Chapter 11

 

Reese stood frozen against the rock face, sword in hand, staring at the apparition as it drew closer across the desert floor. It was a hundred yards away now, passing through cloud shadows and seeming to lose itself in them, only to re-form when it stepped back into the sun. Its eyes were fixed on her—it seemed not to need to look at the ground.

The sight of the ghost sucked all the fight from her lungs. She couldn’t battle this.

Could she?

As it came nearer, she lifted her voice and called, “You aren’t dead?”

It couldn’t really be him—couldn’t be David, dead and part of the cloud. A demon in the form of her worst enemy she could face, but she couldn’t stand an encounter with the man himself.

The cell had been right not to assign her to him. To send her after Jacob, make her remove herself far from the man who had exiled her.

The man who had watched her friend die with a smile.

The man who had torn her spirit apart.

He did not answer.

She closed her eyes for a moment, hoping frantically to find something inside her that would tell her the truth. She found it, in the form of her sword hilt—more solid and heavy in her hand than she had ever felt it. It would not so form itself in the presence of Oneness.

Even if she hated the one connected to her.

When she opened her eyes again, its feet were drifting away, like smoke being blown in the wind. It seemed to struggle to hold itself together. No wonder, really—there could be nothing in this barren region to fuel it, to give it power to take form. This was not the warehouse.

It would have been far easier to find some desert creature to possess. So the demon meant something by this—this was strategy.

Strategy for a different sort of fight.

Reese drew a deep breath and let her sword dissolve.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The demon drew level with her and looked into her eyes with its unnervingly familiar ones—with the face of a man who had been like a father to Reese for most of her life.

“I should ask you that,” it said.

“What do you mean?”

“You called me here.”

Reese jerked back as if she’d been slapped. “I didn’t. You’ve been tracking me.”

“I have been answering to your summons.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Is it?” The familiar face smiled, and David’s voice lapsed into tones Reese knew as well as her own—ironic, comforting, convincing. “We’ve been here every time you’ve needed us. You’ve been searching for answers. We have them. You fell, we caught you. You think that’s all coincidence?”

“Why are you . . .” she choked, and kept going. “Why are you wearing David’s face?”

“Because you want to face him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you?”

And she did . . . that was the problem. She did understand. She knew the creature was right. She had been calling to them, wanting what they had to offer. All but asking for their help. Not consciously . . .

But not entirely unconsciously either.

“Where is David?” she asked the demon.

“In jail. Awaiting trial.”

“Do you know how the trial will go?”

“We have looked into the future, yes.”

“And?”

“He’s found a good lawyer . . . Bertoller has paid for one. Most of the men who could have testified against him are dead or clearly insane. He’ll be judged mentally unsound and released.”

Reese swallowed hard. She didn’t want to hear the words. “And then?”

“And then Bertoller will find him, and they will begin rebuilding the hive.”

“Can I stop them?”

“What do you think?”

She drew another deep breath. She had closed her eyes without realizing it—she opened them again. The being had changed. It was more indistinct now, still in the shape of a man but no longer bothering to ape David.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“Lost.”

“How far will it take me to reach civilization? To get back to Jacob and Tyler?”

“You’re assuming you will.”

“Are you telling me I won’t?”

The demon might have smiled—she couldn’t see its features clearly enough to know. “People die in deserts. All the time.”

“I can’t die here. I have to get back to Jacob. I have to help him.”

“You can . . . but not alone.”

“I’m not alone,” she answered, automatically, the words turning to ash even as she spoke them. It was the watchword of the Oneness—not alone.

But who was with her now?

The Spirit, whom she could not touch?

Her cell, who had exiled her?

Tyler, Jacob, Richard, even Chris? Anyone? She was alone, alone in a desert where she could reach no one and might well, as the demon suggested, die.

The only help, the only companion presenting itself, was the demon in front of her.

And its counterparts that had been hounding her . . .

Or faithfully answering her call.

However you wanted to look at it.

She started to shake her head, almost violently, and called the sword back to her hand, stepping forward menacingly.

“Get away from me,” she said.

“We are not on Bertoller’s side,” it said.

“Get away!”

It obliged, moving back suddenly and beginning to disperse into thin wisps of smoke. “We are power, and drawn to power. It doesn’t matter what you ask of us. We make no judgments.”

As it disappeared, escaping the slash of her sword, it said, “You need only call.”

 

* * *

 

Tyler caught his breath as he slowed to a jog. Jacob hadn’t waited for him and somehow managed to cross more ground in a few strides than Tyler could manage at a run. Why he was trying so hard to rejoin a man who had smashed him in the face, he wasn’t really sure.

Jacob had finally slowed down, standing in the hollow between two sand dunes. He turned to face Tyler.

“If you come with me, you stay out of my way. And you do not interfere. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Tyler said. “But what—”

“I am this close—this close—to avenging my wife, and a woman under my care, and countless—countless—others. Do you understand? I won’t be stopped this time. I won’t be delayed. I’m not going to be too late to cut Bertoller off from the source of his power because you separated me from my greatest weapon and dropped us in the middle of nowhere.”

