End Times (36 page)

Like a candle being suddenly snuffed dead, the blue light disappeared. Owen stumbled back, away from her and the tablet, as if trying to escape the words.

“No.” His voice was low and tortured, his breath ragged. “It has to be wrong.”

“What?” The word echoed across the pit. The passage she’d just read was opaque to her, as baffling as the seven signs and omens were clear. Pastor Ted called the churchgoers of Carbon County the Children of God, but everything else was a mystery.

“What if she was right?” Owen moaned. Her eyes began to adjust to the dimness, and she could make him out in the corner, his back heaving and his hands clenched into fists.

“What if
who
was right?”

“Luna.” The word ripped from his mouth in a guttural growl. “She knew about this all along. She’s been gearing up for it, gathering an army. And I thought she was crazy.”

Daphne went to him, placed a gentle hand on his arm. She felt him trembling beneath her palm. “Are you saying she knew why we were all drawn here? For this battle between the Children of God and the Children of the Earth?”

Owen’s only answer was a long, jagged breath.

Fear percolated in her chest as a memory prickled at the edges of her brain. “Luna called you her Earth Brother,” she said, her voice suddenly sharp. “What did she mean?”

A bitter laugh escaped his lips. “That commune I told you about? Where Luna and I were born? It’s called the Children of the Earth.”

Daphne took a step back, the words buzzing through her like a swarm of bees. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence,” she suggested. “Aren’t all commune names, like,
Planet This
or
Earth That
?”

“It’s no coincidence.” Owen paced back and forth across the pit, pounding a fist into his palm. Between heaving breaths, he told her the story of his birth, of Luna’s insistence that the God of the Earth had called them to Carbon County to fight a great battle in his name.

Daphne leaned against the wall, the pit’s earthy loam soaking the back of her hoodie. “So you’re one of them,” she said when he was done. “One of the Children of the Earth.”

“I guess.” Owen sounded hollow, broken.

“And the voice that drew you here,” she continued, putting the pieces together, hating the picture they formed, “it wasn’t God. It was . . .”

He turned and faced her, the green of his eyes glowing unnaturally bright. “The opposite,” he said darkly.

Daphne felt the world slipping around her, everything she’d always known and believed in flying away from her on a swift, cold gale. “But we were both meant to come here,” she whispered, her lips cold. “Does that mean I’m evil, too?”

It would explain everything: why she had killed a man, how she could never bring herself to have feelings about someone until Owen, who was evil just like her. A noxious stew of self-loathing bubbled within her, threatening to spill over. Pastor Ted, the angry mob at the funeral parlor, even her own mother: They had all been right. She wasn’t just a bad person. She was pure evil—and nothing she did, no matter how hard she tried, would be able to change that. It had been written in stone.

“No, Daphne,” Owen said sadly. “Read the first line again.” He trained his light back to the top of the tablet, forcing her eyes to the very first sentence, to the lines and squiggles that seared themselves into her head and hers alone.

When the true Prophet reads this message
.

A great crack of thunder shook Elk Mountain, and electricity crackled around them. Daphne felt it surge through her, touching a hidden reserve of power and unleashing it screaming into the night, zinging out from her fingers, making her hair stand on end. Even as fear exploded in her chest, she knew that the power was there. It had been there all along, hiding, waiting for someone—or something—to release it into the world.

Owen grasped her shoulders and gazed at her with deadly intensity, his eyes the color of the storm. “You’ve got it all wrong. They all did. Pastor Ted was right that there was a prophet coming to Carbon County, but it wasn’t Janie’s child.”

His voice dropped to a murmur, a breath.

“It was you.”

THE thunderstorm came screaming down on her as she dashed from the pit, drenching her head with cold sheets of rain while thick mud sucked at her feet. She barely felt the downpour battering her face and chest, barely heard the thunder crashing in the sky, was deaf to the sounds of cars starting up and the partygoers at the campfire fleeing the storm, their headlights shattering curtains of rain as hard and unrelenting as diamonds.

She raced around the few stragglers, their faces blurred like painted skeletons in a haunted house carnival ride as they hurriedly collected empty beer cans, the fire already doused by the torrents of water falling from the sky, its final tendrils of smoke choking the air.

A tree branch, knocked loose by the wind, hurtled past her, barely missing her nose, its bark slick and black as oil. It plummeted to the earth a few feet away and stuck in the mud like the mast of a sunken ship, heralding destruction.

She raced past the towering steel shell of the Varleys’ future mansion, up the gentle slope where Janie and Doug had been married, the mud pulling at her ankles and seeping through her thin canvas sneakers, worming between her toes.

Her breath caught in her throat like shards of glass. The valley of Carbon County spread below her, the town battened down against the storm, its lights as muted and faraway as storm clouds rolled silver and furious over the mountain range to the north. Pools of water churned and glistened in the flooded foundations of what would become new housing developments, bars, and shopping centers; off by the Peytons’ trailer, the derrick continued to pump stoically through the downpour, dipping and rising from the earth in grim determination, making money, marking time, a blessing and a curse and an omen all rolled into one. Next to the foundation for the new, state-of-the-art Carbon County First Church of God, the makeshift steeple of the old church in the Pizza Hut grasped at Daphne through the deluge, calling to her, begging her to stay.

Carbon County needed her. The people who had taken her in, revered her, and then rejected her were about to face a struggle more dire than anything Pastor Ted had predicted, an influx of evil that only the Children of God could fight—and only with her help. As bitterly as their accusations still rang in her ears, as hurt as she’d been by their words, she knew she was the only one who could save them. And she had to. It was her chance to finally do some good in the world, to redeem herself from the fear and death that had stalked her for her entire life.

