Renegade

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  What the child wanted, he did not know. But he believed this part of his mind, and not the part that was chiding him for refusing to leave the truck. He’d spent the rest of the night sitting up with his back against the window, his shotgun cradled between his legs, and the flashlight close at hand.

  He had no desire to revisit that night, or to spend another one like it out here.

  But he really had no idea what to do now. A night full of terrors and watchers wasn’t much better than a day with little direction, a day he would spend trying to hunt Reese down in an area where she was almost certain not to be.

  He finished his third circuit around the truck, wider this time than the others, looking for any sign of the child he knew hadn’t left signs. The sun was already growing hot, and he could feel sweat raising on the back of his neck. He wiped it with his hand and growled, wishing Tyler was here to grumble at.

  Maybe he should call the village. Talk to Richard. Tell him what he’d seen and ask him if he had any idea what it was.

  “No,” he said out loud.

  He didn’t really want to get the cell into this.

  When he found Reese, he needed to talk to her, and it needed to be just the two of them—well, and Tyler. Sort of. But it needed to be about them, not about the cell.

  Even if he was pretty lost without them right now.

  He packed up his things and started the truck again, heading north. He didn’t really know what he thought he was doing. Like if he just kept following scant hopes, he’d stumble across Reese. More likely he’d get himself on the wrong road and they’d miss each other for the rest of their lives.

  But he couldn’t stand the thought of going home to the village and just waiting.

  Better to run in circles until the day he died.

  He switched the radio on as he drove, trying to ignore a growing pressure in the back of his head. The highway was clear, not many people out this far in the middle of nowhere. Old classic rock tunes blared through speakers that were in much better shape than the ones in his old truck—he almost missed the way the old radio had rattled out the bass lines. Driving a new truck made him feel uncomfortably like a new person.

  The pressure was getting stronger.

  He jacked the radio up louder, but the noise only seemed to make it worse—like it was clashing with some other sound and the combined effect was giving him a headache. He switched it off and drove in silence before pulling over to the side of the road and swearing.

  He shoved his door open and got out, yelling, “Would you leave me alone?”

  There was no answer. Naturally. What did he think was bothering him, anyway?

  The Spirit.

  The Oneness.

  The SOMETHING that wanted him to be part of it and had decided to get aggressive about the fact.

  “No,” he said, stalking circles around the truck. “No, not now. I’m not ready. I need . . .”

  He didn’t know what he needed.

  He stopped short.

  The child was sitting on the hood of the truck.

  This time he saw him clearly. A boy, about eleven. White-blond hair. Green eyes. Faded cheeks. An expression far more serious than most eleven year olds ever carried.

  Chris blinked, and the boy was gone.

  “What are you trying to do to me?” he asked.

  No answer.

  No apparition this time, either.

  He got back in the truck and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel until it got too hot and stuffy to sit there anymore. The pressure had eased off a bit, just like last night—like seeing the child diffused it. Like lightning in a storm.

  He flicked the radio back on.

  And went ashen.

  The news was playing.

  “No,” he whispered. “God, no. Please let them be wrong.”

  * * *

  Richard had no idea anything was wrong until he arrived on the safe house street in Lincoln. He hadn’t called ahead—figured it would be okay just to drop in and see if Julie was available for a visit. But as he pulled onto the street, he knew from the police cars everywhere and the caution tape blocking off the entire lot that something terrible had happened.

  As he drew closer, he knew what it was. His gut told him.

  He could feel the residue of death.

  Julie.

  April made a noise beside him, and without saying a word or checking on Nick and Alicia in the backseat, Richard pulled a U-turn and started to drive away.

  “Why?” April asked softly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t we . . .”

  “Not with the children.” He kept his voice low.

  “You can’t what?” Nick asked. “You can do whatever you want. We don’t care.”

  He grunted as Alicia apparently elbowed him in the ribs. “Yes, we do.”

  Richard checked the rearview and saw the expression on Alicia’s face. It figured she would be more perceptive than Nick on this front—she was Oneness where he was not, and before that, she had been possessed.

  She knew both sides of this coin.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Richard said, trying to reassure her. “Going back to the village right now.”

  “What happened?” Nick whined.

  Richard was going to say “I’ll tell you later,” but Alicia spoke first. “Someone died.”

  Nick went quiet and still. “Oh.”

  “I think it was him,” Alicia said, her voice shaking. “I think it was Clint. I think he did it. He killed somebody.”

  “Don’t worry,” Richard said. “They can’t get back into you. You’re Oneness now. The demons can’t possess you ever again. And Clint isn’t going to find you.”

  He glanced over at April, who was half-turned in her seat and was staring back at the caution-taped crime scene with a pale face. “What about the daughter?” she asked.

  Miranda.

  He almost hit the brake and turned around again. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t take the kids back there. Not when the sense of evil was still so strong in the air.

