Sinner

by Ted Dekker

  She kissed his lips where she’d bitten him and pulled back, fighting to control some unnamed emotion. “I would give anything to be you. To be flesh, real flesh. Human. You’re the king of the world.”

  He felt a moment of pity for the beautiful woman who walked because he’d written Black into flesh. Black had written Kelly for the sole purpose of delivering Johnny to this night.

  And all of it was because of him. Billy.

  The door opened and Kinnard entered.He stopped at the sight of Kelly’s hand on Billy’s face, but she didn’t remove it until he reached them.

  “Well?” she demanded.

  “In the air now. One air-fuel bomb. Over the target in fifteen minutes.”

  “Air fuel?” Billy asked. “What will that do?”

  “It’s twenty thousand pounds of high-explosive, designed to spread as it burns. It will detonate two hundred feet above the ground and has a blast radius of 1.2 kilometers. Basically? It will incinerate the whole town, including the buildings, the media, the cars—all of it will burn. We’ll be able to say whatever we want about how this went down. There won’t be any evidence to the contrary.”

  “Good,” Kelly said.

  Billy nodded. “Good.”

  KAT STOOD in front of the stage, looking up at Johnny and Darcy squaring off.

  “I am looking at you,” Darcy said, and Kat knew by her tone of voice that she was saying yes.

  Her hands were trembling and her heart was racing because she wanted to see the light on the road to Damascus the way the apostle Paul had seen it.

  “The problem, Johnny,” Darcy said, placing both hands on her hips, “is that you just don’t—”

  But that’s all she could say, because Johnny’s eyes went black and she sucked at the air as if a huge boot had landed in her belly.

  Johnny was showing Darcy herself.

  Kat felt fear’s familiar fingers lock on to her heart as she fell into the twin holes where Johnny’s eyes had been. She ripped her stare away and threw her hand up to block the image. She’d been here before and the image had been much stronger then, but she couldn’t bear to face it again, weak or not.

  A terrible groan swelled behind her. She leaped to the stage and spun to face the crowd. Looks of horror had rounded their eyes in shock. Most stared at Johnny, unable to tear themselves from the striking sight of blackened eyes, from the very real, albeit forgiven, evil that haunted them all.

  The light, they needed to see the light!

  “Look away!” she cried, sweeping her hands to one side. “Don’t look yet!”

  They threw up their arms and buried their heads in their hands, but most were weeping already.

  Kat whirled back and faced Johnny, whose eyes were fixed, coal black. She clenched her jaw against the terror that lapped at her mind and turned to the woman.

  Darcy had fallen to her knees and allowed her arms to go limp as the darkness flowed into her. Her body shook with terrible sobs and her face was twisted in such anguish that Kat couldn’t help but feel her pain.

  Still, Johnny refused to remove his gaze. Darcy’s eyes were held captive.

  The woman’s mouth went wide in a silent cry.

  “Johnny?” Kat cried.

  Still he would not let her go. Darcy clamped her jaws shut and bared her teeth as if trying to keep her head from shaking off.

  Kat had stared into those eyes for only a couple of seconds and nearly died. Darcy had endured thirty seconds, and Kat wondered if it just might kill her.

  “Johnny!”

  But he kept it up. Deeper, harder. Her eyes began to roll back into her head. That she was reacting meant she’d opened herself to the truth, which was a good thing, but not if it ended her life!

  “Stop it!” Kat jumped in front of Darcy, blocking her from Johnny’s eyes. “You’re going to kill her!”

  He closed his eyes and opened them again. Blue.

  For a moment he looked at her, dazed. She could hear Darcy breathing hard through a soft whimper behind her, the only sound on the night air.

  Then Johnny blinked and his eyes became white, and Kat caught her breath.

  “SIR, WE’VE located Darcy Lange.”

  Billy swiveled to the door and looked at the staffer who’d intruded. They were now less than two minutes from the strike and Darcy had finally come out of hiding. Lovely.

  Kelly stepped up behind him and placed a supportive hand on his elbow. He had no idea what Darcy would think of Kelly, who wasn’t really vying for his affection as much as returning to him. She presented no real threat to Darcy, not in a romantic way.

  Darcy was flesh and blood. Kelly was flesh and words. She was here to help them take down the traitor who would destroy them all.

  “Is she coming?” he asked.

  “She’s not on the base, sir.”

  “At the armory then, whatever.Why isn’t she coming?”Heat flared up his neck.

  “She’s in Paradise, sir.”

  Billy’s blood ran cold. “Paradise? She’s in the town of Paradise?”

  “That is our understanding, yes, sir.”

  There had to be a mistake.

  “The Paradise?”

  “A helicopter pilot just called in reporting that she forced him to fly her to Paradise almost an hour ago. He left her there and is on his way back now.”

  Billy was too stunned to speak.

  “I knew she would betray you,” Kelly said in a low voice. “It was the way she was looking at him that first day in the tent. She’s—”

  “No!” He shook her arm off and ran forward, then pulled up and paced back, gripping his hair. “No, no, that’s not right, she would never do that.”

