Attack

by Rachel Starr Thomson

  “Why here?”

  “She was put here to die.”

  Melissa swallowed. “Who would . . .”

  “The demons would. They fear power like hers. Like yours. They fear this generation of Oneness, because yours is an age of prophets and warriors that few ages have seen. Mine certainly did not.”

  She turned.

  The woman she had seen on the cliff was standing there, lit by a light that wasn’t the torch. Her eyes, dark and beautiful, were full of compassion and challenge.

  “Who are you?” Melissa asked.

  “My name is Teresa.”

  “You’re Oneness?”

  She smiled. “Of course.”

  Melissa looked behind her. Both children were sitting near the entrance, staring out at the pounding rain and the dark. Alicia looked like she wanted to hold Jordan’s hand but was afraid to touch him. He was standing outside the iron bars, close enough to get wet by the rain.

  “Can they see you?”

  “No.”

  Melissa bowed her head. “You’re the cloud, aren’t you?”

  “Of the cloud, yes.” Teresa lowered her voice and looked over the painting again. “I was here when April painted this, watching her remarkable gift. I came to sit with her because I did not know if she was going to die, and I died—long ago—in the same way that they planned to kill her. By starvation, so they would not bear the full weight of such blood.”

  Melissa couldn’t look at her. “They are not ‘higher angels,’ demons.”

  Teresa’s voice was full of rebuke, but equally full of love. “Of course not.”

  “I’m afraid,” Melissa said.

  “Of course you are.”

  “Why can’t the Oneness help me?”

  “It can,” Teresa said. “But perhaps you are asking for the wrong kind of help.”

  “I can’t see the good of dying.”

  “Sometimes,” Teresa said, “it is good only because to go on living would be wrong.”

  Melissa swallowed hard. “Do you know what’s happening to Richard?”

  “We are not clairvoyant,” Teresa said, “or everywhere at once.”

  “You know an awful lot about me.”

  “Only because you are here, and like any of the Oneness, I can feel your presence and much of your soul. More so than many, because I want to, and I am not afraid of the depths of pain you feel.”

  Melissa looked up, finding that her face was streaked with tears. She did not want to talk about herself.

  Or about the decision she was making even now.

  “What’s happening out there?” she asked instead.

  Teresa’s face was solemn. “A battle. Perhaps the great battle.”

  “Can I fight?”

  “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  Melissa closed her eyes and tried to think in the direction of another. To send a message without speaking.

  Richard . . .

  * * *

  Richard knew, instantly and without shock, that Melissa had broken free.

  And his eyes filled with tears, because he also knew what that meant.

  Clint was in his face, holding him up by his shirt, suspending him off the ground though he was barely the taller of the two. He was examining Richard’s face as though he was an art dealer looking over a particularly pleasing piece before he bought it.

  Or more fittingly, an iconoclast looking over a particularly revered statue before he destroyed it.

  But with Melissa’s change, a link in the chain Clint had carefully constructed broke.

  And Richard felt the shift in power.

  “Stop,” he croaked.

  He watched as Clint’s eyes widened.

  He had intended to deal a blow just then.

  He couldn’t.

  “Put me down,” Richard ordered, his voice gaining a little strength. He felt Clint’s hand tremour, but he did not obey.

  “Shut up,” Clint whispered. “Do not speak.”

  “You have no power to order that,” Richard said. “Yours is dominion over the dust. Mine is the power of the word.”

  He reached up and took Clint’s hands with both of his, prying them loose. The warlock’s eyes flared with rage.

  “Richard!” Tony called from the trees nearby. “I beat him! I’m coming!”

  “Do you know you’ve lost?” Richard asked. “You’ve been whipping the Oneness with a chain made of dissidents. It’s broken. Melissa has turned.”

  “You never should have learned about her,” Clint seethed.

  “Funny,” Richard said, satisfied to feel his feet hitting the ground. He took a step back from the sorceror. “I thought you had that all under control.”

  His first word, “Stop,” was still holding the man. He did not really understand where the authority to bind him like this was coming from, only that it was his, as naturally his as any birthright, and he believed in it. He clenched his fist, and his sword formed again.

  But it was his voice that would conquer.

  His word that would be mightier than the sword could ever be.

  Tony burst back into the clearing, bloody and bruised but happy, with his lip split and his sword held triumphantly high. “I drove them out!” he announced. “All of them! And the kid’s not dead!”

  “Impossible,” Clint snarled.

  “Tony, join me,” Richard said. He gave the order in a clipped, no-questions tone. A general now, calling a soldier to his side.

  They were facing the enemy incarnate in this man, and he knew better than to think the battle was over now.

  Clint’s eyes rolled slightly back in his head, and his body trembled—he was breaking free of the power of Richard’s word.

  “How did you do that?” Tony whispered, awed, as he took his position next to his commander.

  “I don’t know,” Richard whispered back. “But we are One. And we’re not going to lose this fight if you stay close and follow my lead. All right?”

  “You got it, Captain.”

