Exile (The Oneness Cycle)

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  And it worked. The men were gone, both of them jumping into the car and hitting the gas. “Run hard!” she shouted. “I’m coming after you!”

  Closing her hand, she felt the sword taking shape even as the bird creatures turned their eyes in the direction of her shout. “That’s right,” she said quietly as the blade in her hand became solid and hot. “Come and get me.”

  Three of them rushed her at once, but they were hindered by the tight space, and Reese took them two and then one, dispatched in quick strokes. The tattooed man had put a bullet through one, momentarily slowing it down, and it wasn’t hard to kill as it launched itself at her with a snarl. The last two hung back, eyes glowing, glaring at her with a hatred that sent a shiver down her spine.

  Yet somehow, it felt good to be hated.

  Chris turned her direction, went pale, and shouted, “Look out!”

  Claws hooked into her shoulders from behind, and a heavy weight bore her to the floor. She’d lost. With the other two just waiting for her to slip, there was no coming back from this one …

  But she heard a shriek, and the weight on her back ripped off and back; she made it to her feet again just in time to dispatch the two remaining demons that were coming in for the kill.

  Panting, unbelieving, she whirled around to see the dead body of the attacker from behind, curling and shrivelling back to its bird form. It had been decapitated. Not by her.

  She turned back. Three feet away, Diane was standing with a sword glowing in her hand, staring at the dead bird.

  Reese nodded, her eyes filling with tears. “Thank you.”

  Diane couldn’t seem to find a voice, but she nodded in response.

  Chris gave his mother a hard stare and then turned back to Reese. “They got away with the others. We have to go after them.”

  “We will,” Reese told him. “I know where they’ve gone.” Without an enemy to fight, her sword was fading away, and she relaxed her grip and let it go. Diane followed suit. Reese rested her hand on Diane’s shoulder. “And this time we’re going to win.”

  Diane jerked herself away. “There’s no we.”

  Chris shook his head and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Tyler’s out there, Mum. You can’t fight this right now.”

  She turned on him. “What do you know about it? Your father—”

  “Died, if I had to guess, fighting for something he believed in,” Chris shot back. “When did you decide that staying out of the fight was the best way to honour him?”

  To both their surprise, Diane started to cry. “The Oneness—it’s supposed to be this idyllic, this wonderful thing … this thing that changes your life for the better. And all it does is bring loss and pain and hardness.”

  “No,” Reese said. “The Oneness is no idyll. Nobody knows that more than I do. From the day I became One, I’ve learned to fight and to strive and to endure. The Oneness opens your eyes to the darkness. But the darkness is real, Diane—trying to hide from it doesn’t change that.” Her voice softened, and she placed her hand on Diane’s shoulder again, a touch as loving as a daughter’s and just as sincere. “But it’s not all there is. The wonder is real, too, and the light—and the love. But you won’t know it if you don’t choose to walk in it. To endure even when things are hard.”

  The older woman broke down. Shaking, sobbing, she clung to Reese and vented twenty years of grief on the girl’s shoulder.

  And Reese, who still could not feel the truth of what she believed, chose to believe the truth of her own words, and she comforted Diane with all the compassion she could find within her.

  Chris turned away and waited in stony silence until his mother’s sobs wore thin. “We have to go,” he said finally.

  “We know,” Reese said. “We’re coming.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Don’t you want me to convert first?” Chris whirled around and stared hard at her.

  She looked unflinchingly back at him. “Of course I do.”

  He swallowed. “Blast it, girl. It isn’t fair, what I feel about you.”

  Her voice dropped to a near whisper. “I know. But Oneness is first.”

  Diane looked between the two of them and shook her head. “You two are not choosing an easy path.”

  Reese, her arm still around the older woman, looked at Diane and smiled. “Right now I don’t think we’re choosing anything. But Chris—Chris, whatever happens, thank you for everything.”

  He nodded, a short, hard nod.

  * * *

  Sometime on the drive, Angelica started singing. The words were in Italian; the tune was a lullaby. She stroked her brother’s head and sang to him and whispered to him, urging him to hang on, to make it. Tyler closed his eyes and let tears eke out. Funny that he should feel his own childhood loss so keenly here, now—that shut up in a trunk, barrelling down a highway toward some gruesome end, newly aware of a whole new dimension of the world, he would remember his parents and the accident and feel ten years old again, losing them for the first time. Chris and Diane had done everything they could for him. But he’d never stopped feeling the loss, the lack—the sense that everything he needed to undergird life had been taken away and he would always and forever be floundering, looking for a place to land and take shelter and learn how to grow up and be strong.

  It had been that same sort of loss, of confusion, that he’d seen in Reese’s eyes on the boat when he first pulled her out of the water. It was why he’d been so stuck on helping her somehow. In some small way, he knew how she felt.

  Angelica kept singing, her voice mostly drowned out by the sound of the car and traffic passing outside, and then choked the song off and just whispered and talked at Tony. He wasn’t responding to her anymore. Tyler hoped he’d passed out from the pain. He suspected the boy’s knee was shattered, and the bullet was still in there. He was better off unconscious.

