Chapter 10

 

Jacob’s directions took Reese way off the highway and plunged them down a valley where it was noticeably cooler, shaded with old-growth trees that lined the roads and buzzing with bees and other insects. Beyond the trees, fields of wheat and corn waved in the sunlight. Giving up on the old air conditioner, she and Tyler rolled their windows down and let the fresh air flow in. Jacob didn’t seem to notice. Impervious to the weather, he was a man on a mission.

That struck Reese as ironic. This was supposed to be their offensive, after all. They had pulled the man out of detention so they could somehow convert him, so they could accomplish their mission. Thus far they had been a giant failure, and he seemed more set in his ways than ever.

We have a week, she reminded herself. This is only day one. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Of course, it was highly possible he was thinking the same thing.

She had no idea where he was taking them. Maybe another commune like his. More proof that his way of doing life was worth any cost.

Instead, he told her to pull off the road outside a little iron gate. She did, the car lolling in the long weeds. He pushed through the gate, and she and Tyler followed, curious.

On the other side of a line of trees and tall weeds, they entered a manicured little cemetery.

Jacob strode to the centre of it, then turned and boomed, “What do you see?”

She had to admit he was better at this kind of thing than she was.

“A graveyard,” Tyler said.

“Yes, a graveyard. And tell me what is memorialized here.”

“Death,” Tyler said, at the same time as Reese responded, “People’s lives.”

He eyes sparked. “I contend that the real answer is neither. What this place—and millions like it, all over the world—truly stands for is the failure of the Oneness.”

Reese raised an eyebrow. “Big words for someone who has caused multiple deaths in the last couple of weeks.”

“Now, now,” he said, his tone dangerous, “I am innocent until proven guilty in this country. But guilty life is not the same as innocent life, and the death of the guilty is judgment, not failure—you understand the difference?”

“I understand that you see a difference.”

“So you tell me,” he said, booming again, ignoring her, “what does the Oneness stand for? What is it that we do?”

“Unity, love. We hold the world together.”

“People say that. Do you mean it literally, or in some figurative sense?”

Reese considered that. “Both.”

“You’re right. Without the Oneness the world would in fact fly apart. Without the Oneness—the true Oneness—death and chaos would overtake everything, and the universe as we know it would cease to exist.”

He turned to Tyler. “You see, boy? I am a believer. In every sense of the word, I believe in the Oneness, much more than many do. You did not join some weak straw man, some pretend game of men when you became One. You entered into the most serious business in the universe.”

Tyler looked suspicious, but he listened. As did Reese.

“All right,” Tyler said slowly. “We’re here to stop death from reigning. But you think we should kill people. You don’t make sense.”

His eyes—those lively, dangerous eyes—glimmered. “What should die must die. That is how we will rid the world of chaos. Through judgment. When all judgment has been carried out, and everything corrupt is gone, there will only be life, and we will win. The fight will be over.”

“You say that,” Reese interrupted, “but you work with demons. They are evil, they are chaos, and you think you can somehow conquer darkness with their help?”

He shook his bearded head. “The demonic is power. That is all they are. They are agents of chaos and death only because we have not chosen to master them, to direct their energies elsewhere. We have used them as an excuse, that we should not have to be what we are. Because we are afraid to enter the fullness of our power, we are afraid of purity. We have compromised until we are sick, until we have become agents of corruption ourselves.”

Reese shivered. “I still don’t understand the graveyard.”

He folded his arms and looked smug. “You will. Look around. Do you know anything about any of these people?”

With a wary look at him, Reese moved to read a gravestone. The name was not familiar; the date was within the last twenty years—more recent than she had expected in a place this out of the way.

As though he could read her mind, he said, “This is a private graveyard, fairly popular with wealthy people from Lincoln and Mark. It’s not as old as it looks.”

In testy obedience, she kept wandering, reading names, looking for one she knew. She found nothing.

When she stopped in front of an impressive granite headstone, carved with what looked like Greek pillars with serpents twined around them, Jacob said, “Stop.”

She did. Tyler joined her, staring at the stone. “Creepy,” he said.

Jacob came up behind them. “This is where my journey began,” he said. “Twenty years ago. I knew this man.”

The name on the stone was Franz Bertoller. Reese had never heard of him. According to the stone, he had been dead only four years.

“Twenty years ago?” she asked.

“He had selected his grave and had the stone carved in advance of his death. It was here before the final date was carved on it, ready to receive him. He died at a very old age—ninety-eight. Comfortable, happy, surrounded by family. ‘Ancient and full of days,’ as the old books put it.”

