Free Prophet by Jennifer Bosworth Page B

apart. He was instantly soaked from head to foot. He heard his father shouting for him to get back inside, but for once he ignored the prophet. He slammed the church doors shut and rammed the only thing he could find, a piece of broken two-by-four, through the handles.
    It wouldn’t keep his father and the Followers inside long, but it gave him time.
    Rance sprinted around to the side of the church where the cellar door was located. But he should have paused to think before rushing out into the rain. The cellar was padlocked.
    Rance pounded on the wooden doors. “Olivia! Can you hear me! Please answer!”
    No sound. And no time to wait for it.
    Rance had to break through the door before his father and the Followers stopped him. Before Olivia drowned in the cellar. Before the buried dead were washed loose from their graves, and Olivia floated with them. In the dark. In the dark, where he must go to save her.
    “Rance!” He heard his father’s distant voice. “You stop this! I command it! God must judge us all! He must judge us all!”
    Another bolt of lightning drew a jagged line across the clouds, illuminating, for a moment, a shovel lying against the wall of the nearby toolshed. Rance slipped and skidded through the mud and snatched it up.
    He raised it high above his head and brought it down on the padlock. It did not break. He tried again. Nothing.
    He pictured Olivia’s golden-green eyes and sun-bright hair in his mind, and raised the shovel once more before bringing it down with every ounce of strength he had.
    He felt the charge before he really felt it. It tugged at his hair and woke his nerve endings and made his heart stutter.
    The lightning filled him, washed everything to perfect, pristine white. Washed away Olivia’s face.
     
    Rance had never been in a hospital, not even when he was born. So when he opened his eyes and found himself in an all-white room with white sheets pulled to his chest, he wondered if he had died. His vision was blurry, which made everything around him appear soft, heavenly. He blinked a hundred times, but the blurriness remained, as though he were looking through a sheet of ice.
    Monitors beeped at a slow, steady pace. Rance began to remember what had happened before everything turned white: the storm and his attempt to free Olivia from the cellar, how he’d raised the shovel above his head, turning himself into a perfect lightning rod.
    And the lightning had come for him. Come to judge him.
    The beeping became faster and faster. Rance’s right hand began to feel hot to the point of pain, tingling with a fidgety, electric feeling.
    He held his right hand before his eyes and saw, through the filmy veil that obscured his vision, veins of red on the palm of his hand, like it had been drizzled in blood.
    There was a pounding in his head, a buzzing in his ears, and then a voice spoke so clearly inside his mind that Rance thought at first there must be someone else in the room.
    Now you bear the mark. There is great work ahead for you. Gather your Apostles, for you are the new prophet of the Church of Light. The power is in your hands, and with your hands you must do the work of God.
    Footsteps. Three indistinct figures entered, and the voice ceased speaking.
    “He’s awake,” a woman said, and began touching him, checking the needle he hadn’t even realized was in his arm until she jostled it.
    “There’s something wrong with his eyes.” His father’s voice filled the room, always deep and booming, the way it was when he gave a sermon.
    “I’m afraid he’s developing cataracts,” another man said. His coat was white, but not his pants. They were black. He was no Follower. “It’s not a common aftereffect of being struck by lightning, but it has been known to happen.”
    “His hair…when will its color return?”
    His hair? What was wrong with his hair? Rance wished for a mirror.
    “We don’t know,” the white-coated man answered.
    “I thought you people were supposed