Hive

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  Great, April thought. Probably a pseudonym.

  “Did he say where he was from? The name of the children’s home, I mean?”

  “Can’t recall,” Shelley said. “It was long.”

  “I see.”

  April tried to stem her rising frustration. Maybe Smith wasn’t a pseudonym. Maybe they could track him down using that name. Her eyes roved over the driveway, recalling the car sitting there, wishing desperately she had the kind of perfect recall that could pull up a make and model and license plate. All she knew was it had seemed like it came from a bygone era. Oh—another flash of inspiration struck.

  “What about the kids?” she asked. “He had two kids and a woman in the car with him. He say who they were?”

  “No,” Shelley told her. “He just left them sitting out there. I offered to let them come in and have a drink or something.”

  April frowned. It was a whole lot less than she had hoped for. At the least she’d been optimistic that Shelley would turn out to be a talkative drunk and would let loose some clue, but the opposite seemed to be true.

  “Well, thanks,” she said finally. “I should probably go.”

  “Wait,” Shelley said. Without a word of explanation she got up—steadying herself on the doorpost—and disappeared inside. April stood and waited uncomfortably, shifting her feet. The couple down the street had quieted for a few minutes, but their volume was rising again. At least it still didn’t sound like anyone was actually being physically threatened.

  Shelley reappeared in the doorway with a small bundle wrapped in a plastic bag. “It’s Nick’s favourite shirt,” she said. “It was in the laundry when you came.”

  With unexpected tears in her eyes, April accepted the bag, said good-bye, and started home.

  Once she got off the street, the fight grew too quiet to hear. It was replaced by the occasional car passing, the sound of TVs inside open screen doors, the call of gulls overhead, the distant lapping of the bay. A quiet weekday in the village. Children were laughing somewhere. But April found the sounds dissonant. Because on Nick’s street a woman was still screaming at her man, and Shelley was still drunk and still too lost to be a mother.

  April’s feet dragged the last few blocks to the cell house, and not only because she was tired.

  “Vincent Smith,” she announced when she entered the kitchen. Reese looked up from a pot of something on the stove.

  “Dr. Vincent Smith. Sound like a real name to you?”

  “Could be,” Reese said. “At least his first name isn’t John.”

  “I’m not sure it’s Vincent either,” April said, sitting down with a wince. She tossed the bundle of Nick’s shirt on the table.

  “You all right?”

  April leaned her head in her hands. It ached. “Yeah.”

  “You are still supposed to be taking it easy,” Reese said. “Building up your strength. Not walking all over town.”

  “Thanks,” April said, “but I’m okay. Really. I just want to do something.”

  Reese sat down across from her. Strain showed in every line of the young woman’s face. “I know. Me too.”

  April reached out and touched Reese’s hand. “You care a lot about those boys, don’t you?”

  “They rescued me,” Reese said. “Both of them. And they weren’t even Oneness.”

  Chris still isn’t, April was going to point out, but thankfully she caught herself and said nothing.

  April and Reese had not talked much since they both came back to the cell house and began living together. Both had been through hell because of David. Both had exposed him. Both had nearly died doing it. But the experiences were too personal for words, and they stayed silent and simply felt the commonality between them.

  The commonality, and the gap.

  Reinstated in the Oneness, Reese was. But somehow, since her exile she had not come fully back to trust. And April’s near-starvation and isolation had done something to her as well. She had wounds that needed healing. Maybe she was afraid that getting too close to Reese’s still-raw hurts would only reopen her own.

  “So,” Reese said. “Dr. Vincent Smith. I’ll call around and see if I can find him.”

  “Shelley said he came from Lincoln.”

  “I assumed that.”

  “You think this is all connected to the hive?”

  Reese didn’t answer or nod, but she leaned back in her chair and squinted her eyes like she was putting memories together. “We never did find the hive itself. We found its core—the place where demons were gathering, empowered by David.”

  She stopped.

  April bowed her head. David’s betrayal of the Oneness, peaking in his exile of Reese when he thought she was too close to discovering him, was the evil the demons had thrived on. The evil powering everything they faced now. She thought again of the couple screaming at each other in Nick’s old neighbourhood. There was no such thing as a small betrayal of love.

  It was, in fact, the sin that threatened to destroy the universe. The primary evil that the Oneness existed to combat.

  Reese went on. “It created a demonic core in an unused warehouse in Lincoln, and from there they went out and possessed—building the hive. We knew it was happening, sometimes encountered some of the victims, but we never really cracked the hive itself or found a way to locate all its members. I thought that attacking the core would undo it. It might have worked. But the exile happened.”

  She paused again. “And then you happened. Your kidnapping. And you got this village involved.”

  “Actually,” April said, “I think you did that. If Tyler and Chris hadn’t found you, and cared so much about what happened to you, the connections might not have been made in time.”

  Reese shook her head with an opaque smile. “It’s a good thing I don’t have to understand how the plans work.”

  “Do you think they’re real things? Plans? Or is that just what we call life after it happens and seems like an unchangeable, a given?”

