She made a sound but didn’t say anything. He kept going. “So he has done two things. First, he has gathered demons together under his leadership and organization, creating a hive—a conglomerate of humans and demons working together toward a single goal. The children are part of that hive. So are . . . others. Others who are much more obviously evil. He’s been careful. This hive has many faces.”
She took a sip of wine and waited for him to continue. But he could see a wall up behind her eyes—she was not truly open to some of what he had to say.
“Second, he is going after members of the Oneness he sees as weak, trying to turn them. He wants to turn the Oneness against itself, infect it from within—transform it into a parody, a monster where once there was a man.”
“You’re poetic.”
“I’m telling the truth. David himself is the first—and he’s worse than anything I’ve seen from the purely demonic. There’s another man, called Jacob, very different but also frightening. He’s been responsible for the deaths of several men recently, and has been controlling the lives of others—control, not unity, and not freedom. He’s used fear and manipulation and isolation to create his own utopia. Not exactly Oneness ideals. I heard your music—I know you would never agree to the things Jacob does or believes.”
“You are connecting me with him rather arbitrarily, don’t you think?” she cut in.
“Not that arbitrarily. The children—” He stopped himself. He had almost told her what had happened, that he had driven the demons out and the children were no longer part of the hive—that he was keeping them in a secluded place, under a shield, where the demons couldn’t even reach them.
Thereby destroying her victory over cancer.
“The children talked to me,” he said slowly. “They told me that David has targeted you as well, and that they have been visiting you with the purpose of turning you against the Oneness. They aren’t trying to lead you into truth or give you life. They’re trying to use you. You told me you love the Oneness.”
“I do.”
“How much?”
Her face paled, and she looked away as her whole body went rigid.
They didn’t speak.
But the question was clear.
How much?
Enough to suffer for that love?
Enough to die for it?
“You have no idea what you’re asking me,” she whispered.
She looked as though she would stand, perhaps to pace, but instead she trembled with profound weariness, and he saw not only the woman who had just played a concert for hundreds and moved them deeply, who had not only just spent herself in two hours of sheer artistry, who had not only opened her soul to a stranger and discussed things so deep they had to cost just to talk about, but who had been fighting a protracted battle for far too long.
She was tired.
Weary.
He bowed his head. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I think I should leave now. You need rest, and I . . . I can give you time to think about this.”
“You don’t have any choice about that,” she said faintly.
He smiled. “It’s true. But I’m glad to give you time. You said you love the Oneness, Melissa. I think I can say the Oneness also loves you.”
He stood and reached out his hand. She looked at it a moment before taking it, and he helped her to her feet and steered her toward her room. He had no desire to leave her, but he knew he didn’t have an option.
She turned just before she closed her bedroom door. “You’ll stay nearby?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
And he would.
Chapter 10
Jacob’s directions took Reese way off the highway and plunged them down a valley where it was noticeably cooler, shaded with old-growth trees that lined the roads and buzzing with bees and other insects. Beyond the trees, fields of wheat and corn waved in the sunlight. Giving up on the old air conditioner, she and Tyler rolled their windows down and let the fresh air flow in. Jacob didn’t seem to notice. Impervious to the weather, he was a man on a mission.
That struck Reese as ironic. This was supposed to be their offensive, after all. They had pulled the man out of detention so they could somehow convert him, so they could accomplish their mission. Thus far they had been a giant failure, and he seemed more set in his ways than ever.
We have a week, she reminded herself. This is only day one. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Of course, it was highly possible he was thinking the same thing.
She had no idea where he was taking them. Maybe another commune like his. More proof that his way of doing life was worth any cost.
Instead, he told her to pull off the road outside a little iron gate. She did, the car lolling in the long weeds. He pushed through the gate, and she and Tyler followed, curious.
On the other side of a line of trees and tall weeds, they entered a manicured little cemetery.
Jacob strode to the centre of it, then turned and boomed, “What do you see?”
She had to admit he was better at this kind of thing than she was.
“A graveyard,” Tyler said.
“Yes, a graveyard. And tell me what is memorialized here.”
“Death,” Tyler said, at the same time as Reese responded, “People’s lives.”
He eyes sparked. “I contend that the real answer is neither. What this place—and millions like it, all over the world—truly stands for is the failure of the Oneness.”
Reese raised an eyebrow. “Big words for someone who has caused multiple deaths in the last couple of weeks.”
“Now, now,” he said, his tone dangerous, “I am innocent until proven guilty in this country. But guilty life is not the same as innocent life, and the death of the guilty is judgment, not failure—you understand the difference?”
“I understand that you see a difference.”
“So you tell me,” he said, booming again, ignoring her, “what does the Oneness stand for? What is it that we do?”
“Unity, love. We hold the world together.”
“People say that. Do you mean it literally, or in some figurative sense?”
Reese considered that. “Both.”
