of Timothy. The older Shaw brother looked terrible. Since we’d seen him in the video earlier, his treatment must have gotten significantly worse. His eyes were swollen purple balloons, and he had bloody cuts on both his cheeks. His bottom lip was split and red. His greasy mop of hair looked darker than usual, and though I didn’t want to dwell on it, I realized it must be because his hair was soaked with blood.
Worse, still, in order for him to look this bad they must have been beating him constantly. Werewolves could heal superficial wounds. They must have let him recuperate only to continue the beatings anew.
Nausea churned in my gut, tickling the back of my throat with the threat of vomit.
A woman in the front row clapped her hand over her mouth in disgust, but instead of leaving the room she only moved back two rows.
She wasn’t repulsed by what they’d done to Hank, I realized. She was disgusted to be sitting so close to a werewolf.
I clenched my jaw. In that moment I hated everyone in the church as much as they must hate me. I loathed them for their opinions and their prejudice. I hated everything that building stood for. My anger was a real, tangible thing, and for one sliver of time I wanted nothing more than to raze the Church of Morning to the ground, taking everyone inside with it.
