Deviate

by Tracy Clark

  I pulled the key from her grasp and tucked it back inside my shirt. “What does this key open?” I asked. It had obviously meant something to Clancy. It was important enough that my father buried it under the albino redwood tree in Santa Cruz at my mother’s request so that no one would ever find it.

  But I found it.

  Gráinne’s flecked green eyes turned skyward and then snapped back to mine. The barest hint of a wry smile curved her thin lips. “Heaven?”

  Just when I thought she was thinking more clearly, she lapsed into nonsense. I turned away from her and stared out the window at the lace of fog and fences. My entire body was taut with anxiety.

  Giovanni startled me when he reached over and shuffled through the glove compartment. “Cristo,” he said. “Nobody carries maps anymore. We’ll have to stop for one.” Soon, he pulled over at a gas station.

  “You go in. What if someone recognizes me?” I said, thinking of the airport video of two innocent people falling dead at my feet. My father spoke passionately about the mysterious deaths around the world and his theory about dark energy before he died. I remembered his impassioned words: The increase in natural disasters is a sign that there is a serious crisis or imbalance in our world…but the more critical sign now is the people who are mysteriously dying. My father thought the Scintilla were somehow a key to solving the imbalance. But Giovanni and I knew what we saw that day the deaths occurred—the back of an Arrazi, walking away. The Arrazi’s aura was white from a fresh kill.

  I shielded my face from passersby and practically held my breath until Giovanni returned, map in hand. Danger stalked us from all directions. Hunted by Arrazi, valued more than gold on the black market, and, according to Clancy Mulcarr, we had enemies who wanted us dead more than he wanted to possess us. This mysterious Society he was involved with?

  I glanced around, watchful. The whole world was full of enemies whose faces we didn’t know. We needed to fade into the fog until we could figure out what to do.

  Once we were on the right highway to Trim, my mother’s whole demeanor shifted from a shaking rabbit cornered by a cat to a child with her nose and hands pressed to the cold window. What must it be like for her after all that time, to be free?

  She was a fool if she felt free.

  “Turn right,” she instructed Giovanni, who had the map spread open on his lap as he drove.

  The rain stopped but the roads were still wet and speckled with reflections. Streetlamps cast discs of yellow light on the slick pavement below. I tried to calm my beating heart as we slowed to a stop in front of my childhood home. When Finn had brought me here before, it was sweet and magical. The whole scene was lit in my memory by the light of love and discovery. Returning was like walking from a dreamscape into a nightmare.

  Surprisingly, Gráinne didn’t jump out when we stopped. She sat, wide-eyed and stunned, as she stared at the cottage—white with ivy curtaining the red trim windows and bright red door as I remembered—the home she and my father and I had shared so many years ago, before she disappeared.

  Deep worry lines etched the bridge of her nose. We were all afraid. My stomach settled somewhere near my ankles and Giovanni’s eyes darted, both of us looking for someone to dash out and cripple us with their ability to wrench our auras from our bodies. He clutched the black hilt of the knife he’d used against Griffin in the shack.

  I couldn’t bear to look at that knife. Griffin wasn’t the only person who had felt its bite. My neck throbbed where it had sliced into my skin, leaving a line of puckered dried blood. I bit back a sob, thinking of my father on his knees with a scarlet bloom unfurling on his stomach after Griffin stabbed him. His expression had been so disbelieving. I was the last person he had fixed his gaze upon before the life left his eyes.

  Was it love I saw in their depths? Or blame?

  “What about the people who live here now?” Giovanni whispered as he opened the door for my mother and helped her out.

  “No, no,” she muttered. “No one should live here. Benito told me he would never let it go.” As we walked through the red gate, her slender fingers brushed the metal daisy. “Cora, your da gave me that daisy the day you were born.”

  “Is it strange to call me Cora?” I’d been born Daisy, my name changed when my dad fled with me to the States.

  Gráinne’s straight black hair hung limp over the hanger of her shoulders. So much about her was lifeless, including her eyes when she looked at me and softly said, “None of us are who we were then.”

