Exile (The Oneness Cycle) (12 page)

Mary tuned the twins out as they argued with each other. As far as she was concerned, the question was settled. These two were a gift. They were coming.

* * *

The warehouse on Kliff Street looked, from the outside, like any other building in the industrial part of Lincoln. It was sandwiched between other warehouses, the outside facade corrugated tin painted a dull rust colour. Loading docks lined the back where Reese lingered in the shadows of a dumpster, watching.

Saturday morning, the industrial zone was quiet. No extra activity was happening here either—nothing to identify the warehouse as different from its neighbours. Even the spiritual darkness was remarkably damp—indistinct, low-lying, hard to sense. But then, that was a characteristic of this hive. It was better cloaked than any demonic operation Reese had ever encountered; it was part of how it had stayed undetected for so long, gaining an enormous foothold without the Oneness catching on.

It had been Reese who insisted there was more here than met the senses, something bigger going on than anyone realized. Reese who treated the war against this place as a full-scale assault—an offensive rather than ongoing defensive tactics. Reese who was sure she knew the way of the Spirit in this and had led teams in to follow that way.

Reese who had gotten Patrick killed and had inspired more conflict and dissension in the Lincoln cell than the Oneness had known perhaps ever.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. She couldn’t dwell on the sorrow, on the grief, now. She had come here to die, but not without inflicting damage first. And she couldn’t do that if she was emotionally incapacitated.

She felt weight, pressure, in the palm of her hand. Spirit gathered and concentrated its energy against that which was counter to it: against the dark powers of evil, hatred, and negation. The Spirit—life—found a thousand expressions in this world, but the one Reese wielded did more to express the potent reality of the world as it was than any other.

Sword.

They were at war.

An irony struck Reese: that as an exile, as one cut off from the Oneness and thrown into the world alone, she was acting toward the enemy as she had thought it was acting toward her: as a renegade. She would strike a blow for the sake of those she loved but was no part of.

Let me die in a blaze of love,
she thought.

She stepped out from behind the dumpster in the oppression of memory, the trauma of victory ended in soul-cleaving defeat cutting at her heart. She stepped across the parking lot toward the inauspicious door next to a closed loading dock, carrying the absence of Tony and Patrick, the absence of the Oneness, with her—bearing the emptiness that undid her. But the sword was coming to hand, not denied her this one last time. She gripped it and pushed the door open.

The sound of empty, cobwebbed silence greeted her, the warehouse vast in its disuse. A cluster of pallets, six by six, stacked with cardboard boxes, sat in one corner. The rest of the empty concrete floor, shiny and smooth from the traffic of hundreds of feet, spread out from the door unencumbered and disappeared in shadows on all sides. On one high, wide wall, scrawled graffiti indicated that the warehouse had recently been broken into and vandalized. But there wasn’t much here to vandalize.

The emptiness, like everything else about the hive and the creatures that powered it, was deceptive.

As she took more tentative steps into the gloom of the warehouse, Reese could feel the tension in the air, a low buzz growing with every inch forward. The sword took full form in her hand, slicing into visibility in the shadowed room. Slowly she became aware of a smell—a reek in the atmosphere, familiar, rotten.

She reached the middle of the floor and stood scanning the warehouse from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Nothing moved.

They were here. Waiting.

For what?

She licked her lips and thought a final prayer.

Spirit, I come back to you. If you will take me, take me. If not … even so, I give myself to you.

Slowly they morphed out of the shadows. She saw them first as flickers, movements caught in the corner of the eye, flares of light—eyes glaring. The shapes gathered form, still vague as though she saw them through a screen.

“What are you waiting for?” she called.

No response, but the movements, the flickers, increased.

She stretched her arm out, holding the sword high. “I am alone,” she called. “You remember me. I come alone, and I challenge you.”

A creature over six feet in height, broad-shouldered like a man, melted out of the shadows directly across from her. Its face was a pair of eyes staring out of a mass of white scars.

“You,” it rasped, “are not alone.”

The words cut her to the heart.