  He wondered where Patrick was. He pictured him sitting in the backseat of the car, watching over the thugs without their knowing it, and the image made him smile.

  Not that Patrick had done anything useful. He supposed, being immaterial and dead, there wasn’t much a ghost could do to intervene in circumstances like theirs. Still, some ghosts could do things, right? Poltergeists were known for … what? Knocking on walls and moving things around? Okay, so that wouldn’t be much help.

  His thoughts went back to Reese. He’d heard her voice in the confusion back in the village—no question about that. And despite the danger he knew he was still in, he couldn’t help feeling triumphant that Chris and Diane had been left behind. Good for Reese—whatever she’d done.

  He wasn’t sure if he was happy or troubled that they were sure to come after them. No way Chris was just going to let anybody disappear on his watch without attempting a find and rescue. And he got the feeling Reese would be the same way. They would go back to Richard and Mary and team up. They knew where to find them … Chris would have heard the thug’s comment about the warehouse.

  The sounds of traffic outside changed, from the steady roar of the freeway to the clunking, closer, more exhaust-saturated atmosphere of city streets. He heard distant honking and somebody yelling something. The car went through a pothole, jarring them so badly that Tyler banged his head on the top of the trunk. Angelica held Tony down, determined not to let him be hurt any more badly than he was.

  “He okay?” Tyler asked, needlessly.

  “He’s going to be fine,” Angelica answered.

  Tyler smiled up at the trunk and shook his shaggy head slightly. The twins gave a whole new meaning to the word optimist. He thought of how they had come to help Reese even after being told that she was poisonous, how they had clung to loyalty to her and how they were unwavering in their loyalty to each other. It reminded him of Chris—of Chris’s dogged protectiveness, and the loyalty Tyler had always returned to him. The comparison made him think that they weren’t so different after all, he and the Oneness. They
were friends, standing by each other, taking the world as a unit instead of apart.

  Except that Oneness was more, Tyler realized. He and Chris were friends, two against the world, each for the other, but the Oneness extended between people like Mary and Richard and Diane and the twins and Reese, and it expanded out to include people who were alive and people who were dead, and it crossed countries and continents. And in the end, the Oneness didn’t even exist for the Oneness. They took the whole world in—they held it all together. They were One for the sake of people who didn’t see them and for the sake of people who hated them.

  He thought of the grid he had imagined seeing, a pattern that held everything in place and connected everything to everything else, and suddenly knew he hadn’t imagined it. He’d been shown something.

  It was real, all of this. It wasn’t just some game the twins and Richard and Mary played.

  He found the thought awe inspiring.

  It had grown quiet outside, nothing but the monotone of the engine filling their ears. The car made a hard turn and then stopped.

  A door slammed and feet scuffed asphalt. A loud rattling noise filled the air—the sound of a door being pulled up?—and the car drove forward.

  The trunk opened to the inside of a warehouse.

  The warehouse. The one where Reese had come to fight her demons, literally, and die alone. The one where Richard had rescued her with his booming voice of authority from some other plane.

  Maybe he would do it again.

  Hammer-man grabbed Tyler’s arm and hauled him into the dim light of the warehouse. His stomach sank.

  Richard was already here. And he wasn’t going to be rescuing anybody this time.

  Chapter 16

  “So how are we going to do this? Last time you went in there you just about got slaughtered.”

  Between the looks Chris kept giving her, apparently examining her to make sure she actually was healed from the last attack, Reese told him and Diane everything she had learned about the hive and David’s treachery. Chris’s assertion that the thugs were heading for the warehouse only confirmed what she already knew.

  Opening the door to Chris’s truck and swinging herself in, she ducked her eyes when she caught Chris staring at her again.

  “What?”

  “I don’t understand why that hermit didn’t heal you right away.”

  Reese flushed. “He thought … he thought wrong things. About me. You know that.”

  “Mary and Richard weren’t so sure about you either, for a while. You’re putting your neck on the line for people who couldn’t decide until yesterday whether you were the enemy or not.”

  “I’m putting my neck on the line for the Oneness, Chris. My family. You would do the same.”

  “If I was one of you.”

  “Which, unfortunately, you’re not.”

  They stared at each other, locking into one another’s eyes for a long moment. Reese looked away first. Diane was standing beside the truck. Behind her, her house was full of light—she had turned every lamp and lightbulb on after the dead birds were cleared out, trying to restore some sense of homeliness and security. It was dark outside, and the lights blazed out with warmth.

  “Are you coming?” Reese asked.

  Diane looked at her son as though pleading for help.

  “For Tyler,” he said.

  “No,” Reese said, shaking her head. “No. For Mary. And Richard. And April. Your cell, your family. For the world. For the Oneness.”

  She met Diane’s eyes without flinching. “For me.”

  “I wish I was more like you,” Diane said. “But I’m not.”

  Reese nodded slowly. “Okay.” She turned to Chris. “We need to go. I don’t know how much time we have left, but I don’t think it’s much.”

  He turned the ignition and the truck roared to life. Reese put her hand on Chris’s arm. “You don’t have to come,” she said.

  “You know I’m not going to stay behind.”