  “I don’t feel safe here,” Giovanni said, surveying the property.

  “I could be in another time zone and not feel safe. Another planet, even,” I said.

  He nodded his agreement. “Is there a key, Mother?”

  “Mother?” I mouthed.

  He shrugged, a blond curl draping over one stormy blue eye, which was ringed with bruises from the beating he’d gotten when he was captured. “Somebody should call her that,” he said in his bullish way.

  I was about to fire off that he could go get his own mother and quit trying to lay claim to the one I’d just found, but I stopped myself. He couldn’t do that. He never could. Though I didn’t know the whole story, I knew he’d lost his parents when he was little like my mother had lost hers, and for the first time in his life, he had found two other Scintilla. He was no longer alone. Would it be such a bad thing to let him borrow “mother”?

  I thought she’d go to the door, take us inside, and shield us from the enormous sky of stars and the world of shadows. But Gráinne, Mother, immediately strode past the house toward the backyard and the wild patch of daisies whose black faces beamed at the moon. I remembered my vision from my first visit here, of her in this yard, planting. But as I watched her drop to her knees now, her long hair curtaining off both sides of her face as she dug with bare hands, it hit me; I hadn’t seen her planting in that vision.

  I’d seen her burying.

  My mother’s hands ripped furiously at the stalks of flowers, flinging them aside like a god throwing bolts of lightning. I wondered if I’d looked that possessed the day I unearthed the key from under the albino redwood. It hurt to watch.

  “Mom,” I said, trying out the foreign word. “Please let one of us dig for a while. We need to hurry and get out of here.”

  Her arms shook like little stems of wheat trembling in a breeze. Giovanni reached under her arms and lifted her to standing, then dropped to his knees next to me, both of us moving the years of dirt covering my mother’s secret.

  I flinched when Giovanni used the knife to hack at the dirt, remembering the feel of it nicking my neck and the burn of its mark on my back. I hadn’t had time to look at how the knife had marked me, but I knew it had. I had no idea why it sometimes happened when I retrieved memories, but I wore the evidence as a series of tattoos on my skin; strange proof of my power—psychometry—my sortilege as a Scintilla.

  That knife held a memory that had gotten us out of the shack when I used the information to bluff Clancy Mulcarr. Three. What was the mystical significance of three Scintilla? Clancy was so triumphant to have captured us. But he was scared, too. He desperately didn’t want someone or something known as the Society informed of what he possessed. I needed to find out who or what they were, and I needed to know why Clancy’s prize was three.

  With both of us digging, we made better progress. The blue-black sky turned milky. A glow of light flared from the horizon. “Your first sunrise out of that place,” I said to my mother, thinking of the thousands of moons she’d carved in the wooden floor, one for each day of her captivity. I’d also been branded on the palm of my hand by her moon. The clover ring, the key on my shoulder, the moon on my palm, and whatever was on my back, not to mention the cut across my neck. These were the outward scars of my new life.

  I was dizzy with fatigue, struggling to continue digging, to even keep my eyes open, when Giovanni said, “Hey! I think I feel something.” We both scraped faster, peering into the dirt. We spotted s
omething like gleaming white stone, then dug faster to uncover it.

  I sat back on my heels. “Is that what I think it is?”

  My mother, who’d been half dozing against the side of the house as we dug, startled and her eyes flew open. Giovanni flicked the knife underneath the object and used it like a lever to push it up from under the last inch of dirt, then pulled gently.

  “What the hell?” he yelled, dropping the thing. We both scuttled back onto the grass.

  “Oh my God.” I turned to my mother. “You buried a freaking body!”

  Four

  Cora

  “Jesus, Cora. Shut up!” Giovanni hissed, looking around.

  “Not a body,” my mother singsonged with a smile that froze my blood. “Just a hand.”

  Giovanni and I shared a look, something like quizzical horror. What on earth had she brought us here for? I could barely control my voice. “Whose hand?”

