Renegade Read online

  But she just kept seeing the image of him standing on the catwalk in the warehouse, watching Patrick die with satisfaction. And then pinning his death on her.

  Exiling her.

  And behind that, all the years she had trusted him, considered him a brother, even loved him.

  She exited the phone booth she’d used to make the calls and nodded to Tyler, who was leaning against a lamppost just beside it. She didn’t even know the name of the town where they were—just that it was in the mountains, inland and north of nowhere, with foothills and a desert between them and the coast.

  She forced her thoughts back to the original call. “The lieutenant says he trusts us.”

  “I hope that’s a good idea.”

  She shot Tyler a glare.

  “Hey, Reese, easy. You know as well as I do that we don’t know what we’re doing. Just following Jacob around and hoping he has some kind of good plan.”

  She leaned on one of her crutches and used her free hand to wipe sweat from her forehead. “It’s hot as blazes again.” The air smelled like burnt pine. Everything out here was dry.

  “I miss the water. The bay,” Tyler said.

  “Well, maybe we can get back there soon.”

  Tyler was quiet, falling into step beside Reese as she hobbled down the street toward the public parking lot ringed with pines where they’d left the car and Jacob. Crutch, hop. Crutch, hop.

  “I’ll stay with you as long as you need,” he said finally. “The water can wait.”

  She turned and regarded him, his long, curly hair making his face boyish despite several days’ worth of blond stubble on his chin and cheeks.

  “Thanks, Tyler.”

  “You deserve to have someone stick by you.”

  “You don’t really believe in what I’m doing, do you?”

  “Sure I do. You need to figure out where you stand on some issues. That’s important. I believe in that.”

  “But you don’t like where I’m going on those issues.”

  “Jacob scares me,” Tyler said. “I don’t love it when you entertain his questions. But I can’t stop you. And somebody has to ask the hard stuff. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “You’re a good friend.”

  He shrugged and smiled. The smile faded quickly. “So what else did you find out?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “No answers to why you’re being attacked?”

  “No.”

  Tyler stopped. “You learned something. Spill.”

  She tried to act affronted. “What?”

  “I didn’t think you could get more uneasy, but you’re worse since you stepped out of that phone booth. You’re not like this because Lieutenant Jackson trusts us.”

  Reese sighed. The boy was perceptive.

  “I talked to Julie. She said David’s back.”

  Tyler brightened. “What? They’re done? The battle is over?”

  “Seems that way. Apparently Richard visited her and told her that the hive is finished. But David didn’t change his heart. They brought him back to jail and he’ll face charges.”

  He slowed down and scanned her face—she could feel his eyes on her even though she didn’t look at him. “Are you happy about that?”

  “I don’t know what I feel about that,” she confessed. “I want justice to be done. It’s good that he’ll face trial.”

  But he won’t face vengeance, she thought. And I promised Patrick vengeance. Justice—against the real enemy.

  They crossed the street, thumping across the blazing pavement to the nondescript parking lot. Pines surrounded it on three sides; on the fourth was the back of a one-story commercial building with its paint peeling.

  “Are you happy that he didn’t change?”

  “Tyler . . .”

  “I just think you should talk about it.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know. Do you have to ask questions like that?”

  “You do. You’re asking yourself. I just think you shouldn’t handle them alone.”

  She smiled and chuckled. “You really believe in the Oneness.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “It’s just impressive. For someone so new.”

  “Didn’t you believe like this when you were new?”

  She didn’t want to even think about that. She had believed more than anyone she knew. Reese had always been the blazing idealist, the one set on fire by her own passionate convictions. She’d believed with everything in her that the Oneness was life—that “never alone” was the only watchword she needed. She’d let the Oneness and its goals define her and had poured her whole life into its service. Until David exiled her.

  Somehow, even though that had been a lie, it had changed everything for her.

  Maybe that was why she felt it necessary to entertain Jacob’s questions. Maybe, by following new ways of thinking about the Oneness, she could rediscover belief. Start over somehow. Rediscover the love that had changed her life once.

  “I just can’t quite come back yet,” she whispered. “I’ll get there, Tyler. I just need time.”

  He nodded, but he looked unhappy.

  They crossed the parking lot to the car. They had left Jacob waiting for them, but he wasn’t there—no big surprise. The man was anything but patient and docile. Patience and docility, in fact, were two of the Oneness qualities that he generally abhorred.

  “So now what?” Tyler asked.

  Reese reached for the door handle, pulling her hand back as the metal threatened to burn her fingers. “Ouch. Now we . . . Oh, there he is.”

  Tyler looked over the top of the car. Jacob was striding across the parking lot like he owned it—like he owned the whole town. Dressed in his work pants and button-up shirt, with a dark beard covering most of his face, he looked incredibly uncomfortable in the heat. What they could see of his face was flushed beet red.

