From Sky to Sky
Page 1
PRAISE FOR FROM SKY TO SKY
“From Sky to Sky proves yet again that Stevens does not merely write books rather experiences that engage the heart and mind. Visionary and compelling, yet always extremely readable, Stevens continues her tradition of thought-provoking speculative fiction. With a philosopher’s eye, she weaves deft characterization, unparalleled atmosphere, and characters whose journeys I would follow to the ends of the earth in a challenging, beautifully rendered way.”
–Rachel McMillan, author of The London Restoration
“If author Amanda G. Stevens isn’t already on your instant buy list, this book proves why she should be. From Sky to Sky … puts a fresh, welcome twist on the Christian speculative fiction genre. In a story that is both authentic and deeply felt, Stevens tackles the themes of found family, questions of faith, surrender, justice, and empathy with well-crafted characters and dialogue that kept me engaged long after I finished. I can’t wait to see what she writes next.”
–Jessica Keller, Publishers Weekly bestselling author of the Red Dog Ranch series
“From Sky to Sky … expands on the experiences of a group of ordinary people who just happen to be immortal and who find, in their struggles to come to terms with their immortality, that they are still very human. This is a fantasy that’s heartbreakingly real and full of truth and grace. Excellent.”
–Julianna Deering, author of the Drew Farthering Mysteries
“I simply can’t get enough of Amanda G. Stevens’ longevites. They’re enigmatic, startling, and endearing, and they’ve led me to consider life and death, justice and mercy, human frailty and human resilience, from a completely new perspective. This is a series for the thinking Christian—bold, unique, and compelling.”
–Katie Donovan, Fiction Aficionado
© 2020 by Amanda G. Stevens
Print ISBN 978-1-64352-327-9
eBook Editions:
Adobe Digital Edition (.epub) 978-1-64352-569-3
Kindle and MobiPocket Edition (.prc) 978-1-64352-570-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without written permission of the publisher.
Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations also are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Design: Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design
Published in association with Jessica Kirkland and the literary agency of Kirkland Media Management, LLC, P.O. Box 1539, Liberty, Texas 77575.
Published by Shiloh Run Press, an imprint of Barbour Publishing, Inc., 1810 Barbour Drive, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683, www.shilohrunpress.com.
Our mission is to inspire the world with the life-changing message of the Bible.
Printed in the United States of America.
Now unto the King
eternal,
immortal,
invisible,
the only wise God,
be honour and glory for ever and ever.
Amen.
1 TIMOTHY 1:17 KJV
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
PROLOGUE
Someone had better be dying. Oh, wait, we can’t do that. Maybe you forgot.”
Zac clenched his cell phone tighter. Colm sounded annoyed and half awake, no different than any other time he’d been woken up this last century. As if nothing had changed tonight. As if he’d committed no sins tonight.
“I’m standing in the corridor of the Harbor Vale Family Inn.” Zac kept his voice just above a whisper. They did not need mortal witnesses to this, however it went down. “Come on out and talk to me.”
“The Harbor Vale Family Inn? Where on earth is that?”
“Harbor Vale, Michigan. David’s town.”
“Why would I be in Michigan?”
To kill someone. “You’re here.”
“Listen, mate, your perceived emergency can wait at least until dawn cracks. Maybe by then you’ll remember which city I live in.”
“Colm. Come out.”
The call ended.
A minute later, fully dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt unbuttoned over a black tee—shoot, he’d even put his shoes on—Colm emerged from a room near the end of the hall. He was nearer the exit, and Zac rocked onto his toes, but Colm didn’t bolt. Anyway, if he did, David was outside to tackle him and no doubt would do so with grim relish. Zac padded toward him. The corridor was well lit, with no shadows from which to stalk an unsuspecting guest.
He did another quick check of his surroundings. They were alone. “There’s a dead mortal in town.”
“I imagine there are a lot of them. Death is sort of their thing.”
“A murdered mortal—strangled, David thinks—left under a pile of brush.”
Zac tried to find something in Colm’s eyes to show him the truth, but the man’s face was no different tonight than it had been in the nineteenth century. No additional lines, nothing new in the expression. Colm’s forehead crinkled upward, his raised eyebrows as pale red as his hair and mostly lost against his complexion.
“You think he’s covering up the murder by pretending to find the corpse?”
“Stop, Colm. It’s over.”
“What’s that?”
“Your career as a serial killer.”
At last his face did change. A poise was discarded, a warmth dropped away. His smile was bland as usual, no teeth, but it opened a foreign well of cold between them.
“Why?” Zac said. “Tell me what’s in your head.”
“Oh, that would go well.”
“Tell me, man.”
