Renegade Read online

  To her surprise, as she squirmed to get comfortable amidst the roots and ruts of the orchard ground, she found herself blinking away tears.

  This wasn’t where she wanted to be.

  Thinking about killing a man.

  Thinking about turning her back on everything she’d been taught and taking up arms in a way that would make everyone she loved see her as an enemy.

  But if Jacob was right . . .

  Truth was truth.

  “Reese,” Tyler said from above.

  “Yeah?” She squinted up, but she couldn’t see him in the shadows overhead. It had gotten late, leafy branches arced out above her, and the moon was waning—even with a clear sky, there was little light.

  “You should pray,” he said.

  For some reason, she hadn’t thought about that.

  “I’m not really a praying person,” she said. “I mean, I serve by fighting. Prayer is Richard’s forte.”

  “Yeah, but it’s for everyone, right? Just a way of getting in touch with the Spirit . . . with who we are.” He cleared his throat. “There’ve been a couple of times in all this craziness when I felt pretty lost and had no idea what to do, and I tried praying. And last time I tried it, I walked.”

  She smiled. She would never forget that.

  “You were amazing.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was the Oneness. I just tapped into it. So . . . well, you aren’t alone, even with all this.”

  “Tyler . . .” She struggled to put words together. “You know the things I’m thinking about. What I’m considering doing. How much of a black sheep Jacob is.”

  “Yes, but even if everyone else in the Oneness thinks you’re wrong and you’re really right, that doesn’t make you cut off. The Oneness only exists because of the Spirit, right? It’s the thing uniting everyone. And I don’t think the Spirit takes sides. So you can’t be kicked out, and you really never will be alone. Even Jacob isn’t.”

  She thought about that. “How did you get so smart?” she asked, teasing, only half-serious. She wasn’t sure she wanted to think too heavily about what he was saying.

  “I’ve had to think a lot,” Tyler said. “This Oneness business has not exactly been an easy ride so far.”

  “I guess not.”

  “First there was you, and the whole exile thing. And then right away we’re getting attacked by demons, and fighting the hive, and kidnapped by Jacob and almost killed by Clint. And pretty much the whole time it’s been just me and Chris, and Chris isn’t even One. So I’ve been trying to figure out a lot of things on my feet.”

  There was a rustle of leaves and branches, and he dropped down in front of her, looking her in the eye. Her head and shoulders were propped up against the tree, and she felt tears in her eyes as he looked at her.

  “I know this is hard,” he said. “But you aren’t alone. And you’re right—the truth is out there. I don’t think Jacob is leading you to it. But as long as it’s really what you care about most—finding the truth, and really being Oneness, whatever that means—you’ll be okay. Just make sure it’s what you care about most.”

  She impatiently wiped a tear away with the heel of her hand. “I’m not sure what you’re saying.”

  “Think about it.”

  “I will.”

  She wouldn’t. Now right now. There was too much to think about.

  Tyler pulled himself back up into the tree, and Reese closed her eyes and settled down at its base.

  Just for a little while, she didn’t want to think at all.

  Chapter 5

  That night Richard found himself a perch on the roof and sat staring out at the lights on the bay. A barely-there sliver of moon hung over the sea; the water beneath was deep black and still.

  “And the earth was without form and void,” he said to himself, “and the Spirit of God hovered on the face of the waters.”

  He turned his head at the sound of a window opening, and April clambered out onto the roof, closing the window quietly so as not to wake Nick, who slept beside it. She settled next to Richard.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.”

  “You’re in my spot.”

  He smiled. “It’s a free country.”

  “So how was your time with Julie?”

  “It was fine. The children ran around with Miranda in the backyard, and Julie was about as open as anyone I’ve ever known. She’s scared—has some reason to be, since they think she’s the one who gave the trucker the dose that killed him—but I think she’s going to be all right. We stopped for a talk with Lieutenant Jackson as well, and it sounds like they think Julie was an ignorant accomplice. If anyone killed the man on purpose it was Jacob or his wife.”

  April shook her head. “Don’t know why they would do that. He wasn’t a threat to them.”

  “Who knows what they see as a threat?”

  April was quiet. Then, “Maybe Reese does, by now.”

  “I should have . . .”

  He let it trail off. She pushed. “You should have what?”

  “I should have thought more carefully before I gave Reese the job of dealing with Jacob. Should have thought about how vulnerable she was. Is.”

  “It’s not your fault,” April said.

  “Maybe it is.”

  “You just took down a hive,” April answered. “Destroyed a threat to all of us. Stripped a sorcerer of his power, saved a kid from demon possession, got us all through alive.”

  “Thank you for your kindness, but you got yourselves through alive. And I lost one kid. And we didn’t turn David. And . . .”

  “If you blame yourself for Melissa, I might smack you.”

  He looked at her, barely able to make out her fine features in the scant light. She was pale and slender, fragile in a setting like this—the combination of tough and vulnerable that April had always been.

  “I was thinking of doing that, yes,” he said.

