In more ways than one, this town was a cesspool.
It was hard to reconcile the town with her memories of its lord: a clean, well-groomed, confident man who was almost fastidious in his manner and appearance. Somehow she had expected that to be reflected in the people he shepherded; but there was nothing of the manner or appearance of Franz Bertoller here.
Her spirit reached out for some hint of the Oneness present in the crowd, but found nothing. She was alone here.
At least the dying themselves did not appear to be among the townspeople. As she rode past, they turned back to their business, and the clatter went up again—blacksmith, farrier, goods hawker all at work while the dead burned on their borders and the dying lay at their heart.
His letter had stated that his home—the castle—had been converted into a hospital. She wondered who tended the sick. Somehow she had expected to find the Oneness at work alongside the nobleman, but though her spirit still searched ahead of her, she had little expectation now that she would find them once she passed through the castle gates. If they were there, she should feel their presence already.
“State your name and your business,” the gruff guard at the castle gate demanded, eyeing her up and down.
She threw back the hood of her cloak and looked the man in the eye. He shrank away from her, though he was twice her size and looked, from the scars on his face, like a man of experience.
“I am Teresa of the Via del Sol, of the Southern Lands,” she said. “I have come in answer to the lord’s own summons. He requests my help to tend the dying.”
The guard looked at her squint-eyed, with a strange mixture of curiosity and fear. “Is that who you are?” he said. “I have orders to admit you. Have you proof that you are who you say you are?”
She reached into her cloak and drew out Franz Bertoller’s letter. “I have the lord’s request, written by his own hand. And if you should need further proof, the man knows my face.”
“Aye, lady,” the man said. “That he does.”
He waved aside her offer of the letter. “It’s enough that you have it in your hand; I believe you. A moment.”
With a rattle, the portcullis was drawn up and the low gates opened. Teresa ducked her head as she rode through into a courtyard of surprising breadth, flagged with rough stones. The castle itself stood directly ahead; to her left, stables and a low-roofed blacksmith’s shop flanked it, while on the other side stood a chapel. The belltower of the latter drew Teresa’s eyes at once; as she dismounted, she searched the simple structure for some sign of life. If a place of prayer had been built here, then surely the Oneness had lived here once, even if they did not now.
A boy took the reins of her horse, and the guard fussed behind her, instructing the lad to take good care of the animal even as he closed the gates again. Teresa was about to turn and ask him a question, but the man who appeared in the entryway of the castle arrested her attention.
He was ten years older, but otherwise the same as he had ever been. Broad shoulders and a handsome jaw, close-cropped hair and fine clothing. His forehead was lined with greater care, and his eyes fixed on her with greater intensity than she remembered.
Such intensity that it stole the breath from her lungs.
He came forward, extending a hand. The few servants and guards in the courtyard moved back as though repelled by the force of his presence.
She reached out, letting him take her hand and kiss it.
“I thank you for answering my summons,” he said as he swept a low bow. “So much time has passed that I feared you would not come.”
“I had to prepare for the journey,” she said. In his presence, in this foreign place so far from home, she was suddenly overwhelmed with what she had done. Why had she come here? What had possessed her to travel all this way to see a man who could only be a threat to her?
A threat . . . because he drew her, attracted her, more than she wanted to admit, and because now that she saw him again, she remembered the evil she had sensed in him. It was still there, vibrant and frightening.
“Come,” he said, straightening himself. “You must come and eat and drink and rest. And then I will show you the terrible plague that has stricken my people, and solicit your help in combatting it.”
Her first instinct was to refuse the offer of comforts, but she knew immediately she could not do that. She needed the things he offered, and there was nowhere else to turn. Unless . . .
“That chapel,” she blurted. “Who built it?”
He looked coolly over at the peaked structure that stood to the right of his stone abode. “It was built by a priest,” he said, “a man of the Oneness some fifty years ago. He served my father.”
Her heart sank. “He is dead then?”
“Thirty years hence.”
“And you have no other of the Oneness here?”
He smiled, a smile that concealed more than it showed. “Indeed, no. They do not often linger in my house. You, in fact, are a special honour to me. You will be the first of the Oneness to reside in my house since my father’s day.”
She smiled and nodded, and followed him into the castle with growing trepidation. Once again she wished Niccolo was with her—or at least that he would speed his coming now. That he would come, when he learned where she had gone, she did not doubt. The bond between them had never lessened since his childhood. Yes, he would follow her here.
And then, whatever evil might lurk in this place, they would overcome it together.
* * *
Without question, what bothered Andrew most was that Miranda seemed so much older now. It was almost like she had taken off a mask when she left the house, and this time, she hadn’t bothered to put it back on. Behind it was someone he didn’t know at all—not the scared, immature little girl; not the daughter who adored him and who he hoped to protect and bring up to be a good woman. Instead, the girl who had come home in the back of a police car was a surly teenager whose eyes sparked with hatred and who refused to speak much or to explain anything beyond the absolute facts.
