A fleeting thought of Nick came to him, a small boy throwing himself off the end of a dock because he just couldn’t take life anymore, because he wanted to swim away from it all.
You can’t, Tyler thought, it finds you. It finds you and you just have to die. You can’t even figure anything out before you do.
It was good that he couldn’t talk to Chris. Couldn’t voice any of this nihilism that was all he really thought or felt right now.
Upstairs, things went quiet, and then the whole atmosphere sank into a deeper, more twisted and perverse darkness. Tyler thought he could feel the ground throbbing beneath him and something filthy in the air. He could not move, thanks to the drugs, even to shudder. But his whole being quaked inside. In his mind’s eye he went through it all again: the killings on the highway. The crunch of gravel under tires as the truck pulled off the road, his exultation and satisfaction at the sound of the police approaching. Their captor swearing. The truck door being raised, letting in blinding light.
And then the killings.
Why he and Chris were still alive, he had no idea. What they wanted with them. What they had in mind to do with them.
Whatever was going on upstairs ceased, and the atmosphere normalized again—as normal as it could be down here. Then the door at the top of the stairs opened, letting in light, and two bodies came crashing down the stairs and landed in a heap at the bottom.
The twins.
They didn’t move.
Again the door opened, and a skinny, unimposing figure appeared on the steps. He held up a flashlight and shone it down, into Tyler’s eyes, and said in a voice that cracked with youth, “Where’s the rest? You said we’d get all of ’em.”
“They’re coming,” answered another voice, far too familiar. The young man in the moving truck. The Wizard, the hitchhiker, the man without a name who spoke with a faint European accent and tore grown men apart with his bare hands and with glee. “My brother has shot the girl by now and is bringing the mother back with him. It has already begun.”
“You’re very confident,” said another voice, one Tyler remembered too well even though he had been around it very little. David. His blood ran cold at the knowledge that this man was here too, and he wanted to cry and scream and maybe kill him. David’s betrayal of the Oneness cut deeper than Tyler could explain, even now that he hardly believed in the Oneness anymore.
“I have every reason to be confident.”
“They are stronger than they look, this cell. They’ve beaten us before.”
“Correction, my friend. They have beaten you before, and that because you are too personal, too closely connected to them.”
“They fought an entire core and won.”
“Only after you had allowed it be fractured. You weakened, and your loss of strength tore the whole unit apart. You know the demons. It takes strength to hold them together. More strength than it seems you have.”
David’s voice had lowered dangerously. “You speak pretty strongly for someone who wouldn’t even belong to this collective if it wasn’t for me. The hive exists because of me.”
“And it will go on existing without you, if it comes to that. You are not even possessed. You cannot be. That makes you the weaker.”
“And you are an arrogant idiot,” David replied. “You don’t know anything about strength.”
The Wizard laughed. “I killed two men with my hands. I think I know a great deal.”
“You know what an animal knows. Mine is the mind driving this hive. Mine is the vision directing it.”
“You are the god, yes, I know,” the younger man said, but his tone was mocking.
The door closed and the teenager on the stairs disappeared behind it. The basement was plunged back into total darkness.
Tyler strained to hear anything from the twins—any sign of movement, any sound of breathing. He could hear nothing. Possibly they were already dead, and this basement was the crypt where they’d been buried.
He wondered who “the girl” was the Wizard said had been shot. Reese? April? “The mother” had to be Mary . . . or Diane.
He had just accepted that the twins were in fact dead when one of them moved. He wanted to call out to them, but he still could not speak.
Pray.
The word, the command, came at him out of the darkness as though spoken by a voice. Demanding obedience.
If he could have shaken his head, even his fist, at that voice, he would have done it. He had seen the futility of prayer. He had seen the futility of believing in anything except chaos and death.
Pray.
He found that although no other part of him could move, he could close his eyes. Tightly. He did so. Willing the very idea away from him.
Pray.
Why? his spirit shouted back. What good does it do? What good does anything do? It’s not enough! Prayer is not enough. The Oneness is not enough. The Spirit, whatever the Spirit is, is not enough. All there is is emptiness, lack, horror, and dying.
All that fighting does is exhaust you.
For a moment his mind settled into a weary rest, as though the voice had waited for him to say his piece and was letting him calm himself before it spoke again.
And then there it was again.
Pray.
No use, Tyler argued, more weakly this time. This is me we’re talking about. Me. I can’t tell the difference between a demon-controlled maniac and a Spirit-filled leader of the Oneness. I can’t tell when a warehouse is full of demons or if my fellow Oneness, only a few feet away from me, are dead or alive. I can’t pray. I’m not enough. I’ve never been enough.
The voice answered: You are not alone.
Pray for what, how? He wondered. He wished he was Richard. Richard knew how this worked. Richard could—
The answer cut off his own thoughts, surprising him. He’d thought he was talking to himself. But his own voice wouldn’t invade quite like this, would it?
Reach out.
I can’t even move.
Reach out.