“I’m thinking I can stop babying you now, you and Simon—I hope you’ve looped him in—and I’m experiencing the satisfaction expected when someone becomes aware of the magnitude of your life’s work.”
“Colm—”
“You asked.”
Zac drew as deep a breath as he could, and ice seemed to flood his lungs. His thoughts tried to disintegrate, but he held on to them.
“Why did she tell you?” Colm said.
Moira. He knew. “She didn’t intend to.”
“We had an understanding.”
“There’s nothing to blame her for.”
“Maybe you’re right. I’ll thi
nk on it.”
He could have driven his fist into Colm’s face. He could have wept. “You’re not going to deny it. You’re not even trying.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“Disappoint?” Zac’s voice bounced off the close walls around them, and he forced it lower. “You violate them—you extinguish them in cold blood.”
“If that’s how you want to see it.”
They’d stood here long enough. He shifted his feet, ready. “David’s outside.”
A flash of Colm’s teeth. “To take me into immortal custody?”
“Essentially.” And David wasn’t alone, but he would leave Moira out of this as long as he could. If only Simon were out there too.
Colm motioned to the side door. “After you.”
Zac cocked an eyebrow. “So you can jump me?”
“Oh, please. What would be the point?”
“Escape,” Zac said slowly as if speaking to an infant.
“Nah. I’m cool with seeing where the next bend in the road takes me. What’s your plan? Restitution to society, rehabilitation?”
They began walking, Colm more or less beside him but a pace behind his shoulder. Zac’s hands tightened, and his senses strained to catch the first movement toward him, but Colm continued to walk and talk. The glittering chill between them had re-submerged, no trace left.
“Or maybe you’ll want to find a way to end my life, payment for the ones I took. I can’t argue with the principle, but I’m curious about the method.”
“Shut up,” Zac said.
“Think on it, mate. Because this much I can tell you: I’ll never stop taking them.”
“I guess it’s a habit like any other, if you’ve been at it since 1907.”
A low whistle over his shoulder made him bristle. “For not intending to tell you, Moira got good and detailed.”
Zac stopped walking when they reached the door, turned his back to it, and faced Colm. “Tell me why.”
“It’s what I’m here for, and it’s what I do best.”
“Murder is what you do best.”
Colm dipped a nod. “Amen.”
The irreverence flayed Zac. He opened the door and stepped out into the night, and his lungs drank a gasp of pure air. He fast-walked to David’s parked Jeep. Colm matched his strides, a shadow on his shoulder, the shadow of terror and death, pain and grief. The shadow of rot and blight on the human race, ego run wild with itself and abusing its ageless, undying power.
At the Jeep, Colm raised his hands, his surrender as flippant as the last word he’d said. “Thank you. I’ve waited a long time for this.”
Moira stared at them with white-edged eyes, and David looked ready to pull his concealed weapon and shoot Colm in pure righteous anger. Simon would weigh in on Colm’s fate from afar when they called him. And Zac understood the thing that had eluded him till now, the quiet lament in his soul that mattered so much less than protecting the mortals, than bringing justice for the ones Colm had slaughtered, than learning why Moira had kept the putrid secret so long and let the mortals die. It mattered so much less and yet it ripped him seam from seam, and deep inside he felt the hemorrhage begin that he would never be able to stanch, never be able to numb.
His family. Tonight had broken his family.
ONE
Nobody knew, as he strode through the propped-open doors of Harbor Vale Bible Church, that Zac had not entered a sanctuary like this one in more than a hundred years. Nobody knew his legs were trying to turn him around and bolt. After all, he was Zac Wilson, and nobody knew a thing about him he didn’t want them to know.
He lagged behind a few others who dispersed with clear direction. The foyer was open, the west wall composed of windows from the floor up that faced a side parking lot and a row of elderly pine trees. Nothing about the space justified Zac’s reluctance to step into it. Behind a desk stacked with programs and papers stood a blond guy maybe twenty years old. He looked bored, but his smile was real enough as he saw Zac hesitate.
“Hey, dude, are you here for the pack-a-backpack thing?”
“Yep,” Zac said.
“Okay, see the hallway off to the right? All the way at the end, they’re in room 38.”
“Thanks.”
His legs quit fighting him as he fast-walked that direction. He hadn’t expected a lightning strike, but the wrongness of his presence here was permeating. God saw he wasn’t here to worship or repent, knew the lost cause Zac saw in the mirror.
“Zac?”
He pivoted toward the voice. Tiana Burton stood, hands on hips, at the mouth of the hallway he’d just entered. Her smile was one of the kindest Zac had known in all his years. He stepped toward her to absorb more of its warmth. They stood eye to eye, she tall for a woman and wearing heeled boots, he five-eight-and-a-half in his shoes.
