One
Eden, California
One month later
Wednesday, May 24, 5:30 a.m.
DJ Belmont looked over the list in his hand. "It'll take me forever to get all this shit."
Sister Coleen shrugged in apology, unconcerned about the swear word he'd let drop. They were alone in the clinic-he, Coleen, and Pastor-so Eden rules did not apply.
Rules he'd grown up with. Rules he intended to shred the moment he took over Eden. He was one step closer to his goal, having killed Brother Ephraim a month before. He'd have taken care of all of his problems had he not been shot himself. After a month, his left shoulder still ached and the arm remained basically useless.
The first shot to his shoulder had hurt like fire, and for that he planned to hunt down the bitch who'd pulled the trigger. Her name was Daisy Dawson and her death would serve a dual purpose-payback for the injury and heartbreak for the man who shared her bed.
Gideon Reynolds. The very name had DJ seething with rage. He banked it, unwilling to have to explain it to Coleen and Pastor. Because Gideon was supposed to be dead. Supposed to be dead at DJ's father's hand, in fact.
Except now he knew that Waylon Belmont-DJ's own father-had let Gideon go. He'd set Gideon free from Eden. Lied to everyone when he returned, saying that Gideon had died for the sin of murdering the Founding Elder Edward McPhearson as he'd attempted to flee. Everyone had believed him.
Even me. The banked rage flared anew and he shoved it back. He hadn't realized the extent of his father's betrayal until last month when he'd learned that Gideon was still alive.
His father had been punished, though. It had been DJ's first killing and it had felt so damn good, watching the light dim in that bastard's eyes. He'd been seventeen years old and had finally understood that true power lay in the ability to grant life. Or death.
DJ granted a lot of death.
"It's been a month since your last trip," Coleen said, unaware of his mounting anger. "And you came back wounded, so you couldn't bring back the supplies you'd gone to buy. We had emergency rations, but they're gone. The women stretched the rations as far as they could, but a hundred and fifteen people require a lot of food. We've run out of most of our essentials."
"Yeah, yeah. I get it." They were scraping the bottom of the supply barrels, and DJ was already tired of the jerky that seemed to be their remaining source of protein. "I'll pick up the supplies and scout out a new place for us to live."
That was the plan, anyway. The compound was freezing and hungry, huddling in the caves as they were. The caves had never been intended to be a long-term location, but DJ's injury had forced them to remain far longer than was healthy for any of them. Especially me.
He had other priorities for this trip, however. He'd search for another location if he had time.
She studied his left arm, resting in a sling. "You're sure you're okay to drive?" A tiny brunette in her early fifties, she was Eden's healer, their only medical "expert." To his knowledge, she'd had no formal training, but she'd done the best she could with his wounds.
At least he wasn't dead, although he'd apparently come pretty damn close.
"I'm fine," DJ grunted. He flexed his left shoulder, then moved that arm around, swallowing the pain. "See? Full range of motion."
Which wasn't nearly true. Fortunately, he'd trained for years to shoot with either hand. He wouldn't be completely helpless when he left the compound, but the pain was still excruciating. Sleeping on a pallet on a cold, damp stone floor wasn't helping matters any. He couldn't wait to get to civilization so that he could sleep in a real bed for a change.
"Not quite," Coleen murmured, "but I gave up trying to tell you what to do years ago."
Because she was not stupid and she valued her life. DJ didn't suffer fools, nor did he allow anyone to give him orders.
No one except the elderly man in the chair. Pastor was the shepherd of Eden's flock. He was the leader, and he gave the orders. DJ disobeyed him frequently, but Pastor never found out.
Like his father before him, DJ was the only person permitted to leave the compound-at least the only person the community knew about. The Founding Elders had taken leaves of absence four times a year, ostensibly to "pray on the mountain." In reality, they went to the nearest city and fucked, drank, and gambled like sailors on shore leave.
Now DJ and Pastor were the only remaining elders. Pastor himself was the only remaining Founding Elder. DJ had taken his father's place after Waylon's untimely demise. To this day no one suspected he'd killed his father.
Because I'm damn good. He didn't leave loose ends.