Footsteps splattered through the mud behind her. Soon Owen was at her side, coal-black hair soaked and clinging to his face.

“This is real. I
feel
it,” she gasped.

She gazed out at the storm-whipped valley beneath them, the wind raking chilled fingers across her cheeks. “The rest of them—of you—of the Children of the Earth: Are they coming here, like the tablet said?”

“Yes.” He stood next to her, shoulder to shoulder on the edge of the cliff.

“Will you recognize them when they come?”

She felt him nod. “From my dreams,” he explained. “I’ve seen their faces now, all of them. I can feel them getting closer.”

Daphne’s heart splintered. “So it’s true,” she said bitterly. “We’re on opposite sides. When this Great Battle comes, we’ll be fighting against each other.”

“No.” Owen whipped around, his jaw hard. “I won’t let this happen. I don’t want it. I don’t care what the signs say. They can’t
make me
be evil.”

A white flash of lightning sent him into sudden silhouette, hands on his hips and soaked shirt clinging to his chest. She wanted to believe him more than anything. But she couldn’t ignore the signs. Now that all the pieces were laid out in front of her, she could sense the battle coming, could feel its magnitude drawing her in, preparing her to lead the way. Perhaps it was what she’d been feeling all along.

“But you just said that it’s preordained,” she said. “The tablet’s been right about everything else. Why do you think you can fight this?”

“Because I don’t want it.” He took her in his arms, and she gripped him tightly, feeling his heartbeat against her cheek. “And I never do anything I don’t want. Daphne, I want to be on your side. I want to be with
you
.”

She pulled back and drank him in, his face pale and sculpted as a marble statue, lips firm. “How do I know this isn’t a test?” she asked suddenly, her eyes clouding. The sky around them had turned jaundiced, the brooding yellow of a bruise. “How do I know you’re not deceiving me, that I’m not just seeing what I want to see?”

Owen grasped her hands as the last wash of rain swept the valley clean. “You’re the prophet,” he replied simply. “You see the truth.”

She stepped away from him and gazed down at the valley as it transformed before her eyes, telling tales of what was to come. She saw visions of destruction and rebirth, of a great clash between good and evil that pierced the very center of the earth and radiated in fiery waves to the heavens. She saw the Children of God rise up against the Children of the Earth, saw the citizens of Carbon County—the citizens of the world—struggle between the promise of purity and the temptation of easy riches. She saw the flames of war and a million dark tornadoes of inner conflict, and she knew that out of it all, a victor would rise greater and more powerful than anything the world had ever known.

But her vision stopped there, the outcome as murky as the mist still swirling below them.

“I see it,” she said as the images faded, leaving only the storm-swept valley in its wake. She turned to Owen, a new determination blazing in her eyes. “It’s coming.”

They stood, two pillars from opposite sides of an ancient rift, united on the mountaintop.

She knew, then, that she believed: not just in gods and prophecies, but in the quiet power within her and all humankind. It had guarded against her mother’s rage and protected her from Jim’s abuse, had bubbled out in Janie’s laughter and washed over her in the peaceful glint of Floyd’s smile. It had guided her, when her world was dark and unforgiving, to a family she loved and a town she could finally call home—and it had brought her and Owen together, piercing the iron shell she’d put up around herself and showing her the deep and solid core of good in a man who had been marked for evil.

She knew that to preserve what they had, to get them through the hardships to come, she had to keep that core of good alive in him, to be the light guiding them through the darkness. She had only her own power to rely on, power that was as small as her pounding heart yet as vast as the cosmos.

She turned and took his hand in hers, a fresh night breeze whispering in their ears of events to come. “It’s almost here,” she said quietly. “I just hope we’ll be ready in time.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people went into making this book a reality: from friends and family to strangers who were thoughtful enough to post motocross and oil rig videos online.

First and foremost, I want to thank my wonderful editors at Razorbill, Jessica Almon and Ben Schrank, for believing so totally in this world and in my ability to bring it to life. None of this could have happened without your great ideas, astute character notes, and masterful plot manipulations.

My agent, Tina Wexler at ICM, deserves a medal for her gracious support, advice, and endless encouragement . . . even (especially) at nine months pregnant.

For helping
End Times
be so much more than words, I want to thank Emily Osborne for a cover design that took my breath away, Tara Fowler for an inspired publicity campaign, and Sarah Chassé and Kate Frentzel for making sure each word was the correct one. Thanks as well to all of my early readers (Pittacus Lore, Leah Konen, Jocelyn Davies, Danielle Paige, Jessica Khoury, Morgan Rhodes, and Nova Ren Suma) for your excellent feedback and kind words.

The road to becoming a published author is full of twists and turns. I’ve been fortunate to have navigation assistance from some truly phenomenal folks along the way, including Bennett Madison for helping me find my voice, Shani Petroff for telling me to just go for it, Micol Ostow for opening so many doors, and everyone in her YA fiction class for being there through the dark days. I also want to thank the Hearst Corporation for helping me buck the stereotype of the “starving writer” and my fantastic colleagues at Hearst Digital Media who make coming to work a pleasure every day.

It goes without saying that I never could have written a word without the early and constant encouragement of my parents, Zeke and Linda Hecker, who plied me with books and never doubted that I would grow up to be a writer.

Finally, eternal gratitude to my incredibly patient, intelligent, and handsome husband, Tim, for always having dinner on the table, acting like it’s normal when I talk incessantly about fictional seventeen-year-olds, and personally DJing my one-person LED hoop jams when all I needed was a break. You are the osssssssssssumest.