We all trickled out of the room with the radio. Most people headed back outside to talk about this new turn of events, but I didn’t feel much like company. I started back for the sanctuary. I thought maybe I’d go out the front of the church and take a walk, maybe look for a coat hanger or some stairs to throw myself down.
But Kieran caught up with me in the sanctuary. “Hey,” he said. “Where were you? I could have used your help with Hallam earlier.”
I was amazed. “Kieran, I was on Hallam’s side. I don’t think we need to go after those guys.”
“Well, now, it’s impossible anyway, considering we have orders to get across the river.”
“They have orders, Kieran. Not us,” I said. “I think we should go back to D.C., like we’re supposed to.” I hadn’t realized I thought this. But I guessed I did. I wanted to wait until I saw Polly again, but if she delivered the grimoire, then everything would work out. I’d strip Jason and me of our powers. Hallam and Marlena could get past Jason easily then, I hoped. And Kieran and I could go back and…what? Play house? Except for the baby part, everything would work out, I guessed.
“You do?” He considered. “I guess you’re right. We were only hanging around to try to stop Jason. Now that they’re going to go west for sure, I guess they’ll sneak around him or something, like you suggested earlier.”
I nodded. “Right.”
“So when do you want to go?”
“A few days, I guess. They still need another boat. I’m sure Hallam and Marlena are in there deciding who’s going to go looking for one.”
“Okay,” said Kieran. “Sounds good.” He sat down heavily on one of the pews. “I guess it was crazy of me to try to get everyone to help me go after those guys. It just drives me nuts knowing they’re still out there. I wish I’d killed them before.”
I sat down next to him. “Sorry,” I said, taking his hand. “Maybe I should have used my powers.”
He shrugged. “Well, it’s done now. There’s no point dwelling on the past.” He squeezed my hand. “Where were you anyway? You disappeared after dinner.”
There wasn’t much point in keeping it from him, I guess. I got the pregnancy test out of my pocket and handed it to him.
He made a face. “What is this?”
“It’s a pregnancy test, moron. Two lines are positive. One’s negative.”
“Oh,” he said. “I can’t read it in this light.”
I took it back from him. “It’s positive.”
He sat up straight, taking my other hand. “It is?” He sounded excited.
“Yes,” I said, doing my best not to sound excited at all.
“Wow,” Kieran breathed. He hugged me.
I let him, but I didn’t hug back.
“Hey,” said Kieran. “What’s wrong?”
Was he an idiot? “What do you think is wrong? I told you I didn’t want to be pregnant. I’m glad you think it’s so wonderful, but I don’t.”
Kieran let go of my hands and got out of the pew. He stood in the aisle, not facing me. “Damn it, Azazel.”
I let my head fall back and stared at the ceiling. “What?”
“You’re so hot and cold,” he said. “Yesterday, I thought you were into it, and now you’re not. I don’t know what to think.”
“It was just an idea yesterday,” I said. “Now it’s a reality.”
“I want you to be happy about it. I feel like an asshole if I’m happy about it and you’re not.”
“Sorry that the fact that I’m going to gain tons of weight, get stretch marks, and go through hours of painful labor doesn’t make me thrilled. Sorry that makes you feel like an asshole.” How could he possibly make this all about him?
“Forget it,” Kieran mumbled. He trudged back through the church, out the front door, the way I’d planned to go. Now I couldn’t even go for a walk.
Instead of following him, I lay down on my side and curled up in a little ball on the pew.
* * *
I dreamed of honey. Just outside Columbus-Belmont park, the river was made entirely of honey. It was thick and amber colored, and it oozed over the rocks and the grass on the banks. It smelled cloyingly sweet. The scent drifted up to the lookout house where we’d rescued Lily and the others. I was standing outside the lookout house, gazing down on the river of honey, wondering if it was tainted, or if it would still taste good.
A fly alighted on my shoulder. It spoke to me in a teeny voice, not unlike Polly’s. “You can’t go across the river, or you’ll get stuck in it,” it said in my ear.
I brushed the fly off of me, annoyed.
Above me, the sky abruptly convulsed into storm clouds. The blue sky was obliterated with gray.
Lightning flashed behind them, illuminating the wispy edges of the clouds. The clouds shifted, moving in and out of each other, and then solidifying into a shape. I cocked my head to stare.
The shape became clearer and clearer as the clouds knitted themselves into each other. It was a face.
I shuddered as I recognized the face. Liam Sutherland, the most evil man I’d ever met. We’d never been enemies, not quite. But he’d never really been on my side either. Sutherland’s idea of fun was raping and killing teenage girls. Sutherland made his living by selling information to the highest bidder. Sutherland had dirt on everyone, and no one could touch him. He bought his immunity from every government. He worked with high officials in churches and pagan organizations alike. Why was I dreaming about Liam Sutherland?
Sutherland’s cloud face looked down on me. His angry eyes bored into mine. “Azazel,” he said, delighted. He’d always found me a little too creepily attractive for my taste. I’d hoped that these days, I’d be too old for his taste. I’d hoped that he’d died when the solar flare happened. Why was he in the clouds? “There are things you don’t know about what’s happening out west.”
