Renegade Read online

  “What do you think she’s doing?” Mary asked.

  “I wish I knew.”

  Seated at the kitchen table, Diane looked up from a newspaper. “Figuring things out, I’d guess. Her life hasn’t been exactly simple recently, and you sent her off to talk to the devil himself, from what Chris said.”

  “Jacob is a brother.”

  “One with a tongue like a fox.”

  Richard sighed. “I think she’ll be all right. She just needs some time, and some space—clearly.”

  The sound of children’s laughter outside turned his head. Nick was dousing Alicia with a garden hose, and she was shrieking and telling him to stop it. Both of them were laughing their heads off.

  “We can’t do anything about Reese right now,” Richard said. “Nothing except trust her. She’s got Tyler with her, and they’ve both got good heads and better hearts. I’m not worried. I do wish we could do something about Jacob, but I think we’d better trust Reese with that too.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust her,” Mary said. “It’s just that I’m worried about what might have happened. If Jacob got the jump on her somehow.”

  “She called Lieutenant Jackson, and he said she sounded just fine. Just collecting her messages and letting him know she wouldn’t be back for a little while. I think she’s okay.”

  Jacob was the last loose end, the one part of the hive they had not managed to get hold of—all because Reese had defaulted her post in some sense, but Richard refused to think of it that way. He would trust her. She had earned it.

  “I want to go back to Lincoln, though, and see Julie again,” he said. “She and her daughter could use the solidarity of the Oneness right now, and I think Reese would want us to take care of them.”

  He looked up when Melissa walked into the kitchen, smiling faintly as she looked out at the loud water fight outside the window.

  “Looks like fun,” she said.

  April trailed in after her, dressed for a run. “Nick hasn’t had fun like that maybe ever. I’m glad you brought Alicia.”

  Mary raised her eyebrows. “You’re going for a run in this heat?”

  April shrugged and pulled her blonde hair into a ponytail. “I have to get my strength back sometime.”

  “Heat exhaustion doesn’t seem like the best way.”

  “It’s cooler down by the water.”

  She was out the door before Mary could respond. Mary just laughed and shook her head, laughing even more when Nick turned the hose fully on April as she jogged past.

  “It’s a growing family we’ve got,” she told Richard.

  “Who would have seen that coming?” he asked. Alicia had become Oneness while she was still hiding out with Melissa in the cave on Tempter’s Mountain, just suddenly opening herself to the Spirit. Nick had yet to become One, but it was only a matter of time. It was common for children who lived in cells to act as functional members of the Oneness before they were actually Joined.

  Alicia’s brother, Jordan, had disappeared. Richard and Tony had spent two days searching for him on the mountain, to no avail.

  “You did all you could,” Mary said softly.

  “Sometimes,” Richard answered, “that is a terrible limit.”

  “That’s why it isn’t just you,” she said. “That’s why we have the Oneness.”

  He nodded and looked away from the window. Outside, April had abandoned her run, wrestled the hose away from Nick, and was now soaking both children. Melissa had glued herself to the window and was watching, deep in thought. Richard glanced her way but found he couldn’t keep watching her. He hadn’t known how hard it would be for him to have her here—because once again, “all you can do” was a terrible limit. He could do nothing to save her life, and he hated that.

  All he could do, all the village cell could do, was act as a hospice and help her die in peace and surrounded by family.

  She turned away and seated herself at the table across from Diane, pouring herself a glass of cold lemonade. Every movement was graceful, long, slender fingers somehow calling attention to themselves even when they weren’t making music.

  Mary laid a hand on Richard’s shoulder and left it there, imparting all the sympathy and strength she could.

  He covered her hand with his and squeezed her fingers without a word.

  “So,” she said, “you’ll go into town to see Julie. You want company?”

  “I don’t see why not.” He motioned toward the pair who had regained control of the hose and were now soaking April from head to foot. “We might as well take those two along. They can play with Miranda.”

  “She’s a good bit older, isn’t she?”

  “She is, but . . .” He hesitated. “She isn’t mature. I don’t think it benefited Jacob’s goals to raise mature people. Or else his control just didn’t give them room, even if he intended it that way. I noticed it in some of the others too—it’s like they’re years younger than they should be.”

  “Childlikeness can be a good thing,” Mary said, raising an eyebrow as April shrieked and chased an equally shrieking Nick around in a circle.

  “Childlikeness, yes. Childishness, no. Jacob kept them childish—underequipped and underempowered. Dangerous in a war.”

  Mary shook her head. “I wish—”

  “We all do.”

  Neither said Reese’s name again. There was no point in talking about it. There was nothing they could do.

  * * *

  As Jacob drove, Reese closed her eyes and conjured up images from years of battles, years of hunting down demons, years of thinking she was making a real difference in the world. On the surface, she was. They had broken the backs of a few criminals, but there was always another to take its place. They had freed a few people from torment, but there was no guarantee they hadn’t walked right back into it, or into torment of another kind. The Oneness supposedly held the world together, but the forces of entropy were so powerful it was hard to see it as anything but a losing battle.

