Exile (The Oneness Cycle)

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “It’s real, you know,” a voice beside him said.

  Tyler nearly jumped out of his skin. The tall, big figure of a man who had appeared to him in the cliffs with a message for Reese was standing beside him. The man, Patrick, didn’t look quite so battered and bloody this time, as though he’d found a few minutes somewhere to clean up. If a ghost could clean up. He was huge and tough and intimidating. And yet veiled somehow.

  “Well?” Patrick asked. “Are you waiting for something?”

  “I …” Tyler closed his mouth. “I’m … what are you doing here?”

  Patrick chuckled. “Let’s just say I’m along for the ride.” He gestured at the house. “You really wanna know what this life is all about, keep walking. That’s the only way you learn anything—by experience and carrying on.”

  Tyler nodded, decided to temporarily ignore the fact that he was talking to a ghost, and kept on toward the door.

  He knocked.

  It was a moment before anyone answered, but the door on the other side of the screen unlatched and opened about an inch. A man, short and covered in tattoos, peered out. “Yeah?” he asked. “Can I help you with something?”

  Tyler cleared his throat. “I wondered if Mrs. Sawyer was in. Paper boy … it’s dues day.”

  Trying not to be too obvious, he did his best to peer around the man into the house. But it was no good. The man wasn’t big, but he was effectively blocking every inch of visibility, and he seemed in no hurry to open the door wider.

  “She’s occupied,” the man said. “Got guests. Can you come back?”

  “Well, it would be a pain,” Tyler said. “I’ve got a whole route to do, and then I’d have to walk all the way back … I’ll just be a minute. Can I see her, please?”

  The man looked behind him as though to confer with someone else. Tyler heard nothing—no whisper or conversation—but the man turned back to him and said, “No. She says she’s busy. Look, kid, come back tomorrow. This ain’t a good time.”

  Tyler nodded. “Right. Thanks for your time.”

  He turned away and heard the door bang shut behind him. To his surprise, Patrick was still standing at his side. The man—or ghost, whatever he was—looked grim. He walked companionably alongside Tyler as they strolled back up the road, trying not to look too hurried. Finally, out of sight of the house, Chris, Tony, and Angelica appeared. Where they had been hiding was anybody’s guess. They were good at this, Tyler thought.

  “Well?” Chris asked. His tone was sharp, and his eyes bored right through his friend.

  “They wouldn’t let me in. I think she’s there … but they’re not friendly.”

  “You’re sure of that?” Chris asked.

  “I saw one of them through the window,” Angelica said. “Big man, shaped like a hammer. I’d know him anywhere. He comes to visit David. He’s Oneness.”

  “He’s not,” Tyler said, amazed at the surety in his own voice. “He’s not. Can’t be.” He looked to Patrick for confirmation and realized the big man had vanished—or just gone back behind the veil. How this cross-mortality business worked was beyond him.

  “I’m sure he’s Oneness,” Angelica repeated. “David trusts him.”

  “But you can’t feel him?” Tyler pressed. “I mean, like Chris asked before … can’t you just tell if someone is Oneness or not?”

  She shrugged. “Yes, if I really think about it … but it’s not always sharp from a distance. Why are you so sure he can’t be one of us? This is good news!”

  “I’m sure whoever’s in that house, they’re not good news. I might not be Oneness, but even I can get a gut feeling about something.”

  “Hey,” Tony interrupted. “Heads up.”

  The others looked at him, and he pointed to the street they had all just stepped off of. A boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, was wandering up it pushing a bike, looking intently around him as though he was hunting for someone. His hair was sandy blond, his face pinched and aged beyond its years.

  Tyler cast a glance at the others and then stepped out into the street. “You looking for something?” he asked.

  The boy lit up at the sight of him. “Yeah, you!”

  He pushed his bike close at a jog and then stopped inches from Tyler, looking around furtively as though he was afraid someone was following him. The boy lowered his voice. “You were just at the white house up the street.”

  “Yeah, I was,” Tyler said. He dropped to one knee to be eye-to-eye with the boy, who was small for his age. “What about it?”

  “I don’t know,” the boy said, and Tyler realized he was shaking. “I think something bad is going on there. Hey, if I’m wrong, you won’t tell nobody, will you?”

  Tyler reached out and lightly rested his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “No, no, of course not. What’s got you spooked?”

  “Some men went in there this morning,” the boy said. “I saw them.”

  “They’re just visiting,” Tyler said cautiously. The boy shook his head, his blond hair in vehement disarray. “No, I seen them before. Down at the dock—” The boy shook even harder, and his eyes filled with tears. “I know I shoulda told somebody … I shoulda gone to the cops. But I was scared … I didn’t know what to do.”

  “It’s okay,” Tyler said, now stroking the boy’s head. He realized he was treating him like a much younger child, yet the boy didn’t shy away from his touch. It was as though he desperately needed a mooring, a secure place, and he had found it and latched on to it in Tyler.

  “There was a lady,” he said. “My friend. She came down to the docks where I read my books and was talking to me. Those men—” he pointed up the road toward the house—“they took her.”

  Tyler’s blood ran cold. “When?”

