Exile (The Oneness Cycle) (10 page)

Well, April reflected as she lay on the floor of the cavern after a long painting spell, letting the rock overhead meld into the familiar fuzzy darkness that was part absence of light and part April’s own weariness, no one in the cloud was infallible.

A deeper darkness was pressing in. She could feel it—a pressure gathering around her head, around her heart. Feebly, she fought it—Teresa had told her many times to fight it. But she was so tired.

April closed her eyes.

Seated at April’s side, Teresa bowed her head and said a prayer for her friend.

Chapter 8

The roar of passing semitrucks on the highway dulled Reese’s discomfort as she rode in silence beside the kindly old man who had picked her up. Awkward but trying his best to be helpful, he tried to make conversation once or twice before giving up and contenting himself with driving. After that the trucks and the miles took over, and neither felt a need to talk.

It was an hour’s drive into Lincoln, and to her surprise he took her all the way. He dropped her off next to a corner store and stuffed a few dollars into her hand. Genuinely grateful, she thanked him.

“It was nothing,” he said, and drove off. Untrue, she thought. Kindness is always something. His unassuming help made her think of Tyler and Chris, and she pushed away a sense of guilt for leaving them. She had done it
for
them, after all. The enemy was after her. Better that she die here, in a city so full of people that everyone was anonymous, in an alley or a parking lot somewhere, than that the final fight happen in the village where its repercussions would touch everyone.

Exile she might be, but Reese had never stopped thinking in terms of connection. All things were connected, after all, though few recognized or believed it. The Oneness was different because they recognized and threw themselves into the connection. For that reason they functioned as the threads holding together a world that was trying to break itself apart.

The door buzzed as Reese pushed her way into the corner store. She stood at the counter in the back of the store for a moment, the floor beneath her scuffed and dirty from those who had come before her. Her eyes roved over the line of coffee thermoses, paper cups in three different sizes, and a sausage warmer next to a basket of half-warmed pastries. Quickly counting out the money in her hand, she grabbed a plastic-wrapped danish and a large coffee. The clerk barely acknowledged her as he took her money and made scant change.

Back outside, Reese looked over the street and considered where to go. The Lincoln skyline—nothing impressive, just a few central banks, law firms, and other businesses in three midsize skyscrapers—loomed to the west, probably a twenty-minute walk away. On the other hand, she could stay out here in the grungier, less professional part of town, with its gas stations and restaurants and corner stores crowding the main streets and housing divisions at the back of them.

Or she could go to the warehouse.

The thought struck her with cold force. She looked down at her hand, picturing the sword forming there. Why not? She was going to die anyway—and if it came down to it, she wanted to. So why not wade back into the thick of the hive’s power and take out as many of the enemy as she could?

Why not do one last thing for the Oneness, even if they didn’t want her help anymore?

She would be going alone. No one else to get hurt. And no need to stand around on street corners and wait for an attack.

But what if she couldn’t access the sword? What if that last vestige of Oneness had worn off? She wasn’t sure why it had stayed in the first place. Chances were good she would find herself in the midst of a demonic swarm unarmed.

You’re going to die either way, she reminded herself. Six of one.

She flexed her hand and remembered when she had clutched Patrick’s while he died. He had gripped so tightly, and she had vowed to avenge him.

Well, she would keep the vow.

Resolute, she started down the street. She’d had the man drop her off in an unideal part of town—it would take her forty minutes to get to the industrial quarter where the warehouse was. That was okay. She’d have time to plan.

* * *

As they barrelled down the highway in Chris’s truck, Tyler kept casting glances at the tall black man who shared the back bench with him. Something about Richard’s presence staggered him. It was like the man carried the aura of some other world on his shoulders. Every time Tyler got near him, he felt like was brushing up against the universe.

Mary’s earlier words bothered him more the closer they got to Lincoln.
This is a supernatural battle. You can’t fight it.
It was true, wasn’t it? He and Chris weren’t equipped for this. He’d seen demons twice now, both attacking without warning, and if Reese hadn’t been so quick—and armed—he might be at the bottom of the bay at this moment. Richard and Mary didn’t look like they were carrying swords, but they possessed something—some kind of power—nevertheless. He could feel it. Especially on the man.