Ah. It was the same song and dance all over again. “What do you want for your information, Sutherland?” I asked. He always had a price. He always wanted to trade. And if I had no money and no information, he always suggested we trade by him raping me. I’d never let that happen. If Sutherland didn’t always turn out to be so damned useful, I would kill him.
“Why, my safety, of course,” said Sutherland. “You don’t think I don’t know that you and your boyfriend are trying to spoil all my fun, do you? Promise to leave me alone, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Leave him alone? “You afraid of me, Sutherland?”
“Terrified,” said Sutherland, grinning widely. Then the clouds that made up his face dispersed as rain began to fall.
Drops of it fell on my hands and head. It wasn’t water. It was honey.
Sticky, warm honey was coating my hair and clothing and sliding all over my skin. I dove for the lookout house, the only shelter around. Jason was inside. He was holding a baby. It was swaddled inside blankets. I couldn’t make out its head.
“It’s raining honey,” I said.
Jason just shrugged. He made cooing noises at the baby. “I don’t know how much longer I can wait for you, Azazel. He’s getting stronger.”
I wanted to get away from Jason, but the sky was still spitting out large gobs of honey. I could hear them splat against the roof of the lookout house.
“They’re coming,” said Jason. “I’ve held off as long as I could, waiting for you, but soon I’ll have to do it without you.” He sighed. “It won’t be easy. I can make them want to work together, but I can’t make them want to destroy. They have to want that themselves already. But you can do that. You can make them want to kill him. If we were together…”
Even in my dreams, Jason was trying to get back together? Jesus. “Give me the baby,” I said.
“Why?” said Jason. “It’s not yours. You don’t have babies. You never have babies.”
“I’m pregnant now.”
He shook his head. “This baby isn’t yours. You remember what kind of babies you have.” He pointed into the fireplace in the
lookout house. In the corner was a twisted piece of blackness, a worm-shaped thing with rows and rows of sharp teeth. My dream in Italy at the Sol Solis school.
My dream of having a baby with Jason. That monster thing. But you couldn’t remember other dreams in dreams. Could you?
“Stop worrying about babies and worry about what family you’ve got left,” said Jason.
I turned away from the fireplace. There, standing behind Jason, tied to the poles holding up the lookout house, were Hallam and Marlena. They were bleeding.
I rushed to them, working at the knots that held them fast to the poles with honey covered fingers. I couldn’t untie them.
Hallam moaned.
I looked at Jason furiously. “If they’re my family, they’re your family too. Why are you doing this?”
Jason laughed. “Because it’s fun,” he said.
“Untie them.”
Jason turned back to the baby. “Baby’s going to learn how to torture people today, aren’t you?”
He tickled the baby’s tummy. “Yes, you are, little man. Yes, you are.”
“Stop it!” I screamed, and—
—woke myself up on the pew where I’d been sleeping. It was morning. Light streamed in through the shattered windows. I’d slept out here all night, apparently.
Chapter Fourteen
Hallam and Marlena had decided that they’d be going to look for another boat to get across the river. I didn’t think this was a good idea. I wasn’t crazy about my dreams, and I didn’t always know what they meant, but I was pretty sure that the dream I’d had last night was warning me that Jason intended to capture Hallam and Marlena and torture them. What the raining honey, cloud face of Sutherland, and baby had to do with anything I didn’t know. Possibly they were just things my subconscious was trying to work out. My dreams were confusing at best, but I had a feeling about this.
Hallam and Marlena grilled me about everything that happened in the dream and concluded that since it contained so many weird and irrelevant things, they shouldn’t take it seriously.
I tried a different tactic. Why were they the ones who were going to find the boat? Hallam was the person in charge of the team. If he left, we would all be bereft of leadership.
Hallam explained that he wasn’t going to send any of the people who’d been captured by Jason out alone again. He didn’t think it was fair to them after their ordeal, and he didn’t think they’d be able to do the job quite as well, because they might be overly cautious. He didn’t want to send people who hadn’t been captured by Jason because there were reasons they hadn’t been part of scouting parties in the first place. It could only be him and Marlena, in other words. They were going. As for who would be in charge, he was leaving me in charge, but I had express directions not to do anything crazy like go after those nut jobs Kieran wanted to go after.
I volunteered Kieran and myself to go after the boat instead. I thought that made more sense.
Marlena wasn’t into that. I demanded to know why, and Hallam was a little curious too. Marlena got kind of quiet, and asked me if I’d had a chance to take the test we’d talked about.
Hallam wanted to know what test.
I got mad. I told her that yes, I’d taken the pregnancy test, and yes, it was positive, but that was no reason to keep Kieran and I from going after the boat.
Hallam freaked out. He was unintelligible for several seconds, just stringing together swears. His face got really, really red. Finally, all he could yell at me was, “How could you be so stupid, Azazel? How could you be so stupid?”
I tried to tell him that I’d been as careful as was possible these days. It wasn’t like I could pop into a pharmacy and get my birth control prescription refilled. It had been an accident, the way these things usually were, and I wasn’t any happier about it than he was.