At least none that he'd known about until a month before, when he'd learned that the woman he'd thought he'd killed thirteen years ago was still alive. He could have sworn Mercy had been dead when he'd left her bleeding in front of a bus station.
Mercy Callahan. Gideon's sister. Except that she'd been Mercy Burton when she'd lived in Eden. She'd been Ephraim's wife until DJ had let her and her mother believe he was helping them escape. He'd wanted them to hope.
He should have shot both women in the woods outside Eden, but he'd been young and stupid and focused on his cartoon-villain revenge plot. Mercy's mother was definitely dead, and he'd brought her body back, but he'd been interrupted in the middle of killing Mercy. Someone had come and he'd run, leaving her behind. He didn't see how she could have survived the two bullets he'd put into her body, but she had.
Which left him a huge mess to clean up now. He'd told Pastor that he'd buried Mercy himself. If Pastor ever found out that she'd survived, DJ would lose everything.
So he had loose ends to take care of. He'd almost done so a month ago, but a second shot had damaged the nerves in his left arm, leaving him unable to shoot and bleeding profusely. He didn't know who'd fired the shot, but when he found out, the fucker was dead. He'd barely made it back to the compound alive. He'd barely managed to stay conscious long enough to tell Pastor they had to move. Immediately.
Luckily Pastor trusted him implicitly. The old fool.
DJ had only let him live this long because the old fool was also a crafty fucker. He'd memorized the account numbers and passwords to the online bank accounts that held Eden's fifty million bucks.
DJ needed those passwords before Pastor kicked the bucket. The old man was still in decent shape, though, goddammit. He was seventy-two, but his heart still beat soundly in his chest.
Coleen glanced at Pastor, technically her husband. Coleen had gone through three husbands in the thirty years she'd been at Eden. Two had died of natural causes. One had been murdered.
Not by my hand. Although DJ had longed to kill Ephraim's brother, Edward, more times than he could count. No, the thanks for Edward's death had to go to Gideon Reynolds. Gideon had claimed it was an accident, and DJ had believed it. At thirteen, Gideon had been a goody-goody. And strong enough even then to best Edward McPhearson in a fight.
When DJ met Gideon again, he'd kill him slowly, making sure it hurt especially badly. Partly for denying DJ the satisfaction of killing McPhearson himself, but mostly for escaping. For having a life, when DJ had been stuck in this hellhole, serving a narcissist with a god complex.
Even putting all of those reasons aside, Gideon would have had to die, simply for becoming a goddamn FBI agent who had apparently been searching for Eden since the day he escaped.
Pastor cleared his throat gently. "You seem agitated, DJ. Are you not healed enough to take this excursion?"
"I'm fine," DJ snapped, then blew out a breath at the unamused look on Pastor's face. It was never a good idea to make Pastor angry. "I'm sorry. It does hurt, but we need supplies."
And I have loose ends to snip.
He needed to find Gideon and put him down like the dog he was. He needed to find Mercy and make her suffer the way she should have suffered thirteen years ago.
And then he'd find Amos Terrill, Eden's former carpenter and Gideon and Mercy's stepfather. The month before, that bastard had smuggled himself and his young daughter out of Eden in the back of DJ's pickup truck. Which Amos had then stolen. Asshole.
Hopefully he'd find Amos in a graveyard somewhere, because one of DJ's bullets had struck the man in the throat. He'd need to die eventually, because he'd found Gideon and Mercy and had probably updated them on everything about Eden since they had left. For that, if he was still alive, he'd pay.
And then I'll come back, force Pastor to give me those damn account numbers once and for all. He'd stayed in the same toxic pattern, serving Pastor for far too long. He hadn't realized how much time had passed until he'd been shot.
Nothing like a near-death experience to reset one's priorities.
"It's all right," Pastor said evenly, making it clear that DJ's outburst wasn't all right. The fucker. "Will you locate little Abigail? She may have been taken into the foster care system."
Because he'd told Pastor that he'd killed and buried Amos after finding him hiding in the back of his pickup when he'd stopped in the next town. He hadn't mentioned Abigail at all. He wasn't sure why. Maybe it was because she was a child and he hadn't considered her a threat. Pastor had assumed she'd escaped.
