Physically, she was the smallest one there, but her power radiated out like the energy from a collapsed star.
‘How nice to meet you after all this time,’ she said. Her voice was dark and commanding. ‘We’ve been wondering when you’d make an appearance. I knew it wouldn’t be long.’
‘They told me you were dead,’ I gasped. This situation was spiralling out of control. What next? Was John bloody Patmos about to rise up out of the grave behind me?
‘Some of us are a little more resilient than others,’ she rejoined.
Maybe, some inner voice whispered. But it helps if you’ve got a pack of doctors at your beck and call. Not only do they keep you alive, they could be blackmailed, bribed or seduced into producing fake death certificates and fake faces.
Against my better judgement, I felt curious about her. It was those eyes; they drew you in. There was a flash of lightning and a boom of thunder to the west. The storm was almost upon us. The bloody woman brought her own special effects.
‘When did you come back to Australia?’ I asked.
‘A good few years ago now.’
‘Why?’
She swept a hand out at the darkness.
‘This land – it’s in my blood. It’s where I achieved enlightenment.’ She looked around at the bush, shivered briefly and inhaled. ‘I was hungry for the scents and smells I grew up with: sassafras, boronia, chocolate lily. Flowering gums.’ Just for a millisecond, I caught a glimpse of the innocent country child she must have once been. Then she added: ‘But I don’t suppose a Laverton girl would know such things, would she? It’s all tiger snakes and thistles out there, isn’t it?’
She stepped forward and pinched my chin between her forefinger and thumb. Her nails were long and sharp. Craig Hawley and Dougherty tightened their respective grips on my arms.
‘You’re an interesting person,’ she said. ‘It’s a pity we didn’t meet years ago. We could have really made something of you. Tell me, was that your father sneaking around here a few weeks ago? The famous Ben Redpath?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said, reluctant to give her any reason to set her hounds onto Dad.
She scorched me with those eyes. ‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure before, but I am now. That was why we arranged this little welcome party.’ She swept a hand out at the floodlights and the men with guns. ‘I knew you’d be along sooner or later. They tell me you come from the desert, know how to read the land. How fascinating.’
I shrivelled a little inside. Laverton, my father, the outback. This woman knew me better than I knew myself. That must have been the secret to her longevity: she planned, watched her back, eliminated threats. Looked for her opponent’s weak point. She ran her nails lightly down my face then stepped back.
‘Tell me, Jesse Redpath: who are you?’
‘You seem to know everything – you tell me.’
Her laughter was like a slap in the face.
‘You’re many things,’ she said. ‘A demon, a thief, a trickster. But it’s your spirit that burns brightest. Do you understand the danger that comes with living in the age of the apocalypse?’
‘Yep – it produces maniacs like you.’
She stepped back, assayed me coldly and smiled. Her smile was more sinister than most frowns.
‘What do you think this is all about, Jesse?’
‘Power, of course. And there’s nothing as powerful as money to a tiny mind like yours. I presume you and your sons are resurrecting the Revelators. Or at least trying to squeeze what you can out of the corpse. Let me guess: you had money squirrelled away in some safe haven and you used it to revive a company – a healthcare provider – that had been in the family for years. You’re using the business to launder old and generate new money. You’ve dug up the dirt files and are blackmailing people into carrying out your orders and adding to your wealth. Maybe your so-called “resurrection” has even given some of your more idiotic followers a sense of your immortality. How am I doing so far?’
‘It’s nothing to do with wealth,’ she snapped. ‘This is a material world – of course you need resources for a mission like ours. But it’s for a greater cause. It’s for our covenant.’
I blinked. ‘Your what?’
‘Our direct link to the glory that lies in us all – if we choose to accept it. My husband understood that. He embodied it.’ Her gaze lit up. ‘You destroyed him, of course.’
‘I never even met the guy.’
‘You and your fellow foot soldiers of the devil, you’ve met him many times, in countless garbs and guises. You drove us into the wilderness. You are destruction itself.’
She stared at me and intoned a line she’d clearly used before. ‘His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself.’
Oh Jesus, I thought, she believes her own horse shit. Is there anything more dangerous?
‘I heard he was a rapist and a paedophile,’ I couldn’t help but say.
I wouldn’t have thought the temperature could drop any further, but drop it did. An icy wave moved across her surgically enhanced face.
‘There’s one thing I still don’t get,’ I added while I had her off balance. ‘Why did you go after Nash Rankin? Couldn’t you give the poor bastard a break? After all you’ve done to him, the mess you made of his life?’
Something faded from her countenance. Had she held a faint hope that there might be a chance they could use me? Whatever hopes she held, they’d just vanished.
