Renegade

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “No!” she heard herself shouting. “No!”

  Then Tyler, with his hands bound, and something happening—a bonfire, a sacrifice.

  She saw the cell house in the fishing village burning, swallowed in billows of black smoke.

  She saw Bertoller shoot Jacob at point-blank range.

  And David was there, watching in the background. Free. And approving like he had been when Patrick died.

  “Get me out of here!” she shouted. “I need to help them!”

  Julie’s death was already in the past, too late to help. But surely not all of these visions had already come to pass. Surely there was time to help. There was something she could do.

  “Get me somewhere I can help,” she said.

  One of the faces in the shadows around her said, “Anything else we can do?”

  “Yes,” she said, violently wiping tears from her face. “Heal this stupid leg. Get me out of this cast.”

  “You’re asking for our help?”

  “Yes. I need it. Help me.”

  Her ears filled with a roar as the spirits inhabiting the air moved to do as she asked.

  * * *

  Melissa was playing the piano like the song would save someone. She had been three hours at it, filling the house with music.

  They’d heard nothing from April and had no lead on where to look for her. They had gathered to pray, the only thing they could do, and Melissa poured her prayers out in music.

  The Spirit was a great calm, a deep dark. Richard had hoped to tap into knowledge, or power; into the rush he often felt when he went deep in prayer. But there was only this—

  Only stillness.

  The circumstances were too familiar for them not to make the connection: last time April had disappeared, she had been abducted by thugs and left in a cave to die, starved to death because of who she was—a great saint. An identity she had not yet truly embraced and walked in. That event had led to their meeting Reese, and the battle with the hive in Lincoln.

  They had thought the battle was over.

  And now here it was, beginning again—in the same place.

  But this time, the Spirit was still.

  Richard felt almost estranged from it. As though the plan the Spirit was willing into being this time was something he could not accept.

  Melissa played on.

  Was death the Spirit’s will?

  Melissa’s death, April’s. Was that the meaning of this stillness? Because this time, the Spirit would do nothing to stop what was pending?

  For the first time, Richard found himself so disturbed by what he was sensing that he had to stop praying. He stood, nodded to Mary, and left the house. The strains of Melissa’s song followed him out.

  His feet took him down the road in the fading light of evening, over the cobblestones toward the bay. The moon was already out, thin and shining in a blue sky; a planet, nearby, shone more brightly than the brightest stars.

  “I can’t do this,” he said aloud. “Can’t just give up and let them die.” He groaned. “You’re asking too much.”

  Trust me, he thought he heard, spoken by a voice deep in his spirit.

  But the words brought no comfort, no peace.

  He did not know how to trust—not when there was nothing he could do. Not when he was being asked to lay down everything, even to put down prayer, to accept that it would avail him nothing.

  He had spent years learning to operate in the Spirit. To drink it in, to fall into the river, to be carried by it, to act in its surging power.

  He felt now as if it had cast him ashore.

  “You’re asking too much,” he said again.

  He found himself on the docks, looking over the water of the bay. A vast expanse of blue covering who knew what mysteries beneath its waves. Giving not even a hint of what lay beyond the waters.

  April’s painting came to his mind’s eye: the illumination above the bay. But the only light he could see now was the sickle moon.

  And it, too, offered no answers.

  Someone was there beside him.

  He thought it was Mary. She was always faithful to seek him out in times like these—times when he most needed someone to stand by his side.

  He turned to acknowledge her presence, but it wasn’t her.

  It was no one.

  And yet there was someone there.

  He felt himself beginning to tremble.

  Back up at the house, Melissa let her hands grow still, and the music ceased.

  Chapter 14

  Tyler didn’t know how long the journey took. Nor did he know exactly how it happened. There were no flaming horses this time, just a passage of time that occurred beyond any conscious sense, and then they were dumped in the street in a city he recognized as Lincoln. And Reese was there, staring at them with a disturbance in her eyes—a darkness, a tornado—that scared him.

  He half-expected Jacob to go after him then and there, but lying on his back in the street, Jacob took in the skyline and realized where they were. He kept quiet. Maybe for Reese’s sake; Tyler didn’t really know. He was convinced that he’d made an enemy. Which was ironic, because for the first time, he truly understood how much he and Jacob were One. That what he had shouted to the Spirit was true. This man was his brother, and he wanted to save him.

  He also realized, for the first time, how much danger Jacob was actually in.

  “I know this neighbourhood,” Reese said, turning. “The safe house is near here. Where Julie was.”

  She was walking—her cast was gone. Tyler decided not to ask her about it. He suspected he wouldn’t like the answer.

  “Then this is where we’ll pick up Bertoller’s trail,” Jacob said, rising from the ground and markedly ignoring Tyler. “We need to talk to the people at the . . .”

  “You can’t,” Reese said. “They’re looking for you, remember?”

  “They’ll be looking for you, too,” Tyler said. “You’re the one who took Jacob out.”

