Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1) (27 page)

“And it takes four hours to drive here from there,” I bellowed. I’d gone out onto the front deck by now, but I knew Vonda could hear me. I knew I was upsetting her even more. I couldn’t care. I was doing what needed to be done.

“Look,” Carradine bellowed back. “I’ll step up the urgency level of the raid, and now I can add kidnapping onto the charges for the warrants. I’ve got a bunch of John and Jane Doe warrants so I can just add extras onto there as they pop up. But I can’t just alter a finely-tuned op because your old lady got taken.”

“
Yes you can
,” I shouted. “I was in MARSOC. We conducted combat ops in Eastern Afghanistan. You can be ready to deploy at a second’s notice and you fucking know it.” I paused to take a breath. Carradine wasn’t overly eager to interrupt me, anyway. I said what needed to be said. I didn’t want to step on Carradine’s toes and throw a wrench in his op, but I was an outlaw. I couldn’t wait for the fucking law to come to my assistance. We were used to taking things into our own hands. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Can you muster enough men by then?”

“We’ll see,” Carradine said skeptically. “Let me hang up now so I can call my superior. Don’t go off half-cocked.”

I was so filled with rage I didn’t even have the bandwidth to laugh at the term “half-cocked.” “I’ll give you a day to get your men in place.”

I might have been lying. I wasn’t sure I could wait that long. Twenty-four hours during which Mahalia could be tortured, or moved to that fabled Texas compound. For all I fucking knew, her name was a password already.

I spent the night tormented with gruesome images. Of course I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up drinking with Sledgehammer, Dust Bunny, and Dingo, plotting our moves. Naturally they wanted to participate in a raid of our own.

Looking back, this was the start of our new Assassins chapter. Sledge was the muscle who would encourage action. Dust Bunny was the theorist who could also devise bombs. And Dingo was the eager recruit, becoming more knowledgeable in technology every day. This tragedy was the catalyst for them to come together, giving us our first common goal.

I couldn’t say no to an Assassins raid. There were advantages and disadvantages to each side. The more men, the more we drew attention to ourselves. Any covert activity would be detected with more men. However, more men meant more firepower and muscle. We had to gauge how easy it would be to scare those polygs into doing our bidding. That wasn’t easy to gauge when they were such fucking whackamoles to begin with.

I wound up falling into our bed about an hour before sunup. But I felt ready to roll. The angrier and drunker I got, the more I wanted to go in there with all barrels blazing. Maybe I was brash because I’d pretty much gotten away with killing Breakiron, even if in self-defense. I felt inviolable because I had the sense of right on my side. I was an enraged, pissed-off man in love, and no one got between Mahalia and me.

I think I managed to sleep a little. A couple of my men did, because we didn’t get rolling until about eleven. I hated that Vonda was seeing us off at the front door. She knew we were on our way to bury some human beings, whoever got in our way. That wasn’t something a teenaged girl should already know about.

But I wanted her to know we were taking care of business.

MAHALIA

A
beige dress
hit me in the head.

“Get dressed, you slut,” snapped Allred Lee Chiles. “You’ve been lying around here buck naked just wishing that filthy biker would come in the gates. Now your wish has been granted.”

Gideon!
Allred seemed to forget it was he who had stripped all my “outsider” clothes from me and burned them in the fireplace in a dramatic show of superiority. “How am I going to get dressed with my hands bound like this?”

Allred snorted as if it was a giant irritation for him to take five steps over and snip off the zip ties that bound my wrists with a pair of scissors he kept handy inside his severe black high-collared jacket. His attire meant we’d be moving again. I’d only been here two days and we’d moved three times.

Every time someone came in the gate, Allred would panic and move me. I wanted to tell him it couldn’t possibly be worth it, having a personal sex slave you had to move every twelve hours. Already he’d beaten me with an elephant bookend—the ivory tusks raked angry welts across my bottom—a fake potted plant, and of course his belt. He’d raped me anally, which luckily I was sort of used to. Then I realized how sad it was that I was used to something like that.

A few of my sister-wives were in attendance, but no one spoke a word to me. They knew I was being punished for having the gall to leave. I knew I was being punished for having a life outside of the compound.

“Blood atonement,” snarled Allred. He backhanded me across the cheekbone for good measure. “I’m done with spilling my own blood for the sins of others. I should’ve had your lover erased a long time ago.”

He termed people “erased” when they’d “gone to Texas.” I was still reeling from the knowledge that there
was
a Texas compound. Then what about the bodies Gideon had discovered in his mine? I figured maybe a small percentage of them, like the peckerhead who’d tricked me with flowers, actually did wind up there. That gave credence to the fable, and probably lured men away from Cornucopia when they thought they were being promoted. What a sick place the Texas compound must be if that was where the “good” ones went.

I got shakily to my feet and tried to step into the ugly dress as Allred continued to rant.

“Consuming fire and earthquakes are going to strike the planet!” He’d been on this “end of days” roll for several months now. It was a disturbing new trend in a sinister and creepy life that had been unfurling in front of my eyes for five years. “God is going to make waters boil and the decimating pestilence of illness will sweep the globe.” Abruptly he shifted his focus. “You’re fat and tainted by the touch of that abominable biker. I think I’ll send you to Texas where no one can touch you and you don’t cause trouble.”

Yanking me by my bruised arm, he shuffled me toward the door. I was barefoot and naked under the dress, never having felt so vulnerable. “Did Gideon come in the gate?” I dared to ask. Allred had finally installed a camera at the gate, so even people who used legitimate passwords were being denied access.