  She wondered what would happen if they stopped. If they just gave up. If people would destroy themselves, sending the earth up in an atomic supernova, or if the laws of physics would actually unravel and cease holding the universe in place.

  For a moment it struck her as absurd that they saw themselves as having so much impact. Were they just deluded?

  Had she just been lied to?

  She shook her head. Even Jacob didn’t believe that; he just believed the Oneness was going about its work the wrong way, that they needed to wrest greater power into their hands and go after the human agents of evil and deterioration to restore the balance of justice in the world. But it was funny how asking those questions could open the door to more.

  Not only to questions, really, but to doubt.

  She had never been a doubter.

  She didn’t think she liked the label.

  Her ankle was throbbing, and she gingerly shifted position and then closed her eyes again. At the moment she didn’t even want to look at where they might be going.

  “I bought something while we were in town,” Jacob said out of nowhere. He inclined his head toward a satchel on the floor, a bag he had been hauling around with him since they got him out of the corrective facility. He obviously wanted Reese to pick it up, so gingerly, she did.

  “Open it up,” he said.

  With a suspicious look at him, she slowly opened the bag. Inside, a thick plastic bag was wrapped around a purchase. She unwrapped it, feeling its heavy weight, and found herself looking at three good-sized hunting knives.

  She cast an easy glance over her shoulder at Tyler, who was sitting forward to see. He was frowning.

  “What are these for?” he asked.

  “Even before you told me about Bertoller, I knew this journey might take us into violent waters,” Jacob said. “Better not to be unarmed.”

  “We have our Spirit swords,” Tyler said.

  “And those only work against spiritual enemies.”

&nbs
p; Tyler folded his arms. “All our enemies are spiritual.”

  “We’re still proving that, aren’t we?” Jacob asked.

  Reese had put two of the knives down and held just one now, pulling it out of its sheath and brandishing it carefully. It felt strange—its physicality a mirror of the Spirit sword she knew so well, its solid presence in her hand at once like and completely unlike the hilt that had formed there so many times. Just as the enemy it was meant for was like and completely unlike the enemies she had fought for years. An unexpected memory struck her: Patrick talking about how much he liked hunting and how it had made him better in battle. He liked knives, bows, and arrows, not guns. She had told him she preferred bloodless targets.

  That was all before he died.

  She smiled faintly at Tyler, who was watching her with obvious worry. “Patrick would have liked these,” she said. “He was a hunter.”

  Tyler had seen and talked with Patrick several times—Reese’s old friend had come to him as part of the cloud even before Tyler was Joined. “I don’t think he would have liked what you’re thinking of doing with them,” he said.

  “Your problem,” Jacob boomed, “is that you lack purpose, boy. You think the Oneness is all about your—that it’s about having friends, having community. You don’t yet understand that you are here for a reason, and that reason is combating the powers of destruction. The sooner you get serious about our cause, the sooner you will discover that Reese is heading in a right direction, not a wrong one. We are not here to hold hands. We are here to make a difference.”

  Tyler sat back and grumbled something in reply, sounding like little more than a petulant child. Reese continued to stare at the knife in her hand and to test its weight. She didn’t bother to test how sharp it was—that, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  “You’re a born warrior,” Jacob told her. “I know more about you than you might think. Your reputation in Lincoln was growing, and David sometimes talked with me. He would speak glowingly of your strength, your quickness, your mind in a fight. But you were born for this cause, not to waste your talents fighting an unending battle trying to disarm weapons instead of disarming the people who wield them. Because that is all the demons are—weapons. You were born to take up those weapons yourself and wield them in the cause of the universe, of life and strength and growth in the face of corruption and rot.”

  Her response was automatic, even though he was unsettling her—not only by his words, but also because his was the same voice that had spoken to her from a demonic incarnation only the night before. “I won’t fight alongside demons. I won’t use the demonic.” She turned in her seat, trying to face him. “And you should know better by now. Even granted that you are right about some things, it was Clint who tried to teach you to use the demonic. Clint you welcomed. And look at what you know now—he was your greatest enemy all along.”

  “Not mine,” Jacob said, flushing. “Not my enemy. Ours. The enemy of the Oneness. And I have admitted, freely, that I was wrong about him. But it was a distraction—a tactic of the enemy to knock me off course. My basic understanding was not wrong. I was simply deceived in applying it.”

  Their road was taking them through a stretch of orchards, apples growing on one side and an open, unplowed field of weeds waving in the other. Jacob pulled over abruptly and got out, stalking around to open Reese’s door.

  “What are we doing?” she asked, reaching for her crutches as Tyler handled them to her.

  “I’m hungry,” Jacob said.

  Reese still had the knife in her hand as she slipped one crutch under her arm and used it to hop forward. It crunched and threatened to slide away on the gravel, but she kept herself upright. She wrinkled her nose. “The apples are still green.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of eating those.” He pointed down an orchard row to a chicken scratching in the dirt. “Kill that,” he said.

  She didn’t even know why she did it—why she just obeyed, like his word was a switch that triggered a response. Without even thinking, she aimed the knife and threw it.