It didn’t matter, though. Hallam wasn’t about to let “a pregnant lady” put herself in that much danger. I needed to sit tight until he and Marlena got back and then hightail my butt back to D.C., where they would hopefully assign me someplace less dangerous.
There wasn’t anything else I could say. I begged them to be careful. I begged them to watch out for Jason or Jason’s people. I made them promise to be back by a certain day or we’d go looking for them. They agreed.
Later that morning, they left.
Kieran wasn’t speaking to me. He was really pissed off about not getting revenge for his family and my not wanting to have a baby. I kind of thought he was being stupid about it, but telling him that didn’t seem to make him any less angry with me.
I was in charge, so I considered ordering him to get over it. I decided that wouldn’t work either.
Instead, I just kind of moped around. I didn’t offer to help with food preparation, which I probably should have done. I sat on the steps in front of the church, staring at the empty road, the trees and their new leaves, and the abandoned buildings of Columbus. I sat there for hours. I tried not to think. I’d been over and over everything in my head so many times, there wasn’t much point in going through it again.
There was a baby. Damn it.
Sometimes it seemed like there was no end of people who needed my protection. With my powers, I felt that responsibility keenly. Personally, there was Chance, Hallam, Marlena, and now Kieran. I used to feel like I had to take care of Jason. I didn’t have to protect him from danger, because he was pretty good at doing that himself, but he was always getting himself into trouble, and I had to comfort him and be there for him. Overall, it just felt exhausting. I had to make sure people were safe all the time. And here I was, with some other little being growing inside me, some other being that I’d have to keep safe.
So, who was it that took care of me, huh?
Certainly wasn’t going to be a baby, that was for sure. I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that babies were tons of work, and that they didn’t love you back. You loved them and they took, took, took. And since you loved them, you didn’t mind that they took everything away from you. Hell, you liked it.
I was going to be a terrible mother.
Maybe I could just have the baby and pawn it off on Kieran. He wanted the baby so bad, he could have it.
But I knew that wasn’t going to work, either. If I was going to have this baby, I’d want it when all was said and done. You didn’t carry a little being around inside you for nine months, and not want to hold it when you were done. Your body released all these weird bonding hormones and stuff, and it was only natural to want to take care of it. And beyond all that biology, I knew that I kind of wanted the baby anyway. I wouldn’t have chosen to become pregnant, but if I was, I’d do the best I could. It would turn out okay.
Maybe if I went and said something like that to Kieran, he’d snap out of whatever funk he was in. I stood up, ready to try to reconcile, when I heard the sound of a car motor.
What? There were never any cars. Most people hadn’t been able to figure out how to get gasoline out of the ground without electric pumps. And a lot of the gasoline had been taken and stockpiled by the government. So why was I hearing a car?
The sound got louder, and then an old gray Volkswagen bus chugged around a bend in the road and pulled up to the church. Who was this?
The side door slid open and inside, I saw a man sitting in a wheelchair.
Chance?
I rushed forward. Chance was holding a remote which controlled an electric ramp. It was lowering him and his wheelchair to the ground.
“Chance,” I said.
He grinned at me. “Pretty sweet, right? Someone converted this thing into a wheelchair accessible vehicle.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Chance wheeled himself off the ramp and hit a button on the remote. Everything folded back up on itself, going back into the interior of the bus. He wheeled himself around to the back of the bus. “The best part,” he said, “is that I can work on the engine myself.” He pulled open a hatch on the back of the bus. “See. The eng
ine’s right here in the back. I can sit in my chair and fiddle with it when stuff breaks.” He beamed at me.
“What are you doing here?” I repeated. “You’re supposed to be in D.C. You’re supposed to be safe.”
“I’m glad to see you too, sis,” he said.
“Chance!” Had my brother always been this annoying?
“D.C. was boring,” he said. “I’m missing all the action there.”
“You should be missing the action,” I said. “I want you out of the action. You’re…handicapped for God’s sake.”‘
“We prefer wheely people these days, actually,” he said, wheeling past me to look at the church.
“I heard Hallam and Marlena were here too. I came to see you guys. I think I can help.” He looked at me. “You know, with Jason.”
I clenched my teeth. “You never have to see him again. I made sure of that.”
“Are Hallam and Marlena here?” Chance asked.
“You missed them. They’re away, looking for a boat.”
Chance shrugged. “Cool. I’ll see them when they get back.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll get back in your little magic bus and drive back to D.C.”
“Geez, Zaza, come on.”
“Zaza?” said Kieran. He was standing at the door to the church, hands in pockets. “Now why didn’t I think to use that nickname for you?”
I glared at Kieran. “No one calls me that except Chance,” I said. It always made me think of my family, and most of my memories of my family were pretty unpleasant.
“Hi!” said Chance, waving. “I’m Azazel’s brother, Chance. I’m here to help with Jason.”
Kieran raised his eyebrows.
Good. Kieran was on my side, at least.
“No, wait,” said Chance. “I know I’m in a wheelchair. I’m not going to fight him. I’m going to talk to him.”
“Chance, we’ve all talked to him. He’s completely gone off the deep end,” I said.
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