Richard looked over and caught Tyler staring. Tyler jerked his head away, but he didn’t miss Richard’s smile. “You have something you want to ask me?”

A semi on the left honked as Chris pulled in front of it, dodging heavier traffic coming up on the right.

“I was just wondering about you,” Tyler said honestly. “And about how to fight this … whatever we’re going to fight.”

“We hope you won’t have to,” Richard said. “But what were you wondering about me?”

“You have a … an aura. Something.” Tyler shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

“I think I do.” Richard’s eyes were kind. “You’re feeling the power of prayer.”

“Prayer? Like ‘Now I lay me down to sleep’?”

Richard laughed. “Not exactly like that. Prayer is much more than recitation. It’s participation. It opens up pathways between heaven and earth and brings power down by lifting weakness up.”

“That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

“But it’s what you’re feeling.”

Tyler gave it some thought. “So you’re like this because why? You’re not praying right now.”

Richard thought out the question before answering it. “Prayer can be continuous, without ceasing,” he said. “It’s a discipline of keeping your heart fixed. I try to do that. So right now I am praying, in a way. But I’m also talking to you, so my focus is elsewhere, yes. I’m ‘like this,’ as you put it, because I’m prayed up, as some folks would put it. I’ve been praying and fasting since April disappeared.”

“Wait, that was days ago,” Tyler said, sitting up a little straighter. “You haven’t eaten since then?”

“No.”

“But all this praying and fasting didn’t help you find her,” Tyler pointed out. “You still don’t know where she is. And now you’re not even looking—you’re chasing down Reese.”

Richard looked troubled. “I hope Reese will lead us to April. You’re right, I haven’t found her.”

“But why not? With this supernatural access of yours …”

“It’s not a vending machine,” Richard said. “Put something in and get whatever you ask for out, just like that. Sometimes you don’t even know what you’re asking for. And it’s not a game of odds—just keep trying and eventually you’ll get lucky. It’s participation, remember. I don’t pray to get around the plan; I pray to be part of it.”

“The plan?” Tyler asked.

Mary spoke this time. She’d been following the conversation from the seat beside Chris. “The world is unfolding according to design. Think of a tapestry with different threads connecting just as they are meant to. We call those threads plans. They are directed—they have purpose. But we are
in
the tapestry, so we can’t see where every thread leads until we get there.” She reflected. “Sometimes not even then.”

“So all this … Reese getting her heart broken, and your friend being kidnapped or killed, and demon attacks, all that … this is all some plan?”

“I know it’s hard to understand,” Richard said. “But we aren’t alone in this world. We all make choices, take actions, do things—for ourselves, to one another. We make up the fibres in the tapestry, and every one is truly significant. But another hand guides every fibre into threads and the threads into a picture, a plan. Nothing is disconnected, and nothing is outside the Spirit.”

“Not even us?”

The question came from Chris, who despite driving aggressively, almost angrily, was following the conversation. His question was carefully controlled.

“Mary said we couldn’t fight this battle because we aren’t supernatural,” Chris pointed out. “Because we aren’t like you. But you’re telling me we’re part of this plan business too? That we’re in the Spirit somehow just like you are?”

“Yes,” Richard answered. “Nothing that exists exists outside the Spirit. The difference between us is not that. The difference is that we are not only inside the Spirit, but the Spirit is inside us. And that is not true of you.”

The words sounded harsh, yet Tyler believed them fully. He could feel the difference. He was not what Richard was. A thousand “Now I lay me down to sleeps” would never call down the kind of power that was swirling around Richard like dust motes in light. And he could feel other things too. He and Chris were close, like brothers, but they weren’t like Mary and Richard. In some invisible way Tyler could not see but only feel, he knew they were truly One. He wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that their hearts were beating in sync.

“How do you change?” Chris asked. “What makes somebody Oneness? Or were you just all born like this?”

