Exile: Book 1 in The Oneness Cycle Read online

  “Seems a little rash to say she’s missing,” Diane said, knowing full well that Mary was never rash—that the Oneness did and said very little in haste. “Maybe she just wanted to get away.”

  “Things have been dark lately,” Richard said. “We are all careful to stay connected and report back in time. April wasn’t careless. We’ve looked all over town and can’t find her.”

  Diane cleared her throat. For a fleeting second she had hoped that the boys’ Reese and this April might be one and the same—but no, this girl had only been missing since yesterday morning, and Reese had left her cell, wherever it was, at least sixteen hours earlier—enough time for her to cast herself off the cliffs.

  “So you’re here because . . .”

  “We wondered if you’ve seen anything,” Mary said.

  Diane started to shake her head. “Do you know a girl called Reese?”

  Richard frowned. “No.”

  “Never mind,” Diane said. “I don’t think I can help you.” She knew what she should tell them—that she’d seen a demon two nights ago, in a flash of vision, and seen its bat-body dead on the floor, slain by a girl who said she was an exile from the Oneness and should not even have the power to wield a sword. A girl who claimed the impossible and yet believed it so deeply she had tried to take her own life only a few hours before. But she couldn’t say it. The girl was involved with Chris, and Chris was her son, and Chris didn’t need to become mixed up with these people—to become enamoured with them like Douglas had.

  Like she had.

  So she said only, “I haven’t seen anything. Surely one of your own can help you.”

  “Diane . . .” Mary reached out to lay a comforting hand on Diane’s shoulder, but it wasn’t comforting. Anything but. Never, never had this woman brought comfort—not her and not her people.

  The Oneness held the world together. Diane knew that, and she treated them with respect because of it. Respect, but not welcome.

  And yet, she had to know.

  “What do you think happened to her . . . April?”

  “We don’t know,” Mary answered. “But we’re worried. Something feels very wrong. You feel it too, even if you won’t admit it.”

  Diane bristled a little. “Is there any possibility—any chance she might just have left?”

  Richard frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe she wanted to leave.”

  He shook his head, his face betraying how abhorrent he found the idea. “Not possible.”

  “Isn’t it?” Diane asked, pretending the comment was off-handed. “Doesn’t anyone ever leave the Oneness? Don’t you ever throw anyone out?”

  Mary paled. “How could you suggest such a thing!”

  Diane wasn’t sure herself. She softened. “I’m sorry. I was just trying to say that maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem. Maybe, after all, this girl just went off on her own for some reason.”

  “I wish I could believe that,” Richard said, cutting Mary off before she could respond more explosively. Though Diane doubted he knew the history between the two women, he seemed to have picked up on the strained dynamic between them and was doing his best to calm it down and stay focused on the reason they were there—the missing girl, concern for whom was evident in his whole bearing. “But she was clear on when to be back, and April doesn’t just go off on her own. She knows better.”

  Diane shook her head, but she was less combative now. She considered once more telling them about Reese, then decided to leave it alone. Things were bad enough—one girl exiled from the Oneness, another inexplicably gone—without her getting into the middle of it.

  Still, she couldn’t just send them away with nothing.

  “If I see anything that might help, I’ll tell you,” she promised.

  Mary nodded. “Thank you.” Richard caught her eye and raised an eyebrow in a look that meant, “Shall we go?” She nodded.

  Then she met Diane’s eyes one more time. “Things are dark,” she said. “Like Richard told you. Be careful. And if you need us—well, you know where to find us.”

  The words came out dry, cracked. “I know.”

  Diane watched them go, padding across the damp ground to a car that was shiny and new and probably Richard’s. He seemed like a man with a good job and a good paycheck, the kind who would do well in the world if he wanted to. But he wouldn’t—not when he was one of them.

  “I hope she turns up soon!” Diane called out, adding a well-wish to the promise she’d made to contact them if she saw anything. And she meant it.

  The Oneness weren’t her enemies, she knew that.

