Page 28 of Devoured

Apparently, he was just a liar, and I was just a fool. I didn’t know him at all. And now I have to loathe him for it. I have to loathe my best friend. My cousin. A guy who has always been more than a brother to me.

Emotions pound against my ribs, that toxic churn of abandonment, isolation, loneliness that has anchored me since my Drowning. It demands I unleash my claws and slice through all twenty-one werewolves at once. But I breathe through the feelings, as I always have, and focus on reality.

Cora is marching a pack of her strongest werewolves straight into the heart of St. Augustine, and she hasn’t told us why. We are surrounded by mortals shopping, eating, drinking. Children scream and laugh as they dodge puddles in a small park lined with slender oaks. They do not fear us. They hardly notice us. And across the street—Catedral basílica de San Agustín.

A cathedral originally erected in 1565 until it was attacked. Burned down, broken again and again, only to be resurrected by whichever humans were stupid enough to think they could rewrite the future. But the outcome was always the same. This is the fourth iteration of the church, and the seat of the Catholic bishop of St. Augustine.

Right now, however—as Cora halts before the Doric columns flanking two massive doors—it looks more like a tomb.

Tension knots my brows, my muscles, until my bones throb with effort to remain entirely still. The rest of Cora’s infantry leaders swarm around her, but I don’t want to be at the front of their pack. I need to be in the rear, close enough to protect whichever helpless child Cora decides to murder on a whim.

Pain shudders through my chest, but I can’t allow myself to contemplate my parentage right now. Or how, for my entire life, I believed this woman was my mother. I believed she was the blood in my veins and the stain in my lineage. She was my damnation.

And now, she is Sin’s.

My cousin stands beside his mother, leaning against the smooth stone, his gaze fixed on the park and children as she opens the doors. They creak, sounding as haunted as anything inside Castle Severi, the rustic orange entrance giving way to the pitch-black intestines of the cathedral. The chandeliers emit no light. The neat stained-glass windows have been curtained shut.

It is too dark. It is too quiet.

For some reason, I can’t scent a single thing.

Still, Cora ushers us inside. Her favorite werewolves file after Sinclair, who strolls almost lazily down the center aisle. I wish I could know what he’s thinking. I wish I could know which parts of him are false.

He knocks into a hidden pew and exhales roughly. Even that sound seems like a lie. Too harsh and too perfected. A performance like everything else. How long has he been planning this? How could he let them all die? He swings around the other side of it and throws himself onto a bench, then kicks his legs up in front of him. Plucking up a Bible, he opens it and flips to a random page.

Twenty werewolves separate him and me, but I can still spot the slightest tremble in his fingers when he says, “A bit of a droll meeting spot, Mother.”

Cora smiles with wicked delight. “Inside, Calix,” she commands. “Shut the doors behind you.”

I glance over my shoulder, through the entrance and to the streets of humans beyond, before closing the doors slowly. All remaining light snuffs out until we are alone in the dark.

Cora’s footsteps echo eerily through the cathedral. “Religion is a funny little thing, isn’t it?” Her voice softens to a faint whisper, almost youthful and innocent in tone, as her werewolves shuffle and shift in anticipation. “They ask us to believe. They tell us we must do so without proof, or our love isn’t true—faith, they call it. And then we wait and we wait for some great other to come calling when, in fact, it was a mere story told by men all along. How many of you were fooled? How many of you experienced the heartbreak of life in hopes of the next being better? In hopes of some afterlife cleansing you of the stench of our world and saving you from the consequences of those who came before?”

Several werewolves clap while others begin to hiss in violent agreement. Beside me, Jasper—one of Cora’s most lecherous sycophants—hollers, “To hell with God! We are gods now!” More cheers.

My insides twist, snarled in revulsion. I don’t know where Cora procured most of her pack, but they’ve been all too happy to share in her bloody tirade. They don’t even seem to care why she brought us here. But instincts roar through my bloodstream. Whatever this is—it’s bad.

A single candle ignites.

Cora stands on the chancel, a dove-white candlestick melting on the altar before her. She weaves a finger in and out of the orange flame. “They lied to you. They lied to me too. In all these centuries, has anyone seen truth of faeries before? Has anyone run with vampires or swum with sirens? Lies. Manipulations. They seek to control us through their useless fables, but we are not to be controlled by the overlords of fantasies anymore; we are to be in control of ourselves.”

My gaze darts to Sin, but I don’t want to confirm my worst fear. I don’t want to know how alike he and his mother really are.

Cora grins wider now, locking those nauseating black eyes of hers on my own. “In the coming months, the weak-minded packs of this Earth will challenge us. They will fight with a strength they believe is gifted to them from some personified sky. We, however, will fight with a strength we have earned. We will prove to them that their gods are false, and they can either join us in reality or dig their own graves.”

At that, she crouches. She wrenches something large and heavy out from behind the altar.

A man.

No—not just a man. The bishop, wreathed in illustrious black robes and a bloodred zucchetto. My blood runs cold, and my voice comes out razor-edged as I turn to look at Sin lounging in the pew. “What the hell are we doing here?”

“What we’re doing, Nephew dear”—Cora drags the man down the steps of the chancel by his collar, but he doesn’t writhe or scream. He must be unconscious, his head thudding against the floor with every harsh movement—“is proving our strength and improving our numbers. The only reason werewolves have avoided strengthening their courts through Bitten members is because of false stories of mortal weakness.” She throws the man into the aisle, and long shadows fall on his pale, wrinkled face. “But look at one another. All of you, look at what I have created. Does this look weak to you?”

Her fangs glint as she gestures to her insidious pack. They practically vibrate with excitement at her words. If they were transformed, I imagine their tails would thump like dogs’.

“This is the bishop of St. Augustine, and you are going to bite him.” She peels the zucchetto from his balding head and tosses it into the fervent crowd. Luca snatches it, inhaling deeply, before tearing through the zucchetto with his teeth. “Tonight, we shall all prove our loyalty to this pack. To our court and the future of our world.”

I flex my hands, my claws close to unleashing. I won’t do it. Not a fucking chance.