The other was Reese, standing in the centre of a battle. Smiling.
Victory seen and painted ahead of time.
Diane set the torch down, leaning it against a crop of rock on the floor, and gingerly lifted April’s head and shoulders, trying to administer water from a flask. It dribbled out—April couldn’t respond even involuntarily. Not surprising. It was Sunday; she’d been three full days and three full nights without food or water. And was injured besides.
Clucking softly, Diane put out the torch and set all her attention to picking April up. The girl was small and she was lighter than Diane expected.
“I’ve got an IV in the car,” Diane explained. “You’re coming home with me, and you’re going to be all right in no time.”
To her surprise and delight, April stirred in her arms.
“That’s right,” Diane said. “You’re coming home.”
Diane stepped into the sunlight with April in her arms. The bay glistened far below. A strong sense of peace, of rightness, pressed down with the warmth of the sun.
Diane did not put words to what she knew.
That she too, for the first time in twenty years, was truly going home.
The End
The story of the Oneness continues in Book 2: The Hive.
Click Here: https://www.rachelstarrthomson.com/hive-list-optin/
A Note from the Author:
Thanks for reading! I’m honoured that you took the time to delve into my world with me. I’d love to connect with you‒you can find me at Facebook.com/RachelStarrThomsonWriter or on Twitter @writerstarr.
My website, www.rachelstarrthomson.com, lists all of my other novels, short stories, and nonfiction. You’re cordially invited to come by! You’ll also find buy links, a blog, and usually something free to read.
Finally, if you enjoyed this book enough to tell others about it, would you consider leaving a review at the retailer where you got it? I’d appreciate it a whole lot.
Stan Lee always said it best: Higher!
Rachel Starr Thomson
Hive
Chapter 1
A preview
April sat on the shingled roof looking out over the slope of rooftops, the cobbled street, and the bay, watching for the boy. Nick. Her throat burned, and she shivered even though she sat in the sun. A blanket wrapped around her shoulders helped stave off the chill, but the chill came as much from within her body as without, and she knew it. She had flirted far too closely with death only two weeks ago; it wasn’t a surprise she was still fighting to get strong.
There he was, slouching around the harbour. He was far, but April had good eyesight. Always had. He walked like he carried too much for a kid his age, maybe eleven. After what had happened with her, she was almost surprised he would go back down there, hang out by the same fishing shack. But then again, she knew a little of what his home life was like, so maybe her being kidnapped by a couple of thugs hadn’t actually scared him that much.
She smiled as she thought about his last contact with the Oneness, the supernatural organism to which April belonged: he had tipped off Tyler and Chris about her abduction. He had done it, April knew, because the Oneness was calling him. He was supposed to become one of them. He just didn’t know it yet.
Shoot, she didn’t think he knew they existed yet.
She swallowed in frustration, ignoring the raw burn in her throat as she did. She was supposed to be the one reaching out to him, but she hadn’t entirely recovered her ability to walk in a straight line.
Which was definitely one reason she was going to get in trouble for sitting on the roof.
“April!” It was Mary, right on time. Slightly harried and definitely concerned. The window beside April creaked open and Mary stuck her head out, forehead creased, and said “April” again in a slightly less startling tone. Probably worried that if she scared April, she would fall.
“I’m okay,” April said, turning her head to take in the sight of the older woman climbing gingerly out to sit beside her. “Just watching.”
“The boy again?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll get to him in time. You will.”
April sighed. “I already feel late.”
“You were trying.” Mary’s voice was gentle. “You didn’t choose what happened. But it was part of the plan. You know that.”
April harrumphed. “He needs us. Look at him. No kid should walk like that.”
Mary squinted in the direction of the harbour. “I can’t see that far.”
“Well, he walks like a little old man. Like . . .”
Mary laid a hand on April’s shoulder. “You’ll get to him.”
Despite herself, April felt the tension ebbing at Mary’s touch. There was a reason Mary was the head of this cell. She was wise, and peaceful, a mother even though, like so many of the Oneness, she had never married. Mary moved closer, and April allowed herself to rest her head on her shoulder.
“It’s all right,” Mary said. “You are recovering. That battle will wait for you. I’m sure of it.”
April grimaced, but she kept her eyes closed and nestled further into Mary’s shoulder, letting the connection between them settle her heart even more deeply. Battles did not generally wait. But it was good that this one would. The last fight had nearly killed her, and she knew it.
“I’m going for him as soon as I can,” she murmured.
“Of course you are,” Mary whispered back.
And she would.
* * *
It was almost noon when Chris Sawyer walked into his little cottage high up on the cliff, grabbed the sword from over the mantel, and smashed something with it. This time the “something” was an old vase neither of the boys cared about, one nobody cared about, really.
For all that he was making statements, Chris wouldn’t have broken anything that would really hurt anyone else to break.
Aggravated, with himself and with the inconsequential nature of the vase, he put the claymore back up on its hooks and set about picking up the broken pieces of glass with his big hands.
