Chapter 11

 

AS I GOT to the door of the cabin, it burst open and Renee’s wide-eyed look of panic had me jumping and yelping all at once. She hauled me inside without a word and her angst flipped to anger before my eyes.

“Where have you been?” She grabbed her hair with her hands. “You have any idea what could have happened?” She gripped me by the arms then stalked into the living room. “I couldn’t leave Zack, I couldn’t come and find you.” She spun around, walked over to me, and slapped me clean across the cheek. “You could have been hurt!”

I blinked a couple of times and touched my hand to my stinging cheek. It wasn’t as though she’d landed me with a right hook or anything but more the fact that she’d raised her hand in the first place that shocked me. She put her hands over her mouth as she registered her assault and the tears bubbled over and down her cheeks.

“Aeron, oh God, I’m so sorry . . . I didn’t mean to . . .” She reached out for me but I was still kinda dumbstruck.

She’d hit me.

“I was so worried, you could have . . . I was so scared . . .”

Then I saw it. Above her head was a dark swirling mass, not like the leaches that I saw above some people but dangerous all the same.

Fear.

You see, there’s one thing that I have learned since I left the institution and that is fear is the greatest enemy of all. It stops you seeing what is really there and making a decision based on logic. Fear likes to distort your thinking, distort the world around you until all you can see is black and hopelessness.

Well, I cared too much about Renee to let that cloud suck her soul from her.

I walked to her and wrapped her up in the biggest hug I could manage. Unlike afflictions or leeches or any kind of nasty wounds that the world could inflict on a person, fear was not something I could displace or heal just by touching. No, fear was a personal monster that each one of us had to face and conquer but it didn’t mean that I was gonna leave her to fight it alone.

“I’m here,” I told her. “Joyce was out in the road and I needed to help her get back to Charlie.”

Renee burst into sobs. “I thought I’d lost you.”

I kept my decision on the CIG to myself but my heart wanted me to tell her that I’d follow her anywhere should she need me. A dumb notion that was nothing but lip service and no matter how much she needed me to lie, I wasn’t going to.

“I’m not exactly small,” I told her. “You can’t miss me.”

Renee buried herself into my shoulder, her pain and worry hitting me like I was tied to a rock in a storm. “I wish I could go back to Oppidum with you,” she whispered. “I wish I could just live by the river.”

Oh, did that dig a knife into my heart. One minute she was pretending she pretty much despised the sight of me and now she wanted to tend fields and make wheat. My own confusion started to muddy my determined focus to stay in St. Jude’s.

“But you can’t,” I told her. “You have people to save.”

Her eyes met mine as she looked up at me. “You were serious about leaving CIG, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, hating the pain in her eyes. “We both know that I ain’t cut out for lying and hiding and all the yes sir and no ma’am stuff.”

“It’s not lying,” Renee said. “We are protecting people.”

“And I guess my view of protecting people is that when you’re honest, there’s a lot more trust.”

She sighed as she clung to me. “Aeron. What if I had told you who I was and what I knew in the beginning. Would you have believed me?” She raised her eyebrows. “Would you have sat back and let me do my job?”

“No. I would have thought you were crazy.” I held up a finger to stop her speaking. “But, I would have trusted you a lot quicker.”

“And what if you had been the killer?” Renee said, something flickering across her eyes. “What if the next person that I protect is actually the monster I’m trying to stop. What then, Aeron?”

What the heck was I supposed to say to that? “I would guess it would freak them out and their inner lunatic would be revealed. Would make the whole process a lot quicker.”

Renee frowned. “Or they could hurt me . . . or someone else.”

There was a hidden truth peaking its way through her words, her aura shimmered with her honesty.

“That’s what happened, didn’t it?” I asked, gripping her to stop her from turning away. “You trusted someone and they turned out to be the bad guy.”

Renee tried to look away but I grabbed her by the chin.

“The scars you fight, they’re from back then.”

She tried to fight it. Her energy was a screaming tangle of desperation. The real her inside threw herself against the barrier she’d erected all around her for protection. She was determined to hold on but the barrier shuddered. I kept staring into her eyes. I wasn’t letting her go. The real her hurled everything she had at the wall. The barrier shook and rumbled, then buckled under the weight of the truth.

“Yes.”

The release of the word was like an opening door. Glitter pulsing from her lips. 

“They hurt you?”

“Not just me.” She buried her head in my shoulder. Her voice lost and scared. “Please, don’t make me go back there.”

I held onto her as she sobbed and felt a need to shield her. Whoever she had tried to help had torn her inside in more ways than I would ever understand. So where was my place now?

Did I just leave Renee to wander around in life and lose herself bit by bit or did I abandon a kid who needed my help before he gave up completely. What was I supposed to do?

“Keep on keeping on,” a voice whispered through the air, faint enough that I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined it or if Nan really had spoken.

Renee cried herself to sleep and I put her into bed. I felt restless and frustrated. So I did the one thing that I knew would help me to forget everything for a while, the one thing that seemed the most constant thing in my life. I sat on the weight bench and got ready to go through my usual routine.

Blob came and sat on the edge of the treadmill. “Aren’t you big enough already?” he asked in his normal bored-sounding tone.

“I got to do something,” I said. “Besides, I can’t sleep.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I’m over-tired. If I sleep now, I’ll get visions.” I gripped hold of the handles, getting the right feel before starting my set. “I really don’t want visions.”

“Why?” Blob asked again.

“For once,” I said. “I really don’t want to know the future.”

I started my set and let the thoughts fade away. The future meant decisions, the future meant that someone who needed me was going to get hurt. Getting stuck in St. Jude’s had delayed the inevitable. Anything that would delay that was just fine by me. I breathed through the strain, counting the reps as I did so.

As far as I was concerned it could keep snowing . . . indefinitely.