  But that didn’t make her any less afraid.

  * * *

  Richard kept his eyes on the road as he drove back up the cliff road to the house, not looking his companion’s way. But the air between them was thick all the same.

  Just as he turned up the road that would take them home, he said, “You have a history with that woman.”

  “It’s not just me,” Mary said. “We all do. Couldn’t you sense it?”

  He was quiet a moment. “Yes, I suppose I could.”

  Mary sighed as she clenched and relaxed her hands, trying to let out some of the tension she’d been carrying from the minute April should have arrived and hadn’t. “You know she didn’t tell us everything.”

  “It’s not like we could force a confession.” He sounded unhappy about it.

  “I believe her, though—when she said she’d tell us if she could help us. She knows something, but she doesn’t really think it would help or she would tell.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never met one like her before.”

  Mary was silent as they pulled into the driveway. She rested her hand on the door handle and thought back, letting the memories play out. “They’re not common,” she finally said. “But it’s not without reason, how she is. I’ve wished a thousand times I could go back and change what happened, but . . .”

  “You know that’s not in your hands,” he said gently, putting the car in park. “And right now we’ve got to concentrate on getting April back.” Even as he said the words, his face seemed to age with worry. “What do you think happened to her, Mary?”

  Mary shook her head, the creases around her mouth and eyes strained.

  Things are dark, they had told Diane. They had not explained what they meant—why they were so sure April had not just gone off to get some time alone, or lost track of time and decided to stay somewhere. Things were happening that they could not explain, not only here in their little village overlooking the bay, but out in the wider world—the letters, the dreams, the unsettled sense of a storm building. They had been expecting an attack.

  April was only a beginning. They had to find her, yes, but equally they had to find some way to understand what was happening—before the enemy could move in full force and find them defenceless. But neither voiced that now.

  They sat in the car in silence, both with their eyes closed, feeling the pressure of a storm front coming.

  * * *

  April awoke to pain spiking through her head so badly that she rolled over onto her stomach and tried desperately not to be sick. It took a few disoriented minutes to realize she was lying on a hard, rough rock surface, and that her hands were tied.

  It was dark.

  Confused and still battling stabs of pain from the back of her skull, she tried to sort out the last things she remembered. The fishing shack . . . the boy. Leaving. The view down the narrow passage and the sun on the other side, and then . . .

  She remembered. Twisting herself around, she sat up and lowered her forehead to her knees, pulled up against her chest. For a moment when the first man had stepped around that corner, she’d thought she was back in her own childhood. That was her father stepping around the corner. The grab for her, the blow, were expected.

  But she had been wrong; she’d realized that quickly. She didn’t know these men. She still didn’t know why they had attacked her
, or why they had brought her here, or where here was.

  She held her head very still, hoping to clear it, and listened. A trickle of water somewhere. The rocky surface beneath her was dry, thankfully, but the air was cold. It was dark. This was a cave, she decided. She had been tied up and dumped in a cave.

  She tried to pull her wrists apart, but they were bound securely with something broad and inflexible that would hardly let her move her hands. Duct tape. A sound not far away caught her attention and she jerked her head up, regretting it immediately as flashes of light ignited in front of her eyes and pain took up a dance in her head. She bit her lip to keep from making a sound.

  No other noises followed, and no one appeared in the darkness around her. But when the lights stopped flashing in her eyes, she realized that it wasn’t completely dark in the cave—her senses were adjusting, and she could make out a crisscrossing pattern in the murk ahead of her. It was a door, she realized, a barred metal gate. This place wasn’t just a cave; it was a prison.

  Moving her head very slowly to avoid a repeat of the fantastic headache that waited to pounce, she figured out where the nearest cave wall was and scooted backwards until she could lean against it. The more awake she became, the more acutely she realized that she was alone. She swallowed a lump in her throat and said a prayer for grace.