Tyler was sitting in the kitchen, looking over the short counter at the mess in the living room and his friend meticulously tidying it. “Bad day?” he asked.
He winced and regretted the words immediately. He knew full well what the problem with Chris was.
Him.
Or more accurately, the Oneness.
Even more accurately, that Tyler had gone over to the Oneness. At the same Diane, Chris’s mother, had finally started to admit she was part of them and they of her. At the same time Reese had almost been destroyed by the Oneness and yet had cemented her unbreakable commitment to them, all at the same time Chris was falling in love with Reese.
Tyler could remember just enough of his own mind and heart before the Joining to know that Chris was in an agony of confusion and resistance and just not understanding. He couldn’t blame him.
Of course, if he could only get him to see . . .
He chided himself and stopped there. They’d already had that conversation, and it had already gone badly, enough times. Some things you just had to come to on your own.
On your own.
Three words that Tyler hardly had a context for anymore.
Chris’s voice was tight. “You know what kind of day I’m having.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you seen Reese?”
“Down by the bay. I said she could take one of the boats out.”
Chris yelled. He had closed his hand over a shard of glass without thinking. As he charged into the kitchen to find something to stanch the bleeding, Tyler watched him and wished he could do something, anything, to ease the torment in his friend’s soul.
“Have you heard from Richard and Mary?” Chris asked.
“No.”
“How long are you going to wait?” Chris asked the question like it was a freight engine, carrying about two hundred cars behind it. “You have to go after the hive!”
&n
bsp; “I don’t know,” Tyler said. He had to admit to some impatience even on his part when it came to that—but he was still so caught up in the euphoria of Joining that he couldn’t bring himself to actually cross the line to frustration with the cell leaders. Anyway, he had seen them in action enough to know they were trustworthy. And he had seen the enemy in action enough to know he didn’t stand a chance without their full help behind him.
Of course, Chris had seen that too, which was at least partially why he was pacing the cottage and smashing things instead of out trying to rid the world of the creatures who had ripped out Reese’s heart and then nearly killed her.
Chris was not Oneness, and he had, he said, no intention of becoming One. But he had every intention of fighting on their side. He had seen the enemy, and he wanted nothing more than to drive that filth out of the world. It wasn’t just the demons—though they were terrifying, and horrific. It was the people attached to them. People who weren’t born evil through and through, people who had chosen their own depravity. Tyler shuddered.
How many were there, he wondered? People who had been pulled into David’s schemes?
Twenty?
A hundred?
A thousand?
Richard wouldn’t give numbers. He just said there was a hive, and it was likely very bad. And then he locked himself up with no food or water and prayed, because that was how Richard found power enough to fight demons, by making himself weak and light-headed enough that his head could actually clear and his strength could start to come from some other place.
Tyler, new to all this, didn’t try too hard to figure it out. He would wait on their leadership.
The one thing that was not in question was that they were going to fight. They had discovered the hive by no accident. They had attacked its core and exposed its leader. It was a threat, not just to them in some personal way, but to the world. And the Oneness, as Mary had reminded him only last night when they sat at the cell house and looked out over the town’s lights and reflections off the water, existed to serve and to save the world.
In the rush of companionship, of love, of profound not-aloneness that came with being One, it was almost easy to forget that.
You’re a newbie, Tyler reminded himself. It might not always feel this good. It might die away. Get old.
But he remembered how broken, how destroyed Reese had been when she first came and opened his world to the realities of the Oneness. They had fished her out of the water when she tried to drown herself because she believed she had been exiled from the Oneness. Apparently nothing about being One had worn off for her, had dulled or gotten less important. If anything, time had only strengthened the bonds.
From where he sat now, that looked to Tyler like a very, very good thing.
Chris came back from the bathroom with his hand wrapped. “Have you heard anything more about that kid?”
“We’re watching him, apparently,” Tyler said. “April wants to go after him, but she’s still too weak.”
He closed his eyes as he spoke. He could feel April, out there somewhere not too far away. Could feel her heartbeat and the way her skin burned and her throat ached. Could feel how much she wanted to get to that boy—the kid she watched and hung out with sometimes who would ride his bike down to the harbour, the one who had tipped himself and Chris and the twins off to the presence of David’s thugs in Diane’s house. He shook his head at the memories. It had been a heck of a two weeks.
If you’d asked him, he would have told you life couldn’t really change this much, this radically, this fundamentally, in that short a time.
But he wouldn’t have believed it, even then. After all, he’d experienced death as a kid when his parents died in an accident. He knew exactly how little time had to do with radical when it came to change.
He knew your whole world could go up in flames, or it could come to a glorious culmination, all in one single instant.
Chris sat down at the table behind Tyler and shoved a brown-betty teapot to one side. “I wish I knew what they’re waiting for.”
“I don’t know either.”
“I thought you could all read each other’s minds.”
“Not really.”
“I know.”
“Yeah.”
Tyler cleared his throat. “Wanna go join Reese? I don’t think she’d mind the company.”