  “Melissa was already dying before she came,” April said. “You saved her in the only way that really counts.”

  “But the children . . .”

  “You really think the hive was going to keep helping her? They were just using her, like they use everybody else. They would have finished with her and then let the cancer take over, and she would have died a traitor and knowing she’d been deceived and done terrible things because of it. You saved her from that, Richard.”

  He thought it over and swallowed a lump in his throat. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.”

  The night was still, so still they could hear gentle waves lapping in the harbour below. The air was still warm, but a cool breeze off the water made it more than tolerable.

  “So what do we do about Reese?” April asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Our offensive is over. We won. Reese still has a mission to finish, and she’ll finish it. We can’t do anything else but wait for her. And trust her.”

  April bit her lip. “You think we can?”

  “Yes,” Richard said slowly.

  “Good. I think so too.”

  They sat, side by side in the darkness, for an hour or more.

  Finally April asked, “You planning to sit out here all night?”

  “I considered it.”

  “You should sleep.”

  “So should you.”

  She threw something off the roof—a twig or piece of debris she’d been playing with. “I don’t need sleep. Slept for weeks after the cave.”

  Neither of them went to bed.

  * * *

  Two hundred miles away, Chris was sleeping under the stars in the back of his pickup truck.

  He woke to the sound of a coyote howling and yipping not far away. A gun in the truck bed beside him calmed him, and he tossed in his sleeping bag and tried to get comfortable enough to sleep again.

  The pressure was growing.

  He could feel it in the air, like a storm front. Weight, heat, building, s
uffocating him.

  He knew what it was.

  He tossed again, lying on his back now, staring up at the stars. The coyote launched into a series of barks and yelps, joined by several others.

  He wouldn’t give in.

  Not yet.

  Not this way.

  A memory had been preying on his mind: the hermit on Tempter’s Mountain, before he was shot to death by David, telling him, “Don’t wait too long.”

  He didn’t know how long “too long” was, but he was determined to wait.

  No matter how strongly the Spirit pushed on him to surrender, he was not ready to go under yet.

  He couldn’t breathe. The coyotes were getting louder. Cursing, he tossed off his bedding, grabbed his gun, and jumped out of the truck onto the hard dirt. Might as well go hunting. Quiet things down.

  But it was too dark.

  Cursing again, he got into his truck and turned it on, headlights flooding the night. The landscape ahead of him was barren; dirt and gravel, mostly; scrub, low trees. The lights picked up a pair of eyes that glowed green back at him and then loped away.

  The coyotes quieted down.

  He hadn’t realized they were that close.

  Breathing harder, he turned the engine and lights off, climbed back into the truck bed, and lay down on his back.

  There were stars, but their light was too distant to make any difference down here. The moon was almost nonexistent.

  “Reese, blast you,” he whispered. “Where are you?”

  If he was Oneness, maybe he would have some supernatural way of finding her. He could reach out and . . .

  Well, who knew what he could do.

  He wasn’t Oneness. Unlike his mother, his best friend, and the girl he was pretty sure he loved.

  He had waited a week for her to come home or be in touch and then had decided to go out and find her. Patience was not his strong suit, and he could not celebrate their victory over the hive—if victory it really was—without her. His whole journey with the Oneness had begun because of Reese. As far as he was concerned, if she wasn’t home and healed, they hadn’t won anything.

  He sat up, leaned against the rear window of his truck, and stared out at his desert surroundings. He had gone to the corrective facility where Reese and Tyler had collected Jacob and tried to follow them from there, heading off in the initial direction Lieutenant Jackson indicated and then asking around. The trio was distinctive enough to remember, especially with Jacob a part of them—the man was like a magnet; no one could fail to be affected by the pull he gave off. But while a few people remembered seeing them and could point him in the right direction—a gas station attendant, a grocer—there were just too many possibilities and not enough pointers to get him all the way to them. The one thing he was fairly sure they had done was go back to the site where Clint had killed the police officers who pulled him over on the side of the highway. They had gone in that direction, and gut instinct told him they had stopped there.

  That must have been hell for Tyler.

  Tyler.

  He wouldn’t really be happy until Tyler was home, either.

  From there he had decided on a different tack, and gone to the Lincoln cell to see if they had any idea who Reese might have contacted or where she might have gone. They looked at him like he had two heads when he asked if she had family—not a normal question for Oneness, then. But someone thought that Reese was originally from the mountains a few days’ north and east of them. Someone there might know her.

  So. Where else did he have to go?

  He heard something.

  He quieted his thoughts and concentrated on listening, just to be sure.

  Yes, there it was again.

  The coyotes coming back?

  Softly, slowly, he reached for his gun.

  Had the air grown heavier?

  Chris was not one who needed his hand held, but right now he wished Tyler was here. Another set of eyes and ears would come in handy.

  Especially a set that could better sense things beyond what was strictly earthly.

  The sound—a scratching, movement, gravel crunching—was growing closer.

  And he didn’t think it was the coyotes.

  “Tyler,” he whispered, “you picked a ba-a-d time to disappear.”

