Chapter 12

 

“It’s ironic that you should be here together,” Clint said, eyeing Richard and Melissa with something like pleasure. “Did he tell you, my dear, what he has done to you?”

Melissa didn’t take the bait. “Who are you? Why are you in my apartment?”

“I am not a stranger, if that’s what you’re implying,” Clint said. “I know all about you and your affairs of late. The children come to you—do you know who sends them? Where they come from? They come from me. I send them to you faithfully. It is I who look out for your health and make sure that you are given life. It is I who saw the children’s remarkable gifts and developed them to begin with.”

Richard could not speak. He did not know what he feared more—that Melissa would believe Clint and side with him, or that Clint would tell her what he, Richard, had done.

It was fairly clear he planned to.

And she wouldn’t understand—not the way she was now. Not with her desperation to hang on to life and the hope the children—the possessed children—had given her.

His fear came out as a threat, aimed at Clint.

“What are you doing here?” he growled. “Answer the lady.”

“I’ve come to enlist your help,” he said, pointedly answering Melissa and not even looking at Richard.

“My help with what?”

Her tone was shaken, but bold. Richard found himself admiring her all the more.

“Rescuing the children,” Clint said.

“Rescuing them? From what?”

“They are being held hostage.” Now his eyes shifted, pinned Richard like an insect. “By this man and his cohorts.” His voice lowered, playing deliciously off the reaction he saw in her eyes. “Oh, yes. Did he say he’d come to help you? To be your friend? He has come to make sure you die instead of living. He cannot bear that you should live, for it would alter his understanding of the world too terribly, and his understanding is more precious to him than any human being, not least you. Isn’t that right, my friend?”

“We are not friends,” Richard said.

It was all he could find to say.

He wanted to pour out his heart to Melissa—to explain everything, to apologize that he hadn’t told her, to beg her to trust him anyway.

And to confess that he didn’t really know how to answer Clint’s charge. That was why he hadn’t told her all. Because he was going to ask her to die.

And he couldn’t stand that.

“You’re a liar,” he growled.

Clint was nothing but smug. “Then explain where the children are. And under what conditions.”

Richard’s mouth hung, and Melissa turned to him. “Richard, please explain what he’s talking about.”

He heard the underlying plea.

Please prove that I can trust you.

Please prove that you are on my side and this man is not.

He wished he could prove that.

“They’re in a cottage,” Richard said.

“With whom?”

“With some of the Oneness.”

“Under armed guard.”

“Only armed with the Spirit sword. We all carry them, all the time. Even she does.”

“And under what else?” He looked more smug, more pleased, than ever.

“Under a shield,” Richard admitted.

Melissa sat down. Her face had gone grey.

“Better than that,” Clint said. “It’s not as though they’re under a shield to keep their demons depressed, hmmm? When I say ‘demon,’ let us all think of the same thing: not of evil, but of power, of gifts. Mankind has often used the term that way, have they not? To describe the gifts, the sensitivities, the perspectives that sometimes drove them mad in pursuit of artistic vision, purity, love. It is the true sense of the word. You have personified them as something inherently evil only because you need an enemy to fight, and you are afraid of man ever becoming all he should be—free, and not bound by your chains of sameness and responsibility to a mass.”

“I call them what I call them,” Richard said, “because I’ve seen their eyes, and their wings, and heard their voices, and nearly been killed by them. And my good friends, and my family, have nearly been killed by them.”

“Because you set yourselves up as their enemies right out of the gate,” Clint said. “What do you expect them to do? Yes, you’ve been attacked by demons. And Melissa has been healed by them.”

He turned to her, his presence courtly, beseeching. The voice of confident reason and mastery. “The fact is, my dear, the children are only ‘possessed’ by their own higher angels, their own true selves. You’ve seen that for yourself. But what I have tried to train, encourage, and develop, this man has done all in his power to destroy.”

He turned back to Richard. “Come, now. Explain it. Tell her what exactly you’ve done to the children, and why you’re keeping them under a shield. What you’re afraid is going to happen.”

He looked at Melissa. Blue eyes looked back at his, pleading.

“Richard. Please.”

All the strength wanted to go out of his legs. He wanted to sit down, bury his face in his hands. But Clint was here, and he could not be so weak in the presence of his own enemy.