  The staffer watched them with big eyes.

  “She’s there, isn’t she?” Kelly snapped.

  “She isn’t there for Johnny.”

  “Then why?”

  Billy didn’t know why. Nothing else made any sense. Darcy had crossed over to Johnny? No, this wasn’t right.

  “Should we call off the strike, sir?”

  “No,” Kelly whispered. “Johnny has to die.”

  DARCY DIDN’T have the thoughts, much less the words, to describe what had happened to her in those eternal thirty seconds, but she knew that everything she had known for the past ten years was in fact wrong.

  Not just wrong. Dreadfully, horribly incorrect.

  She’d looked at the world and seen dark gray, when all along it was a brilliant red.

  She’d walked through life looking for nice, neat squares to protect her from her past when in reality there wasn’t a straight line to be found.

  Tonight she’d come face-to-face with the rawest kind of evil and this feeling, this terror . . . it had made a mockery of her worst nightmare.

  Then she’d become perfectly aware that this evil resided in her.Was a part of her nature. Was a disease that she had contracted and protected like a deep pit might protect the fungus growing on its walls. She drowned in the black lake of her own soul.

  She was drowning in that lake, unable to scream, when the water had turned red. And for a moment she thought she had died.

  Now someone was standing in front of her, the young girl, Katrina Kivi, yelling out for Johnny to stop. It occurred to Darcy that she was trembling on her knees, not drowning in a lake.

  The girl gasped and stepped away.

  Johnny stood where she’d seen him last. But his eyes weren’t black any longer; they were white.

  And then the world erupted with white-hot light. The brightness rushed her, slammed into her chest, and knocked her back on her seat.

  For the briefest of moments, she wondered if a massive explosive had been detonated right here on the stage. But she wasn’t dead. Was she?

  No. Two realizations crashed through her mind with equal force. The first was that she was shaking again, but this time with pleasure.

  The second was that she was more alive than she had ever been. And at this moment she was seeing the kingdom of
light.

  Darcy began to weep.

  * * *

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  * * *

  HOW MUCH time passed was difficult to tell, because the minutes had either slowed or sped up and Darcy couldn’t tell which.

  It seemed as though the sum of all Darcy’s awareness had been concentrated into a drug and administered to her intravenously. Every synapse, every nerve ending, every sense she possessed was stretched to the limit of its capacity.

  There was light, yes, but this particular light wasn’t just white beams floating around the town square. It was a warm charge of energy that she could breathe and feel on her skin. It was the complete absence of darkness here in Paradise, Colorado.

  Darcy stood and turned slowly, gazing at the town square. Johnny faced the people, frozen in time, eyes blazing white. But it wasn’t just his eyes, it was the whole town square, swimming in light. He wasn’t the source of the brightness, he’d simply opened their eyes to what was already here—a prophet showing them the chariots of heaven.

  Slow motion. Perfectly ethereal, perfectly real. And silent.

  The people were moving, heads turning, tilting, eyes wide as they gazed in wonder at the change. But slow, very slow, at one tenth the normal speed of things.

  An older gentleman on the front row had his arms spread wide, his head tilted back, and his mouth wide open in what could only be a scream of pure delight. A silent scream.

  Next to him, a gray-haired woman dressed in the brightest yellow dress Darcy had ever seen stood with both hands over her mouth, looking up. Tears streamed from her wrinkled eyes that seemed to cry out on their own. I knew it. What did I tell you? I knew it!

  Darcy looked over the three thousand. To a man, woman, and child they breathed the light, some jumping, some trembling, all gripped in this force that had slowed time and was filling their mouths, their throats, their bones with raw power and pleasure.

  Joseph Houde, the newsman who’d first broken the story about Paradise, stood next to two other reporters apart from the crowd, filming, but they were anything but steady. One of them had dropped his camera and was on his knees, face in hands.

  But of them all, young Katrina Kivi stood out. She was leaping two feet off the ground in slow motion, flinging her arms over her head and grabbing at the light. Silent words cried from her mouth, like a delighted child who was finally allowed on that ride, the big one that she’d stared at for so many years until she was tall enough to buckle in.

  They were all swept up in one overpowering sentiment, Darcy thought: It’s here. It’s really here. It’s really, really here.

  And it was. So real and vibrant, so heavy with power that she wondered if this was heaven.

  Darcy saw all of this at once, maybe in the span of a few seconds, maybe an hour. But there was no transition for her. She knew the moment that the light slammed into her that she’d been wrong about Johnny and the three thousand. About Jesus and the kingdom he’d insistently talked about over two thousand years ago.

  And about preventing any human being from placing this light on the top of the tallest mountain for all the world to see.

  Darcy wept.

  For joy, for sorrow, for regret, for desire of whatever was now coursing through her veins.

  And then the light collapsed into itself and vanished, as if someone had pulled the plug. Slow motion fell into real time and the silence was pulled away like a blanket.

  Her own scream was the first to reach her ears, and she hadn’t even been aware that she was screaming. Then Katrina Kivi’s high-pitched cry of delight, several feet away. Then the whole crowd’s, a roar of approval and cries, the sound of weeping and moaning, all rolled into one symphony of fascination and bliss.

