Exile (The Oneness Cycle)

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “And why try so hard to protect the hive?” the hermit put in.

  Once asked, the answer was clear—so solid, so apparent that it couldn’t be denied.

  Mary felt it like a blow. “The hive, David—it wasn’t centred in that warehouse. It’s centred in you.”

  With the words spoken and hanging in the air, the look of wounded confusion left David’s face. Without hurrying, he unholstered the revolver at his waist and pointed it at Mary. “I think it’s time you both stop talking,” he said.

  Mary’s face went white, but her fear didn’t dim her anger. “You can’t bring your demonic forces in here!” she said. “This place is under a shield!”

  David cocked the gun. “I don’t need to,” he said. “This isn’t demonic, my dear. This is human.”

  “Why?” Mary asked.

  “Reese was going to discover me,” David said. “With her insistence on going after the hive. The Spirit was leading her straight to me. I had to get rid of her somehow, and the exile was better than a killing. It gave me power—it gave the core power. Power enough to finally, finally come after you.”

  “Me?” Mary said.

  “You brought me into the Oneness,” David said. “Twenty-three years ago. I don’t think you even remember—that’s how little you care.” His grip on the gun tightened. “I want nothing more than to be rid of the Oneness. Since the Spirit won’t set me free, I’ll cut myself loose in my own way. Starting with you—all of you.”

  “You’ll do what demons fear to do?” Mary asked quietly.

  He waited.

  She glared at him. “I don’t know where April is, but I’m sure now you’re responsible for her disappearance. Whoever took her, they didn’t kill her. Afraid to shed blood. Now you’ll do what demons are afraid of? David, reconsider. You said yourself you can’t be free of the Spirit. I hate to think what blood on your hands—Oneness blood—will mean for you.”

  “Blood,” David spat. “You think I’m afraid of a little blood? I didn’t know the meaning of the word until the Oneness forced me to it. Death cannot come quickly enough for me. And I cannot be any more damned than I am while I’m still a part of all of you!”

  Before anyone saw it coming, Richard stepped forward and put his hand on the revolver, gently but firmly bearing it down. “What happened to your family twenty years ago was not the Oneness’s doing. You know that. It was the enemy who inspired that attack.”

  “What do you know about it? You weren’t there!”

  “Mary has told me about the bombing and the massacre,” Richard said. “You’re not the only one who lost everything—the only one who needs healing …”

  “I know where to find healing,” David said. Richard’s grip had grown tight, both on the revolver and on David’s hand. The cell leader relaxed his arm for a moment and then unexpectedly brought it up, twisting free of Richard’s grip and clubbing him across the face with the gun. Blood gushed from Richard’s nose, and he staggered backwards with David still beating the gun around his head and shoulders, wild and uncontrolled. Mary grabbed the cell leader’s other arm and held it, trying unsuccessfully to drag him away from Richard.

  “David,” she screamed as the men with him came charging up the hill to intervene. “Stop it! Stop it, you can’t do this!”

  One of the men grabbed her and threw her off, and she fell to the ground. Richard lurched back as David straightened up and glared at them. “Don’t you tell me what I can’t do.”

  Mary struggled back to her feet, holding her abdomen as though someone had kicked it. “David, how are you doing this? How can you deny the connection—the Spirit? Everyone else?”

  “I can’t,” he growled, and his voice slowly slid back to normal. It was steely now, dreadfully controlled. “No matter how hard I try, no matter how badly I want to, I can’t leave the Oneness. So I will make the Oneness leave me.”

  “You know it wasn’t our fault,” Mary said, still crouching in the dirt. The hermit laid a hand on her shoulder, but Mary’s eyes didn’t leave David. “We didn’t cause the massacre. That was the demons—the creatures you’ve sided with. You’ve become what you hate, David.”

  “No,” he countered. “What I hate is you. All these years the demonic has been offering us freedom. A return to primal chaos, freedom from the Spirit holding—binding—this world together. Freedom from each other. I want that freedom, Mary. It’s my choice, and I’m choosing it.”