No matter how silver-tongued, how beguiling that enemy could be.

“We freed them,” he said. His voice was threatening to break, to shake, but he wrestled it under control.

“You what?”

“Melissa, please, listen to me, and trust me. This man, no matter what he says, is my enemy and yours. He’s the enemy of all Oneness and all that is good and whole in the world. He kidnapped and plotted to kill a number of our own, to burn them alive in a house full of leaking gas—was it your ‘higher angel’ that gave you that idea, Clint? Some of us tried to save them, and Clint used the children to incapacitate me. Their demons—not their ‘power,’ no matter what he says—threatened to kill them if I tried anything, and I couldn’t just let that happen. So they held me helpless, hostage, for a little while. Held both my hands like little kids taking a walk in the park with their daddy. And I figured, if they’d been dealing with the likes of this snake all their lives, likely they needed a daddy. So I just held their hands tight back and loved them through that grip just as hard as I could, and by the time that fight was over, they got past their demons and cried out for freedom of their own accord, and Mary set them free.” He faltered. “Mary. One of our own. A good woman.”

Melissa looked stricken. He could only imagine what she was feeling—hers was a depth of emotion he could share, but she was walling him off. Probably walling them all off.

“So yes,” he finished. “Yes, they’re behind a shield. Yes, some of the Oneness are guarding them. It’s for their own protection. Because we figured this guy would come for them, and so would their demons.”

“That’s not the whole truth,” Clint said.

He didn’t seem one bit shaken, one bit thrown off, by anything Richard had said.

Like the truth didn’t matter even the tiniest bit.

Like he knew the lie would conquer.

But he knew, now, the ‘truth’ Clint was fishing for.

And it was true. So he would speak it first, before this man could spin it.

“We are protecting them from themselves, yes,” Richard said. “The chances are very good that if they do not join the Oneness, they will invite the demons back to take over again.”

“And then they could heal me again,” Melissa said.

Her words fell in the room like a sentence. And an accusation. All in one.

“Yes,” Richard admitted.

“And right now, there is no one to heal me. In two days the children won’t be here, and I will start to lose ground again.”

“That is precisely what will happen,” Clint said. His eyes gleamed. “But I think you do not imagine how fast you will lose that ground.”

Richard wanted to kill him, then and there. He was threatening her. The bald-faced devil.

No, worse than the devil.

The man.

“That’s why I’m here,” Clint said softly. “I came to collect you so we can go together and collect the children.”

“Why do you need her?” Richard asked, but Clint ignored him. Melissa didn’t seem to have heard. She took the hand Clint was offering, hesitantly, and took a step toward the door.

And turned back and looked at Richard, who was still standing in the middle of the open seating area.

“What about him?” she asked.

“The clown?” Clint asked lightly. “I think he can wait here for you. Don’t you? He wants to guard you. Let him do the next best thing and guard your home. Alex will help him.”

She frowned. “He’s a free man.”

“No,” Clint said gently, “he is not. Because I am not giving him his freedom just now.”

She stopped and pulled her hand away. “Then I am not going with you.”

This time, Clint did look surprised.

Richard was sure his face held the same expression.

“You brought a friend,” Melissa said. “I want to bring one with me.”

“I am your friend.”

“No,” she corrected him. “You are not. I’m not sure what you are, but you’re not my friend . . . not anyone’s friend, I don’t think.”

“I raised the children in their power.”

“Then I’m sorry for them,” she said.

And for a moment, something flashed across Clint’s face that told Richard he knew he might actually lose her—that Melissa was not as securely in his grip as he thought.

Silently, inwardly, Richard cheered.

He had not known it until now either.

For a second confusion flashed across Clint’s face, and then he turned to Alex and barked, “You come with us. Watch him.”

He nailed Richard with his glare. “Come, then. I do not object to you seeing us get the children back—to you seeing how eagerly they come back, how much we do not even have to fight. Not like you are fighting for so many of yours, hmmm?”

“We would not have to fight for any of ours if you had not attacked us,” Richard said.

Clint laughed. “So you say. But it is not I who am at the root of all your troubles. It is David. One of your own. He sought me out, asked for my help.” He inclined his head in a mock bow. “I am only a servant.”

Like everything the man said, the words felt a lie. Richard wanted to call them out, debunk them, expose them for the bald fabrication, the horrific twisting, they were.

