Attack

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “I know. Look, I just took him down the cliff a little ways. He was sitting here thinking too much and it wasn’t good for him.”

  “Richard told you to keep him in the house.”

  “Richard isn’t here,” Tony said, frustrated and annoyed that she was fixating on his actions instead of listening to his news. “He would have understood why I took him out. But there was a demon down there. I thought the shield was supposed to keep them out.”

  “Not necessarily out. Just powerless.”

  “How powerless?” Tony asked.

  “I don’t know. Relatively. April said the man who came into the village house was in his own right mind ... well, sort of. But the demon couldn’t control him there. Or empower him.”

  “Well, something freaked Jordan out, and I don’t think it was the sight of a bird. I think it talked to him.”

  She lowered her voice. “Is he okay?”

  “No. Richard was right. He’s being pulled back. I’m glad the bird scared him so much—maybe the scare will throw him back our way for a little while. But it’s not going to last. He needs to join us, or he is going to go back to them.”

  Tears filled her eyes. “I hate that.’

  “Me too. But it’s true.” He glanced around the cottage, but there was no sign of anyone except the children and Angelica. “Where is everyone else?”

  “Miss Brown took them on a nature walk.”

  “And she left you two here?”

  Angelica shrugged. “We’re being punished, I think.”

  “What did she tell the other kids, anyway?”

  “Some song and dance about going on a retreat.”

  He frowned. “I’d rather they knew the truth. I think it would be easier to keep them safe.”

  “Maybe.” She wrinkled her brow. “You think we’re going to have to keep them safe? I mean, besides just keeping them here under the shield?”

  “I don’t think that raven was just a freak appearance,” Tony said.

  “Could Jordan have called it here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. But if he wants them back ... if he’s getting restless and wants to be possessed again ... do they know that? Can they feel it? Maybe he’s creating a crack in the shield.”

  Tony considered the possibility and didn’t like how plausible it felt. “I don’t know what to do about him. He’s scared of the demons, but he’s playing with the idea of still being on their side. He won’t talk to me. I don’t think he even likes me.”

  “Just keep trying,” Angelica said. “You can’t do anything else.”

  “I wish we were out on a boat,” Tony said, glancing glumly at the four walls of the cottage. “Like Chris and Mary. Not stuck here.”

  “Birds can get out on the water too.”

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “I hope they’ve thought of that.”

  “They’re prepared,” Angelica said. Then added, “As much as anybody.”

  “I wish I felt like we were.” Tony heaved a sigh and sat down at the table, a square barely big enough for two people that sat on rickety legs and was covered with dusty dishes, half-empty bottles of who-knew-what, and dog-eared paperback books. He picked up one of the books and riffled through it. “This book is so old it’s crumbling in my hand.”

  Angelica shoved aside a few dishes and sat across from him. Her chair creaked loudly under her. It seemed amazing the whole place hadn’t fallen apart long ago—like even though the hermit had lived here, he hadn’t really used anything or bothered to keep it up. “Do you think we should call everyone up here?” she asked. “Is an attack going to happen?”

  “I don’t . . . ” he tried to think the question through. “I don’t think so. I just saw one raven. And I think it came for Jordan—because he was calling it somehow or because it was just coming to call him. I don’t think they can get through the shield in a major way.”

  “Okay then,” Angelica said. “So don’t stress. We’ll just keep keeping an eye on everyone, and especially on those two in there”—she pointed toward the living room, with its obnoxious racket from the TV, which they had turned up too loud—“and we’ll trust that everybody else is getting their jobs done and this battle is going to end well.”

  “Do you really think that’s going to happen?”

  “What else would happen?”

  “We could lose.”

  She regarded him seriously. “It’s true.”

  “But not likely.”

  She smiled. “Since when does the Oneness really lose?”

  “Since when does the Oneness betray itself?”

  The smile faltered. “Nothing has really changed. We’re still out here watching out for each other and giving the demons hell. Nothing to worry about.”

  He grinned. “I like that. Just wish I didn’t feel like I was sticking my fingers in my ears and singing la la la.”

  “My ears are open,” Angelica said. “Yours too. Just because we’ve seen and heard some nasty things doesn’t mean the whole world has changed. Have a little faith.”

  He nodded. She held up a bottle of something brown, corked and opaque behind thick glass. “And if you need a little extra help, you could try some of this stuff. Seems like it kept the hermit alive for a hundred years or something like that.”

  In the living room, someone on the TV shot someone else, and the sound, compounded by static, made Tony jump. Angelica laughed at him and shoved the bottle in his direction. “Yeah, you definitely need to take some of this.”

  Chapter 8

  On the water, the air was ten degrees cooler at least. The sun was blinding, glaring off waves the colour of white crystal.

  The boys owned three boats: a skiff, a small fishing trawler with nets where they spent most of their time, and this one, a sailing yacht that was Chris’s pride and joy.

  He had never pictured using it as a floating prison cell, much less a floating interrogation unit. Or whatever exactly they had made it.