  April shivered. The air in here was cool, and her tank top and track pants offered little warmth. What was she doing here? She tried to remember the men’s faces, but she had barely had a look at them. She was sure she had never seen them before. Were they just human? Was this all just some man-made plot—was she being trafficked or held for ransom or targeted for some serial crime?

  She seriously doubted it.

  The months leading up to this day had been strange, full of the sense that something was coming. A foreboding felt in the spirit long before the mind could catch up. Often it was April who could make sense of such feelings, who could name the threats and see how to combat them. But not this time. When she tried, she could only find murk—confusion and darkness. And it wasn’t just her. Letters had come from other Oneness cells, speaking of trouble but unable to offer specifics. Mary’s dreams had been nightmarish, all of them warning, warning, warning . . . but the warnings remained indistinct, so without clarity that no one could act on them. Richard, faithful Richard, had been staking himself out in prayer three times a day, late at night and early in the morning, but to no avail. There was nothing. Only the sense that something was coming.

  April could only assume this was the first strike.

  She pushed down a growing sense of dread. She knew the enemy, the cruelty and hatred associated with everything they did. She refused to imagine what they might be planning to do with her. Imaginations like that bred fear; and fear was central to their power. She flexed her hand as much as possible within the tape, feeling for the latent presence of a sword.

  The Oneness lived always at war. The enemy was real and persistently active; others could live with the illusion of peace and harmony in the world, but the Oneness could not. And yet, attacks were not common in the fishing village. The little cell was so tiny, so inconsequential, that it attracted scant attention. April, Richard, Mary: just three individuals serving in a tiny town on the edge of the bay. There was nothing remarkable about any of them.

  So what am I doing here? April wondered.

  Gingerly she leaned her head against the rock wall and closed her eyes.

  She could hear waves, some distance away. The bay. She wasn’t far from home, then.

  She smiled faintly.

  * * *

  When Reese awoke on Friday morning, it was to the smell of bacon and eggs and coffee. These boys were surprisingly domestic, she thought; or maybe they were just bothering to be that way because she was here. The thought made her feel welcomed and cared for, and that sensation lingered a moment before the heaviness replaced it—the sorrow that threatened to choke her off and cripple her again.

  She’d spent yesterday in a fog. They had left her alone. She’d slept most of the day—just refusing to wake up. She wanted to be dead. At the very least she could keep herself mostly unconscious.

  She pushed off the blankets she’d pulled over herself sometime in the night—for a long time she hadn’t been able to find the motivation, but eventually the cold won out—and pushed herself out of bed, her feet and legs heavy, her arms weighed down. Heaviest of all was her heart, like an anchor in the centre of her being, dragging her down to a watery depth where she didn’t want to go.

  In the living room a fire was flickering. It had been going the night before, too—she’d noticed it when she got up for a few minutes. She wondered if Chris had sat by it all night, thinking thoughts of his own. He intrigued her, and she sensed that she intrigued him, in some way that scared and comforted her all at once. She looked around for him, but he was gone. It was Tyler who stood over a skillet on the stove, enduring the spitting of grease.

  He flashed her a quick smile, one that was tired like an older man’s smile after the strain of a long day. His face and his long, curly hair were so boyish that the weariness of the smile seemed out of place. Reese recognized it all at once and felt bad for failing to do so the day before. Tyler’s was a smile marked by loss, by grief. He knew the heaviness she felt now, though the degree of his loss was lesser than hers.

  Or if not lesser, she corrected herself, guilty as she looked at him for judging him less bereaved than herself, at least different.

  “Would you like some breakfast?” he asked. “It’s hot. Coffee’s on the counter there . . . help yourself.”

  She nodded distractedly and poured herself a cup. It was thick and black, with no cream in sight. She grimaced at the heavy, bitter taste but welcomed it anyway. Plates clacked as Tyler shuffled the eggs and bacon onto two of them and handed one across the counter. Just two plates. Chris was gone, then.