“You’re right. Without the Oneness the world would in fact fly apart. Without the Oneness—the true Oneness—death and chaos would overtake everything, and the universe as we know it would cease to exist.”
He turned to Tyler. “You see, boy? I am a believer. In every sense of the word, I believe in the Oneness, much more than many do. You did not join some weak straw man, some pretend game of men when you became One. You entered into the most serious business in the universe.”
Tyler looked suspicious, but he listened. As did Reese.
“All right,” Tyler said slowly. “We’re here to stop death from reigning. But you think we should kill people. You don’t make sense.”
His eyes—those lively, dangerous eyes—glimmered. “What should die must die. That is how we will rid the world of chaos. Through judgment. When all judgment has been carried out, and everything corrupt is gone, there will only be life, and we will win. The fight will be over.”
“You say that,” Reese interrupted, “but you work with demons. They are evil, they are chaos, and you think you can somehow conquer darkness with their help?”
He shook his bearded head. “The demonic is power. That is all they are. They are agents of chaos and death only because we have not chosen to master them, to direct their energies elsewhere. We have used them as an excuse, that we should not have to be what we are. Because we are afraid to enter the fullness of our power, we are afraid of purity. We have compromised until we are sick, until we have become agents of corruption ourselves.”
Reese shivered. “I still don’t understand the graveyard.”
He folded his arms and looked smug. “You will. Look around. Do you know anything about any of these people?”
With a wary look at him, Reese moved to read a gravestone. The n
ame was not familiar; the date was within the last twenty years—more recent than she had expected in a place this out of the way.
As though he could read her mind, he said, “This is a private graveyard, fairly popular with wealthy people from Lincoln and Mark. It’s not as old as it looks.”
In testy obedience, she kept wandering, reading names, looking for one she knew. She found nothing.
When she stopped in front of an impressive granite headstone, carved with what looked like Greek pillars with serpents twined around them, Jacob said, “Stop.”
She did. Tyler joined her, staring at the stone. “Creepy,” he said.
Jacob came up behind them. “This is where my journey began,” he said. “Twenty years ago. I knew this man.”
The name on the stone was Franz Bertoller. Reese had never heard of him. According to the stone, he had been dead only four years.
“Twenty years ago?” she asked.
“He had selected his grave and had the stone carved in advance of his death. It was here before the final date was carved on it, ready to receive him. He died at a very old age—ninety-eight. Comfortable, happy, surrounded by family. ‘Ancient and full of days,’ as the old books put it.”
He gave the speech with an edge, a foreboding tone that said he was about to reveal a dark mystery, and Reese found herself tense until he did.
“Few people ever knew it, but Franz Bertoller was responsible for one great act in his life. He did not push the buttons himself, but he arranged it all. He designed the hive. He bought the police.”
Reese’s stomach sank.
“He bombed a cell house and burned down two others, and then he hounded the Oneness in a massacre that those who were there have never forgotten. He unleashed hell. He advanced chaos. He was a murderer not of the wicked, but of the good. Our whole world sank deeper into darkness when his day of triumph came.”
The serpents on the stone seemed more menacing now, more alive in the leafy shadows. Tyler and Reese were silent, staring at the stone.
“I had a wife,” Jacob announced.
Startled, she turned and looked at him.
He continued. “Yes, I was one of the few Oneness who married, in the depth of unity and love that only those who are both One and in love can know. She was goodness, sweetness, purity itself—she was light. I loved her as no man has ever loved a woman.”
His voice wavered as he spoke, and Reese believed him. He looked at them both with a passion and care that wrenched at her heart. “You may think I was hard on your friend—Chris. But I saw something. I saw that he was in love with one of ours, one of the Oneness, and that he was not yet One. I believe in love, Reese. I do not want you led astray by something that will only hurt you in the end. He needs to come into the Oneness. You know that. I was only trying to help him get there.”
Tyler was trying to catch her eye, but she ignored him and hung her head. Bringing Chris up here, now—her soul was in turmoil.
Jacob’s voice broke. “My wife was in the house that Bertoller bombed. The blast burned and maimed her, but she was still alive. I carried her out. Many of the refugees were fleeing together, but I would not go until I had tended her wounds, stopped the bleeding, held her in case she was going to die. I sat in the shadow of the burning house, listened to the police sirens coming, heard justice miscarrying even then, even in how they began the investigation. I knew they were against us and that we were the targets of something bigger than we dreamed. She clung to me, and I wept silently over her and told her, again and again, that it would be all right. It would be all right, for we were Oneness, and we were stronger than death and stronger than darkness. It would be all right, for we would triumph. The plans of the enemy would backfire. We would be seen to be victorious. And she would live.”
Reese’s eyes left the tombstone and fixed on his face. The pain there was as raw as it must have been twenty years ago—both the pain and the passion.
