THREE

I LEAPT BACK IN ONE KNEE-JERK MOVE. Molek groaned—not the predatorial kind, but a suffering wail. The Lord of the Dead was alive but hurting. Not quite dead but dying.

Or so it appeared.

What if this was an act? An elaborate plot to deceive me all over again?

The bats still traveled in every frenzied direction, spitting their curses. I stepped back but kept my gaze fixed on my archenemy. The nightmare that had led me here now seemed more like a demon-induced trap than a divine revelation.

I knew what to do—what name to call on for protection—but something heavy clamped down on my right shoulder. I spun around, ready to fight with the only weapon that had ever proven to work in spiritual combat—faith-filled words. But thankfully, there was no need to defend myself.

The familiar old man gazed at my face. No smile today, but calming assurance poured from his golden-brown eyes, peering from beneath the brim of his straw cowboy hat.

“Hush.” That’s all he said, just barely above a whisper, yet it sent the bats flapping away.

“Please.” I grabbed his plaid shirt sleeve, layered under the same overalls he always wore. “Stay awhile.”

He had a way of disappearing as quickly and unpredictably as he showed up, gracing me with a few vital answers to mysteries no ordinary person could possibly solve, then leaving me hanging, desperate to know more.

I would have liked an explanation of where he’d been the past few months and how he’d found me out here, in the middle of nowhere, but I had an even more important question. I pointed to Molek’s dirt-framed face. “Is he really dying or just faking?”

The old man narrowed his eyes at the assassin. “Principalities can’t be killed the way you understand death, but they can be banished to outer darkness, as good as dead.”

“Where’s that? Tell me how.”

He kept his gaze fixed on Molek. “When wicked reigning powers lose a major territory to the Kingdom of Light—a town as coveted by evil as this one—they’re banished to the furthest, darkest, most tormenting chambers of hell. You’ve already been told how to send Molek there.”

Arthur’s prophetic letter. The call to gather the people of Masonville onto my land for an unheard-of time of spiritual devotion, purging the land of the sins of the past. The way I understood it, in the spirit world, my acreage remained stained with innocent blood, and the only way to wipe it clean was to express remorse to God on behalf of the unrepentant guilty people, long dead now.

Even though I’d never had the chance to tell the old man about Arthur’s instructions, he somehow had a way of knowing pretty much everything, so I wasn’t completely surprised he’d just referenced the prophecy. “So, it’s not too late?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Trust me, if it was too late, you’d know it. You’d see that the tables had turned.”

“But even if I find a way to get people onto my property, how will I make them believe me enough to cooperate and pray?”

I’d known from the moment I’d been handed Arthur’s call to action that it was unrealistic. A town of mostly shackled people doesn’t care about the spiritual history of a piece of land, much less want to gather on it to do something as seemingly absurd as ask God’s forgiveness for atrocities committed a long time ago. And after months of reaching out repeatedly to all seventeen student pastors around here—a ton of churches for a community our size—only six had finally agreed to meet with Ray Anne and me on the front steps of Masonville High this Sunday.

We hoped they’d want to join forces with us and persuade more people to join the mission to purge the school and my land of evil, but judging by how difficult it had been just to schedule an initial gathering, Ray and I had our doubts.

What’s more, Masonville was home to occult worshipers who were working against us around the clock, evoking and empowering the very evil we were trying to expel. Deranged as it was, I’d seen it with my own eyes: they wanted Molek to reclaim his position of lethal authority over our town.

The old man folded his arms and tilted his head to the side. “You believe the mission is to pressure a crowd of people to meet up on your land so you can try to convince them to go through the motions of some prayer exercise they think is useless?”

He’d basically nailed it. “Well . . . yeah.”

“That wouldn’t fix a thing. It’s a process, young man—guiding people to the truth so that they actually understand and want to join the cause.” He glared at Molek again. “Your faith and action up to this point have kept him off your land, separating him from his army and the students. That’s no small thing, but it’ll only last so long. He’s relentless. Until he’s banished for good, he’ll keep trying to find a way to rise up and reestablish his throne. If that happens, you’re looking at generations of suffering and warfare.”

“Yeah, I realize that.” It was weird how this extremely nice man had a way of frustrating me. I always felt like a jerk afterwards for having been impatient with him. I forced a polite tone. “I want Molek gone, cast into outer darkness, like you said. But I don’t get how to convince people to do their part.”

He patted my shoulder, completely patient with me, as always. “Again, it’s a process, Owen.” It was strange, but I didn’t recall ever having heard him say my name before. “Molek has to be starved out of town as one captive soul after another comes to the Light and learns to defy him—his lies and temptations. Only then will gathering on your land make a difference. While you work to that end, pay attention to what circumstances come your way. Who’s put in your path and why.”

I took another satisfying glance at Molek’s restrained body, buried alive. “He can’t tempt or lie to anyone in that condition.”

