Renegade

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  When the song ended, it was as though the air was holding its breath. April stood still at her canvas, staring at it.

  She had created something new.

  No longer just an ocean scene.

  Her hands began to tremble.

  “April,” Mary asked softly, joining her at the painting and laying her hand on her arm, “what is that?”

  “I don’t know,” April whispered.

  In the sky over the water April had painted light—like a sunrise in clouds, but the sky was cloudless and the light originated in itself and not in the sun. It spread itself across the clear blue with a subtle but potent force—a personality.

  None of them had ever seen anything quite like it. Yet in the painting, it did not seem like something imagined.

  “The ancients,” Richard said, “used to describe something they called a bright cloud or cloud of light.”

  “What is it?” April asked.

  But she didn’t really need to—they all knew the answer.

  The bright cloud was the Spirit made visible.

  No one spoke the words; just left them hanging in the room.

  “Why have you painted it?” Mary asked.

  “I don’t know. It just happened.”

  They stared at it in silence.

  * * *

  Even in the desert surroundings, the air was cool—autumn cool. Reese thanked the Spirit for that as she picked her way through the rolling, barren hills. In the distance the hills became foothills, and then mountains. She was angling herself away from them, trying to go southwest, toward where she thought—she hoped—the coast was. The closer she got to the ocean, the more likely she was to find a town or a highway.

  She thought of Julie as she went. Julie, dead at the hands of Jacob’s old enemy. Reese had been the one to bring Julie into the Oneness, and the connection formed between them in that moment had been strong—stronger than any tie natural to human existence. The strength of it was such that Reese found it incredibly hard to believe that Julie was dead. She could still feel her life, her essence, her energy, even though she must have passed into the cloud.

  But the thought of that breach, of the split between heaven and earth, hurt.

  And the idea of Julie being murdered—suffering whatever that had meant, enduring the violence to the soul of hatred and the violence to the body that was brutality—that hurt more.

  She found herself wishing, fervently and half out loud, that Jacob had succeeded in killing Bertoller all those years ago. That he had not backed off, betrayed by his own tenderness. By the reticence to target any human being that was taught by the Oneness. She found herself wishing he had steeled his heart and his hands and just done the deed.

  If he had, she wouldn’t now be contemplating doing it herself.

  It did have to be done. Of that she had become convinced. Who would be next? Miranda? Lorrie, Jacob’s wife? Or one of the village cell? Certainly they now numbered among Bertoller’s chief enemies—prime targets. If they dispatched a hundred thousand demons, sent them screaming into the abyss, it wouldn’t matter. The hatred was Bertoller’s, and he would find a way to manifest it. He would always find a way to carry out what was in his heart.

  Unconsciously, her sword formed in her hand. If the demons were there, they remained invisible—and she found that she didn’t care.

  More likely, the sword had formed in response to the thoughts in her heart.

  As the hours passed, shadows shifted across the landscape, giving it a life of its own that Reese found eerie. Her sword remained in hand, like a reminder—but of what, she didn’t know. She didn’t bother to force it away. Being armed felt good out here.

  Despite the cooler air, the sun’s rays grew stronger as the approach of noon made them more direct. Reese found a twisted pine and sat beneath it, letting its branches provide shade. She didn’t know how long she’d been walking . . . hours, judging from the sun.

  Sitting forced her to face thoughts she’d been shoving aside with the action of hiking all morning. Contemplation on what exactly had happened when Tyler started to pray—and why she had fallen.

  Especially on why she had fallen.

  The first part was easy enough to guess at. He had wanted to tap into the Spirit in some way that would allow them to travel without the car—and faster. Somehow, he’d done it. The boy who had walked in the power of the Oneness had flown by the power of the Spirit.

  She marveled at that. Maybe she’d been underestimating Tyler all this time. In a near lifetime of being Oneness, she had never seen anyone access the Spirit like that. Not ever.

  But then again, maybe she had never seen anyone try.

  It was the second part that bothered her more. She remembered the rush of wind and roar of flame that had lifted them out of the car—the physics of that, she wouldn’t even try to figure out, nor what had happened to the car when they were somehow raptured out of it—and how startled—momentarily terrified, actually—she had felt. She remembered the sensation of flight, of being carried, and the world rushing by below, and then she remembered falling.

  Why?

  Vaguely she had a sense that something had pulled her down. If she tried, she thought she could remember—something clawing, tugging at her legs, pulling her off balance.

  The same something that had caught her moments before she would have hit the ground?

  The demon?

  That made sense.

  Except . . .

  She groaned and buried her face in her hands. Why had a demon been able to reach her when she was caught up in the Spirit? How could it possibly have come so close?

  Why, as she struggled to return to the light, did it seem she had been chosen by the darkness?

  In the orchard, Tyler had suggested she pray. She hadn’t done it. She’d said she wasn’t much for prayer. And that was true. Reese had always found her points of communion with the Spirit in fellowship with the Oneness and in the rush of warfare.

