Escape from Eden (35 page)

The Reverend, nestled on his throne as if in front of a TV, tsked loudly. “Agatha, do you think you are more important than anyone else here?”

Agatha dropped her arm, the end of the chain hitting the floor. Her eyes opened wide with disbelief. “Reverend, you said that we would—”

But before she could finish her sentence, a blur of silver smacked against her ear and she folded into a heap on the floor. Gabriel stood with the bat in his hands. It was coated in blood and I looked past him to see the security guard, gun still in his hands, beaten and unconscious, sprawled out on the floor.

I raised my eyebrows at Gabriel.

He shrugged. “Little League. I could hit a sixty-mile-per-hour ball when I was eight years old.”

“Nice,” I said. “Messed up, but nice.”

I bent to pry the chain from Agatha’s fingers, feeling no remorse. She’d killed eleven people on the last Bright Night–who knew what other horrible things she’d done for the Reverend. Her fingers were chilled from the iron, flecks of rust on her skin.

When I stood, pain shot through my back. I winced, squeezing my eyes shut. As I opened my eyes, I saw the Reverend pointing his handgun at Gabriel’s temple. I thought, with a detached sense of ludicrousness, that I didn’t know such a disgusting lump of a man could move so fast.

“I know a game we can play, Gabriel,” the Reverend said. “Deer hunter?”

“That’s a little expected, don’t you think?” Gabriel asked, his tone mocking. But his brow was wrought with worry. A slow drip of sweat tracked down his face.

“You have a smart mouth, boy,” the Reverend said. “It would be a relief to silence it.”

“You won’t do that,” I said to the Reverend.

“Do what, child?” he asked. “Take away what God gave him? His life? It’s my every right to take it away.”

“No, you wouldn’t kill your key moneymaker.”

The Reverend’s eye ticked.

“You know, your best money-making prostitute,” I said, flashing Gabriel a look. “Sorry,” I said to him.

“All good,” he said. “I’ve been called worse.”

“Do you two think this is some kind of joke?” With a tilt of his quivering second chin he indicated the Flock warring in the pavilion. “Your peers are dying. Killing each other for the privilege of joining me in the new Edenton.”

“How are you going to refill your stock?” I asked, stepping closer to the Reverend.

“Stock for what, child?”

“Las Casitas?” I asked. I waited for a reaction. His face was a blank mask. “The members of the Flock you sell to high-paying patrons. Like us. Gabriel’s worth a lot, according to Thaddeus. Why would you kill your prized animal?”

“Now you’re calling me an animal?” Gabriel asked, acting a little too confident. I could see through it though, down to the panic rippling below the surface of his calm.

“Enough of you,” the Reverend said.

I heard him breathe out in a huff. He raised a meaty hand and, with one push, shoved Gabriel toward the edge of the stage. He grasped at the Reverend for balance, knocking the gun from his hand. It skittered off the stage and into the fighting below.

I rushed forward.

“No!” I caught Gabriel by the hem of his shirt, but it slipped from my fingers and he tumbled into the flailing limbs and madness of the Flock.

I dove in after him, hitting the floor with a thud that rattled my teeth. The fighting around me was loud and frantic, flashes of bloody faces dipping into my line of vision. My hand felt weighty, and I realized I still had the length of chain in my grip. Something swung at my head and I ducked, only for it to catch a hank of my hair and drag me to the ground. Tears blurred my eyes. I looked up to see Enrique standing over me with a chain in one hand, crowbar in the other. When he smiled down at me, his teeth were coated with blood.

“I’m sorry, Mia,” he said. “But I have to bash in your pretty face.” He lifted the crowbar over his head.

I scrambled backward. “You don’t have to do this!” I kept moving as he advanced on me. My back hit the edge of the stage. I was cornered. “Do you want to see Ibbie?”

Enrique paused, crowbar over his head. “How do you know about Ibbie?” he asked. His eyes went from dark and haunted to soft.

“I met her the other night,” I said, eyeing the crowbar. “She’s trying to get to you and Angél. She wants to be with you guys again. She loves you and misses you and wants to get you out of here—”

In a flash, a bat caught him in the stomach. He doubled over and fell to the ground. I looked up. Bridgette, face streaked with tears and dirt, glanced down at me before swinging the bat wildly into the fighting mass of people.