“I want to give her her space.” Chris thought for a moment and changed his answer. “Sure. Fine. Let’s go find Reese.”
Tyler grabbed his keys from the kitchen counter. “I’ll drive.”
* * *
The way down to the water was tense. As expected, Reese hadn’t taken the boat out far. She saw them waving from the dock and came back to pick them up. She’d only taken the skiff, no big deal to turn around and come into the harbour. She handed Chris the anchor rope as they came in, and their hands touched. She blushed. He scowled.
Man, Tyler thought, but said nothing. His attention was diverted by a kid running down the dock opposite, straight at the water like he never meant to slow down. He looked familiar . . .
He was familiar. It was the kid April was always watching. Nick.
“Hey kid!” The words weren’t out of Tyler’s mouth before Nick threw himself whole-body off the end of the dock and hit the water with a loud splash, then started swimming like he did not intend to stop. Ever.
There wasn’t much boat traffic at this time of day, and the water was calm and not too deep—it was perfectly safe. But the harbour wasn’t exactly a normal place to go swimming. What was wrong with the beach?
Nothing.
But there was plenty wrong with the kid.
“Something’s wrong,” Reese said at the exact moment Tyler knew it was true. The boy was swimming toward the open bay like his arms and legs would never stop churning the water, and Tyler saw himself after his parents died, and Reese after she jumped, and April being April—April with her own past full of things she had just wanted to run away from. And he wanted to jump in after the kid and grab him, and bring him back to the dock and embrace him wet and dripping and shivering and tell him it would all be okay. They were here, and it was going to be okay. He wanted to pick him up in the arms that were Oneness, his arms, and all the family and web he represented now, and never let go.
Instead he just stood on the dock and watched the kid swim, stricken. He didn’t know what to do.
He felt Reese next to him like the presence of the sun’s warmth on his skin. Thoughts in unison, not shared, but kin. Before he had been Joined, become One, he had wondered if his identity would be swallowed up in the Oneness and he would lose himself. That, he was slowly realizing, was the great fear—the reason people resisted. But Oneness was not a loss of identity. It was not even a loss of separateness. It was the kind of joining that love accomplishes, where each is made his own apex, the best of what he could possibly be, and in that strength chooses to cleave to others because he recognizes that life is not worth living alone.
Tyler had, in fact, felt more than once in the last two weeks that he was only now beginning to understand who he really was and where he was going. What the seed inside Tyler MacKenzie had been containing all these years, ready to sprout and grow into something he did not recognize but had always been meant for.
Watching an eleven-year-old boy swim away from hell, Tyler wondered what seed was in his soul and what it would take to start the process of growth he had been born for.
And Chris. Whether and if Chris would ever embrace this truth that there was more to himself that he was denying, a life he was not supposed to miss.
That had been a surprise too. When Reese first betrayed the existence of the Oneness and Diane first began to explain it to them, Tyler had assumed they were a special class of human beings, as different from normal people as dogs were different from cats. He saw it differently now. Now he was pretty sure everyone was meant to be Oneness. Everyone had that seed. But some chose never to let the seed germinat
e, and spent their whole lives bound up in a hard shell and a dark place, refusing ever to stretch and grow into the sun.
At least, he thought it worked something like that. He was no guru. Just a kid who had gotten swept up in something big, and wished everyone else would do the same thing. And belonged to a Oneness cell and sometimes talked to dead people.
He quirked a smile. You had to hand it to Chris—he might not be ready to join the Oneness himself, but he had put up with a whole lot of weirdness without balking. For love of Tyler, Tyler knew, and for a tentative, slowly growing love of Reese.
Reese was watching Nick, the boy, with a frown. “Do you think we should go after him?”
Tyler took in the spray Nick’s arms and legs were kicking up. “I don’t think I have that much energy.”
“I do,” Chris cut in. “You want me to go get him?”
“No,” Tyler said, “I don’t think so. He’ll be okay. He’s just working something out.”
Reese watched him a few more minutes. He had stopped swimming like a maniac and was floating on his back, staring up into the sky at a flock of gulls circling overhead.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” she said.
“It’s not easy, being eleven,” Tyler said.
“Especially not some kinds of eleven,” Chris finished.
The threesome stood and watched him for a while, Reese still standing in the skiff with it rocking gently beneath her, Chris and Tyler on the dock. Nick was just a kid, and none of them really knew him, and yet the harbour at that moment was orbiting around the pull of his personality and his need.
“I’m going to get him,” Reese announced after a minute more. But the anchor rope stayed tied, and neither of the boys moved to help.
She stayed put.
* * *
On the outskirts of town, a car pulled up to a nondescript gas station, a privately owned affair with a white gull on the sign.
The man who got out was a stranger to the fishing village. He was tall and stood straight with impeccable posture and neatly groomed hair of no particular colour. His wife sat in the car with their two children in the backseat, a boy and a girl about eleven and twelve years old. The wife looked harried. The children were calm.
“Hurry up,” the woman called out the window.