Chapter 11

 

Richard stationed himself in the parking garage where he could watch the elevator that led to her apartment, and, bored after a while—and concerned that he would miss something—he created a circuit for himself, stalking from the garage to the street outside where he could scan comers on all sides to the lobby where he could watch who went up, and back to the parking garage. A doorman questioned him and he told them he was working for Melissa. She confirmed it when the doorman called.

For which he was grateful.

His own restlessness and pacing reminded him of April, who tended to run when she wanted to work something out. His usual tendency was exactly the opposite: to sit, to find a quiet place, to sink deeply into prayer and be caught up in the rush of Spirit, there to forget himself, to almost leave his body, to transcend.

He felt he ought to do that now, but for some reason he could not quiet himself.

He couldn’t shake the sense of guilt over having cut Melissa off from her healing.

He knew, even as he admitted that to himself, that he was thinking foolishness. The hive, the children, the demonic powers that had controlled them—they were not trying to help Melissa. Even if they had the capability of holding the cancer at bay, even if they could cheat death for a time and help her cheat it, they were doing nothing for her good. All was a plot, all a scheme to destroy her along with everyone else.

And yet when he searched his heart, he found that he could not blame her questions or her choices. She was right. He had been asked to die, but only in battle, only knowing he was a victor. He had never been asked to face what she was facing, or to justify it to himself: to explain why the Oneness, the source of all true life, could not stop death from eating away at his body and truncating a gift and calling greater than most would ever know.

It didn’t make sense.

He also confessed, as he paced the sidewalk outside the building and then scanned the lobby for what seemed like the hundredth time before taking the elevator to the parking garage yet again, that he cared about this girl more than he had cared about anyone in a long, long time.

Oneness was a strange thing. It bound all together in a single body, but some would always be closer than others. There were those who were close by proximity and common calling—like Mary. He and she were like two fingers on the same hand, always about the same work, deeply connected and believing in one another almost more than they believed in the greater ideal of the Oneness. It was that way because it had to be; the Oneness was infinite but every member finite; they could only be close, functionally close, to so many.

Others were close because of how their personalities meshed or because of a history together.

Melissa was something different.

He knew as he walked his circuit that if he found anyone threatening her, he would die to keep her safe and count it nothing.

He could not put a name to it. He asked himself if this was romantic love—if, after all, he might become one of the few Oneness who married. But it was not. It was something more stable, more deep even than that.

He could only describe it to himself as calling.

He was meant to love her. He was meant to keep her safe. She was meant to be a part of him like a strand of his own DNA.

He realized, with a sudden understanding that literally shook him where he stood, that he could not stand the idea of losing her.

She could not die.

It was unthinkable.

But you’re asking her to, a voice said. That’s what you want. For her to give up all ties to the powers that are keeping her alive and choose to die instead, just to prove that you are right.

Just to comfort you in your own convictions.

Your own conceits.

He stopped and buried his face in his hands, forcing himself to breathe, to seek, to calm.

To pray.

Spirit, he breathed. Spirit.

It was like calling into a well. Nothing answered but the echo of his own voice, yet he felt a sense of depth—perhaps a far distant stirring.

I have never doubted you, he prayed. I have never doubted. Not until now. Help me.

He lifted his eyes at the sound of the elevator doors opening, and there she was.

He was in the parking garage, and she got off the elevator with a sort of awkward grace, holding out her hand to him. Gone were the evening gown and the high heels. She wore a flowing skirt and a sleeveless shirt, casual but beautiful.

“The doorman told me you were stalking around like a . . . well, like a stalker. You told him you were working for me?”

“I am working for you.”

She smiled, and it creased the corners of her eyes. “I know. I thought, since you are getting a workout pacing all over the place, I should feed you dinner.”

“How did you know I was still pacing?”

“I called downstairs and asked.”

He smiled. Now that she mentioned it, he was hungry.

And glad to be back in her presence.

They rode the elevator in companionable silence. She gave him another smile just before it dinged and the doors opened to the penthouse.

