AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Cordelia and Celeste walk out the front door as I rush up the stairs. Cordelia is holding her grandmother’s hand, and this is the first time I see worry on Celeste’s face.
“They’re out back. Searching,” Cordelia says, her voice almost too quiet over the beating of rain on the shingles. Although she’s not crying, I can see she has been.
“Get inside. Both of you,” I say and run back down the stairs and into the backyard. Barrett’s expression is pained as he trudges back to the house. He’s drenched, and when he sees me, he hurries his step. I meet him half-way. “What happened?”
He pushes a hand into his wet hair. I see the streak of gray and I swear he’s aged a decade since Willow’s baby shower.
“I don’t know how. I don’t understand.” He shakes his head, squinting through the rain as he tells me, “She went to the shed to get some things. There are guards throughout the property.” He looks up at me. “You said they’d be safe. You swore.”
His voice breaks and a sick feeling settles in my gut as tears spill from his eyes.
“Where’s my brother?” I ask, lightning igniting the sky. No thunder though. We’re too far from it. Some part of me makes a note of the fact that that lightning is still coming from the direction of Eden’s Crossing.
Barrett shakes his head, then points behind him toward the pool and shed in the back.
I turn to the guards closest to me. “You, take him inside,” I tell them.
He doesn’t put up a fight, and I see the toll this has taken on him. All of it—the Tithing, the years leading up to it always on the backs of our minds, his more so than mine, perhaps, knowing he would lose a daughter. Raising her knowing all along that he would lose her.
“Where are the other guards?” I ask the other IVI man.
“Two down at the shed. Ten out looking with your brother, two at the front door and six inside the house. One of their men is down.”
“Where?”
“Behind the shed.”
“Go inside. If anyone tries to enter—”
He nods and is gone before I need to finish. They won’t hesitate to use deadly force, especially if two of their own are down.
I scrape my hand over my face and stalk past the pool toward the shed with its open door clanging back and forth, swinging in the wind and bouncing off something that won’t allow it to close. I realize what that something is when I get near enough and light shines on the black pant leg, the polished shoe of one of the IVI soldiers.
I walk inside, take in the scene. Two men lie dead on the ground, their throats slit. They’re covered in blood that stains the wooden floor. On the floor beside them is a woman’s shoe—Raven’s most likely.
But I don’t see the Disciple’s body.
I walk out of the shed and back into the heavy rain. “Emmanuel!” I call out and follow the beam of flashlights into the dense copse of trees.
“Here!” Emmanuel calls back and, in a few minutes, I see him. He and the guard are crouched around a body on the ground. The Disciple. I recognize him from his black robe and the oversized rosary.
Emmanuel straightens, then turns to me with a puzzled expression. “I don’t get it,” he says. He’s holding onto a torn piece of red silk.
“Tell me what you know.”
He drags his gaze from the fallen man to me. “I was with her just fifteen minutes before they took her. I told her to stay inside, but they don’t fucking listen, do they?” He pushes his hand through his hair. My brother, too, looks like he has aged. “But this guy shot dead out here makes no sense.”
I look at the Disciple who was killed by a bullet to the back of the head.
“Why isn’t he at the shed with the guards? He couldn’t have walked here with a bullet to the back of the head.” When they told me one of the Disciples was down, I’d assumed he was killed during a struggle.
“It wasn’t our bullet. The men who were killed, their weapons were in their holsters,” the IVI guard says.
I look at Emmanuel. “They killed their own? Why?”
Emmanuel shakes his head. “And with a gun that wasn’t silenced. They weren’t trying to be discreet. Not when they killed him. With the Society guards, they used knives.”
He shifts his gaze to the torn piece of silk.
“Where did they get in and out?”
“Back of the property. The fence was cut. This was stuck to it.”
I take it, see the darker smear of red. I know it’s blood.
“Let’s get inside. I can’t think with this rain.”
Emmanuel shakes his head. He doesn’t move. “Why kill their own?”
Lightning splits the sky and again, I note the absence of thunder again. Something isn’t right. Not here at this house. And not with that storm.