But he couldn’t, because this time Clint was right.

Speaking truth.

As almost impossible as that seemed.

Clint narrowed his eyes as he looked at Alex and Richard, from one to the other several times. He held his arm out to Melissa again, and she took it, but with her head held higher and her air more clearly watchful.

“You will come,” Clint said to Richard. “Like she says. Come and see us get the children back. But if it should occur to you to try to stop me, or to attack our progress, I want you to stop and think about who else might be under my control just now.”

Melissa did not react.

Somehow, he had cloaked his words so she could not hear them.

Falling in step behind them, Richard did all he could to send a subverbal message. Be careful.

And to his surprise, one came back: as clear as a word from the Spirit itself.

I will.

 

* * *

 

It was not David at the heart of the darkness threatening the Oneness.

Found under the trailer by a land surveyor days after he had collapsed there, a nearly dead David was airlifted from the remote location to a hospital in Lincoln, where Oneness found him and quickly took responsibility for his life. Once a regimen of IVs and pills had made him strong enough, they moved him to a safe house.

It took him a long time to want to do anything more than sleep. He lived in a half-coma, staying there intentionally because when he came out, he had to face all that had happened and all that had been thought, every alternative truth that had been entertained in his fearful and grieving and fever-destroyed mind.

And still there in the secret place of his soul, reliving it all, Mary struggled to patch together her own thoughts.

This was the chief: it wasn’t him.

All this time, all this effort, all this recrimination, and it wasn’t him after all.

They had gone after the wrong man.

Nor, as David had insisted, was she the real cause.

It had been Clint all the time.

Or, at least, the man who now went by that name.

Undoubtedly, many of David’s actions had been evil. His intents had been evil. He had powered the core in the warehouse; he had exiled Reese; he had shot the hermit and gathered the hive. He was as given over to his bitterness and hate as any man had ever been, and in his own way was as far gone as the possessed man who pretended to be in his employ but was all the time directing every piece of the game according to his own master strategy.

David refused to wake up for nearly two years.

Something far away was calling for her, screaming for her. She was needed. Desperately needed. She tried to get back, but the lethargy, the coma of David’s memories held her away from the voices calling.

On the yacht deck, David opened his eyes and smiled grimly.

He could not move.

He would not release himself that much, because to do so would be to release Mary as well.

And he was not ready to do that yet.

His hope, that he could draw her into his soul deeply enough to hold her captive there, was working.

The demons were swarming over the deck in nearly fully tangible form, stumping around like grasshoppers, like spiders, like horrors out of a children’s fairy book of the old, Grimm kind.

Chris and Diane lay unconscious or dead on the deck.

April was still standing, only because the demons thought it enjoyable to toy with her.

David wanted to call out to them and tell them to stop it, because it could backfire to leave any one of them standing. He had seen that in too many encounters with them. To be one was to be One, with the strength of all, though they were likely not aware of that to any full extent.

He was glad the boy, Tyler, was not here. Somewhere he had discovered the truth of Oneness enough to escape paralysis. Better that he not be here to pass that understanding on.

He wished he had the strength to talk, that he could pull out of his soul sleep completely enough to address April.

So, he would tell her, we get to kill you after all. What is this, the third time? You would think your friends would take a hint and protect you better. That they would get some idea of how important, how key, you are to everything. But they don’t. They just treat you like another common foot soldier, because that is how the Oneness is. No one better than another, no matter how naturally superior; no one allowed to rise above the mud.

That was why the Oneness would lose. Because they insisted on denying the truth about each other and about themselves.

Unexpectedly, he felt a twinge of conscience. His own journey had begun in the anger, grief, and doubt birthed through the cruel and unjust deaths of people like April.

His own daughter would have been just about her age.

He had come a long, long way.

But he closed his eyes again and refused to think any more about that.

 

* * *

 

“The parking garage is down,” Richard said when Alex hit an elevator button going up.

“We’re not taking the car,” Clint answered.

“I have a perfectly good one waiting down there.”

Clint ignored him.

Melissa offered Richard a halfhearted smile, meant to be encouraging, he thought. He was at least encouraged that she wasn’t treating him like the enemy, even if she wasn’t sure yet where she stood on everything she’d just learned.