  “I’m not sure we’re going to win this one. Not without your mother.”

  “How much help can she be? She’s never even carried one of those sword things before today.”

  “It isn’t about that. It’s about the Oneness—everyone joined together, everyone being who and what they are. She is one of us. We need her. If she won’t see that … I just don’t know what’s going to happen out there, Chris.”

  He set his jaw and backed the truck out of the driveway. “We’re going to get Tyler out of there, that’s what we’re going to do. And the rest of them.”

  Reese nodded, but she was staring out the window now, bleakly taking in the village street and the shadowy view of the bay passing by. The hour’s drive to Lincoln passed in tense, unhappy silence. When they were ten miles from the exit, Reese started talking.

  “We’ll go in from above. There’s a fire exit from an upstairs catwalk down to the ground outside. Once we get in, we’ll have to find out what’s going on—where they are, what exactly they’re doing. I need you to be the one to do that.”

  “So the demons don’t get you.”

  “Something like that, yes. If the fight starts too soon, we won’t have time to free the others.”

  “Tell me again why we aren’t calling in the Lincoln cell.”

  Reese shook her head. “They won’t be ready to believe me against David. That will come, but … not yet. And I wouldn’t want them to. Loyalty is a hard thing to change.”

  Chris cast her a curious look, keeping his eyes mostly on the road. “Does it hurt you? Fighting him?”

  “He’s still one of us.”

  “Like my mother.”

  “A little bit.”

  Her voice grew quiet with every answer, like the words took too much effort and caused pain.

  “I’m sorry she wouldn’t come.”

  Reese smiled. “It’s not your fault.”

  “She’s angry … still. She blames all of you for my father’s death.”

  “Anger is dangerous.”

  “So is grief.”

  Reese half-turned so that she was facing Chris, who kept looking straight ahead. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’re still grieving this whole exile thing. You’ve been swallowed by it since we found you. I don’t know why you haven’t been able to cut loose, but if you don’t, I think it’s going to drown you. Maybe at a really bad time.”

  She glanced down at her hands. “I don’t know how to cut loose. I believe what Richard and Tyler said … I know they’re right. I saw it in April’s painting. But I can’t feel it. I still feel what it felt like to be cut off … to be cast out. To be treated like an enemy by everyone I love.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Chris said honestly. “But you can’t go into the warehouse weighed under by all that. If you do, you’re not going to make it back out.”

  She considered his words. “You might be right.”

  “I am.”

  “What makes you such an expert in grief?” Reese winced. “I’m sorry. I know better … your father …”

  “Nope,” Chris said. “I was too young. Don’t even remember him. That’s why I didn’t remember any of this Oneness business from all those years ago either. Yeah, I’ve missed having him around, but it isn’t like losing someone I’d learned to love.”

  “Then what does make you such an expert?” Reese asked, gently teasing but genuinely curious at the same time.

  “Tyler.”

  “Tyler?”

  “Tyler’s parents died when he was ten. He was an only child—totally alone in the world after that. It wasn’t just a death; it was like the end of the world. It tore his whole universe apart. He took years to get to some sense of normal—some kind of sense of functional and whole. Mum and I did all we could for him, but still … years.”

  He flicked his eyes off the road and drilled them into her. “Reese, you do not have years.”

  She looked out the window. “Exit’s coming up.”

/>   He ignored her. “If Tyler dies tonight it’s going to be the end of my world. But I don’t want to lose you either.”

  She smiled faintly. “I understand.”

  He pulled off at the exit. “I hope you do.”

  * * *

  Mary stood in the centre of the warehouse floor, arms folded and eyes angry. Richard was stretched out on the ground beside her. His body lay facedown, but his head was turned so that Tyler could see how battered his face looked—one eye was swollen shut, and his nose was purple. His face was heavily streaked with blood. No one seemed to be guarding them, but Mary’s rigidity suggested otherwise.

  Oh. Demons.

  Right.

  So much for Reese teaming up with the village cell.

  The thugs pulled the twins out of the car and dumped Tony roughly on the ground, then reached down to cut the zip tie around Angelica’s ankles so she could walk to the warehouse. The moment they did, she erupted into a kicking, biting tornado, calling heaven down on them both in Italian. Kelly backhanded her across the warehouse, and Tyler found himself suddenly boiling over. When Hammer-man cut the tie around his ankles, it was all he could do not to follow Angelica’s example.

  Save it, he told himself. You can grandstand when they try to kill you.

  He got to his feet, and Hammer-man prodded him toward Mary. Angelica walked beside him, holding the back of one hand to her cheek, muttering something. Kelly’s gun was in her shoulder, or she would have turned to get Tony. As it was, her brother was left lying on the asphalt.

  Tyler felt the moment they passed through the demonic guard. The air around turned darker for half a second, and his hair stood on end. Mary was watching him with an expression that told him she could see everything. It was mingled with another expression altogether—tenderness. Compassion.

  His mother would have been her age.

  One more time, he pretended he was Oneness. This was his mother he was walking toward. He crossed the warehouse beside his sister. Richard, on the ground, a father—the best kind of father, one who deserved to be looked up to.