Reese bit her lip. “What about Jacob? Did he change too?”
“He’s the same. But I’m more scared of him than I used to be. He was so angry with Tyler and Chris the other day. He gets angry with all of us. He says we’re supposed to be different from the world, but we’re just like them, wanting to be like everybody out there instead of following God’s ways. But we don’t. I don’t think. I think we all want to do what’s right.”
“Miranda, what happened in that barn wasn’t God’s way.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Are you the only one who knows about all this?”
“No, my mother knows. I told her. I shouldn’t have, probably, but I was so scared that night.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say very much. She just said things would be all right. But I don’t think she likes it either. She’s been not very happy. And Lorrie is mad at her all the time.”
Reese nodded. “It’s good that you told her. You should keep talking to her, whatever happens. You don’t have to be alone.”
“But Jacob doesn’t like us to talk about some things.”
“Like what things?”
Miranda paused. “Him. Or things we aren’t happy with. He says we complain and judge and that we need to respect his authority.”
Reese bit her tongue. “Just keep talking to your mom. That’s why you have a mom. So she can help you make sense of things.”
Miranda nodded but didn’t look convinced. Reese marveled at how much confusion and guilt one man could introduce into a young life. But that was typical. Jacob wanted control, and confusion and guilt were two of the main tools of control. She said a silent prayer that this child would be set free—her and her mother and all the others in this community, even those who were already demonized, who were already being drawn into the hive.
“Okay, now listen,” Reese said. “I’m going to ask you more questions, and I need you tell me everything you know. But you should know that I’m going to tell the police what you tell me. This is not wrong, Miranda. It’s the right thing to do. You need to be honest so that Chris and Tyler don’t get hurt. Tell me everything you remember about them being taken away.”
Miranda stared at her, and she started to shake. Reese locked into her eyes. “Someone is already dead,” she reminded the girl. “You can help me stop Chris and Tyler from dying too. This isn’t a game. And you know this time what’s right and what’s wrong. You know it isn’t right that Rick Brodie died, and you know it isn’t right that my friends were taken away. Listen to what you know. And tell me.”
“Clint was here,” Miranda said. “I saw him come into the house. Jacob was talking to Chris and Tyler in the dining room, and they were all yelling and mad at each other. Clint was listening outside the door. Then he went inside and everything got quiet, and then I could just hear him and Jacob talking. He said he would take them away and Jacob wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore. He said he would make everything disappear. I got scared because I shouldn’t be listening, so I ran around the house, and I saw a truck out front and some other men. I don’t know who they were.”
“How many other men?”
“Just two.”
“What kind of truck?”
“Like a moving van . . . not a very big one. I didn’t want the men to see me so I hid in the bushes. And then I saw Clint and Jacob and Nathan carrying Chris and Tyler out, and they put them in the back of the truck. And then Clint climbed in after them, and they shut the door and then the other men got into the front of the truck and drove it away.”
She was shaking harder than ever.
“And then what happened?” Reese asked gently.
“And then Mama came out wailing and crying because Rick Brodie died.”
“And then you called the police?”
Miranda nodded, tears streaking down her face suddenly. “I didn’t know what else to do. I’m not supposed to use the phone. I’m not even supposed to know where it is. But I do because . . . well, because. So I went and called 911 and told them about the death. And then I called you.”
“You did the right thing,” Reese said.
“I don’t know,” Miranda said. “I think maybe I ruined everything. They took Jacob and Lorrie away, and they’re going to come back. No one is allowed to go anywhere right now.”
“I know you feel like you betrayed them,” Reese said, “but all you did was tell the truth. The truth is going to help. In the end, even if it hurts for a while, it will help. Can you believe that?”
She was trembling so hard that her teeth chattered. “I don’t know.”
“Well,” Reese said, “I do. I understand what it’s like to be part of a family, of a community like this. I know how it feels to do things they don’t like. But the truth is going to help all of you. Even Jacob and Lorrie. And especially you and your mother.”
“What if we all go to jail?”
“Then it will probably feel like your world has ended. But it won’t have. Not really.”
Miranda looked away, and as she did she gradually calmed down. Finally she looked back, surveying Reese’s face in the green shade of the tree. “You’re a lot like Tyler,” she said.
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re both like Jacob.”
Reese thought about that for a minute. “In some ways, yes.”
“But you don’t scare me, and he does.”
“Jacob has made some choices that should scare you,” Reese said. “I know it’s hard for you to think about him like that, but you know he’s been doing things that are wrong. He’s been bringing in people and powers that aren’t safe. Pay attention to that fear. Pay attention to what you’re feeling. It’s not wrong.”
She stood. “I have to go,” she said. “I have to find my friends. Thank you for your help. You can call us again—you, or your mother, or anybody who needs us. And I’ll come back and check on you. I promise.”
“Even if I go to jail?”
Reese smiled. “Even then.”