The elevator took them up to a service floor just above the penthouse, one they weren’t supposed to be able to access without a special key, but the doors opened seemingly at Clint’s whim. From there they climbed a ladder to access the roof.

The city of Mark spread out below them and rose around them, lines of traffic, lights, glass and steel. The air was cooler up here instead of hotter: heat rose, but only heated its environs where it was trapped. Way up here, some thirty stories above street level, it dissipated into cooler, thinner air.

Clint strode to the parapet at the front of the building and stood atop it as though he would leap. Richard’s heart went still for a moment at the thought that Clint was actually going to require them to jump and expect him to take care of them somehow.

He did not actually doubt that the man could do it.

He was just fairly sure Clint would conveniently forget to take care of him.

Clint spread out his arms, facing them, exultant master of space and air and time. “Come away with me, then,” he said.

“I’m not going to jump,” Richard said.

“Of course you’re not.” Fool, said his tone. “The way I travel requires no such theatrics. Only mastery. And thankfully for you, I have all the mastery any of us need.”

Even as he spoke, the ground seemed to rush out from beneath Richard’s feet. They were airborne—perhaps. He felt as though he could see the surface of the earth rushing beneath him, a blur: the steel and concrete of the city whisking past, the browns and greens of the countryside, the farm fields; the sweep of mountains, yellow and pine; the sea. He felt no wind, no sense of movement, only a profound displacement—as though if he tried to put his feet down somewhere he would fall forever, never able to recover his location in the world.

It stopped.

They were on a patch of wooded ground, tall pines on every side. Richard retched, only mildly comforted by the knowledge that Melissa and Alex were doing the same thing.

Clint sounded amused. “It takes only a little getting used to.”

Alex said something mouthy, but Richard was still too sick to catch the words.

“You know,” Clint said, “the sad thing is that you could do this too. Especially a man like you, a man of prayer and in tune with the Spirit. There is a great deal you are capable of that you have never even asked to explore. You are content to stay low, common, like the rest of your kind. But you are a man of far greater power and ability than even you have any idea. That is why you cannot defeat me. Because for all your vaunted talk of transcendence, and for all that I believe in nothing but myself and the dust, I have far more faith than you.”

Clint stopped and arrested Richard with his eyes, ignoring the fact that Richard was still recovering from being sick. When he spoke, Richard knew he was cloaking again—that no one else could hear him.

“Mark my words,” he said. “I have just said to you the truest thing I will ever say to you. I do not know why I said it. But I loathe the idea that any word I speak should be wasted.”

Richard felt shaken.

Finished being ill, and with Clint no longer speaking to him, he took a moment to feel his feet solidly under him and become more aware of his surroundings. The smell of pine sap was strong in the air, but it didn’t cover up the scent of salt, nor the distant sound of waves. The ground sloped sharply away to the west. Chances were they were near the cliffs.

And near the hermit’s cottage.

Yes, this was Tempter’s Mountain.

A crashing in the trees alerted Richard to someone or something coming. He raised his head with a sinking feeling.

The feeling was not amiss. The crashing revealed itself, with a stumble into the clearing, as Jordan.

“Well done,” Clint said with a smile. “You have escaped the shield.”

The boy didn’t seem to notice the rest of them at first. “I think they’re chasing me,” he said. “Help me get my powers back!”

Then his eyes transferred to Melissa and widened, and from her to Richard—he ignored Alex completely.

“You!” he said.

“Yes, it’s me,” Richard said. “Think about what you’re doing. Remember how you felt before we set you free. This is not a game, Jordan. You were a prisoner. You’re going to go back to being a prisoner.”

“You were powerful,” Clint said. “And you want it back. You’ve had time to experience the ‘freedom’ these people promise you. Don’t let them treat you like a stupid child.”

“Jordan,” Melissa said quietly, “I still need your help.”

Richard closed his eyes.

That was the end of it.

And he couldn’t—he couldn’t watch the transformation.

He could feel the creatures as they gathered in the air, invisible presences all around, eager—hungry. He knew with his eyes closed that Jordan was thrilling to the presence, both excited and afraid, and that Clint was standing with his hands on the boy’s shoulders, encouraging him to open himself up.

It wouldn’t take much. Possession was always easier the second time.

Richard was vaguely aware of Alex at his elbow, guarding him, he supposed.

He wasn’t sure why they felt that was necessary.

