“Even though the FBI is involved?”
I couldn’t help the slight laugh that slipped out. “The FBI doesn’t matter to him,” I replied. “He believes he has the authorization of God.”
“To kill people?” Elliot sounded incredulous.
“Absolutely.” I sat up and looked at him. “El, the Community believes they were chosen by God to live a life apart. That only those who are most worthy will find the way to salvation through purging sin from their bodies and minds in order to purify their souls.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Elliot muttered, his hazel eyes wide. “So all that shit you told me about—that was topurify your soul?”
“What did you think it was for?” I asked, just as incredulous.
“Because your father’s an abusive fuck,” he retorted. “I don’t know why abusers do the shit they do.”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes, even though it felt a bit flippant. “There is always a reason,” I told him. “Always. It mightnot be justifiable to the rest of us, but there’s always awhy. Sometimes it’s alcohol or drugs or addiction, sometimes it’s greed, panic, PTSD, rage, fear?—”
“Religious nutjobbery?”
I shifted a bit, my butt starting to fall asleep on the worn wood of the stairs. “If you believed—really,trulybelieved that sin could be beaten out of someone, and if you believed it was your sacred duty to do it, wouldn’t you?”
Elliot’s expression now was horrified, and that hurt. “Are youseriouslyjustifying what that fuckhead did to you?”
“No!”Was I?I swallowed. “That’s not… not what I meant,” I mumbled, feeling heat rush up my throat and into my cheeks.
Elliot bent down, taking my face in both of his calloused hands. “Seth, baby, look at me.”
I obeyed, aware that there were tears running into his fingers.
“Nothing, I repeat,nothingcan justify what was done to you and Noah. I don’t fucking care if the God your fuckhead of a father believes in is real, youdon’t fucking do that to your kids. You don’t do it toanyone,much less people you care about. People you’re supposed to love. You got me?”
I nodded, gulping air. Elliot slid down a step, one leg on either side of my torso, pulling me against his chest. I listened to his heart beat, the pulse faster than usual, but slowing the longer we sat there. After a few minutes, he stirred.
“So what’s he going to do?” Elliot asked softly, sliding one hand to cradle my skull, letting the other rest on the back of my neck. He held me there, fingers gently stroking the hair at the nape of my neck.
“Who?”
“Your father.”
“I—I don’t know, exactly.” I swallowed. Tried to focus my brain. “I—I think now that he knows what I am, he might…want to do it himself.” That seemed right. Well,accurate. The only time my father had withdrawn from punishment or purification had been the one time he’d felt that it would be more inappropriate for him to be involved than not. When what needed to be done involved assaulting his sons. Not at the same time or in the same way, but with the same intent.
To force us to become something we weren’t by showing us that what we thought we wanted was an abomination.
I couldn’t exactly argue that what Jeremiah Porter had done to mewasn’tan abomination. Or what he’d done to Noah, although the logic there had been different—that Noah needed to experience hispurposeas a wife and mother.
The end result had been the same.
We were still who we were, but we’d almost given up on ourselves. We’d tried.
I’d wondered, sometimes, if there was a God or Creator or Fate or whatever, and if that was the reason that the drowning had failed and all the times I’d prayed desperately as a kid for the cruel God I’d still believed in to just take my soul hadn’t been answered because there was more to our lives than the hell that had been our childhood.
Because there was. So much more.
“Dowhathimself?” Elliot asked, when I’d been silent for too long.
I sat back and looked up at him, at the planes of his face, the concern in his fractured-brown-green-crystal eyes, the way the copper skin on the long column of his throat rippled as he swallowed, the lines of scar around his jaw slowly fading as time passed. Even though his features were familiar, I still always wanted to study them, to find new things I somehow hadn’t noticed. To see each additional line and wrinkle as they formed, showing where he smiled or arched his eyebrow. God, how I loved him.
“Kill me,” I replied softly. “Because I refused to be purified. So I have to be purged, because I am unworthy of the transformation.”
“Seth—” He was clearly upset.