A tiny, almost imperceptible sigh escaped him.
He pictured Richard. Concentrated, tried to see the older man’s face. His wise eyes and his gentle smile, and the authority with which he spoke. That was something you could picture, intangible though it was. Authority marked every line on Richard’s face. And then Mary. He pictured her too. He started by trying to see her face as he knew it, but for some reason the image kept morphing, showing him a younger woman instead. The woman who had known David in his early years, who had brought him into the Oneness. The woman who had come to the village fleeing from an attack much like this one, and had brought Diane into the Oneness too, and eventually brought April home.
He tried to picture April then, and was momentarily stopped when he remembered that she might be dead. A lump came into his throat, and his heart beat harder, but he forced the feelings back and just pictured her. Of all the village Oneness, he knew April least. Yet she was part of him. As he pictured he could feel her strength, her courage, her compassion reaching out to him. He felt it and thought she could not be dead.
But that thought made him picture Patrick, who was dead—or wasn’t, as was the case in the cloud. Patrick who had appeared several times to him while he was still outside the Oneness and then again when he was in, talking to him and assuring him there was a plan, there were reasons for everything, and proving beyond argument that death just was not the end Tyler had always assumed it was.
He pictured Reese, fiery, tormented, strong-willed Reese.
He formed Diane in his mind’s eye, his surrogate mother.
He reached out, in spirit, for the twins. He found that when he did, they were not dead or even unconscious or even trapped; they were vibrant and strong as ever, full of life, full of ideas and bravery and ready for anything. He almost smiled, both at the image of the twins and at his own hubris in imagining them like that.
Pray, the voice had said. Was this prayer? Was he actually accomplishin
g anything but thinking of all these who were part of him and smiling at thoughts of their strength and their humanity and their companionship?
Something wet hit his shoulder and trickled down his arm.
The sensation was incredibly irritating, and he wished more than anything he could wipe it off. He still couldn’t move. Another drip, another trickle. Slow and heavy.
For a terrifying moment he thought it might be blood, but then he smelled it.
Kerosene.
His hair stood on end.
More drops, hitting his hair and face and shoulders and hands and feet. Sprinkling like rain from overhead. His skin was crawling even as he wanted to gag on the smell. He knew what they were doing. Preparing the pyre. Drenching the sacrifice.
They were going to burn the house and everyone in it.
He could hear noise upstairs, scuffling, raised voices.
And then there were tears on his face again, mingling with the fuel.
Reach out.
For one more person.
For Chris.
Two more—Chris, and Nick.
They weren’t One. Weren’t even reachable like the others were. But Tyler reached for them anyway. Desperately tried to find their spirits in the dark, picture their faces, join strength with them both and pull them home to safety.
He wasn’t sure exactly when the Oneness had begun to feel safe again.
But in a sudden, hazy blaze of light, as though he was seeing through smoke to a brightly lit room, he saw Patrick, and many others, and beings he thought might be angels, all standing in the basement with them and driving a message home.
Never alone.
Never, never alone.
Never, ever, ever alone.
Tyler believed it. The scene vanished. The kerosene fell faster. He did gag on the smell.
* * *
Richard pulled his car to a stop directly behind the moving truck, and they piled out without fanfare. Hilts throbbed in their hands, but they held the swords back, not yet giving them form. The air stank of witchcraft and smelled also of blood. The latter smell, they guessed, came from the moving truck.
Reese marched to the front door and pounded on it.
They wanted a fight, they were going to get one. No sneaking in this time. No lurking around the edges, biding their time. There was no time to bide.
The air shifted, tinting itself a different colour, and the wood grain of the door began to swirl as the physical makeup of the world around them started to re-form.
“None of that!” Richard boomed.
His voice returned the world to normal.
Spell stymied.
Reese pounded on the door again.
It was thrown open from within, and she found herself facing a woman she had never seen before. The woman was about thirty, professional, harried. She appraised Reese with a barely hidden sneer.
“Yes?” she said. “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“You don’t really need to ask that, do you?” Reese answered.
“This is my house,” the woman answered. “I think you owe me an explanation of why you’re trying to take my door off its hinges.”
“You wouldn’t be Mrs. Smith, would you?” Reese asked.
The woman flushed. Identified.
But that thought stopped Reese in her tracks. “Wait, where are the children?” she asked.
Behind her, Mary and Richard had been drawing closer to the door, but they stopped. “What children?”
“April said there were children,” Reese said, ignoring the woman who still stood in the doorway. “When the fake Dr. Smith came for Nick, he had a ‘wife’ and two children with him. April just took out the doctor. Here’s the wife. Where are the children?”
The woman snarled, with an expression so animalian that Reese drew back. The snarl resolved into a smile, just as terrifying.
“Why don’t you come in and see?” she said. “For that matter, I think a few of your friends are here already. They’d love for you to join the party.”
