Attack

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  The doors open with a rush of cold air, and the crowd surged forward. Richard found his seat, in the balcony and toward the back, and settled in between a talkative woman and an overweight, surly gentleman taking notes on a yellow pad. The woman, thankfully, ignored him after a greeting and directed her attention to the people she was with.

  Richard waited, listening.

  He had a sense that the atmosphere itself was trying to talk to him, to tell him something, but he couldn’t quite make out the message.

  The curtains swept aside, and the spotlight lit a grand piano and a woman.

  She was young, tall, blonde hair swept up in an elegant French roll. She wore a long, black dress, but it impressed Richard with its unremarkable quality: she wasn’t there to call attention to herself, but to the music.

  And that, she did superbly.

  The music quieted all the buzz and energy of the crowd and called it up to something higher, alternately swelling and quieting, weeping and laughing, charging and comforting. The compositions were a mix: some classical, some original. Richard found the originals called to him more deeply, perhaps because they came from the same place his heart was at home: from the Spirit, from the Oneness. But he was as drawn by the woman as by the music. She didn’t seem separated from it, a creator sharing her creation. They were one, her and the music that poured out of her. It was her spirit speaking, pouring out, beautifying, challenging.

  He wondered if anyone in this crowd really heard it.

  He was very sure his neighbours on either side, the woman who was quivering with her desire to talk and the critic taking notes and liberally blotching his paper with ink from a runny pen, did not.

  He knew something intuitively as he listened, though, and that was that something was missing. That her music was meant to accomplish something it wasn’t, to extend an invitation she was withholding. It was meant to sing, he understood, of the Oneness, and it was not.

  She was holding that back deliberately.

  Before the concert ended, he got up and excused himself, annoying other members of the audience as he slipped past them in the darkness. He murmured apologies and made his way toward an exit.

  He walked outside, back into the heat and the noise of the city, feeling like had left a sacred place and descended into Hades. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to do.

  Following some instinct, or just wandering because he didn’t know what else to do, he followed the contours of the building, down a dark alley, and came out by the stage exit. A black car was sitting there, waiting.

  The driver was possessed.

  He saw it immediately, like a flare in the air over the driver’s half of the car. The sword appeared in his hand, fully formed, sharp and ready.

  He did not think the man was equally aware of him.

  He approached the car cautiously, but not too slowly; he didn’t want to give the man extra time to notice him. The air buzzed as he drew closer. Hive. This was one of David’s men. He was sure of it.

  He knocked on the window, and the man rolled it down with a look of surprise—quickly replaced by recognition.

  Richard drove the sword through the man’s chest before he could act.

  The demon wailed but released quickly, and the man slumped down behind the wheel. Richard reached through the open window to pop the lock on the door and dragged the man’s body out, depositing him safely behind a dumpster to recover and absconding with his chauffer’s coat and hat. Both made the sweltering heat worse, but he slipped into the car feeling grateful. His heart was racing with adrenaline.

  He hoped she would come out before the chauffeur recovered.

  His sword was still in his hand, and he laid it across his lap and kept a sharp eye on the rearview and side mirrors. The demon, bereft of a body, did not reappear.

  He didn’t know how long he would have to wait.

  Calming himself as much as he could, taking one deep breath after another, he kept his eyes open and alert and tried to pray. To create a shield, an atmosphere. Something he could welcome her into so they could talk. Doing so was a challenge he wasn’t sure he was up for; he was too on edge. The lobby had been full of demons—not hive demons, but enemies nonetheless. The whole city was likely full of them, as most cities were. And he was trying to whisk away their prime target.

  For a moment, he allowed himself to close his eyes and center on the Spirit.

  Whatever else, he knew he could not do this alone.

  Chapter 9

  Despite having lived by the sea for nearly twenty years, Mary had never really spent time on it. It took her a few hours to get comfortable with the rhythm of the waves and the smell and weight of the salt spray, much heavier out here than in the village. David didn’t seem to have the same luck; he stayed green well after her stomach had adjusted. His strategy for dealing with his situation seemed to be to wait, hands folded and eyes closed, like a man expecting an execution or taking a nap.

  It made Mary angrier than she could explain to herself.

  He was so normal to look at—so middle-aged and average—that she had to keep telling herself how evil he was, and recalling all the scenes that had played out before her eyes since he was discovered: his exile of Reese, his shooting the hermit on Tempter’s Mountain, his dragging them all off to be killed at the warehouse, and his later presence in the house alongside Clint where Tyler and Chris were nearly murdered. She had to remind herself that he had something to do with children and teenagers being possessed, and that he had found the most evil people he could, and the most threatening demonic entities he could get power over, and pulled them together into a hive with the aim of infiltrating and destroying the Oneness.

  All that, and she could swear he was snoring.

  Humanity, she thought, you are strange.

  So much power and passion in skin and bones, with a stomach to go queasy on the water and sinuses to snore under the influence of sleep.

