Exile (The Oneness Cycle) (16 page)

But then she heard the voice again—the voice that might be a woman’s, might be from the cloud, or might just be her own imagination.

Hold the torch high, and look around you.

The light of the torch, for a moment, did more to cast shadows and confusion than to illuminate. But Reese slowly rose, holding it still and high, and as her eyes focused, she caught her breath—for a very different reason this time.

“Incredible,” she muttered.

April had done this?

Revealed in flaring, living reality by the light, paintings covered every visible inch of the walls and ceiling. In character they reminded Reese of pictures of prehistoric cave paintings—April’s materials had been similar, apparently just red mud and the natural shapes and colours of the rock—but with far more detail. Rose vines grew, arched, and coiled throughout the mural, thorny and flowering.

But this wasn’t just about art.

The woman was there, beautiful and grim. “Do you see it?” she asked.

For a moment, Reese didn’t.

And then she did.

“The truth revealed,” the woman said.

Painted across the wall in excruciating detail was Reese’s own story.

And with it, the secret of the hive.

Chapter 13

The discovery that Reese was gone sent Mary and Richard into desperate searching. The hermit responded grimly, confirming his own opinion of her trustworthiness—clearly she was stronger than she’d allowed them to see and had been deliberately deceiving them. His best guess was that she’d come here to tear the shield or lead the demonic to his hiding place. Richard ignored his suggestions and hunted through the bush with Mary at his side, eventually wending their way up the bluffs behind the house and into a thicket of thorny bushes. It looked like Reese had been this way. The hermit trailed behind them, offering suggestions and occasionally water.

They hadn’t been in the thicket more than five minutes when the sound of a car pulling up to the house set Mary on high alert. She could just see the driveway from here, and she focused her eyes on it while staying low, hoping it was Chris and Tyler and the others—although this was too early, too soon for them to be back.

It wasn’t them. It was a green station wagon she had seen before. Relief flooded her, mixed with an unexpected caution.

David’s car. The Oneness was here.

“My God,” the hermit breathed. It was a prayer, not an expletive. “How have they come here?”

The two men and Mary had just rounded the corner to the house in time to see the car and David pushing his way through the front door, accompanied by four other men. Mary started forward to greet them, but Richard grabbed her arm and motioned for her to keep silent. They ducked back out of sight and found themselves a place from which to watch.

“They’re human,” Richard said grimly. “Your shield can’t keep them out.”

“I don’t understand,” Mary said. “David is one of us. Why aren’t we …”

“He is,” the hermit said. “Those others aren’t. The men with him are possessed.”

“They …” Mary stopped. “What?”

“This may be why Reese ran,” Richard said quietly. “She may have sensed them coming.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Mary said.

“Little has, lately.”

The men seemed to be searching the house. Crouching at Richard’s feet, Mary closed her eyes. She focused on the Spirit all around, on the power holding the world together, on the closeness of Richard and the hermit, on their combined strength. She focused and brought all these things together in the palm of her heart and lifted them in prayer.

The sensation came in a rush—expansion, contact. Eyes and ears.

Mary gasped.

Reese was nearby.

And April.

* * *

“I’m not waiting,” Chris said. “I don’t care what anyone says. My mother is in there with a couple of kidnappers, and I am not walking away without her.”

He was staring down Tony and Angelica, who had both insisted—and continued to insist—that they needed to wait for Richard. To drive the truck back to the hermit’s and tell him and Mary what had happened, and to come back in greater force, with the man of prayer and the leader of the village cell both with them. They didn’t know what they were facing here, but it was more than just demonic, and the twins weren’t confident of their ability to handle it. Better that they wait and do this properly.

Tyler had never felt so torn.

He had known Chris all his life. They were closer than brothers. It was Chris who had drawn Tyler into his world, had provided him with security, with friendship, with a place to call home. He had even shared his mother—Diane, who was in trouble now. But Tony and Angelica were part of a world Tyler desperately wanted to understand, a world he was beginning to trust more than his own. He saw the world as bigger than Chris did, understood that all this mess was far, far more than this single moment. That it was bigger than just one person or one threat.