And then he heard a shout.

“Richard!”

The shout was happy, relieved. He knew the voice, young and optimistic: Tony had found them.

“Richard, stop them!”

He opened his eyes. Tony was still a ways away, running full-tilt toward the clearing, zigzagging down a path that was clearer than the way Jordan had come. His sword was in his hand and he had every intention of throwing himself at Clint or the demons or Alex and fighting until they killed him or he won.

His youthful brashness, his total zeal, was the stinging rebuke Richard needed in that moment.

Of course. Of course he was here to fight. Of course he could not just let this happen.

He wasn’t sure how Clint had managed to convince him otherwise.

His own sword was in his hand in an instant, and he sprang forward to drive it into Clint.

The warlock waved his hand, and Richard felt air like a wrecking ball in his stomach, throwing him bodily backwards six feet into a tree. The wind knocked out of him, he struggled to stay fully conscious and keep hold of his sword. Empowered by the demonized, embodied evil that was Clint, the demons started to gather physical form. Thunder boomed, shaking the trees, and a wind started to blow in the tops of the pines. Tony arrived, met by Alex with his hands spread and some sort of net forming between them. Richard’s eyes riveted on Clint, and he did not watch the scuffle between the younger men.

Clint laughed as the storm wind blew in his clothes and his hair. “You feel that? That is my power stirring. My higher angel. I am dust, and I control dust. I control clouds and rain. I am electricity, and I am thunder. What is your Spirit to compare to me?”

He took a step closer, the shadows of the boys in combat darting around behind him. “The storm is already fierce out on the water, where you sent David and your pathetic cell. You and yours are dead as I speak. You have failed in everything.”

He stopped only three feet from Richard and let his voice drop. “This is the end for you, my friend.”

“We are not friends,” Richard answered.

And summoning all of his strength, he pushed himself off the tree and straight into Clint, driving his sword deep in the man’s chest.

Clint stared down in momentary surprise at the place where Richard’s blade pierced. Then he began to laugh. It seemed that the blow had no effect, that it did not even stir the demons within this man.

Richard clung desperately to the hilt and tried to push the sword deeper, but he was stopped by some power he could not begin to grasp.

Clint moved his hand again, a motion like brushing off dust, and Richard flew back once more, skin ripping from his hands as he tried to hang onto the sword. The blade disintegrated. He landed on his back in the hard dirt and pine needles.

Tony was still fighting. Alex, it seemed from his combat style, had learned witchcraft from Clint and was eager to use it, but Tony was so fast, so determined, and so bull-like in his style that Alex hardly had the time for the strategic kind of fight he needed. He was just barely fending the teenager off.

Richard’s hands stung.

His eyes stung.

He saw Clint advancing on him and told himself it was over for him, but where was she?

Melissa—where was she?

Gone. Gone with the boy.

To do only God knew what.

 

* * *

 

Mary tried to get up, to get out of David’s past and get back to the future where she was sure someone was calling for her, needing her badly, but she couldn’t do it.

The link was too strong.

And David, she thought, might be keeping it that way deliberately.

When he came out of his self-chosen coma, a still-young man with still-fresh losses and pain, Mary was surprised to the point of tears to discover that he was not yet a villain.

Quite the contrary.

The young David woke from his two-year sleep with new hope and new zeal. Looking over what had happened, he determined to know two things: that the Oneness was good and that what he had seen was evil. And knowing that, there was only one choice to make.

His belief, and his drive to act on that belief, were infectious. He became, for the first time in his life, a man of prayer. He sought of the Spirit and connected deeply with the river of personality, purpose, and majesty that it was. He found himself in the Oneness, gloried in it. It lifted him above his losses. Life meant something, something more than it had before the massacre.

His joy impacted Mary, pulling her into it, summoning her to believe with all she was in all the Oneness was, in all the Spirit was, in all they believed to be true. Summoning her to know it to be true. Summoning her to act.

She was at home in this version of David, and more than at home. She was lifted, elevated, made her finer, fuller self. This man could have led a cell in great things. He could have delved as deep as Richard in the things of the Spirit. He could have changed his world.

He had changed his world. But not in the way he now promised to do.

What happened, she found herself whispering, but the whisper was swept off, carried away, buried by the strength of his passion.

She forgot herself in him.

One—and only One.