‘This enterprise has been our life’s work,’ she said, with a trace of weariness in her voice. ‘Our mission. We’ve been working at it for decades. There have been hundreds – thousands – of followers and believers. Our brethren. Our children. But that boy remains my biggest disappointment. We saw his promise early, gave him everything, and he threw it in our faces. For what? For a foolish, self-centred emotion, born of the devil. He lied to the police, betrayed the faith we had in him, the love we showed him, the truths we let him see. God only knows the harm he could have done, would have done, if it hadn’t been for the doctor.’
Guin read the bewilderment on my face and allowed herself a satisfied little smirk. ‘Dr Rush.’
The psychiatrist. I realised what had been bothering me since my visit to Rush. The logo in George Hawley’s office: a blue crown with triple spikes. There’d been something similar at the entrance to the Nexus in Ivanhoe. Ronald Laws had mentioned that the company owned several private hospitals. The Nexus was one of them. Damien Rush had been Nash’s psychiatrist since the cult was first reported to Family Services, had been treating him when he’d suffered his first psychotic episodes. They’d somehow got the doctor under their control – blackmail? I thought about the tremble in his fingers, wondered what he was on – then forced him to dope Nash with something that would induce psychosis. The bastards had used his own doctor to assault him, driven him half mad.
Guin had been trying to pump me for information, to see how much I knew, what I might have passed on to the authorities. But now she was just boasting. Even in her late eighties, standing in the snow with the wind whipping at her fur-lined coat, she had to be the one running the show. She was toying with me – and enjoying the experience.
‘What about Rosa?’ I asked.
‘Ah, Rosa. Sometimes – for the greater good, or god – you need to make decisions that can seem harsh at the time. I liked Rosa. We all did. But once you’ve been given the honour of joining the inner circle of our family, you can never leave it. She understood that. She was another disappointment. And with the farrier, no less. How degrading.’
Suddenly I’d had it with this she-devil.
‘She was the mother of your grandchildren!’ I yelled.
I thought about Stefan’s description of Rosa riding pillion on Raph’s bike, racing along the riverbank laughing, her hair blowing in the wind. I could only hope the affair had brought some happiness into her life before they moved on her.
I glanced at Craig Hawley. He was glaring at me, his cuckolded anger laid bare. I glared back at him, until he looked away.
Lochran didn’t. He was enjoying this as much as Guin was. The shotgun was poised in his hands. He was just waiting for a word from Guin.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I said to him. ‘Raph. Rosa. Even poor old Leon, up at Horse Thief Creek. You do the dirty work. You repair the damage when things go wrong.’
Guin spoke for him. ‘My nephew has been well trained for his role. He has a special talent for making problems disappear.’
She was looking at me like I was a piece of off meat; chances were, I soon would be. I gloomily contemplated the array of weapons angled at me, wondering where to begin. Throw Dougherty at them? There was more thunder, almost upon us now, then a sprinkle of hail. A wave of rain rushed up the valley.
‘We need to wrap this up,’ said George Hawley.
Guin tightened her coat and stepped towards her car. Then she casually remarked to Lochran: ‘Put her in the ground, next to Rosa.’
She paused for a moment, then turned, eyes widening, keen to watch what was about to go down. I remembered Starcy mentioning she was a voyeur. Of death, it seemed, as well as sex. The rain arrived in strength, a torrent of water crashing through the air, running down our backs and faces.
Lochran raised the shotgun.
I adjusted my stance, preparing to make a move.
A swift whipping sound cut through the air and a shock wave flew over Lochran’s face. There was a flash of bewilderment in his eyes, then he shuddered, twisted around, threw his head back and his left arm out. His right arm jerked and the gun exploded, shredded the left thigh of Craig Hawley, who’d had the misfortune to be standing directly in front of it. Hawley went down screaming, grasping and staring at his leg in disbelief. Lochran tumbled forward. There was a fierce little bolt buried in the middle of his back.
Dougherty whirled round, looking for the source of all this devastation. Then realised, too late, that I was the more immediate threat. He swung his pistol back at me. I threw myself to one side, felt the bullet whizz past my body. I snapped an axe kick at his gun hand, a roundhouse kick into his guts. As he folded I seized his right arm, flicked him over my shoulder and slammed him into the ground. I put a knee into his back and twisted the arm until I felt something give. He groaned in agony. I ripped the gun out of his hand. He tried to find his feet, had almost found them when I swept them out from under him. I thought about the complicated situation I was in and shot him in the right leg. I wasn’t sure what he was capable of but I figured that should just about cover all bases.
Craig Hawley was making a lot of noise. He’d crumbled to the ground, his thigh mainly metal and minced meat. A blast of buckshot at point-blank range will do that to you. The Doberman was trying to work out who to attack. It was clearly thinking about me, but then there was a distant whistle and it pricked its ears, turned its head and loped off into the night.
Lochran was on the ground, face down, shuddering, groping around trying to find whatever had buried itself in his back and shattered his world. Wondering what the hell had just happened.