  He was right, and they all knew it.

  Before Tyler could wrap his mind fully around what was happening, he’d been elected to seek out the trail. He found himself walking two streets over from the safe house, listening to the buzz of activity still happening over there and trying to figure out what he was going to say that would convince anyone to talk to him.

  In the circumstances, he felt alone, and he hated that.

  Concentrating on steadying his breath, he focused on the police cars and the flashing lights up ahead. Did these people always do everything like a big show? They’d been here since the night before, hadn’t they? So there shouldn’t be any reason for lights and attention-getting. But there they were. Maybe it was necessary to look intimidating so they could keep interference from the population away.

  He didn’t think they were going to welcome him.

  He was half a block away when the hilt started to form in his hand, and instinctively he knew he wasn’t going to have to deal with the police after all.

  Someone else was here, and someone else wanted to talk to him.

  He heard a low hiss from a house right beside him, coming from the cellar, like a gas leak. The cellar door, an old-fashioned outdoor wooden affair, was open, beckoning him into a black pit.

  Surely they didn’t think he was that stupid.

  And yet he wanted to talk to them. He was sure they were here waiting for him to give him a message, and he needed to hear that message or else he and Jacob and Reese would keep chasing their tails until they gave up in exhaustion and Bertoller killed who knew how many other innocent people, starting with everyone from the farm community and moving on.

  Not that he expected them to tell him the truth. He just wanted to hear the lie so they could get to work seeing through it. The Spirit had brought him straight here, so he meant to follow up in whatever way he could.

  A tree branch, stretched out overhead just low enough to avoid power lines and thus being cut by city officials, but dry and dead enoug
h that it should have been cut, creaked and moaned as it moved in the wind.

  Except there was no wind.

  The sword finished forming in his hand. He hoped none of the people up at the crime scene would look his way and see him standing there, looking like a comic book wannabe staring down an invisible enemy.

  “Come out,” he said, spreading his feet a little apart so they wouldn’t start taking him to the cellar of their own volition. “I’m not talking to you down there.”

  His voice shook a little, but he held his ground. And felt proud of himself.

  You weren’t going to catch him going down into that darkness. The demons could come out and face him like a man.

  Something almost filmy started to appear in the air before him. He recalled as quickly as he could what little he actually knew about these creatures. Ordinarily they possessed in order to take physical form and have power in the physical world. For them to take on substance of their own, they needed to feed off of something—some evil, some great wrongdoing.

  Something like the murder of a woman like Julie.

  He could hardly see this one, but it was there, hovering with a bare substance that was almost too ethereal to see. If he blinked, it took him a moment to get hold of its shape again. He felt as though he was trying to fix his eyes on a rising wisp of smoke that was blowing away even as he spoke with it.

  But he heard its voice clearly, speaking into the air. This was no voice in his head. It was outside him, disembodied but belonging to a real personality.

  But the voice said nothing. It just laughed at him.

  “Why are you here?” Tyler demanded, afraid to raise his voice too loud—he still didn’t want to attract attention from the crew up the street. Didn’t want anyone normal to see him down here, confronting a demon in broad daylight with a sword in his hand. He tried to keep his voice strong and authoritative even if it was kind of quiet.

  The demon laughed again.

  “What do you have to tell me? Why are you here?”

  “What makes you think I want to talk to you?” the voice answered.

  Tyler reddened. “I’m all you’ve got. I’ll take a message. Just give it to me.”

  “Come to the haunting ground,” it said.

  And even Tyler knew what those words meant.

  * * *

  “The haunting ground,” Reese said.

  “That’s what it said.”

  She exchanged glances with Jacob, who seemed both excited and angry.

  “The cemetery,” she said aloud.

  “Of course,” Jacob said. His tone was dismissive. She didn’t need to speak the words—they’d all understood the reference.

  Bertoller would meet them in the cemetery Jacob had haunted for years as a young man—the cemetery where Bertoller’s own gravestone stood, lying for decades about his death.

  That seemed appropriate.

  “They’re going to be waiting for us,” Reese said. “Ready for us. We’re talking about walking into a trap.”

  “Waiting for us, yes,” Jacob said. “Ready for us, no. Not this time.”

  “Why do you say that?” Tyler asked at the same time Reese did.

  Tyler got the distinct impression Jacob was only answering Reese. “Because we will do things they don’t believe we will. Because I will use whatever powers I must use. Because you will kill Bertoller. And they believe we are still bound by the Oneness.”

  Reese met his eyes without flinching, even as Tyler waited for her to rebuff Jacob’s words, to tell him how wrong he was. About everything. But she didn’t say a word.

  “Reese . . .” Tyler said.

  “I’ll do what I have to do,” Reese said. She turned and let her eyes meet Tyler’s. There was something new in them—she was apologetic, but determined.

  He shook his head. “No, Reese. If you play his game—you don’t know what you’re getting into.”