  Dust began to swirl all around Clint, a small storm of its own—a dust devil, Richard thought. Ironic, that old term. Whoever coined it could have no idea how accurate it could be. As the dust gathered, Clint seemed to grow in stature—certainly his strength was returning. What had he boasted? He controlled the earth—the powers of the earth. He was gathering power to himself.

  Power that might be stronger than Richard’s, untried and untested as Richard’s was.

  “We have to get him out of here,” he heard himself saying, hardly knowing the import of his own words.

  “Where to?” Tony asked.

  “Where are we?”

  Tony, eyes fixed nervously on Clint, said in surprise, “Tempter’s Mountain. Where you sent us.”

  “But not under the shield.”

  “No, we’re too far out.”

  His mind raced. The whirlwind around Clint was growing in thickness and ferocity, and he knew they had only seconds before he broke free of Richard’s order altogether and launched some kind of attack—and this time he would not make the mistake of getting too close. Tempter’s Mountain. Angelica was here. Melissa had to be close, and she was firmly on their side now. Even Mary might not be far . . . on a boat somewhere out on the sea, out in that storm. Close maybe, but too far to come to his help.

  I can’t do this alone, he thought.

  A voice answered, You are not alone.

  And he knew what to do.

  He crouched down. “We have to get him out of here,” he said.

  “You said that. I’m good with that plan. Just tell me what to do.”

  Richard smiled. “I don’t know what to do. I’m playing this one by ear. But it will work—it has to work.”

  He remembered Tyler walking out of the basement of the house, using the strength of others to animate his legs.

  He remembered whisking over the earth at speeds too high to calculate, all because Clint believed in his own power. Doing things he
had never done because he, Richard, did not believe.

  And he remembered what he had seen when he brought the children’s home people to the mountain.

  The hermit’s eyes smiling at him.

  A man and a woman, both long dead.

  The cloud.

  He closed his eyes and whispered, “Help us. Get us out of here.”

  The hermit’s voice spoke directly in his ear, so close that he jumped.

  “Now that’s a good idea.”

  And more heavily, the old man intoned, “Pray!”

  “Tony,” Richard said. “Pray.”

  They let their swords dissolve. They dropped to their knees in the dirt, both of them, let go of their need to fight, let go of the battle, and let themselves be swept up in the rush.

  And what a rush.

  Richard had never, in all his years of seeking, felt the Spirit like this.

  The river was not just flowing in this place; it was flooding at high tide, overturning everything in its path.

  In the roar that was prayer, he heard himself telling Tony to reach—to stretch out his hands. They were trying to do what the cloud sometimes did, but in reverse; to cross from their own sphere to the other. To join their brethren on that side of existence that did not belong to them by nature of their own earning but by relationship: because their members, their Oneness, belonged on that side.

  He felt like he could hear the hermit urging him on, and laughing hilariously.

  The roar of prayer snatched them up, off the earth, into some other place—all three of them.

  Clint let out a scream of rage.

  They still stood in the grove, but Richard did not think the ground was under their feet. Their surroundings were bright, stark white. He could see the clearing and the trees, and even the storm, through the whiteness as though through a veil. The hermit stood next to him, cackling and rubbing his hands with glee.

  “Good boy!” he laughed, slapping Richard on the back. The touch made some impact, but it wasn’t—precisely—physical. “Oh, I knew it—I knew you could do it! I tried this, you know, for years. But I could never quite manage it.”

  Richard could only shake his head in bewilderment—and stare at Clint, who had dramatically changed.

  Instead of a young, virile man in the prime of his life, exuding power, the man who moments ago had threatened to destroy them was shriveled, a tiny, wizened creature with large eyes who stared up at them like a cornered animal. Richard had never seen anyone who looked so old—he might have lived two hundred years instead of the twenty-some Clint had claimed. His eyes flicked from one to the other of them, and his body shook—with rage, Richard thought. Behind him, another of the cloud, a big fighter, stood with arms folded and glared down at the little man.

  “Patrick!” Tony cried out with joy.

  “Hey Tony,” Patrick said. “Never thought I’d see you over here before . . . well, you know. Before your time.”

  “This shouldn’t be possible,” Richard said.

  The hermit waved his hand dismissively. “All kinds of things are possible. Most people just never believe in them enough to try.”

  “You tried,” Richard pointed out.

  “I lived alone for thirty years. I got bored. But I didn’t quite get up the belief, or the need, I suppose, that you just did.”

  The hermit fixed his eyes on the hapless sorceror. “Now him, I’m interested to see here. Being on this side doesn’t allow for disguises, you see. And now that he’s stripped of his, I know him.”

  Clint—or whoever he was—spat. “Old fool.”

  “Who are you calling old? Bertoller, they used to call him—Franz Bertoller. And another name before that, I’m sure, and another before that. Responsible for too many things. Too many terrors.”

  “Why doesn’t he have any power now?” Richard asked. “I half-expected the demons to be stronger . . . here. I was only looking for your help.”