The old man lowered to one knee, hovering over the regional Creeper King as if studying his otherworldly features. Molek’s eyeballs rolled back behind his eyelids and shook within their sunken sockets, like he was having a seizure. “Even in his absence,” the old man explained, “his demonic subjects carry out his mission, shooting his deceptions like flaming arrows at people’s minds. Provoking crippling thoughts and painful, disheartening emotions.”

I stared at the mysterious cowboy, now more intrigued with him than the Lord of the Dead. “Who are you? How do you know all this?”

“Focus on what matters.” He scooped up dirt and tossed it on Molek’s exposed face, and it stayed there, the physical realm colliding with the unseen. “You have to find your people.”

“Meaning . . .?”

“Seek out and band together with those chosen by God and destined to believe your account and join you in the mission. Together, the handful of you can turn this town around and overturn evil.”

It was like déjà vu, only I knew why the scenario felt familiar. “My father basically just told me that.”

The old man nodded, like he was one up on me again.

“I’m meeting with some church people this Sunday,” I said. “Is it them?”

Still kneeling, he looked up at me with a small yet reassuring smile. “I have no doubt it will become clear to you when you find the ones called to serve alongside you.”

What a relief. People were being divinely stirred to believe and assist Ray and me. How else would we ever convince them?

Molek groaned, drawing our attention. “We need a battalion of armored Watchmen to stand guard here,” I said. “Look what a beatdown they put on Molek. They need to strike him again if he starts to move.”

The old man stood and rubbed the dirt off his palms, the soil only a slightly darker shade of brown than his skin. “Heaven’s army dragged him and his throne off your land, outside city limits, but the beating that left him this impaired came at the hands of his own kind.”

“Are you serious?” I’m sure my eyes were wide.

“In desperation, Molek summoned wicked cosmic powers that outrank him to descend on Masonville and help him reestablish his throne here—to combine their heightened destructive powers with his and devastate the town. They came, but they punished him severely for fumbling his assignment to begin with.”

I rubbed anxious circles on my chin, staring up at the morning sky, processing things out loud. “So even though these cosmic beings hate Molek, they’re willing to team up with him to try to destroy us?”

“All wicked forces hate one another,” the man said. “It’s the nature of their kingdom. But this town is a vital territory to their global plan. Their mission demands that they work together to see Masonville fall.”

There it was again. The idea that the world’s fate was directly tied to ours.

“Who are these superior rulers?” I thought maybe he was referring to the bats.

“Rulers of satanic darkness that preside high in the atmosphere over America. Seven of them have descended on Masonville, severely increasing the intensity of their influence on the people here. They’re larger in stature than Molek and far more wicked.”

So, it wasn’t the short, squatty bats. And far more wicked? How was that even possible? Yet it fit. This had to be the greater evil Arthur’s letter had warned about. The meaning behind the shadow that had brought me to my knees and tried to suffocate me in my nightmare.

The old man nodded solemnly at the broken-down house. “More than a century ago, that sat among others just like it on your land, during Caldwell’s plantation era. Unthinkable evils were committed within those walls, but it was eventually abandoned and hauled off. Dumped out here.” He shifted his weight toward me. “Think about it: if that house was restored and occupied now by a wholesome tenant, wicked men couldn’t enter it again, but since it’s vacant, they could walk in anytime and make themselves at home—men even crueler than the ones who lived there before.”

“Okay?” He seemed to be making some kind of analogy, but I struggled to follow it.

“And so it is with Masonville.” He faced me. “It’s not enough to have driven Molek off your land and out of town. The people here are empty without the Light. So evil has come in greater strength and number to fill the vacancy. It’s how wicked forces operate, generation after generation.”

I raked my fingers through my hair, already feeling the heightened stress. “Please stay and help me.”

The old man made no commitment—or reply. Instead he led me away by the arm, turning our backs on Molek and the house. Thankfully I had enough sense to get my phone out and pin the GPS location before we got very far.

“It’s not your job to pick a fight with the seven Rulers,” he explained. “Stay focused on finding those assigned with you to the mission, and together, gather the townspeople on your land to fulfill the sacred, scriptural promise you’ve been given.”

He let go of me, and we walked side by side between rows of ripening corn. “Know this,” he warned. “If Molek regains his strength, rises from the earth, and joins the seven Rulers, they will triumph, and the decades of heightened darkness will begin—here and in regions far beyond.”

“And countless people my age and younger will pay the price,” I added. I’d already learned from my father that hell’s end goal was to wipe out my generation and the next from the face of the earth, since no generation before us was so called to expose and defy evil’s agenda. Through every twisted means possible, demonic overlords and underlings were frantically working to kill us off. And based on the ancient historic account, Molek was among the most notorious assassins of young souls.

“How can Molek regain his strength?” I asked.