  Reese tossed her crutches into the backseat and hopped into the driver’s side as usual. Thankfully it was her left ankle that was broken, and she could stretch it out best when she was driving. Jacob sat beside her, mopping his face with a handkerchief. The inside of the station wagon felt like a blast furnace. She turned it on and felt hot air blow out the vents. The air conditioning worked, but only intermittently—and even when it was running, “worked” was a slight overstatement.

  Tyler eased himself into the backseat and didn’t say a word.

  Jacob started to say something about the heat in towns and how reflective it was of man’s need to turn everything into concrete. Reese wasn’t really listening.

  One phrase was pounding through her head, made more hellish by the hot air:

  Franz Bertoller is alive.

  The man Jacob had failed to execute so many years ago.

  The man whose crimes had prompted him to rethink the entire way the Oneness operated, to conclude that they had compromised and lost their power and integrity by failing to bring such evil to justice. The man who had destroyed much of the Oneness twenty years ago, including Jacob’s beloved first wife and Mary’s twin brother and even Chris’s father, though he wasn’t Oneness but was only connected to them . . .

  And not only was he alive, but he had been operating as Clint. Jacob’s one-time right-hand man.

  “The plot thickens,” she muttered under her breath.

  “What did you say?” Jacob asked.

  “I said it’s really hot.”

  Liar, her thoughts said. Why don’t you just tell him?

  She would. She just wasn’t sure how yet.

  When they sprang Jacob out of jail, where he was awaiting charges of manslaughter at least, and possibly murder, after the death of a man who had been in the care of his community, it had been on the agreement of a week spent examining one another’s case. Jacob would try to convince Reese that he was right about his cause, and then she would try to convince him that he was wrong.

  So far they had stretched the agreement past a week, and all she had acco
mplished was discovering that she wasn’t convinced of her own side.

  So now it was her turn, her game, and she was on a mission not so much to convince Jacob as to convince herself.

  That, or give up and change sides.

  Once upon a time she would not have thought that was possible, but a lot of things had changed.

  Jacob went back to complaining about the heat and man-made misery. She wondered if he ever encountered a subject he wasn’t passionate about, but she doubted it. The strength of the man’s spirit was gravitational enough to pull planets out of orbit.

  By contrast, she felt about as powerful and influential as a flea trying to change the direction of a dog. She might irritate, but she couldn’t do much to change the course of anything.

  She knew the case she should be making. That the task of the Oneness was to hold the world, even the universe, together by counteracting the destructive forces of darkness, and that they did so through love, service, and compassionate reaching out to ordinary humans while battling the demonic wherever they found it.

  Somehow, with the image of David’s face in the warehouse haunting her, the case felt weak.

  “Perhaps you should consider,” Jacob boomed out of nowhere, as though he was reading her thoughts—which maybe he was—“the role of justice in any love worth the name.”

  She didn’t answer, pretending that driving was taking too much of her concentration. Despite the fact that they were in a two-stoplight town in the middle of nowhere and that traffic was nearly nonexistent at this time of day.

  “It’s Reese’s turn,” Tyler piped up from the backseat.

  Jacob likewise ignored him.

  Aren’t we a happy crew, Reese thought, turning out of the town and toward the narrow highway that headed back into the woods and toward the cabin.

  Franz Bertoller is alive.

  That thought came pounding back through, insisting that she not ignore it.

  She had agreed with Julie that Jacob needed to know.

  But it was going to change things if he did.

  For both of them.

  She gave the car more gas, pushing it forward like she could drive away from the course-altering power of Julie’s news.

  She couldn’t.

  Without signalling, she slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. Gravel and pine needles crunched under their tires, and the car listed to the right toward the ditch beside them.

  She threw it into park and sat back. “Franz Bertoller is alive,” she said.

  About as subtle as an atomic bomb.

  Jacob went white.

  The car was silent.

  After a moment he said, “That’s impossible.”

  “It’s not. He must have faked his death. He was demon-possessed. He’s been . . .” She almost choked. She cleared her throat and kept going. “He’s been going under a different face. Clint. Clint is Franz Bertoller.”

  Silence.

  She kept on, not sure what reaction she had been expecting but wishing Jacob would do or say something. “The cell figured it out. They’ve stripped him of his power somehow, but he’s reverted to his old form and they can’t pin Clint’s crimes to him, so . . .”

  Jacob pounded his fist into the dashboard so hard that Reese thought he was going to go through it, and then he swore, jerked the car door open, and stalked up the winding road, visibly trembling.

  “Wow,” Tyler said.

  She wasn’t sure if he was commenting on her news or on Jacob’s reaction, but she said, “I know.”

  Apparently the news didn’t take Jacob long to process. “You will help me go after him,” he said when he got back in the car.

  She didn’t know if it was a question.

  But the answer was yes.

  She would.

  It was as good a way as any to find answers, and somehow, she knew she couldn’t leave him to do this alone.

  “Reese . . .” Tyler said in the backseat, but they both ignored him.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked.

  “Find him. Bring him to justice.”