  Prayer was something more direct, more intimidating, and more demanding. Battle required discipline and a willingness to be wounded, but prayer required the disciplines of potential boredom, blind reaching, and a self-denial that went much deeper than withstanding pain. She had never been comfortable swimming in that particular ocean.

  She ought to do it now. What else was there to do, lost in the desert?

  She tried. She licked her lips and tried to verbalize something. Even to form a thought and send it in the Spirit’s direction.

  Nothing came.

  Instead, she rose and kept on going through the dry hills.

  As the sun crested the top of the sky and began its way down again, Reese became aware of two things: that she was incredibly thirsty, and that something was tracking her.

  The hunters were back.

  She turned and glared at the landscape behind her, not bothering to hide that she knew they were there. She could see nothing.

  But every instinct told her something was there.

  Picking up her pace, she started to trace a more erratic route across the desert, following shadows and heading for a region with more scrub and rock—more cover. She was alone, and if she was going to be in a fight, she needed something at her back.

  A rocky outcrop covered on three sides with scrub, crowned by scraggly pines, and faced with sheer rock on one side was perfect. She made her way toward it, finding that she was glad for this—itching for it, actually. She needed a fight. She needed to take out her confusion and aggression and anger on someone. She needed an enemy with a face.

  She wasn’t expecting the face that presented itself.

  The bear in the woods, the one that had spoken with Jacob’s voice and had a man’s face, had looked like a stranger.

  The creature that approached her now, ethereal, pulled together as from cloud and not from flesh at all, wore the face of David.

  * * *

  Chris parked his truck in front of the farmhouse and got out, breathing in the
cool air. The season had changed from stifling heat to the cool of fall overnight. He welcomed the relief. It was bracing—just what he needed, given everything he was facing. Some of the leaves in the trees around the farm were already going gold and brown, as though they’d anticipated the change in the weather before it came. Responding to cues no one else could see or feel.

  His approach to the house scattered chickens, which were ranging free in the yard and clucking loudly, and set a dog to barking. The animal came bounding from the back of the house, a black lab mix, wagging its tail. Chris held out his hand, let the dog sniff it, making friends quickly. The lack of human response to his presence was eerie. A tractor sat abandoned in the field next to the house; the barn doors stood open. No one had been here since the death and subsequent arrests. The farmhouse stood lonely.

  Chris approached it slowly, eyes and ears open for any sign of Miranda. When she didn’t appear, he stepped onto the porch and knocked at the front door. He waited several minutes before knocking again, and then calling out, “Miranda? It’s Chris. Are you here?”

  He was kicking himself, telling himself he’d been wrong and followed a false trail, when the door cracked open.

  Miranda’s wide blue eyes peered out.

  “Hey,” Chris said. “Are you going to let me in?”

  Without a word, she opened the door all the way.

  “Thanks.” He had barely stepped inside when she threw herself into his arms and burst into tears, her sobs getting louder and less controlled by the moment.

  “It’s okay,” he said, stroking her hair and letting her cling to him. “It’s all right. I just came to check on you. What are you doing here?”

  His calm tone pushed her away from hysteria, and she managed to gasp out an answer. “I just . . . came . . . to look for . . . my mother.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Chris said. Gently, he pried her arms loose and steered her toward a flowered couch in the living room. “Sit,” he said. “And tell me why you thought she would be here.”

  “She disappeared,” Miranda said, holding her hands together so tightly her knuckles turned white. “She left the safe house. She said she wouldn’t leave me!”

  “I don’t think she meant to,” Chris said. “But take it easy . . . why did you think she would come here?”

  “Because she said she wanted to. They think she killed that man, and she thought if she could come back here she could find some proof that she didn’t. But she said she wouldn’t leave me, and she’s not here, and . . .”

  “I think she’s okay,” Chris said. He knelt down, took her arms, and looked her firmly in the eye. “Miranda, listen. Don’t panic at what I’m going to tell you. The police think your mother has been killed. You might even hear that on the news. But I believe she’s all right. I met a witness who says she’s okay.”

  “Where is she?” Miranda asked, a note of panic coming into her voice despite Chris’s admonitions.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m going to take care of you until we find her, or she finds us. Okay?”

  “O . . . kay. Where’s Reese?”

  He winced. “I don’t know that either. But I think she’s going to come looking for your mom, and then we can connect with her too. She’ll help look after you.”

  He didn’t tell her that Jacob was most likely with Reese. He suspected that would trigger Miranda’s always-latent hysteria, and that just wouldn’t do anyone any good. She seemed to have steadied out for the moment.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked. “And how did you get here?”

  “I hitchhiked,” Miranda said. “Last night.”

  “Don’t do that again,” Chris said, a little sharply.

  “I got here.”

  “It’s not safe. Especially not for someone like you.”

  “Fine,” she said, folding her arms and huddling back into the couch. Pouting. The girl was fourteen at least, but she looked for all the world like a small child.

  “So what have you done since you’ve been here?”