  “And everyone else along with you?” the hermit said. “You can’t just make a choice like that for yourself. If you succeeded you’d be taking away everyone else’s right to choose.”

  “I don’t care,” David said. He looked down at the gun still in his hand, smiled, and shot the old man.

  Mary screamed out as the hermit dropped in the dust, blood soaking the hand he held against his abdomen. David holstered the revolver and nodded to his cohorts. “Tie those two up and get them in the car. We’re going to do this thing right.”

  “What do you mean?” Mary found the voice to ask.

  His eyes glimmered. “I’m not going to kill you out here, under a shield where the effort would be half-wasted. I’m going to kill you where it counts.”

  Mary’s stomach sank, and she knew what he was going to say before he finished.

  “We’re going back to the warehouse.”

  Bound hand and foot so tightly that they could not move, the companions were laid side by side in the back of the station wagon and covered with a thick blanket. It was damp and musty and smelled like old gasoline and grease, and the air beneath the blanket turned quickly heavy and suffocating.

  They were silent as the car started and pulled away from the hermitage.

  Outside, it was growing darker.

  “Reese,” Mary whispered.

  * * *

  Reese tried her valiant best to lift April and carry her out of the cave before giving up. Her efforts only served to make it clear how weak she actually was from the attack. Straightening up, an attack of nausea nearly knocked her off balance, weariness sweeping through her core and every limb. She sat for a moment, letting her legs regain their strength. All around her, the painting told its terrible story. And April slept.

  “Listen,” Reese said, peering down at her unconscious companion, “you hang on. I’m going to get Mary and Richard, and they’ll get you out of here as soon as they can. You only have to hang in there for a little while longer. Okay? Just an hour, and we’ll have you out.”

  She looked up, the scenes glimmering in the torchlight. The little village cell was there, and Chris and Tyler. The woman she had seen on the path and in the cave had been drawn in especially vivid detail, even the compassion in her eyes showing. She swallowed hard at the images of herself, of the hive, of the hive’s secret. Her mouth set in a grim line.

  “And we’ll make sure this story finishes well,” she heard herself say.

  Sore, she stood and put the torch out in the wet earth around the edges of the cave. The light outside temporarily blinded her as she emerged, the low evening sun shining directly into her eyes. Leaving April behind went against all her instincts, but she reasoned that the girl had been left to die; no one was likely to come after her now, and she was better off sheltered in the cave than being carried or dragged by Reese, who would likely collapse if she tried it. She wasn’t happy with her own weakness, but going back to Richard and Mary was the best thing she could do.

  She wondered if they were still arguing with the hermit. Maybe so, she told herself. It doesn’t matter. You know the truth now.

  Knew it, but could not feel it. She felt as exiled as she had when she entered the cave. The only new emotion—rising and growing the longer the painting lingered in her mind—was anger. Outrage, even, carrying with it a blinding new hurt but acting as its own defence against that hurt. She had not been exiled by the Spirit; she had never been in the wrong. She had been targeted—mercilessly and maliciously targeted by one she had trusted.


  Deliberately, she ducked the boiling emotion by turning her thoughts back to April. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she pushed herself back up the path toward the hermit’s house.

  She was close enough to hear when the gun went off. Running was her first response, her automatic reaction, but her feet slipped on the sandy path—or just gave up placing themselves properly—and she went down. As she did, she felt the bleeding wound in her side tear and gape further. She rolled over and stared. Blood was spreading across her abdomen, staining her hands. She had already stained the ground where she had fallen.

  Suddenly scared, she pushed herself up and forced her legs to work again, to carry her toward the hermit. She heard Mary’s scream and the sounds of a fight. The cliffs were blurring on every side. No, no, no. Not now. She couldn’t pass out now. She had to make it back in time to help …

  Her legs refused to keep holding her up, and she crawled forward, one hand clutching her side, blood soaking her sleeve and dripping to the ground beneath her. She gritted her teeth and crawled up over a ridge, just in time to see the station wagon pull away.