“You’ll know soon enough.” He reached toward my eyes, and of course, I squeezed them shut. He cupped his hands over my eyelids. Totally weird. “Be caring, young man, and you’ll see what you need to, when you need to. You both will.”

I knew he was talking about Ray Anne.

He removed his hands. I blinked a few times and nodded, remembering a strange but proven paranormal principle: when I looked at people through eyes of compassion, so to speak, I saw hidden burdens and bondages on them that I couldn’t detect otherwise. It was totally bizarre, but then again, lots of supernatural things are—from a human perspective, anyway.

He resumed walking, a brisk stride for a man his age. I kept up, eager to learn more. Everything I could. “Where are the seven Rulers right now?”

“All over town, working to spread their own influence and outdo one another, even while on a joint mission. But more days than not, at dusk, they commune on your land. At least a few, if not all seven of them.”

“Where on my land?”

“The place most associated with death.”

No surprise. I was confident I knew the spot.

The wise old man looked up and around, a cue I recognized by now. “Don’t leave,” I said. “Please, stay and help for once.”

He shoved his hands in his deep denim pockets and grinned. “Haven’t I always been there when you needed me?”

He’d definitely saved me on more than one occasion. Most recently, he’d come to my rescue after I’d been gagged and hog-tied in the woods, freeing me just in time to rescue little Jackson from his sadistic captors. But he’d said he’d meet back up with me at the scene of the crime that night and never did. “How come you bailed on the occult ritual, when I broke up the ceremony and stole Jackson back?”

He smiled wider, showing his gleaming white teeth. “I was there.”

“Oh.” In all the chaos, I must have overlooked him.

He glanced over his shoulder. “I have to go, but I’ll see you again.” He instructed me not to follow, then turned and walked away in the middle of me asking, “What’s your name?”

I stood there all of two seconds, then dove between cornstalks, determined to follow in spite of his warning. But he was gone.

It figured. He was a marvel all his own.

I left the cornfield and drove toward Ray Anne’s house, squinting into the rising sun. She loved when I had updates, and man, I did today.

I’d just passed Masonville High and was driving alongside my wooded property when a pale-faced teenage boy came stumbling out from the tree line, holding hands with a dark-haired, olive-skinned girl, both dressed in jeans and hoodies. In late August, in Texas.

They were both shackled. At first I thought something dark and freakish blanketed their faces, but when I looked a second time, there was nothing on them.

I circled back and pulled off the road, curious about the scary face thing and also wondering what they’d been doing in my woods. It was six-thirty on Wednesday morning, the first week of a new school year—a weird time to go walking the trails. When I parked and turned my engine off, they angled away from me, marching through knee-high grass back toward the woods, lurching forward at times like their equilibrium was way off. His blond hair pointed in every wild direction. She latched onto his skinny waist to keep her balance. They had to be freshmen. Maybe eighth graders. And both naive enough to think if they ignored me, I’d just go away.

“Hey,” I called out.

The boy looked back and mumbled something. I ran and caught up to them, planting myself in their path. “What are you guys doing out here?”

She looked up at me, but he pulled his hood down, covering half his face while tugging on her hand. “Come on, Zella.” When she didn’t move, he let go of her and strode toward the trees without her.

She was a petite girl, only as tall as my chest, with dimples that made her seem innocent, but her brown eyes were glassy and bloodshot. And roaming all over the place. “Please don’t call the cops on us.” Her eyes pooled.

I wasn’t sure why she thought I’d call the police, but before I could say anything, she turned and tried to catch up with the guy—her boyfriend, I assumed. But she tripped over her own Nikes and slammed onto the grass.

“Are you okay?” I went to her and reached to help her up, but she dodged my hand.

“We got it.” The boy sighed, turning back and working to get her onto her feet, obviously as high as she was.

“What are you guys on?” There was no sense playing dumb. I’d been around enough of my mom’s druggie boyfriends to spot users without any second-guessing.

He finally got the girl up, then faced me. “Nothing.” After that, his syllables slurred together, but it seemed like he said, “Just leave us alone.”

That’s when it hit me.

“Gentry?”

I recognized him. Gentry Wilson, Lance’s little brother—a lot taller and thinner than he used to be. I hadn’t seen Gentry in a while, not since Lance went from being the best friend I had in this town to one of my worst critics.

Gentry stared at me with an open-mouthed, blank expression, his brain clearly not firing on all cylinders. I placed a brotherly hand on his shoulder and asked again, “What are you on?”

He shrugged my hand away and stared off into the distance. “Why would you care?”

I leaned down so I could look him in the eye. “Gentry, it’s me. Owen Edmonds. Remember?”

He hardly glanced at me, but then again, his mind was frying. This wasn’t the same giggly kid who used to follow Lance and me around and try to shoot hoops with us in their driveway and beg me to drive him around on my motorcycle. The memories must have triggered compassion in me, because the next thing I knew, I had an up-close look at the most grotesque bondage I’d ever seen.