  “The demons have no power in the land of the dead,” the hermit said with a sniff. “They only pretend that death is their realm. In reality it is the limit of their power. Beyond life as you have known it there is only the Spirit.”

  Richard hesitated. “We aren’t dead, are we?”

  “Of course not. You’re just visiting. Like we visit you. And I might add, you’re not seeing the fullness of what it’s like over here. We, for example, are still appearing to you as you know us. The reality is quite different on this side. But it couldn’t exactly be interpreted for you, being as you’re still just flesh and blood.”

  Tony eyed the man they had called Clint warily. “What are we going to do with him?” he asked.

  “Shear him,” the hermit said, drawing himself up to his full height—which wasn’t much. “Strip him of his power and send him back into the world.”

  “Shouldn’t we kill him?” Richard asked.

  The question filled the silence that followed.

  “He’s done so much damage,” Richard said. “If we send him back, he’ll gather his power again, eventually. Come after us again. Hurt many others besides. Shouldn’t we end it here?”

  He lifted pleading eyes to his old mentor. “I am asking, not suggesting. I don’t know the answer to this question.”

  “Death always comes eventually,” the old man answered. “And with it comes reckoning. But we are Oneness. We offer life. We do not deal death.”

  The rebuke was gently but firmly given. Richard bowed his head and nodded. He felt Tony’s hand on his shoulder.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” the teenage warrior said.

  “Thanks, Tony,” Richard said, smiling. “But I can take the sting of that for myself. I’ve needed to know.”

  The hermit turned stern eyes on Clint.

  “We will, however, administer this. Fool of the devil’s, prepare to be stripped of your power.”

  * * *

  On the water, the yacht—ceaselessly tossed and swamped by the waves, shuddered, and they felt it.

  A wail went up, miserably unhappy.

  “Idiots,” David mumbled. “They’ve lost. They should have known they’d lose, turning on me.”

  Still weak, he lay on the floor of the cabin.

  Mary, April, Diane, and Chris, huddled together in a corner across from him, looked at him and then at one another.

  The demons had not killed them.

  They had shoved them down here instead, intending to wreck the ship. Or so David interpreted their actions.

  And instead of taking David with them as their rescued general, they sent him below too.

  The traitors, he had raged, the ungrateful, idiotic, slavering curs.

  But the demons, for the moment on their own, empowered, and unaccountable to anyone, decided in that moment they would rather have a hive without David calling shots.

  “Without me,” David said, telling the others as though they would sympathize with him, would take his side as rational creatures, “they are nothing. Without me they’re too cowardly and stupid even to finish the work out here. I would have ordered you all killed. They’ll let you live because they’re afraid of the consequences of killing you.”

  Now, he sat in the corner where he had been sulking, and he listened to their angry, fearful wails with a mix of satisfaction and anger. “Stupid brutes,” he said.

  He looked over at the others, and said, “It’s because of you, you know.” He pointed, leveling a finger—at April.

  “You’re a Great One, and they’re scared spitless of killing you. This is the third time they should have killed you, and they’re going to fail again, unless we get lucky and the ship wrecks anyway.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Chris announced. “Whatever’s going on up there, I think we’re about to lose them. And this is my ship, and I’m going to save it.”

  “What will you do with me?” David asked. “You’ve failed at your task. Convert me, right? That’s what you were going to do. Well, you haven’t. So now what happens
to me?”

  “We can answer that after we talk to Richard,” Mary said.

  “Assuming he’s still alive. He and Reese. It was dumb of you, to split up.”

  “They’re alive,” Mary said. “We would know it if we’d lost them.”

  “Like you knew it when you lost me?” He sneered.

  Mary closed her eyes.

  The wails above intensified.

  And ended.

  A sound like bats’ wings rushing out of a cave at dusk sounded from above, and then, suddenly—

  Calm.

  Chris stood slowly. “I think it’s over.”

  Diane followed, her legs shaking under her. “I don’t know how it’s possible.”

  April smiled. “The others must have won somehow.”

  David only looked away.

  As Chris, Diane, and April headed up the narrow stairs to the deck, Mary paused.

  “I’m sorry for what happened,” she said. “But I did not turn you off the path. You did that to yourself.”

  He looked shocked.

  “How can you . . .”

  “Yes, I was there, I went back with you. I felt what you felt. And I will never mock your pain. Nor will I tell you that you hadn’t heard the Spirit. But it was your responsibility to do it. You were knocked down, but you refused to ever find your feet again. And I did not do that to you.”

  She went to the stairs and then turned. “It’s not too late, David, to find them again. You are still One of us. We’ll help you if you’ll let us.” His face was turned away, like that of a petulant child demonstrating that he was not listening. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you—probably take you back to jail and let you be locked up, maybe even let the administrators of justice administer it all the way. You’ve killed, David. You’ve taken lives. We can’t protect you from that.”

  She walked up one step, stopped, and turned one more time.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again.

  He did not turn his face to look at her.