Boundless (Unearthly, #3)(78)

I nod, dry my eyes on my shirt, and try to smile. It’s not fair of me to expect too much from the congregation. They’ve tried to help us in every way they could. They even offered to send a couple scouts to look for Jeffrey this week, to warn him, but I didn’t think he’d listen to any of them.

“We’ve got to lean on each other,” Billy says, squeezing me.

“Thanks.” I shift my weight to lean heavily against her, and she laughs.

“That’s my girl. Now come on. Let’s get you two on the road.” She keeps her arm around me as we walk to the edge of the meadow. “You call me,” she says, at the point where we’re supposed to say good-bye. “Anytime, day or night. I mean it. I’ve got your back.”

“Wait,” I say. I turn to Christian. I want to join the congregation, I say, and I don’t know why it embarrasses me to tell him, but it does. Officially, I mean, I clarify, since it seems like, in some ways, I’ve been a member of this group all along.

I’ve been thinking about this for the entire fourteen-hour drive from Nebraska. Longer than that, even. I’ve thought about becoming a member of the congregation since the first time I came to this meadow. Mom and I had a talk about it. I asked her, “So will I be expected to join the congregation now?” and she smiled and said it was something I would have to decide for myself.

“It’s not something to be done lightly,” she said. “It’s a great commitment, you understand, binding yourself to these people, to this cause, for life.”

“Commitment?” I repeated. “Well, when you put it like that, maybe I’ll wait.”

She laughed. “When the time is right, you’ll know,” she said.

It feels like the time is right.

Do you mind waiting? I ask Christian.

No, of course not, he says. He understands. He joined the congregation last year, but he doesn’t often talk about why.

I did it because I wanted to be part of them, he says. I know on the outside they might seem like a bickering, badgering, half-dysfunctional family, but underneath all that, they’re trying to do the right thing. They’re fighting on the side of good, in every way they know how.

He’s remembering the way they came together after his mother was killed. Protected him. Comforted him. Stopped by with meals so he didn’t starve while his uncle learned how to cook for a ten-year-old vegetarian. They became his family, too.

I turn to Billy, who’s been waiting patiently for me to say something out loud. “I don’t know the rules, if I have to be invited or perform some special task or something, but I want to join the congregation. I want to fight on the side of good.” My voice wobbles on the word fight, because I can’t fight. I’ve already proven that. But this isn’t a fight with glory swords they’re talking about. Christian’s right—it’s family, the only family I have left. I need to do something. I need to stand for something tangible and good, the way my mother did. I need to try. “Can I do that, before I go?”

“You bet,” she says, and she takes me to find Stephen. We find him reclining in one of those collapsible camping chairs near his tent, reading a large leather-bound book.

“Clara would like to join us,” Billy tells him.

For all of two seconds Stephen thinks she just means I want to join them for roasting marshmallows or something, but then he sees the look on my face. “Ah,” he says. “I see. I’ll call the others.”

Within ten minutes I’m standing in the innermost ring of an outward-spreading circle of angel-bloods, the entire congregation assembled again in the middle of the meadow, and every single one of them is looking right at me. I try not to squirm. Stephen asks me a single question: “Do you promise to serve the light, to fight for the side of good, to love and protect the others who serve alongside you?”

I say I do. In that way it’s kind of like a wedding ceremony.

The congregation unfurls their wings. I’ve seen them do this before, with my mother, when they were saying good-bye to her the last time I was here. But now it’s me in the center of the circle, and it’s night, so when they summon glory around me, it kind of feels like the sun rising in my soul. I haven’t felt glory since the Garter, and something releases inside when the light floods me. I feel warm, for the first time in more than a week. I feel safe. I feel loved. Their light fills the meadow, and it’s different from the glory I call up in myself, fuller, like the beating heart of every person in the circle is my heart, and their breath is my breath, their voices my voice.

God is with us, they say in Latin, for what I assume is the team motto, their words a swelling hum around me. Clara lux in obscuro. Bright light in the darkness.

“I’m thinking about Chicago,” Christian says, the day after we get back to Lincoln. He’s sitting at the dining table in our hotel, surfing the internet on his laptop.

I look up from where I’m preparing Web’s morning bottle. “What are you thinking about it?”

“We should move there,” he says. “I’ve found us the perfect little house.”

I promptly lose count of how many spoonfuls of powdered formula I’ve scooped into the bottle. “Oh. A house.” He’s looking at houses. For us. Even though I feel lighter after the glory in the meadow the other night, the idea of hiding away with Christian and Web, creating a whole new identity for myself, still doesn’t sit right.