  “I’m going out on the water in a bit,” Tyler said after he’d eaten a couple of distracted mouthfuls. “Thought you might want to come along. Unless it’s . . . I mean, unless the water is going to bother you.”

  Reese thought about that for a moment. Would it bother her? Just two days ago she had stood at the top of a cliff, looking down on the bay and a distant storm coming, and let her sorrow and her loss drive her off, down through the air, into the cold embrace of the bay and the darkness, into the end of her physical life now that all that truly mattered had already ended. But somehow she had risen.

  And she was alive today. More alive than she had been at the top of that cliff.

  No, she decided, the water wouldn’t bother her.

  Tyler dug out some more old clothes for Reese to wear on the boat, and while she changed into overalls and a button-up striped shirt, he washed up the dishes. He tossed her a coat and a pair of much-too-large boots, the gaping space filled as much as possible with several layers of thick socks, and looked her over critically. Deeming her nearly ready, he grabbed a floppy-brimmed hat from the laundry room and handed it over.

  “Good,” he said. “I think we’re ready to go.”

  When they exited the side door onto the sloping gravel driveway with its sharp dip and overlook of the village and bay, the crunch of car tires met their ears, and Diane drove over the ledge a moment later. She exited the car looking furtive.

  “Is Chris here?” she asked Tyler.

  “No ma’am,” he replied. “He went out early. Can I help you with something?”

  Diane cast a look at Reese and quickly averted her eyes, sliding back into the car after the slightest hesitation. “No,” she said. “But if you’re in when he gets back, call me.” She started her car and began to back into a turn.

  Reese frowned.

  There was something about this woman.

  “We’ll ride in the truck,” Tyler said, heading for a grease-stained carport at the side of the cottage. “It’s a bit of a hike down to the water.”

  Just a minute, Reese wanted to
say. She stood frozen in indecision, wanting to run up to Diane’s car, motion for her to roll down the window, and say, “What is it? What’s going on? What aren’t you telling me?” But she didn’t. How could she? She didn’t know these people . . . and she didn’t belong here. Or anywhere.

  But . . .

  She had seen the demon.

  The realization hit like a weight. Diane had seen the demon. It was one thing for an ordinary mortal to know about the Oneness. Some people did. But to see the demons, and not with her eyes—to see them from far away, in a vision, with eyes to see . . .

  Reese gasped.

  Diane finished turning her car around in the tight space and roared down the hill. Reese’s eyes filled with tears as she watched her go.

  A blue pickup truck pulled up beside her. “Ready to go?” Tyler asked.

  They rode in silence down the steep hill, the vista around them breathtaking. There was nothing like this—sweeping cliffs, quaint village nestled at the base of them and climbing up the sides with neighbourhoods like stray creeper vines, the blue of the bay stretching away to the horizon and the blue of the sky pristine above it—in the city where Reese had always lived. She wondered if the beauty had something to do with why today, although she still carried a heart heavy as rusted iron, she did not want to kill herself.

  But she cast a glance beside her at the young man driving the truck, his blue eyes on the road, his tousled hair wild, and knew it had more to do with him and with Chris. Their rescue had extended to more than simply fishing her out of the water. Their kindness and protection was permission to live—a safe place where she could feel, and feel acutely, and yet not need to run.

  She looked down at her hands in her lap. She was going to have to leave—you didn’t just show up and take advantage of strangers forever. They weren’t the Oneness. If only . . .

  She forced her thoughts off that tangent.

  It didn’t take long to reach the wharf, and Tyler had the boat out with ease. The day was calm, beautiful. He worked the sail with muscled arms and spoke not a word to Reese. She sensed he was waiting for permission.

  Briefly, she considered giving it.

  The wind in her face was cold, but the sun shone down with warmth, glancing off the water beneath them in bursts of light. Reese could see why he loved the water. She wondered about his own story. Why he and Chris lived here when most young men their age would be heading for the city, or going to school, or trying to build some kind of career for themselves. Why Tyler smiled like an old man who knew grief. Why they were both so gentle and good.