“Stay close to me,” she had whispered.
Patrick and Tony crouched behind her, both with swords drawn, both wearing dark clothes and grim expressions with an undercurrent of excitement, even joy. Their cell had been defending against the hive with no real success for months. And now Reese had brought them to its source.
Garish light did little to illuminate the parking lot, casting deep shadows instead. Reese had chosen an old Buick to hunker down behind. Its tires were a little flat, and grass was pushing through the pavement beneath it. The warehouse loomed beyond, lit by perimeter lights that attracted insects and hummed with an electric buzz. Men were unloading a truck at one of the docks; Reese and company were waiting for them to leave.
This was it. The core, the locus of demonic activity and presence that had been fuelling the hive. She had found it, after months of tracking, and she knew that now was the time to strike. They did not expect an attack. And the Spirit was leading—she knew tonight was the time.
The cell was not entirely behind her. David had tried to talk her out of an attack, saying it was too dangerous and they didn’t really know enough about the core to strike it with so little preparation. But she knew what the Spirit was saying, and Patrick and Tony felt it too . . . enough, at least, to trust her to lead them here. And anyway, wasn’t this what they had spent their entire lives preparing for? Every attack, every skirmish, every fight with the demons had been preparation for a bigger battle, one that would strike a real blow, make a real difference. She’d felt that in her gut since she was a girl. David would see. He would understand and admit that he’d been wrong.
Reese crouched in the shadows and soaked up that assurance, the strength of Oneness. She felt her companions’ spirits bonded with hers, and beyond them the cell—even David—giving her strength like marrow in her bones. She drew on every one of them as she waited and steeled herself for the fight: on their presence, their power, their unity, their love.
Oneness was the truest, the most real thing in Reese’s life. She was strong, a warrior with few equals in a cell full of fighters, because of the strength of her belief in their bond and all that it meant. And now, in this moment, Oneness and Spirit throbbed through her veins like a hot pulse, bringing her body and spirit to life.
The men finished unloading and turned their attention to the back of their truck, leaving the loading door ajar.
“Now,” Reese said, and all three moved at once, as if they’d known this opportunity would come exactly when it did. They ran silently through the shadows and slipped through the door before anyone knew they were there. The interior was almost entirely dark, lit only by traces of the lights outside, and those winked out as the dock door closed with a rattle of chains and tin and the truck departed.
For a moment they stood alone in the darkness, back to back, forming a tight circle. Dust, diesel, and electricity tinged the air.
They were the meeting place of three worlds—physical and spiritual, and the Oneness, straddling the other two. The spiritual world had not yet noticed their presence. It would only take a moment. Reese could feel the presence of the demons, unbodied but there on the other side of the visible.
So, while hers was still the element of surprise, with the rush of Spirit still pumping through her veins, she began the attack with a single word: “Now.”
Patrick and Tony raised their swords and let out a war cry. All three surged forward into a battle with creatures that barely had time to materialize, their swords made of spirit and effective even against the invisible. The demonic came together as wisps of white and grey cloud around them, dispersed and dispatched before they could offer any real resistance.
How many there were, she never really knew. The air felt thick with them, thicker than she had ever felt it. If she were alone, she knew she would stand no chance. But she was not alone. The men with her were among the best fighters in the cell—in the country, really. She herself was one of the best in the nation. They empowered each other as only Oneness could do. And the Spirit—
She had never felt the Spirit so strongly.
She felt as though she was carrying the energy of the worldwide millions of Oneness with her.
As they fought, she could feel the sins of the demonic dispersing with them. She could feel the lies, the wounds, the suicidal thoughts and insanity. She could feel the abuse and the substance addictions, the temptations, the domination, the witchcraft. Everything they had been working in the city, through the hive and otherwise. Everything they represented, going to pieces along with them.
Though it was dark in the warehouse, light wasn’t needed. They were fighting blind with a sight that saw what the eyes could not. She had never operated so purely in the spiritual world, never come so close to leaving the physical behind.
The fight was a blur in her memory. More a rapid series of sensations than a linear story. One thing only she remembered with clarity: she remembered the moment Patrick died. The demons had begun to pull themselves together into more discrete, visual forms, forcing the Oneness back into a more physical way of fighting that was, to her surprise, harder. Relying on their eyes seemed to rob them of ability to respond to invisible cues. At the same time, there were far fewer of the creatures—it seemed the attack had already been successful. They had decimated the core.
Reese had spun around to face an attack from a winged thing flying straight at her, and when she had driven her sword through its heart and watched it fly apart into wisps of smoke, she heard a cry of anguish and turned to see Patrick fall to his knees. The demon behind him, formed in the shape of a tall man, raised its battle axe to deal a death blow. Reese threw her sword like a spear and pierced the demon through the heart.
She rushed to Patrick, but it was too late. Her sword disintegrated beyond her as she grabbed Patrick’s hand and held it tight, and he clung to hers—a grip too strong for a dying man. His face was streaked with sweat and dust, but he smiled.