  Never imagined giving his sleeping quarters—below deck—to a man who hated his guts and who hated everyone else he cared about.

  Who had tried to turn his mother into some kind of monster.

  Who had almost ruined the life of a girl he cared about, and tried to turn her too.

  Begrudgingly, Chris had to admit that he wouldn’t have known Reese without David’s crime against her. If she hadn’t been exiled, she wouldn’t have come to the village and thrown herself off the cliff, and he and Tyler wouldn’t have found her, and discovering what she was wouldn’t have led him to Mary and to finally, after all these years, hearing the truth about his father and his mother and the Oneness.

  A truth he was resisting, and he didn’t know why.

  Tyler had gone over to the Oneness. It hadn’t taken long at all. He’d recognized in them everything he longed for, everything he’d missed in life, everything Chris hadn’t been able to give him no matter how much he wanted to or how much he tried. He’d accepted them in a moment, like it always seemed to happen, and become something that wasn’t just human anymore.

  His best friend, a . . . something.

  Gulls called high overhead, circling under a few strips of stark white cloud. Chris watched them, his eyes tracing their circles, following the lines of their wings. He adjusted the sail to catch a brisk wind from the south and breathed in the air that braced him. This was where he belonged. His father had thrived out here. Diane had stayed near the water because of the memories and because she wanted Chris to follow in Douglas’s footsteps, hoped that he would. Sailors and fishermen who had been Douglas’s friends took Chris aboard when he was small, and he owned his first boat at twelve; when Tyler came along less than a year later, the boys spent every possible moment on the water. And grew up, finished high school, and decided that was where they wanted to stay—not moving on with the rest of the world, but salted and baptized by the ocean spray in the midst of their nets and their sails. They made a poor but livable i
ncome fishing and doing odd jobs around the docks—patching sails, mending hulls, packing catches in ice.

  This was not the use he’d pictured for the yacht when he bought it for cheap and started work repairing it. But he was glad he could serve.

  David was sitting in the stern, his arms folded, looking green beneath his six o’clock shadow and as miserable as ever. He glared at Chris when he noticed him watching. They had had a brief but lively discussion over whether to tie the man up—Chris and Diane for, April and Mary against—but ultimately had decided to leave him free. Chris felt like he’d chosen to let a viper loose in a garden where he’d be weeding all day, but he hoped that keeping an eye on the fugitive would be good enough. He wouldn’t put it past the man to kill them all in cold blood, but he was stronger, even with his arm in a cast. At least, he hoped he was.

  Disgruntled, he remembered Reese’s story of being healed of her wounds by the hermit on Tempter’s Mountain, and he wished the old man was still alive so that he could fix his arm.

  Not very selfless, are you? Chris asked himself. Wishing a man back from the dead just so you don’t have to wear a cast.

  He realized he was glaring back at David, a glare meant to show off all his strength and promise a beating if he ever caught him up to anything.

  He was acutely aware of the women on the ship, all of whom were below in the cabin right now, and of his task: protect them at all costs.

  David had turned his glare away; he was staring up, up at the gulls and the wisps of white in the blue sky. Out here the sun didn’t beat like it did on shore. Chris could feel it burning the skin of his face and nose, but without the relentless weight of heat that had accosted them on land.

  April appeared at his elbow. She was surprisingly good at moving quietly and quickly, even on the water where her footing was unsteady. She asked a few questions, and Chris showed her how to set the sail. He liked April, he had decided. Which was a good thing—it was hard enough not to wish she was Reese. If he had disliked her, it would be unbearable.

  He left April handling the sail and stalked over to David, who looked up at him with the same unveiled enmity he’d been showing since the prison.

  “You like it out here?” Chris asked.

  “You didn’t come over here to make conversation. Threaten me, like you’re leading up to.”

  Chris wanted to kick him. He refrained. David stretched out, folding his hands on his stomach and closing his eyes in a gesture that dismissed Chris completely. “Tell Mary to get up here and talk to me,” David said. “That’s why we’re here. Let’s get it out of the way so you can get on to what you really want to do, what you have to do.”

  He knew David was referring to killing him.

  Unbelievable that he could talk about it that way.

  He thought of a few clumsy retorts but didn’t say any of them.

  “I’m here,” Mary said from behind him, making him jump. He mumbled something and stepped aside, letting her come alongside him.

  She looked down at David and shook her head lightly. His eyes were still closed.

  “Ignoring me now?” she asked.

  “Giving you all the attention you deserve,” he answered without moving.

  She sighed.

  This was going to be a long trip.

  April was watching them closely from her station across the deck, and Chris found himself drawn back to her, away from the tension between Mary and David.

  “So where are we going?” she asked when he reached her side.

  “Absolutely nowhere,” he told her. “We’re going to keep going in circles until we’re finished with him.”

  One way or another.

  The gulls were calling louder overhead, and April raised her eyes toward them, watching them. She looked worried.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Do you think they’re demons?”

  He had thought of it. “Naw.”

  “Do you think they’ll come?”