Reese stayed where she was, tensed with indecision. Her first instinct had been to let the sword form in her hand and drive the demon out of this woman, no matter what the results be to her. The Oneness never took a human life if they could help it, but war was war, and if people were going to involve themselves to this degree, their lives couldn’t be guaranteed on either side. But the thought of the children had thrown her off. Kill this woman, she could maybe do. Especially after April had already killed someone earlier this same day. But she couldn’t be responsible for the deaths of children, and there was a good chance there were two—or more—in this house.
She thought of Miranda and the children’s home and nearly was sick. If the hive’s first goal was to turn the Oneness against itself and use their influence in the world to spread possession and demonic control, children were among their prime targets. Oneness could not be possessed, but people working alongside demons could be just as bad as people possessed by them, and perhaps more able to target the innocent.
“What do you think, we’re holding them hostage?” the woman said, pleasure glowing in her eyes. “Or are you just afraid to come in and find out that children are on our side too?”
“No child is on your side,” Reese said. “Even if you have gained control of them.”
“Naive,” the woman said.
“We want to see our friends,” Reese said. “You can let us in and let them go, peacefully, or there can be a fight. And I will wager we’re stronger than you are.”
The woman laughed. “Not one for subtlety, are you? Do you always go marching into battle like you’re going to destroy the whole enemy army at one go? Didn’t learn much from the warehouse fight. We are always in more places than you think. We always have plans you don’t know about.”
Reese flushed, the shame and pain of the battle where she had lost Patrick and invited the distrust and exile of David’s cell coming back. The woman’s comment bit deep, deeper than the words themselves should allow. She knew the powers in the air were playing on her emotions and dredging up the exile to throw her off, keep her from being strong enough or clear-headed enough to make good decisions in the moment. Chris had once told her grief was dangerous. She wrestled her mind back to focus, trying to ignore the pain forcing its way up her throat.
“Let us in,” she said quietly, “and we’ll see who is ready for who.”
She stepped forward, and to her surprise, the woman stepped back and motioned for her to enter the open door.
Second thoughts raced through her mind. The woman’s words plagued her. This wasn’t wise. Richard and Mary should have gone around the back and tried to get in some other way. They should have gone to the Lincoln cell to try and get more help. They should have tried to draw the hive leaders out into neutral territory, tried to take this more slowly. This was the warehouse all over again, and once again, she was leading the way into disaster.
She swallowed all of that fear and stepped inside the house.
The entrance was a dingy foyer with old, stained carpet and striped, wallpapered walls. A living room, empty, was shadowed off to one side. The place felt old and smelled like mildew and something else. A strong, dirty smell with a physical impact.
Some kind of gas.
Instantly, she felt herself on intensified alert. The heightened awareness brought on by the smell also linked her more strongly to the man and woman following her, and she felt the rush and fear attendant upon Mary’s own memories. There had been something about an explosion in her history, Reese knew. Death by fire.
But they stepped in behind her. And now all swords were drawn and fully visible.
The possessed woman stood five feet in front of them, in front of a doorway into another room. If anyone else was in the house, they weren’t showing themselves. The air felt stretched, tense, but no demonic presence was visible but the one dwelling inside this human being.
She was so normal, so much a woman—a mother
, a wife, a daughter. Short, styled hair; stylish clothing; well-kept nails. And something inhuman looking out through her eyes.
“What are you waiting for?” that something asked. “You’re here to battle, aren’t you? Drive me out.”
Reese clenched her fingers more tightly around the hilt.
“Come on,” the demon taunted. “Of course you might kill her, but you knew that when you came here. If you don’t risk killing her, you’ll lose your friends and your lives. We will win because you didn’t even try to stop us.”
Reese took a step forward.
“Her name is Hilary,” the demon announced. “She was born in Lincoln. Went to college out east, got married, went through a painful divorce. She likes movies and walking on the beach. She’s spent hours by the ocean, crying or reading or trying to find some meaning and hope in this life.”
Reese stopped. She couldn’t do this. She knew she was playing into the demon’s game, but she couldn’t just plunge a sword into this woman knowing what would happen to her. It was bad enough she had almost killed Alex in the schoolyard. Then, she had just been trying to get information—she hadn’t intended to keep going until he died. But here, that choice wasn’t part of the equation. It was drive the demon out, probably killing its hostess in the process, or leave all the advantage in the enemy’s hands.
The demon smirked. “What? Can’t bring yourself to admit that there is no hope, no meaning? That death is the only way?”
From behind the woman, two figures stirred in the next room and slowly padded out, eyes glassy. Children. A boy and a girl. They walked past Reese, totally ignoring her, and each took one of Richard’s hands and held them. Staring straight forward. His sword disintegrated. He couldn’t hold it and their hands at the same time, and he wouldn’t hurt them.
Reese turned her head enough to see, and she groaned inside. Richard was incapacitated from a fight unless he could find a way to get the children out of harm’s way. Little chance of that, considering they were possessed. Mary, still armed, looked from Richard to Reese. Her expression showed the strain she was under.
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