He gave the speech with an edge, a foreboding tone that said he was about to reveal a dark mystery, and Reese found herself tense until he did.

“Few people ever knew it, but Franz Bertoller was responsible for one great act in his life. He did not push the buttons himself, but he arranged it all. He designed the hive. He bought the police.”

Reese’s stomach sank.

“He bombed a cell house and burned down two others, and then he hounded the Oneness in a massacre that those who were there have never forgotten. He unleashed hell. He advanced chaos. He was a murderer not of the wicked, but of the good. Our whole world sank deeper into darkness when his day of triumph came.”

The serpents on the stone seemed more menacing now, more alive in the leafy shadows. Tyler and Reese were silent, staring at the stone.

“I had a wife,” Jacob announced.

Startled, she turned and looked at him.

He continued. “Yes, I was one of the few Oneness who married, in the depth of unity and love that only those who are both One and in love can know. She was goodness, sweetness, purity itself—she was light. I loved her as no man has ever loved a woman.”

His voice wavered as he spoke, and Reese believed him. He looked at them both with a passion and care that wrenched at her heart. “You may think I was hard on your friend—Chris. But I saw something. I saw that he was in love with one of ours, one of the Oneness, and that he was not yet One. I believe in love, Reese. I do not want you led astray by something that will only hurt you in the end. He needs to come into the Oneness. You know that. I was only trying to help him get there.”

Tyler was trying to catch her eye, but she ignored him and hung her head. Bringing Chris up here, now—her soul was in turmoil.

Jacob’s voice broke. “My wife was in the house that Bertoller bombed. The blast burned and maimed her, but she was still alive. I carried her out. Many of the refugees were fleeing together, but I would not go until I had tended her wounds, stopped the bleeding, held her in case she was going to die. I sat in the shadow of the burning house, listened to the police sirens coming, heard justice miscarrying even then, even in how they began the investigation. I knew they were against us and that we were the targets of something bigger than we dreamed. She clung to me, and I wept silently over her and told her, again and again, that it would be all right. It would be all right, for we were Oneness, and we were stronger than death and stronger than darkness. It would be all right, for we would triumph. The plans of the enemy would backfire. We would be seen to be victorious. And she would live.”

Reese’s eyes left the tombstone and fixed on his face. The pain there was as raw as it must have been twenty years ago—both the pain and the passion.

“She did live. Miraculously. I carried her away, keeping to the shadows, avoiding the creatures that hunted us. It wasn’t only men, it was demons also; on our heels like slavering dogs. Sometimes in the form of slavering dogs. That night was the stuff of a thousand nightmares. But we survived it. We walked for days. I don’t know how long. I only know that she was on the edge of death, and I was holding her here with everything in me. I walked until I was nearly faint with hunger and thirst, but I realized we could not keep going—she needed food and drink, and her pain was too bad . . . she was so badly burnt, so badly wounded.”

Reese closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about it—didn’t want to imagine the details of what that journey looked like.

His voice caught, choked up in his throat. “So I left her. I found a secluded place, where I thought she would be safe. I went into town to find something for us to eat.”

His voice hardened. “When I came back, she was dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Reese said, but she wasn’t sure the words were even audible.

“They had found her,” Jacob stressed. “She would have made it. But they found her.”

He cleared his throat. “After that I realized that we had not won—we had lost the battle. Everywhere I looked, there was nothing but loss. The Oneness was reeling. And I came to understand that something was out of balance. Blood had been shed, and it had to be avenged. But when I tried to talk to others in the Oneness about our duty to set things right, they refused to hear me.”

Insects buzzing in the trees behind them were a morbid chorus to the story.

“I realized I had to do the work myself. I dug into what had happened, realized who was responsible—this man. I learned other things about him. His life was chaos. More than any senseless demon, he had chosen wickedness and walked it out faithfully. I knew he had to die. His blood for my wife’s. His soul for the countless souls he had doomed and tortured. So I took a gun and I tracked him down. I made it past his bodyguards and security systems, and I stood facing him in his own bedroom and accused him of his crimes.”

Reese was riveted. The story was supposed to end with Jacob getting his revenge—surely it had to end there. But it hadn’t. The date on the gravestone told her that—Jacob had not shot him.

“You didn’t do it,” she said.

The grief on his face was hard to look at.

“I failed. I didn’t have the courage. When it came to pulling the trigger, the weakness and compromise of the Oneness overcame me, and I walked away—and he laughed.”