"I'll try," he said.
Pastor's lips pursed, a sign of his displeasure. "She'll tell someone about us. Luckily she's so young that no one will believe her, and luckily she's the only one to have gotten away."
For a career criminal, Pastor was damn gullible. He actually believed that all the escapees had been rounded up over the past few years. To be fair, DJ had used surrogate bodies, like his father had before him. When the escapee couldn't be found, he found a random person-usually homeless or a runaway-about the same size and coloring, then killed them, mutilating the body so that it couldn't be identified.
Pastor believed that no one had ever escaped Eden.
Pastor was an idiot.
"Luckily," DJ agreed. "I'll get the supplies, scout out a new location, and search for Abigail Terrill. Is there anything you'd like to add?"
Pastor shook his head. "No, but I would like you to fix the satellite dish before you go. I haven't been able to get online since we moved here to the caves."
A move that had been necessary because Amos Terrill had been thick as thieves with the FBI. If Ephraim hadn't spilled his guts, it was almost certain that Amos had. So they'd moved the community to their ultimate safe space, a series of caves just outside the border of the Lassen National Forest.
It had been DJ's storage spot for their drug harvest for years and his father's before that, the rock shielding their stash from government eyes in the sky. Neither conventional satellite imagery nor infrared cameras could find them here.
"I'll try," DJ promised, but he was lying through his teeth. There was no way he was fixing the Internet. He hadn't allowed Pastor online while his wounds were healing, claiming he was too weak to manage it. But the truth was that Pastor could not know that Mercy and Gideon were alive, and, given the shoot-out the month before, they could still be in the news. "But the dish was damaged in the last move." DJ threw an accusatory glance at Coleen. "She didn't pack it correctly."
Coleen looked down, her jaw clenched. "I did my best, considering how heavy it was, and that I had to move it into the truck by myself. I couldn't ask for help, because you were hurt and Ephraim was dead and nobody else is supposed to know we have a satellite dish."
She actually had done well. There was nothing wrong with their dish, but he couldn't let them know it.
"We need to bring in another elder," Pastor said thoughtfully. "One young and strong enough to help with things like that, but old enough to bring some wisdom."
"Also one who won't go crazy with rage, knowing we lied to them all these years," Coleen added carefully.
Pastor chuckled, because Coleen was the only person allowed to be candid with him. She'd earned the right through thirty years of being Pastor's lapdog, but even she tiptoed around the man. One never knew what mood he'd be in at any given time, on any given day.
"True." Pastor studied his manicured nails, a sure sign that whatever he was about to say would not be what DJ wanted to hear. "I'm considering Brother Joshua. He was extremely helpful in coordinating our move, and considering we only had the one truck you brought back, DJ, this move was one of our most stressful. We packed the congregation into the truck like cattle, but with over a hundred people, plus the heavy equipment, he made at least ten trips."
"And I had to keep everyone calm, because no one wanted to live in these caves," Coleen added. "There was an unusual amount of unrest. It took us four days to get everyone settled. You don't recall because you were unconscious."
"Brother Joshua behaved admirably under pressure," Pastor finished. "He would make an excellent elder."
To an untrained observer, it might have seemed that Pastor was asking for input. DJ knew better. He exchanged a glance with Coleen, long enough to see her slight grimace, because she didn't like Joshua. Well, mostly she didn't like Joshua's first wife, and if he was chosen as an elder, his first wife would be elevated in status as well. But Coleen's expression was wiped clean by the time Pastor lifted his gaze from his hands. That was the purpose of him looking at his hands-to give the receiver of orders time to appear okay with his edicts.
"I'll be ready to brief him when I return," DJ promised. Like that was ever going to happen. Once he had control of Eden's money, he'd leave Joshua and Coleen and all the other Edenites to do whatever the fuck they wanted.
Pastor stared at him through narrowed eyes. "Find Amos's child. Bring her to me. I will not allow her to become a symbol of concern or discontent in my flock. Make it your priority."