  “We’ll go back for her.”

  “You think they’ll let us near her?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not to take her with us. But Jackson trusts us. He’ll let us visit her at least. Be some . . .”

  “I’m not sure there is any comfort for this.”

  A muscle in April’s jaw was twitching. Richard wanted to reach out and lay a comforting hand on her arm, but he needed both hands to hold the wheel. They were shaking, and he was getting less confident of his ability to keep driving.

  He hadn’t known Julie well. Not well at all. They had only met a tiny handful of times. She was new to the Oneness. She was a helpful contact and witness and their one link to Reese and Jacob, and Richard had looked forward to knowing her better and calling her family.

  But he felt her death like it had been his own sister. Like they had known each other for years. Grief and fear pounded through him and threatened to wrestle his hands away from the wheel and send them right into an accident. Grief and fear and guilt.

  They should have stopped this.

  They should have known she was in danger.

  They should have . . .

  “We should have done something,” April said.

  Nick started to pipe up from the backseat again, but Alicia cut him off with another well-placed elbow.

  “We’ll get the kids home,” Richard said. “We’ll get the kids home, and then we’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  * * *

  The only good in the news report of Julie’s murder was that Chris was fairly sure he knew where to find Reese now.

  She would go to Julie’s daughter. No question of that.

  So he broke his silence and called the village cell. Talked to his mother and made her promise not to tell any of the others. A promise which, despite how tightly in cahoots with the rest of the Oneness she was these days, he was still able to extract fr
om her. Old habits died hard, and Diane had stood against her own cell for a long, long time. She told him where to find the safe house where Julie and Miranda had been and gave him contact information for the lieutenant they had been working with, and then he headed for Lincoln as fast as his new truck would drive.

  Which was impressively fast.

  A side benefit to speeding as insanely as he was, through the bright morning sun toward the city that was far too many miles away, was that he almost felt like he could outrun the pressure. The ache that kept starting up in the back of his head and then pressing down on him like an incessant wave, the sense of being pushed to his knees that he was beginning to think of as a call.

  He knew that was what it was—a voice beyond voices calling to him, trying to pull him in, trying to force his hand.

  But the more it tried, the more he wanted to resist.

  And then without warning he slammed his brakes, sending the truck careening as he tried to keep control of it, and pulled to the side and pounded on the steering wheel.

  “Enough!” he shouted. “What are you doing to me?”

  There was nothing there now. He was screaming at an empty horizon.

  But he’d seen the child again. Two seconds ago, perched on the hood of his truck with the wind whipping through his hair and clothes, kneeling on one knee and staring intently at Chris.

  He got out and stomped around, crunching gravel under his feet, smelling the hot-tar smell of a newly touched-up highway under the late summer sun.

  There was no sign of the child now. He was going crazy.

  No, he wasn’t, he corrected himself. This was the Oneness, doing this to him.

  What was he seeing?

  He forced himself to stop pacing and calm his breathing. He had to think about this. The Oneness were people; they didn’t just appear out of nowhere and disappear again just as fast, and they couldn’t just kneel on the hood of a pickup truck going eighty miles an hour. Nobody could do that.

  His brain ransacked what he knew of the Oneness. The cloud. That was what his mind came up with: the cloud. The dead people who were still sticking around somehow, part of the Oneness even after they’d died. Tyler had seen a member of the cloud before he’d become Oneness. This had to be the same thing. The Oneness was stalking him and sending that creepy little kid to do it.

  He got back in his car, still breathing hard. The kid wasn’t creepy, actually—not at all. He was a beautiful child. Nothing in his appearance or the way he looked at Chris was intrinsically frightening. It was just the way he kept showing up, and the intensity in his eyes.

  Chris laid his head on the steering wheel and groaned. “I don’t have time for this,” he said out loud. “I need to find Reese while I still have a chance. I can’t deal with ghosts right now. Please, leave me alone for a few hours, okay? Or days. Just leave me alone.”

  Nothing happened. No response, no feeling of calm, no ghostly apparition nodding its head.

  Good enough.

  He started the truck back up again and got back on the road, driving just a bit more slowly this time. Darn kid had nearly given him a heart attack. The sight of him perched up there while Chris was speeding so dangerously had made him think he might end up killing him by accident.

  At least he had settled that the kid was a ghost. You couldn’t kill ghosts.

  * * *

  They heard the news playing on the radio inside a truck stop where they got gas. Julie was dead.

  Murdered.

  Like a big, flashing neon sign with Jacob’s name written on it.

  He had been right.

  Tyler regretted every stupid word he had said. Every challenge to Jacob’s integrity and heart. Every insinuation that he didn’t care about his people, that he was only using them. He could see it burned in Jacob’s eyes now, pounding in his temples. He cared. He felt this. This was not just about revenge. He wanted to stop the man before another innocent person got hurt.