Jacob traced his fingers over the name etched in granite. “That was when I found my way here. I came for morbid reasons, I suppose. To dwell on my failure. To think about it. To try to find the truth. I knew he would die someday, and it had not been by my hand.”

“But he did die someday,” Reese said. “Justice was done.”

His eyes flashed. “It was not. Not for a moment. He continued to ply his trade—gambling, drugs—for sixteen years. He destroyed countless more lives. I watched it happen. I even tried to get to him again, but I could never replicate my success of the first time. This gravestone is not a monument to justice, to our triumph. It is a monument to our failure. To our pathetic weakness.”

He swept his arm out. “They all are. After my failure that day, I spent three years in this graveyard. I squatted in a shack on an old farm half a mile down the road. Came here every day, to think and to pray and to remember. Slept here on nights when it was warm and dry enough. I went into town and looked up all their names. I know every man and every woman here. I know all the evil they represent—and all of it unchecked, unavenged, unchallenged. Did the Oneness do a thing to alter the course of chaos in their lives? Oh, we stepped in here and there—tried to help someone. Got a child or two into our own ranks. But that’s all. Compared to the lives they destroyed, we had no triumph at all. And all the time the balance is off. All the time evil goes on triumphing, and we go on letting it—and nothing is done, nothing balances the scales again, much less wins them.”

His eyes were on fire. “Bertoller himself encountered the Oneness numerous times before the bombing, when he already had blood on his hands and they knew it. They never stopped him. Never brought about justice. The massacre was fitting, in a way. It was another monument to our failure.”

Reese stared at the name on the grave, and it seemed to her that it was mocking them.

Jacob’s voice quieted, calmed. “Finally, sure that I understood the truth, I went to begin my own cell. My own Oneness community. But they could not be weak like the rest. They could not fail as I had failed, as so many have failed. They could not lose sight of their purpose. So I determined to raise my community in two ways. They would know purity first—so they would love goodness, and innocence, and hate wickedness with all that was within them. They would be separated from the world, holy. And secondly they would know power and not be afraid to use it. You accuse me of consorting with evil, but I consort only with power. I raised a family of faithful ones, people with the clear eyes to see what is right and what is wrong. And they were ready to learn power, so I began to teach them. That is why I brought Clint into our midst—to teach us power. To teach us to harness it. He is brilliant, and gifted.”

“He’s evil.”

“You say that not knowing anything about him. Do you think I would let him through my doors without knowing him first? I, who have shepherded my community so carefully for so many years?”

“That is hard to believe,” Tyler said, and Reese couldn’t tell if he was sincere or his words were sarcasm. Not that she could blame him. He had seen much too much of Clint.

Jacob was incredibly convincing.

But she remembered Julie and steeled herself.

“The problem is,” she said, “you didn’t bring your people into the Oneness at all. They don’t know the Spirit. They only know your rules, your ways.”

Jacob flushed. “I submit that one who has been an ardent member of the corruption that we now call Oneness for so long cannot clearly say what it is to know the Spirit or not.”

She pictured him living here, a young man dwelling among tombs, for three years.

“You fixated on darkness for so long,” she said. “How do you know you can trust your knowledge?”

She turned her back and walked away through the grass, her eyes trailing the gravestones, every one calling up spectres of lives lived in lust and greed and damage, the picture Jacob had painted. She wished she could believe he was wrong about all these people.

But she didn’t.

She’d seen too much in Lincoln, as part of the cell that was forever tracking and fighting the demonic, to question him much on that point. But it shook her now, to look back. Because they had always just gone after the demonic, and in all of her years that had never truly solved the problem. It was always people at the back of things. People using each other. People turning on each other. People destroying each other.

And it was people they never really stopped.

People the Oneness only tried to help, to serve, to save.

What if Jacob was right?

What if you couldn’t win the battle that way?

What if some people simply had to be stopped, taken out of the way, so that they could not live ninety-eight years of darkness worse than demons?

What if, instead of using their swords to make a real difference, they had been play-fighting on the field of the world all these years?

And what if he was right about her—and years of closing her ears and eyes to the truth had warped everything she thought she knew, so much that she could not trust herself to know anything?

Tyler appeared beside her.

“You’re letting him get to you.”

“He’s . . .”

“He’s not right.”

She stopped. “He could be.”

“Reese, he’s not. I’m new to the Oneness. I haven’t been ignoring any ‘truth’ for years and years. And I know the Oneness is good, and Clint is evil—the demons are evil, Clint’s power is evil. What you do, what all of you do, is good and right.”

