by Tracy Clark
That’s when I knew: in order to prove my love to Cora Sandoval, I had to let her go.
Forever.
It hadn’t been the first time I’d had a frightening experience with Cora. I recalled the night her father caught us in her bedroom. That was the moment everything changed. I had this angel of a girl in my arms. Of course I was out of my mind, turned on from rolling together, kissing with abandon in the moonlit bed, but it was more than that. I since realized it had to be the first time I’d unknowingly gotten a direct hit of her Scintilla energy.
I was buzzed with it, reeling, mumbling about how radiant she was. Strange, though… Now that I knew the difference between taking her energy and being given her energy, I saw that night in a new way, and it confused me. In her room, I’d felt like a funnel, her essence pouring into me, like she was actually giving to me.
The more heady and befuddled I’d felt, the more compelled I’d been to warn Cora about what my parents had told me I might become. I’d begun to speak, started to tell her the unfathomable truth, when her dad had walked in on us.
I’d run away from Cora because I thought the euphoric state I was in was a signal that I was becoming a monster. I left her house, came to my senses, and ran home to Ireland the next day. Turned out, I couldn’t run from fate. To add to my list of self-recriminations, she showed up in Ireland, and I couldn’t leave well enough alone. Damn it—I should have left well enough alone. I’d thought will trumped biology.
For the bleedin’ life of me, I’d never understand why we, of all people, couldn’t stay the hell away from each other.
I slammed my heel into the blade of the shovel and heaved another load of dirt onto the grass. Cora had once sat in this very spot, reading from her mother’s journal, trying to unravel the mystery of herself. We had no idea then how much we had in common. How intertwined were our fates. The worst torture was the feeling that I’d found the one, only to be smacked with the cruel reality that it was utterly impossible for someone like her to be with someone like me.
Scoop after scoop, I shoveled until my arms quaked with fatigue, until I caught myself standing in the sunrise, dozing on the crook of my arm over the handle of the shovel.
“Enough of this. Come in now.” My mother’s stern voice carried down to me, startling me awake. From the hole, I peered up at her outline, black against the approaching day. Holding an umbrella in one hand, she bent and reached down to me with the other. I looked at the grave I’d dug, wishing I could pull the earth around me like a blanket and go to sleep.
“Finn,” she urged.
I stabbed the shovel into the dirt and stepped on the blade to raise myself higher. I grabbed her hand and pulled myself from the muddy pit, onto the soaked grass. She waited wordlessly for me to raise myself to my feet. We stood, face to face. I read the look that was in her eyes, the impatient question: I’ve come to terms with what I am. Why can’t you?
She took a step closer and peered into my eyes with a searching intensity. “I see,” she said with a blink of sad comprehension. It was the first time I could remember my mother’s voice cracking. “You have plans to die.”
Six
Cora
Had my mother opened the cellar door?
I couldn’t recall a moment while I’d been talking to Giovanni when her relentless kicking had stopped. My heartbeat spiked as I sidestepped past the gaping hole in the floor to get to her and get the hell out of there. Bells of alarm chimed in my body, and beneath the ringing sang one persistent note of danger. I felt threat behind me as tactile as a gust of wind and swung around.
His gloved hand was already in motion when I’d turned. Ducking, I narrowly dodged a syringe. Before I could cry out, his other arm sliced through the air in a knife-hand strike to my windpipe, right over the stinging cut. I fell backward and slammed into the refrigerator, clutching my throat, wet with new blood. It felt like my neck had been hammered in half. Stars dotted my vision as I gasped for breath, which was as futile as trying to climb a cloud. Nothing would go in. No sound would come out.
The man lunged at me and I kicked my foot hard, catching him in his right knee and knocking him into the cellar door. That man crashed into another who emerged from below. They both scrambled like black spiders to get to me. I still couldn’t scream, could barely breathe. I let go of my neck and pushed myself off the refrigerator, but the man I’d kicked grabbed one of my feet, yanked me down, and pulled me across the floor toward the hole. The gold ring tumbled from my hand and rolled down the cellar stairs.