Yes, she had been leaving the school every day. She hated it there. The teachers were “freaks.” Something about the place scared her, and she didn’t want to stay. Yes, she had found friends off campus and frequented their hangouts. Alex was one of them. As far as Andrew could tell, Miranda’s “friends” were a motley crew of high school dropouts and druggies. Every suburban dad’s nightmare, in other words.
She refused to talk to Julie at all. Just completely shut her out. Chris and Reese, she treated with so much obvious rancor that they offered to leave only minutes after she came home, and Andrew didn’t try to talk them out of it.
He found Julie sitting on the couch in the dark, hugging her knees to herself.
“It’s not your fault,” he offered.
“Whose fault is it? Yours? You came back into her life just in time to offer her sanctuary. From all the trouble my decisions got her into.” She sighed and wiped what he assumed was a tear off her face—he couldn’t really see if she had been crying, but it seemed a safe assumption. “This is my fault, Andrew. But thank you for saying otherwise. For all your efforts to work with me.”
He sat down gingerly. “We aren’t the first people whose teenage daughter has rebelled.”
“It’s more than rebellion. It’s like she’s two different people.”
“It’s trauma too.” He paused. “I tried calling a counselor. I thought maybe therapy would help. But I dropped him mid–phone call because honestly, everything Miranda has been through—it’s so big. And weird. What can a psychologist know about all this stuff?”
Julie laughed a little in the dark, but it was a hopeless laugh, and it hurt to hear.
“So what’s a father to do?” Andrew asked. “Pay a shrink? Move to Alaska? Shoot somebody?”
“At least it doesn’t sound like she got into too much trouble with those friends of hers.”
“As far as we know. She’s barely told us a thing.�
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Julie’s voice wrestled with her words. “I don’t know her, Andrew. And that’s my fault too. I tried to be there for her in the community, but everyone was playing such a game . . . trying to be the people Jacob wanted us to be. I’m not sure I’ve known her for years.” A little heat came into her voice, and she leaned forward, out of the darkness into the dim light shining from elsewhere in the house. “Whoever she is, Andrew, there’s hope for her . . . but it’s in the Oneness. In the Spirit. I know they can help her. I know there is healing there, from everything Jacob did. And . . . from everything I did. And from all the rest of the nightmare.”
He fought back the resistance that immediately rose to her words. Because he had to fight it back. Because there was no other answer that he could see.
“She isn’t exactly open to the Oneness. You saw how she reacted to Chris and Reese being here. And worse, April. The other night.”
“April,” Julie repeated. “Andrew . . . I know she won’t like it, but maybe she needs to talk to April.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You know you’ve found the right medicine when it starts to interact with the disease. The fire—and the sacrifice, all of it—had to be the highest point of trauma for Miranda. And April was there with her in it. If anyone can help her walk through what happened there and get healing for it, I think it’s going to be April.”
“Forgive me for saying this,” Andrew said slowly, “but is April in any condition to help anyone right now? She looked to me like she could use some assistance herself.”
Julie was silent for a moment, and Andrew got the unnerving sense that she was consulting someone else. Then, “I think she can help, Andrew. I’m sure she can.”
* * *
Melissa was coming home from radiation treatment, and April was keeping as wide a berth from the cell house as she could. Without explaining why, she had moved most of her things up to Chris’s cottage and taken up residence on the couch in the long side room with its grungy old shag carpet and its windows that looked over the bay. It was storming out over the water, but the rain had not yet hit the cliffs; she sat on the couch and stared out at it, grateful for the water, for the cold, and for the quiet.
All of those things gave her a sense of security, of stability, as she rested and let herself feel the fire inside.
It was there, burning deep in her core. She could not deny that anymore, and she knew that trying to deny it was a bad road to go down. That it was hurting her to do so. And although she was grateful for the stability afforded by her surroundings at this moment, and though she was assiduously avoiding Melissa and coming into contact with the reality of death, she was also beginning to make peace with the idea that she could not control this fire and was not supposed to.
It was only the beginning of peace. But it was something.
She closed her eyes and let the memory of the darkness wash over her—the darkness in the deep place of the sea, the place that had been in the bay but had not—she knew, with certainty, that she had been transported somewhere else, somewhere that belonged to the world of Spirit and not to this coast at all. She had experienced something there that could not be put into words; it was everything Oneness was, but far more; it was the heart, the personality that had willed the Oneness, with its love and its connectedness and its power that came of unity and community, into being. And it had been working something in that darkness that hid light, creating something—birthing something.
This is the womb, the voice of the Spirit had told her.
The place life comes from.
The birthplace of every great secret and of many things that have never yet been seen or known.
In the confidence and beauty and power of that place, April had walked back into her captors’ hands and brought the fiery holiness with her, letting it loose to consume and burn to ashes all that could not withstand its presence.
