TWENTY-EIGHT

I SAT ON MY MOTORCYCLE in my mom’s gravel driveway, engine off, staring up at the early evening sky. I was relieved my parents were talking. Still, I wished I could go back in time and fix everything somehow. Redo our family history, starting with both sets of my grandparents. Had any of them ever stopped to consider the domino effect of their decisions? How their kids and grandkids would pay?

How I’d be impacted?

The thought came boomeranging back at me: Was I thinking about how my choices would someday affect my kids and grandkids?

Then again, if I married Ray Anne, would I ever even have any?

Suddenly I was desperate to hear her voice. I reached into my pocket for my cell but pulled out my wallet instead—a frustrating reminder that my phone had been burned up. Elle’s bookmark was wedged in my billfold. I read it.

“Even if my father and mother abandon me, the LORD will hold me close, Psalm 27:10.”

Pretty relevant to my life. And so like Elle to somehow know it would be. But the longer I considered the verse, the more resentment ground within me like a bag of rocks in my chest . . . Where was the Lord when I was seven years old and my mom left me home alone all weekend while she stayed across town with her boyfriend? I’d curled up in her bedsheets and cried the entire time. And where was God when I was trudging through snow at four years old, our pantry so empty I was willing to eat grass if I found any, and I fell into a sewer pipe and nearly died? Apparently some man had finally pulled me out, but was I supposed to believe God had been “holding me close” as I was trapped and freezing for hours?

I shoved the bookmark back in my wallet and did the usual—stopped thinking and suppressed emotion. I needed God to help me save lives in Masonville; I couldn’t afford to anger him with bitter accusations.

Still seated on my bike, I turned over my shoulder and commanded the Creepers still spying into my mom’s house to go at once. Watchmen reached up out of the earth and snatched the Creepers by their feeble ankles, yanking them underground, demolishing their stakeout. Heaven’s army usually invaded from the air—this stealth attack from below was extremely cool.

An hour passed, and I remained amazed that my parents were actually in the same room together. I wasn’t willing to interrupt them.

I drove to the church—what remained of it—and searched for my dog, but sadly, couldn’t find her. I determined I’d keep trying. I headed to Ray Anne’s house, anxious to tell her my father had come to town, but even more eager just to see her. If she refused to speak to me, I’d settle for just being near her. I pulled down harder on the gas.

“I love you.”

It was weird how easily I could envision her sweet face and say it into the wind, as long as she wasn’t there to hear it.

As I turned into her neighborhood, it occurred to me that I’d never once heard my mom tell any man she loved him, and she hadn’t said it all that often to me over the years.

I’d told her even fewer times.

I knocked on the Greiners’ door and also at the garage apartment, but there was no answer. No one home. I had no choice but to move on to my next important stop.

I raced to the edge of town, parked among the cornstalks, then began the trek to the abandoned house, as hollow as the principality buried beside it. At least I hoped Molek was still there, stuck in the dirt.

Thankfully there was some daylight left. I had no cellular GPS—no phone—but I was confident I could find the spot by memory now. I had to. It was my duty to make sure Molek stayed down and the Rulers didn’t prevail. It was Ray Anne’s calling too, but she was buried alive herself right now in paranoid fear.

I’d only begun to traipse past rows of cornstalks, mulling over my father’s shocking admissions, when the distraught infant came at me again—screaming its head off this time, like it was being tortured.

It’s indescribably distressing to cover your ears, only to have a noise get louder.

I charged ahead, determined to stay on mission, even with that foreboding presence surrounding me like it was somehow in front of me, behind me, and hovering on both sides.

My will to keep going took a huge hit when my body began physically reacting to the affliction. It was like something was moving inside me, clamping down on my heart like an iron claw, then twisting in my gut, then lower still, pressing against my bladder until it felt it might burst. I had no choice but to stop and hunch over, cradling my midsection with both arms. The experience reminded me of when I’d first drunk the well water and it had wrecked my insides, only this was much, much more painful.

“God, help me.”

It only got worse. The aggressive sensation traveled back up, assaulting my gut and heart all over again. And with it came crippling emotions I couldn’t begin to process.

I didn’t recall this form of anguish while spying on any of the Cosmic Rulers, but I still wondered if this internal torture was their doing. “No evil has any authority over me,” I uttered. But up and down the sensation went, moving through me like a hostile hand tearing apart my organs—like those insects from hell that, months ago, had infested my apartment were now squirming inside me. I moaned. How long could my beating heart take this degree of torment?

