Reawakening Eden (9 page)

His hand darted forward, and Eden’s sluggish synapses had a hard time following the movement. She managed to focus on the syringe in his hand a second before a tight burn erupted in her arm as he jabbed it in. Almost instantly, the world swooped and wobbled, and her stomach spun like a sock in a dryer.

“What did you give me?” Her tongue was thick and unresponsive, and a bitter taste coated the back of her throat.

“Just something to help you accept.” He turned away to dispose of the syringe, and Eden lost sight of him as the colors in front of her eyes shattered into kaleidoscope shapes. His voice came to her again, through the twisting pointillist explosion of her vision. “I was wrong before to try to fill the vessel without our people present. They must be with us for our miracle or it will not help them. But I couldn’t have you resisting the will of our God in His cathedral. This will just make you more pliant, so you are ready to receive His gift.”

Eden’s last thought as the drug swamped her system was
He’s crazy. Batshit crazy.
Her thoughts screaming, she fell silently into the depths of her body, caged there by the sweet, sickly grip of the drug.

Chapter Nine

Eden had a sudden, powerful sympathy for virgin sacrifices.

Jonah’s lieutenants carried her through the congregation, her vision still pixilated and jumbled. They didn’t seem like real people. Gathered together with the candlelight flickering over them, they became one body, one mind with a thousand hungry faces. She would have screamed, but her voice was as paralyzed as the rest of her.

Still wearing the satin nightie at Jonah’s insistence—lest this religious experience tip into the pornographic—Eden was placed on the altar. They didn’t strap her down, but then they didn’t need to. The drug was restraint enough. Aware of her surroundings in a disjointed way, she was a prisoner inside her own body, helpless to even twitch a finger in resistance, though she continued to fight her silent, internal battle, hoping panic-driven adrenaline would rush the drug through her system.

She tried to hold on to the present, tried to keep her thoughts sharp, but must have lost time again because suddenly Jonah was standing over her in a purple robe, hands raised, his melodic voice rolling out over the congregation. Maybe it would be easier if she didn’t remember it, but she wanted to be aware—as if ignorance of what was done to her in the next hour would be a second violation, reinforcing the first. All she had right now was her consciousness. She couldn’t give it up.

Jonah preached about the End of Days. He brought his audience to tears, his powerful voice guiding them through the remembered horrors of the last year. He renewed their grief mercilessly, stoked their anger and their helplessness and then, when the thick emotion in the sanctuary had built all the way to the towering rafters, he offered a tiny kernel of hope. Rebirth. Catharsis. He promised an end to the suffering. He promised new life. He promised prosperity and happiness. He reminded his people that he had foreseen Eden’s arrival. He swept his arms down to include her in his sermon, and every eye in the congregation fixed fervently on her, seeing in her not a bone-thin fellow survivor, but the voluptuous Holy Mother who would be their savior.

Then Jonah was climbing up on the altar on top of her, carefully arranging his robe discreetly around them. Eden’s head remained turned toward the sea of faces, her neck too weak to let her see anything else. She waited for someone to jump up and scream stop. She waited for one of the women watching to rush forward and cry rape—but she had never spoken out against Jonah and his religion while living in the Seattle commune. She hadn’t wanted to rock the boat, so no one knew exactly how unwilling she was—except Jonah’s soldiers and the doctor who had doped her.

No one moved. They simply watched—many with expressions of blind reverence that amplified her nausea.

Jonah reached beneath his robe between them. Eden’s skin crawled, expecting to feel him shoving into her any second, but instead she only felt movement against her stomach. Jonah was giving himself a hand, trying to get hard enough to do his God’s bidding. She felt a small, vicious sense of satisfaction that his body was betraying him, but she knew it wouldn’t last. This delay was her last victory.

She let her eyes unfocus and slid off into a distant corner of her mind where Jonah couldn’t reach her, holding onto that piece of inviolate self.

Was this the new world they were given? Was this really the purpose behind six billion deaths? So they could come to this? How different life would be if Connor had been the leader here. A general, guiding by example, unafraid of work and living by an honor so embedded the idea of revoking choice for the greater good would never even cross his mind. A warrior king of mercy and integrity. Firm, but unrelentingly kind.

