Page 47 of Providence

The grin on my face was manic. Goliath was a shadow beside me, barely making a noise for a man so large. But he wasn’t a man, was he? Neither of us were men. We were fucking Horsemen. And today, we would reap.

I let the Horseman out, the power of War spreading through my limbs, coating my flesh in power and making adrenaline thrum in my veins. I loved it. With the Horsemen consuming our mortal bodies, we were more. I could hear the men inside the warehouse, the women whimpering somewhere toward the back. The clank of chains. The cruel words. I could smell the blood, piss, and cigarette smoke.

Goliath looked at me, baring his teeth in something that could have been a smile or a grimace. His eyes were black like demons, but Goliath looked like that all the time. It was hard to know where his Horseman stopped and the man began. Tonight, it didn’t matter.

Our cuts covered weapons, desert eagles, sawed off shotguns, and a semi-automatic that was strung across Goliath’s shoulders. He was fucking Conquest. He was here to slaughter.

I nodded toward the roller doors at the rear. I glared at him. “No women, unless they are with the Cartel. Got it?” Goliath was like a grenade. You could pull the pin, but the power of his release would destroy everything in his path.

I felt the moment he let his Horseman completely free. A shiver went down my spine, a residual human response to a threat. But my Horseman rose up and greeted its brother, and we fully merged.

Goliath melted into the darkness, and I pulled up my shotgun. It was fucking time to go to war.

I aimed a low kick to the metal reinforced door. I was stronger than ten men now. Stronger than your heroes. I was destruction and death.

Heads whipped in my direction as I strode through the metal door like it was made of cardboard. A split second was all it took me to assess the room. All these people stunk of violence. There was nothing innocent in this room.

I opened fire, mowing down the first row of Cartel thugs before they’d even raised their guns. I dropped the shotgun and grabbed my Glocks, nailing one after another. I felt a hit to my chest but it was no more than a slight irritation before I was spray painting the shooter's brain over the man beside him.

One man turned to run, but I shot him in the back. No one could leave. They’d made their decisions. They knew what they kept in cages in the back. They were all guilty.

More men poured into the room, a brief flash of confusion lighting their faces. They expected an army and only found one man.

They began to shoot, but then Goliath strode into the room. He was already coated in blood and chunks of gore, always playing with his food, that one.

A man fell to his knees. “Diablo,” he whispered, crossing himself. Goliath threw back his head and laughed, a chilling noise that was cruel and sharp like knives and not even a little bit human.

“Worse, motherfucker,” he growled, then slammed his booted foot into the man’s face with such force it bent back at a 90 degree angle.

I rolled my eyes, leaving Goliath to play with the remaining people in the room. This war was won. They’d folded under the first push, fucking pussies.

I stopped beside him. “No one leaves,” I growled, and Goliath gave me a bored eye roll that would have fitted a teenage girl better than a 6’7” demon, coated in the viscous remnants of a good bloodletting. He looked like Satan’s wet dream at that moment.

I walked out into the hall, shooting people as they came into my view. We were going to have to burn this fucking building down, but not before we got what we came for.

I had barely a speck of blood on me, which made me wonder what the fuck Goliath had done before he made it into that room, but at least I wouldn’t terrify the women being stored back here.

I followed the sounds of whimpers and the hot scent of fear. It was like a golden string pulling me toward the fucking den of suffering.

This warehouse was pretty high-tech, and when I got to a door that was protected by a biometric pad, I would have been screwed, if I hadn’t been an immortal. As it was, I just put my boot to the hinges and watched it fly across the room. There were screams as I strode into the dimly lit space. Gunshots ricocheted off the walls; whoever was shooting them had the precision of a fucking five year old. I lifted my gun and put a bullet between the eyes of the shooter. I didn’t look at his face. I didn’t owe this fucker the mercy of someone remembering his face.

The recesses of the room were shadowed, but not shadowed enough that I didn't see the chainlink cage filled with women. The smell of unwashed bodies and waste was repugnant, but nothing made my stomach turn like the fear in their eyes when they looked at me. Like I was a monster, an animal.

“Cain?” A small, shaky voice spoke, and my eyes flicked through the dirty faces in the cage. These faces I absorbed, committed to memory. I would remember this moment and use it to fuel my rage. I searched for the voice, and when I spotted the vaguely familiar face of Bambi, I mean Gemma, I breathed a sigh of relief. She hadn’t been sold. She was okay.

“Gemma. I’m here now. I’m going to get you out of there. All of you,” I said softly. I met her eyes, and as tears tracked down her face, I wanted to pull her out of there and hug her. But now was not the time.

I grabbed keys from the guy whose face I’d exploded, and unlocked the chained gate that was penning them in. They were all in nothing more than underwear, and as the ones at the front burst for the door, I could tell the ones who’d been recent acquisitions compared to the ones who’d been here the longest. Those ones sat in the corner, rocking and blank, no longer cognizant to their surroundings.

I wanted to redo my entrance to this fucking warehouse. Instead of mowing them down, I wanted to tear off their dicks one by one and feed them to each other.

I needed to coral the scared women before they ended up getting a stray bullet.

“Wait,” I barked, and they were so downtrodden that they all stopped instantly, freezing like rabbits. “We need to be smart about this,” I said softly. “Please help the ones who cannot help themselves,” I indicated to a woman, she could have been 19 or 45, I couldn’t tell under the dirt and trauma. “We can all get out of here together. Believe me when I say you will not spend another moment here,” I growled. There wouldn’t even be a ‘here’ in a moment. I was going to raze this fucking building like Gomorrah.

They listened, probably because defiance had been beaten out of them already. They helped up the ones that were trapped in their minds, some physically dragging the ones that looked near death until a single entity was left in the cage. I walked over, and realized it was a teenage boy. At least, I thought he was a teenager. His body was so emaciated that it was basically skeletal. Starved and exhausted. He was shirtless, his ribs showing painfully, and he had a tattoo of black wings on his chest above his heart. He was also missing an arm, the wound below his elbow raw and infected, oozing shit that smells disgusting. He tried to push himself up onto his knees, and it kicked me out of my shock.

“Easy kid. I got you.” I leaned down, and picked him up, realizing that he was a lot taller than I thought, but fucking light as a feather. Hell, even if I wasn’t riding the Horseman right now, he would have been too fucking easy to carry. He flinched away from my touch, his light brown hair hiding his face, and my heart broke. I didn’t want to push him, but he couldn’t walk out on his own two feet either.

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