  She tried, too, to pull to mind the events of twenty years ago, the events David said had turned him, events he said she had been involved in. You brought me into the Oneness, he had told her. You were there when I turned against it.

  But she didn’t know what he was talking about.

  The metal rings on the sail tapped against the mast with a tink, tink, tink, and she looked up at it and the blue sky beyond, wracking her memory.

  Was she crazy somehow?

  Had she blocked it from her memory?

  There were plenty of horrible memories from those days. Plenty that could have turned a man. Plenty that could have made his heart go cold and even full of hate. But that wasn’t how she remembered any of it. In all the destruction, and betrayal and cruelty, and demonic enterprise and death, she remembered the Oneness drawing closer together. She remembered unity strengthened and fired by affliction, new members—like Diane and nearly Douglas—coming in, death being shown up for the sham it ultimately was when you were One. That was what she remembered of those days: that she had never seen the Oneness so clearly, or known her own place in it so proudly, or believed in it so passionately.

  David’s experience had been different, evidently.

  And she had been there.

  There were birds in the sky again, flying near the boat, soaring and diving to fish. April and Chris, at the far end of the yacht, were eyeing them nervously. She knew they feared a demonic attack—and it might come that way, from the air. But she feared far more that it would not. She feared that she would be uninterrupted in her talk with David—whenever it really began—and they would say all there was to say, and he would not repent.

  And they would have to kill him.

  Because they could not allow the hive to go on.

  They could not allow him to continue to threaten the Oneness the way he had, and did.

  But . . .

  She closed her eyes. Shook her head at the thought. Felt the cold chill of it fall over her.

  To kill one of their own.

&
nbsp; To deliberately take his life, even in justice, even in fair retribution for the lives he had taken and the lives he had ruined.

  What would it mean to them?

  Would it cripple them—change their unity somehow?

  Could the Oneness even survive it?

  She cleared her throat to open conversation, but he didn’t acknowledge her or move.

  Maybe he really was sleeping.

  The sail cast shade across his face and the pile of netting he was lying on. She struggled to remember that face younger.

  All her clear memories of David were from more recent years. She knew him as head of the Lincoln cell. The fishing village was quiet; they rarely crossed paths. When they did, there was the quiet sympathy of leadership; they both knew what it was to watch out for others and try to steer them, even more than was the usual lifestyle of Oneness. She had considered him a friend.

  But before that . . .

  What was before that?

  She was still trying to struggle through that when Chris strode up and, without warning, kicked David in the side. The man rolled over and glared up without a yell. He’d been awake, then.

  “Chris!” Mary burst out.

  He looked down at her, his eyes smoldering, but didn’t answer. Then he turned his gaze back to David. “Time to wake up,” he said. “Mary’s here to talk to you. And I’m not out here just to give you a nice long nap.”

  “We don’t have much to talk about,” David said, looking at Mary.

  “Talk about the Oneness. Talk about what you’re trying to do to it.”

  “You care a lot for someone who refuses to join,” David said. “Watch your interest in that girl, Christopher. Oneness women will lead you places you don’t want to go.”

  Chris flushed. “Shut up.”

  “You told me to talk.”

  “To Mary.” He seemed to realize he was being drawn into a childish word game, and he glared at David again. Then to Mary, “I didn’t kick him hard. Wish I had.”

  “Chris, you had better go steer the ship,” she said, noting the weariness in her own voice.

  Weary already, and this hadn’t even really begun.

  Chris turned away with a last glare at David and stalked back across the ship. For all that she knew he didn’t need to steer anything—they were really just drifting out here, and didn’t plan to do anything else for a while—she was grateful for his obedience and more grateful for his presence.

  So amazingly much like having Douglas with them.

  Diane was below. She had not come up yet, burying her nose in a paperback—a novel, of all things, at a time like this—and saying little to Mary or anyone else.

  It wasn’t really fair that she should have to be part of this fight, but she was Oneness—and Oneness could not isolate.

  Not even if they wanted to.

  “Chris is right,” Mary said. “We didn’t bring you out here for a nap.”

  “You brought me out here to kill me,” David said gamely. “So why don’t you do that?”

  “We don’t want to kill you, David.”

  “You should. You should want to eradicate the evil that is me. Do I have to remind you what I’ve done? And that’s not even all. I could tell you a lot more.”

  She wondered if she should pursue that line of conversation. He might tell her something that would help Richard or the others.

  But somehow she doubted it. David was all about control. He was not going to give that up just for the sake of goading her.

  “That’s not really what I care about,” Mary said.

  “Oh, that’s right. Because you care about me, yes? Like the Oneness cares about every individual. So much that you invite us all to be lost in the conglomerate and suffer all our lives under the impossible burden of unity when we were made to strive, to be ourselves, fully ourselves, to make ourselves. To realize what we are supposed to be, like I can never do, because I have you and all the rest tied to my ankle like a millstone.”

