Free Renegade by Amy Carol Reeves Page A

working on a cure. After all, the Conclave needed her; they needed her to care for their many animals, to guard their wealth.
    She feared she would always be as she was now.
    Wearily, she had changed the subject, but her mind kept returning to that redheaded woman—Caroline.
    Max reclined a bit, leaning back upon her. He stared up at the ceiling as he smoked, deep in concentration. Seraphina felt her jealously flare up. A woman in the Conclave … but a woman who could travel and study with them, who would see more of the world than she had. Seraphina always felt like a child, pushing against the glass walls of a fabulous world that she could not venture into.
    Petey roared in his cage, only seconds before lightning cracked in the sky outside. The tiger always roared before the fiercest storms, and that night there was a terrible one.
    She leaned over, curling into Max. She wondered where his thoughts were. She knew that he had mental powers and physical powers that others did not—psychic abilities, the ability to climb down walls, defy gravity. The elixir had had this odd effect upon him, and he was almost as mythical as she was. She wished now that she had his mental powers, that she could see his visions, that his thoughts would slip out toward her mind like water. He had shared so much with her. Now he seemed distracted, and she was interested in his sealed-away thoughts. She wondered if he thought of Caroline; she wanted him to be hers alone. Only hers.
    “How long are you staying?” she had asked, letting her gown slip away a bit from her shoulders.
    She had his attention in that instant.
    He ran his hand along her back, along her tattoo, which was only slightly raised in scar tissue and ink. She had requested that her tattoo be drawn larger than those on the other Conclave members, that it cover her entire back. She had embraced her position within the Conclave with sorrow and relish. At first, she had thought the immortality would be a gift, giving her power she had not had in her mortal life, but eventually realized that she had not only become their pet, but their slave. She had not seen the other Conclave members since they had made her immortal, after … she rarely allowed herself to think about that time.
    Also, she couldn’t think of how Robert Buck, and especially Julian Bartlett, had abandoned her. For years now, Max had been the one to supply her, to bring her a yearly dose of the elixir. She took her elixir with him, without ceremony, when he came to inject a concentrated formula into all of the animals.
    “Only two nights,” Max had said finally. “I must leave the following morning.”
    She had stood, the fire and storm sounds roaring. She pulled the ribbon that held her gown together, letting it fall to the floor.
    His stays were too short. Always too short.
    It stormed. For two nights and an entire day. On the morning he left, the storm finally moved eastward—away from her world.
    Often over the years, from the tall craggy peak where she now rested, she would watch him row away from her island. Now, sunlight broke through a crack in the black storm clouds and she stretched her back in the beam. Shiny. Indestructible. Dense. As she coiled her tail, Seraphina’s thoughts turned to her old life—to the days before the transformations, before her life had fallen into this beautiful placid ruin.
    Reflecting on her human life could be too painful. It was only here, in her monster form, that she could allow herself to think of the time before she became an immortal freak.
    That life, in most respects, had been one of ease. Her father was the wealthiest Scotsman on the island, her family’s estate just outside the nearest Orkney isle seaside town of Bromwell. She thought now of how many lives had started and ended while she lived out her decades on her island home, just across the waters from Bromwell. She had been forbidden by the Conclave from going there. Still, she often wondered about her