  It killed the bird.

  Uneasily, she waited as Tyler went to retrieve it. Jacob looked pleased. “That was excellent,” he said. “You didn’t even need time to aim. And that isn’t even a throwing knife. David was right about you.”

  “David has never been right about me.” Her snapped response surprised her with its own vehemence.

  Jacob’s chuckle quieted. “I’m sorry. Poor choice of words. But you are the warrior your reputation says you are.” He looked pleased—proud, even. It made her uncomfortable. Too much like he was taking ownership of her gifts.

  Even so, she knew what he said was true. She was a fighter. The sword was her gift—every member of the Oneness had a special gifting in something, and battle was hers. Years with the Lincoln cell, leading others into the fray, had honed that gift until it was as sharp as the knife in her hand.

  But it still chilled her to think what Jacob wanted her to do with it.

  Tyler held out the chicken, and it flopped ungraciously in his hand. “What do you want to do with this?” he said.

  “Gut it and pluck it and eat it,” Jacob answered.

  “Isn’t that stealing?”

  “We already killed it. Anyway, its being out here means it wandered away from the coop. The owners have probably given it up for dead anyway. Better us than a coyote.”

  Tyler sighed and flopped down under a tree, starting the work of gutting the bird.

  “You know how to do that?” Jacob asked.

  “I’m not completely useless.”

  Jacob didn’t bother to respond.

  Reese just laughed and hopped over beside Tyler, laying her crutch down on the grass as she eased down against the trunk of the tree. She could help with the next step. Chicken plucking wasn’t the most pleasant task she could think of, but it wasn’t the worst either.

  “I don’t like any of this,” Tyler said quietly. “Those knives.”

  “He got one for you too.”

  “I won’t use it.”

  “Maybe you can kill us some more chickens.”

  “I couldn’t do what you did anyway. I’m a fisher, not a hunter.”

  “Where did you learn to gut a chicken?”

  “Chris shoots birds once in a while.”

  Chris.

  A pain in Reese’s stomach accompanied the mention of his name.

  She knew that she ought to feel guilty for running out on the cell. She knew that she ought to feel guilty for co-opting a mission, for changing course when she was supposed to be converting Jacob and considering her own conversion instead. She knew that on some level, to some degree, she was acting as a traitor.

  But it was Chris she felt regret over, and Chris she wished more than anything she could talk to.

  “Do you suppose he’s all right?” she asked.

  “He’s a man. He can take care of himself.”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant.”

  “Do I think he’s worried sick about you? Yes. And probably about me too. I try to convince him I can take care of myself too, but he doesn’t believe me.” Tyler smiled, though sweat was running down his face and getting chicken feathers and dust stuck in it. “He still thinks I’m a little kid who just lost his parents and needs his help to get through life.” His expression sobered. “But I wouldn’t have made it without him.”

  “I’m sorry to worry him,” Reese told him. “I wish there was some other way.”

  “There is some other way.”

  “No, there isn’t. I really have to figure this out. You told me that yourself.”

  “I know I did. I just wish Jacob didn’t have to be in the middle of it.”

  “I can’t figure this one out without him. He’s the only one asking questions.”

  Tyler grimaced. “David asked questions.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just be careful about the answers you find, I guess.�
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  “It’s not a matter of ‘being careful.’ You look for the truth, and when you find it, you accept it. I don’t have a choice about that.”

  “Okay,” Tyler said.

  She wanted to get up and walk off in frustration, pace up and down the orchard rows to cool her head a little, but her bad ankle made jumping up impossible, and in the heat the effort it would take to pull herself up and get on the crutch again didn’t quite feel worth it.

  She wished Chris was here. She wanted to talk to him. Tyler was Oneness—even if he hadn’t been for long—and she couldn’t help feeling like he was guarding his loyalties. Like he saw her as the potential traitor she felt like.

  For the millionth time she wished David had never exiled her.

  Somehow she was sure that if he hadn’t, she wouldn’t be where she was now. And even if where she was now was in one sense good—truth was better than a lie, always—she would have given anything to trade this life for her old one.

  Chris, with his resistance to becoming One, did not share Tyler’s conflict.

  That evening, they roasted the bird over a fire in the orchard. The weather was clear and they planned to sleep out here. It would take another two days of driving at least to reach Lincoln, and this was nicer than some places they could end up sleeping.

  Tyler climbed a tree above Reese and settled into the branches.

  “You going to sleep up there?”

  “Yup.”

  “That can’t be comfortable.”

  “Neither can the ground. Chris and me used to do this when we were kids. We’d go camping up in the cliffs and find trees to sleep in. Don’t have to worry about getting eaten by wolves.”

  “There are no wolves within a thousand miles of here.”

  “There weren’t when we were kids, either. Didn’t stop us from climbing the trees.”

  She smiled as she laid her crutch beside her and tried to get comfortable at the base of the tree. Jacob was a ways away, thinking stormy thoughts.

  The knife Jacob had given her was in its sheath near her hand. It made her feel safer somehow.

  She wondered how she might end up using it, other than killing chickens.