Exile (The Oneness Cycle) (18 page)

She looked up, the scenes glimmering in the torchlight. The little village cell was there, and Chris and Tyler. The woman she had seen on the path and in the cave had been drawn in especially vivid detail, even the compassion in her eyes showing. She swallowed hard at the images of herself, of the hive, of the hive’s secret. Her mouth set in a grim line.

“And we’ll make sure this story finishes well,” she heard herself say.

Sore, she stood and put the torch out in the wet earth around the edges of the cave. The light outside temporarily blinded her as she emerged, the low evening sun shining directly into her eyes. Leaving April behind went against all her instincts, but she reasoned that the girl had been left to die; no one was likely to come after her now, and she was better off sheltered in the cave than being carried or dragged by Reese, who would likely collapse if she tried it. She wasn’t happy with her own weakness, but going back to Richard and Mary was the best thing she could do.

She wondered if they were still arguing with the hermit. Maybe so, she told herself. It doesn’t matter. You know the truth now.

Knew it, but could not feel it. She felt as exiled as she had when she entered the cave. The only new emotion—rising and growing the longer the painting lingered in her mind—was anger. Outrage, even, carrying with it a blinding new hurt but acting as its own defence against that hurt. She had not been exiled by the Spirit; she had never been in the wrong. She had been targeted—mercilessly and maliciously targeted by one she had trusted.

Deliberately, she ducked the boiling emotion by turning her thoughts back to April. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she pushed herself back up the path toward the hermit’s house.

She was close enough to hear when the gun went off. Running was her first response, her automatic reaction, but her feet slipped on the sandy path—or just gave up placing themselves properly—and she went down. As she did, she felt the bleeding wound in her side tear and gape further. She rolled over and stared. Blood was spreading across her abdomen, staining her hands. She had already stained the ground where she had fallen.

Suddenly scared, she pushed herself up and forced her legs to work again, to carry her toward the hermit. She heard Mary’s scream and the sounds of a fight. The cliffs were blurring on every side.
No, no, no. Not now.
She couldn’t pass out now. She had to make it back in time to help …

Her legs refused to keep holding her up, and she crawled forward, one hand clutching her side, blood soaking her sleeve and dripping to the ground beneath her. She gritted her teeth and crawled up over a ridge, just in time to see the station wagon pull away.

David. He’d found them.

Shivering, and then convulsing, she dragged herself another three feet toward a hollow in the cliff and then fell forward.

Letting out a long groan, she realized she wasn’t alone.

The hermit was there.

He was staring at her.

He was dead. Wasn’t he?

He wasn’t … he moved. His hand inched up toward her face.

She licked her lips, wanting to tell him the truth.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

His eyes still stared like a dead man’s; she wasn’t even sure he could see her. But he knew she was there. She tried to answer him but couldn’t. Her voice too was bleeding out into the sandy ground.

“I was wrong,” he went on. “You were cloaked … I was wrong. I should have helped you. Forgive me.”

One of them moved—she wasn’t sure who—close enough that the hermit’s hand could reach her. He laid it on her forehead and whispered something in a language she did not know—Spirit tongue, Spirit words. As he spoke them, something inside her fluttered to life, and a warmth began to spread throughout her body.

“I am … a healer,” he told her. “The Spirit brought you to me to be healed. I’m sorry.”

She got the words out seconds before he breathed his last. “I forgive you.”

On her back, she gazed up at the sky. It was intensely blue—hardly a cloud—and the tops of pine trees and the sandy sweep of ridges rimmed it. The sun slanted down, its rays softening as the day drew to a close. She lay next to a dead man and mulled over his words as the warmth spread and pulsed through her—a miracle, she thought. She ought to be dead as he was. She ought to be bleeding to death. But the bleeding had stopped. And she was getting stronger.

The last act of mercy by the hermit of Tempter’s Mountain was doing its work. And a good thing, too, she thought. No one else knew where April was. No one else knew that David had taken Richard and Mary. And no one else knew the truth about the hive, about the betrayal—

She still felt herself to be an exile, but as she gained strength and stared into the sky, Reese knew it didn’t matter. There was work to be done, and she was the only one who could do it.

