The Risen Series | Book 5 | Defiance

by Crow, Marie F.

  Copyright

  Defiance is a work of fiction. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEFIANCE: A NOVEL

  Copyright © 2020 by Marie F. Crow

  All rights reserved.

  Editing by KP Editing

  Cover Design by KP Designs

  - www.kpdesignshop.com

  Published by Kingston Publishing Company

  - www.kingstonpublishing.com

  The uploading, scanning, and distribution of this book in any form or by any means—including but not limited to electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the permission of the copyright holder is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized editions of this work, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  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

  Epilogue

  Extras

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  “Dad?”

  The man I never thought I would see again - the man I never thought I wanted to see again – stands before me highlighted like a phantom by my truck’s headlights. The lights add an eerie glow to him, as if he is already dead, and gone, and this is just my mind tormenting me once again. But it’s not. My father, Collin Hawthorn, is very much alive and well. At least, for now, he is.

  Rhett and Lawless part, tense and waiting for me to either make peace or war with whom we have stumbled upon. I can almost hear Fate giggling with every step I take towards them. Her twin, Karma, is just waiting to see what I will do, as are those around me.

  “Dad?” I repeat, as if fog will take the features I am seeing and twist them into a different man standing before me.

  It doesn’t.

  “Helena?” I hear him ask.

  Only for a moment, my father’s eyes rest on me. He is already trying to peer through the burning lights of the truck for those he hopes might be inside. My father isn’t looking at me. He was never even looking for me. He is looking for his Angels.

  The same pit of nothing I have dwelled inside of slithers around me. It takes its cold grasp and leeches the tenderness from me that I had allowed to fool me. I was stupid to think this was about to become something more; something I used to once crave.

  “They are dead,” I tell him, and his hopeful eyes.

  I watch the light shrink from his face. I watched the joy he was wearing shrivel to agony. I watch him transform and I feel nothing for him.

  “I killed them,” I tell him, further ripping the heart from his body. “I killed my mother. I killed Ashley. I killed Conroy.”

  The men around me shuffle the way people do when tension rises, but my men, they aren’t normal men. They don’t just shuffle. Knives are grasped and a gun is chambered. They are still too raw from what we have left behind to ‘play nice’.

  “Lilly?” my father asks me, noticing her name missing from my list.

  His voice is breaking. The simple name caught in his throat before shredding its way free. A nicer person might be more tender with the bad news I have to share with him. A nicer person might care to ease this man through his suffering; a short, guided version of the tour that is waiting for him. I’m not that person. I’m the daughter he didn’t want, and I have no comfort to offer this man.

  “You can thank your wife for that death.”

  I watch as my words cripple him. I watch as they take the strength from his legs. He is reduced to nothing more than a pile of flesh in the arms of the two men beside him, as they guide him to the cold street beneath their feet.

  David only used a little stone to kill Goliath. Such a simple weapon and it changed the world around them. Stones, like words, can do such horrible things to people. Truth, now that bitch, she can destroy people. I am Helena Hawthorn and the world has taught me well the damage Truth can do to a person’s soul.

  Chapter 1

  I’m dreaming. It’s the same dream I have had for as many nights as we have been on the run. We linger here or there until they find us. Somehow, despite our best efforts, the Risen always find us.

  I’m four again. I’m standing in my new boots and my ‘good dress’ in the kitchen. A kitchen I will always remember being too white. It’s too perfect, too clean, and everything I am not.

  It’s not white anymore. In my excitement to show my father the frog I have caught, I have trailed behind me the proof of the weather. The brown mud is smeared in child-sized prints trailing behind me.

  I have been exploring every puddle, every overflowing ditch with the eyes of a child. They were worlds to me inside of my world and I dove deep into their waters, soaking my dress, my hair, and ruining my boots.

  No one tells a kid the rules of suede. All I had known when I first saw them, was they were a deep red with gold stitching. They made me feel pretty, which was something I was starting to learn I didn’t measure up to in my mother’s eyes. After my little exploring adventure, they are almost black with the water soaking them and the mud encasing them.

  “What have you done?” Carol screams at my former self.

  She is not really looking at me. All she can see is the once perfect carpet of the living room I have marred. She sees the perfectly clean kitchen tiles I am dripping muddy water upon. In fact, I don’t really remember her ever really looking at me until she wanted to eat me that morning in the hallway.

  My father runs into the room hearing her screams. His eyes look from her to me and back as a smile slowly starts to form. Seeing his silent approval, I happily hold the wiggling reptile out to show him. Of course, it picks this time to slip free, bouncing across the tiles straight for Carol. It heads straight for the woman who has already filled the house with her pitch of distress. Her voice climbs octaves now.

