Renegade

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  In his mind’s eye, the men were all the way upstairs and were going through the bedrooms. They might come in at any moment and see the open window and hear the rustling in the tree as they made the leap.

  No time to waste.

  “See that branch?” Chris said, pointing. “Jump to it and grab it and then get yourself over to the tree trunk.”

  “I can’t!” She was too loud—almost wailing.

  “Hush,” he insisted. “You can, and you’re going to. I’ll be right behind you.”

  She backed up, pressing herself against the house and pulled herself away from Chris’s arm. “I can’t.”

  He considered throwing her. And imagined the result if she just panicked and let herself fall.

  “You have to do this!” he stage-whispered. “We don’t have time. Trust me.”

  She shook her head, plastering herself even tighter against the house.

  Chris was about to grab her and throw her after all when Testy started barking wildly and a man walked around the outside of the house.

  One of the intruders.

  The man glared at the dog and cursed it. Miranda whimpered again, and Chris realized he had grabbed her arm and was squeezing it far too hard. He loosened his grip and tried to communicate calm and control. They had moved over enough to be clear of the window, but it was still open—if the man on the ground looked up, or if the intruders came into the bedroom and checked out the roof, they would be caught.

  He allowed himself to hope that the intruders didn’t really expect to find anyone and so wouldn’t look out the open window.

  Considering that they had bothered to come out here in the first place, the hope was slight at best.

  Testy had lowered himself into a crouching, growling stance, and he circled the man with evident threat. The intruder cursed again, and took a step closer to the house.

  The dog charged. Miranda screamed.

  Chris clapped a hand over her mouth, his heart pounding as the sound of a shot reverberated in his ears.

  The shot had covered the sound of her scream. He hoped.

  Tears were filling Miranda’s eyes, but the dog seemed unharmed—he had yelped and moved back a distance, but it looked like the shot had missed. The gunman cursed again, yelled something in a language that wasn’t English, and disappeared around the other side of the house again. In a moment other voices, all speaking whatever the other language was, shouted at him. Chris closed his eyes as the men argued with each other.

  And he heard footsteps in the bedroom.

  Leaving.

  Moments later they both heard a car starting up and driving away.

  Good dog, Chris thought.

  He couldn’t bring himself to speak out loud.

  Chapter 9

  That evening, April borrowed Richard’s car without asking and headed up the coast toward Tempter’s Mountain. She didn’t tell anyone where she was going.

  She needed to revisit the death cave, and she wanted to do it alone.

  Weeks had passed since her imprisonment and near-starvation there. Weeks during which she had concentrated on healing and trying to get her bearings back. But the cave had not vanished into memory. It had taken on life of its own, the prophecies painted across its walls not only being fulfilled, but playing an active role in their own fulfilment by opening eyes and prompting action. Prophecies she had painted. Without having any idea what she was doing.

  Teresa, the cloud member who had visited her in the cave, had told her that she had great significance and that we do not know who we ourselves are. Richard had told her, after the rescue, that he believed her to be one of the great saints.

  A term which, even now, made her want to laugh incredulously. She was not great. She was simply April. Oneness with a troubled past and a propensity to draw and paint and run. The only “great” thing she had done in her entire life was snatching Nick out from under the nose of the hive. And even that wasn’t much—she’d just been in the right place at the right time.

  Except for the mural in the death cave. That seemed like something a great saint would create.

  As did the painting she’d done today. She had painted the Spirit—in visible form.

  She had never heard of anyone doing that before.

  The road looped along the coast, through yellow sand bluffs and pine stands. The blue water to her left shone in the lowering evening sun. She was glad for the beauty and for the vast expanse—they allowed her to consider all these things without folding in too tightly upon herself. To remember that all that happened to her happened in a wider world of purpose. It was good to have that assurance, because April was not sure who she was anymore, and the need to know would be crippling if she didn’t think the answer existed out in that wider world—if the Spirit didn’t have a plan.

  She was hoping the cave could help. She remembered very little about her time there—being hit on the head before David’s thugs dumped her there probably had something to do with that. She could barely remember doing the painting or what it looked like. Her clearest memories, in fact, were of Teresa’s presence. So she hoped that getting back to the cave would bring something back; would help her remember what had happened and how she had managed to paint detailed prophecy of the calibre that she had. Maybe if she could remember that, she could understand something more about who and what she was.

  She left the water behind as she turned up the back roads to Tempter’s Mountain, bouncing through unkempt territory until she parked in front of the hermit’s little cottage. It was empty, of course, and silent. Monument to a life that had crossed over into a greater reality.

  She wasn’t exactly sure how to find the death cave, but she’d managed to weasel general directions out of Richard without telling him why she wanted them. Without stopping to look in on the cottage, she headed up the paths behind it that led down the cliffs.

  She felt the cave before she saw it—felt it as a growing edginess, a knot in her gut. She wasn’t surprised to feel it, or to sense it turning into fear. She had nearly died here, after all. Nearly been killed by a cruel enemy.

