Exile (The Oneness Cycle) (6 page)

Outside, the sun shone with deceptive brilliance and warmth. It was a beautiful day—as beautiful as the village had ever seen.

“When I came here, years ago, I was fleeing trouble. It followed, and that was the worst battle we’ve had—it took your father’s life, and it hardened your mother’s heart. After that things were calm. I was alone here, just me and your mother, for more than a decade. Then Richard came, and then April. This place was a haven for them too. But now …”

“Does this have something to do with Mum’s dreams?”

Mary laughed bitterly. “Yes. Of course. Not that she shared them with us. But we’ve all been feeling it for months … a sense that darkness is closing in. That something is going to happen. That evil is coming.”

Chris pondered the words for a few minutes and then said, with great conviction, “I don’t think Reese is the evil. I mean, I understand what you’re saying—that her being here means something is wrong. But I don’t think
she’s
evil. What you said about a limb being gangrenous … it makes sense. But it doesn’t fit her. She’s not diseased. She’s just heartbroken.”

Mary turned and regarded the young man. Handsome and confident and strong. It was like having Douglas back again.

“I think I’d better talk to Reese,” she said.

He nodded, but after a long hesitation, and she knew he was considering it from the girl’s point of view—trying to decide if it was wise, and safe, to allow the meeting. Every inch the protector. It struck her as incredible that Chris hadn’t asked for more details about his father’s death—and his involvement with the Oneness, and Mary, in general. He had to want to know. Diane had kept him in the dark all his life. But instead, his thoughts were for a girl he barely knew.

“You’re a good man,” she said softly.

“And what about your friend?” he asked. “The one who went missing? Are the police looking for her?”

“Richard is. We haven’t called the police.”

It was clear in his face that he disapproved.

“The police can’t help when it’s demons,” she tried to explain. “And we think … well, all this trouble isn’t human. Sometimes involving more people just makes things worse.”

He was already heading for the door. “Come on, then,” he said. “I’ll take you to Reese.”

He turned concerned brown eyes on Mary. “Just be careful. Please. She isn’t whole.”

Chapter 5

The cottage was empty when Chris and Mary arrived. Chris did a preliminary search of the rooms and then returned to the tiny living room where Mary was waiting. “They’re not here,” he announced. “They must have gone out … probably fishing.” He frowned. “I don’t know if taking her out on the water was a good idea.”

“She tried to drown herself two days ago?” Mary asked.

“Yes. I don’t know what Tyler is thinking.”

“Maybe he left without her?” Mary suggested. “She might have gone off on her own.”

Chris paced, clearly agitated. “I don’t like it.” He stopped short. “I told you she was attacked here. In the side room—there’s a big hole in the window to prove something bigger than a bat came through, even though that was all that was left of it after she killed it.”

He looked at Mary as though to confirm that his words weren’t crazy. She nodded.

“They possess,” she said. “Demons don’t have bodies of their own. They’ll transform whatever they inhabit, but once they’re driven out, the body goes back to its own form.” She made a face. “Bats are a favourite.”

“Do you want to see the room?” he asked. “Maybe there’s something that could help you … some kind of clue.”

She shook her head but stood anyway. “I don’t think it will look different from any other attack.” She let Chris lead the way through the kitchen and laundry room to the long side room with its musty carpet and old plaid couch. A wind outside was blowing clean air around the tarp. As she had expected, there was nothing in the room to indicate what had happened or why. They had disposed of the bat and cleaned up, and there was nothing to distinguish signs of the kill from any of the older stains on the shag carpet. But she closed her eyes and tried to put herself in the girl’s shoes. An exile—separated from the Oneness, actually rejected and sent out. The very thought drove a weight into Mary’s gut, and she cradled her arms across herself, trying to ease the bitterness of the thought. But the attack was strange. And that the girl had warded it off—with a sword she should not be able to wield outside the Oneness—that was stranger still.

Nothing about this situation was right.

“She said it was a renegade,” Chris said.