“Well, fancy meeting you— Wait a minute.” He cocked an eyebrow. “This is your church, isn’t it? Yours and David’s.”
“It is. Welcome.”
“What are you doing here on a Friday night?”
“Service event. Somebody brought in a ministry for foster kids and matched donations, so we’re … Oh my word. Was it you?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of cluelessness.
Tiana laughed. “Does your fan base know about this?”
“I started it online. I wanted to do something local, and then the foster organization told me the backpack event was being hosted here.”
She sobered. “You wouldn’t have chosen a church for the venue.”
“Feels hypocritical.” The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, as if bridled electricity did indeed hover over him.
“I respect that. But I’m glad you came.”
“I initiated the thing. Figured I should show up.”
They walked side by side down a gray-walled, gray-carpeted hall with a ceiling high enough that his brain fabricated no threats to his life. The smell of cookies overwhelmed the recent use of lemon cleaner.
“Where’s David? Is this his idea of a date?”
She gave a quiet laugh. “He’s home practicing.”
He waited for the object of the sentence, but then he got it. “Piano.”
“He’s agreed to stand in as church pianist as long as Karen Scott is on maternity leave, and she’s due sometime before Thanksgiving.”
“They’ll never let him quit. The man could play Liszt with his hands tied behind his back.”
They reached the propped-open door, through which drifted the lively delight of human conversations. Zac stood to one side and studied the crowd. Sixty or seventy people mingled. At the back of the room, a long collapsible table was spread with plates of cookies.
“I wanted to come,” he said. “Money’s distant. Hands-on is more my thing.”
“Will you be swarmed by Zac Wilson autograph seekers?”
He rolled his eyes. “I highly doubt it.”
But when they stepped inside, more than a dozen occupants broke off their discussions and beelined for him. Guys and girls, twentysomethings, beaming.
“Zac!”
“It’s Zac!”
Tiana shoulder-bumped him. “News for you: church kids follow you too.”
He couldn’t help laughing. “Hey, everybody.”
As she moved away, Tiana squeezed his shoulder. A few of the girls watched her go, and he guessed at the things they would notice: the easy confidence and poise in Tiana, from her long-legged stride to the elegant black coils of her hair.
“Are you two …?” one of the girls whispered to him. “I won’t post it online if you are.”
“Tiana’s a friend,” Zac said. When the girl gave a doubtful squint, he added, “She’s also dating a friend. Maybe you know him? David Galloway.”
“The piano guy.”
“That’s the one.”
The voices around him continued. “Zac, I brought white chocolate chip cookies,” and “We saw your fund-raiser online and thought maybe it’s a sign you’re mo
ving here,” and “Oh, I hope so.”
He flashed back to the line of thousands at Marble Canyon, autographs and awed faces, their relief as he described his rescue from certain death at the hands of an angel. Irreverent fiction, but they had swallowed it because they wanted to, because he was the one spinning the tale. He squirmed inside at the memory.
Movement at the front of the room drew their attention. A brunette woman in her forties waved for silence, and the room settled.
“Hey, all, in case you don’t know me, my name is Louise Pitts and I’m the ministry coordinator here.”
Ah. She had called last week and invited Zac to their event.
“It’s great to see so many of you on a weeknight. As you know, we’ll be packing backpacks for foster kids who are going into new homes, sometimes with nothing but the clothes on their backs. We underestimated the donations, which is a great problem to have. There’s a lot to sort and stuff, most of it purchased by Foster Gifts with the fund-raiser donations. We have a ministry founder here to tell us about them. Let’s welcome Jim DeClerck to HVBC.”
Applause rippled as a middle-aged bald guy took over. Louise caught Zac’s eye and smiled. He dipped his head in gratitude: she hadn’t given him away.
Jim DeClerck talked for fifteen minutes, his timing so precise Zac suspected a military background. Then the group split up. The twentysomethings who stuck by Zac decided to sort and stuff for ten-to-twelve-year-old boys and grabbed grocery bags labeled as such. On each table, someone had already stacked about a dozen backpacks. Their group upended bags of clothes and toiletries. Zac compiled and folded a wardrobe for one unknown boy after another—shirt, pants, pajamas, underwear, socks. Soft fabrics between his fingers, reds and blues, greens and yellows.
The shirt in his hands now would have fit his nine-year-old self the day he became man of the house, whether or not he wanted the job. The kid who would wear this shirt might have faced the same thing, might be entering an unknown family and calling himself a failure. Zac rubbed his thumb over the buttons before folding it and setting it on the pile. He picked up another, an Oxford shirt in orange and brown plaid, and smiled. To him plaid would always be a ’70s style.
A ponytailed girl took the place across from him. Her purple graphic hoodie bore a giraffe design, and she looked younger than the rest of their group. “Hi, Zac.”