She looked around the graveyard, its neat, silent stones monuments to something. Jacob was waiting by the giant headstone of Bertoller, keeping his distance, letting them talk. She imagined him again a young man, thrashing out his questions and his grief among the dead. He was mad. Or a prophet.

And she thought of Chris.

“We let his wife die,” she whispered.

“But you didn’t let me die. Or Chris. You saved Chris, Reese.” He hesitated. “Besides, I don’t think you can blame yourselves for what happened to his wife. Bertoller did that.”

“And we didn’t stop him.”

“It’s not your job to stop him.”

“It’s our job to combat corruption. It’s our job to hold things in order, to hold them together. It’s our job to keep the world safe in the hands of love, to be the hands of love. Are we doing that if we let men like that go unopposed?”

Tyler didn’t answer. He looked confused and lost.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know these are heavy questions. Honestly, I’ve never asked them before. You’re right. He’s getting to me.”

She lowered her voice and scuffed the ground. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

Tyler looked back at him and squinted, as though he was trying to see the man more clearly. Then, unexpectedly, he said, “He was right about one thing for sure.”

Reese raised her eyebrows. “And that is?”

“You and Chris. I think you’re meant to be together. He really loves you. You love him too. But not before he’s Oneness. Jacob is right about that.”

She just stared at him.

He looked down and shuffled his feet in the dirt. “I’m sorry,” he said, but he wasn’t.

He wasn’t sorry at all, and she didn’t want him to be.

“No,” she said. “You’re a good friend.” She turned to look at Jacob again. “I don’t know what to do about him. I’m supposed to be bringing him back into the fold so he won’t be a threat to the Oneness anymore. I’m doing a terrible job.”

“Well, ball’s in your court now. Right? You’re taking turns. So you take him somewhere.”

“Where? I can’t compete with this!”

“Because you don’t believe in what you’re saying,” Tyler said, “so you can’t think of anything to support you. Jacob believes in himself so much he’ll find proof of his beliefs everywhere.” Tyler looked at her with an expression between a command and a half-questioning suggestion. “Maybe you need to figure out what you really believe, instead of just trying to figure out what he does.”

She found it in her to grin. “When did you get so smart?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. Just born that way, I guess.”

She swatted him, leaning hard on her crutches to give herself a free hand, and he ducked and laughed. “Maybe you’re right. But this was not the plan.”

“Plans come from the Spirit, right? Is the Spirit usually predictable?”

“I meant my plan.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“Tyler . . .”

“Yes?”

Standing among the gravestones, with his sneakers scuffed and his hair in a long tangle as usual, he looked like a little boy. And she wanted to smack him and hug him at the same time.

“Thanks for being so difficult. I think I need you right now.”

“No problem,” he said.

And together, their eyes strayed back to Jacob.

He had left the huge gravestone and was wandering, reading the smaller stones, reviewing all he knew about these people.

His failures.

His vision for the future.

Reese realized she’d been waiting for him to take control again, to tell them it was time to go and move on to the next place. But it was her turn. Technically, she was in control now.

Even though she felt a lot like the world had turned upside down.

“Well,” she said faintly, “I guess it’s time to go.”

“What are we going to do?”

“What you said,” she answered. “Figure out what I believe. Figure out whose side I’m on.” She flashed him a tired smile. “There’s no point in continuing all this if I don’t know that.”

She motioned to Jacob when he looked their way and headed back toward the car, feeling heavier on her crutches than she had when they’d arrived.

Heavier in her heart, in her mind.

She knew what she didn’t say.

If Jacob was right, and she accepted his beliefs as true, she was exiling herself again—cutting herself off from everything and everyone she loved.

Choosing it this time.

But if she had learned anything from what David had done to her, it was that truth mattered.

 

* * *

 

Mary’s hand shook as she reached for David’s. His eyes were trained on hers, in hers, riveting, compelling.

He was a liar, a practiced liar, yet she hoped to find truth by entering into his soul.

This was madness.

And yet she had no other choice.

Truth about him—worse, truth about herself.

It was she, he insisted, who had sent him down this path years ago. She who had twisted him, perverted him, turned him against the Oneness. She who had done to him what he was trying to do to others.

Two things, she feared.

One was this power. Yes, Oneness could do this. Yes, they could enter each other’s hearts to this degree. Yes, they could go past all the normal boundaries of human knowledge, all the normal limitations. They did not do it. Not because it was morally wrong, but because it cost.