“That’s possible,” Mary conceded. The demons would know if the girl had once been part of their enemy. They were spiteful enough to try to kill her for that. And yet, in light of all else that was going wrong, the attack didn’t feel like a renegade.

It felt like a plan.

Suddenly the emptiness of the cottage took on an urgency. Whoever this girl was, whatever she meant, she shouldn’t be out there alone. Mary turned on Chris. “Where did you say they might be?”

* * *

Once divested of their boots and coats, Reese and Tyler struck out for the nearest land—a tiny cove off the bay, shielded by the cliffs and some miles from town. The water was calm but the distance far, and when they had reached the warm sand, they lay panting and stretching their arms and legs for twenty minutes before either tried to speak. Despite her exhaustion, Reese kept herself on high alert, her eyes scanning the cliffs overhead for some sign of the enemy. They stretched away in sweeping lengths of red rock and scraggly pines and bushes, eventually capping beneath the blue sky. Deceptively idyllic.

Finally Tyler said, “No renegades?”

Reese cleared her throat twice. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Why are they targeting you?”

I wish I knew!
her heart cried. Wasn’t it enough that she had already lost everything that made life worth living? Wasn’t it enough that her identity had been stripped, her love denied, her purpose eternally compromised? She was a wreck, a shell, a castaway destined to be undone by the elements. She was no threat to them anymore. So why attack her?

A tiny, desperate shred of hope stabbed her heart like shrapnel, and she denied it access.

That hope, unfulfilled, would destroy her completely.

The exile was not a mistake. It was real. There on the sand, she closed her eyes and let the pain wash over her full-force again, just to remind herself that there was no hope.

Why did she bother fighting back, anyway? They could come and kill her right now and she would welcome the freedom death brought.

Beside her, Tyler rolled onto his hands and knees and shook his shaggy head, damp curls spraying sand like a dog, and then stood and started brushing himself off in preparation for the long walk home.

This was why she bothered.

She turned her head and looked up at him. He was about her age, she decided, early twenties—maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. He was not Oneness. Yet he and Chris had risked things for her from the moment they pulled her out of the bay—from the moment they discovered her in the water, in a chance so improbable it could only be a freak accident or a carefully orchestrated plan. She had killed the first demon because it attacked in the cottage and would have gone on to harm her rescuers too. She had killed the second because it was diving straight at Tyler.

She sighed and squinted up into the blue sky. She was more alone than she had ever thought to be again, and yet in surrender or in fighting, she would be affecting other people. Somehow it didn’t seem fair.

“Well,” Tyler said, “we’d better get going. If we’re lucky, Chris will have supper on by the time we get back.”

Reese pulled herself slowly off the ground. Her clothes and hair were damp, and sand clung to every inch of her. She started brushing herself off as she thought over her options. It didn’t take her long to resolve to go. This village was peaceful—storybook-like, really. If Diane Sawyer was anything to judge by, even the Oneness here was at peace. It wasn’t fair to any of them for her to be among them, drawing the attention of the enemy. She needed to leave. She thought of trying to explain this to Chris, or even to say good-bye to him, and grew an unexpected ache in her throat. She would just go, then. Once they hit the streets, she’d say good-bye to Tyler and head out of town. He might try to follow her, but she knew how to keep herself hidden. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

Thoughts of other days, other trips, other missions crept in around the edges of the walls she’d built to keep memories at bay. Other days when she’d found herself part of a tapestry unfolding, what most of the Oneness just called a plan. She wasn’t sure how plans worked when you weren’t part of the Oneness anymore, although others certainly had roles in them; but she was quite sure she didn’t want her part, whatever it was, to unfold here. Better to get as far away as possible and hope to draw the whole tapestry after herself.

Tyler had already started trudging along the beach, and he called over his shoulder for her to follow. She did, planning ahead as she went. They were going to have to climb up into the base of the cliffs to avoid the incoming tide; the hike didn’t look easy. It might be dusk by the time they were nearing the town, so it wouldn’t be hard to slip away—perhaps even before they hit the streets. It was from a cliff height not far from here that she had jumped only two nights ago, but she barely remembered the paths she had taken then. She shivered a little as she pictured what might happen once she got away from Tyler and struck her own way into the cliffs—she would be vulnerable out there and not hard for the enemy to kill. An image of herself lying wounded or dead in the evening darkness made her shudder. For some reason death did not feel so welcome now.