One
Eden, California
One month later
Wednesday, May 24, 5:30 a.m.
DJ Belmont looked over the list in his hand. "It'll take me forever to get all this shit."
Sister Coleen shrugged in apology, unconcerned about the swear word he'd let drop. They were alone in the clinic-he, Coleen, and Pastor-so Eden rules did not apply.
Rules he'd grown up with. Rules he intended to shred the moment he took over Eden. He was one step closer to his goal, having killed Brother Ephraim a month before. He'd have taken care of all of his problems had he not been shot himself. After a month, his left shoulder still ached and the arm remained basically useless.
The first shot to his shoulder had hurt like fire, and for that he planned to hunt down the bitch who'd pulled the trigger. Her name was Daisy Dawson and her death would serve a dual purpose-payback for the injury and heartbreak for the man who shared her bed.
Gideon Reynolds. The very name had DJ seething with rage. He banked it, unwilling to have to explain it to Coleen and Pastor. Because Gideon was supposed to be dead. Supposed to be dead at DJ's father's hand, in fact.
Except now he knew that Waylon Belmont-DJ's own father-had let Gideon go. He'd set Gideon free from Eden. Lied to everyone when he returned, saying that Gideon had died for the sin of murdering the Founding Elder Edward McPhearson as he'd attempted to flee. Everyone had believed him.
Even me. The banked rage flared anew and he shoved it back. He hadn't realized the extent of his father's betrayal until last month when he'd learned that Gideon was still alive.
His father had been punished, though. It had been DJ's first killing and it had felt so damn good, watching the light dim in that bastard's eyes. He'd been seventeen years old and had finally understood that true power lay in the ability to grant life. Or death.
DJ granted a lot of death.
"It's been a month since your last trip," Coleen said, unaware of his mounting anger. "And you came back wounded, so you couldn't bring back the supplies you'd gone to buy. We had emergency rations, but they're gone. The women stretched the rations as far as they could, but a hundred and fifteen people require a lot of food. We've run out of most of our essentials."
"Yeah, yeah. I get it." They were scraping the bottom of the supply barrels, and DJ was already tired of the jerky that seemed to be their remaining source of protein. "I'll pick up the supplies and scout out a new place for us to live."
That was the plan, anyway. The compound was freezing and hungry, huddling in the caves as they were. The caves had never been intended to be a long-term location, but DJ's injury had forced them to remain far longer than was healthy for any of them. Especially me.
He had other priorities for this trip, however. He'd search for another location if he had time.
She studied his left arm, resting in a sling. "You're sure you're okay to drive?" A tiny brunette in her early fifties, she was Eden's healer, their only medical "expert." To his knowledge, she'd had no formal training, but she'd done the best she could with his wounds.
At least he wasn't dead, although he'd apparently come pretty damn close.
"I'm fine," DJ grunted. He flexed his left shoulder, then moved that arm around, swallowing the pain. "See? Full range of motion."
Which wasn't nearly true. Fortunately, he'd trained for years to shoot with either hand. He wouldn't be completely helpless when he left the compound, but the pain was still excruciating. Sleeping on a pallet on a cold, damp stone floor wasn't helping matters any. He couldn't wait to get to civilization so that he could sleep in a real bed for a change.
"Not quite," Coleen murmured, "but I gave up trying to tell you what to do years ago."
Because she was not stupid and she valued her life. DJ didn't suffer fools, nor did he allow anyone to give him orders.
No one except the elderly man in the chair. Pastor was the shepherd of Eden's flock. He was the leader, and he gave the orders. DJ disobeyed him frequently, but Pastor never found out.
Like his father before him, DJ was the only person permitted to leave the compound-at least the only person the community knew about. The Founding Elders had taken leaves of absence four times a year, ostensibly to "pray on the mountain." In reality, they went to the nearest city and fucked, drank, and gambled like sailors on shore leave.
Now DJ and Pastor were the only remaining elders. Pastor himself was the only remaining Founding Elder. DJ had taken his father's place after Waylon's untimely demise. To this day no one suspected he'd killed his father.
Because I'm damn good. He didn't leave loose ends.
