Attack

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  That they had not stopped him before now seemed a crime.

  The plan grew from an idea to an obessesion, a heartbeat. He did not tell anyone else. He would need them all—the Oneness would have to do this together. He was certain it would work. But he would wait for the right time to tell the others.

  In fifteen days the cell would convene with other cells in a radius of a hundred miles. All the leadership would come, and anyone else who wanted to be there. It was the perfect time, the perfect place.

  The Spirit had arranged it that way, he was sure.

  It was part of the plan.

  The day came.

  There were over seventy of the Oneness there. They met not far from Lincoln, in a small town where they rented a hall. It was the first time in several years since the massacre that they had dared to convene like this, in public, but the pogrom seemed to have settled for the time being.

  They began in prayer, and it was glorious. So many voices all raised in one, a harmony of sound like waves crashing, like a song. David exulted in it, felt purified and strengthened by it.

  When that was done and various members began to speak, he looked across the room and noticed her there. She was beautiful, like she always had been. A small woman, brown hair, courage in every line of her being. Her hair, he saw, was silvered a little. He had heard of her brother’s death and was sorry. He had never forgotten the courage of both twins on the night they fled. It had been one of the few threads of gold to which he could cling, and believe that in the end the Spirit would weave a tapestry of their misfortunes that brought beauty out of it all.

  Her name was Mary. After his girlfriend, the mother of his child, had refused to follow him into the Oneness, he had sometimes found his heart yearning for that sort of love again—and it was Mary his thoughts most often focused on then.

  He was glad she was here.

  That too seemed part of the plan.

  Finally talk turned to the massacre, and to the steps they were all taking to recover from it, and he knew his time had come.

  He stood and cleared his throat, and with the sensitivity of unity they all quieted and waited for him to speak.

  “There is a man,” he said hesitantly, and thought that was a poor opening. But if he’d memorized a speech, he had forgotten it. This was his moment, and it was too important for memorized speeches.

  The Spirit would give him the words to say.

  “On the night we ran,” he stumbled along, “I encountered a man. A sorceror. He killed several of my fellow runners. And I learned that he set the bombs. He was behind all of it.”

  Everyone was listening.

  “His name was . . .”

  And Mary cut him off.

  Gently, but with mild reproach she said, “We don’t fight against flesh and blood. Our battle is spiritual. I’d rather not know his name and be tempted to hate it.”

  And that was the end.

  No one listened to him after that.

  One voice after another chimed in after Mary, some expressing their shared conviction that the fight was not human but demonic; others simply going again into their common stories, the grief, the loss, so they could all mourn together.

  But David was done mourning.

  He wanted to act.

  He needed them to believe in him and to act alongside him, because this he could not do alone.

  Once he tried to speak again. But this time they did not notice.

  As they all talked, one over the other, no one thought of him again. It was as though he were exiled—not Oneness at all, not now when he needed them most.

  And in the depths of his soul Mary stirred again.

  She realized, with surprise, that she had been able to see herself—and ached to know how David had viewed her once.

  And she knew it now.

  This was what she had done.

  One gentle rebuke—one interruption.

  And somehow he had never found his footing again.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  And his grip let go.

  They were lying on the deck of Chris’s yacht.

  The sky overhead was nearly pitch-black.

  There were demons everywhere.

  She was too late.

  * * *

  Melissa held the boy’s hand tightly as they pushed their way out of the pine grove and emerged on the cliffs, following a winding path up toward the level ground above. The storm over the water had turned the air a dark, slate gray, and lightning cut it. Wind rushed through the trees and scrub on every side and kicked up yellow sand from the bluffs, marring the air so it was hard to see and harder to breathe. There was no rain as yet.

  She wasn’t sure what she was doing, really.

  She had never felt so torn.

  She told herself she was saving the boy. The battle going on in that grove was fierce and dangerous; she was just getting a child to safety. And trying to find the other one, the girl.

  So they could both come back to power and heal her again.

  Perhaps it was the threat Clint had issued—telling her that she could not imagine how much ground she had already lost. Whatever it was, before the revelation that Richard had set the children free from demonic possession, she had felt no different since her last appointment with the children. But everything had changed when that truth came out. Something deep inside her body, down in her core, had begun to make its presence felt. She could feel it as a tight mass of malignant pressure on one side of her belly, and the more minutes passed, the more it began to send a dull pain throughout her body, a promise of weakness and debilitation to come.

  It ached especially in her fingers, where the music was.

  That ache, and her growing fear, were driving her just as hard as any concern for Jordan.

  She knew that but chose not to acknowledge it as they skirted around a twisted pine that bent over and obscured the path.

  “This way,” Jordan urged, even though they were already religiously following the path. Melissa had no desire to wander out here longer than necessary. “She’s up there. In the cottage.”

  She paused and looked back over the sea, at the massing clouds and chopping waves. She could not be unaware of the presence in the storm—its darker-than-dark, unnatural personality. Malignant, like the tumor she could feel stealing her life.