  Reese squinted again, taking time to process that. “I think they’re real things. How else could you have painted prophecy all over that cave wall?”

  April shrugged. Her memories of her time in the cave were odd. Not at all dim—she remembered every waking hour with a vivid clarity most of her memories could not claim. Yet they seemed unreal for all that. Like an especially vivid dream, or something that had happened outside of this world completely.

  “Do you think plans ever fail?” April asked.

  Reese looked at her curiously. “Are you always so frivolous?”

  “I almost starved to death,” April said. “It affects your thinking.”

  Reese smiled. “It helps if you were a thinker to begin with.”

  “You didn’t know me before.”

  “I can guess at you before.”

  April laughed. “Probably accurately.”

  “I don’t know,” Reese said plainly. “For a while there I knew I was caught in a plan—David’s. The hive’s. I don’t know if the enemy can override the Spirit and trump God. I just don’t know.”

  “I think,” April said, frowning, “they can’t. But I wish I knew.”

  “Sometimes you can’t know. Or we can’t, anyway. Our perspective is too limited. So we can only trust. Or so I tell myself.”

  “You still struggle with it, don’t you? The exile. It still hurts.”

  “It remade me,” Reese said simply. “Not in ways I like. I hope I can heal more than I have.”

  She shook her head as though to dislodge that thread of conversation. “I’ll start calling around to see if I can find this children’s home of yours. Do we have anything besides the name—Smith—to go on?”

  “No,” April said, blowing out a breath of frustration. “Nick’s mother was drunk, and I’m not sure she really learned anything about the home even when she was sober. He just walked in and played off her guilt and intimidated her into almost giving up her son.”

  April looked off into
the distance out the kitchen window and shuddered.

  Whatever Reese had on the stove started to rattle, so she got up and clicked off the gas element. “Egg?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  Nick appeared in the kitchen entrance, solemn and silent. April wondered if he’d been standing in the common room, listening. She regretted having mentioned that Shelley was drunk.

  “You hungry?” Reese asked from the stove.

  “Yeah.” He crossed the floor and sat down at the table like he knew he belonged there. April smiled. “What have you been doing today?”

  “Went fishing off the pier with Richard,” Nick said. “Caught nothing.”

  Reese, listening as she sawed off a couple slices of bread and dropped them in the toaster, said, “You should go out on Tyler’s boat sometime. The fishing’s better out on the water. They would teach you.”

  Bless your optimism, April thought. Reese knew as well as she did how very much the enemy played for keeps. Who knew if Tyler and Chris were ever coming back?

  The thought made her wince, and she realized that if she were Reese, she would refuse to consider it.

  “There isn’t much to do around here,” Nick announced.

  “I’m sorry you don’t approve,” April said.

  “Oh, I like it,” Nick answered. “But you need more things to do.”

  “Do you have something in mind?”

  “Yes,” Nick said, and he drilled April with his intense blue eyes. “You can teach me to draw.”

  April drew back, startled. How did he know she could draw? She hadn’t shown him.

  A slight shadow of guilt passed over his face, but he didn’t seem to think it worth hanging onto. “I found your sketchbook,” he said. “You’re very good.”

  Recovering her composure, April said, “Do you like to draw?”

  “Yes,” Nick said, leaning forward, “only I’ve never really done it—but yes, I know I do. I just need to learn.”

  Old soul, April thought. And kindred spirit.

  “I can teach you,” she told him. “There’s an art store by the water . . .”

  “I know,” he interjected.

  “. . . we’ll go buy you some paper and pencils. Now, if you want.”

  “After lunch,” Reese cut in, setting down a plate in front of each of them. Toast and eggs.

  “This is breakfast food,” Nick pointed out.

  Reese stuck out her tongue. “It’s the only thing I know how to cook.”

  But Nick’s comment hadn’t been criticism, more just an observation—as was clear from the energy with which he tucked in. April watched him eat, amused even as her heart ached at the memory of his mother, and the thought of how often he’d probably gone hungry, and at her own memories, of lack and alcohol and parents she wasn’t sure had ever loved each other. The little boy across the table had a right to be old for his age. Just as they were kindred spirits for several reasons.

  Her memories still hurt, and in many ways they still made her who she was. But for April, everything had changed when she became One. Her childhood had become, not a cancer determined to destroy her over the course of her life, but a ploughed field receptive to new seeds, new life. The Oneness had gathered her into its pulsing heart, its arms that were the universe and the Spirit at the centre of the universe.

  Through her, those arms were reaching for this child. And something in his spirit, she knew, was answering.

  Deep calling to deep. The beckoning, and the rising up to follow.

  Nick finished his scrambled eggs, and April stood. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Reese gave her a look as they went, a silent promise to make those calls right away and know something, anything there was to be known, by the time April got back.

  “Why did you go see my mom?” Nick asked as they walked side by side down the quiet street toward the village. The air had grown full-out muggy and hot, and gulls overhead sounded irritated and crass in their calls. No breeze carried coolness off the water toward them.

  “I thought she could help me with something,” April said.

  “No, she couldn’t,” Nick said flatly. “She can’t help anybody with anything. Not me, not my dad, not you.”