  When Gráinne didn’t answer, I paced on the grass. My body shook from chill and fatigue, and fear settled on my skin like the fine mist hanging in the air. I was utterly confused and exasperated. Uncontrollable shivers racked me.

  “This is ludicrous,” Giovanni whispered.

  The sky brightened with every passing moment, and the light scared me more than the darkness. In daylight, anyone might see the three of us, industrious and dirty, bloodied and bruised in the backyard, digging up bones with a knife. At least regular people couldn’t see the silver light of our auras flickering in the dawn. A light flipped on inside a house next door. The world was waking up around us. “We need to get out of here.”

  We all peered into the hole at the bones, so slender they were almost elegant, the hand clutching the soil beneath like it was clinging to the dust it would return to. Giovanni reached in to swipe dirt away from the joints of each willowy finger and his movements stirred up a glint of light. From inside the hole, something shimmered and reflected against the rising sun.

  “What is that? A ring?” I whispered. It looked like a simple gold band. Every cell in my body quivered with revulsion as I reached in the hole to slide the ring off the end of the finger.

  Immediately, I was flung into another time.

  A brutal fight.

  Savage.

  Life or death.

  I’d been cast into the violent red energy of a memory held by the ring. I saw my mother as if I, myself, were the wearer of the ring. We fought and rolled and collided against each other. The images hit fast, like blinding strikes of lightning. A confrontation, running and tackling, and one final, terrifying image of my mother swinging an enormous ax, which caught the hand that had risen up to shield against the blade.

  The hand fell.

  Dropped to the ground with horrific finality.

  Fingers splayed open.

  The ring was revealed in my memory vision. Recognition punched my breath from me; it was the same ring, with the very same double-triangle insignia, as the ring upon Clancy Mulcarr’s hand. And it matched the ruby-red crystalline pyramids that connected at their tips at the top of the key that hung around my neck. What did it mean?

  The last image I saw was that of my mother, grabbing the severed hand and running.

  Sister spots of pain burned my forearms. There would be marks from this ring. I could already feel them branding into me. I struggled for breath and swung my gaze to my diminutive mother, her body withered from maltreatment, her mind half baked from trauma and from her aura being drained over and over these many years. God, the things she’d been through. She had such inner strength.

  I barely knew her, but life had recently taught me that we can barely know anyone, not even ourselves sometimes.

  “You fought for your life,” I said, respect welling up.

  “I fought for ours,” was her answer as she took the ring from my hand and spit unceremoniously on the insignia’s flat surface before wiping it off on her skirt. “I buried the hand after I was attacked. The ring meant nothing until I saw it on Clancy’s finger tonight. It was a new trinket, one I’d not seen him wear before.” With a look of disgust, she handed the ring back to me.

  I hugged my mother then, for her ferocity and for her strength. I’d underestimated her. She was ravaged but lucid enough to understand that this ring might mean something. It was important enough to be worn by the Arrazi who’d imprisoned her for almost thirteen years, and had been worn by her attacker. It had to mean something.

  Too many truths had been buried. She was right to unearth this one.

  Giovanni held the skeletal hand from one finger like he was doing some kind of macabre minuet with a dismembered hand, then tossed the bones back in the hole and shoved dirt over them.

  “I’ll be needing something from inside the house.” Without explanation, Gráinne walked toward the back door, carefully slid a rock out from the loose mortar in the house’s stone foundation, and scooped a key from the hole behind it. Dogs barked in the distance, birds warmed up their singing voices, the hum of increasing traffic reached my ears. The world continued to awaken.

  “Perhaps I should wait outside,” Giovanni said. “Keep a look out. Rush her. We’ve been here too long already.”

  I nodded and followed Gráinne through the back door. The house smelled like timeworn air and thirteen years of dust. “Hurry,” I warned my mother, though in truth, I’d have loved nothing more than to have the leisure to explore the house and trace its memories with my fingers. I’d endure many marks to see my father again.