  Higher angels? She asked herself.

  Just an embodiment of human gifts and powers?

  Melissa’s had not been a life heavily steeped in encounters or battles with the demonic. Not until the cancer, when the demonic offered itself to her as an answer the Oneness could not give. The Mark cell was not her spiritual home; she came from a rural home several states away and had only come to the urban world when her music took her there. She had remained more aloof and separated from the Oneness in Mark than she should have, perhaps. But it was not long after going to the city that the diagnosis had come, and the solution, and all of her questions and fears.

  * * *

  It had taken more than an hour to round up all the kids from the children’s home and get them to stay in the cottage, telling them that the storm looked bad and the lightning and wind would be dangerous. Angelica and Susan and the Smiths didn’t tell them more than that, even though their warnings produced more disgruntlement and restless annoyance from the kids than anything else.

  “But we want to stay outside!” one teen protested. “It’s stuffy in here! Just let us stay out until it actually starts getting dangerous.”

  A thunder clap cut him off, and Valerie Smith gave him a look offering the startling sound as her answer. “There’s no lightning yet,” he said, sulking.

  Angelica had posted herself at the front door. Her sword remained invisible—not good that the kids should see it—but it was ready to appear at any moment.

  A smell was beginning to fill the air, mingling with the sea salt. Not the usual smell of impending rain. It was something else, something unpleasant—sulphurous.

>   “Come on, Tony,” she said. “Find him and get back here.”

  She didn’t want to think about what it would mean if Tony didn’t find him.

  Lightning striking somewhere nearby lit up the sky.

  Laughter caught her attention. Two of the kids were outside, dancing around in the dirt driveway with the delight of forbidden fruit. “Get back here now,” Susan Brown called, sounding more frayed than Angelica had ever heard her.

  Unwilling to leave the woman to her own devices, Angelica stalked into the driveway and collared both kids. They were young, young enough to respect her eighteen years.

  “Listen, this is stupid,” she said. As though to punctuate her words, thunder clapped deafeningly overhead. It darkened by several degrees simultaneously, and fear flashed in the kids’ eyes. “Yeah, that’s right,” Angelica said. “Now get inside!”

  They did, running ahead of her as she returned to her post.

  She was only there less than a minute when Valerie appeared white-faced beside her.

  “Alicia’s gone.”

  “What!”

  “I don’t know how she got past us . . . she must have gone while you were out in the driveway.”

  A few minutes. That was all she’d been gone.

  But that was all it took.

  Chapter 13

  Melissa’s heart leaped when she saw the little girl standing in the path, seemingly waiting for them.

  Alicia’s light blonde hair was whipped by the wind. She stood unmoving, unsmiling, in the shadow of the scrub pines, the cliff rising to her right and the sea roiling over the drop-off on her other side.

  Jordan stopped and greeted her.

  She didn’t answer.

  Only her eyes greeted him back, solemn and unhappy. He ignored it, grabbing her hand and jabbering at her with a bullying, older-brother tone, but Melissa could not share his determination or his indifference.

  Yet she needed this child to heal her.

  The sky was growing darker by the minute, rapidly turning the day to night. A gust of wind blew, so strong that Melissa had to brace herself against it to stay standing. The sheer drop to the left suddenly seemed terribly close. The wind whipping through the children’s hair and clothes made them look vulnerable to blowing away at any minute.

  “Come on!” she shouted, fighting to be heard over the wind. “Follow me!”

  They didn’t respond, and she grabbed both their hands and charged up the path. The focus had shifted—with no need to find Alicia any longer, she felt the urgency of getting both children, and herself, to safety before something unpredictable happened in the wildness of lightning and wind.

  And demon, a voice reminded her.

  The demonic is the greater threat here.

  Dust and pine needles lifted and hurled into the air by the wind half-blinded her as she pulled the children after her. The main path climbed steeply up a sharp bank; it was too steep, too demanding when they were this blind and this buffeted. She looked around hopelessly . . .

  . . . and thought she saw a woman beckoning them from another outcropping to the north.

  The woman disappeared just as quickly as she’d appeared, ducking away to take shelter, perhaps. But Melissa was sure she’d seen her.

  The children were suddenly resistant to her pull.

  “We have to go!” she told them. “We have to get where it’s safe!”

  She hesitated, half inclined to try the steep path anyway, but there she was again—the same woman, beckoning her from another part of the cliffs to the north. And now that she looked, she could see a trail going that way.

  She had seen her a little more clearly this time. A woman with long, dark hair streaming in the gale, and a white dress.

  The sound of the wind grew higher, taking on tone—like a voice, a voice threatening and a little insane. Without further thought, Melissa charged up the path toward where she had seen the woman.

  Jordan tried to pull back. “Not that way!” he yelled.

