Dark Hope: Book One of the Archangel Prophecies

Dark Hope: Chapter 2

I didn't have much to take with me from Alabama: my school, Holy Innocents, had required uniforms, so I had little clothing of my own. Dad had always deemed the things my mother kept sending me "too showy," and he'd promptly packed them up to send to Goodwill. Mom had said to leave my treadmill; she'd get me a new one. So I loaded up the backseat of her Audi convertible with my books and climbed in, ready to put my past behind me.

As Mom backed out of the long rutted driveway, I took one last look at the house in which I'd lived for almost ten years. Dad wasn't there to wave goodbye. When I'd told the judge I was afraid he'd make a scene, he'd ordered him to vacate the premises for the hour before and after my mother was supposed to collect me. He was probably down at the church, praying for a miraculous intervention to keep me from moving to Atlanta. Resentment flooded through me, and I crossed my arms, refusing to acknowledge the fluttering in my stomach.

"Ready to go?" Mom asked, looking expectantly into the backseat at me. I nodded and she accelerated. In an instant, a cloud of dust obscured my view of the house.

We rode in silence. My request for a change of custody had come as a surprise to my mom. She'd never challenged the original arrangements over the years, had never pumped me for information or probed to find his failings as a father. It was like she wanted him to be a good dad, was even rooting for him. When I'd insisted on talking in private with the court-appointed mediator, she hadn't questioned it. She'd never tried to get me to explain why I wanted to move back to live with her.

Now, as we weaved in and out of the fast lane, she kept her end of whatever unspoken agreement she had with my dad and left me to my own thoughts. But I didn't want to think. Instead, I let the steady hum of the asphalt under the tires lull me into a half-sleep.

"Here we are," Mom said briskly, jolting me out of my trance as she made a sharp turn. The two hours had gone swiftly, and I was surprised to see that we were in a neat subdivision, almost home.

My mom still lived in the same big house in the suburbs we'd had before my parents separated. It made no sense. She had to drive miles to get to the airport. She lived alone. The house was a massive colonial looming ahead of us at the end of a cul-de-sac: great for a family with young kids, a bit much if you were a single not-quite-divorcée.

The perfection of it was jarring after living as we did in Alabama. Even though Dad and I technically lived in a decent neighborhood (thanks to the generous check Mom sent every month), our house was pretty sad. Dad had blocked out most of the windows with aluminum foil, nailing their sashes shut, and had installed double deadbolts on every door. The yard was a dead zone with bare patches of dirt and stubby clumps of straw, all that was left of the bushes some previous owner had planted. From the mint green and plum wallpaper that looked like it came from an old Holiday Inn to the saggy garage door, the entire place looked like someone had abandoned it circa 1992. The covenants had expired on our neighborhood, so the neighbors just shook their heads and whispered among themselves about what a shame it was.

That wasn't the only thing they whispered about us. My dad had embraced an extreme religious-slash-survivalist lifestyle that was way outside the bounds of any normal church. He'd raised me like a hunted thing, always wary, pushing well-meaning neighbors away to keep me isolated from the "threat"-whatever threat it was that he imagined. We lived on the edges of social acceptability, my daily trips to school tolerated only because of the legalities and my mom's refusal to let him homeschool me. Between his erratic behavior and the story of my past, we were outcasts, tolerated at best in the small town in which he raised me. But now, all that was going to be over at last.

I felt a little twinge looking up at my new home as we pulled up the driveway. With its pretty white shutters, sparkling panes, and wide expanse of green grass, it should have been cheery, but the yawning windows looked just as sad to me. As she pulled into the spotless garage, I wondered again why Mom had lived here by herself all these years.