At least none that he'd known about until a month before, when he'd learned that the woman he'd thought he'd killed thirteen years ago was still alive. He could have sworn Mercy had been dead when he'd left her bleeding in front of a bus station.
Mercy Callahan. Gideon's sister. Except that she'd been Mercy Burton when she'd lived in Eden. She'd been Ephraim's wife until DJ had let her and her mother believe he was helping them escape. He'd wanted them to hope.
He should have shot both women in the woods outside Eden, but he'd been young and stupid and focused on his cartoon-villain revenge plot. Mercy's mother was definitely dead, and he'd brought her body back, but he'd been interrupted in the middle of killing Mercy. Someone had come and he'd run, leaving her behind. He didn't see how she could have survived the two bullets he'd put into her body, but she had.
Which left him a huge mess to clean up now. He'd told Pastor that he'd buried Mercy himself. If Pastor ever found out that she'd survived, DJ would lose everything.
So he had loose ends to take care of. He'd almost done so a month ago, but a second shot had damaged the nerves in his left arm, leaving him unable to shoot and bleeding profusely. He didn't know who'd fired the shot, but when he found out, the fucker was dead. He'd barely made it back to the compound alive. He'd barely managed to stay conscious long enough to tell Pastor they had to move. Immediately.
Luckily Pastor trusted him implicitly. The old fool.
DJ had only let him live this long because the old fool was also a crafty fucker. He'd memorized the account numbers and passwords to the online bank accounts that held Eden's fifty million bucks.
DJ needed those passwords before Pastor kicked the bucket. The old man was still in decent shape, though, goddammit. He was seventy-two, but his heart still beat soundly in his chest.
Coleen glanced at Pastor, technically her husband. Coleen had gone through three husbands in the thirty years she'd been at Eden. Two had died of natural causes. One had been murdered.
Not by my hand. Although DJ had longed to kill Ephraim's brother, Edward, more times than he could count. No, the thanks for Edward's death had to go to Gideon Reynolds. Gideon had claimed it was an accident, and DJ had believed it. At thirteen, Gideon had been a goody-goody. And strong enough even then to best Edward McPhearson in a fight.
When DJ met Gideon again, he'd kill him slowly, making sure it hurt especially badly. Partly for denying DJ the satisfaction of killing McPhearson himself, but mostly for escaping. For having a life, when DJ had been stuck in this hellhole, serving a narcissist with a god complex.
Even putting all of those reasons aside, Gideon would have had to die, simply for becoming a goddamn FBI agent who had apparently been searching for Eden since the day he escaped.
Pastor cleared his throat gently. "You seem agitated, DJ. Are you not healed enough to take this excursion?"
"I'm fine," DJ snapped, then blew out a breath at the unamused look on Pastor's face. It was never a good idea to make Pastor angry. "I'm sorry. It does hurt, but we need supplies."
And I have loose ends to snip.
He needed to find Gideon and put him down like the dog he was. He needed to find Mercy and make her suffer the way she should have suffered thirteen years ago.
And then he'd find Amos Terrill, Eden's former carpenter and Gideon and Mercy's stepfather. The month before, that bastard had smuggled himself and his young daughter out of Eden in the back of DJ's pickup truck. Which Amos had then stolen. Asshole.
Hopefully he'd find Amos in a graveyard somewhere, because one of DJ's bullets had struck the man in the throat. He'd need to die eventually, because he'd found Gideon and Mercy and had probably updated them on everything about Eden since they had left. For that, if he was still alive, he'd pay.
And then I'll come back, force Pastor to give me those damn account numbers once and for all. He'd stayed in the same toxic pattern, serving Pastor for far too long. He hadn't realized how much time had passed until he'd been shot.
Nothing like a near-death experience to reset one's priorities.
"It's all right," Pastor said evenly, making it clear that DJ's outburst wasn't all right. The fucker. "Will you locate little Abigail? She may have been taken into the foster care system."
Because he'd told Pastor that he'd killed and buried Amos after finding him hiding in the back of his pickup when he'd stopped in the next town. He hadn't mentioned Abigail at all. He wasn't sure why. Maybe it was because she was a child and he hadn't considered her a threat. Pastor had assumed she'd escaped.