“We did it.”
She wanted to believe he would live. She knew better. Their connection was strong—strong from a cell life together, strong from a shared passion, strong from a last battle fought side by side. She could feel life ebbing from him and knew that his spirit was about to fly.
There was some hope, some excitement in that. But the grief quickly overtaking her drowned out her sense of it. It didn’t seem fair—that she should go home and celebrate victory while Patrick would never leave the warehouse in bodily form. That she would be welcomed back to the home they both loved, wrapped in its warmth, while he went on to a strange, foreign journey.
Anger at the demonic and all that fed it rose within her.
“I’ll avenge you,” she choked out. “I’ll see to it that the hive is finished forever—that the demonic never forgets you.”
He tried to smile again, but his body was in the throes of letting go—and he was gone.
* * *
Reese and Tony returned to the cell house in their run-down city neighbourhood in the wee hours of the morning, exhausted, sore, grieving, and victorious.
Angelica, Tony’s twin, was the first out the door as they walked up the cracked cement to the house. She grabbed him, half a hug, half a demand. “Where have you been?”
“Beating the hive,” Tony said.
Angelica’s eyes raked them both, filling with tears. “Where’s Patrick?”
“He’s gone on,” Reese said, steeling her voice.
Angelica let out a sob and ran back to the door, disappearing inside.
It wasn’t quite the welcome Reese had expected. Not that Angelica’s grief was a surprise, but there was something else—something almost ominous in the short, fearful way she had spoken. And in the way no one else emerged from the house, though the lights were all on and it was clear the cell was waiting for them.
Tony reached out and squeezed her arm just before they stepped through the front door.
Inside, the cell was gathered in the common room, faces gr
im.
David, especially, was grim.
And worse. Accusing.
“Reese, where is Patrick?” he said.
“He fell,” she said. “I’m sorry. But David—we brought down the core. They’ve been destroyed. The Spirit—”
“Reese, you need to be silent.” His voice was shaking as though it hurt him to speak, as though he didn’t want to say any of this. As though all he wanted was for everything to be all right. But that reluctance only added to the way his words slapped her across the face. It gave his words authority.
She obeyed.
“I told you not to go,” he said.
“I . . .” She swallowed and looked around, trying to find a friend. The faces of the cell members, her brothers and sisters—the marrow in her bones—were blank. Frozen. Eyes lowered, refusing to meet hers. “I had to follow the Spirit.”
“You’ve insisted for weeks on following your own ways, your own will, and calling it the Spirit. You’ve acted against the Oneness.”
“I only . . .”
“Reese, a man is dead. One of ours is dead. Patrick is dead.” His face twisted with grief. “Isn’t that enough to tell you how wrong you’ve been? How deceived?”
Silence.
He went on. “I’ve tried to help you see reason, to show you the truth. You’ve resisted every step of the way. Resisted to the point of killing your own brother—he would not be dead without you, Reese.”
His words were so impossibly awful as to be nonsensical. She heard them; they sent the room—the world—spinning. But she couldn’t comprehend.
“You have to be cut off.”
He was still talking . . . she couldn’t follow.
“You’re a danger to the Oneness . . . to the cell and to all of us . . .”
And the words she could not forget.
“You have to be exiled . . .”
* * *
“There’s one part of that night you aren’t remembering,” came Jacob’s voice from the darkness behind her. She jumped and turned, but she couldn’t see him. How many hours had she been pacing in the dark under the pines, replaying her memories? The cabin was not far away, but it was plunged in shadow.
“Every member of the Oneness has a special gift,” Jacob said. “Mine is sight. And I’ve seen your memories—you’re missing something. Something you need to know if you’re ever going to find peace.”
“What is it?” She didn’t want to ask the words. Didn’t want to give Jacob this much access to her heart. But they came out her mouth anyway.
“Ask someone who was there,” he said.
The piece of the woods where she was lit up—
It wasn’t Jacob she was talking to.
It was a creature standing on two legs like a man and speaking with Jacob’s voice, but it was covered with black fur—a bear perhaps.
“Demon,” she said, threateningly, and her sword formed in her hand.
Late.
It simply repeated the words, “Ask someone who was there.”
Her hand was shaking. She didn’t raise the sword in aggression. “You?”
“Will you allow me to show you?”
It was still Jacob’s voice, unnerving in its familiarity as it came from the mouth of something so decidedly inhuman.
She knew what she ought to say.
That she ought to refuse any communion with this creature—this enemy of all that she was.
But she said, “Yes.”
It stretched out its hands, and somehow it was closer now—standing right before her. Its massive, clawed bear hands surrounded her head, and she was back there, in the warehouse, standing in a swirl of cloud and smoke and unearthly light. She was locked in hand-to-hand battle, but this time she turned away from her enemy, leaving it undealt with, and faced Patrick instead.
In doing so, she saw what she had never seen before.
That moments before Patrick was stabbed in the back, his attention had been pulled away from the battle by someone standing on the high catwalk that rimmed the warehouse.