I hit my knees in the dirt. “God, please.”

There was no spirit of Suicide around. The pain alone was enough to make me want to die. It was that bad.

I collapsed onto my side and crunched into a ball. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, I felt a baby nestled against my chest, writhing like Jackson would do when he didn’t feel well.

“Get away from me!”

A tiny hand hit my sweaty neck and clung to my skin. And then came the crushing. It was like the child’s invisible accomplice had lain on top of me, pressing its massive weight against my right shoulder and hip and legs. It felt like more than one tormentor—like a dogpile of them was smothering me.

“God, where are you?”

The full-scale assault continued: the excruciating movement inside me. The mountain of oppression bearing down on me. The ghostly infant haunting me.

“Jesus!”

I don’t know how long I lay there, disoriented and groaning. I only know that at some point, that gentle yet commanding voice I’d come to know spoke from within.

STAND UP.

I couldn’t stop clawing the sides of my head, much less stand. “I can’t.”

I waited for another instruction—something more doable. But it never came.

Still lying on my side, feeling as if a mound of steel had me pinned down, I realized I had a choice. I could lie there in defeat or try to stand like I’d been told. Try, at least.

I pushed against the ground, but my upper-body strength was practically nonexistent. “Lord, help me stand.”

I was in no less pain when I finally sat up. I could still feel the baby on the ground next to me. It paused for brief moments to catch its breath before wailing again, like real babies do.

“Lord, help me stand,” I pled again, feeling an intense, incompatible mix of faith toward God and contempt, to be honest.

I rose to my knees, then dragged my foot across the dirt until the sole of my shoe was flat on the ground, my aura shining around it.

“Lord, help me stand.”

I bent forward and breathed—in through my nose, out through my mouth—as the inner affliction bore down on my bladder again. What kind of evil was this?

“Lord, help me stand.”

I held out hope Custos would come lift me up. At the very least, the old man. He’d rescued me twice before, when I was too weak to help myself. But minutes ticked on like hours, and no one came. I had to use both hands and press against the earth with all my depleted might. Soon, I was bent over, but on my feet. The weight of the invisible monster pressed down hard on my back.

“Lord, help me stand. All the way.”

I wanted to hit my knees again, not straighten my spine and lengthen my tortured gut. But inch by inch, I lifted my upper body until at last, I stood upright. The oppressive weight bore down on my shoulders now, the baby still protesting at my feet.

WALK WITH ME.

Another divine instruction that seemed out of reach. I didn’t feel like I could take a step, much less walk, but I moved my foot forward a few inches. “Help me walk with you, Lord.”

I managed one step. Then another. Then another. The pain the same. My resolve renewing.

I finally managed to walk, struggling the same way Ray Anne had after back-to-back surgeries. I begged God with every ounce of humility in me to please, please, please take away the agony—even slightly. And silence the infant, which was still following right behind me.

But he didn’t.

Over an hour after I’d started the trek, I finally arrived at the little abandoned house, no less miserable. But I had to force my focus off my pain and onto what mattered most right now.

I moved to the front left corner of the house, then leaned forward to sneak a peek.

Molek was only buried up to his waist, and he used his long spirit-world fingers to claw away physical-world matter, scooping dirt and tossing it aside, freeing himself from his soil prison. Next to him, his boxy throne poked out of the dirt, and he worked to unearth it as well.

I continued spying as one of those hateful bats descended, landing on top of Molek’s thorn-crowned head. The Lord of the Dead tilted his head back and opened his mouth so wide, he could have swallowed the fat winged creature. Instead he let the bat spit that black-grit death dust concoction onto his outstretched tongue. There was no telling what conflict had created this latest batch—which Lights were feuding instead of loving.

The bat flew away, and Molek resumed digging, faster now, still chewing his nasty potion.

Out of nowhere, he turned his head my direction and froze.

“I’m breaking free.” His voice was the sound of a thousand high-pitched whispers, aimed at me. Mocking me. Scorning my heavenly assignment to defend and liberate people. “I am free,” he asserted, “but you’ll never be.”

That horrible agony traveled up through my midsection again, and I knew . . .

The war raging over my town was about to come to an inescapable standoff. And so was the turmoil inside of me.