Piercing the Darkness (85 page)

KHULL RAISED HIS
knife.

“Mr. Goring!” came a cry from upstairs. “Mr. Goring! Something
terrible is happening!”

Footsteps! People were in the chalet!

Khull grabbed Sally from behind, clapped his hand over her mouth, and poised his knife at her throat. His message was clear.

“Mr. Goring!” came the shout again.

Santinelli pushed Goring. “Answer them! Stop them before they find us!”

“My word,” said Goring. “Those letters! They’re right up there on the table!”

He hurried to the stairs, turning off the basement lights.

“Mr. Goring, are you here?”

He ran up the stairs. “Yes, right here! What is it?”

AMETHYST CUPPED HER
wings open and came to an abrupt halt just short of the big white house. LifeCircle was under attack! Angels were everywhere! The spirits there, her masters, were fleeing!

CLAIRE AND JON
scurried about the office, finding documents, papers, anything and everything that might connect them with this miserable lawsuit and everything it entailed. They would deny everything, of course. It was all they could do. Maybe they’d get through okay, maybe they wouldn’t—they didn’t know, they couldn’t think about it, they could hardly think at all; they were just too scared.

They’d gotten the tip-off: Lucy was talking; there were copies of Roe’s letters in the wrong hands. The lid was coming off!

Jon jammed papers into a trash can until it was full, muttering angrily, “I knew we should have gotten out of this long ago! We’ve overreached ourselves!” He ran to find another container.

Claire had the telephone propped on her shoulder. She was talking to Miss Brewer, Amber Brandon’s fourth grade teacher. “That’s right. You’d better come up with some good explanations for what happened to Amber. Lucy Brandon’s done an about-face, and she’s blaming it all on you. Hey, don’t blame
us
! You didn’t have to select that curriculum; that was entirely your own choice, and we had nothing to do with it! No, I never heard of any Sally Roe; that’s your concern, not ours!”

She slammed down the phone just as Jon rushed back into the room with a garbage can. “Jon, what about that curriculum? Can that be traced to LifeCircle?”

Jon found some documents and held them up for Claire to see. “Not after I burn these!”

OVERHEAD, THE SWARM
of survivors from the LifeCircle rout turned tail and fled before a wall of angels. They flew toward the elementary school. Ango the Terrible would be there with all his mighty hordes! He would know what to do!

GORING REACHED THE
upstairs and found the two psychics from the morning discussion group all in a dither.

“Here now,” he said, “what’s all the commotion?”

“Bad energy,” said the woman attorney. “I can’t explain it, but all the psychic energy around here is horribly disturbed!”

The fifth grade teacher nodded in agreement, his eyes wide with horror. “We’re being invaded! That’s the only word I can think of to describe it!”

IN THE BASEMENT,
Sally, Khull, and the others stood in the dark, overhearing the conversation. Sally tried not to stir; she could feel Khull’s blade against her throat.

Goring was trying to calm them. “Well, just take it easy. Let me encourage you to combine your insights with others around the campus. Perhaps we can all learn and benefit from this experience.”

“It’s scary!” said the lady.

“I’m so disoriented,” said the man.

KHULL PULLED SALLY’S
head back so hard, she thought her neck would snap. He huffed into her ear, “They’re feeling
you
, lady! You and your filthy Jesus!”

THE CLOUD OF
evil spirits closed ranks and drew in tight, swords ready, as all around angelic warriors continued to thunder down the mountainsides like an avalanche and swirl around them like a cyclone. The Host of Heaven struck the cloud at the base, and it collapsed downward to fill the gap; they assaulted the pinnacle and it shriveled, bleeding a shower of stung demons; they shot like fatal bullets through its center, and the cloud’s mass began to thin. They harried it, struck at it, sliced it into weaker segments. The cloud was thick, tough, and tenacious, but it was weakening.

Tal hacked an attacker, mowed through four more, spun and kicked another spirit aside, and then spotted a sudden, instantaneous gap in the demonic mantle just over Goring’s chalet. He folded his wings above his head and dropped through it.

SALLY AND THE
others could hear Goring having a bit of trouble with his distraught psychics.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” said Goring, “I do have some urgent business to attend to.”

“What could be more urgent than this?” said the man, his voice coming close to the basement stairway.

“Please!” said Goring, coming after him. “Use the front door! Go out the way you came in!”

Maybe, just maybe, that man would hear her. Sally steadily filled her lungs.

“Wow!” said the woman. “What are all these letters? Fan mail?”