The smile vanished two seconds after they stepped out.

“What are you doing here?” she said. “Who are you?”

A smiling, well-dressed young man with a square jaw and blond hair rose from her couch. His accent, faintly European, set off every last alarm bell Richard had.

“Oh, you don’t mind,” he said. “I came to enjoy dinner with you both. And to help you.”

“You didn’t answer the lady’s questions, Clint,” Richard said. “Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

Movement from the kitchen momentarily distracted him, and he caught sight of black clothing and a smirking expression.

Alex.

“You know who I am,” Clint said. “You both do. As far as what we are doing here—well, you might say we are closing a net.”

 

* * *

 

There was a storm coming.

Tony could see it from the ridge behind the cottage. It was massing in the sky over the water, dark clouds hovering low and menacing. A breeze, deliciously cool but somehow threatening, was blowing straight at the land.

“Tony.”

Angelica’s voice was sharp. He turned. “What?”

“Jordan’s gone.”

His heart sank. “What?”

“He’s gone. I could have sworn he was there a few minutes ago, but he’s gone now and I can’t find a trace of him.”

“Get everybody searching.”

“Spread them out? Are you sure that’s smart?”

He knew what she was asking.

He felt it too.

There was an attack coming.

No, they couldn’t spread everyone out. Not even to find Jordan. They had to get them safely clustered in the cottage, where the shield was strongest, where they could be best defended.

He wished Richard was here.

He turned and eyed the coming storm again. He thought he could see creatures in the clouds, wings and eyes, armour and swords.

He was imagining that.

It was just a storm.

But an attack was coming.

“Get everyone inside,” he said, changing tacks in a moment. “Be ready—for anything. I’m going after Jordan. If I can’t find him and we run out of time, I’ll come to join you.”

And we run out of time.

They both knew what he meant by that.

She nodded, drew her sword—out of thin air, it looked like, but Tony could feel his forming in his hand too, whether in response to the demons quickly arriving or just to his own anxiety, he couldn’t say. She rushed off toward the cottage, calling for Susan Brown. Enlisting help in getting all of the kids back.

Thunder rumbled, and Tony turned back to the cliffs.

Jordan, he thought, would have gone in one of two directions:

Down the road, back toward civilization.

Or down the cliffs.

Both away from the shield.

He had no idea which way to check. He closed his eyes and tried to pray, not his strong point in the spiritual disciplines of life in the Oneness, but one that came naturally in a situation like this—a plea, a desperate call for insight.

He didn’t know whether he was answered, but he felt drawn toward the cliffs.

He started on the path he and Jordan had explored earlier that day, the storm before him in a vista of dark grey and gathering electricity, gathering thunder. He was plunging into that looming threat.

Going demon hunting.

No, he told himself, going boy hunting.

But he feared he would find both at once. Both together. And both needing to be fought.

Reese, Mary, Richard, he thought. Wherever you are, whatever’s going on, hurry.

We need to win this fight.

And we need to win it fast.

 

* * *

 

The storm had blown up fast—too fast, unnaturally fast. April watched it come, letting the sword form in her hand. Chris was taking in the sails, and he called on his mother to give him a hand.

Diane cast a pointed look at Mary and David as she appeared from the hatch. “So they did it?”

The two were stretched out side by side, eyes closed, looking as though they were asleep.

Or dead.

“I don’t know what they’re doing,” Chris said, testy, “but I hope they hurry up and finish, because what’s coming I can’t fight.”

April’s eyes were fixed on the gathering clouds. A bolt of lightning broke through the grey, momentarily slashing silver over the dark sky.

Diane, coming up beside her as she followed Chris’s instructions, leaned closer to her and followed her gaze to the clouds.

“It’s not natural, is it?” she asked.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Can you see demons?”

“I can feel them.”

Diane sighed and flexed her hand. “So can I.”

April cast her a compassionate glance. “Best just to let it form. You don’t want to be caught without defense. And I think they may attack very quickly.”

