Author's Note: This chapter was a bit of a toughie. I wrote four completely different versions of it and after much revising and fussing, I finally settled on this version which I was the most happy with (or the least unhappy with, rather). As always, I'd like to thank everyone who read and reviewed the last chapter, Genius-626, Lins, Inwe[z]247, Mythstar Black Dragon, VoloDiNotte, FireChildSlytherin5, stormyseas77 and Faith-Catherine. I'd also like to thank everyone who added this story to their favorites/author alerts list. I honestly cannot express how grateful I am for your thoughtful support and kind feedback. Thanks, guys! I do hope you enjoy this installment.

Disclaimer: I claim no ownership of Priest.

Part 5 Novice

The Church was not her home. This Rowan knew, although she only began to understand it after a year spent living in the city, cloistered away from the world in a life of pray and deprivation, and more often than not, violence.

She was a novice then. That's what they called her. Not Rowan. Not little girl. Not child. Just novice. She was a postulant, a hopeful supplicant, a candidate who had been blessed but not yet chosen to bear the cross. That would take time and training. That would take pain.

So much pain.

The others were called novices as well. The green-eyed boy who continually insisted that his name was Marcus. The young twins who didn't seem to know where they were or why. The sullen teenagers who acted strong during combat training, but always cried in their sleep at night. And the young man with the sad face who rarely said anything at all.

The Church kept them segregated and secluded from the rest of the populace in a building that stood in the shadow of the city's cathedral. It was a low, squat structure, a barracks with long halls haunted by memories and cellars that were always cold even when the heavy heat of the city festered beneath the polluted canopy of clouds.

The novices slept on hard wooden benches in drafty dormitories. They ate porridge and drank water, but also fasted. They were locked in the chapel for hours, kneeling on the unforgiving stones, prostrating themselves before the sad-faced saints and before God, who had blessed them.

It was monastic life at its worst and at the age of eleven, Rowan knew what it was to be an ascetic, someone who measured their existence not by what they had, but by what they had lost, what she had lost…

Sage. Her mother. The small tin and wood hovel in the wasteland that was ramshackle but her home nonetheless. And this Church, this place of open, empty rooms and iron-walled chapels and children who cried at night was not home. Her dormitory bed with the wooden frame and scratchy straw pallet was not her cot in the hovel. Marcus and the twins and the teenagers and the sad young man were not Sage. And the Priestess was not her mother.

Rowan hated her. She hated her.

Priestess was built for violence. She had a habit of pacing in tight circles, her figure graceful, yet tempered by a potent ferocity, an unsettled tension that mimicked a large predator on the prowl. She had killed vampires. She was the leader of the Priests and the one who knew best how to train the novices. Through obedience and pray. Through coercion and confusion. Through what the Church promised and what it denied. Through violence. Through pain.

And Priestess knew best how to hurt them. She knew how to hurt them all.

Rowan herself was too young to fight when she first came to the Church. Her bones were delicate and her body malnourished and her skin too soft and she bled easily. It was decided that she couldn't withstand the first barrage of combat training that the older novices underwent, and for the first year they spared her and the green-eyed boy and the young twins. They were granted time, they were strengthened, they were prepared for what was to come.

For the pain. So much pain. And for the violence.

The older novices were not so fortunate. They were taken to the training grounds, a great rectangular arena under the dormitories that had a sand floor and air vents in the ceiling and yellow electric lights that tried to mimic the sun but always failed.

It was in this place, this wide and empty crypt, that they learned violence. Where they learned what it was like to hurt someone else…and to be hurt.

Rowan was also brought to the training grounds every day with Marcus and the twins and together, they huddled on the stone benches outside the arena and watched. Were made to watch.

Priestess was built for violence and she bred it into the novices, bled it into their bodies and breathed it into their lungs. But Rowan only hated her. Hated her. And she knew she could never, never be like her. An animal that was almost human. A human that was almost animal. She would never be like Priestess.

For hours, Rowan would watch her, half awed, but always revolted by everything Priestess did. She would hurt the novices, taking their heads into her hands and smashing their skulls into the sand. She would kick them while they laid curled at her feet. She would bring blood to their lips with a flourish of her tight, little fists.

Violence. Such violence.

And Rowan was trapped by it. Isolated in a prison that itself was a paradox, an uneasy juxtaposition between faith and the worst kind of reckoning. She would sit on the hard bench on the sidelines of the arena, clutching Marcus's sweaty palm in her left hand, the fingers of her right curled around the edge of her seat, pressed against the cold, pitted stone.