And in her pain, she screamed out a battle cry and charged forward, swinging for the being’s head. A sword of its own flashed out of the dark and met hers in the air, deflecting the blow and then slicing down at her. She ducked and spun out of the way, but the blade glanced her shoulder, cutting through her shirt and drawing blood.

Demons formed everywhere and charged from all sides. Reese fought like a wasp in a spider’s web, entangled and doomed but determined to wreak as much destruction as she could. They hissed and shrieked and fell away from the bite of her sword, but there were so many. They were underfoot, tripping her up; latched onto her shoulders; biting at her neck and arms and legs. Fangs, razor claws, and the terrible chatter and noise of their words, ceaseless, pouring at her in a flood.

“Remove! Back, creatures of the dark!”

Another voice boomed through the warehouse and reverberated off the walls. From all around Reese it rose like a pillar of fire, thrusting her assailants away and flinging them to the ground and careening into the walls.

Reese turned to see a tall black man standing in the warehouse door with his hands lifted. His eyes and hands were blazing with light.

A man of prayer.

To her shock, Tony and Angelica appeared behind him.

Why were they here?

The demons regrouped and flew forward again, attacking both Reese and the newcomers in the door. Again the authority in the man’s voice arrested their advance and flung them back. “Away, abominations!”

Reese gaped at the power the man displayed. The very air was vibrating and sparking with it. When the demons came forward once more and the man’s voice boomed “Away!”, the surge of power knocked her off her feet along with them.

She blinked up at the warehouse ceiling. Silence. The creatures had not re-formed this time. She could not tell if they were still there or if they had actually fled.

Everything hurt. Her neck and hands were sticky with blood. She was still clutching her sword.

A small woman knelt beside her—not old, but no longer young. Reese knew her for Oneness immediately. Her bearing and expression radiated wisdom and kindness.

But why were they here?

She licked her lips, tasting rust and dirt. The woman was smoothing Reese’s hair back from her face and examining her wounds. Finally she said, “Are you all right?”

“I … I don’t …”

Movement behind the woman drew Reese’s attention. It was hard to see—harder to see than it should be. It took a moment to make sense of what she was seeing. But she managed to get out, “Chris?”

He said nothing. Just looked down at her with his protective, good heart in his eyes. And Tyler was there too—talking to her.

“Why did you leave? What were you thinking? You could have got yourself killed in here!”

Tony and Angelica’s voices joined in, subdued but pressing her for answers too—wanting to know why she was here, wanting to know how she could still wield a sword, wanting to know if she was all right.

But it was the last of them that she wanted to see most, and it was he who appeared finally, standing over them all with an air of deep authority.

“Who are you?” she asked.

As though the others were not even there, he answered, “Richard.”

And she knew that he could do what no one else could. This man who carried heaven’s power in his voice could give her back what her heart wanted more than anything in this world—more than life, more than death.

“Tell me who I am,” she said. Her voice sounded thick. The loss of blood …

He gazed solemnly down on her.

“You are Oneness,” he said, and she closed her eyes and lost consciousness.

Chapter 10

They hustled Reese out to the truck as quickly as they could without risking further injury to her and laid her down on the back bench. Richard motioned to the empty truck bed. “Get in,” he told the younger crew. “We need to get away from this place.”

Tyler and Tony nodded wordlessly. Chris fixed Richard with a glare, but the tall man laid his hand on the younger one’s shoulder and said, “You ride in the bench. Keep Reese still. We’re not trying to keep anything from you.”

Chris nodded and got in without a word. Mary met Richard’s eyes, pleading.

“I want us to get away from here,” he repeated. “There is much more going on than what we saw in that warehouse.”

“What I saw in that warehouse,” Mary told him, “was the greatest show of power I have ever seen.”

Weary to the bone, he nodded in acknowledgement. She smiled, the corners of her eyes wrinkling. “And you told me
April
was more important than we knew.” She took his hand and squeezed it tightly. “Whatever happens, my friend, I am proud to stand alongside you.”

