“Zach was one of us,” I begin, hoping to distract her. I move behind her and rest my hands on her shoulders. “One of our youngest brothers. We were all brothers, you see, even though we rarely shared the same mother and didn’t acknowledge Prophet scum as our fathers. They certainly never treated us like their children.”
“He was only five,” Rowe takes over from the darker side of the trailer. “And this bastard had a sick fascination with him.”
Rowe knows exactly what it’s like to have a Prophet fixated on you.
Moore’s eyes are glazed from pain and full of tears, his muffled whimpers a backdrop to the story of his sin.
“They were celebrating before the ritual,” Cole speaks up. “Drinking.”
“This vile waste of air didn’t feel like being careful,” Silas adds.
Marek clears his throat. “Zachary passed before we got off the property.”
My hands fist at my sides. I was… distracting the Prophets and wasn’t there when we lost Zach. But I remember seeing his body once I ran to catch up with my brothers.
“What was he like?” Jules asks after a moment of solemn silence, broken only by Moore’s sniveling.
“We didn’t really get a chance to have interests or anything like that,” Logan finally says. He smirks at the still-hot blade in his hand. “Not healthy ones, at least. But he was sweet and gentle.”
“Sweet and gentle isn’t what Moore is getting tonight,” Cole snarls, his teeth flashing under the lightbulb. Knowing our brother, he’s eager to get his knives wet.
“Jonah, drape him over the chair,” I instruct. “I don’t think we have much time.”
“Worth it to see the little bird cut his sack off,” Rowe mumbles, making a few of us chuckle. Even Jules’s lips twitch at the macabre approval.
“What are you going to do to him?” she asks. There’s no reproach in her tone, only a reporter’s curiosity.
“He’s going to die the same way Zach did,” Logan replies in a dark tone. He picks up a juggling club, testing its weight in his hand.
Jules’s mouth falls open. “You’re going to… With that?”
“Oh, yes,” my flame-loving brother says with relish. “The thick part should do the trick. I go first.”
Zach was closest to Logan, seeing the older boy as a role model. I found out later that he was the one who held the boy as he died.
“Leave some fun for the rest of us,” Silas says from wherehe’s moved to my side. I exchange a look with him and nod. We usually go slower than this—a week of psychological torture, a week of endless pain. But this works.
He nods back, letting me know we’re good. Jules is now one of us, and my brothers will treat her as such.
“It won’t go in,” Logan complains from behind a screaming Ezekiel.
“Use the blood on the ground,” I suggest mildly.
“That’s sick, boss,” Cole snickers. “I love it.”
I move my hands, still resting on Jules’s shoulders, to her neck and apply gentle pressure. Her head lolls back, allowing me access, giving herself over to me.
“I have my moments,” I whisper, looking down at my girl.
Not killing her was the best choice I’ve ever made. I knew she’d be perfect for this, for us.
I’m not blind to the darkness, the depravity inside her. There’s something in her past… Her demonsarethere, singing with mine.
I’m going to find out what shaped her. I’m going to let her exorcise them like my brothers and I are exorcising ours, one Prophet at a time.
25
JULES