She would pray. Marcus would pray. And the twins would cry, their voices bleating like lambs, their eyelashes beaded with milky tears.

And sometimes, the older novices cried with them.

It didn't happen often, only on the days when Priestess hurt them the most, when she would rush into the arena with what seemed like preternatural speed, her reddish hair swinging down her back in a long plait, her jagged nostril dilated to catch the heady scent of fear. And she would send the novices scattering. She would find the weakest and pin him to the ground, twisting his arms behind him as she told him to get up, get up.

Sometimes the beaten novice would bury his head in dirty sand and surrender. Sometimes he would fight back. And sometimes he would even cry.

Rowan hated it when they cried. It made her feel hopeless somehow, like when she used to watch Sage drive his pitchfork into the barren earth. Like when she used to see her mother say her rosary, praying for the husband she knew was never going to come home.

It was a deep, sick feeling. An understanding that caused the meager porridge in Rowan's stomach to curdle. A knowing that made her vulnerable. She hated to feel hopeless. And she hated to see the novices cry.

The worst came on an afternoon Rowan would never forget, on a day that would have been unmemorable for its insignificance and tired ritual and useless routine. Marcus's hand had been clutched in hers. The twins were scrubbing at their leaking eyes. And the older novices fought, or tried to fight as Priestess moved among them, her body twisting and arcing, her garments streaming behind her in a mournful veil of faded black, her movements fluid yet so very ugly. So very vile.

On this day she grabbed the smallest novice, a boy who was maybe fourteen and seemed to weep the most at night. Priestess wrapped her fingers around his neck, creating an inescapable vine, and lifted him off the ground.

And the novice tried to be fight back and oh, it was terrible to witness. Terrible to recognize how futile his efforts were, even when he thrashed his legs at her, trying to sweep her off her feet as he had been taught.

He failed, his boots only breezing past her ankles and she threw him back to the ground, slamming his jaw into the stale sand.

There was a crack. The sound of bone breaking. The novice's mouth fell open, his red tongue lolling out like a dog's, his face distended. He gagged and coughed and clutched at his jawbone, which had been shattered and was already swelling with the promise of a dark bruise.

"Mama," he cried, then started to scream. "Mama!"

Rowan dug her nails into Marcus's hand as she watched Priestess start to circle. She wondered, vaguely, if she had ever had a mother of her own.

"Get up," Priestess demanded.

"Mama!" the novice wept.

"Get up!"

But the boy didn't listen. He only brought his knees up to his chest in a pale effort to protect himself. Rowan watched as he rolled wildly in the sand, as he tried to make his body small so that he could sink into the welcoming earth and hide.

And for the first time, emotion flickered across Priestess's scarred face, expressing itself as puckering of the lips, a lifting of the brow. Angry. She was angry.

Or maybe sad.

Rowan couldn't tell the difference.

Priestess raised her hand, the hand of judgment, and she drew her arm back, the sleeve of her coat billowing slightly in the hoarse breeze that was pumped in from the air vents overhead. She was going to hit the boy again, this Rowan knew. She was going to hurt him.

But Priestess didn't. She didn't hit the novice because someone knocked her off her feet. Someone threw her back to the ground where her head bounced and blood bloomed in a thin trail along her brow, flashing color in an otherwise lifeless, gray world.

It had been the oldest novice. The blue-eyed, sad young man who's name Rowan didn't know and would probably never know. He stretched himself on top of the Priestess, his full weight bearing down on her body as he crushed the air from her lungs. And she was stunned. Stunned.

"Get up," he muttered, putting his lips close to her ear, the skin around his mouth dappled with sweat, "get up!"

And then Rowan knew. She knew.

Turning to Marcus, she released his hand. "I've decided," she said, over the sound of the twins weeping. "I've decided. I don't want to be like Priestess."

"But you will be," Marcus insisted.

Rowan shook her head. "No," she said. "I'll be like him."

Author's Note: Originally, it was Rowan getting the beat-down in this chapter, but upon further consideration, I thought that that scenario might be a little too dark for this story. And, after all, this chapter was dark enough, I believe.

Thanks so much for reading! If you have a free moment, please leave a review. Feedback always makes my day. The next chapter is in the works and should be posted in a week. Until then, take care and be well!