  “Just looked for Mom, and then changed my clothes and took care of the chickens. There’s a lot of work to do around here. The police should let some of our people go so they can come back and take care of the animals.”

  Unlikely, Chris thought, given that there had been another murder in connection with the community. At least, everyone thought there had. He thought over Sonny’s words—his confident assertion that Julie had indeed been shot but then had come back to life and been spirited away.

  Spirit. Whatever exactly that word meant, it was changing Chris’s world in ways he found incredibly unsettling.

  “That your dog outside?” he asked.

  “That’s Testy. He’s Jacob’s dog.”

  “He’s pretty friendly.”

  “Yeah. He’s supposed to be a guard dog, but he’s no good at it.”

  As if on cue, Testy started barking. Chris moved to the window and looked out.

  “Miranda,” he said, “do you know someone who drives a black Cadillac?”

  “No . . .”

  The dog was growling now, and menacing the car and its inhabitants.

  “Go upstairs,” Chris said. “Hide.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Stay calm,” he commanded, responding to the rising pitch of her voice. “Just do what I tell you. Now!”

  Whimpering, Miranda jumped off the couch and ran for the stairs. Chris stayed by the window, standing out of sight where he could see out but no one could see him.

  Testy was backing away from the car, still barking but evidently unwilling to attack the men emerging from the car. There were four of them. All four wore black suits and carried handguns.

  “Not exactly the friendly neighbour type, are you?” Chris said in a low voice.

  Testy continued to circle the men, trying to hold them at bay with his barking and growling but not actually attacking them. They mostly ignored him and advanced on the house.

  Chris regretted having sent Miranda upstairs. He should have told her to find a back door and get out.

  He should do the same, but he couldn’t leave the house with her still in it.

  Cursing under his breath, he sprinted to the stairs as the men pounded on the front door. He didn’t think they were going to take “no answer” as a reason to leave. Positioning himself near the top of the staircase, he listened for their further progress. In a moment he heard the front door open—he should have locked it—and the men enter.

  “Search it,” one of them said. “Find the woman.”

  They were looking for Julie too.

  So Sonny was right—she had disappeared.

  The staircase ended in a blind corner, and Chris moved around it so he could hear anyone coming up before they could see him. The open door at the bottom of the stairs made it more likely they would come up soon, but it also allowed him to hear what was going on below—a fair trade.

  For a split second he thought he saw his child Watcher friend sitting on the bottom step.

  At least he wasn’t alone.

  Standing with his back to the wall, he scanned the hallway for something he could use as a weapon or for any sign of what room Miranda had gone into. All the bedroom doors were closed, and the hallway was mostly clear of clutter. A small, narrow hall table stood against one wall, sporting a doily and a decorative vase. Chris picked the vase up but discarded it as too light to be any use, then picked up the table itself. He could use it as a club or a shield, as necessary.

  From the sounds downstairs, the men had fanned out into other parts of the first floor. Chris took the opportunity to open the bedroom door he was most familiar with—the door to the room where he had stayed during his and Tyler’s short imprisonment here. A hall table wasn’t going to do much good against guns, especially once the whole group was alerted to his presence; better to keep retreating as long as he could.

  If only he knew where Miranda was.

  He measur
ed the wisdom of searching for her—equally afraid of making noise that would attract attention from the thugs downstairs and growing too distracted in his search to notice them coming up—and was spared from making a decision when her frightened whisper met his ears from the closet in the room.

  “Chris?”

  “Good,” he said quietly. “Good that you’re here. Stay quiet.”

  He scanned the room and noted the oak tree outside the window. It would take a little courage, but it should be possible for both of them to climb across the slight roof outside the window and then jump into the tree, and from there to reach the ground.

  Of course, they took a risk of being seen.

  Voices and footsteps on the stairs decided it for him. He quietly closed the bedroom door, shoved the hall table under its handle, and pulled Miranda out of the closet with his finger on his lips.

  “We’re going out the window,” he whispered.

  “I can’t!”

  “Yes, you can. And you can do it quietly. You have to. Just trust me.”

  She whimpered as he steered her across the room and opened the window. It was an easy climb to the roof, if slightly nerve-racking—the shingled surface was steeply pitched. Her whimpering was growing to a whine. He shushed her sternly, and she silenced herself, her face white.

  He opted to go first. The last thing he needed was Miranda falling off the roof, and it would be easier to get her to climb down to him then to convince her to get out there alone. He swung himself down easily and reached up for her with one hand while he gripped the windowsill with the other.

  “Come on,” he whispered. “Easy does it.”

  Her long dress made the climb awkward, but she half-climbed, half-toppled out of the window, and he set her feet firmly on the roof.

  Below them in the yard, Testy appeared. He barked once and paced below them, wagging his tail.

  Chris surveyed the jump. A strong, gnarled branch swept out just past the roof. All Miranda needed to do was jump to it and then hand-over-hand her way to the tree so she could climb down. It should be plenty strong enough to hold them both.