I spun round, looking for more threats, had the misfortune to catch Guin’s eye. Catch her eye? That was an understatement; there was no avoiding it. It was like being sucked into a maelstrom.
‘You really are the devil,’ she growled, her voice devoid of inflection. ‘Hell follows you around.’
I suddenly understood that the entire artifice of her face – the pencilled brows, the painted lids, the rouged cheeks, the spidery lashes – was constructed to draw you into those eyes. They hypnotised you; if you looked deep enough, they told stories that ate away at your self-confidence. If you looked harder, you saw it all: the Bible-bashing father, as brutal with his offspring as he was with his animals. A scattergun mother on a dirt-poor farm full of slaughtered sheep and skinned rabbits, the cruelty, the callousness and cunning.
Cunning?
Jesus, she was trying to distract me. Succeeding. I caught a flicker in her gaze, followed it, landed on George, who was inching towards the front seat of his car. I ran, jumped, kicked the door into him. He crumpled. I ran round to see what he’d been up to. There was a shotgun in the rack. I grabbed it. George was groaning and trying to find his feet.
‘Are there any more weapons in there?’ I yelled.
‘No.’
I thumped him in the head with the stock of the gun.
‘Sorry,’ I said as he slumped back to the ground. ‘I’m sure you’re telling the truth, but I wouldn’t want to stake my life on it.’
I frisked him, found nothing. Maybe he had been telling the truth. Guin was standing at the front of the vehicle, one hand on the bull-bar, the other at her mouth.
‘What about you?’ I growled.
She said nothing, but her head was moving from side to side, trying to take on board the developments of the last few seconds. The rain was falling furiously around her. She looked like a laughing clown on a rubbish dump, with her gaping mouth and the colours running down her cheeks.
I walked towards her and she shrank away, her hands raised and moving across her plasticated face. Even now, it held the ghost of a smile, a smile would be there until the day they laid her in the ground. She gazed at the night sky, as if wondering where salvation was going to come from now, gradually realising that it wasn’t coming from anywhere. I was it. She snarled at me like a trapped cat.
I stomped forward and grabbed her by the throat.
‘Where’s my boyfriend?’ I yelled. ‘And if you say he’s in that grave, you won’t be far behind him, you narcissistic witch.’
I tightened my grip, drew back my fist.
‘Tell me,’ I roared.
She flinched, faded away.
‘He’s up at the winery,’ she croaked.
‘Where in the winery?’
‘The cellar round the back.’
I pushed her away. She slipped and landed on her skinny arse in the mud.
There was movement off to the south side of the clearing. Bailey Hawley stepped into the floodlights’ glare, a crossbow in his hands, the dog at his side. Lucinda was on his other side, an arm around his shoulders, trying to hug him and hold him back. He was weeping and dragging himself forward, his face fraught with anger and fear.
‘He killed our mother,’ he gasped, gesturing at Lochran and looking at me. ‘They told us she’d gone to her family in Queensland, but he killed her. I just heard them say it. He was going to kill you too.’
Lucinda was trying to console him, to little avail. They both looked around the clearing, stunned. She went across to her father and tried to render assistance. He’d gone into shock. He was staring at the dark and shivering. I took off my belt, fashioned it into a tourniquet, showed her how to maintain the pressure on his shattered leg. I made a miserable icepack out of snow and leaves, tried to slow the bleeding.
‘That one,’ she said, indicating Lochran, still groaning on the ground and making futile attempts to reach the arrow in his own back. ‘He’s an evil man. I think he killed Raph, the farrier, as well. Our friend.’
‘You were there, that night at Wycliff, weren’t you? I saw you on your horse.’
She nodded. ‘I overheard him talking to my Uncle George. I couldn’t hear the details, but just the tone of their voices gave me an ugly feeling. I tried to follow them, to warn whoever they were going to attack, but I lost them in the storm and had to turn back. It wasn’t until the next day I heard that Raph had died.’
I saw the reason for her initial caution towards me when I brought her brother home. She wasn’t sure what horrors her family had perpetrated, but she was doing her best to preserve something, if only for Bailey’s sake. Trying to act as a mother. The last thing she wanted was a police officer poking round the house. She had to keep her fears to herself. I also understood her brother’s antagonism towards me: they’d raised him to be suspicious and hostile towards the authorities who’d ruined the family. Maybe he was even being raised to be Lochran’s apprentice; that’s why they were getting him used to weapons and dogs.
Craig Hawley rolled over and groaned, clutching his leg. He raised himself on one arm, then slipped in the mud, flopped back down, appeared to be losing consciousness. I put him in the recovery position. ‘Try to stop him shutting down,’ I said to Lucinda. ‘Keep talking to him.’
I stood up.
‘Sorry, I have to go.’
I gathered up all the weapons and mobiles I could find and threw them into the car. Things were looking up, but I didn’t want anyone in this gruesome crew calling for reinforcements.
‘I’ll get help,’ I said to Lucinda.