Chapter 10
Tony’s head was buried in a math textbook, staring cross-eyed at algebraic equations he could make absolutely no sense of, when he felt Angelica’s eyes boring into his back and turned around.
From a desk behind him in study hall, she gestured toward an empty seat.
Alex was gone.
He had been there two seconds ago . . . Tony had turned around to check, pretending to be looking at a clock on the back wall. But now he realized that he could feel the teen’s absence; the low-lying, under-the-surface tension that filled the air when he was there had lifted. It was so undercover that the change was barely perceptible. But it was there.
Both twins raised their hands at the same time. The teacher raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Bathroom?” they blurted in unison.
“Go ahead.”
They spilled into the hall at the same time and looked both ways. Alex was nowhere to be seen. Sharing the same instinct, they turned on their heels and headed for the double doors at the end of the hall—the ones that let out into the schoolyard in the back. They didn’t think he was still in the school. And they didn’t think he would be out front where anyone would notice him exiting.
A day on duty had won them no friendship with the boy from the home. He ignored them, occasionally casting scowls in their direction, and they hung out trying to interest him but failing. They didn’t want to show too much interest lest they tip him off to their true identity. As it was, it was playing with fire to be Oneness in the presence of demons. Both could lie low if they wanted to—keeping to the shadows, essentially—but you never knew when a wrong movement was going to give you away. Dr. Smith treated them like anyone else in the home, and Susan and Valerie did likewise. This, their second day at school, had been hardly more revealing. Alex kept to himself, showed little to no interest in any of his classmates and zero aptitude for anything scholastic. He spent most of his time with music
in his ears and his eyes focused on something in his own head that no one else really wanted to know about.
Tony and Angelica had both kept a close eye on anyone Alex interacted with, hoping to find more of the hive. They did notice that one of the teenage girls seemed to make a special point of avoiding him, and Angelica would have put that down to normal adolescent dislike if it wasn’t for the faint presence of fear in the girl’s eyes. But she showed no sign of being demonized herself.
Disappointing, considering they had hoped to find more of the hive in the school. Of course it was possible that there were more, that the hive was in fact spreading through this ready-made social network, but that its members weren’t the type to be in summer school. Alex himself wasn’t that type; Dr. Smith forced him to be here, as was obvious from everything in his demeanour. Judging from how poorly he seemed to perform in every class, it was obvious the doctor was wise to send him. He could probably use all the help he could get.
But now he was gone, and finally, both twins knew deep in their gut, the chase was on.
They made it to the yard in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of black disappearing into the woods across the fence on the far side, past a basketball court and stretch of ground where the track-and-fielders met. The woods weren’t much, just a long patch of greenery in the middle of the town that hadn’t been bought and developed, but it was enough to hide in or escape through. The twins exchanged a glance and then wordlessly broke into a trained, silent run, straight across the schoolyard. They risked Alex turning around and seeing them, but he shouldn’t expect that anyone was following, and it was a better risk to take than losing him completely because they were slowed down trying to stay out of sight.
One after the other they jumped the fence and stood in a crouch, not saying a word, looking and listening for any sign of the direction he had taken. The woods weren’t their usual territory—they had done most of their demon hunting in the city haunts of Lincoln. But the dark air and the eerie silence in the trees felt familiar. Whatever was in Alex was manifesting itself more strongly now, not trying to hide. It left an aura behind it: that unmistakable mix of fascination, beckoning, and horror.
Tony led the way, picking a direction straight through the trees. There was a barely discernible path that might have been nothing more than a deer track or the vague waymaking of root and tree trunks, or might have been used by human beings before. Angelica followed hard on his heels. As soon as their ears picked up the sound of someone ahead of them, they slowed their steps and hung back. The trick now was to follow without being heard.
They didn’t want to catch Alex. Not until he led them wherever he was trying to go. Not until he led them to others.
They had done this before. Tracked this very hive before. Followed demons and demonic activity, trying to get to the centre of it. Once, it had led Reese to the warehouse, with Tony breathlessly at her side, and Patrick, their friend who had died in the fight, watching their backs. The warehouse had reeked of death and evil and rot, horror crowding out fascination; it had housed the core—an enormous gathering of demons drawing strength from something and using that strength to go out and perpetuate the hive. The evil of David’s betrayal, though none of them knew it then.
They had hoped, when they went into that warehouse swinging their swords and fighting like crazed warriors from some bygone age, that they were destroying the hive once and for all. They had been wrong. David pulled them back and stopped the forward advance of their attack, long enough, apparently, to allow the core to regroup after the battle where Patrick died.
One thing was for sure, with so many demons gathering in one place—thousands, Tony thought—the potential of the hive had to be staggering. They would not come, not in such force, if they did not believe they could find and possess people enough for all of them. People like Alex, bent on destroying themselves. People like the man who had impersonated Dr. Smith, bent on destroying others—children like Nick and good men like Vince Smith himself. And ideally, they would find people with connections: people who were part of homes, schools, communities, so that the evil could spread. Demonized people often isolated themselves, or were isolated by their communities, but that worked against the demonic drive and frustrated them. They wanted everyone.