Diane went back to her work, head bowed until April said a sharp, “There.”

She looked up and saw them too: the edges of wings in the clouds, the leer of eyes. They were forming as they had in the warehouse: a core, without bodies or need of them. It wasn’t common for such a gathering to be able to form so far away from land. They needed something to feed off of, something from which to draw energy and form. When they had a source, a core attack was powerful. The demons weren’t limited by bodies or able to be cast out.

“What are they drawing from?”

“Maybe David.”

Diane cast another almost panicked look at the two lying on the deck, lost in some inner world.

They had come out here to convert him or kill him.

They hadn’t really asked what would happen if they ran out of time.

 

* * *

 

Deep in the past, David was still wracked with pain and guilt over losing his child—and still believing, fervently, almost blindly, in the Oneness. That the Oneness gave meaning not just to his life but to his loss. That the Oneness would make it all worth it in the end. That the Oneness meant he could transcend all this—the burns, the pain, the heartbreak.

The hunting.

Mary, deep in David’s soul, felt it all and knew her own heart, somewhere far away, was breaking.

Her own heart, somewhere far away, knew what he would become. She didn’t know why. Only that he told her it was her fault.

Pushing through the heartbreak, trying to stay with him and not withdraw in her own sense of pending loss and grief and guilt, she found another one: a heartbreak mingled with joy. Sam was here. Sam and his children and his wife. Her twin, her family.

She had forgotten how much she missed them all. Time had dulled it. But they were here, sitting around their little campfire in the cornfield, huddled around the burning husks, whispering and comforting each other and her.

She still could not see herself, but she still knew she was present. She knew that her niece was curled up in her lap, snuggling against her, and that Sam often turned to her and whispered something that brought her strength.

There were others with them as well. Others came throughout the night, pulled by the magnetism of Oneness to the hidden place in the cornfield. The group grew, all united and yet separated in their various griefs, so that Mary felt she was justified a little in having forgotten David’s presence that night. The details of who and where and when had blurred in the smoke and the darkness of the night.

Sam spoke to them all, the whole group in their woundedness. He reminded them of what they were: servants of mankind, expressions of the Spirit, keepers of the world. He told them that darkness would not triumph though it tried with all its fury.

They had only just begun to sleep, to calm enough to really rest, when a teenager broke into the clearing, gasping, his sides heaving from a long and desperate run.

“They’re coming,” he choked out.

No one asked precisely who—or what.

They simply pulled themselves up and kept going.

And David, denied the opportunity to truly sink and grieve, felt as he ran the first glimmerings of real despair.

Perhaps it was the juxtaposition—Sam’s words of encouragement and victory followed so quickly by the news that they were still being hunted. That it wasn’t over with the blast and the incalculable losses. That more loss was coming.

It got harder as they went. Somewhere along the line, he had been injured—he couldn’t remember where. Perhaps back at the house, perhaps while fleeing down the country roads. His ankle was swelling and getting harder to walk on. The group began to pull ahead of him, farther and farther, he and a few others who lagged. The part of his consciousness that was Mary didn’t know them, but David evidently did.

They drew back and finally veered away in a different direction.

“We might as well split up,” one of them said. “Give the demons a split target to follow.”

They knew, when they said that, that they might give their lives so the others could get away.

They believed in that kind of sacrifice.

David believed in it.

The main road was leading through cornfields. A farm road, it was dirt and gravel, uneven and full of potholes. They chose to veer away to the right, hoping to make it back to a clearer, paved public road. As much as that might make them easier targets to find, it would also help with injuries—David wasn’t the only one limping on a bad leg at this point—and get them closer to potential help if something did happen.

The plan failed. At first the road did hit pavement, giving them hope, but after some time of stumbling through the dark, it turned into a narrow, ridged dirt road that plunged into the woods.

They kept going. They didn’t know what else to do. They paused once, wanting to discuss it, but for all of them the sense of something on their heels was so strong that it pushed them back into motion.