  My father rushes to save her. He is laughing as he chases the jumping creature across the floor, making a grand show of his heroics with his facial expression and remarks. I stand, my four-year-old self, laughing at the man I had placed all of my love and trust in, the way which little girls blindly do. I watch as the person who was once me, covers her mouth as sounds of childhood glee float from her.

  I’m never really in the dream, but a soundless watcher knowing what waits for those I am watching, constantly unable to stop any of it. My point-of-view flips from the me then, to the me now, without reason or timing. It adds to the horror.

  “I’m
glad you two find this amusing,” Carol wails. “I spend all day cleaning this place and for what? No one respects me.”

  My father almost snorts over her drama.

  “It’s just a frog, Car. It’s not like she brought in the whole ark,” he tells her, casting a wink my way.

  “You always take her side. Ever since you brought her home,” Carol cries, “I have not been able to do anything right.”

  I watch as the little girl who was myself cocks her head hearing what Carol has said. Even at that age, I knew it wasn’t phrased right. The little girl with a wet dress, and even wetter braids, looks to the man she believes holds all the answers, but he won’t meet her eyes.

  “Not now,” he says to the woman I thought of as a mother.

  I watch as he reaches a hand out to Carol. I watch as she turns from him. Like someone underwater, I scream silently, trying to warn my dad about what is going to happen next. I try to tell my former self to run, to not look, but just like a person underwater, I’m choking on the sounds.

  The true memory has Carol turning to shove my father away, but this isn’t just a memory. It’s the twisted effigy of what my mind holds as days meld with the past.

  Carol turns as he reaches for her and she is as she was that morning I discovered what had become of our world. She stands, no longer in her A-line skirt with its matching blouse, but in the yellow nightgown, covered in the blood of my sister. Grabbing my father’s arm, she pulls him to her sneering face, destroying him much as she destroyed Lilly.

  She latches onto his neck where the tender flesh meets between the ear and shoulder. She pulls it between her teeth until the long cords of tissue sever. Spraying the white walls with his red blood in a mist, my father dies still staring at me with the slow smile of approval he came into the room wearing.

  I’m screaming for me to run. I’m trapped behind the scenes unable to reach the cast of the play in front of me. Carol stalks towards the four-year-old who is staring at her with confusion. I close my eyes. I used to watch it like I could stop it. I used to stand, screaming into the space around me. Now I wait for it to end, but no matter how hard I close my eyes, I can still hear it all.

  I hear the moment Carol finds me. I hear the sick, wet sounds of Carol destroying me. I know the moment I die, and I know I will die again tomorrow night. I die every night at the hands of a woman who was never really my mother.

  It’s always this memory my sleeping demons pick to twist. This is the moment in time when I first knew something was wrong. This is when I first caught the first of the clues I chose to ignore through the years.

  She didn’t eat my father and me then, but she killed us just the same. She drove the first wedge between us that day. He stood there, holding her as she cried while he stared at me.

  “I love both my girls,” he had said with worry engulfing him.

  “If you ever loved me, you couldn’t love her,” Carol had said.

  It was then the light in my father’s eyes had started to dim for me. It was that day, in that very white kitchen, she had declared a war between her and I. A war a four-year-old would never win, and she never did.

  “Hells,” Lawless calls to me from the blackness that surrounds me. “Hells, it’s just a dream.”

  My eyes flutter, opening to see the stars above me in their black landscape.

  “Jesus woman, get some therapy so the rest of us can get some sleep,” Rhett sleepily mutters from his spot beyond me.

  “I could just kill him for you, Hells,” Marxx offers, knowing fully of whom I constantly dream of now.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time you have offered,” I say, remembering the many nights at the bar when I came in more defeated than just deflated.

  “Won’t be the last either,” Marxx says, hinting at the long road ahead of us.

  It’s not just the miles we have to survive, or those we have survived. It’s the blending of the two groups and it’s not gone well. I haven’t helped either. Surviving yet another near-death by a Risen, almost being hung, watching Chapel die, and escaping the burning school did not set the best of moods for a family reunion on the interstate so many nights ago. Not knowing I even had a family to reunion with also didn’t exactly help with any heart-warming hellos. A greeting card writer, I was never meant to be.

  For days I have felt like I’m living in madness trying to gently pull the truth from my father. Throw in the creatures wanting to dine on your flesh if you let your guard down and it almost feels like Christmas with the family again - one big passive-aggressive, death wish filled, holiday of fun.

  “I don’t even know why we are with them,” Rhett continues to grumble. “They are just using the supplies we are already running short on. I swear if that boy asks to touch my bike one more time, I’m going to break his jaw.”

