Page 7 of Sire

For another potent minute, she’s silent before warning, “Lay a hand on this girl and I’ll poison you.”

Poison? What a biblical way to go.

“You should.”

I spot the passenger van up the road in a hotel parking lot. My brother Jace waits beside it. My mom, as well. My brothers, in their rental cars with their victims, have arrived, too. They’ll take the girls from here, and I’ll never see the Iron Angel again.

It’s best that way.

You should only glimpse the Devil, not take a road trip with him.

I park beside the van.

Of course, the Iron Angel fears what’s about to happen, so she vows again, “And if you ever lay a hand on me, Pastor?—”

“Yeah, yeah…” I meet her gaze in the mirror.What the fuck?She makes me smile. “You’ll poison me, too.”

“No,” she answers sweetly. “We’ll fall in love.”

CHAPTER TWO

WREN

“You’re not gonna changeyour mind about him, are you?”

“Nope,” I answer the mountain of muscle beside me. “I’m five feet tall. Stubbornness serves me well.”

Standing by the doorway of a kids’ playroom in a historic Charleston church, I’ve made the right decision about the man we’re staring at.

I haven’t stopped thinking about The Pastor.

How could I?

He’s the fallen angel who sacrificed his flesh for me.

And if I’m making the wrong decision about him—which I’m not—how much more fucked up can my life get?

I trust my instincts. They’re all I have left, and they’ve gotten me this far.

I also trust this total snack standing beside me. He’s the one who drove the passenger van to the fancy beach house where my life, and the lives of nine other girls, went from savage to saved.

It’s been a whirlwind of a week since then, but my hearthas been like the eye of a storm. Calm. Certain of where I need to go next.

Staring at the back of the man God sent to me, I ask the other, “He’s your brother, isn’t he?”

Mr. Muscle doesn’t answer. We just watch the back of the jacked and tatted man in a tight, white T-shirt and jeans, who looks eerily like him.

Giggling kids surround The Pastor, but my stare falls to the white bandage wrapped around his left pinky. Or what remains of it. The rest? He sacrificed for me.

It’s why I’m here.

It was a sign.

I side-whisper, “What’s he doing?”

“Entertaining the kids while their parents take an English class.”

“But what are they doing tohim?”