  “They might. We’re doing our best to cut David off from help, but we can’t seal off the sky.”

  She glanced down at the waves. “Or the sea.”

  “Attack of the fish?”

  She made a face at him. “You never know.”

  He held up an oar. “I’ll be ready. Beat them off with my paddle.”

  She laughed, and he was glad; glad to be making someone smile. But her expression sobered again quickly as she looked up at the birds again. “If they do come, I’ll wish we had Reese with us. Or Richard. Mary is really the only fighter.”

  “You can fight, can’t you? Wield that sword like all the rest of you? Even Tyler can do that.”

  “I can. But fighting isn’t my gift—and I hate it.”

  He remembered that she had killed a man last time she bore the sword, and his heart went out to her.

  “You know you did what you had to do.”

  “He didn’t leave me any choice.” She knew exactly what he was referring to. “I only wanted to drive the demon—or demons—out. He refused to let go. And he would have killed us. Not just me.”

  “I know.”

  “So many people have died.”

  And this time her eyes had strayed back to David, who was still reclining on the deck as though he had chartered this boat for a pleasure cruise. Mary sat near him, but far enough away to look like she was protecting herself. They weren’t speaking.

  “You know,” Chris said, “everyone acted like we were getting the exciting job. I think the biggest risk out here might be that we get bored to death.”

  “Things will get exciting,” April said. “Soon enough.”

  And she eyed the birds again.

  “They aren’t demons.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  He looked up, watched them circling, heard their calls, and admitted that she was right.

  He didn’t know that.

  * * *

  The best thing about driving a long way was that it gave one time to pray. The most frustrating thing about it was that even though you could pray, your attention had to be fractured, and you couldn’t really enter in. Over the years Richard’s gift for prayer had grown into an addiction; he craved the rush it gave him almost as much as the insight and power. It reminded him that he was transcendent, something more than just flesh and blood and bone, something more than anyone could see. At times like this, especially, with a battle hanging in the air and importance riding on everything he did and every word spoken, he needed that sense of transcendence.

  He had been surprised when Alicia told him where they would go to meet with the woman, the one they were responsible to turn against the Oneness. It was a good three-hour drive, and he wondered who had chauffeured them on a regular basis.

  Or if they’d found some other way to get around. Horrible as demonic possession was, it did offer attractive power to some, especially to those who would pursue it, like Clint had. And these children had been under his tutelage to some degree, and under David’s direction. David, with his calculated plans, would have encouraged them to seek out the limits of power and use it.

  It was very possible they’d travelled in the same way Alex had when he disappeared from Dr. Smith’s house. He didn’t like to think about the children being that well-versed in the practices of the demonic, but that was the whole point—they had been recruited, at their age, because their age and the ideal of innocence would make it so hard for the Oneness to fight them. Even to wrap their heads around fighting them.

  Richard shook his. He was thinking of the children as enemies. They weren’t, not anymore. Not for now. Thank God.

  Please God they could keep it that way.

  He comforted himself by remembering the presence of the cloud up on Tempter’s Mountain. He hadn’t really left the children in the care of two teenagers who were good at wielding a sword but mostly unproven at anything else.

  The drive took him south, and he drove over a ridge to look down on a valley, split by
a wide river spanned by highway and railroad bridges in three places, crowned by the high skyline of Mark. It was the biggest city in the region, dwarfing Lincoln, a one-time mining town that had grown and eventually been taken over by banking and tech companies. The heat outside swelled as Richard took the freeway into the city, looping around the heart of it, exacerbated by concrete and glaring off skyscraper glass. Billboards studded the roadway, trying to grab his attention away from the heavy, too-fast traffic, advertising concerts, TV shows, and toothpaste.

  One did grab his attention for a moment, showing him the face of the woman he was going to see.

  He slowed a little to get a better look, sobered.

  David knew what he was doing.

  His exit put him into the heart of the downtown arts district, and he poked through heavy traffic before finding a parking garage and heading into the sweltering heat in search of the box office and a concert ticket.

  He had no idea how he was going to get access to her. That, he was leaving up to the plan—to the leading of the Spirit that was beyond his comprehenion but which he knew would come, opening doors in the right time and place.

  Two steps into the lobby of the theatre, crowded with people, and he could feel a sword forming invisibly in his hand. He didn’t call it all the way to being, but took note of the pressure and what it meant.

  He should have known he wouldn’t be alone.

  That he could count on opposition as much as he could count on the Spirit to lead.

  The lobby was a narrow, curved foyer open to three floors, with balconies looking down on it and glass windows letting in the sun and the presence of the city outside. Air conditioning kept the air comfortable, remarkable considering the heat outside and the hundreds of people crammed into the building, waiting for the doors to open. Richard stood in a corner and scanned the crowd, looking for signs of the enemy or anything else worth seeing. He spotted neither. The demonic was present; he could feel that in the sword in his hand; but lying low. People milled under hanging banners advertising other concerts, ballets, and plays; their chatter and laughter filled the air.