The innkeeper’s words spurred him on now. Franz Bertoller an enemy of the Oneness. And Teresa in his house. Miracles of healing happening, through a painting, as in the old days—but could the darkness see that as anything but a declaration of war?
She needed him.
He ignored waves of mild fever and pushed his horse onward, upward, into the mountains.
As the day wore on and the sun began to sink, he could feel the weariness in his steed but could not bear the thought of stopping for the night. Dark clouds were gathering overhead—storm clouds, he realized. He might want to push on through the night, but nature was unlikely to let him.
Unhappily accepting that to press on through a storm would likely get him lost, he began to look for shelter for the night. He found it in a shallow cave in a wall of black rock, reachable by an incline covered with shale. Pines clustered thickly around the slope, but the way itself was clear. He led his horse up the incline and freed it of its saddle, tethering it to a scraggly pine tree that was growing at the far end of the cave mouth.
It grew blacker by the moment, and by the time he had settled down in the back of the cave, rain started to fall. Within minutes the rain had grown to a deluge, and streams began to pour over the cave mouth, trapping him behind a variegated wall of water. His own corner remained reasonably dry, and he wrapped himself in his coat and resigned himself to spending the night out here.
He did not expect the demon attack and had no warning but for the sword that formed in his hand, fully there all at once. His body responded as though one with the weapon, leaping: he thrust it forward into the darkness even as claws and eyes and a great toothy maw appeared through the falling water and bore down on him. His sword thrust found purchase in the beast’s shoulder—a bear, great and black, and animated by something far worse than any predator of the forest. It roared, Niccolo drove the sword harder, and he heard the shriek as demons rushed from the creature’s body—but not before the terrible jaws had clamped onto his shoulder.
He heard his own shouts even as he did his best to twist the sword in deeper, and his knees buckled as pain seared through his body from his shoulder. He was pulled forward as the bear drew back and shook him, pulling him out into the rain. His body slammed against the rock wall and then his hands and face were being skinned against the shale and the bear had released its bite.
He heard demons shrieking through the darkness and his horse crying out in terror.
Then nothing more.
* * *
“I found him,” Richard announced, standing as he shuffled files back into a neat stack. “It’s a sixteen-hour drive. Who’s coming?”
“I am,” said nearly everyone. April’s eyes filled with tears, and she uncurled herself slowly from the chair. “Thank you.”
“He’s our boy too,” Richard said.
“Can we leave right away?”
“Far as I know.”
“I need to go up to the cottage,” April said. “Just to get something.”
“Fine,” Chris said. “My truck’s there anyway, and we should take it. We’re going to need a few cars.”
April nodded dumbly, and not fifteen minutes later she was standing in the fishing cottage up on the cliff, rooting through her things for a sketchbook. She’d been drawing pictures for Nick, and she wanted to give them to him as soon as they found him.
She straightened when the phone rang.
Chris was outside starting the truck; she was the only one there.
It rang again.
And she knew—
She knew it was him.
“Hello?” she asked, her hands shaking.
“April?”
“Nick, thank God. Where are you?”
“I need you to come,” Nick said. His voice trembled.
“We’re coming, Nick. Where are you? Are you with your mom’s boyfriend—Tom?”
“No, I ran away. I hate him. I hate it there.”
“You ran away?” She forced her voice to stay calm. “Nick, where are you? We can’t come get you if we don’t know where you are.”
“I’m not sure. I’m at the shipyards. In Bywater.”
She closed her eyes. Bywater was only a few hours north of here—it was only by the Spirit’s grace that he had called exactly now, before they all hit the road and went too far to be any help.
“Where’s your mom?” April asked.
“I don’t know. Probably with him. I thought I could hitch a ride home, but they were gonna call the cops on me so I ran.”
Chris appeared in the kitchen doorway, a questioning look on his face. She waved for him to stay put and mouthed Nick’s name.
“Okay, listen, Nick, do you see anywhere safe where you can wait? A restaurant or an office or something?”
“They’ll call the cops on me.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” April said. “You can wait at the police station.”
His voice got stubborn. “I don’t want to. Just come get me.”
She thought better of arguing. Probably better for them all that they didn’t involve the police again anyway. “Okay. Fine. But you need to wait somewhere safe.”
“I’m safe. I’m where they build the ships. By the dock. There’s a phone there. That’s where I am.”
She had to marvel at his nerve. But then, she knew too well what was driving it. She could still feel the sense of his distress, and its echoes in her own memories.
Memories that would always be a part of who she was, no matter how much she didn’t want them to be.
Hanging up, she told Chris, “He’s in Bywater. At the shipyards. He ran away from Shelley and hitched a ride or something . . . don’t ask me.”
“That’s good,” Chris said. “He’s not far; we can get him tonight.”
“Yeah,” April said. “But I’m not going to be happy until we’ve actually got him, so let’s get going.”