It cost to enter so fully into what they were.

And a voice whispered to her:

If you are afraid of the cost, you will never enter the fullness of what you are or of what I am.

The second thing she feared: that she would see herself through David’s eyes and know herself to be the enemy of all she truly loved, to know herself a hypocrite, to know herself a darkness greater than any she had tried to fight.

Since she was a teenager, Oneness had been Mary’s life.

She had given herself to it, served it, proselytized for it. It was her family, her passion, her work, and her heart.

She feared discovering that from some deeper place within her, she had been working to undo what she loved so much.

That her whole life would prove to be a sham.

A desperate bid to convince herself she meant something and lived for something beyond herself without uncovering the truth.

Behind her, April and Chris were talking, their voices a low murmur under the sound of the waves, the boat kicking up spray, the sail flapping, the birds calling.

Before her, David’s eyes drew her in.

He took her hand—she had not found the courage to take his.

He closed his eyes.

And she closed hers, knowing that in that moment she was stepping outside of the world where the sun was, where the waves were, where her family was. And she was stepping into a man’s soul.

The first thing she knew was darkness.

Darkness washed over her, but not the darkness of fear. This was the darkness of a womb, of a deep, quiet, sacred place where life was formed.

Silence here was a heavy hush, a brooding.

Then a rush of thought, emotion, and being—like a freight train bearing down on her, screaming over and through her, overwhelming.

She gasped and woke up.

She was in a place she recognized. A house. She couldn’t remember why she knew it, or what had happened here—only that in some sense she belonged in this place. She looked down to see where she was sitting and found that she could not see herself.

Nor could she see David. She was not looking through his eyes. But he was there—a presence she could feel, but as invisible to her as she was herself.

He was younger here.

This was a long time ago.

Twenty years ago.

That should mean something to her, but in this moment, here, it didn’t.

She had a sense that she was to wait, and to watch, as much outside of herself as she could be. And so, very conscious that she was doing it, she quieted the voice of her own mind and sank back into his.

She became nothing.

Or nearly nothing.

It was impossible, she found, to be rid of herself completely.

Someone in the room was talking. The conversation was nothing of consequence—so little so that she drifted out of it without really taking in what was being said, distracted by other details. It was night, and an open window was letting a cool breeze through ruffled curtains. The occasional car passed on the street outside, and the distant thumping of a stereo added its rhythm to the night, but it was late fall and the neighbourhood was indoors—cozy behind closed doors. Here, the sense was overwhelmingly one of comfort, of home. Of fellowship and connection, belonging.

It was Oneness at its best, warming her heart, enveloping her. Oneness giving even the shabby decorating of the house—a large house she thought, having a sense of space beyond this sitting room—a meaning and glow beyond themselves.

Someone walked into the room, and she turned to look at him, and felt her own heart lurch.

Hers, not David’s. Her heart asserting itself because this face, this young man, meant so much to her.

Her brother.

Her twin brother.

He was cradling a child, a three-year-old who was half asleep snuggled against his chest. Like hers, Sam’s build was slight, but he was strong, and more than a head taller than she was.

The bond with his spirit was as strong, as vital, as she remembered it being. She realized she had known he was there even before he entered the room. They exchanged a glance now and smiled without words.

Exchanged a glance?

Yes, she was there too—in a corner of the room that she could not see, physically there, her younger self.

But she wasn’t in that self now. She was in David, seeing—to some extent—from his perspective.

She was supposed to be learning, so she wrested her attention away from Sam—oh, how she wanted to leave it there!—and tried to divine how David felt about her presence in this place twenty years ago. If he already viewed her as an enemy, or if—

Her attempt was thwarted by the blast.

She remembered this.

It all played out like she remembered it. It was the back of the house that blew off, killing everyone who was there, sending off a blast of heat that ripped through now and burned them all as they stumbled out the doors, coughing and choking in air that had been cool, had been moving lace curtains, and now was a black inferno.

The house was big—bigger than the impression she’d had standing in the sitting room. Big enough that nearly as many people managed to get out before the rest of the house blew as had died in the initial bombing.

Fear rose up and choked her, more blinding than grief, and she didn’t know if it was hers or David’s. But she saw Sam stumbling out, with his child in his arms, and the rest of the family—his wife and two other children—running to him from another door where they had escaped. And then they all joined hands and ran.

Ran from the second blast.

The second crippling, burning wave of heat.

She’d never forgotten the cries of those who didn’t get far enough away.