Any hopes that the trees were just a small stand, something they would be out of in minutes, died away as the woods got thicker, the moon disappeared completely behind tangled branches and the remaining leaves of fall, and the sounds of autumn insects droned louder.

Soon they were stumbling through total darkness.

David’s ankle twisted and gave out. He sprawled on the ground, too exhausted even to cry for help.

Someone noticed anyway. There were four of them in the splinter group. One turned back, a young woman. Tried to help him up.

He was too tired, too hurt.

“Just leave me here,” he rasped.

He didn’t know if they would have.

At that moment the sense of being hunted shifted:

To a sense of being surrounded.

There was nowhere left to run.

It wasn’t just dark now; it had turned thick—like the air was made of tar, too thick to breathe, too thick to move in. David could not get up, could not move. Pressure on his chest grew until he thought it would burst.

He tried to move his arms, to push himself up, but it seemed as though they had sunken into the earth, and the earth itself was holding them in a vice.

From the trees directly in front of him, he heard a laugh.

A young man stepped out of the darkness. How they could see him, David didn’t really know. There was no light—nothing to illuminate him. Yet he was clearly visible, dark on dark.

He looked perhaps college age. Blond hair, a strong jaw, clothing that would have fit in at an elite prep school.

He spoke with a faintly European accent.

“You have come so far,” he said. “You did not really think running would do you any good?”

He heard someone else answering but could not make out words. The tone was brave. Valour, like the martyrs of old.

The response running through David’s own mind was different.

First, confusion—and, incongruously, curiosity.

“Who are you?”

He had expected—he didn’t know what. Demons, in their own forms, emboldened and empowered by the blast. Perhaps the angry, drug-empowered members of a gang or some criminal with revenge on his mind—whoever had bombed the house.

Not this.

This young man was something completely different. Possessed, yes—but David had seen that before. This was a level of power and possession in a human form he had never encountered, or even really imagined.

The way the air felt, the way the earth had become a chain, shackles around his wrists, keeping him down, the sense of being surrounded—it all came from this young man as surely as it did from the demonic powers within him.

This evil was human.

Deep within David’s pysche, Mary struggled against what she was seeing.

It was Clint, in the darkness of that wood.

Clint, not a day younger than he was now—twenty years later.

Clint, who David had somehow sought out again and forged an allegiance with. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

He had been there. He had been part of the attack that changed all their lives. And yet David blamed her, and not Clint, for his suffering.

She didn’t understand.

Her own wrestling was distracting her from what was still happening—still playing out in that wood as if it were today, as if it had played out perpetually every day since. As though moments did not pass, time did not pass, but simply became films that never ceased to play on a screen of their own.

They were talking. More bravado from some of the others. Mocking, cynical laughter, from Clint.

Then he killed them.

All except David.

David he left lying on the ground with his ankle throbbing and his heart shattered.

He stepped directly in front of him, so that David was staring at his feet, and crouched down. He picked up a handful of dirt and blew it into David’s face.

“And this is all you are,” he said. “Dust. And I, not you, control dust. In Oneness, you are trying to transcend earth, and you never will. You never can become more than what you are. Handfuls of dirt in the universe, going back to dirt in the end.”

He turned and walked away, slapping his hands together to clean them of the dirt, and David wept out the grit in his eyes.

The bodies of his friends lay around the clearing, and he could not see them to avoid them in the moonless forest. When at last he could motivate himself to move again—as much to crawl away from the horror as to try to get anywhere else—he moved inch by inch, desperately hoping not to stumble across a corpse in the dark.

He couldn’t handle that.

Clint’s words haunted him.

Was he truly more than dust?

Was his daughter more than ashes?

Whether he was hurt worse than he knew, or whether the dirt blown into his face had effects he did not know about, he found as he crawled and stumbled through the rest of that night that his mind was twisted, exulted, depressed—wrung out—with thoughts that haunted, excited, and fascinated him: madness perhaps, delirium, or the attempt of a mind to escape from grief that was simply too great to carry. He found in himself a fatalism that was attractive: a desire to believe the witchcraft-worker in the woods, that he was only dust. For if he was only dust, if they all were only dust, than all that had happened was painful—but it did not mean much, in the end.