The double doors at the back of the cathedral slammed open.

For a moment, Eden thought he was a mirage, conjured by her delirious hope, then the parishioners at the back twisted to stare, gaping as Connor stomped up the aisle like something out of a gory action movie.

Camo paint streaked his face—though much less carefully applied than when she’d first seen him. Guns and knives were strapped to every available inch of his body, and the snug green T-shirt and camouflage pants completed the Rambo package. He looked like walking mayhem, and Eden nearly cried she was so damn glad to see him.

Connor fired a shot over Jonah’s head, and it sounded like a cannon blast, echoing in the sanctuary. Jonah screamed and tumbled from the altar, landing with a thud behind it, but he wasn’t down for long. Like the jack-in-the-box of zealotry, he popped up behind the altar, wild-eyed. Connor pointed one of the two guns he held straight at Jonah’s chest.

“The next person who touches her dies,” he said, his voice brutally calm as he strode up the aisle.

The parishioners outnumbered him by hundreds, but overpowering him didn’t appear to be on their agenda. They cowered in their seats, trying to fade into invisibility in the pews, clearly having realized Connor was not a man to fuck with. Jonah’s so-called soldiers, a pack of bullying cowards made brave by the guns they carried, must have recognized the real deal in Connor. They sidled toward the exits, rats abandoning a sinking ship.

Jonah, on the other hand, had apparently missed the day when God was handing out survival skills. “I’m the Angel of Life,” he shouted, his voice just as gorgeous and powerful as ever, even though Eden could almost hear his knees shaking. “I am God’s Arrow and she is his vessel.”

“Nice speech,” Connor snapped, mounting the steps. “But I’m the Angel of Death, and she belongs to me.”

A murmur of unease ran through the congregation—those who weren’t already running for the exits.

“She belongs to God,” Jonah yelped, holding his ground on the opposite side of the altar as Connor took the last steps.

“Fuck that,” Connor snapped. “She belongs to herself. She isn’t a fucking sign or a saint or any of that bullshit. She’s a
survivor
, just like everyone else. And she doesn’t want this. She ran from it. She ran from
you
.”

Eden had never heard Connor string so many words together, but she’d also never seen him so angry. It was a beautiful sight.

He tucked one gun into his hip holster and took his eyes off Jonah long enough to finally look at Eden. Realizing she wasn’t bound, Connor frowned. “Eden?”

She’d managed to turn her head and even twitch her finger, but her vocal cords were still frozen. She strained against the invisible bonds of the drug, meeting Connor’s gaze with her own screaming silently. If she’d thought his expression was black before, she hadn’t begun to imagine what true violence looked like on his face.

Connor rounded the altar so quickly Jonah barely had time to squeak before he was lifted off his feet with a hand to his throat. “What the fuck did you give her?” Connor snarled.

Jonah gagged and choked, flailing at the hand that clenched around his neck. Connor’s pistol was still in his hand and suddenly the barrel was pressed to Jonah’s forehead.

Eden’s breath stilled. For a moment, a single moment of sweet clarity, she wanted Connor to pull the trigger. She willed him to. For closure. For revenge. For everything Jonah had done to her in the name of his God.

But then something shifted in her chest. Maybe it was the drug easing its hold, maybe it was pity, but it felt like selfishness. She wanted to be free of Jonah, not to carry his death with them, a constant memory. There was already too much death in their world.

“Connor.” Her voice was breathy and weak, but he heard her.

Connor dropped his prey and spun back to her, the hand that had been strangling Jonah softly caressing her face. “Eden. Did he hurt you?”

She avoided that landmine of a question and managed to crook her finger to bring him closer, whispering her request. Connor nodded—steely determination and a wild anger in the movement. Then he turned and with one vicious strike, exactly as she had instructed, kicked Jonah Carter’s balls up to his ears.

“Don’t ever come after her again,” Connor growled down at the whimpering, sobbing puddle that was once Jonah Carter. “Or next time I won’t be so gentle.”