  “Thursday morning,” the boy said.

  These were the men who had taken April.

  Chapter 12

  “Thank you,” Tyler told the boy, processing the news as fast as he could think. “You were brave to tell me. What’s your name?”

  “Nick,” the boy said.

  “Listen, Nick,” Tyler said quietly, “can you go home? Are you safe there?”

  The boy’s mouth twisted a little, but he nodded.

  “Okay,” Tyler said. “Go home. Thank you for what you told me. It’s going to save somebody else.”

  The boy’s eyes filled with tears, and he nodded again. Tyler’s heart lurched as he stood and pulled his hand away from the dirty hair. “You’d better get going,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine. You did the right thing. Understand?”

  The boy nodded one more time, then hopped on his bicycle and pedalled away. Tyler stood in the street, looking after him and noting the direction he rode. Then he turned. The others were right behind him, Chris closest of all.

  “They’re the men who took April,” Tyler said. “The boy saw it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Angelica said. “They’re friends of David’s! What …”

  Tony put his hand on his twin sister’s arm. “We’ve known all along something wasn’t right,” he said. “Maybe we’re starting to find out what.”

  “What do we do now?” Tyler asked.

  “Go to Richard,” Angelica said, at the same moment that Chris said, “Rescue my mother.”

  * * *

  Once outside the door, Reese let her legs take her. She moved blindly, following trails at the back of the house into the cliffs. It struck her that they couldn’t be far from the village—the bay was far below, down steep cliffs. The terrain was steeper and more frightening here, but traversable. It reminded her of the place she’d tried to kill herself.

  There was no sign of Patrick, and she wondered if she had imagined the voice. Either way, she was glad she’d left. The argument was behind her, and she was alone with her grief again. It was becoming a familiar companion, one that she didn’t like to share with anyone else. She suspected she had put the hermit’s protective shield behind her, but she couldn’t feel it … all of her
senses, once alive to connection, were dead.

  “Why am I alive?” she heard herself asking. But no answer came.

  How long she stumbled along the paths she didn’t know, but eventually she spotted a cave.

  A dark shadow in the cliff side below a bluff, accessed by a narrow, precarious trail, was all that marked its location. She was above it, and it would be hard going to get down. Besides, with the warm sun on her back as she climbed the trail and the sight of seabirds diving and circling in the air beyond the cliff, she had little desire to plunge herself into the dark. She intended to keep going, get as far away from the hermit and the cell members as she could before her groaning, protesting body collapsed.

  And she would have done so, if she hadn’t seen the woman.

  A woman stood in the path just in front of the entrance to the cave. Beautiful, with long dark hair and a cream-coloured dress that reached to her ankles, she looked as though she had stepped out of another time.

  Her eyes were fixed on Reese.

  The woman raised her hand and beckoned Reese to come.

  And then she vanished.

  Reese stood blinking and wondering what she had just seen. The cloud? Why here?

  She wouldn’t know if she didn’t try to find out.

  One slow, careful step at a time, Reese made her way down to the path and the entrance of the cave. When she reached the entrance, the sense of power in the air nearly knocked her off her feet. This, she could feel. Evil—but not just evil. Other powers had met here, had clashed perhaps, and all had left their mark. The woman from the cloud might have had something to do with it.

  At the moment Reese stepped over the threshold of the cave, the reek slammed into her, turning her stomach. The small hole in the cliff opened into a biggish room that narrowed down to another hole, and this was one was blocked by iron bars.

  A door. A prison.

  “What is this place?” she breathed.

  The answer came to her. A killing cave.

  Reese looked around and spotted a torch and matches. Someone had been here not long ago—or the woman from the cloud had managed to bring supplies here. She was more open to the first option. Lighting the torch, she held it high, trying to ignore the smell. The iron bars seemed rusted but strong. A lock made it clear that anyone behind the door was not meant to come out. There was no key that she could see.

  It can be picked.

  Was that a woman’s voice?

  Regardless, picking locks was something she could do. She put out the torch and staggered back out into the bright sunlight to search for a suitable tool, wondering all the while exactly what she thought she was doing.

  She was supposed to be running away. Not getting all wrapped up in opening a door.

  Then again, maybe this was part of a plan.

  That thought kept her going. Twigs and pine needles were useless, but she found a piece of wire in a bird’s nest, conveniently located in the cliff side where it wasn’t hard to reach, and silently thanked whoever exactly was guiding her before returning to the cave and picking the lock. She relit the torch and pushed open the door.

  The smell grew stronger, and she held her breath for a moment before realizing she couldn’t keep that up and settled for breathing through her mouth. Dim light filtered in from outside, and she could hear water dripping somewhere. She held the torch up and peered through the gloom, sure she was supposed to see something.

  She did, although it took a moment to realize she was looking at a body.

  “Oh, God.” She dropped to her knees beside the form curled up in a corner of the cave. The torch spread light on a girl, about Reese’s own age, gaunt and pale and dirty. Light blonde hair fell around her face and partially obscured the black ink of a rose vine tattooed across one shoulder.

  She was breathing, Reese realized with simultaneous relief and fear. Not conscious, but alive.