  “Oneness is what we’re supposed to be,” Mary said. “You know that.” She regretted those words instantly. “Or maybe you don’t. I don’t know what you know anymore—what lies you’ve let twist your mind. So maybe you don’t know anything. But Oneness is not a loss, David. It’s a coming into yourself—into who you are meant to be.”

  She brightened just a little at the idea that maybe, just maybe, he only needed to hear this again. That maybe he just needed to be reminded of the truth.

  “If you would just embrace that,” she said. “If you would just stop striving against it, you’d see. Oneness would allow you to be all you are. It would allow you to embrace your life and your destiny. You never can if you try to do it on your own.”

  “But I’ll never know that, one way or the other, because Oneness refuses to let me go.”

  She looked away, over the water. She couldn’t handle looking into his face right now—the pallor, the anger, the bitter, bitter cold. The wind was brisk and raising white caps in the distance, but here the water was relatively calm. She marveled at tides and currents, at the way it could all be one ocean and yet affected so differently in different places just yards away. And she tried to put herself in David’s place, just for a moment.

  “What is it like?” she asked.

  This time—maybe for the first time—she caught him off-guard.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What is it like—being held by the Oneness when you don’t want to be? What do you experience that as? I know what Oneness is to me. I don’t know what it is to you. I can’t fathom it—can’t imagine it.” She turned her eyes back to him and looked him in the eye after all, gratified that she had raised something in them that wasn’t the controlled, calculated freeze and taunt of a few minutes ago.

  “It’s a never-ending fire,” he said. He sat up, suddenly, loosing his hands and leaning forward, close to her, his face close to her face. “It burns every minute. It’s noise that never ceases, when all I want is to be alone. It’s guilt that never dies away. Every time I try to dream, every time I want to hope, Oneness is a million voices and a million threads pulling me away from myself, scattering me, forcing me to care when I do not want to. It is the weight of the world—of the universe—when all I want is to be light and to be free.”

  She considered his words.

  She did not want to, but this was the first time she’d felt like she was seeing the man behind the monster of betrayal. She owed it to him to consider his words.

  “Come now,” he said, very softly. “You can go deeper than that.”

  Her eyes fluttered open—she hadn’t realized she’d shut them. “What?”

  “You’re thinking about what I said. But you’re holding yourself back. We are still One, you and I. You can go deeper. You can feel what I feel, if you’ll just care enough to enter in. I haven’t invited anyone into my spirit in two decades, Mary. I’ll invite you. You really want to know the key to all this? Come in.”

  She closed her mouth—she was gaping.

  “No,” she rasped.

  He sat back, smug—but perhaps disappointed, too.

  Perhaps even hurt.

  “You’re afraid to,” he said. “We are all One. We are all meant to share in one another’s souls, one being, one body in heaven and earth. But you are too afraid to enter into what it is to be me.”

  He closed his eyes and folded his hands again, the posture of sleep. “My soul is too dark. So I am One, and I am completely alone.”

  Never alone.

  The words were the watchword of the Oneness, the words the Spirit whispered when you first joined, the words that were promise and strength and new being.

  Never alone.

  But he was.

  And her heart moved with compassion.

  He did not open his eyes. “I feel that, you know. You all think I’m cold and hardened, but I feel Oneness acutely. I know you are pitying me. And I also know how afraid you are.”

  She stood, almost thr
own off balance by the waves, and grabbed the rigging to steady herself. Her breath was coming fast. She turned on her heel and almost threw herself down the short, narrow stairway into the cabin. She leaned against the wall and tried to slow her breathing down.

  From the bed, Diane looked up over the ratted pages of a mystery novel, the cover looking damaged by damp. She raised her eyebrows and then lowered her glance back to the pages before speaking.

  “He’s getting to you?”

  “He’s . . . I don’t know.”

  “He’s dangerous. He’s getting to you.”

  Mary didn’t answer.

  “You shouldn’t have brought me,” Diane said. “I can’t help you with this. I look at him and just want to kill him for what he’s done, and then I sympathize with him. I wouldn’t mind out of the Oneness myself, sometimes.”

  “You have a role,” Mary said faintly. “You’ll find it.”

  “You, on the other hand, are going about this badly. You’re not going to win this playing war as usual.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  Diane sighed and put the book down on the bed beside her. “What’s getting to you?”

  “That I can’t remember . . . that he’s goading me with something I seem to have forgotten all about. That he can read me like a book.”

  “That he’s playing with you,” Diane said.

  “Yes.” She almost laughed, hopeless. “He told me to come in . . . to form a deeper connection with him and go plunging into his heart. I can’t.”

  Diane fingered the book like she wanted to disappear back into it, but didn’t. She fixed Mary with a steady gaze, a challenge in it.

  “Tyler walked,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Tyler walked. Tyler used the power of the Oneness and walked when he should have been paralyzed by the drugs he was on, and Tyler is new to the Oneness and not that good at anything. But he reached out and did a miracle and saved a lot of lives.”

  “Yes, he did,” Mary said, lost.

  “And yet you’re afraid to use your power. You can form a deeper connection with David.”

  “Yes . . .”