I stared after her for a few seconds, thunderstruck, and scanned the pavilion for Gabriel. I caught sight of him in the far corner on his knees. Someone had him in a choke hold from behind. I scrambled to my feet and ran toward him, dodging people along the way. I skidded to a stop in front of them, breathing heavily and staring at the man choking Gabriel. At first, I didn’t recognize him. I blinked, trying to figure out who he was.

I heard Gabriel rasp, “Mia. Help.”

I swung the chain at the man’s head and he struck the floor like a sack of dirt.

Gabriel fell forward on his hands, gasping for air. I dropped to his side.

“You okay?” My eyes went immediately to the reddening mark around his neck.

He coughed. “Almost.” He coughed again. “Who was that guy?”

“Prayer Circle,” I said. “He was in the Reverend’s cottage serving those pink drinks.”

I glanced around the pavilion and realized there were a number of faces I didn’t recognize. Had the Reverend let loose the locals he employed to help kill off the Flock?

Onstage, the Reverend was sitting back on his throne watching the mayhem with a shameless grin. I helped Gabriel to his feet and glanced around for the gun that had fallen off stage, worried that if one of the Flock found it, he or she would gun down someone in the pavilion. The fighting had to stop. I flung my arm around Gabriel and dragged him along with me, back to the stage, and ran up the stage steps.

“Make them stop!” I yelled to the Reverend once we reached the top.

He slowly turned his head toward me. “Come here, child, and I will.”

“No,” I said.

“You want them to stop? Then come here.” He reached out a hand, bloated fingers curving to beckon me forward. “You did this, girl. You made all this happen.”

“This isn’t my fault!” I said.

“Isn’t it? If you hadn’t interfered, we’d still be living here peacefully. Now come here and see how many lives you save!”

You’ve changed everything, do you know that? Now, it won’t be peaceful. It will be hell.

I shuddered at that thought. This was my fault. If I hadn’t escaped, if I hadn’t come back for the network, hadn’t stolen the poison. I stepped forward, but Gabriel held me back.

“Don’t,” Gabriel gasped, still catching his breath.

I unhooked Gabriel’s arm from mine and walked toward the Reverend. At the edge of the stage, I saw the bloodied bat Gabriel had held earlier and swiped it off the ground.

The Reverend laughed at me.

Gabriel called my name, but I kept moving.

“You won’t use that, child,” the Reverend said as I approached.

“You don’t know what I’ll do,” I said. “Now make them stop fighting.”

The Reverend glanced at me with suspicion, and paused briefly before yelling “Stop” over the horrific din of the skirmish below. “Everyone stop!”

Everything went eerily silent. Edenton seemed frozen inside a block of ice. Even the morning sun, reaching down around us in wide golden beams, was still and cold. The wind in the trees stopped. The birds silenced.

I breathed in steadily, deeply, trying to calm myself.

Down on the floor of the pavilion I didn’t see a crowd. I saw a jumble of mangled limbs, matted hair, and crumpled forms. A few older, male members of the Flock stood, clothes torn and skin bruising, slashes leaking blood, along with the faces I didn’t know. I saw Bridgette and Dina among them. They stood back to back, breathing heavily, each armed with a bloodied weapon. I saw Freddie, standing against a column of the pavilion, gun raised, dark eyes wide with horror.

The other security guards had disappeared.

Sister lay contorted in the back, where she’d stood with the girls from the sewing cottage, her arms and legs twisted in unnatural directions. Suzanne stood next to her, wooden board in hand, the end of it stained dark. Her face was splattered. Eyes bright and expectant, she stared up at the Reverend. At her feet, Kori began crawling away from her as if she were contagious and deadly.

“I want each of you,” the Reverend bellowed, taking my arm in a harsh grip, “the survivors, the ones blessed by God Himself, to witness the death of this girl.”

In a panic, I tried to wrench my arm away and swing the bat at him at the same time. I connected with his shoulder and he let go of my arm. I swung again wildly, but the bat slipped from my grip and tumbled to the stage. The Reverend’s hand hooked onto my arm again, tightening with a wounding force. I cast my alarmed gaze to Gabriel. A security guard now stood next to him, gun pointed at his head.

The Reverend continued, breathing heavily, clearly in pain. “She cast aside our beliefs for her own. And, you know what those beliefs are? She believes in doubting everything! She believes knowledge is freedom! She believes that faith … ” He paused for effect. “That faith is not wanting to know what’s true!”

The quotes from Papa in my sketchbook.

So the Reverend knew everything about us. There were no secrets for the Flock. Only secrets kept from us.