  But she ignored him. If the woman was some kind of enemy, it was too bad; they would have to take their chances. This wind didn’t seem discriminating; if they didn’t get out of the storm, they’d be blown from the cliffs.

  Alicia seemed to agree. She held Melissa’s hand tightly and followed her with such sure-footed eagerness it almost seemed like she was trying to pull them both ahead.

  The path they were on now was narrow and made more hazardous by roots and the rocky dirt piles left by small-scale landslides, but Melissa kept to it. A flash of lightning lit the vista ahead of them, and she could see now the dark circle of a cave in the cliffs where she had seen the woman. That must be the shelter where she had beckoned them to, and it must be where she was now.

  Jordan hung back again. “I don’t want to go this way.”

  Melissa stopped and looked him in the eye. He looked a frightened child—more so than she had ever seen him. Both children had always come to her as children, but confident and clearly gifted, powerful in their own way. That sense of power and confidence was absent from the boy now. Thunder cracked, bringing down a rain of dirt and stones from above, and his face went pasty white.

  “It’s not safe,” Melissa said. “Just trust me. We have to take shelter.”

  “No,” Jordan said, “I want to go back to Clint.”

  “We can’t,” Melissa said. “We have to get out of this storm now.”

  Her timing couldn’t have been better. Another ear-splitting crash of thunder dislodged yet more earth from above and from below, and this time the path where Jordan was standing started to crumble away beneath his feet, stones and earth spinning down to the sea below. Melissa, still holding his hand, yanked him forward, and the motion jarred yet more of the ground loose. A rapidly growing gap in the path appeared just where he had been, eating away at the earth. And then the rain began. Stinging, piercing rain.

  “Let’s go!” Melissa yelled, and this time there was no argument. Both children held her hands and followed her, as fast as they could, almost at a run but wary of the shifting landscape above and below them.

  She noticed the smell just before they reached the cave, but she had no other choice. They plunged inside.

  She expected to be greeted by the woman she had seen. But instead, they were instantly smothered in total darkness. She could hear dripping in the back of the cave, counterpoint to the downpour outside, echoing oddly. The air was stale, and worse—it stank of something human. But no one seemed to be here.

  “I thought she was here,” Melissa said.

  “Who?” Alicia asked.

  “The woman in the path.”

  Both children just stared at her.

  “We shouldn’t have come here,” Jordan said, his voice trembling.

  The realization struck Melissa in a moment: Jordan was this afraid, this timid, because his demon could not act. They were under the shield here.

  But she had seen a woman. She was sure of that.

  She edged her way deeper into the cave, cautious. “Hello?”

  No one answered.

  A few more steps, and her foot brushed against something, making her jump. When she did, her hand crashed against something hard—a wall?

  No, iron.

  An iron lattice of some kind—or bars.

  She pushed against them, and hinges creaked. The door swung inward.

  Behind her, Alicia’s voice was muffled. “This is a torch.”

  The object her foot had struck. “Can you find matches?” Melissa asked.

  One of the children did. In a moment they had lit the torch’s oily head, and it flared to life, a blue flame in the darkness of the cavern.

  Alicia held it up.

  They were at the entrance to what seemed a moderately deep cave, but the narrow opening to the rest of it was covered by the bars—they were bars, like a prison door in some ancient dungeon. It wasn’t locked. Taking the torch from Alicia, Melissa pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped thro
ugh.

  A cavern opened up beyond it, the size of a decent room with a ceiling low enough to touch but just high enough that Melissa wasn’t scraping her head along it. Once again she expected to see the woman.

  Once again there was no one there.

  “Wow,” Alicia said.

  And Melissa looked to see what she was seeing.

  It was the last thing she expected, and it took her breath away.

  A painting, etched and mudded and splashed across every wall and the entirety of the ceiling. Rose vines, stretching through scene after scene, face after face, one grand story telling itself across the cave walls.

  Jordan stood near the entrance and shivered.

  She thought he might have run, if the storm outside had not been so fierce and so terrifying, and he so powerless without access to the demons who gave him strength and significance.

  She saw herself in him in that moment. Shivering and afraid of the cancer threatening her from within, unwilling to do without the outside power that had been keeping her alive.

  But her eyes were drawn the painting.

  To the story it told.

  The rose vines led her through it, a path through the tale splashed across the stone. The story of a man—Oneness, she saw—who turned against his own people, who tried to exile a friend, who twisted and changed himself and invited the demons in to help him do it. Who sank himself in their evil to escape what he was. She saw many others in the story—a boy, his bright eyes full of promise and importance, a ship full of Oneness fighting demons over the sea, a man on his knees in prayer.

  With a tiny gasp, she saw herself. She was there too, sitting at her piano, playing music while a storm gathered around her.

  “Who did this?” she whispered.

  A woman’s voice answered her. “Her name is April. She is gifted, like you, in the arts—in bringing life into focus and perspective, and seeing and communicating things that reason alone cannot know. And important, like you.”