Chris nodded. “I’ll call over and let everyone else know. You and me can just hit the road now. No reason to wait.”
April appreciated that more than she could say. She had barely had time to buckle up in the truck before Chris joined her and they were on their way.
Chapter 17
Nick sat huddled between a couple of oil drums on the dock near the shipyards, shivering in the orange light as snowflakes drifted lazily down. It was incredibly lonely to be engulfed by the night in such a world as this. But he liked that loneliness better than what he’d run from, because here was alone and waiting for the Oneness, his real family, to come and get him. And before he had been trapped with people he didn’t trust, speeding up the highway toward a future he didn’t want, inwardly alone and outwardly without any control at all.
Now, though, as he shivered in the cold and listened to the mingled sounds of machinery running and water washing up against the docks and people shouting somewhere at a distance, he had to wonder if he’d done something stupid by running away.
At least he’d reached April on the phone. She would be here soon.
But it was cold.
And as much as he hated to admit it, he was scared.
There was some kind of menace in the air here that he had not expected. Like something . . .
He chilled through as he recognized the sensation.
Something demonic.
Something like what they had encountered when they were fighting the hive, and the evil was after them all the time.
But why would anything like that be here?
Because of you, he told himself. Because they want to kill you, Nick.
That makes no sense, he argued back. I’m just a kid.
He tried to rewind his memory, think over what had gotten him here. He’d run from his mother and Tom at a gas stop when they weren’t looking. That wasn’t hard—there had been slot machines inside, and they were inside playing. They left him for hours. So he just took off.
When you were scared, he told himself, accusingly.
That was true
. He hadn’t just decided to run. He’d felt, suddenly and forcefully, horribly afraid. So he had bolted, without much foresight and definitely without any real plan.
He’d run up the highway a ways, slowed down, and decided he was going home. He hated his mother. He hated Tom. He wanted to go back to the Oneness, and his mother and Tom had no right to take him away. He knew they weren’t planning to bring him back—they didn’t exactly try to hide anything from him. They talked in front of him like he was two years old and couldn’t understand what they were saying.
So then he’d tried to hitch a ride, and one guy gave him a ride a little ways, and then the next person said he was going to call the police, and when he stopped to use a payphone, Nick ran again.
Why had he done that?
The police might have helped him out. He knew there was dirt to find on Tom. They might have let him go home and protected him from his mother and her boyfriend. At first he’d been okay with the idea that the cops would come get him.
But then the fear again.
It had come hammering at him out of nowhere, so he couldn’t even breathe. And he’d run once more.
He leaned against a stack of pallets and tried to sink deeper into his coat to keep warm. His duffel bag, stuffed with all the belongings he’d been able to bring with him, was wedged between him and one of the oil drums. He wanted it to warm up like a pillow, but it was just too cold outside.
What if the demons just came after him?
What if they possessed some stray dogs and came and tore him to pieces?
Fear was swelling up in his throat again, choking off his air supply. But this time he couldn’t run. He couldn’t move. He was sure if he peeked out over the oil drums, something with teeth and claws would be there and rip him to shreds.
And that wouldn’t even be as bad as the fear—as feeling what it felt like to look into the eyes of something like that just before it killed you.
His heart pounding, he closed his eyes like he could shut out the fear and the threat that way. Like maybe if he couldn’t see it, it couldn’t see him.
Whatever “it” was.
Hurry, April. Hurry and come and find me.
A loud clanging of machinery not far away made the oil drums and the pallets and the ground under him tremble, like an earthquake. If something was sneaking up on him, he’d never even hear it.
Maybe it would be a bear.
He didn’t know why that image came into his head.
Maybe the demon would come in the image of a huge, black bear, with enormous teeth and long claws and eyes that were red as blood. It would come snarling over the oil drums and rip his head off.
Any second now.
His entire body was quivering. He was going to attract it—it was going to know he was there because he was shaking so hard, it would hear him and smell his fear.
Stop it, he told himself. Calm down.
But he was going to die. You couldn’t calm down when you were going to die.
You couldn’t stop it.
You couldn’t.
The quivering in all of his body culminated in a scream that he couldn’t keep down, and he leaped to his feet and ran.
* * *
Niccolo dreamed.
He saw a boy a world away. One like himself in many ways—full of fire, full of art, full of the Spirit and of life. And threatened.
He tried to speak to the boy, but could not.
The boy thought he was alone. Alone in a dark world full of water, machinery, and enormous ships. But Niccolo could see what the boy could not: that the air all around him was filled with others. Demons prowled the perimeter of an angelic guard. Some of the cloud stood and watched, whispering things to the child that he could not hear.
Niccolo thought a great battle was about to break out between the Oneness and the demons. A battle for this boy: for his life and his heart.
Of all the demons, the worst had the form of a gigantic black bear with teeth and claws like spearhooks. Niccolo could feel the force of those teeth, clamped into his shoulder, dragging him, shaking him—
He woke up gasping in the rain.