  “Rhett has a boyfriend,” Aimes sings from her side of the fire.

  “It’s kind of cute, really,” Dolph says, joining the conversation from where he is standing watch.

  “Both of you, suck me,” Rhett mutters and I can hear him pulling the nylon sleeping bag tighter around him.

  The nights aren’t as cold now, but winter keeps her fist clutched tightly around us. She refuses to give up as we refuse to give in. The slow shifting of the weather has allowed us to further space ourselves from the others. No longer are we confined to the random houses we have found deserted and depressing with their rotting dead, or worse, rotting undead. We haven’t found anyone alive since leaving the burning high school. I think that is taking more of a toll on us than the many Risen we have been unfortunate to find.

  “Don’t worry, Rhett,” Aimes says. “When I turn, you’ll be the first one I come for.”

  “The sex that bad?” Lawless asks with a voice thick with sleep but unwilling to let a chance to tease them pass.

  The silence from them both makes us all laugh.

  “I’m up, Dolph. We can switch,” I offer.

  Dolph nods his time-tried, traditional head nod before heading to where his sleeping bag has been waiting for him. I watch as he slides into the fabric with an exhale a mattress company would envy for their commercials. A warm fire, a simple night’s rest, and food consisting of something other than the canned questionable we have found are the only luxuries we now own. Needless to say, I think we are all missing the high school for one reason or another.

  Slipping from the warmth of Lawless, I shiver when exposed to the night’s air. I can see where the other group has their set-up similar to ours only a small space away. We keep just enough distance to keep the tension at bay, but not far enough space to prevent either group from quickly alerting the other should something go wrong.

  Peyton gives a slight wave as I take watch. I return it, unsure of what else to do knowing he is watching me. Peyton has tried his best to bridge the gap between our two groups. I think it has only put him higher on Rhett’s shit list.

  Since Selma, Rhett has become a protective beast. He follows April like a dark shadow, daring Fate to come near her. Even now, the little girl is sleeping in his tight embrace and it’s odd to see him acting as a father. His games have gone from veiled threats and innuendoes to tag and hide-and-seek. It’s weird, and somehow still, all the more reassuring than any of the other many changes we have all been through. He makes me wonder if perhaps there is a chance for a ‘normal’ life still waiting for us.

  Settling myself against the base of the tree Dolph had just left, I sigh when I recognize the shadow-like outline heading towards me. There are reasons I have stopped offering to help out. No one comes to talk to the men, but when Paula or I take watch, it’s suddenly time for ‘hey neighbor-like’ chats around the campfire.

  “How is everyone?” Peyton whispers.

  Even with his attempt to stay quiet, I know from the sounds of the bags around me the men are aware he is here. After all, a deep sleep now could mean you’re sleeping forever.

  “Fine, I guess,” I reply nonchalantly.

 
I don’t try to hide the volume of my voice. If the men around me want to lay in the dark pretending to not be listening, I plan to call their bluff.

  Peyton settles on the same tree trunk. His eyes are roaming the woods around us, watching the distant, dancing reflected lights. We have placed our little noisemakers, as Aimes calls them, around the thickest parts of trees. Everything from baby rattles to pots and pans hangs from various types of twine-styled material. They twinkle when the wind rolls them under the moon’s light.

  “I think we are a little road weary,” Peyton shrugs as he says it, as if I asked about his group.

  “What? Ginjer with a ‘J’ doesn’t like our new life?”

  I hadn’t meant it to be so snarky. It just was. I guess I’m losing my touch of sarcasm.

  Peyton makes a little sound of amusement anyway, before saying, “Yeah, I guess she is. I’m more worried about Genny.”

  I cringe when he says her name. It was one thing to discover my father was alive. It was another to discover most of my life was a lie. Not only was Carol not my mother, my siblings were only half, but I had a whole family I had never met. I had a mother who wanted me, while I grew up with one who didn’t. It was bitter to hear and, in my mouth, still lingers its sour taste.

  “Collin is worried about her, too. Losing her mother and her aunt like that, she’s fading on us. He’s trying his best, but the poor girl just keeps going deeper into herself,” he says.

  “Don’t worry, Collin will grow bored soon enough and find something else to do.”

  I give Peyton big eyes of innocence when he looks at me after hearing my response. The men chuckle, daring Peyton to respond to me. He does anyway.

  “I’m not going to pretend to understand everything between the two of you, or three of you, I guess,” Peyton says. His lips almost frown trying to figure out exactly how we all tie together, before adding to his verbal downward spiral, “but I do know he feels a lot of shame over it. He watches you, trying to figure out what to say to you.”

  “You can tell him to stop,” Lawless mumbles. “Anything he might have said, he should have said years ago.”