Someone human.
And as Reese looked, the human figure was illuminated, and she saw him clearly. She was aware that out of her line of sight, Patrick had been stabbed and fallen.
She saw the man on the catwalk respond with satisfaction.
The vision dissipated, and Reese stood in the clearing of the woods with tears streaming down her face.
She knew the man on the catwalk. They all did.
David had been there.
The creature—the demon, she reminded herself—was still standing in the clearing with her, in the preternatural light. Waiting.
“Why did you show me that?” she asked.
It began to answer.
She did not want to hear.
She screamed and threw her sword straight through its heart. The creature let out a tortuous bellow and crumpled, its human features fading away and its height shrinking as the body turned back to that of a black bear.
“No, no, no, no,” she said, her protests dwindling to a whisper.
She had nearly allowed a demon to bring her into its confidence.
And now she felt what she had never, ever felt after a fight before—remorse. For killing one of the demonic.
She heard shouts, and a light—natural this time, flicked on inside the cabin, followed by the porch light and then the sweeping and bobbing beacon of a flashlight. “Reese! Reese, where are you? What’s going on?”
Tyler arrived in the clearing, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “What’s happening? Are you okay?” His light flashed onto the bear carcass, and he stepped back involuntarily. “What . . . did you kill that?”
Jacob was just behind him, far less shaken and holding a stronger flashlight. He shone it on the bear for a full three minutes without speaking.
The other two quieted, waiting for him.
“Well,” he said, grimly, “if that was what I think it was, our wait here is over. Reese? Do you have something to tell us?”
She shook her head.
She couldn’t tell them. Couldn’t speak.
Chapter 3
They left the cabin in the morning. Jacob didn’t explain, just said it was time to go. Tyler seemed happy to be leaving, and Reese was more than ready to leave the clearing behind. Their first stop would be a logging town on the way out of the mountains, where they could access a laundromat, groceries, and a pay phone.
The latter was for Reese. It was about time she put in a call to Lieutenant Jackson and explained why she wasn’t bringing his prisoner back.
Whether she ever would depended on what side she was on, and she wasn’t sure about that yet.
But Jackson had been helpful, and had trusted her, so she called. If she hadn’t, she might never have gotten the message.
“One of our witnesses has been trying pretty desperately to reach you,” Jackson told her. She could guess who, but she asked anyway. Yes, it was Julie.
She got the number for the safe house and called.
“Reese,” Julie told her, “there’s something Jacob needs to know. Some of your cell came here yesterday and told us that Clint has been defeated—they stripped him of his powers somehow. But Reese, Clint isn’t his real name. Or even his real face. He’s been disguising himself.”
Reese frowned. “So his real name is . . .”
“Franz Bertoller.”
Reese’s blood ran cold at the name. It called up Jacob’s story all over again—his terrible, world-altering story of loss and the miscarriage of justice. Franz Bertoller was a monster. The man responsible for the death of Jacob’s wife, for Jacob’s descent into torment and conversion to a new vision of the Oneness, for the bombing of the old Oneness cell twenty years ago that had affected so many in Reese’s own life, for the suffering of countless people.
Jacob had long believed him to be dead of old age. Reese had seen the man’s gravestone.
“He’s alive?”
“Yes.”
&n
bsp; “Isn’t he . . .”
“He’s an old man. Very old. Don’t ask me what keeps him alive.”
“You’re right,” Reese said. “Jacob does need to know this.”
“Richard said they can’t charge him with Clint’s crimes because he lost his disguise when he lost his powers, and the police can’t connect Bertoller with Clint. Especially considering that as far as they’re concerned, Bertoller’s dead.”
“Right.”
“There’s something else. Something I thought you should know.”
She knew it before Julie said it. “They brought David back?”
“Yes. No change of heart. He’s back in jail, waiting for charges.”
Reese’s heart wrestled with itself—she didn’t know if she felt broken or elated by the news. “Oh.”
“Richard said the hive is destroyed anyway.”
“Oh,” she said again. It was good news.
She had chased the hive for years. Had nearly destroyed it herself before the exile. She should feel triumphant, victorious.
She didn’t.
Whatever had happened in the last battle, she hadn’t been part of it. She’d been off with Jacob, trying to convert him and instead finding all of her own most cherished beliefs put on trial.
And the verdict was not yet in.
But Bertoller . . .
She did have to tell him. He had to know.
“Thank you, Julie.”
Julie’s voice was kind. “I’m sorry if this news isn’t the easiest to take. About David.”
Alarm struck her at the words. “What do you mean? It’s great news that the hive is finished.”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant I’m sorry that David didn’t change his heart.”
“Oh. Yes.”
Reese hung up after saying good-bye, wooden and hating her own conflicted feelings. She should be sorry David hadn’t changed. The village cell had determined to do all they could to help him, redeem him. She should be heartbroken that he had refused their help. Wasn’t he her brother? Didn’t she want him saved?
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