“Not at first,” Mary said. “You become Oneness when you are born a second time—born of the Spirit.”

“So how do you do that?”

Richard smiled gently. “That is a mystery. No one really knows.”

Tyler eyed Chris nervously. His friend was more pent up than Tyler had ever seen him. For some reason these people mattered to Chris in a way that they didn’t to Tyler, even though he was the one who had seen demons and ghosts and talked to Reese at length. These people with their non-answers might make Chris explode.

To Tyler’s surprise, Chris was silent. He swerved into the passing lane again, speeding past a convoy of dump trucks, and then pulled back into the right. A sign declared it was only twenty miles to Lincoln.

“How did it happen to my mother?” he asked, finally.

Tyler bit his tongue in shock. Diane was Oneness?

It made … sense. But she wasn’t quite like these other two. His mind raced. She had never claimed to be Oneness. She was intuitive and spiritual in a way others weren’t, but she wasn’t eager to claim it and never seemed happy when she shared things she knew. Was that why she was so different from these two? Because she didn’t want to be what they had embraced?

“The same way it happens to any of us,” Mary said. “She looked into the truth and was born of it.”

Tyler sighed heavily. “You people aren’t real helpful.”

Richard shrugged apologetically. “There isn’t a good way to explain it. You will know when the Spirit is seeking you. At some point you yield—or you don’t. The moment of yielding is the moment of birth.”

“And then what?”

“And then you are alive. Forever.”

The words brought Patrick to mind. What had he said?
We are risen.

“What is it like to be one of you?” Tyler asked.

Mary answered, “It’s hard. But we would never trade it.”

“My mother would,” Chris said. His voice was hard again.

“We don’t know why your mother is the way she is,” Richard started, but Mary gave him a look, and he stopped. “To be honest, I didn’t know about your mother,” Richard finished. “Not until we went to her to ask for help finding April.”

“Help that she wouldn’t give you.”

“I don’t think she had anything to offer us, or she would have,” Mary said. “Your mother tries to stay out of conscious participation in the plans as much as she can. But she doesn’t work against us.”

Tyler raised an eyebrow and waited for more explanation, but none came. He sensed that Mary and Chris both understood this dynamic better than he or even Richard. At least this explained why Chris seemed so tense. It wasn’t just that he was worried about Reese. This was personal.

The exit loomed up under an overhang on the right, and Chris pulled off the freeway, following Mary’s hastily given directions. The truck bounced through a pothole as it pulled onto a city street in a dingy, grass-through-the-sidewalks neighbourhood. “Are you sure this is the right place?” Tyler asked. For some reason he’d expected the Oneness to be headquartered somewhere more impressive.

“This is it,” Mary said. She smiled at him like she knew what he was thinking. “Never judge a book by its cover.”

Tyler shrugged, uncomfortable, and Mary told Chris to take a left at the light. They drove past a corner grocery store with its windows plastered with flyers and took a few more potholes on their way to the end of the street. Two blocks down they pulled up in front of a two-story vinyl-sided house with a front porch covered in vines. The house was big for the lot; strips of grass on each side were all that constituted a yard. The asphalt driveway was crammed with four cars; other cars lined the street on either side, belonging to who-knew-what homes. Although the house looked old, it and the yard belonging to it were neat and clean—less rundown, overall, than any of the surrounding homes.

Chris found a place to park a few houses down, and all four piled out of the truck. Richard cleared his throat. “Well, we’re here.”

With a nod to Mary, Richard took the lead. Chris and Tyler fell in behind them, Tyler feeling particularly conspicuous. Could anyone in this distinctly city neighbourhood tell how much he and Chris didn’t belong here? They were fishermen and village boys through and through. Thank God.

As they turned up the crowded driveway to the front door, Richard paused, looked over at Mary again, and then addressed the boys. “I think it’s best if you don’t mention Reese,” he said. “Perhaps not Patrick either. In fact, maybe you’d better let Mary and I do all the talking.”

“Fine with us,” Chris said, and Tyler nodded. He wasn’t sure what in the world he would say to these people anyway.