Tryp ran along the highway through the desert, his dress shoes slapping on the hot asphalt, sprinting as far as he could until his lungs cramped and then jogging past the sagebrush until he could sprint again. None of the cars that whizzed by him stopped to offer him a ride. The suit clung to his sweat, and he abandoned the suit coat, tie, and dress shirt in the desert bushes without stopping. He made it back to Kumen’s house and the rental car in forty-five minutes.
His car was the only one in the parking area. Black asphalt stretched around it where all the other vans and big sedans should have been.
Since everyone was gone, Kumen must have taken Elfie to the temple to marry her, which meant that he probably hadn’t raped her yet. Energy bolted through him. Tryp might still be able to save her.
Heat puffed out of the car when he opened the door. The sun was still far above the horizon, so the heat of the day had gathered inside. He slid in and grabbed one of the water bottles from the back seat, chugging the warm, sweet water down his dusty throat before he twisted the key and skidded back to the road.
Tryp sped through the beating sun and around the back of that shoddy excuse for a temple.
When Tryp was eighteen, once he had some money, he had gone to the Mormon temple in Los Angeles on visiting day. He couldn’t go as a member because he hadn’t been old enough to have ever been given temple documents and because the New Empyrean temple was a wild offshoot that the real LDS didn’t recognize, approve of, or discuss in polite society.
The LDS temple’s crystalline beauty touched Tryp in ways that he had never expected.
Then he visited the Greek Orthodox Church where he had been baptized as an infant and attended until his mother had taken up with Kumen, and he fell into a pew, shaking, because he swore that he could remember his father standing beside him in the rainbow-dappled sunlight of the stained glass windows, peering down at him with dark eyes through the streamers of incense fog. The gilded icons shimmered in the sunlight.
A black-frocked priest had found him half-lying in the pew and talked with him for hours, never mentioning the tattoos that were already crawling down Tryp’s arms or the rings in his ears.
Back at this flat-box warehouse excuse for a church in the desert, Tryp heated with anger all over again.
This fucking cult was destroying people: the teenage girls taken as brides for old men, the Lost Boys set out on the road, and all the children who received an entirely inadequate education. When Tryp had started at the performing arts high school, the school district had provided tutors to catch him up in every single subject so he could graduate on time. He’d worked his ass off. None of the others had had that chance for even a basic education.
This cult destroyed everyone.
Besides Sariah, his own mother had probably been up there on the stair rails, assuming that she hadn’t died in childbirth in the intervening years. She had watched Teancum aim a rifle at Tryp’s head, and she hadn’t done a damn thing.
Tryp should have purged all the anger over his mother dragging him as a seven-year-old to New Empyrean and abandoning him to the older girls to raise until she had driven him out to the highway and left him, but the deep hurt was still there.
And she still chose Kumen and the cult over Tryp, even when a gun was aimed at his head.
Tryp bounced his palm off the steering wheel, killed the engine, and got out of the car to walk into the church.
He sneaked in a set of back doors that no one had locked when he had lived there as a tween, either, and limped through the back hallways until he neared the celestial room, where he smelled acrid smoke. The doors slammed open and women and children ran out.
Tryp dodged the people swarming out of the doors, all grasping the hands of struggling young children and turning to watch smoke floating out behind them.
Tryp slid around the open doors.
Inside, silver and gold sparks fountained from the floor, and Elfie flipped a tissue into the air and touched a match to it. It exploded with a sharp bang. With her manic grin amid the pyrotechnics, she looked like a fire goddess wielding wild magic.
Behind her, yellow flames flickered in the carpeting and clawed at the walls.