And death would end the pain.

There was freedom in the thought.

A freedom directly opposed to that offered by the Oneness.

But after all, the freedom of the Oneness was not freedom to escape or freedom to mean little. It was responsibility, terrible, heavy. It was servanthood, a yoke. It was meaning so great it was crushing.

Or so it felt to David, weary beyond life in the darkness of night, in pain and staggering toward some shelter or hope he could not see.

He wondered if the others had made it to safety somewhere.

We did, Mary wanted to tell him. We got away. Maybe you did save us, you and the others, by drawing them off.

Her own memories tried to filter into the scene. We crossed a lot of miles. Walked until we wanted to die. And then split up, like you did, for the same reason. We, me and Sam and his family found shelter with Douglas and Diane in the fishing village.

Now, looking back, she almost felt shame at how much more quickly she had found comfort, shelter, and relief. That while David wrestled with the very core of who he was, while he lost the last few shreds of companionship he had left, she was settling into a place she would call home and bringing others into the Oneness, creating a new family even as she was on the cusp of losing the old.

He didn’t know when he broke out of the woods, only that eventually the sun was coming up over undeveloped rural land, highlighting fields of weeds and scrub. He found a padlocked trailer and tried to break in, but he didn’t have the strength. Crawling into an open space beneath it, he fell asleep.

Fever.

What might have been days of fever.

Mary, both within him and without him, writhed in the throes of the illness herself even as she wanted nothing more than to run to him.

She hadn’t known what he was going through.

Truthfully, she hadn’t thought about him.

She remembered, in those days, an overwhelming sense of sickness, woundedness, and loss. So many of the Oneness had been scattered and were wandering the roads as hunted refugees. By this time the police had come out as against them, and those members who had remained in the city were being detained and questioned, and it was already fairly clear that false charges would win the day. They were still discovering how many had died. Never had chaos seemed so strong and so prevalent, and they all felt it. In fact, the sense was so strong that Mary remembered throwing up intentional blocks: taking steps to close herself off mentally and emotionally.

She had never done that before or since, but it was too much. They all did it. No one could have functioned, could have saved themselves or anyone else, if they hadn’t.

And even now, she knew it was irrational to think that she could have or should have done something different.

But she wished with all her heart that she had.

That she had stayed sensitive enough to know that someone was lost, was sleeping out under a trailer, equally wracked by fever and by doubt.

He probably wasn’t the only one, she told herself.

We all suffered then.

Now, though, One with David’s soul and experiencing his trials herself, his suffering seemed all that mattered in the world.

And if she had known where it would lead?

The damage it would do to him, the damage it would threaten to do to the Oneness?

She could not parse the timeline. She didn’t know where she was while David was under the trailer on some forsaken piece of land. If she was still fleeing, still hiding, or if she was sitting warmly in Douglas’s living room, telling his wife about the wonders of the Oneness.

Trying, maybe, to convince herself. Back then, so much was shaking that any chance to grasp surety had to be taken.

Somewhere far off, torn between her own memories and growing sense of guilt and the fever and madness that were taking their toll on David, she thought she heard a voice she recognized.

Calling her name.

Who . . . ?

A woman?

 

* * *

 

“Mary!” April shouted again, her back to Mary and David, the demons coming against her in an onslaught more furious than she could have imagined. “Mary, wake up, we need you!”

She blinked away stinging tears of frustration.

Her calls were doing no good.

Diane was already down.

Chris had disappeared in a swarm he could not fight.

She could not do this alone.

They were going to lose.

Rain lashed the boat even as waves tossed it, and it was all April could do to keep her feet.

“Mary!” she screamed against the storm and the fight—like the name was a prayer, and an answer to it would save the day somehow.