Tyler drew himself up short. “I dropped us? We fell. I didn’t—”

“It was your arrogance that got us here,” Jacob said. “You played with powers you don’t understand and have no ability to control. Argue with that if you want.”

He turned and began stalking away again. Tyler followed. “Wait. Did you call Reese a weapon?”

“Reese is a weapon. I don’t expect you to see that.”

“She’s just a girl.”

“She’s a woman with an extraordinary gift and the capacity to become more powerful than you can dream. The demons have been offering themselves to her—giving themselves to her control. I have sought their power for twenty years, and they have never done that for me. She only needs to let go of her fears and her misguided beliefs about the Oneness. She does that, and she will become a force for good such as this world has rarely seen.”

“By becoming a killer?” Tyler asked. “By killing Bertoller?”

“Bertoller must die.”

“Bertoller is a man.”

Jacob just cast a look over his shoulder that said Tyler was a worm, and stupider than a worm.

“What kind of game do you have around here?” he asked abruptly.

“What?”

“Game. Hunting animals.”

“Deer,” Tyler said. “And, uh, geese . . .”

“You still have that knife I gave you?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you kill with it?”

“Not a deer or a goose. I’m a fisherman.”

Jacob sighed. “Fine. Stay here. Gather wood for a fire. A big one.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Call for help.”

“With a fire? We’re going to make smoke signals?”

Jacob glared at him scathingly. “I would like to believe you’re not as ignorant as you pretend.”

“I would like to believe you’re not talking about calling the kind of help you’re talking about calling.”

“Just build the fire.”

“Are you going to sacrifice something?”

“You’re lucky I’m not going to sacrifice you.”

Tyler looked around as though searching for help, but there wasn’t much he could do. It couldn’t really hurt to build a fire, could it? Jacob was already climbing the dune, off in search of something to kill—Good luck on that in the middle of the day, Tyler thought—and Tyler heaved a sigh and started to search for flammable scrub or driftwood.

He offered a prayer for Reese as he worked. He could still see her falling, hear her calling his name. What had happened back there?

And where was she?

“Be okay, Reese,” he muttered as he began to fill his arms with driftwood. “Just be okay. We’ll find you soon.”

He paused.

“Please, remember that you aren’t alone.”

 

* * *

 

Bertoller watched as his men spread along the beach far below. Two others, armed thugs, bodyguards, stood at a respectful distance.

One of them carried a cell phone. It rang.

He waited as the thug grunted his way through the phone call and hung up.

“They’ve got the brat,” he said. “And someone else. Young guy who won’t give his name.”

“Description?” Bertoller said.

“Early twenties, big. Red hair.”

“Sawyer,” Bertoller said. “That’s good. If nothing else, he’s a bargaining chip.”

The phone rang again—this time the thug expressed surprise. When he hung up, he said, “They found the car Reese and Jacob were driving.”

“Just the car?”

“It was empty, on the side of the road in the mountains. No sign of them—not a footprint, not nothing.”

Bertoller considered that. It wasn’t a good sign. And he was not happy to have lost them. Still, chances were they were heading for Lincoln—if word of Julie’s death had reached them, it was guaranteed.

“They’ll show up eventually.”

The thug sounded nervous. “No word yet on the other woman.”

Bertoller cursed in automatic response—not to the report, which was expected, but to the reminder. That Julie was alive somewhere, as the demons already gathered to him assured him was true, was his sharpest reminder that all was not yet under his control.

But the Power would win. No matter how many murder victims came back to life and walked away.

He, the man whose name for some centuries had been Franz Bertoller, and before that names he could hardly remember, would not allow it to go any other way. He needed no reminder that the stakes were high—for him, deathly high. That for the first time in his history, he had been so thoroughly cut down that if he did not come back, if this tiny cell with its cluster of great powers that did not know themselves were able to strike at him again, he might lose entirely.

He might die.

He had spent his whole life serving the darkness, the chaos, the forces of entropy, corruption, and decay, but he would not surrender himself to those forces just yet.

He scanned the beach below for some sign of April, but it was too far, and wherever she was, she was hidden. Their ignorance of themselves had served him well thus far. April’s mural was an alarm signal not only because it displayed what she was to him, but because it displayed it to herself as well. If she acted on what she saw herself to be, he would not be able to stand against her.

And she wasn’t the only one. Richard. Reese. Melissa. Even the boy, Tyler.

He intended to kill them all before they could step out of their ignorance and into the fulness of their identities. Unless, of course, they turned—as David had, and Jacob, and nearly others. That had been his greatest dream. Turn the Oneness on itself, infiltrate and infect its ranks, turn it into a giant hive crawling with the powers of evil. Make the Oneness the ultimate destroyers of the universe they were holding together.

He had to admit now that he’d been overreaching.

But to kill a handful of great saints before they knew what they were? That, he could do. And doing so would empower him, make him stronger than he had been perhaps ever before.

He remembered great saints of the past, some he had killed and more he had kept his distance from, but he had never seen so many in one place.

From the beach below, a howl rose. Shouts carried the message up to him. The beast had found a trail.

Not the girl, not yet, but at least they could follow her now.

They were far from a village and farther from a real road. She wouldn’t reach help or disappear anytime soon.

It could only be a matter of time before they found her.