Connor dismissed the cult leader without a backward glance, gently scooping Eden into his arms. She curled into his chest, enveloped in safety, and began to shake. “Easy, baby,” he murmured against her hair, “I’ve got you now.”

“Lucas and Hannah Rose…”

“We’ll get them,” Connor vowed, icy determination in his tone. “No one is ever going to separate us again.”

That sounded promising.

As he walked up the center aisle, Eden glanced around. The pews were empty. Abandoned. Jonah’s followers had left him, hopefully to go learn to think for themselves and find their own way, or maybe just as a strategic retreat. Either way, at least it looked like it would be a while before Jonah would be able to organize anyone to follow them. And by then, she would be long gone. Lost in the new world. Eden nestled closer to Connor.
Lost
had never sounded so good.

It was after midnight when they passed the sign welcoming them into Oregon. The sound of Lucas’s and Hannah Rose’s soft snores in the backseat mingled with occasional woofing dreams from Precious, who was bandaged and nestled in a puppy bed in the back of the newly commandeered Hummer. Eden rested her forehead against the chilled glass of the passenger window, her mind too busy for sleep, as Connor drove them farther and farther south.

They hadn’t spoken more than a few words to one another since he’d carried her out of Jonah’s church. Connor was, well, Connor. And she’d still been dopey enough that his suggestion to sleep off the last of the drug had seemed like a brilliant idea.

But she hadn’t slept.

Every time she closed her eyes she saw the church. The helplessness of being unable to move her body, unable to protest, had been so much like her dreams could be that she was afraid to sleep, afraid she’d fall into that helpless place again. She kept reminding herself that it had turned out all right. Connor had come for her. Nothing had happened. But every time she told herself nothing had happened, the words felt less and less reassuring, countered every time by the knowledge of what so easily
could
have happened. The nightmarish
ifs
she would have been helpless to stop. Always that word. Helpless.

“Pull over.”

Connor looked over at her, startled to find her awake, but complied without comment.

As soon as the car stopped moving, she was tempted to jump out and run into the night. Just run and run and run to prove she had the strength in her muscles, the ability to escape when she needed to. She needed to prove she wasn’t that helpless girl, but running wouldn’t erase the fact that in that church, she had been. So instead, when Connor threw the gearshift into park, she crawled into his lap, curling between his body and the steering wheel.

His arms closed around her. He was warm and strong, and just the scent of him reminded her of safety and comfort. For a while, he didn’t speak, holding her, and silence was all they needed.

But for once Connor wasn’t content with quiet. He rested his chin on the top of her head and said, his voice low so as not to disturb the children, “Eden, I’m so sorry—”

“No,” she interrupted. She tried to think of how to tell him how it had felt to see him walk into the church. He’d called himself the Angel of Death, but there was such a powerful vitality to him the words couldn’t have been more inaccurate. The shock of so much death in the last year had shuttered most people, cutting them off from the world, sucking the life out of them. The people in Seattle had looked for life in Jonah’s sermons, but Connor’s strength was the real definition of living.

She slid her arms around his shoulders, holding on tight. “Did you ever see that old Tarantino movie
True Romance
with Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater?”

Connor frowned, clearly not seeing where she was going with this. “I think so.”

“There’s this moment, after this firefight when Christian Slater killed half the cast of the film, when Patricia Arquette picks her way across the bodies littering the floor and tells him that what he just did was
so romantic
.” Connor still looked confused. Eden didn’t think she was saying this right, but the words were sticky tonight, they weren’t coming easily. “When you came for me, it was the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me. You said I belonged to you, and I felt that all the way to my toes.”

She kissed him, taking all her helpless fear and turning it into something infinitely better. Connor caught her to him, returning her kiss with a desperation of his own.

“You aren’t allowed to let me leave again, Connor, okay?”

“You aren’t going anywhere without me,” he agreed.

“I don’t want to go back to Idaho,” she whispered, suddenly nervous that he would change his mind, still bound to the place that had held him before.

Connor shook his head, rubbing his cheek against hers. “That’s my past. I can’t hold on to it anymore. I don’t know what the future will be—maybe New Mexico has reverted to the Wild West and they need a sheriff. Whatever happens, I will always be standing between you and anyone who would hurt you.”