  And almost certainly, her name was April. This was the girl Mary and Richard were searching for.

  In her mind she turned the events, the words, the revelations of the last few hours. A few rang over and over, offering life that Reese could not quite seem to grasp. But this was part of a plan. It had to be. And if she could still wield a sword—and speak with the cloud—and be drawn this deeply into a plan so tangled and full of power …

  You are Oneness. Richard had said it. Even the demons had said it. Not an exile. It was not true. She was not alone.

  But somehow her heart hadn’t come back to life at the words. Could it be so dead—so broken—after the pain of the deception that it wasn’t possible to revive it?

  Richard’s words, spoken with authority, meant the most. But it was Tyler’s, offered in a faithful panic, that were strengthening her now. Listen, Reese. You’re not an exile. Patrick said you were wrong about that. He said things aren’t what they look like, and this is the kind of darkness that requires patience.

  Patience. The word meant endurance—the strength to continue, to not give up, to not stop fighting, not stop waiting, not stop believing. Patience for the dark. The hardest, and most important kind. Patience to continue when there seemed to be no reason to do so.

  To keep living in a place like this, where someone had left you to die.

  “This is about you, isn’t it?” Reese asked the unconscious girl. “You need it too … patience. Seems like you have it. But I hope your dark is over. I hope if you wake up, when you wake up, everything is right for you. Everything is … healed.”

  April made no response, and Reese felt the presence and possibility of death like a noxious fume in the air.

  But then she heard the voice again—the voice that might be a woman’s, might be from the cloud, or might just be her own imagination.

  Hold the torch high, and look around you.

  The light of the torch, for a moment, did more to cast shadows and confusion than to illuminate. But Reese slowly rose, holding it still and high, and as her eyes focused, she caught her breath—for a very different reason this time.

  “Incredible,” she muttered.

  April had done this?

  Revealed in flaring, living reality by the light, paintings covered every visible inch of the walls and ceiling. In character they reminded Reese of pictures of prehistoric cave paintings—April’s materials had been similar, apparently just red mud and the natural shapes and colours of the rock—but with far more detail. Rose vines grew, arched, and coiled throughout the mural, thorny and flowering.

  But this wasn’t just about art.

  The woman was there, beautiful and grim. “Do you see it?” she asked.

  For a moment, Reese didn’t.

  And then she did.

  “The truth revealed,” the woman said.

  Painted across the wall in excruciating detail was Reese’s own story.

  And with it, the secret of the hive.

  Chapter 13

  The discovery that Reese was gone sent Mary and Richard into desperate searching. The hermit responded grimly, confirming his own opinion of her trustworthiness—clearly she was stronger than she’d allowed them to see and had been deliberately deceiving them. His best guess was that she’d come here to tear the shield or lead the demonic to his hiding place. Richard ignored his suggestions and hunted through the bush with Mary at his side, eventually wending their way up the bluffs behind the house and into a thicket of thorny bushes. It looked like Reese had been this way. The hermit trailed behind them, offering suggestions and occasionally water.

  They hadn’t been in the thicket more than five minutes when the sound of a car pulling up to the house set Mary on high alert. She could just see the driveway from here, and she focused her eyes on it while staying low, hoping it was Chris and Tyler and the others—although this was too early, too soon for them to be back.

  It wasn’t them. It was a green station wagon she had seen before. Relief flooded her, mixed with an unexpected caution.

  David’s car. The Oneness was here.


  “My God,” the hermit breathed. It was a prayer, not an expletive. “How have they come here?”

  The two men and Mary had just rounded the corner to the house in time to see the car and David pushing his way through the front door, accompanied by four other men. Mary started forward to greet them, but Richard grabbed her arm and motioned for her to keep silent. They ducked back out of sight and found themselves a place from which to watch.

  “They’re human,” Richard said grimly. “Your shield can’t keep them out.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mary said. “David is one of us. Why aren’t we …”

  “He is,” the hermit said. “Those others aren’t. The men with him are possessed.”

  “They …” Mary stopped. “What?”

  “This may be why Reese ran,” Richard said quietly. “She may have sensed them coming.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Mary said.

  “Little has, lately.”

  The men seemed to be searching the house. Crouching at Richard’s feet, Mary closed her eyes. She focused on the Spirit all around, on the power holding the world together, on the closeness of Richard and the hermit, on their combined strength. She focused and brought all these things together in the palm of her heart and lifted them in prayer.

  The sensation came in a rush—expansion, contact. Eyes and ears.

  Mary gasped.

  Reese was nearby.

  And April.

  * * *

  “I’m not waiting,” Chris said. “I don’t care what anyone says. My mother is in there with a couple of kidnappers, and I am not walking away without her.”

  He was staring down Tony and Angelica, who had both insisted—and continued to insist—that they needed to wait for Richard. To drive the truck back to the hermit’s and tell him and Mary what had happened, and to come back in greater force, with the man of prayer and the leader of the village cell both with them. They didn’t know what they were facing here, but it was more than just demonic, and the twins weren’t confident of their ability to handle it. Better that they wait and do this properly.