“We need to wait,” Angelica stressed again. “They went after your mother because she’s Oneness. This is a strike on all of us. It’s foolish to try to do this on our own. It’s one thing to fight demons, but this time there are people involved. We have to be careful.”

“You followed Reese, didn’t you?” Chris asked. “When she wanted to do something foolish on her own and attack that hive? Isn’t that why some of you people threw her out?”

Tyler grimaced at the harsh words and the harsher tone. “Chris …”

Chris rounded on him. “That’s my mother in there, Tyler! She needs us now!”

“You’re right,” Tyler said, trying to swim his way through a sea of conflicting thoughts and emotions. “You’re right. She needs us. We need to help her.”

He turned to Tony and Angelica and repeated the words, beseeching: “We need to help her.”

“You don’t need their permission,” Chris snapped.

To both their surprise, Tony stepped between them and said, “All right. So what do we do?” He nodded to Chris. “You’re in charge. Tell us what to do and we’ll do it.”

Angelica stifled a protest. Chris raised an eyebrow. “You’re following me? I’m not one of you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Tony said. “Right is right. I’d like to wait for Richard, but you can’t, I can see that. So we’ll stand with you. Tell us what to do.”

Chris seemed taken aback, and for a moment he sought for words. “The attic,” he finally said. “There’s a door on the roof that leads into the attic. From there we can come down the back stairs and into the house. Tyler can go back to the door—pretend he decided he can’t wait till tomorrow for those dues. Be real insistent, get them both focused on him. There are two, right?”

Tyler nodded. “As far as we know.”

“While he’s doing that, Tony, you and me come down the stairs and get into the house. We find my mother and get her back up to the attic with us, then out over the roof before Tyler lets up on them.”

“What if I can’t keep their attention long enough?” Tyler asked. “Or they don’t both come to the door?”

“I’ll help with that,” Angelica said. “We’ll manage.”

* * *

Diane sat ramrod straight, her fingers interlaced in her lap, with her eyes cast deliberately down and watching, peripherally but with all her attention fixed, the door to the kitchen. Hammer-man stood just a few feet away, his back to her, looking through her gauzy curtains into the street. The smaller man had parked himself by the door where Tyler had come knocking.

She had heard him, of course, knew what he was up to, and wanted to call out to him but did not dare. Not to call for help—to tell him to run.

Her inner eyes were going crazy. Flashing scenes at her with the regularity of blinking—flashing in and out of the world where she sat. Living room. Darkness. Living room. Blood. Living room. Demon. Living room …

Her heart beat hard and fast, pushing panic through her veins. She stiffened her whole body against it.

She was trying to pray.

Her hands shook, and she tightened her fingers.

Diane had never learned to pray. It was a skill, something to be trained in, and she had resisted. Had refused to learn, in fact. Prayer was a full entering in. It was a flinging wide, a plunge, a total surrender to Oneness, bringing the Spirit surging and then riding the wave like a surfer racing toward shore. One with the wave, the exhilaration, the spray; One with the very ocean.

Some were better at it than others. But the abandonment that was true prayer never left anyone unchanged, and Diane had spent twenty years fighting to remain the same.

But now was different. Now was abandon yourself or lose everything. You gave everything when you surrendered to the Spirit, but you gave it to power, and sometimes the power turned and worked in your favour. That power was the only thing that could help her now. So she tried, desperately, to grasp the images flashing before her eyes and gather them into something coherent she could hold in her heart and offer—as a question, a request, an open door, a gap in the seawall to let the wave through.

Instead, panic kept balling up in her throat, and her racing heart made focus impossible.

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, she thought.

Finally willing.

After all these years.

Even if for no other reason than sheer, selfish self-preservation.