There were no longer two.

David spent his days with the cell that had rescued him from the hospital. They had all suffered loss, and they grieved together, forming bonds deeper than they had ever known. And David, best and brightest of them, began to form a plan.

It began in prayer. He doubted at first, but over the course of days he became certain that the idea came from the Spirit itself. It was birthed in prayer, after all. And driven by his desire to do right, and to bring the Oneness to the victory they were certainly headed for—the victory promised by the enormity of their defeat in the massacre, a rising again made certain by the distance of their fall.

The conviction that his idea was right, that it was born of the Spirit, did not come immediately. At first he resisted it.

Because it meant going to find the man he had encountered in the woods, and seeing to it that he died or was converted.

Oneness did not take vengeance.

Not normally.

But this time the man was more than just a man. This time he was at the centre of something—something big, much bigger than the massacre. If he was not stopped, worse than those dark days would follow.

More children like his daughter would die.

The demons would triumph.

Little by little, through thought and strategizing and more prayer, the plan came together. He put in the necessary work. Researched, discovered the man’s name and his likely whereabouts. Tracked his habits, his movements. Learned how to find him and most important, how to catch him unawares. In the process he learned more than he had ever wanted to know about the depths of human depravity: the massacre had been the man’s first strike against the Oneness, but not—by far—his first crime against humanity.

That they had not stopped him before now seemed a crime.

The plan grew from an idea to an obessesion, a heartbeat. He did not tell anyone else. He would need them all—the Oneness would have to do this together. He was certain it would work. But he would wait for the right time to tell the others.

In fifteen days the cell would convene with other cells in a radius of a hundred miles. All the leadership would come, and anyone else who wanted to be there. It was the perfect time, the perfect place.

The Spirit had arranged it that way, he was sure.

It was part of the plan.

The day came.

There were over seventy of the Oneness there. They met not far from Lincoln, in a small town where they rented a hall. It was the first time in several years since the massacre that they had dared to convene like this, in public, but the pogrom seemed to have settled for the time being.

They began in prayer, and it was glorious. So many voices all raised in one, a harmony of sound like waves crashing, like a song. David exulted in it, felt purified and strengthened by it.

When that was done and various members began to speak, he looked across the room and noticed her there. She was beautiful, like she always had been. A small woman, brown hair, courage in every line of her being. Her hair, he saw, was silvered a little. He had heard of her brother’s death and was sorry. He had never forgotten the courage of both twins on the night they fled. It had been one of the few threads of gold to which he could cling, and believe that in the end the Spirit would weave a tapestry of their misfortunes that brought beauty out of it all.

Her name was Mary. After his girlfriend, the mother of his child, had refused to follow him into the Oneness, he had sometimes found his heart yearning for that sort of love again—and it was Mary his thoughts most often focused on then.

He was glad she was here.

That too seemed part of the plan.

Finally talk turned to the massacre, and to the steps they were all taking to recover from it, and he knew his time had come.

He stood and cleared his throat, and with the sensitivity of unity they all quieted and waited for him to speak.

“There is a man,” he said hesitantly, and thought that was a poor opening. But if he’d memorized a speech, he had forgotten it. This was his moment, and it was too important for memorized speeches.

The Spirit would give him the words to say.

“On the night we ran,” he stumbled along, “I encountered a man. A sorceror. He killed several of my fellow runners. And I learned that he set the bombs. He was behind all of it.”

Everyone was listening.

“His name was . . .”

And Mary cut him off.

Gently, but with mild reproach she said, “We don’t fight against flesh and blood. Our battle is spiritual. I’d rather not know his name and be tempted to hate it.”

And that was the end.

No one listened to him after that.

One voice after another chimed in after Mary, some expressing their shared conviction that the fight was not human but demonic; others simply going again into their common stories, the grief, the loss, so they could all mourn together.

But David was done mourning.

He wanted to act.

He needed them to believe in him and to act alongside him, because this he could not do alone.

Once he tried to speak again. But this time they did not notice.

As they all talked, one over the other, no one thought of him again. It was as though he were exiled—not Oneness at all, not now when he needed them most.

And in the depths of his soul Mary stirred again.

She realized, with surprise, that she had been able to see herself—and ached to know how David had viewed her once.

And she knew it now.

This was what she had done.