  “I’m afraid I do,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m already into this too deep to turn back.”

  He asked the question through building dread. “How did you get here?”

  “I used . . . whatever powers I had to use.”

  Something in his heart broke. “Reese, don’t give in to them. Whatever they’re telling you, it’s lies.”

  “There’s too much at stake,” Reese said. “I’m sorry, Tyler. But right now, Bertoller is positioned to take everything I care about, and I can’t lose all that. Not again.”

  “You’re giving it to him,” Tyler said, tears filling his eyes. “To them.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, and turned away.

  To keep him from seeing tears in her own eyes, he thought.

  “You believed like me once,” he said.

  Her back went rigid against the backdrop of the neighbourhood lights. “I’m not that person anymore, Tyler. And that was a long time ago. Just pray for me. I can’t. So do it for me.”

  “I will.”

  Jacob took Reese’s arm. “Let’s go,” he said. “There’s no sense in wasting time.”

  Tyler took a step after them, but Jacob turned and pinned him with his eyes. “You’re not coming.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re not coming. I can’t trust you.”

  “I got us here!”

  “You went against my orders and interfered with my plans. I needed that power for more reasons than just getting us here. And you’ll interfere with Reese if you get half a chance. You’ve proven yourself. I’m not taking you another step.”

  “Reese!”

  She just shook her head. “He’s right, Tyler. Better you stay here anyway. You’ll be safer.”

  She allowed herself to meet his gaze, and he saw clearly the tears in her eyes. “Just pray, Tyler. Get us any help you can any way you can. But don’t come. I don’t want you in that cemetery tonight.”

  * * *

  Franz Bertoller stood on a gravestone and watched the preparations unfolding in the moonlight and the flickering shadows cast by the torches ringing one small area of the grounds. They would do things right, this time.

  His own gravestone, engraved with his name and a death date twenty years earlier, shone in the moonlight. A massive slab of granite, he had designed it as an altar, though few knew it. It had been used once before: the night of his “death” when he renewed his youth and continued on with a new face and a new name.

  But the sacrifice that night would pale in power compared to the one he would offer tonight.

  His men, dressed in black and barely distinguishable from the shadows, went about their work silently, bringing bundles of sticks and kindling and laying them on the growing pile on the altar. Chickens and goats clucked and bleated from the crates that had already been delivered, outside of the torchlit area in the center of the cemetery.

  A car pulled up outside of the cemetery, announced by the purr of its engine and the flash of headlights. Bertoller nearly stood on tiptoe, suddenly alert in every cell, to see if this was the delivery he was waiting for.

  It wasn’t. Four men approached with a girl Bertoller recognized as Julie’s daughter.

  “Put her back there,” he said, nodding toward the animal crates. “You’ll be able to find a crate for her.”

  The girl was blubbering and crying, and Bertoller turned away in disgust. She would be the height of the preliminary sacrifices, and her youth and innocence would make her worth more than some, but nothing in comparison to the climax of the night.

  Another car arrived.

  He smiled.

  This was the one.

  He’d heard reports from the first time they abducted this one: she had panicked and tried to fight back, and they had knocked her out and dumped her in the cave. She was terrified, they said. Easy prey.

  Nothing like a great saint.

  Moreover, the girl they had cornered in the cave, the one who had thrown herself off the cliff and led them on a chase along the coast, had been driven by fear.

&nbs
p; So he was a little shaken to see her now, as they brought her into the torchlight with her hands in chains.

  Something had changed.

  She met his eyes without hesitation, her expression challenging him, asking why he had brought her here, insisting that he examine himself and think twice about his actions.

  He pulled his hands into nail-gouging fists.

  She had come into her own. This was a great saint.

  And at last, she knew it.

  “You’re too late,” he said, answering the words she didn’t say. “You’ve realized it too late. Just in time to give your power to me—to feed the darkness.”

  “What you’re about to do—demons themselves would be afraid to do it.”

  “But I am not a coward.”

  “Only a fool.”

  Her eyes did not flinch away from his. “You aren’t the only one who will die tonight,” he said. “We will make a beautiful fire, and the Power himself will light it.”

  “Whatever you’re planning to do, you’re going to regret it,” April said. “You can’t win this fight—after all this time, you should know that. All of your efforts are going to come to nothing, to backfire. Starting here.”

  “You presume to lecture me?”

  “I presume to tell you the truth. It’s not too late for you.”

  He laughed at that. “You are deluded.”

  “There will be a fire here tonight,” April said. “But it may not be the one you intend to light. Please, listen to me . . . it isn’t too late. You can turn around.”

  Too late, he realized how much power she was exercising over the whole scene—that everyone was listening to her, every one of his thugs, that Miranda had ceased her wailing, that even the animals had quieted. That he himself was allowing this woman to speak and to extend grace to him.

  As though she had the authority to do so.

  As though she could speak, and forgiveness would be his, and a new life.