The Renegade

Chapter 9

I woke up to the same pain I had unknowingly passed out to. I opened my eyes and saw the stone wall of my cave and relaxed. Even if I was in pain I was home. I was just about to get up when I saw a shadow on the wall and froze. Someone was behind me. It wasn't Truence either. I jumped up and swung around to see who the hell was in my cave raising my clawed wing, ready to strike.

"Iggy!" someone shouted. I winced as my shoulder ached with pain. I squeezed it with my other hand, hoping to end the pain. It only made it start bleeding again.

"Aven? It's just me, Iggy." A familiar voice said. I froze again, my mind lost in thought. Someone else yanked Iggy away from me.

"Iggy?" Suddenly it all came back to me. I let my wings fall to my sides where they draped down on the floor. My eyes fell to the floor along with them.

"Aven… are you okay?" Max asked. She was standing four feet away from me holding Iggy tightly back by the shoulders, I couldn't see but I'm pretty sure she was glaring at me. At first I didn't respond. I was ashamed again.

"Umm… I guess…" I slumped down against the wall turned my face away from all of them, feeling the burn of tears in my eyes. I sighed and try to compose myself.

Another psychotic attack…now their gonna think I'm nuts…am I?

"I'm sorry." I whispered quietly. I couldn't help but feel guilty.

"It's alright…" Max assured me but something in her voice made me uncertain. I didn't buy it. "You just scared us… umm… Iggy is going to sew your arm up for you now." She finished, guiding Iggy to me.

"Wait, the blind guy is going to give me stitches?" I said taking Iggy's hand when he reached out to find me. I felt him glare at me momentarily but then the heat of it suddenly dulled.

"Don't worry, Iggy is probably the best at sewing out of all of us, no offense Max." Fang reassured me. I trusted him but I didn't really know about what he had just said though.

What girl doesn't know how to sew? My mind forced me to think.

Forget it! You already know she doesn't like you. Just forget it…

"Okay…" I mumbled, carefully laying myself back down on the cave floor. Iggy kneeled behind me and his shadow reappeared on the wall.

"Sorry if this hurts." He said doubtfully.

I can't feel the sting of the needle over the sting of the gaping hole in my shoulder but thanks for warning me.

"You know what you said about me before?" Iggy asked, his voice quiet enough so only we could hear.

"What? About 'the blind guy giving me stitches' thing? Sorry about that, it just seems pretty weird." I replied feeling the guilt that had been building up in me since I said that release.

"No, not that. You said that you and I see a lot of things the same way…" He recalled. My heart raced and out of all things I prayed that I had never said that. Never done anything about the flock when they were in my cave. Never even noticed that they were here. Iggy continued with the four words I never wanted to hear, "I know your blind."

I screamed inside and cried on the outside. No one except Truence had ever known about me being blind. Tears rolled down my face. My weakness is exposed.

"Aven, it's okay." He comforted me quietly.

"I'm not totally blind you know." I said grazing his hand, pausing him so I could sit up. "I have sort of the opposite of what normal people see. I can't see when it's too light; I have a 'white out'. I can only see in the dark and in shadows." I briefly wished I could see Iggy's reaction to all this but lost interest quickly. I had just told my deepest secret. Inside I begged Truence to forgive me for telling our secret.

He's dead; he can't be angry at or forgive you.

I don't know that…

What? That he's dead or that he can't forgive you from the test tube in the sky?

Both…

"When did you…" I started to ask but stopped myself. It wasn't right.

"You can ask." Iggy urged casually, his voice relaxed.

"Were you always blind?" I asked keeping my voice down.

"No." A simple question, an even simpler answer. I knew there was a story behind it but felt that I had already delved my fair share of personal questions.

"I was always this way." I commented. Silence followed my statement.

"Yeah at least you can still see at night though." Iggy said quietly with slight sadness in his voice.

"I'm sorry." I responded, not knowing what else to say.

"It's not your fault, it's the School's. Speaking of which, how did you escape?" He asked, raising his voice so the others could hear.

What is he talking about? Did they get to go to school like normal kids?

"I… I don't understand. I never went to school." I swallowed cautiously, hoping I didn't sound as stupid and clueless as I felt. I felt everyone's eyes on me and bit my lip in embarrassment.

"Didn't you come from a lab run by Satan's scientists?" Iggy questioned, sounding almost as confused as I was.

"I… I don't know… I just remember waking up in this cave all beat up." I confessed. "I had a pretty big gash on my head and this." I stretched out my only working wing and displayed the two-foot long scar that ran across it. "I couldn't fly until it healed. Luckily, bats have almost no blood flow in the skin on our wings so it didn't take long to heal."

"We heal faster than normal people, too." the Gasman jumped in.

"Well, the skin of a normal bat is already the fastest healing tissue on the planet so we heal extra fast." I said trying my best to block my hate of kids from my sentence. I quickly rethought that statement and forced myself to hold in a gasp.

I said 'we'. Shoot… please don't notice. Please don't notice.

"So you just woke up here with no memory of anything at all?" Max said somewhat doubtingly.

"Yeah, I guess. I know just about as much as you do about me getting here." I sighed. I listened as Nudge and Angel sifted through everything in my storage and continued as Fang walked over to the girls and sat next to them, opening a newspaper and starting to read it's contents.

"How'd you get all this stuff?" Nudge asked enthusiastically. I sighed again. This wasn't going to help with winning over these guys' trust.

"Well, I'm kind of an urban legend around here. You know, like Bigfoot or the New Jersey Devil. I'm known as Hell's Angel." I once again felt all eyes on me and continued to speak. "I, basically… steal everything I need from RVs and campsites around here." I bit my lip and lowered my blinded eyes to the ground and waited for a reaction from one of the group.

"I'm finished, Aven. Do you have scissors around here?" Iggy said, saving me from more awkward periods of prolonged silence.

"There should be some somewhere in there." I pointed to the storage area and heard Angel find them and quietly bring them over to Iggy. As soon as he snipped the string I felt around my mangled arm. It still hurt but the time I spent passed out had dulled the pain slightly.

"Aven." Fang spoke only that word and I noticed the rhythm he had held in flipping the pages of the newspaper had suddenly stopped. "Is there something your not telling us?" I tensed as he made his way over to me still holding the newspaper. Iggy scooted away as he came over and squatted in front of me and held the newspaper in front of me. I panicked. Not only could I not see what he was holding in front of me, I probably had no explanation for whatever the picture was of without having to tell them more about myself or Truence.

"Well, the first thing I should tell you is that I'm blind and I can't see what you're holding in front of me." I said as calmly as I could manage, keeping my eyes looking straight ahead of me, whether that was at Fang or not. I reached out a hand and grazed the paper feeling for the heavy black ink that formed the heading.

"Hell's Angels Caught on Film"

"Your not the only one, are you?" He said the tone of his voice alarmingly serious. It brought an unknown fear of all of them into my view. "Who is he?"

"His name is Truence."

Author's Note: Yay! I think this is my longest chapter yet! And there's more to come. Please review, I hope you liked it! Till next chapter!