One gentle rebuke—one interruption.

And somehow he had never found his footing again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

And his grip let go.

They were lying on the deck of Chris’s yacht.

The sky overhead was nearly pitch-black.

There were demons everywhere.

She was too late.

 

* * *

 

Melissa held the boy’s hand tightly as they pushed their way out of the pine grove and emerged on the cliffs, following a winding path up toward the level ground above. The storm over the water had turned the air a dark, slate gray, and lightning cut it. Wind rushed through the trees and scrub on every side and kicked up yellow sand from the bluffs, marring the air so it was hard to see and harder to breathe. There was no rain as yet.

She wasn’t sure what she was doing, really.

She had never felt so torn.

She told herself she was saving the boy. The battle going on in that grove was fierce and dangerous; she was just getting a child to safety. And trying to find the other one, the girl.

So they could both come back to power and heal her again.

Perhaps it was the threat Clint had issued—telling her that she could not imagine how much ground she had already lost. Whatever it was, before the revelation that Richard had set the children free from demonic possession, she had felt no different since her last appointment with the children. But everything had changed when that truth came out. Something deep inside her body, down in her core, had begun to make its presence felt. She could feel it as a tight mass of malignant pressure on one side of her belly, and the more minutes passed, the more it began to send a dull pain throughout her body, a promise of weakness and debilitation to come.

It ached especially in her fingers, where the music was.

That ache, and her growing fear, were driving her just as hard as any concern for Jordan.

She knew that but chose not to acknowledge it as they skirted around a twisted pine that bent over and obscured the path.

“This way,” Jordan urged, even though they were already religiously following the path. Melissa had no desire to wander out here longer than necessary. “She’s up there. In the cottage.”

She paused and looked back over the sea, at the massing clouds and chopping waves. She could not be unaware of the presence in the storm—its darker-than-dark, unnatural personality. Malignant, like the tumor she could feel stealing her life.

Higher angels? She asked herself.

Just an embodiment of human gifts and powers?

Melissa’s had not been a life heavily steeped in encounters or battles with the demonic. Not until the cancer, when the demonic offered itself to her as an answer the Oneness could not give. The Mark cell was not her spiritual home; she came from a rural home several states away and had only come to the urban world when her music took her there. She had remained more aloof and separated from the Oneness in Mark than she should have, perhaps. But it was not long after going to the city that the diagnosis had come, and the solution, and all of her questions and fears.

 

* * *

 

It had taken more than an hour to round up all the kids from the children’s home and get them to stay in the cottage, telling them that the storm looked bad and the lightning and wind would be dangerous. Angelica and Susan and the Smiths didn’t tell them more than that, even though their warnings produced more disgruntlement and restless annoyance from the kids than anything else.

“But we want to stay outside!” one teen protested. “It’s stuffy in here! Just let us stay out until it actually starts getting dangerous.”

A thunder clap cut him off, and Valerie Smith gave him a look offering the startling sound as her answer. “There’s no lightning yet,” he said, sulking.

Angelica had posted herself at the front door. Her sword remained invisible—not good that the kids should see it—but it was ready to appear at any moment.

A smell was beginning to fill the air, mingling with the sea salt. Not the usual smell of impending rain. It was something else, something unpleasant—sulphurous.

“Come on, Tony,” she said. “Find him and get back here.”

She didn’t want to think about what it would mean if Tony didn’t find him.

Lightning striking somewhere nearby lit up the sky.

Laughter caught her attention. Two of the kids were outside, dancing around in the dirt driveway with the delight of forbidden fruit. “Get back here now,” Susan Brown called, sounding more frayed than Angelica had ever heard her.

Unwilling to leave the woman to her own devices, Angelica stalked into the driveway and collared both kids. They were young, young enough to respect her eighteen years.

“Listen, this is stupid,” she said. As though to punctuate her words, thunder clapped deafeningly overhead. It darkened by several degrees simultaneously, and fear flashed in the kids’ eyes. “Yeah, that’s right,” Angelica said. “Now get inside!”

They did, running ahead of her as she returned to her post.

She was only there less than a minute when Valerie appeared white-faced beside her.

“Alicia’s gone.”

“What!”

“I don’t know how she got past us . . . she must have gone while you were out in the driveway.”

A few minutes. That was all she’d been gone.

But that was all it took.