  David. He’d found them.

  Shivering, and then convulsing, she dragged herself another three feet toward a hollow in the cliff and then fell forward.

  Letting out a long groan, she realized she wasn’t alone.

  The hermit was there.

  He was staring at her.

  He was dead. Wasn’t he?

  He wasn’t … he moved. His hand inched up toward her face.

  She licked her lips, wanting to tell him the truth.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered.

  His eyes still stared like a dead man’s; she wasn’t even sure he could see her. But he knew she was there. She tried to answer him but couldn’t. Her voice too was bleeding out into the sandy ground.

  “I was wrong,” he went on. “You were cloaked … I was wrong. I should have helped you. Forgive me.”

  One of them moved—she wasn’t sure who—close enough that the hermit’s hand could reach her. He laid it on her forehead and whispered something in a language she did not know—Spirit tongue, Spirit words. As he spoke them, something inside her fluttered to life, and a warmth began to spread throughout her body.

  “I am … a healer,” he told her. “The Spirit brought you to me to be healed. I’m sorry.”

  She got the words out seconds before he breathed his last. “I forgive you.”

  On her back, she gazed up at the sky. It was intensely blue—hardly a cloud—and the tops of pine trees and the sandy sweep of ridges rimmed it. The sun slanted down, its rays softening as the day drew to a close. She lay next to a dead man and mulled over his words as the warmth spread and pulsed through her—a miracle, she thought. She ought to be dead as he was. She ought to be bleeding to death. But the bleeding had stopped. And she was getting stronger.

  The last act of mercy by the hermit of Tempter’s Mountain was doing its work. And a good thing, too, she thought. No one else knew where April was. No one else knew that David had taken Richard and Mary. And no one else knew the truth about the hive, about the betrayal—

  She still felt herself to be an exile, but as she gained strength and stared into the sky, Reese knew it didn’t matter. There was work to be done, and she was the only one who could do it.

  Chapter 15

  Maybe it was his growing habit of trying to imagine the world from a Oneness perspective. Or maybe stress was just causing him to see things. Either way, Tyler was growing more aware by the minute of a world more buzzingly alive, both more glorious and more menacing, than he had ever before imagined.

  “Kecak,” Hammer-man answered his cell phone. “Yeah, we got them.”

  Tyler heard the voice on the other end say something, but he couldn’t make out words. Just another thug taking orders from another crime boss, like he’d seen a million times on TV as a kid. Not that Tyler had ever expected to get mixed up in the world of organized crime, but guns and abductions and thugs with cell phones were about as grittily real-world as you could get.

  Except that he was pretty sure both these men were demon possessed, and he could still see Patrick watching.

  It was a weird world Reese had pulled him into.

  Beside him, leaning against the wall inside Diane’s kitchen, Tony was as white as a proverbial ghost. (Real ghosts, if Patrick was anything like representative, were not pale at all.) He sat with his jaw locked against the pain of the bullet lodged just above his knee, and he was sweating. Angelica sat beside him looking nearly as pale as her twin. All three were trussed hand and foot with plastic zip ties. Chris and Diane sat across from them, leaning against the stove, and the tattooed man stalked between the rows, glowering down at them and brandishing an obvious gun. Angelica glared back at him. Tyler did not. He had once earlier—looked into the man’s eyes. He saw something inhuman there, a presence darting around behind the man’s face, and it shook him so badly he kept his eyes down.

  Can’t you do something? he wondered in Patrick’s direction, asking himself at the same time whether ghosts could really be expected to read minds. Maybe they could if you were Oneness. Patrick was standing in the window, feet on the sill, head bent because he was too tall to fit in there, but he did nothing. The dimming light of dusk made him seem even more a shadow than usual.