Hammer-man moved over a little and made a grunting noise to himself, perhaps responding to something he saw in the street. His partner in the kitchen bumped into the stove, rattling the burners. She could not fathom why they had come here. She had spent two decades making herself as irrelevant to them as possible. Two decades hiding from the Spirit and trying to make the Oneness pay. Keeping herself apart so the Oneness couldn’t have her, couldn’t access her gift, couldn’t love her, couldn’t consider themselves part of her. They didn’t deserve anything else. Not after what had happened to Douglas.

Minutes ticked past, and the panic subsided somewhat as the images thinned and lessened. Memory took their place, scenes rehearsed a thousand angry, grieving times.

The world did not often take notice of the Oneness. Diane had told Chris as much—they were hidden in plain sight. Until something happened to bring the war out of the shadows. Then, hostile, vengeful, malicious, the devils—the slanderers—came boiling into the lives of human beings and tore into the Oneness with all the collected powers of human fear and demon hate. The results took many forms. Twenty years ago it had taken the form of an out-and-out pogrom. Citing suspicion of cult activities, police had surrounded a large Oneness cell in the countryside and firebombed it, killing men, women, and children. A few people got out. Stragglers were chased—some by the police, some by demons, some by others who hounded them down and murdered them. There had been other factors in it all, witchcraft, possession. The police had not meant for things to get out of hand as they had. The enemy had engineered it all.

Mary’s family were some of the few. The father and husband, Sam, had packed his wife and four children in a station wagon and just hit the road, driving as far and as fast as he could. Mary, his twin sister, accompanied them. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs, and when they ran out of gas, they left the car and started walking. Douglas found them on the side of the road and picked them up. He’d only intended to take them into town, get them to a phone or something so they could find help. Of course, he had no idea when he saw them walking single-file along the highway how much trouble they were in. Or how electrifying their presence would be.

Most of all, he hadn’t expected their love. The children were just children—the same mix of precocious and shy that would be expected in most families. But Sam, his wife, and Mary—they were different. Something about the way they interacted, the way they spoke, the way their eyes met exposed something deep inside Diane’s husband that undid him completely. He didn’t drop them off somewhere. He brought them home and hid them.

At first Diane hadn’t known what to think of them, but after they’d been in the house twenty minutes, she was as sucked in as Douglas was. Conversation happened, and that night over multiple pots of coffee, their talk turned the world upside down and inside out. They were electric, magnetic, true. Especially Mary. From the moment Sam’s twin sister walked into the house, Diane knew nothing would ever be the same. Mary wasn’t just a new acquaintance, not just a potential friend. She was a promise of a life more real, more full and beautiful, than anything Diane had never known.

In the end it was Mary’s fault, everything that had happened.

The police came looking for them, and Douglas lied and managed to turn them away. Sam and his wife wanted to leave. Others would come after them; they decided it was too dangerous to Douglas and Diane for them to stay. They should go find a place in the cliffs, hide away from people, and try to fight the demons off. Sam was certain that they were being followed. Douglas hated the idea—he’d already made the family his responsibility and had no intention of letting them go out from under his protection until it was safe. But Sam was as iron willed as Douglas, and he would have won if Mary hadn’t talked him out of it.

That night she had convinced Sam that staying with the Sawyers was the right thing to do. That the Spirit had led them here, and here was where they should remain. She had convinced him that even if it cost something, it was the better thing to do. The woman had a tongue like silver. Even Diane believed her.

In fact, that night Diane crossed over. As Mary spoke of the Spirit and the world of the Oneness, Diane believed it—and as Mary held out her hand, Diane took it and became one of them.

Douglas did not. Mary had told Diane, with a twinkle in her eye, that he wouldn’t resist long. It was humbling to cross over—there was a surrender, an undoing of yourself to find yourself again as part of something bigger. It was hard for some to do. Especially a man as proud and self-sufficient as Diane Sawyer’s husband.

They lived there two months. The Sawyer house functioned like a cell, with Diane learning that she had a gift of eyes and Sam teaching her about prayer and Mary teaching her about living connected. The world was transformed. Douglas admired his wife’s new identity but wouldn’t enter it with her. She turned her first prayers in the direction of his conversion.