“Get the other woman!” the man yelled to his comrade.
I kicked at the man’s face and pushed my hands against the dusty floor. Sharp splinters of wood pierced my palms. I couldn’t let them take her, take us! The man pulled my legs and, with one forceful yank, dragged my body toward him and leaped on top of me, pinning me underneath him. His only distinguishing mark was a harelip scar that pulled his mouth into an uneven sneer. He sat on my torso and once again raised the syringe.
These men weren’t Arrazi.
If they were, we’d already be subdued and their auras would flare white in triumph.
Suddenly, the man flew backward off me as though he’d been knocked back by an invisible explosion. He lay in a heap by the sink, unconscious.
Giovanni stood like a warrior in the doorway with one arm extended in the man’s direction. I had seen him use his telekinesis on objects before, but never on people. His jaw dropped as if in shock at what he’d done. I scrambled to my feet and ran to Giovanni as the other man appeared from the adjacent room. Giovanni’s arm brushed like an elegant tai chi move, causing the man to crash into the wall and slip into oblivion with his companion.
Giovanni immediately caught me in an embrace.
“You did that.” My voice came out a hoarse, scraping whisper.
“I had no idea I could,” he said, squeezing me tight. His heart thumped against my cheek. “I’ve never moved anything so big. You okay? I knew I should not have left you.”
I coughed my words out. “You couldn’t know they’d come up out of the freaking floor.”
“Who the hell are these men?”
“Not Arrazi,” I said, tearing through the house in search of my mother. “They would have easily just taken from me and my…oh God!”
Crumpled and still on the floor of the living room, next to a small treasure box, lay my mom. I cradled her head in my hands and pressed my face close to her mouth, feeling for breath, holding my own until I felt something.
It was there, a slow heartbeat.
“They had syringes,” I said to Giovanni as he scooped her into his arms. I gingerly picked up the spent syringe, put it in the box, and placed the box on her stomach. “It could have been poison, anything.” Panic was a rising tide in my blood. Dark shadows already circled her eyes, and she was pale to begin with. How could I know if whatever they’d given her was killing her slowly?
She couldn’t die.
Not both of my parents in one day.
The ones who disappear do so forever.
She had written that to my father about her own parents. It was true for Giovanni’s parents as well.
The Scintilla—a tribe of orphans.
Both of us ran toward the front door, but I changed course. Giovanni yelled at me as I raced back into the kitchen where the two men still lay, out cold. “One sec!” I had to get the ring from the cellar. It was the only real clue we had as to whom Clancy Mulcarr was dealing with and probably whom these men were affiliated with.
My heart pumped like it was three sizes larger as I backed down the creaky stairs, my fingers brushing the silky glue of webs on the ladder rungs. A small rectangle of light shone through the cellar window. Luckily the sun had risen higher and I could see enough to scoop up the ring and slip it onto my finger. I curled my fingers around its image.
Another light illuminated the darkness as well. Squinting into the gloom, I focused on a pin of glowing yellow coming from a tunnel
dug through the wall of the cellar. A tunnel. Whoever they were, they’d been waiting. And watching. For a very long time.
I climbed back up the ladder and heaved myself onto the kitchen floor. Holding my breath, I lifted the hand of the man who had attacked me.
“Cora!”
Giovanni’s cautious warning didn’t deter me. There, near the man’s head, was his syringe. I grabbed it and ran.
Giovanni cradled my mother like a sleeping baby and sprinted through the door. He poured her into the car’s backseat and I climbed in, supporting her head on my lap. She looked so small. “We have to take her to the hospital. Whatever they stuck her with could be lethal. She can’t die, G. She can’t.” Tears streamed down my cheeks. One landed on my mother’s forehead like a holy drop of prayer.
“It’s like she’s sleeping,” Giovanni said, directing the car back onto the main road and looking in the rearview mirror constantly. “Maybe they wanted to knock us out, not kill us.”