* * *

April winced as she pulled her wrists against an outcrop of rock for the thirtieth time, pulling and sawing at the tape that had been wrapped in multiple layers around them. Her head had calmed to a raging but regular ache, and the pull against her hands and arms helped distract her from it. Besides, she was almost through.

The last bits of tape snapped through, and she wearily unwound the long strips and dropped them on the rocky floor. Having her hands free would do her no good as far as escape, but it went a long way toward making her more comfortable. Just in case, she wandered to the barred door, grabbed the grid, and shook it. The racket of iron against stone rattled painfully around her head and nearly turned her stomach, but it was secure. Miserably she returned to the spot on the floor where she could lean against a fairly smooth part of the rock wall, and she wondered how long she’d been here. And before that—how long had she been out? It seemed to her it was getting darker in the cave, indicating that it was getting late in the day. Whether it was the same day she’d been kidnapped or another one altogether she had no idea.

Suddenly realizing she’d been wearing a watch when she went out, she glanced down—it was gone. With a heavy sigh she leaned her head forward, resting it on her knees once again. She felt horribly weak, and for the first time she considered that she was hungry. She still had no idea why she was here, and she wondered if she would ever know. It would not be beyond the enemy to let her starve here … wherever “here” was. The thought almost made her smile. The enemy were cowards. More than one of the great saints, the Oneness who were most powerful and effective in the service of the Spirit, had been killed in these offhanded ways so that no one of the enemy would be found with blood on his hands. Maybe this prison had been used for the purpose before. April had no illusions about being a great saint, of course. She lived in a three-person cell in a tiny village overlooking the sea, and her work for the Spirit so far had consisted of little more than befriending lonely people and painting pictures.

Painting. An idea struck, attractive because it had the potential to distract her from hunger pains that were growing increasingly urgent. She got up and hunted around the cave until she found what she was looking for: a wet patch in the wall, streaked with mud. It was too dark by now to know whether the mud was red or not, but hoping, she dug her hand in and loaded it up with “paint,” trekking across the cave to a wide wall. She stood in thought for a moment and then started a pattern she knew well: a rose vine, the same pattern that was tattooed across her shoulder. She swept a few long lines and then went back, working in the roses, and returned for more mud when she ran out, feeling her way for wet spots along the wall to make sure she was picking up in the right place.

How much time she spent on the mural she had no idea, but the supply of mud seemed endless. She stopped after she was content that she’d painted a full vine, beginning in one corner of the wall and arching up to the far corner, with offshoots and flowers and buds and thorns, and smiled to herself as she considered that the painting might not be visible at all come light—she had no guarantee that the mud would be coloured enough to show up. And it was quite possible that the painting was a disaster: she was working near blind, with a headache.

She sat down, feeling a little foolish but strangely happy all the same, and did her best to clean the last of the mud off her hands, using her track pants and the floor. Her hunger hadn’t lessened, but she didn’t feel quite as weak now. She was going to need to find a bathroom—most likely she’d have to designate a corner of the cave for the purpose, although the thought was depressing.

Her eyes were getting heavy, and although it briefly occurred to her that she might have a concussion and should avoid going to sleep, it also occurred to her that it might not matter if she did.

* * *

Tyler arrived back at the cottage shortly after the sun set. It had been a long, hard scramble up the cliffs to the town—probably not more than a five-mile trek, but it had taken well over four hours. Reese had been a trooper, never once complaining and keeping up a good pace, but they’d had to fight their way through thickets, scramble over a lot of steep rock, and backtrack more than once. When he finally saw the lights of the village winking in the dusk, Tyler felt like a burden had been lifted off his back, and he walked faster as he headed up the road to the cottage. Reese gave him a worn smile as he announced, “Almost home!”