  I lifted my sleeves to confirm the latest brandings from the ring. One black triangle had formed on the soft underside of each of my forearms. I shoved my sleeves back down. It filled me with contempt that I’d forever carry a mark of the Arrazi. Then I thought about the invisible marks my mother carried and tamped down my scorn. My scars were nothing compared to hers.

  My mom strode through the kitchen with familiarity and the sureness of purpose. “Does it hurt to be here?” I asked.

  “It hurts that my dreams of all three of us returning together are…” She couldn’t say the word.

  Dreams died with my father.

  The kitchen was lifeless—the beating heart of home gone cold. I traced my eyes over its dusty surfaces. An oak table against the wall, crocks that once held flour, sugar, and tea, the square of the root-cellar door cut into the wooden planks on the floor, the farmhouse sink, empty and dry. An embroidered towel still hung from a hook next to it, and I ran my finger over the threads, wondering if my mom embroidered.

  A loud thumping jangled the walls and my already taut nerves. I ran out of the kitchen, following the noise, and found my mother kicking her heel at a patch of drywall in an adjacent room. “What are you doing?” I asked, grabbing her by the shoulders.

  “Let me be,” she said, breathless and still kicking despite my restraining grasp. Small bits of cream-colored drywall crumbled onto the wide plank floor as the wall began to give way. “I have to get something.”

  “Cora!” Giovanni called to me from the back door. “What in God’s holy hell—”

  I let go of my mother and ran back through the kitchen to where he poked his head through the doorway. “She’s kicking the wall to get something from behind it, I think.”

  The hint of a smirk played on his lips. “What, like an entire body?”

  I groaned. “Please, no. I don’t think I can handle that right now.”

  His eyes were sympathetic. “I know. I can’t take much more, either. Everything that’s happened has rivaled my worst memories. We’re lucky to be alive.”

  “We’ll be lucky to stay alive.”

  We stared at each other for a moment. I was grateful to have found him, another silver Scintilla in a world of color, but I couldn’t help but think that we’d made a superhuman promise back in Christ Church that we shouldn’t have made—to do everything we could to find the truth and stop all this. How were we going to stop all this? Did the lambs ever stop the lions?

  “Tell her to hurry and th
at she can’t make this much noise. Someone will hear.”

  “I will,” I said, hearing another succession of thumps from the other room. “It must be important. Go to the car. Be ready. I’ll get her and meet you out front.”

  Giovanni exhaled a ragged breath. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, totally. We’ll be right there.”

  He retreated down the steps and strode around the corner toward the front of the house. I headed back to retrieve my mother and whatever was important enough to beat down a wall with her feet. I skidded to a stop in the middle of the kitchen.

  The cellar door hadn’t been open before.

  Five

  Finn

  The coarse wooden handle of the shovel chafed my hands as I dug. A heap of soil, blackened by the rain, piled up next to the hole, which was as deep as my waist. I couldn’t tell what was mist and what was sweat trickling down my spine. I had to do this. I reckoned that the harder I worked, perhaps the Scintilla energy Cora had transferred into my body against my will would dissipate faster.

  The sooner it did, the sooner I could die.

  I shivered with the memory of her act as I shoveled, a slowed version of the moment she saved my life replaying in my mind. Cora’s dark curls brushing my neck as she’d bent over me, the petals of her lips pressing against mine, the taste of her tears. The essence of her spirit had rolled into me and through me, suffusing every cell in my body with a penetrating spark of light.

  Her aura was the sweetest wine.

  I’d never felt so alive.

  I’d never been so conflicted. My heart and my body were at war.

  I hadn’t wanted her to save me, but I was too weak to fight her—too weak in body, too weak of heart. Even as Cora doubted my love, she gave me hers. It was the most beautiful experience I’d ever known…and the most shameful. When I realized what she’d done, as her Scintilla aura infused me with strength, a primal shred of me wanted to grab her by the shoulders and pull every beam of her energy into my body. That survival instinct, that pure ravenous desire, scared the bloody hell out of me.