He rattled me even harder as we started down the hallway. “A storm of destructive power will be wreaked upon the United States, paralyzing everyone! It will be sent to humble the people who still persist in murdering unborn children. It is not of the pure way!”

To my credit, Allred had not been so radical and demented five years ago. It had been coming on slowly, a bit at a time, one revelation here, another revelation there. There were murmurs of consuming fires, illnesses that would sweep the world. Every time something like Ebola was in the news, Allred would utilize it to prove his point. Even if only two Americans wound up dying, it was still a “plague,” a pestilence sent to warn us of some goddamned infraction or transgression we were perpetrating.

Gideon’s love was welcoming me, but my guilty and dusty soul had drawn back to Allred’s house of pain and redemption.

Had Gideon climbed over the stone fence? That was entirely possible—I’d never seen any barbed or electric wire on top of it, and it was only about eight feet tall. Or had he somehow crashed the gate and ridden in on his Harley? If the latter, he would be driving down the main street momentarily. Had one of my sister-wives told him where I was? Had anyone dared defy the iron hand of Allred Lee Chiles?

He was hustling me toward the front door now. “Let all nations be warned again! Let all who would be of pure way walk before me because I am your eternal savior and judge.”

“Amen,” murmured some alleged sister-wives as we passed them by.

Boom!
The front door blasted open so violently everyone jumped aside, certain a bomb was on the other side of it. Allred had been amping us up to expect such cataclysms, women fell to the ground behind appliances or partitions. For my part, I was certain Gideon had tossed a hand grenade, so I leaped behind the living room partition too.

Oddly, Allred stood still. Bravery wasn’t one of his best traits, if he had any best traits, so I was surprised. I peered above the top of the partition. The door had burst open so forcefully, the doorknob was wedged in the sheetrock.

Everything happened so quickly, it’s hard to say what came next. Gideon stormed through the entrance, and I mean that literally. With his heavy engineer boots, black leather cut, and chains and implements hanging from his belt loops, he was in fighting form. I’d seen him lifting weights in his infrequent spare moments in the empty dining room. He was gaining back the bulk he’d lost while recovering from being shot. He wasn’t quite up to his lovely mass yet, but he was menacing and imposing, a sight never seen before in these hallowed, quiet rooms.

And he had a gun to Allred’s forehead. “All right, you fucking twisted, warped polyg,” he roared.

But Allred drew a gun I didn’t know he had. He pressed the barrel to Gideon’s chest and must have pushed hard, because soon Gideon was out of sight, outside on the stoop. “You’re not taking anyone from me!” Allred was shrieking in a high, ladylike voice.

Sister-wives’ eyes peered over the tops of counters and stoves, but I was the only one who dared come out of hiding. I stood in the doorframe and yelled, “Gideon, don’t risk it! He’s got a gun!” I stated the obvious. But Parley Pratt and a few other men had materialized out in the mall behind Gideon, their hands on guns in holsters, or patting their pants to indicate they had a gun. Either way, I didn’t want Gideon risking it.

But Gideon held his piece steady to Allred’s head. He spoke in a low voice now. “You motherfucking child-raping sicko. You’re handing Mahalia over to me, and we’ll never have to meet again. We’re out of your life. I got the deed to the mine and as long as you hand over my woman, I’m keeping the bodies in my rearview. I’m not a squealer so let’s just keep this between us, shall we?”

Allred kept shrieking in that mewling tone. “Go tell Australia the people living at sea level will be wiped out by a tsunami! Let every nation stop tormenting my Zion, lest pestilences be visited on them too!”

Gideon looked a little consternated by Allred’s rant. Three enormous black SUVs with dark windows came racing up the drive to Allred’s mall. Gideon didn’t lower his piece one inch, but Allred stepped onto the stoop to see what was happening.

Men, feds, leaped out of the vehicles with guns drawn. It was just like on TV with those ATF vests, little speakers in their ears, and their mirrored shades. Bronson Carradine was among the eight or so men, in the middle of the pack with his gun drawn as well. I went around Allred’s side so Gideon could grab me, but Allred grabbed me first.

He waved his gun at each fed in turn. “You, you, and you! Out of my Zion! My full power will soon be felt and my holy power will knock you down!” He thrashed me down the steps as he spoke. The feds came to a standstill. They were like a swarm of bees suddenly stopped by a cloud of poison. Parley and his men had backed off and were now in the center town square on a patch of lawn.

Allred continued squealing his mumbo jumbo. “Let everything be a pure, noble and holy way of delivering my people!”

It didn’t matter that about ten weapons were pointed at us now. The fact remained, Allred had a hostage, so no one could shoot. I watched Gideon helplessly as Allred dragged me away, Allred’s gun now digging into my side. Pure rage boiled in Gideon’s eyes. Maybe some of his rage was impotence, helplessness that he could do nothing, too.

I was a citizen of heaven, a pilgrim. It seemed it was my time to return there now.

GIDEON

I was angry
and relieved when Carradine and his men came squealing up.

They distracted everyone long enough for Chiles to yank Mahalia down the steps and up their stupid fucking main street. I wanted to kill and bro hug Carradine both at the same time. True, I couldn’t have done much. The arrival of the feds had broken our Mexican standoff, allowing Chiles to get away, for now. I had to stand there like a feeble, powerless moron while Chiles half-dragged, half-marched my woman away.