  That was another reason she needed to know who she was. If she was someone worth murdering, she wanted to know why.

  The path was steep and littered with stones and roots, and she made her way carefully down it, ignoring the growing impulse to turn and run. When the entrance came in view, a dark blot on the cliff side, she forced one foot in front of the other until she reached the opening.

  It smelled rank. She stepped in and flipped on the flashlight in her hand before she could lose her nerve, passing the iron door into the depths of the prison in the cliff. She swept the walls with light.

  And went cold.

  The mural was there—but defaced. Deep black gouges like claw marks raked across it, and someone had altered the pictures themselves with grotesque imagery in black.

  In the center of the mural was a new picture—one she had not drawn. She recognized it, of course—it was the face that looked back at her from any mirror. But her face was twisted as though in torment.

  Written over it letters gouged out of the rock were the words,

  FOUND YOU.

  She turned, very slowly.

  Something was standing behind her.

  * * *

  Chris waited until the car had been gone twenty minutes before he released Miranda’s arm and said, “Okay. We can get down. I’ll go first and pull you up.” She nodded, her face tear-streaked. She had cried the entire time, but at least had done it silently.

  He climbed back through the window and noted signs that someone had searched the room—the intruder must have been there when the gun went off, which was why Chris hadn’t heard him come in. He imagined the man looking out the window to see where the shot had come from. With his eyes drawn to the dog and the man below, he must not have looked to the side where Chris and Miranda were standing only inches away.

  So many things could have gone wrong. He could have yelled
at his compatriot, drawing the attention of the man on the ground to the window and the roof. Miranda could have screamed again, or made any sound loud enough to draw either man’s attention. They could have decided to move at exactly the wrong time.

  “Thank you,” he told no one as he turned around to pull Miranda up.

  He did not know who he was talking to, but he was certain that someone had heard.

  “I’m getting as weird as Tyler,” he muttered.

  “What?” Miranda asked, clinging to his arm with both hands as he hauled her off the roof and back through the window.

  “Nothing.” He set her on the floor and looked at her sternly. “Okay,” he said, “we survived that. But there are two things we need to learn from this. First, that we might have someone after us, and we need to be careful. Second, that you need to learn to be quiet.”

  She burst into tears again, but thankfully didn’t wail. “I’m sorry . . . I couldn’t help it! I was just so scared. And I thought he was going to shoot Testy . . .”

  “He might have shot us if he’d found us. Or worse. Look, I don’t want to scare you, but if I’m going to take care of you, then I need you to help me do it. And that means no hysterics when I need you to be brave.”

  He knelt and looked her in the eye, struck again by how young she seemed—by how much he felt like he was talking to a child and not a young woman. “You can do that,” he said. “Your mother is a brave woman, and from now on, so are you.”

  “Are we going to find my mother?” Miranda asked, her voice wobbly. But she dashed her tears away, and none came to replace them.

  “Yes, we are,” Chris said. “Somehow.”

  “Both of us?”

  “Both of us. Because you are going to be brave.”

  She nodded. “I’ll try.”

  He smiled. “Good. Now that that is settled, you can help me think. This was your home. Do you know anywhere else that your mother would have gone? Or anywhere people are likely to look for her?”

  Miranda shook her head.

  “Do you have family somewhere?”

  Miranda shrugged, looking sorrowful. “Just the community. And they’re all in jail or in custody like we were.”

  “Your mother didn’t have anyone else? Parents, sisters and brothers?”

  “Nobody I knew,” Miranda said. “We moved here when I was born, and Mama said we left our old life behind forever.”

  Chris wondered if Julie was regretting that decision right about now. He wanted to push harder, but remembering that Miranda hadn’t known her own address when she first called the village cell to tell them about the death, he figured it wouldn’t do much good.

  “Did Jacob keep records on the community anywhere?” he asked. “Important papers, letters, anything?”

  At that, Miranda brightened. “He kept letters sometimes—in his office. When mail would come sometimes he said it was better if we didn’t read it.”

  Chris thought angry things but said nothing. Might as well not stir Miranda up anymore than she already was. She bolted off in the direction of the stairs. “Come on, I’ll show you where it is!”

  “Hey, don’t be so loud!” he called out after her as she clattered down the stairs, he catching up as quickly as he could. She waited at the bottom.

  “There’s no one here.”

  “They could always come back. Just keep it down.”

  Miranda led Chris out of the house to one of the barns in back that had several extra rooms built into one end. Jacob’s office was central—and padlocked.

  “Great,” he said. “Do you know where there’s a key?”

  “No,” Miranda said, “but we can shoot it off. I know where there’s guns.”

  Not only did she know where there were guns—unguarded and easy to access—she also knew how to shoot them. Chris watched with a mixture of amusement and alarm as she shot the padlock off the door with easy confidence.

  “Well,” he said. “Thanks.”