His body was burning with fever and weak from loss of blood. Pain still seared through him from his shoulder, and turning his head slightly, he could make out a dark blotch that covered as much as he could see of that side of his body. Though the sky was still darkened by clouds and rain, the sun must have risen, for he could see too well for it to be night.
Shivering and shaking, he forced himself to roll over and then curled up into a ball, unable to go any further. He could hear the voice of his horse not far away, as though the beast was encouraging him to uncurl himself and keep coming back to shelter. But he could not. The pain and the illness were too great.
He turned his head slightly, and his eyes fell on a hulking black shape. The bear. Dead. He knew he had not mortally wounded it; the demons themselves must have killed it as they tore out of its body at the insistence of Niccolo’s sword.
His had never been a life of warfare. Only a few times had he ever faced such creatures, and always on behalf of someone else. Why they had come here, into this forsaken and desolate place, he could not imagine.
Unless they had not been here by chance.
They might have been sent to kill him.
The answer came to him all at once.
To stop him from reaching Teresa.
He forced himself to uncurl. Forced his quivering arm to stretch out and his legs to pull up beneath him; forced himself to his feet. He leaned on the rock wall as he hobbled toward the cave entrance and all but fell inside.
It was still dry where he had sheltered until the attack in the night. But he was soaked, and he could not escape himself or his clothing. He cast a helpless look at his horse, which looked back and shook its head. Forcing himself onto his feet again, he lurched forward, using his good arm to balance himself against the back of the cave, until he reached his horse and let himself fall against it. Its body was warm and dry, and he stood there, leaning his whole weight into the animal, good hand tangled in its mane, soaking up the warmth.
He had to reach Teresa. Somehow, he had to overcome this and get to her. If he had doubted the urgency of his errand, if he’d thought himself spurred on only by his own desire to see her and be near her, he had no doubts now. The need was dire.
Indeed, he had no doubt the need was mortal.
My good innkeeper, he thought in the direction of the village, I would call you to my aid now. I could use more than a rest and a drink, I fear.
But of course, there was no aid here.
He sank to his knees, unable to stand any longer, and shivered against the rock. His whole shoulder was throbbing, and from the warmth he could now feel trickling its way across his shoulder and chest, he judged that the bleeding had resumed.
Teresa, he cast out. Teresa, if you can hear me, I am coming to you—but I am in need of your help now.
He closed his eyes and concentrated on breathing. It seemed his lungs wanted to stop, but he could not allow them to play that trick on him.
Pray. He could pray, should pray. Reach out not merely to the Oneness but directly to the Spirit who inspired them.
That Spirit who was his earliest and oldest companion.
“Help me,” he prayed. “Speed me on my way.”
From deep within words began to form on his tongue, words placed there by another though it was his voice that gave them utterance. He could not understand them, but he felt the deep strength and comfort they imparted.
A reminder that even as he prayed in the depths of a feverish wilderness, he was not alone, and his prayers were not alone nor of his own making.
But his body went cold—very cold—as the last of the prayers trembled through his lips, and he knew the breath that followed them would be his last. Death had stopped him.
His lungs curled in on themselves and went hard, and he rolled up tightly on the ground and died.
An
d then Breath swept through him—he could hear it, rushing in his ears, the breath of the universe, the life of God. It rushed through his body and animated his lungs again, and he was breathing, gasping, and full of light—the whole sky, the mountains, the world above him, pulsating with light.
His eyes were open, his back to the ground, and he blinked up at the sky.
Alive.
And the shape of a man was fading away from before him. As though just a moment ago the man had been clear to his eyes, and they had sat and talked as friends, but now he was leaving, and Niccolo could not quite remember his face or what they had said . . .
Alive.
And stronger. He moved his fingers and then his arm at the elbow, and everything worked as it should. He could still feel blood and water stiffening his clothing as they dried. Sometime between death and living again, the rain had stopped. But despite the blood, he could not feel a wound, and he felt—yes, he was, he tested it—he was strong enough to stand and ride and finish his journey after all.
It was a strange thing, to have faced the end of everything and then discovered it was not the end at all.
A smile quirked his lips as he understood something for the first time: that even had the breath not come sweeping back through him, even if the Spirit had not reanimated his body and given him back his days on earth, he would have discovered that death was not the end.
Not at all.
“But a terrible thing nonetheless,” he muttered. And it was true. Having tasted death, he felt within him a deep distaste for it. It was the opposite of Spirit and life and Oneness; it was corruption and a deep and terrible fracture in the unity that was meant to be.
He understood for the first time that Death was the enemy and that Oneness would overcome it. That they had to overcome it. It was why they existed.
Or else it was the only thing preventing them from truly knowing why they existed, and only when it was gone would they discover that at last.
Rise Page 19