“We can’t guess. It could be moving through her bloodstream. It could be killing her while we argue about it. Take us to a hospital. Now.”
“If we can get my things from the airport locker, I can call a contact of mine. He’s a doctor and might be able to help. Discreetly.”
“Might isn’t good enough. You take us to the hospital now or get out of this car and I’ll take her there myself.”
“Damn it, Cora! It’s not a question of splitting up. I’m not leaving you. But waltzing into a hospital when—”
I shot him a look that could wither a cactus.
“Hospital it is.”
The waiting room reeked of sick normalcy: crying toddlers, old people slumped over in sleep, an impatient woman with what looked to be a scratch on her arm, acting like it had been cut off.
My mind flashed to the image of my mother hacking off the hand of her attacker. I shuddered and made my way to the desk, squeezing the ring in my palm. When the staff saw Giovanni behind me, carrying an unconscious woman, we were immediately ushered in through the double doors. The woman with the scratch glared.
The nurse barraged us with a flurry of questions. “We were attacked,” I stammered. “I have no idea who they were or what they injected her with. We found her unconscious on the floor.”
“Injected?”
The nurse flinched and her aura splayed out fearfully when I produced the empty syringe from the box.
“Is your mother a recreational drug user?”
“No!”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.”
“I see.” She asked me to deposit the syringe in a plastic container and trotted with it down the hallway.
Giovanni and I were asked to wait in an adjacent waiting room despite my protests to stay with my mother. I didn’t want her to wake up without me. I prayed she would wake at all. An elderly man walked toward us with his arm draped protectively around a crying woman. They flopped down together in chairs opposite us. Grief was blue-black twilight rippling around their bodies. She dabbed the corners of her red eyes with a cloth handkerchief and inhaled in rapid bursts. A very big cry of very bad news.
Oppressive dread weighted my chest. I’d have to deliver very bad news. Janelle and Mami Tulke had to be told about my father’s death. The grieving ache burned with fresh flames. How could I tell his wife and his mother he’d been murdered? Hate also charred me. Hate for Clancy, who’d taken the soul of a man already on his knees, begging for our lives.
My fists clenched so hard they hurt.
Giovanni must have sensed the rage in my aura because he softly laid his hand over mine, giving it a gentle squeeze and an infusion of calming energy. The electric current of our auras merged, making my hand thrum pleasantly. For a brief second, I thought to pull away, but I left my hand under the soothing blanket of his.
The woman sobbed inconsolably, each lurch of her body making me cringe. Giovanni and I glanced at each other and somehow I knew what he would do. He sent his energy, the light of his silver aura, in the couple’s direction. They couldn’t see what he was doing, of course, but they could surely feel it, as I could, as a warm cloak of comfort.
I tried to do the same, but my aura sputtered pathetically around me. My anguish was a cage, holding back my light.
Thanks to Giovanni, the woman’s sobs immediately lessened in frequency, like fading contractions. She curved into her husband’s side and closed her swollen eyes, spent. His relief was evident as he rolled his head back against the wall and exhaled.
The waves of my own grief broke less violently. Giovanni’s Scintilla energy probably accounted for that. It felt deliriously good to relax and let my body drift into sleep. Exhaustion crumbled me into hard bits. The last time I’d slept was nearly twenty-four hours ago, in captivity, with Giovanni’s warm breath on my neck. That was how Finn had found us. It wasn’t what he thought when he saw us wrapped around each other in sleep. It was two Scintilla, two caged birds, with our wings over each other for safety.
I woke abruptly, my head jerking forward in panic. Yawning, I noted the clock. We’d been asleep for nearly two hours. The grieving couple was gone, and Giovanni and I were alone in the waiting room with only the flicker of the television mounted from the ceiling. He was sound asleep with his mouth open like a sigh. His hand had slipped from over the top of mine and cupped the inside of my thigh. I lifted it up by his sleeve and set it in his own lap. When I saw what was on the television news, I nudged him awake.