  It only took a few seconds for everyone to realize that it was gone. The only sound came from their weeping, and then even that softened.

  They stared around in wonder, stunned by the change. Breathing hard.

  Darcy ran her hand through the air, half expecting to hit something. A wisp of light trailed off her fingers and then even that was gone. She faced Johnny, who watched her, eyes now blue.

  “None of that was me,” he said.

  She knew, but she couldn’t manage an answer.

  A smile curved his mouth. “Tell them, Darcy.”

  Tell them?

  “Tell them what you know. Use your voice for them.”

  Then she knew, Johnny had his eyes; she had her voice.

  She was facing Johnny with her side to the crowd, so she twisted to see them again. They were still shell-shocked, looking around. A murmur was growing.

  Darcy looked at Johnny. “Tell them?”

  He chuckled. “Tell them, sing to them, scream to them, do your thing, Darcy. I think they deserve it, don’t you?”

  She strode to the edge of the stage, captured by the idea. “Listen to me,” she said, but her voice came out hoarse from all her screaming.

  “Listen! Listen to her!” Katrina Kivi shouted.

  They looked up at Darcy.

  “I . . . I was . . .”

  The floodgates of her soul broke open, and she could not hold back her emotion. She couldn’t say wrong because her throat wasn’t cooperating. Her heart was lodged firmly there.

  She began to sob again. Staring through tears at the three thousand, sobbing and sobbing.

  Darcy thrust two fingers into the air and spoke as clearly as she could. “The kingdom of heaven actually is among us.” The words from the priests who’d raised her filled her mind for the first time in thirteen years. As did the opening from the Gospel of John, the apostle who gave his life for the words he penned.

  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

  Any unbelieving soul could have heard the words from her and stared back dumbly, because her voice could only excite what already was hidden in a person’s mind. But Paradise was not filled with unbelieving souls.

  These were the three thousand who had crossed the country to stand for the truth they believed and now saw. And now the Word reached into their hearts and minds as it never had.

  Katrina Kivi shoved her hands in the air.“Tell us, Darcy!” she screamed. “Tell us more!”

  Darcy gained strength. “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life and that life was the light of men.”

  They began to cry out in agreement, white knuckles gripping the air high over their heads.

  Darcy screamed the words.

  “The light . . .” She grabbed some breath. “The light shines in the darkness, but . . .”

  Their roar drowned out her words, but not their power. They bent their heads back like birds desperate for food, and they screamed at the black sky. The roar ran long, and even though she could hardly hear her-self, Darcy hurled her words into it.

  Because she couldn’t wait for them. She was as impatient to speak as they were to hear. So she drilled them with her eyes and spoke the truth, knowing that they could hear with their hearts if not their ears.

  “But the darkness has not understood it. He came to his own, but his own did not recognize him or receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and the Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

  She wanted to sing this. To cry it out with more than just words. The power that flowed from her mouth begged to be carried by music.

  Trembling, Darcy began to sing the only words that came to mind, but she sang the song in a new melody, not the one the priests used to sing on occasion. A melody she’d heard on the radio once, sung by an artist called Agnew who had a deep, rich voice that had made her chest shake as her hand hovered over the dial.

  The voice that sang the words now w
as hers, soft and light in a high, pure tone. But a thousand times more powerful than any voice that had ever sung the words before.

  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound;

  That saved a wretch like me.

  The words, however thin, slammed into the audience as if God’s breath were visiting Paradise and had come with the force of a hurricane. They were his words, but they were her story—and she could barely stand under the weight of their truth.

  I once was lost, but now am found,

  Was blind but now I see.

  The song thundered from three thousand voices and shook the ground in Paradise.

  “HOW LONG has she been on that stage?” Billy demanded, staring at the image Kinnard handed him as the National Guard helicopter homed in on the dark valley.

  “Nearly an hour.”

  His hands were shaking, and despite Kelly’s reassuring hand on his knee, he felt torn apart by the growing realization that Darcy had defected.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “And that’s the problem,” Kelly said. “Not that you don’t understand, but that Johnny has this kind of power even over someone as strong as Darcy.” She looked out the window. “He’s a dangerous man.”

  Kinnard sat with arms crossed, stoic in this moment of crisis.“So that’s it, then?” Billy said.

  He dipped his head once. “So it seems.”

  “She’s the one who demanded all of this,” he snapped. “Begged me to follow her. Spoke of ruling the world, all that nonsense. Darcy changed the Constitution, for heaven’s sake! Now she’s joined the enemy?”

  “She didn’t start this,” Kinnard said. “You did.”

  A chill washed down Billy’s spine. Yes he did, when he wrote Black, although Kinnard was probably thinking about the decision to destroy Johnny.

  “And she didn’t change anything,”Kinnard continued.“She just helped things along. It was always only a matter of time.”

  An air force sergeant leaned out of the cockpit.“Sir,where do you want me to drop it?”

  “As close as you can.”

  “I can put it right on top of them if you want.”