“She did live. Miraculously. I carried her away, keeping to the shadows, avoiding the creatures that hunted us. It wasn’t only men, it was demons also; on our heels like slavering dogs. Sometimes in the form of slavering dogs. That night was the stuff of a thousand nightmares. But we survived it. We walked for days. I don’t know how long. I only know that she was on the edge of death, and I was holding her here with everything in me. I walked until I was nearly faint with hunger and thirst, but I realized we could not keep going—she needed food and drink, and her pain was too bad . . . she was so badly burnt, so badly wounded.”
Reese closed her eyes. She didn’t want to think about it—didn’t want to imagine the details of what that journey looked like.
His voice caught, choked up in his throat. “So I left her. I found a secluded place, where I thought she would be safe. I went into town to find something for us to eat.”
His voice hardened. “When I came back, she was dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Reese said, but she wasn’t sure the words were even audible.
“They had found her,” Jacob stressed. “She would have made it. But they found her.”
He cleared his throat. “After that I realized that we had not won—we had lost the battle. Everywhere I looked, there was nothing but loss. The Oneness was reeling. And I came to understand that something was out of balance. Blood had been shed, and it had to be avenged. But when I tried to talk to others in the Oneness about our duty to set things right, they refused to hear me.”
Insects buzzing in the trees behind them were a morbid chorus to the story.
“I realized I had to do the work myself. I dug into what had happened, realized who was responsible—this man. I learned other things about him. His life was chaos. More than any senseless demon, he had chosen wickedness and walked it out faithfully. I knew he had to die. His blood for my wife’s. His soul for the countless souls he had doomed and tortured. So I took a gun and I tracked him down. I made it past his bodyguards and security systems, and I stood facing him in his own bedroom and accused him of his crimes.”
Reese was riveted. The story was supposed to end with Jacob getting his revenge—surely it had to end there. But it hadn’t. The date on the gravestone told her that—Jacob had not shot him.
“You didn’t do it,” she said.
The grief on his face was hard to look at.
“I failed. I didn’t have the courage. When it came to pulling the trigger, the weakness and compromise of the Oneness overcame me, and I walked away—and he laughed.”
Jacob traced his fingers over the name etched in granite. “That was when I found my way here. I came for morbid reasons, I suppose. To dwell on my failure. To think about it. To try to find the truth. I knew he would die someday, and it had not been by my hand.”
“But he did die someday,” Reese said. “Justice was done.”
His eyes flashed. “It was not. Not for a moment. He continued to ply his trade—gambling, drugs—for sixteen years. He destroyed countless more lives. I watched it happen. I even tried to get to him again, but I could never replicate my success of the first time. This gravestone is not a monument to justice, to our triumph. It is a monument to our failure. To our pathetic weakness.”
He swept his arm out. “They all are. After my failure that day, I spent three years in this graveyard. I squatted in a shack on an old farm half a mile down the road. Came here every day, to think and to pray and to remember. Slept here on nights when it was warm and dry enough. I went into town and looked up all their names. I know every man and every woman here. I know all the evil they represent—and all of it unchecked, unavenged, unchallenged. Did the Oneness do a thing to alter the course of chaos in their lives? Oh, we stepped in here and there—tried to help someone. Got a child or two into our own ranks. But that’s all. Compared to the lives they destroyed, we had no triumph at all. And all the time the balance is off. All the time evil goes on triumphing, and we go on letting it—and nothing is done, nothing balances the scales again, much less wins them.�
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His eyes were on fire. “Bertoller himself encountered the Oneness numerous times before the bombing, when he already had blood on his hands and they knew it. They never stopped him. Never brought about justice. The massacre was fitting, in a way. It was another monument to our failure.”
Reese stared at the name on the grave, and it seemed to her that it was mocking them.
Jacob’s voice quieted, calmed. “Finally, sure that I understood the truth, I went to begin my own cell. My own Oneness community. But they could not be weak like the rest. They could not fail as I had failed, as so many have failed. They could not lose sight of their purpose. So I determined to raise my community in two ways. They would know purity first—so they would love goodness, and innocence, and hate wickedness with all that was within them. They would be separated from the world, holy. And secondly they would know power and not be afraid to use it. You accuse me of consorting with evil, but I consort only with power. I raised a family of faithful ones, people with the clear eyes to see what is right and what is wrong. And they were ready to learn power, so I began to teach them. That is why I brought Clint into our midst—to teach us power. To teach us to harness it. He is brilliant, and gifted.”
“He’s evil.”
“You say that not knowing anything about him. Do you think I would let him through my doors without knowing him first? I, who have shepherded my community so carefully for so many years?”
“That is hard to believe,” Tyler said, and Reese couldn’t tell if he was sincere or his words were sarcasm. Not that she could blame him. He had seen much too much of Clint.
Jacob was incredibly convincing.
But she remembered Julie and steeled herself.
“The problem is,” she said, “you didn’t bring your people into the Oneness at all. They don’t know the Spirit. They only know your rules, your ways.”
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