She trembled, even now, at the memory.
At the time, in the fire, it had not been terrifying. It had exhilarated her. She had been full of the fire and convinced of its rightness. Only after the fact, viewing the ashes, knowing that men had died, and recalling that despite her sense of confidence and power in that moment, she had possessed no control—
Only then had the fear begun to set in, and the desire to keep the fire down. Quench it. Refuse to allow it to break out again.
Somewhere along the way she had ascribed her own father’s attributes to the Spirit and assigned the fire that had broken out of her the same motives and ways that had beaten and bruised her childhood and her heart.
But they were not the same.
That was what she contemplated now, here, as she sat alone in the cottage and let herself feel the low burn.
They were not the same.
The Spirit was not her father.
The fire was not one of his rages.
Men had died. But not indiscriminately, and not unjustly. In fact, some men had lived who would not, perhaps, if April had been in control. David had lived. Yes, Reese had shielded him, but the fire had honoured that. And had purified Reese herself, in some sense, without destroying her.
She heard two things in the quiet of the room overlooking the bay.
The first: I am a consuming fire.
And the second: And the bush was on fire, and it was not consumed.
She bowed her head and sank into the heat, letting herself really feel it—the way it tingled in her, the way it warmed her fingers and toes, the way it felt like life and passion.
The same voice that had spoken a moment before spoke again, in that silent way she had come to know was the voice of the Spirit.
You need not fear yourself either, it said.
“Fear myself?” she asked, but she knew the wisdom of those words before she had finished questioning them. Yes, that was much of the problem too. The passion inside—she was terrified to let that loose. Her own passion, not just the Spirit’s fire. Her own passionate desire to see Melissa live, and to see wrongs put right. Because she had seen passion before, and so many times it had led to such wrong places.
But you are not those others, the voice said, and you are not walking their road.
“But how do I know I won’t walk it? How do I know I won’t go wrong if I just let go and trust you and follow this burning?”
Because you’ll be trusting me.
“Is that enough?”
Silence met her, but she heard the smile in the silence—the “Of course it is enough.”
After another moment of silence:
It is all that is necessary.
“But I can’t be trusted,” she whispered.
If there was an answer, she could not hear it.
The storm was coming closer to the coastline, and winds were picking up outside.
The voice said, Miranda is coming to see you. She doesn’t want to. She wants nothing to do with you. But you must help her see what I have shown you.
April winced, remembering the girl’s reaction to her presence in her father’s house. The Spirit didn’t have to tell her that Miranda wanted nothing to do with her.
They are looking for you at the cell house, the Spirit told her. Go to meet them there.
And she said, “I will.”
Chapter 11
Teresa passed the night in an ornate, richly furnished room where she felt out of place and intensely uncomfortable, and after sleeping a few hours—she was exhausted, after all—she rose before dawn and found her way through the castle corridors and out to the little chapel.
It was dark within, darker than it should have been, as though someone had long ago extinguished the light there and it had never shone since. She carried a candle from her room, and lighting it, held it up to discover other candles—covered in dust and long, long unused.
Lighting them, she filled the chapel with warm, flickering light.
Candlesticks and censers and other articles of worship lay on side tables and the altar in t
he front of the chapel, cracked and tarnished with age. But Teresa caught her breath in the living light of the candles: across each of the chapel’s four walls, a band of brass had been embedded in the stone. And across it, etched finely and with great artistry, was a depiction of flame—nearly identical to the picture Teresa had painted in her quarters that night so many years ago.
Her eyes filled with tears as the sight awed and humbled her. Not only was she truly not alone in this place, but someone had been here before her who shared her vision and calling—to make the invisible visible. To bring healing and truth in the darkest of places.
When she had finished lighting every candle she could find and the whole chapel glowed with the soft orange light which drew out the etchings in brass and brought life to them, Teresa knelt at the altar and bowed her head, extending her hands before her.
“I am your servant, O Spirit,” she prayed. “Let me be a light in the darkness here, as this chapel is a light in the dark hours of the morning. Help me to bring healing, and use my hands and my heart to draw others into the unity that is you—that is your heart.”
As she prayed, the awareness of being heard grew strong and convicting—but it was different, this time, than it had been before.
She had often prayed with the conviction that she was heard.
But this time she felt the strong sense of Someone in particular hearing.
Mother Isabel’s insistence, all those years ago, that the Spirit should be thought of as a person, even as a man, and not simply as a force or a universal being impressed itself on Teresa’s heart, and she felt that she understood it better than she had before.
Because at this moment, in the deepest part of the morning, the unifying force she had long known as the Spirit felt like an intensely localized, intensely personal presence.
Something about that brought a smile to her lips.
Truly, she was not alone here.
* * *
After failing to find her in her quarters, Bertoller cornered Teresa in the corridor outside the eating hall later that morning. “I am surprised to see you out and about so early!” he said. “After your journey, I expected you would sleep for some time.”
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