She let go and climbed into the cab. With a quick glance back at the warehouse to make sure nothing was coming after them—nothing visible, in any case—Richard put himself behind the wheel. Chris handed his keys up from the back bench.

“Where are we going?”

“Not far,” Richard said.

“Back to the cell house?”

“No.”

Richard shook his head as he turned the key and the engine ground to life. No, they were not going back there. It was the most natural place in the world for them to go: home to their brothers and sisters, home to the Oneness to combine their gifts and draw strength and healing from their Spirit connection.

But for the first time in his life, it was the wrong place to go.

“So,” Mary said as they peeled onto the street and headed for the downtown core, “what was that place?”

“Murder, I think,” Richard said. “The place reeked of it … or something like it.”

“A serial killer?” Mary asked. “There were so many.”

“I don’t know.”

Chris leaned forward from the backseat. “What are you talking about?”

“For a demonic core to grow to that size—and what we saw was just the tip of what was there, invisible—it needs a base in human evil. Something happened in that warehouse, or is still happening there, that gives them the ability to cluster in such numbers and also to take physical form like they did. Normally demons need to borrow bodies.”

“I couldn’t tell if they were physical, exactly,” Chris said. “They looked so indistinct.”

“That was as solid as they get on their own,” Richard told him.

“So is that what you mean by a hive?” Chris asked. “A place where they can gather in large numbers?”

“No,” Richard said grimly, “unfortunately, there is much more to it than that. What you saw was a core—a gathering of demons working together, feeding off the same energy source, united to some degree in purpose. The hive is not merely the core itself, but what they are doing with the power they’re accessing.”

“Which is …?”

“Possessing.” Mary answered the question when Richard remained silent. “The demon that attacked in your house possessed a bat. But demons are strongest when they overtake people—when they have access to human intelligence, ingenuity, strength, and relationships. A hive is a network of human beings possessed and controlled by the demonic. They will work closely together and form a sort of community—it’s a demonic mirror image of, and mockery of, the Oneness.”

Chris sat back. “I can’t imagine.”

“You don’t want to.” Richard spoke again. “The Oneness is the ideal for mankind. Interconnectedness, gifts working in conjunction, an organic body—yet every one separate, unique, individual. Free. The strength of the Oneness is love, and love can only exist where freedom exists. A hive is different. It amalgamates—flattens its members into clones of each other. Its strength is not love, but repression. Sameness.”

Mary wasn’t sure why she said what she said next. “Your father—Douglas—was afraid of the Oneness because he thought we operated like a hive does. Yet the love he saw in us compelled him. I don’t think he knew how to reconcile it with the ideas he already had about what it meant to be one of us.”

“Did he ever do it? Become one of you?”

Mary looked down at her hands. “I’m not sure. I hope so.”

“Because it means you’ll see him again.”

“Because it would mean we all will.”

“Even me?”

Mary turned around. The young man’s eyes were challenging her directly, a flare of independent thought demanding to be answered. Despite herself, she smiled at the sight of him—so exactly like Douglas, with his hand resting on Reese’s head, stroking her hair and streaking his fingers with blood.

“This is what you want, you know,” she said softly. “You’ve always wanted it. To save the world. To protect it. To be who you were born to be.”

Did his hand shake? “I don’t want to lose myself.”

“We are not a hive.”

“I don’t know that.”

She ducked her gaze from the desperation in his expression. “Then wait,” she said. “Wait until you do know it. But don’t wait too long. Others have waited too long.”

When she glanced up again, he was staring out the window.

Richard checked his rearview mirror, his view of the road partially blocked by three young heads. The street was clear, the image of an industrial road on a weekend when the world was in bed or going to the bar. Sluggishly oblivious to all that was going on in higher realms around it. Sometimes, very rarely, he envied that kind of ignorance.

Now was not one of those times. What exactly the recovery of Reese meant he was not sure, but one element of it meant restoration, truth’s triumph, and the healing of a splintered heart, and he was grateful with everything he was to have a part in that. He also knew, with the certainty born of prayer, that Reese was no exile. She was Oneness to the depths; always had been. Her willingness to die for the cause was only further proof of that.