“Interesting. And where is the killer witch now?” Bara asked, eyebrow raised. “Sounds like she’d be a fucking party.”
“Living like a shadow in the outside world,” Dinah said. “That’s all she told us. Pris feels like we abandoned her when we moved away from her vision of how to take the Brethren down. We focus on saving the abused children, not killing the priests who hold them. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not averse to killing them—the world would be better off without them, and no guilt would live within us if we sent those fuckers back to hell. But, ultimately, we chose charity. We discovered some of the local ledgers on our rescues and used their whereabouts against them. We follow a more pacifist approach to put chinks in their armor.”
“But not all of you are pacifist,” Diel said, finally breaking his silence. Noa swallowed at the new inflection in his graveled voice. It was the siren’s call again. The tone, the gruffness, the knowing. He knew who she was, what she was. And he was making his move. Beginning the attack to draw her darkness out. To expose who she really was.
Noa felt her tarnished heart pull toward him, as if her arteries were breaking from her chest and stretching out to entangle with his.
She was a pendulum, swinging too fast between light and dark: She had to fight his pull. But she didn’t want to.
Then, when she faced him, there was a new kind of expression on his face too. He was taunting her.
He was welcoming her darkness home.
It was an explosion, a fucking supernova inside of her as the walls of her fortress took one last blow from the part of her she had repressed, and it flooded through the opening like a plague, smothering the “good” side of her that she had forced herself to adopt over the past couple of years.
Noa closed her eyes, fighting back the urge to groan out loud at the orgasmic sensation of darkness returning to its rightful place at the center of her soul, a reverse diaspora. As her denied half slipped back into place alongside the other like they had never been parted, Noa felt stronger. She breathed easier. She felt lighter.
Noa felt someone watching her. She opened her eyes and found Diel. She found his monster. Noa shifted on her chair, feeling as though a thousand needles were peppering her skin. And when she spoke, only she could hear the changed tone in her voice—it was full-bodied and at full strength. “I guess we all have demons deep down in our souls, don’t we, pretty monster?”
Diel’s smile stretched wide, showing all of his white teeth. He knew. He saw that she was back. Noa’s heart beat at a furious pace, and she felt hot underneath her leather clothes.
Noa shifted on her seat. She bit her lip as a victory cry surged throughout her body at the heady feeling of freedom that came from no longer segregating one part of who she was from the other, from not slicing half of her very essence from her body for the sake of resisting a more violent way of life. Light and dark, good and bad—that yin and yang composition of her soul was who she was to her very core. One wasn’t more important than the other. As the pernicious, monstrous side of her fused with the side that made her feel, she was reborn.
Noa sat back against the dining chair and breathed a clear, deep breath as if she were testing out a fresh pair of lungs. The first true inhale she had taken in years. If Priscilla had been at the table with them, she would have beamed in victory at having her protégé back. At having her little sister by her side—not her sister by blood, but one in understanding, in the shared knowledge that some people’s light was dulled, or in others, completely eclipsed.
“Noa?” Dinah leaned forward so Noa could see her. Noa could hear the concern in Dinah’s voice. Of course she was concerned. She had witnessed this side of Noa before. Dinah had stood by her as Noa had sliced herself in two for the sake of the Coven’s move to peace and non-violence. But Noa had been in pain every day since, rejecting the half of her that had been cast aside out of guilt and shame.
No more.
But Noa didn’t take her eyes off Diel, who had just seen her internal liberation, the monster in him sensing the monster in her. “I’m fine, Dinah.” Noa dug the tip of her nail into the tabletop, gouging out the wood just to feel the stab of pain slice down her finger. “Completely fine.”
Noa’s breathing came quicker, and she saw Diel’s chest rising and falling in tandem with her too-fast speed. His skin was as flushed as hers felt, and his pupils were blown as she knew hers would be too.