  Hammer-man clipped his cell phone shut. “Let’s get ’em in the car. We’re going to the warehouse.”

  Tattoos grinned ghoulishly. He grabbed Angelica’s arm and hauled her to her feet. Her ankles were tied too closely together to keep her balanced, but he kept her from falling. “Open the trunk.”

  They had pulled their car up so it was only feet from the kitchen door, tucked behind the house where neighbours wouldn’t see. Hammer-man obeyed, shoving a few things out of the way. As he pulled his head back up from the depths of the trunk, he paused and scanned the sky. “You hear anything?”

  Tattoos frowned. “No.”

  “Listen!” the bigger thug insisted.

  Dumping Angelica into the trunk, Tattoos paused. “Sounds like demons.”

  “So no problem, right?” Hammer-man said. But he sounded nervous.

  Both men picked up their pace, and Tyler found himself grabbed and shoved headfirst into the trunk, falling on his shoulder and landing with his feet in Angelica’s face.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Shh,” she shot back. “Listen.”

  Tony was dumped in after them, moaning with the pain and temporarily distracting both twins. Hammer-man slammed the trunk shut.

  But Tyler was listening now.

  He heard it at first like a high-up, far-off screech, growing louder like a plane diving or a bomb dropping. Then the sound grew to a roar, both thugs were cursing and someone else—someone new—was shouting something. Car doors slammed and the car roared to life, grinding gravel under its tires. All three occupants of the trunk slammed into the car frame and each other.

  “Hang in there, Tony,” Angelica said.

  But Tyler was exulting.

  Whatever had just happened, they had left Diane and Chris behind.

  And the voice he had heard unmistakably belonged to Reese.

  * * *

  On the road in the old hermit’s Chevy truck, Reese had pushed the speed limit as far as she could without risking being pulled over. As soon as she reached the village, she headed straight for the harbour, parked at the main marina, and strode up the central street toward Diane’s. As she went, she deliberately loosed every emotion, every crippling cry of her soul: her anger, her grief, her horrifying sense of being alone. She kept her eyes fixed on the street that rose up the hill before her, willing her hands to stay unclenched and her spirit to stay open.

  Why?

  Why me? Why would you do this to me? How could you all look the other way—how could you buy into the lie? Don’t you know how badly I’ve hurt?

  Tears blinded her, but she kept going, kept her heart open, let the questions tu
rn into blind, twisting pain.

  She had been a target from the moment she first stepped foot in this village—a magnet for every spiteful renegade and foolhardy devil in this place. And because proximity was power, they would only get bolder as she drew nearer to the hive members in Diane’s house.

  The high-off screech began half a block from the Sawyer house, and she broke into a run, praying that God himself would time this. April’s painting had pointed her this far, but once she got there, she was on her own.

  No, something deep within corrected her. Never on your own.

  Diane Sawyer’s house was just above the road on a three-foot bluff; Reese leaped up, ran for the front-door step, and finally dared to look back.

  Her eyes widened. Six. Six demon creatures in bird bodies were hurtling straight at her.

  Perfect.

  Instead of calling the sword to her hand and meeting the attack head-on, Reese flung the front door open and hit the floor, sending the creatures shooting over her head and slamming into the tattooed man who was pulling Diane to her feet in a direct line from the front door. He went down, firing his gun and cursing. Two of the demons had gone even further, flying over the tattooed man’s head, and crashed headlong into the other thug, who was standing outside behind a black car.

  “Damn it!” the big man shouted. “Kelly, get in the car!”

  Kelly, the tattooed man, swung his revolver and hit one of the creatures in the head, and the demon turned on him, pecking and beating at his head and shoulders. It had effectively beaten him away from Diane, who was, Reese realized, startled, free—the zip ties around her wrists and ankles had been cut.

  Still lying flat on the floor, she looked to Chris. He was on his feet with a penknife in his hand.

  Good man, she thought.

  They didn’t have much time before the creatures figured out they were battling each other. She prayed again for timing.