He looked down at me. The Reverend’s mouth was a thin pale slash. Belatedly, I realized he was holding the scalpel.

My heart thrummed painfully against my ribs. Maybe one was broken? I glanced around for some kind of weapon, but I couldn’t wrestle out of his grip.

“You are a cruel and evil man,” I said, voice sounding shaken. But the Flock needed to know. They had to know. “You do nothing in the name of God, you do it for yourself.” I looked out over the Flock. “He sold us at Las Casitas like we were slaves!”

In those left standing, flickers of understanding lit their eyes. Maybe they all remembered what happened at Las Casitas.

I glanced back at the Reverend. He glared at me from beneath his sweating brow.

“What happened to the preacher?” I asked him. “The one who preached sermons about joy being the fruit of the spirit and blessing the peacemakers? What happened to that good, devout man? The one you were before … before Thaddeus turned you into this monster?”

The Reverend screamed, a rough unadulterated cry of hatred and rage, and swung the knife. I lunged back. My feet slipped out from beneath me, sliding uncontrollably in the blood on the stage. His full weight hit me, knocking me to the ground. I couldn’t tell where the scalpel was as he clambered over me. I hadn’t heard it fall. Then it was there, above my face, the metallic edge winking beneath the dried blood. Gasping, I struggled, but he pinned my legs with his.

He grinned at me, his teeth a canine mix of dull and sharp. A long line of spit leaked from the corner of his lip and stretched down to collect in my hair. I turned my head away.

“Thaddeus said you all would do as we said. He said that you would obey us without question!” Tears glistening in his bloodshot eyes, he held the scalpel to my neck and leaned down closer. “Now, Mia.” His breath was rancid and sour. “Recognize you are a sinner—full of vices and wants—and repent before you step into death.”

He was breathing heavily, as if saying the words had stolen his remaining strength. I shifted my weight to my elbows and shoved my shoulder into his, causing him to lean to one side. And the knife’s edge to slice along the skin of my throat. Superficial, I thought, so I could keep going. Just a superficial cut.

Ignoring the stinging pain, I tangled my leg around his, pulled, forcing him to tumble with me. We struggled, rolling over and over, a whirlwind of clashing arms and kicking legs. He screamed again, either with pain or determination, so loud it felt as if my finer bones vibrated beneath my skin.

Then he was over me, on his knees, the knife held high above him.

“Be still,” he yelled. “And know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth!”

The Reverend hovered there, gazing down at me with a gleam of madness in his eyes. I watched paralyzed as the scalpel arced down toward me with unnatural slowness. I squeezed my eyes shut.

A gunshot rang out. My eyes sprung open. Before the knife slashed across my neck, the Reverend’s expression was scrubbed blank with shock, and he stilled. The scalpel clattered as it hit the stage floor. Scarlet blood seeped through the blue fabric of his shirt. He tipped back and collapsed, his bloated body contorting awkwardly when he hit the ground.

I couldn’t move. Icy fear held me down. Slowly, tears stung my eyes as the disbelief took hold, spilling down my cheeks, searing a cut on my face. I let out a breath or a scream, I couldn’t tell which, and forced myself to sit up. I twisted back to see the surviving members of the Flock staring at something in the back of the pavilion.

There, in a beam of morning sunlight, Aliyah stood, holding the Reverend’s gun out in front of her, still aimed at the stage. Her face was tracked with tears.

My heart stuttered at the sight. She shot him. She shot him to save me.

When she saw me rise, she gradually lowered the gun and leaned back against the post behind her. Her gaze skirted the pavilion in astonishment, at the battered and the bloody, at the broken and the dead.

Gabriel ran toward me and took me by the shoulders. “Are you all right?”

I stared at him. In those green and blue eyes I saw the sharp outline of my battered face.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No,” I said. With shaking fingers I felt for the cut on my neck. They came away with only a small amount of blood. I glanced behind him. “What happened to the guard?”

Gabriel shrugged. “He took off. After … ” He jutted his chin at the Reverend’s body.

I turned and looked out over what was left of the Flock. Beaten bodies laced the ground of the pavilion, limbs twisted in unnatural directions. Blood and dirt stained the wooden floor. The humidity was heavy. The metallic scent of blood, and a smell that wasn’t unlike thawed meat, hung in the air. Nausea hit me in a wave and I dropped to my knees, throwing up what little I had in my stomach. I felt a warm hand on my back, then fingers raking the hair away from my face. I wiped my mouth with the back of my forearm and glanced up to see Gabriel.