  He pushed open the door and entered a neat, practical room with little decoration. Bookshelves lined two walls, laden with thick tomes—a mix of theology, practical manuals, and other things Chris didn’t take the time to figure out—and a large, handmade wooden desk sat against another. A collection of saws of different types and sizes hung on the wall, the only attempt at decorating. But it was the filing cabinets on the fourth wall, on both sides of the door, that interested Chris most.

  “He kept all of that stuff here?” he asked, pointing to the cabinets.

  Miranda shrugged. “I guess so. This is where he took most anything.”

  The cabinets were unlabelled—and locked. The shotgun would be little help this time, since Chris didn’t want any of the files to end up casualties. He started hunting around for a key while Miranda watched.

  “You going to give me a hand?” he asked, looking up from the desk drawers where he was rooting through pens, staplers, and other desk clutter.

  “Don’t think he kept the keys in here,” she said. “He always wore a bunch of keys around his neck. Probably that’s where they are.”

  “Well, that doesn’t help us now.” Chris shut the desk drawer and paused, leaning on the desk surface with one hand while he tried to think of another way into the cabinets. His eyes raised to the saws. “Ah,” he said. “I think I found our way in.”

  Ten minutes and a fight with a noisy electric saw later, he had taken the locks off a cabinet and was going through the first drawer. Bills. The second drawer yielded warranties for much of the equipment around the farm. It wasn’t until the third drawer that he found something that interested him.

  “Here we go,” he said, taking out a manila folder with a name on it. Miranda, perched on the desk looking bored to death, perked up.

  “What’s that say?” she asked.

  “Christopher Hawkins,” he answered.

  “That’s one of the men who lived here.”

  Chris flipped the file open and started riffling through the papers. Yes, this was what he wanted—life insurance papers, birth certificate, other ID, more. He stuck the file back in and went through the others until he came to one marked “Julie Hunter.”

  The chances that this file would lead to her might not be high, but right now it was the only thing he had to go on.

  The file was thick, and he saw why as soon as he opened it—it was full of unopened mail. They were all postmarked from the same place, with the same name on the return address.

  “Who is Andrew Hunter?” he asked. He only heard Miranda’s answer with half his brain—the other half was absorbed in the answer, which he discovered in the next piece of paper. A marriage certificate, dated sixteen years ago, for Andrew and Julie Hunter.

  “Oh,” he said. He looked up at Miranda. “What did you say?”

  “I said I don’t know,” Miranda said.

  He cleared his throat. “Did your mom ever talk to you about your father?”

  “He died before I was born,” Miranda said.

  Chris looked back down at the sheaf of unopened mail in his hands. The last postmark was two years ago.

  Had Julie known about these? Or was Jacob keeping them from her?

  He decided against telling Miranda.

  “Does that file say something about him?” she asked, curiosity itself.

  “There’s a marriage certificate,” Chris said. “For your parents.”

  He flipped through a little more—life insurance. One beneficiary: Jacob. Various forms of ID. More mail—this time with a return address Chris recognized as Julie’s parents. They were several states away. Would she go to them?

  Or to her husband?

  “Who told you about your father’s death?” Chris asked, slowly.

  “Jacob did.”

  He looked up. “Not your mom?”

  “She doesn’t like to talk about him.”

  “So Jacob told you . . .”

  “That my dad died before I was born. Why do you want to know this, anyway?�
��

  He looked back down at the papers. If Julie knew her husband was still alive, and if she had any idea that he’d been trying to contact her for years, maybe she would go to him now. That seemed the most natural thing to do.

  But then again, Julie had been living in a cult for fifteen years. And now, thanks to Reese, she was Oneness. Who knew what she would do? Oneness wasn’t natural. In all kinds of ways.

  Frustrated, he closed the file and tucked it under his arm. It was a place to start. For now, he wanted to get off this property. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going.”

  She hopped off the desk. “Where?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

  She followed him out the door—and they both stopped short.

  “Put your hands up,” the man in black said, pointing a gun at them.

  The other three men stood behind him, smirking.

  They had come back.

  Chapter 10

  April steeled herself as she turned. Faint light outlined the silhouettes of an old, hunched man and a cadre of others, all dressed in black. She could see none of their faces, but she could clearly feel the menace in their presence.

  She knew who the old man was—the only person it could be. “Clint” was back.

  “I thought we would find you here,” he said. “Dogs always return to their vomit. Patience pays off.”

  “What do you want?” April asked.

  The old man waved his hand, taking in the mural. “You thought you controlled the future. But you see, we can also make our mark. You can do nothing we cannot deface. Assert yourself, and we will always be there to bring you down.”

  “What do you want with me?” she asked again.

  “Your life,” he said. “The same thing we wanted last time. But as it turns out, your escape works in my favour. I need power now. Your friends took it from me. And you are going to give it back.”

  “I won’t help you,” April said.

  “You don’t have any choice.”