They wanted, badly, to annihilate themselves, and take everyone—the whole human race, and the whole universe held together by the human race—down with them.
The woods grew darker toward the centre, where the trees were oldest and tallest and most tangled together, and the aura of demonic personality left a stronger stink in the darkness. And then they thinned out, and the twins paused before stepping onto a cracked sidewalk on a residential street. Alex hadn’t seen them. He was halfway up the block, heading who knew where at a faster clip than before.
Then, abruptly, he stopped at an intersection and waited, fidgeting, next to a stop sign. Half a block down, Tony and Angelica tried to duck out of sight, hiding behind a parked car. Alex was looking every way, clearly not wanting anyone to see him, clearly concerned that someone would.
He went rigid and stood up straighter. Tony tensed—he’d seen them.
Or not. Seconds later, a car pulled up to the stop sign, and Alex jumped in. The car, looking like something out of the ‘60s but in sleek, prime condition, roared away.
The twins stood up, abandoning their hiding place in shock. They weren’t convinced Alex hadn’t spotted them. But what had just happened? How had they lost him so quickly?
“Did you get a license number?” Tony asked.
“No. Just didn’t see that coming fast enough.”
“Guess I can’t blame you for that. I didn’t either.”
The car was long gone—by the time they reached the stop sign and turned up the next street, there was no sign of it. And no anything to indicate where it might have gone.
Tony kicked a fire hydrant.
“Like that’s gonna help,” Angelica commented.
“You got any better ideas?”
“Yeah, go back to the home and see if Dr. Smith knows anything he hasn’t told us about where Alex goes and who he sees. And then leave at least one of us there.”
“Why? I want to keep hunting.”
“The home is under attack. Maybe if one of us stays there, the prey will come to us. Anyway, Alex’s being gone isn’t a good thing. He’s with them, almost guaranteed, and who knows what that means to everyone else.”
“Fine,” Tony acknowledged. “You’re right. Think we’re going to get in trouble for not being in school?”
“With the school, yes. With the home—only if nothing happens that requires our help.”
Just following their feet and their vague memory of the direction they had taken on the bus the past two days, they opted not to go back through the woods to the school but just to keep wandering through the residential neighbourhoods until they found the children’s home. Both moody and frustrated, they didn’t say anything.
Until Tony held out his arm and stopped Angelica midstep.
“Do you feel that?” he asked.
As one, they turned their heads to face a house on their left. A moving truck sat in the driveway, and a nondescript wooden fence, higher than eye-level, surrounded the yard. The house itself had that old, slightly overgrown look—like whoever lived there couldn’t really be bothered to trim grass or oil hinges. But it wasn’t the house that really drew their attention. It was something beyond, behind it—like the house was just a film, a haze with a very different reality diffused behind it.
For some reason, both twins suddenly felt as though the ground might drop out from beneath their feet.
Angelica spotted it first—through a crack in the fence. The shine of car wax—the car that had picked up Alex. It was here.
The Oneness believed that their steps were caught up in a bigger picture than one person could see, something sewn up and patched together by the Spirit itself. They called it a plan. Sometimes plans were noth
ing but darkness and confusion to understand. Other times, they were so obvious you could be staring them in the face.
Being here, now, finding the car, this was not a coincidence.
Tony’s face went ashen.
“What?”
“David’s here. I can feel him.”
She knew it was true the moment he said it—and she realized she’d felt his presence all along. It was just so familiar, so much a part of them, that despite everything that had happened it didn’t call attention to itself right away. But now that she was aware of it, it froze her in her tracks.
“Can he feel us too?” she asked, her voice faint.
“Get out of here, now,” Tony said. “They’re coming.”
They turned and ran, and the ground dropped out or the sky fell, they weren’t really sure which—but their footsteps were swallowed up in tangible darkness, blinding them, and they yelled and swung the swords that were present in their hands as demons flocked down and beat around their heads and shoulders. The ground reached up like hands and sucked at their feet, pulling them down to their knees, grasping at their arms, the air growing heavy and weighting them down, pressing on their shoulders, like the whole atmosphere was trying to swallow them up. Angelica tried to swing her sword but couldn’t; it was all she could do to keep her feet.
Dimly they knew this was not the work of demons alone; demonic power did not extend to the earth. That took man and man’s authority. This was what humanity had long called witchcraft and feared, even as some practiced it and became worse than demons.
This time they had found more than a core.
Chapter 11
When April and Nick came back from an excursion down to the harbour to watch the boats coming in and out, the phone was ringing. She rushed to it while Nick took his time getting his shoes off at the front door.
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Reese?” It was a man’s voice, unfamiliar.
“No, I’m sorry, she’s out.”
“I’ve been calling for the last hour trying to reach her. Do you know how I can get hold of her?”
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