Jegudiel (Deadly Virtues 2)

Father Abel lifted his cell phone and made the appropriate calls. Father Auguste met the driver’s eyes. “Take me to Father Quinn.”

* * *

“He will see you now, Father Auguste,” Elaine, Father Quinn’s personal nurse, said as Father Auguste waited in the hallway of his apartment in the Brethren headquarters.

Father Auguste walked through the door to Father Quinn’s rooms. His anger was quick as he looked at his savior in the armchair overlooking the leafy park outside.

Auguste stopped before Father Quinn and dropped to one knee. He waited for Father Quinn to hold out his hand. It took his mentor a few seconds longer than it should have, but he held out his hand, and Auguste held the frail fingers and pressed a kiss to the back of his palm. His skin was rough from the extensive burns, but Auguste held on to the fact that he was alive. God had saved his Brethren mentor from the evil of his old charges.

“Auguste,” Father Quinn said, his voice weakened and hoarse.

“Your Excellency.” Auguste rose to sit in the chair opposite Father Quinn. He looked at his mentor, the man who had plucked him from the orphanage he had been sent to and cleansed his soul that had been ruined and tainted by wickedness and sin. Father Quinn had saved Auguste; he owed him his eternal soul.

“Speak, child,” Father Quinn said. Auguste tried to hold in his rage as he studied Father Quinn’s face. Gone were his hair and eyebrows. His skin was mottled from the severity of his burns, and the reconstruction surgery he had been receiving did nothing to take away the evidence of how he had almost perished in Purgatory, after the cursed Fallen subjects had returned and massacred most of the holy men who had been there. There doing God’s work.

The devil had triumphed that day, but Father Auguste had vowed to be the one who destroyed the Fallen, who brought about their fall back to the depths of hell where they belonged. He would seek holy revenge on the sinners who had managed to evade the Brethren’s care and spread their evil into the world, as devastating and cruel as the most deadly poison.

“I believe they have come for us again,” Father Auguste said, and Father Quinn’s milky eyes seemed to burn with contempt. “Five homes were attacked last night.”

“And our priests?” Father Quinn asked.

“Gone.” Silence stretched between them. Father Auguste clasped his hands in thought.

“Speak, child. I can see God is sending you a message, making something clear to you.” Father Quinn smiled, his scarred lips barely moving as he did so.

“It was always the same pattern.” Auguste thought back to a few years ago when, for a brief period of time, priests had been savagely killed in their homes. Then he thought back to the more present series of invasions—a different tack.

He sat forward in the chair. “In the more recent attacks on the homes, the charges were gone, but the priests were there, alive. Always an ‘H’ written on their forehead in their own blood.” Memories sailed into Father Auguste’s consciousness. Burning flesh on wooden stakes, and screaming witches being lowered into deep water. Seven young witches clawing at him for mercy, the devil spitting false truths from their heathen mouths. He could feel them under his hands, sweating and crying and screaming as he drew the demons from their souls, as he worked with God to cleanse the sin from their darkened hearts.

He could still feel the wetness on his finger as he drew an “H” on their foreheads in their own spilled blood. A purging of evil, and a benediction of the one true faith. Yet the witches would thrash as the mark spiritually burned into their bodies, the demons within trying to battle against the healing power of that “Heretic” mark.

The Coven. The seven witches that had escaped his capture. They were never found after they fled. The Brethren had many enemies. The non-deadly attacks reeked of the Coven.

But this most recent hit was a new beast entirely, a sharp and accelerated change in modus operandi. The priests had not just been tied up by hooded assailants. They were gone, their homes cleansed of any evidence. And now … “Father McConnell’s ledger was also gone,” Father Auguste said, and he saw Father Quinn’s nostrils flare.

“Them,” Father Quinn said, his scarred skin reddening.

Auguste felt the impact of that accusation sinking into his skin. “They’ve made their next move,” he said, and felt his warrior senses rising in him like ash from a fire.

Auguste thought of Selaphiel’s face, one eerily similar to his own. He remembered his brother’s screams and the way his back would arch as the demon within him fought harder to hold on to his soul. Auguste’s little brother was lost to Satan, along with the other heathens that made up their sorry group, and therefore was no brother of his. The Brethren was his true family. Selaphiel was just a blight on the goodness of the world.