She opened her eyes and was back on the boat. She looked across at David—somehow they were both lying on their backs now, side by side, with the spray stinging their eyes.

Her eyes were full of tears.

His were not. But she saw the pain in them anyway.

“These are my memories too,” she said, licking her lips as though they were still burned, cracked and bleeding. “You weren’t the only one who suffered. Who lost.”

Sam. Now the grief rose up—sharp as it had been the first day after he was killed by the drug-addled teens who came so much later, when it should have been all over but wasn’t.

She had never stopped grieving his lost, but somehow the pain had been buried under the years, matted down by time and other concerns and the company of others she loved.

It was not buried now.

She cried, tears just running down her face, pain too deep for sobs.

If anything, David looked satisfied.

But she hurt too badly, in this moment, with the smells and sounds of that night so fresh, to hate him for it.

“We aren’t done,” he croaked.

The memories weren’t easy for him either.

She closed her eyes again.

Again the womb-like darkness, the rush of personality and feeling, and then she opened her eyes and they were in the country, twigs and dried grass snapping under their feet, mud sucking at them, insects biting. There were people before and people behind, urging children on, comforting each other. There was pain—the burns from the blast, the burning lungs from breathing it in and then running, and not stopping, convinced that they were running from something more terrible than a fire. More diabolical than a freak accident, a gas line blowing, whatever else the media might call it.

Hell was on their heels, and they knew it.

She recognized that Sam and his children were in this group, that these were still her memories. She had fled down this road, in this hour, under this moon. She had fled with this conviction of being hunted.

Which meant that David had been there too, right alongside her, the whole time.

And yet she had not remembered him.

The split presence—that this was both her memory and his—made it hard to stay tapped into him, to let herself relax into his personality and quiet her own thoughts.

Once again, she took herself in hand and ordered her own mind, her own heart, to quiet. It was harder this time. Knowing that Sam was here made her want to stay present.

But she did what she had to do.

This time she felt the throbbing confusion and heartache. The question drumming through David’s veins with every step, every tortured breath.

Why?

Why?

Why?

And she felt his terrible grief, grief that was still partially numb but was fighting for his attention, threatening to overwhelm him, stop in his tracks, throw him into a ditch to stay there and weep and die.

Unlike her, he had lost someone he was especially close to in that blast.

Not just close to . . .

She heard the cry of his heart:

My baby!

She opened her eyes again. Back to the yacht. Back to the sun and the salt air, and the ropes overhead and the great white sail.

“You lost a child,” she said. “You’re a father.”

“A real one,” he said bitterly. “Not just some house parent.”

But this time, as she stared into his eyes she didn’t see the pain that had been there before. This, he had walled off. This, he would not go back to. And she thought, maybe, the bitterness was a wall. A protection he had built just so he would never have to face that pain again.

“Are you inventing theories?” he asked. “Trying to understand my pain so you’ll know why I turned? You know nothing. I didn’t turn against the Oneness for costing me my daughter. I believed your propaganda—that death was nothing, that we’d still be One, that she would be there on the other side. Death did not sting that day like it should have.”

“It stung enough. I felt it.”

“I was a man,” he said. “I had a heart.”

“You still are. You still do.”

He closed his eyes. She realized he was weak—and so was she. This connection, this depth of being One, was costing them both.

She wondered why exactly he wanted it.

Why he was so open.

“No,” he said, “I do not. I exorcised my heart a long time ago. If you see pain in my eyes, it is only because a man does not need a heart to feel pain. A man is an animal, and he can be tormented and whimper like one.”

She closed her eyes too.

“I’m sorry for you.”

“You shouldn’t be. I am going to wreck you before this is over. You are going to hate me.”

“That won’t happen.”

They were in a field, surrounded by shadows—a cornfield. Sam had lit a fire. His family and others were crowded around it, but David sat back, away, in the darkness, his soul twisting and gnawing with grief. And with guilt.

His baby.

His little girl.

She had been in the back part of the house, asleep.

He could not have saved her.

But he should have, he told himself, he should have run into the flames and tried. Or died.

But the Spirit had kept him alive. This was an election. A predetermined fate. As was hers. There was a reason. A plan.

Yet his soul still twisted, still churned. He did not cry but writhed in the darkness.

And Mary, facing her own grief and fear of twenty years ago again, found it easier to let go and lose herself in his pain.

Just before her own mind faded completely into his, she heard a voice somewhere, speaking it seemed from the moonlit sky above.

But no, that wasn’t right. The voice was from another place.

April.

Saying, “What is that?”