An alarming incident has public health officials baffled. In the heart of New York City, a subway car rolled to a stop at Grand Central Station with three dead passengers. The landmark station was shut down for forty-eight hours afterward for investigation. Other passengers on the train insist they noticed nothing strange and cannot say what might have caused the mysterious deaths. Some passengers are being quarantined by the CDC for medical testing while authorities seek the remaining passengers who had exited the train before the deaths were noticed. “I thought they were sleeping,” said one witness. Health officials say they are doing everything they can to determine the cause of the deaths. Similar reports have come out of California and some European countries, causing preliminary concern about an epidemic.
Meanwhile, local authorities are asking for help in finding these two people… They are pleading for the young couple to turn themselves in for questioning.
“They may have seen something that can help us. They could be the key.”
The familiar image popped up of me at the Dublin airport, kneeling next to the elderly dead couple. All that could be seen of Giovanni was his arm as he pulled me up and we took off running into the rain. They then showed the blown-up picture of my finger with the ivy marking, the first I’d received when I had the vision of my father talking to Mami Tulke. My stomach plunged as they played the footage from the airport again. I stuck my hand under my leg.
“It’s getting worse. What if we turned ourselves in?” I whispered, looking around to make sure no one could hear. “We’d be isolated, safe from the Arrazi. Maybe they would get us out of Ireland.”
“You think we’d be safe?” Giovanni asked with a derisive puff of a laugh. “Ask yourself, why us? We’re not the only witnesses to the deaths around the world. Why are they so keen to get us, specifically, in for questioning?”
“Using the media to get to us?” I asked, my fingers curling into my fists. “If you’re right, that’s a scary amount of influence.”
“Even if I’m not right, if we turned ourselves in, the Arrazi and whoever attacked us today would know exactly where we were. Don’t forget, Cora. The Arrazi first found you in California. They’re everywhere. We’ve got to find a way to stop them from killing our kind and innocent humans. Until the Arrazi are dead, we won’t be free.”
I crossed my arms. “We’re on the run. We’re not free now. Maybe another country—”
He smacked his hand on the armrest of the chair. “This is where we need to be! I’ve be
en all over the world, searching. Nothing came of it, until I came to Ireland.”
“It’s amazing how you can go from Sleeping Beauty to Captain Intensity in seconds.”
He arched his brows playfully. “You think I’m a beauty when I sleep?”
I ignored that. “What if, through helping to figure out what’s going on with the”—I pointed at the television—“drop-dead people, we latch onto the way to stop the Arrazi? It could be connected. My father thought it was. I don’t know about all that energy stuff, but I think this has something to do with Scintilla and Arrazi. We saw that Arrazi man walking away when those people died at the airport. I bet he killed them. I bet that’s what’s been happening all over, and the world thinks it’s some stupid virus. But if they could see auras like we can, they’d probably see an Arrazi walking away from each scene.”
Giovanni looked stone resolute and I didn’t understand it. Both of our auras spiked in pointed jabs at each other. “I don’t need your permission to talk to the authorities or leave Ireland,” I said, wanting to elude the heft of his domineering ways. Adding you’re not the boss of me would probably not help. Everyone who says that says it to someone acting like they’re in a position of authority, and Giovanni Teso was definitely not the boss of me.
Giovanni suddenly grasped the sides of my face with mild firmness; his palms were an electric layer of warmth on my cheeks. He held my gaze and I held his, which, surprisingly, wasn’t angry, but intense and afraid. “Stop trying to separate us, would you please? We need each other. I’ve gone most of my life without knowing another Scintilla, without having someone who understands. Remember how alone you felt when you thought you were the only one?”
I nodded reluctantly.
“How do you feel now?”
Thick emotion welled up in my throat. The improbability of my life now chipped away at my meager bravado. Whose life was this? I’d slipped into the current of a bad dream that wouldn’t let me go. “I feel lost,” I heard myself say, and the tears finally flowed. I sagged into his chest, releasing the pressure of grief and fear I’d held in for weeks, days, hours. I felt helpless and untethered without the rock of my father, without the love of Finn, without any security or safety at all in this bewildering new world.