"I'll try," he said.
Pastor's lips pursed, a sign of his displeasure. "She'll tell someone about us. Luckily she's so young that no one will believe her, and luckily she's the only one to have gotten away."
For a career criminal, Pastor was damn gullible. He actually believed that all the escapees had been rounded up over the past few years. To be fair, DJ had used surrogate bodies, like his father had before him. When the escapee couldn't be found, he found a random person-usually homeless or a runaway-about the same size and coloring, then killed them, mutilating the body so that it couldn't be identified.
Pastor believed that no one had ever escaped Eden.
Pastor was an idiot.
"Luckily," DJ agreed. "I'll get the supplies, scout out a new location, and search for Abigail Terrill. Is there anything you'd like to add?"
Pastor shook his head. "No, but I would like you to fix the satellite dish before you go. I haven't been able to get online since we moved here to the caves."
A move that had been necessary because Amos Terrill had been thick as thieves with the FBI. If Ephraim hadn't spilled his guts, it was almost certain that Amos had. So they'd moved the community to their ultimate safe space, a series of caves just outside the border of the Lassen National Forest.
It had been DJ's storage spot for their drug harvest for years and his father's before that, the rock shielding their stash from government eyes in the sky. Neither conventional satellite imagery nor infrared cameras could find them here.
"I'll try," DJ promised, but he was lying through his teeth. There was no way he was fixing the Internet. He hadn't allowed Pastor online while his wounds were healing, claiming he was too weak to manage it. But the truth was that Pastor could not know that Mercy and Gideon were alive, and, given the shoot-out the month before, they could still be in the news. "But the dish was damaged in the last move." DJ threw an accusatory glance at Coleen. "She didn't pack it correctly."
Coleen looked down, her jaw clenched. "I did my best, considering how heavy it was, and that I had to move it into the truck by myself. I couldn't ask for help, because you were hurt and Ephraim was dead and nobody else is supposed to know we have a satellite dish."
She actually had done well. There was nothing wrong with their dish, but he couldn't let them know it.
"We need to bring in another elder," Pastor said thoughtfully. "One young and strong enough to help with things like that, but old enough to bring some wisdom."
"Also one who won't go crazy with rage, knowing we lied to them all these years," Coleen added carefully.
Pastor chuckled, because Coleen was the only person allowed to be candid with him. She'd earned the right through thirty years of being Pastor's lapdog, but even she tiptoed around the man. One never knew what mood he'd be in at any given time, on any given day.
"True." Pastor studied his manicured nails, a sure sign that whatever he was about to say would not be what DJ wanted to hear. "I'm considering Brother Joshua. He was extremely helpful in coordinating our move, and considering we only had the one truck you brought back, DJ, this move was one of our most stressful. We packed the congregation into the truck like cattle, but with over a hundred people, plus the heavy equipment, he made at least ten trips."
"And I had to keep everyone calm, because no one wanted to live in these caves," Coleen added. "There was an unusual amount of unrest. It took us four days to get everyone settled. You don't recall because you were unconscious."
"Brother Joshua behaved admirably under pressure," Pastor finished. "He would make an excellent elder."
To an untrained observer, it might have seemed that Pastor was asking for input. DJ knew better. He exchanged a glance with Coleen, long enough to see her slight grimace, because she didn't like Joshua. Well, mostly she didn't like Joshua's first wife, and if he was chosen as an elder, his first wife would be elevated in status as well. But Coleen's expression was wiped clean by the time Pastor lifted his gaze from his hands. That was the purpose of him looking at his hands-to give the receiver of orders time to appear okay with his edicts.
"I'll be ready to brief him when I return," DJ promised. Like that was ever going to happen. Once he had control of Eden's money, he'd leave Joshua and Coleen and all the other Edenites to do whatever the fuck they wanted.
Pastor stared at him through narrowed eyes. "Find Amos's child. Bring her to me. I will not allow her to become a symbol of concern or discontent in my flock. Make it your priority."
/