  Keeping his weight carefully balanced, he pushed himself so he was squatting, ready to jump up, react, move. He readied his gun to fire.

  And hoped whatever was out there was actually susceptible to bullets.

  Eyes. There were eyes staring at him again, glowing—only this time they weren’t picking up the light from his headlights.

  He stared back, wishing he could see what he was looking at and wondering if the creature thought the same or if it could see what he couldn’t—if its eyesight in the dark was as good as his was nonexistent.

  With his gun cocked, he held it for a long two minutes aimed at the eyes, but they did not move, and he did not fire. His hands wanted to shake, but he held them steady.

  Slowly, he lowered the barrel.

  He crouched, keeping his eyes on the gleaming eyes before him, and felt around his sleeping bag for the heavy-duty flashlight he knew was there somewhere. His hand closed around it, and quickly, he raised himself and flicked the light on so he could see what was there.

  He nearly dropped the light.

  It went out. He pounded the bottom of the metal tube, jarring the battery back into working order, but this time the beam caught nothing.

  The glowing eyes were gone.

  The figure he had seen watching him from the desert was gone.

  But he knew what his own eyes had seen standing there.

  A child.

  Chapter 6

  Julie woke to the sound of conflict outside. Voices raised, a door slamming. A car starting and tires squealing as it tore away.

  She hated it. Not just the noise pulling her out of sleep, but the tension, the anger, and the loneliness that throbbed in the silence of her room when the noises died down again.

  The safe house was in a relatively quiet part of the city, but still minor conflicts like this happened, and never failed to wake her. She didn’t know why they always seemed to come at night. Like brokenness and anger and drunkenness and everything else that manifested itself here waited for the darkness, or the glow of streetlights, to come out and show itself.

  Times like this, she missed the farm. No matter how bad things had gotten there, no matter how much Jacob had betrayed them, she’d been searching for a better life there, and most days it seemed like she’d found it. She and everyone else who pitched their lot in with Jacob and his wife and the community. They wanted to create a place where life happened in the day, and all that came out at night were sweet dreams, innocent and hearty and fed by home-cooked food and wholesome relationships and a hard day’s work.

  Was it so much to ask, that life could be like that? That you could go to bed with a clean conscience and sleep to the sound of insects buzzing in the corn and wake to a sunrise and chickens and smiles from people you liked and trusted?

  She’d wanted life to be like that for Miranda’s sake, too. Even more so than for herself. She’d wanted her daughter to grow up in a world that wasn’t so bitter, that didn’t taste like car exhaust and acid rain. She wanted Miranda to be like girls in the past, in books about growing up on the prairies or on safe, protected, happy islands. And Miranda was like those girls.

  At least, she was until her mother killed a man.

  So much for clean conscience.

  It was an accident, she told herself in the darkness of her room. Outside another door slammed and more tires squealed, and she found tears on her face.

  An accident.

  She had only been trying to help care for him. Just following Lorrie’s directions . . .

  Such a terrible end to the story. And it was a story she’d given up so much for . . . sacrificed more than she wanted to remember.

  She rolled over, clutching
her pillow, and tried hard to fall back asleep. Didn’t want to be awake right now. Didn’t want to think.

  A scream from outside jolted her out of bed.

  Was that Miranda?

  She grabbed a sweater from a hook by the bedroom door and rushed out, ignoring protocol—she wasn’t supposed to go outside with letting the house supervisor know. The air outside was cold—strange after weeks of high heat. It pierced her through as she stepped into the artificial, harshly lit world of the city outdoors. Shadows darting across the street drew her attention to something happening over there—and she heard the scream again.

  It was Miranda.

  What was she doing out here? How had she gotten out without anyone knowing?

  Jacob had always said the world was a dangerous place.

  How had her daughter plunged straight into the middle of it only weeks after leaving the safety of the community?

  As Julie rushed across the asphalt street, under the hanging lights to the shadows beyond, calling her daughter’s name and straining to see something, anything, clearly, she felt as though hands were grasping at her and someone was trying to pull her back.

  Voices, all in her head, clamoured—Stop, turn around. Don’t go there. Don’t . . .

  A blinding light cut off the shadows and the voices simultaneously.

  * * *

  When Chris woke in the morning, he searched around the truck and found coyote tracks alarmingly close in the dirt, but no sign of the child. No footprints, nothing.

  One part of his mind, the part that was pretending the world still operated on normal rules, berated him for not trying to find the child the night before. A kid, that part of his mind told him. Lost in the desert. What kind of scared, selfish idiot wouldn’t go out searching until he rescued him? The kid was lost, or a runaway, definitely not safe out there in the night with the coyotes still near and who knew what other dangers lurking.

  The other part of his mind dismissed all that and said the child wasn’t just a kid, wasn’t just a runaway, wasn’t part of this world at all. That part of his mind told him that he’d seen something that belonged to the world of the angels and the demons and the Oneness, and he would never have found him even if he’d searched all night, and if he had found him, the child would not have needed his help.