Chapter 15

Maybe it was his growing habit of trying to imagine the world from a Oneness perspective. Or maybe stress was just causing him to see things. Either way, Tyler was growing more aware by the minute of a world more buzzingly alive, both more glorious and more menacing, than he had ever before imagined.

“Kecak,” Hammer-man answered his cell phone. “Yeah, we got them.”

Tyler heard the voice on the other end say something, but he couldn’t make out words. Just another thug taking orders from another crime boss, like he’d seen a million times on TV as a kid. Not that Tyler had ever expected to get mixed up in the world of organized crime, but guns and abductions and thugs with cell phones were about as grittily real-world as you could get.

Except that he was pretty sure both these men were demon possessed, and he could still see Patrick watching.

It was a weird world Reese had pulled him into.

Beside him, leaning against the wall inside Diane’s kitchen, Tony was as white as a proverbial ghost. (Real ghosts, if Patrick was anything like representative, were not pale at all.) He sat with his jaw locked against the pain of the bullet lodged just above his knee, and he was sweating. Angelica sat beside him looking nearly as pale as her twin. All three were trussed hand and foot with plastic zip ties. Chris and Diane sat across from them, leaning against the stove, and the tattooed man stalked between the rows, glowering down at them and brandishing an obvious gun. Angelica glared back at him. Tyler did not. He had once earlier—looked into the man’s eyes. He saw something inhuman there, a presence darting around behind the man’s face, and it shook him so badly he kept his eyes down.

Can’t you do something?
he wondered in Patrick’s direction, asking himself at the same time whether ghosts could really be expected to read minds. Maybe they could if you were Oneness. Patrick was standing in the window, feet on the sill, head bent because he was too tall to fit in there, but he did nothing. The dimming light of dusk made him seem even more a shadow than usual.

Hammer-man clipped his cell phone shut. “Let’s get ’em in the car. We’re going to the warehouse.”

Tattoos grinned ghoulishly. He grabbed Angelica’s arm and hauled her to her feet. Her ankles were tied too closely together to keep her balanced, but he kept her from falling. “Open the trunk.”

They had pulled their car up so it was only feet from the kitchen door, tucked behind the house where neighbours wouldn’t see. Hammer-man obeyed, shoving a few things out of the way. As he pulled his head back up from the depths of the trunk, he paused and scanned the sky. “You hear anything?”

Tattoos frowned. “No.”

“Listen!” the bigger thug insisted.

Dumping Angelica into the trunk, Tattoos paused. “Sounds like demons.”

“So no problem, right?” Hammer-man said. But he sounded nervous.

Both men picked up their pace, and Tyler found himself grabbed and shoved headfirst into the trunk, falling on his shoulder and landing with his feet in Angelica’s face.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Shh,” she shot back. “Listen.”

Tony was dumped in after them, moaning with the pain and temporarily distracting both twins. Hammer-man slammed the trunk shut.

But Tyler was listening now.

He heard it at first like a high-up, far-off screech, growing louder like a plane diving or a bomb dropping. Then the sound grew to a roar, both thugs were cursing and someone else—someone new—was shouting something. Car doors slammed and the car roared to life, grinding gravel under its tires. All three occupants of the trunk slammed into the car frame and each other.

“Hang in there, Tony,” Angelica said.

But Tyler was exulting.

Whatever had just happened, they had left Diane and Chris behind.

And the voice he had heard unmistakably belonged to Reese.

* * *

On the road in the old hermit’s Chevy truck, Reese had pushed the speed limit as far as she could without risking being pulled over. As soon as she reached the village, she headed straight for the harbour, parked at the main marina, and strode up the central street toward Diane’s. As she went, she deliberately loosed every emotion, every crippling cry of her soul: her anger, her grief, her horrifying sense of being alone. She kept her eyes fixed on the street that rose up the hill before her, willing her hands to stay unclenched and her spirit to stay open.

Why?