  “What about . . .”

  Jacob’s face was anguished. “I’m dismayed at the news that he was disguising himself as Clint. That he was operating right under my nose. It shows blindness on my part. I’m an honest man, I’ll admit this right now: to the extent you said I should not have been working with him, you were right. I was deceived in trusting him, clearly. The fruit of that is in the death of that trucker and the trouble my whole community is in. I take responsibility for that.”

  “I—”

  He didn’t wait for her full response. “But deception is one thing. Evil is another. This man is evil. If he is not brought to justice, he will do far more damage. We can’t let him, Reese. We have to find out where he is and go after him. I have to finish what I started all those years ago.”

  And somehow, it was that last line that brought her fully on board. She knew better than to embrace personal vendettas. She knew that the Oneness was a body, a community, not a collective of renegades on their own personal courses. But she understood.

  “Yes, I’ll help,” she said.

  In the back, Tyler sat against the seat with a thump.

  “You don’t have to come,” she said.

  “Of course I’m coming.”

  “You have to be on our side,” Jacob said.

  “I’m on your side. You two are my family. That’s my side.”

  “On the side of our cause.”

  “I will come with you,” Tyler said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “That’s good enough,” Reese said.

  “Very well.” Jacob’s eyes, fixed until now on Reese’s face, flicked to the backseat and rested on Tyler for a second before returning to Reese. “What do you know about where he is?”

  “Nothing. Julie didn’t know.”

  He looked surprised. “Julie?”

  “Richard visited her and told her. She called the prison, and they put me in touch with her.”

  His face clouded. “I failed her. I failed all of them. Bringing that . . .”

  “You didn’t know,” Reese said, softly. “We can all be deceived.”

  Tyler made a noise, but she continued to ignore him.

  “So who would know?” Jacob asked.

  “Richard might. He’s the one who told Julie everything.”

  Besides passing on Julie’s message, Lieutenant Jackson had also told her that the village cell had been trying to reach her. She hadn’t called them back. She couldn’t, not yet. She missed them, but she had to finish her job before she went home.

  If she still had a home at the end of it.

  So she told him, “I don’t think we can go to Richard. The cell would try to stop y—us.”

  “Would Clint—Bertoller—have contacted any of his cohorts?”

  “You can’t go back to any prison,” Reese pointed out. “They might not let you walk out again. I don’t know how Lieutenant Jackson is covering for us as it is.”

  He was quiet, pondering for a moment. Then, “You’re right. It would be foolish to jeopardize our freedom.”

  Your freedom, Reese thought, but she didn’t say that.

  “We could reach some of his other cohorts.”

  That took her a moment. Sitting in the car under the shade of pines that did little to negate the heat of the sun, with the barren road winding off ahead of them in silence, the suggestion felt incongruous. When she figured out what he meant, it punched her in the gut.

  “You’re not going to keep trying to work with the demons.”

  “I told you. Demons are just power. They’re only servants of evil because evil people harness them.”

  Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel. “Right . . . and that’s why they’re trying to kill me.”

  “I’ve already told you what I think about that. Unless I miss my guess, they proved my point in the clearing last night—in the encounter you haven’t told us a
nything about.”

  Reese didn’t say a word.

  “You’d be better off learning to control them yourself, rather than just fighting them all the time.”

  “No. And I can’t work with you if you try to do that.”

  He looked out the window, his presence a storm. “Then maybe you’d better let me go alone.”

  “There has to be another way to find him.”

  Tyler muttered something in the back.

  Another minute passed.

  “There is another way,” Jacob said. “But you will regret it if we take it.”

  “Try me.”

  “We can wait for him to strike. He needs to get power back, if you’re right that they stripped him of it. He’ll build it the same way he always has—through sacrifice. By destroying others. And then we can hope he leaves us a trail we can follow.” He turned and glared at her. “But you will have to take responsibility for letting him strike when you could have used other powers to find him first.”

  Tyler said his piece again, louder this time so they could both hear him. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  “You go ahead and believe that,” Jacob said. “I’ll let you lead on this only because you need to truly understand the gravity of your compromise. You need to understand what the Oneness’s refusal to use real power is costing this world.”

  “Fine,” Reese said, her voice shaking. “I’ll accept that. I’ve been fighting demons most of my life; I can’t suddenly start allying with them.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand. But I know—sometimes it takes something life-changing to open your eyes.”

  As though she hadn’t already experienced plenty of that.

  Whether or not her eyes had been opened—that, she still couldn’t say.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked.

  “We head for Lincoln. It’s where he last operated. Your friends might be foolish enough to let Bertoller go—alive!—but I’ll not be foolish enough to keep my distance. I want to be there when he strikes, before he can gain the power he needs.”

  Chapter 4

  Richard hung up the phone slowly and shook his head.

  “No good?” Mary asked.

  “She called,” he said. “Jackson said she called. So she got our messages. She’ll call us if she wants to.”