  Tyler, for the first time, felt that he understood and wanted the same thing Jacob did.

  As he walked miserable circles around the pavement, waiting until Reese and Jacob said it was time to go, his memories from the highway kept buzzing around in his head. Clint—Bertoller—and the destruction he delighted in.

  Jacob was right. It was wrong to let someone like that go on living. Indefensible, even.

  Memories of the farm community kept swirling around in there, too. Of their innocence and naivete. Of the way they just wanted to escape the dangers of the world and live a better, cleaner, happier life.

  So much for that.

  He tried to comfort himself by reminding himself that Julie had become Oneness before she died. So she would be part of the cloud now. Still One with them. Not really gone.

  It was interesting to speculate about, but offered no comfort at all.

  They knew now where Bertoller had recently been—in Lincoln, in time to kill Julie and set the news buzzing. That had been last night. He had left no evidence of where he would go next, at least not that the news was telling.

  “Keep heading for Lincoln,” Jacob said tersely when they were all three back in the car. “He was there. We have no choice but to start looking for him there.”

  “You can’t go to the crime scene,” Reese said from behind the wheel. “They’ll arrest you.”

  “Better you don’t show your face either,” Jacob said.

  “I’ll go,” Tyler said from the backseat.

  Driving as fast and hard as they could, it would be a day and a half before they reached the scene of the crime. By that time any evidence might have vanished. But there was nothing else they could do.

  Reese said the words. “It’s going to be another day before we can make it.”

  “There’s another way to travel,” Jacob said. “A faster way.”

  Reese swallowed hard. “No.”

  “I know how to reach them,” he went on. “How to get their help. They can get us there in minutes.”

  “I won’t work with demons.”

  “We don’t have days!”

  She turned and met his gaze, her own remarkably steady. “Julie is already dead, Jacob. Getting there faster won’t stop that.”

  He sat back and turned his face away. “If anyone else dies before we get there, their blood is on your head.”

  She flinched.

  “Wait,” Tyler said.

  “What?” Reese asked, twisting her head back a little to see him while she drove.

  “The way demons can travel—are they the only ones who can do that? I mean, I’ve been able to do some pretty crazy stuff.”

  “You walked, Tyler.”

  “Yeah, but I did it while paralysed. That’s not so shabby, is it? I’m just saying, it seems like as Oneness, we should have access to more . . . power. Than we do.”

  “The boy is on the right track,” Jacob said.

  “I’m not talking about working with demons. Or turning into vigilantes. I’m just saying, we’re supposed to be something more than human, right? Are we really stuck driving in cars?”

  “I don’t know,” Reese said. “If there is another way to do this, I don’t know it. Or how to do it.”

  “Richard might.”

  “I can’t call them.”

  Tyler sighed. “All right.”

  The highway left behind a wooded stretch and opened to a mountain vista that spread before them. It should have been breathtaking. Instead, it merely looked like an obstacle—hours upon hours expressed in space. Hours in which Bertoller might strike, someone might die, they might lose.

  Tyler offered a mute prayer to the Spirit and hoped their efforts would end in some kind of success. The prayer went silent into the air, yet he had a sense that it wasn’t unheard.

  He had walked under the power of the Spirit. Why couldn’t he fly under the same power?

  Smiling a little, he closed his eyes and experimented. Reached out with his mind and heart and tried to touch something.r />
  To his surprise, he did.

  He felt, in a way that was unmistakable though not strictly tangible, a warmth—and a pulse.

  Automatically, he reached out with his hands and felt himself taking something into them—the image that formed in his mind was one of gathering a horse’s mane and filling his fists with it, and then leaning over the arched neck of the beast—

  And flames, his hands were full of flames, the air was full of fire, but he did not burn.

  He heard Reese shout, startled, “Tyler!”

  He opened his eyes.

  They were flying.

  Beneath him he could make out the shape of a horse with a mane and tail of fire, its legs pounding a path through the air, the world beneath streaking past so fast it was a blur. He couldn’t see Jacob or Reese—his eyes were too full of fire. But they were there.

  His heart raced until it wanted to burst.

  And he heard Reese’s voice again—more urgent this time, now scared, now terrified. “Tyler!”

  He looked down.

  She was falling toward the earth.

  * * *

  Reese plunged through the air, her eyes full of tears as the wind tore at her face and hair and clothes. The earth rapidly approached from below.

  One thought passed through her mind.

  She would never avenge Patrick. Never keep her promise. Never redeem herself.

  Something jerked her up, suspending her in the air. Her eyes were too full of saline and water to see what it was. Her rescuer lowered her to the earth by the folds of her shirt until her feet touched ground, and her knees buckled with fear and adrenaline.

  What had Tyler just done?

  And why had she fallen?

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and looked up, scanning the sky as her vision cleared. Blue sky, cloud streaked, no sign of flaming horses or flying men or of her rescuer.