Why me? Why would you do this to me? How could you all look the other way—how could you buy into the lie? Don’t you know how badly I’ve hurt?

Tears blinded her, but she kept going, kept her heart open, let the questions turn into blind, twisting pain.

She had been a target from the moment she first stepped foot in this village—a magnet for every spiteful renegade and foolhardy devil in this place. And because proximity was power, they would only get bolder as she drew nearer to the hive members in Diane’s house.

The high-off screech began half a block from the Sawyer house, and she broke into a run, praying that God himself would time this. April’s painting had pointed her this far, but once she got there, she was on her own.

No,
something deep within corrected her.
Never on your own.

Diane Sawyer’s house was just above the road on a three-foot bluff; Reese leaped up, ran for the front-door step, and finally dared to look back.

Her eyes widened. Six. Six demon creatures in bird bodies were hurtling straight at her.

Perfect.

Instead of calling the sword to her hand and meeting the attack head-on, Reese flung the front door open and hit the floor, sending the creatures shooting over her head and slamming into the tattooed man who was pulling Diane to her feet in a direct line from the front door. He went down, firing his gun and cursing. Two of the demons had gone even further, flying over the tattooed man’s head, and crashed headlong into the other thug, who was standing outside behind a black car.

“Damn it!” the big man shouted. “Kelly, get in the car!”

Kelly, the tattooed man, swung his revolver and hit one of the creatures in the head, and the demon turned on him, pecking and beating at his head and shoulders. It had effectively beaten him away from Diane, who was, Reese realized, startled, free—the zip ties around her wrists and ankles had been cut.

Still lying flat on the floor, she looked to Chris. He was on his feet with a penknife in his hand.

Good man,
she thought.

They didn’t have much time before the creatures figured out they were battling each other. She prayed again for timing.

And it worked. The men were gone, both of them jumping into the car and hitting the gas. “Run hard!” she shouted. “I’m coming after you!”

Closing her hand, she felt the sword taking shape even as the bird creatures turned their eyes in the direction of her shout. “That’s right,” she said quietly as the blade in her hand became solid and hot. “Come and get me.”

Three of them rushed her at once, but they were hindered by the tight space, and Reese took them two and then one, dispatched in quick strokes. The tattooed man had put a bullet through one, momentarily slowing it down, and it wasn’t hard to kill as it launched itself at her with a snarl. The last two hung back, eyes glowing, glaring at her with a hatred that sent a shiver down her spine.

Yet somehow, it felt good to be hated.

Chris turned her direction, went pale, and shouted, “Look out!”

Claws hooked into her shoulders from behind, and a heavy weight bore her to the floor. She’d lost. With the other two just waiting for her to slip, there was no coming back from this one …

But she heard a shriek, and the weight on her back ripped off and back; she made it to her feet again just in time to dispatch the two remaining demons that were coming in for the kill.

Panting, unbelieving, she whirled around to see the dead body of the attacker from behind, curling and shrivelling back to its bird form. It had been decapitated. Not by her.

She turned back. Three feet away, Diane was standing with a sword glowing in her hand, staring at the dead bird.

Reese nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “Thank you.”

Diane couldn’t seem to find a voice, but she nodded in response.

Chris gave his mother a hard stare and then turned back to Reese. “They got away with the others. We have to go after them.”

“We will,” Reese told him. “I know where they’ve gone.” Without an enemy to fight, her sword was fading away, and she relaxed her grip and let it go. Diane followed suit. Reese rested her hand on Diane’s shoulder. “And this time we’re going to win.”

Diane jerked herself away. “There’s no we.”

Chris shook his head and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Tyler’s out there, Mum. You can’t fight this right now.”

She turned on him. “What do you know about it? Your father—”

“Died, if I had to guess, fighting for something he believed in,” Chris shot back. “When did you decide that staying out of the fight was the best way to honour him?”

To both their surprise, Diane started to cry. “The Oneness—it’s supposed to be this idyllic, this wonderful thing … this thing that changes your life for the better. And all it does is bring loss and pain and hardness.”