  April felt the accusation like a slap in the face. She’d known Nick harboured bitterness. But she hadn’t known specifically toward whom or what. That it was his mother felt worse, somehow, than if he had just been angry toward his circumstances or even toward his father, who April knew he barely ever saw.

  “She can’t even help herself,” Nick went on. “She’s worthless.”

  April stopped dead in her tracks and stopped Nick with a hand on his shoulder. He pulled away but didn’t keep walking, glaring up at her defiantly. Guiltily.

  “That’s not true,” April said. “No one is worthless, Nick.”

  “Then why doesn’t she do anything?” he burst out. “She needs so much, and I need so much, and she doesn’t do anything about it. Nothing.”

  “She isn’t worthless,” April said again. “She’s hopeless—without hope. That’s a different thing.”

  Nick turned away and stared down the road at the bay. She could see emotions boiling up in him, threatening to overflow in a burst of energy like she’d seen so many times from him: running through the streets or along the docks, riding his bike straight down the steeply sloping road like he would fly off the end and pedal madly through the sky itself, swimming until he exhausted himself. This, too, she understood. She had taken up running as a young teen to avoid the edge of all she felt. To channel it into speed and pain and muscle. But she needed him to not run right now.

  “Nick, when people can’t see hope, it’s like not having light,” she said. “They feel stuck in the dark and they can’t see any way out. Your mom is like that. But she loves you.”

  “She can’t take care of me,” Nick said, and April knew exactly how much that blunt confession meant in his world.

  “It’s true,” April said. “But she sent you to live with us, and not with that man from the city. He probably put some real pressure on her, you understand that? She did something brave by sending you to us.”

  Nick started walking, straight down the hill toward the art store near the harbour. April sighed and followed after him. Together they descended to the flatter ground at the base of the cliffs, a forest of masts and sails, with the blue of the bay stretching out beyond it dotted with white sails and the occasional white caps of boat wakes. A row of slightly upscale shops lined the richer side of the docks, with a pub punctuating one end and a coffee shop the other. Next to the coffee shop the art store sat, its doors wide open, smelling to the discerning nose like possibilities.

  Nick hesitated before he went in. He looked back apologetically. April smiled and nodded, wordlessly forgiving him for his anger and giving him permission to go in. She had often seen him hanging around the shops by the water, but not going in. She doubted most of the shop owners would mind him hanging around, but he had limited himself.

  He hung back slightly until she reached him, and they both went in past a street display of journals and sketchbooks into the store itself. The walls were painted in swirls of pink and green, and bright display shelves lined them. More art materials and how-to books were placed on wagons acting as tables in the centre of the floor. It wasn’t a large space, but the owner had managed to make it feel breezy and open and inviting.

  Nick was casting nervous glances at the proprietor behind the counter, despite her welcoming smile, so April stepped in, trying to hide how tired she felt. “We’re looking to get a budding artist supplied,” April said.

  “Pencils or paints or both?” the proprietor asked. “Or some other medium?”

  “Pencils,” April answered, “and a good sketchbook. And anything else you recommend.”

  She checked Nick to make sure his expression was approving of the order, and to her relief it was. She would be happy to teach him to paint, but maybe not quite y
et.

  The proprietor, a young-looking middle-aged woman in tie-dye, came around the counter and directed Nick to the sketchbooks, showing him several and talking his ear off all the while. April smiled and stepped back, letting her mind drift to Reese and her search for the elusive children’s home. She offered up a prayer that the search would be successful.

  Armed half an hour later with four sketchbooks in various sizes, two so big that Nick had to hug them to his side with his arm, and pencils, pastels, and charcoal, they stepped back out onto the boardwalk along the dock. The scents of coffee and fried pub food mingled with salt and seaweed. It was cooler down here by the water than up the hill, and April soaked up the warmth and the beauty of the day. Nick’s step was noticeably lighter, but neither spoke as they wandered through the marina, in no hurry to go back home.

  On the other side of the marina’s main offices and a restaurant, a pier stretched out into the water. Nick pointed. “That’s where me and Richard fished.”

  “But you didn’t catch anything, huh?”

  Nick wrinkled his nose. “Naw. We’ll try again. Maybe tomorrow. I don’t think Richard knows much about fishing.”

  April laughed. That was probably true. Richard was a lawyer by day and a man of prayer by night, born in some city far away and only come to this village because the Spirit’s mysterious ways had directed him here. For that matter, none of their cell really belonged in a place like this. They weren’t like the Sawyers, tied to the water and the land by nature and long acquaintance.

  “When do you think Chris and Tyler are comin’ back so they can take me fishin’ for real?” Nick asked.

  Was he reading her thoughts? “Soon, I hope,” she answered.

  “Something bad is happening, ain’t it?” Nick asked.

  She regarded the small boy sadly. “A lot of bad things go on in the world,” she said. “We just try our best to make what we can right.”

  “Yeah, well . . .” he looked down at the pencils in his hands and the sketchbooks wedged under his arm. “You do a pretty good job.”