Deviate

by Tracy Clark

  Giovanni pecked my forehead with a kiss and spoke against my skin there. “Better to be lost together.”

  “Miss Sandoval?” The doctor approached with a smile and outstretched hand, but I couldn’t lift mine to greet her. I was struck dumb by her polished white aura. She was Arrazi, her aura indicating she had killed. Very recently.

  Seven

  Cora

  Next to me, Giovanni sucked in his breath.

  I shoved past the doctor and ran the length of the corridor to my mother’s room, the tiles of the hospital walls buzzing past. I skidded into her room, banging my hip on the doorframe. Funny how, when you can see life in the pulsing colors around people, you no longer look for other signs. At first, I didn’t register the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor, or the IV dripping consistently into her veins, or the reassuring lift of her chest with each breath. All I saw was her silver—calm as a thick mercury lake—radiating around her body, pulsing in time with her heart.

  My mother was alive, beautifully alive. I collapsed over her with relief. Giovanni and the doctor both rushed in. The doctor looked alarmed at Giovanni, whose arm was outstretched as if to ward us from her. She could kill all three of us within minutes. But the doctor couldn’t see auras; Arrazi could only sense them, and she didn’t know what I knew—that with his sortilege, Giovanni could throw her down with a flick of his wrist.

  Unless she chose to take from him first. Didn’t people always take down the strongest first? That was what I would do.

  “You didn’t kill her,” I said with disbelief.

  Her wary eyes appraised us like we were crazy. “Of course not, miss. Please, be calm,” the doctor said. “Your mother is going to be all right. Whoever injected her with the syringe gave her a very heavy sedative—that’s all it was. She’ll come around very soon.” She peered at me and Giovanni, taking in our disheveled appearance, our mud-caked clothes and bloodstains, my sliced neck. “Are the two of you okay? What’s going on here?” The doctor took a step closer.

  “Don’t!” I yelled, holding up my hand. Her shocked response caused me to ease the harshness in my voice. “Please…don’t come any closer.” Why wasn’t she taking from us? Did she not know what we were?

  Her head cocked to the side, brows crinkled in a puzzled knot as she studied me. I braced myself for the hit of her hungry energy, like a hook being sunk into the flesh of my chest. But none came. She backed slowly toward the door and shouted something over her shoulder to the nurse sitting at her station. “Code remedium.”

  “Latin,” Giovanni said. “In Italian we say remedio—remedy. What is that code meant for? Are you calling more like you?”

  His question stopped her in her tracks. “Like me?” she asked in a near whisper. “What can you possibly mean by that?” There was a telling shake in her voice. “If, like me, you mean more medical personnel, then yes. I see the tattoo on her finger and it matches the one on the airport security video. I know who you two are.”

  “Well, we know what you are. You will call off your code or we will tell everyone what the Arrazi do to innocent people. I’ll bet you have an unnatural number of deaths on your watch, doctor,” I said.

  A puff of disbelief came from the woman. She was trying to play it off, but her aura radiated fear. Yellow seeped into the white around her body. “What are you?” she asked in a whisper.

  Bluffing was the only route I saw to get past her and out of the hospital. “You think you have powers? Your only power is to steal souls, Arrazi. We are,” I said, steeling my voice, “your antidote. We are the remedy.”

  “Never mind!” she yelled to the nurses’ station behind her. “Call off the code. I was mistaken.”

  I reveled in the quiver in her voice.

  “But, ma’am,” the nurse answered from behind her desk, “they’re already here.”

  The IV bag came loose from the pole with a tear. “Carry her,” I commanded Giovanni as I pulled the blankets off my mother’s thin legs.

  “Wait,” the doctor said. Her mouth hung open like every thought in her mind vied for priority. Her eyes pleaded with us as we headed for the door, my mother once again cradled in Giovanni’s arms. As we passed her, she touched my arm. “You’re a different kind,” she gasped. “We are not the same. I—I can feel it.” She swallowed hard; her hand gripped me tighter. “You’re not normal. Tell me, what are you?”

  I shook my arm free. “Your worst enemy, lady.”

  The nurse gaped at us as we spilled from the room and started toward the elevators at the far end of the corridor. The elevators chimed. Two security guards and a man in scrubs came out and ran directly at us. “I can do nothing without my hands,” Giovanni said as he spun around with my unconscious mother and darted in the opposite direction, back toward the doctor, her eyes round with alarm as we ran past her.

  “You there, stop!” yelled one of the men from behind us.

  I frantically scanned the hall for a stairwell, but all I could see were more hospital rooms with people tipping their heads out to see what the commotion was about.

  “This is not necessary,” I heard the Arrazi doctor say with a false laugh. “I was mistaken. These are not the people they’re looking for.” She sounded desperate, fearful, and I was glad for it.

  “Then why are they running?”

  I looked over my shoulder to see her standing between us and the security personnel, blocking them, but one of the officers shot past her. Suddenly his running stalled and a bewildered look crossed his face. I’d seen that look before. His aura waved behind him like a bride’s veil in the wind and flowed into the doctor’s body. Our eyes met briefly. Her face was grim, determined. The man clutched his heart and collapsed.

  She ran to him, and even as she asked if he was all right, even as she felt for his pulse and seemed to administer medical help to him, she greedily took every last drop of his aura. Her eyes closed. The seed of his humanity bloomed in her own, and her aura exploded in white.

  We turned a corner and blasted through the door of an emergency exit stairwell, down the stairs as fast as we could go with Giovanni clasping my mother to him. She moaned, the first sound she’d made since we carried her out of her house. At the first floor, I poked my head through the door. No one was waiting for us. All seemed normal. We walked calmly but quickly out the exit to the car.

  My mother was just coming to when we pulled away from the parking lot. She blinked heavily at me as I explained what had happened. My heart beat a mile a minute, but I tried to sound calm for her sake. I turned to Giovanni. “That Arrazi doctor, she didn’t seem to know what she had right in front of her.”

  Giovanni ran his long fingers over his stubble, touched the scab on his lip with a tip of his finger. He looked deep in thought, his brows creased. “No.”

  “She killed that man. For us—”

  He huffed. “For herself.”

  “Why didn’t she take from us?”

  He smiled then, the first flash in days lit in his eyes. “I suspect that had something to do with you. You were very convincing.”

  “I wonder what her sortilege is. She could have attacked us with her power, but she didn’t. Clancy told me that the allure of a Scintilla is that our energy gives the Arrazi their powers. He also said it enables them to live longer so they have to kill less frequently.”

  “That means that many Arrazi have no power at all because they’ve never tasted a Scintilla’s aura. Most probably don’t even know such powers exist. If they did—”

  “We’d have a swarm of Arrazi on us.”

  “Si.”

  Grim thoughts invaded. “We’ll have them anyway,” I said. “Clancy won’t stop hunting us. He wants three Scintilla for some reason, and he’ll be hell-bent on capturing us again.”

  “He’ll search. Awake and asleep. Let’s hope our trail is lost to him,” my mother said groggily through a yawn. She was always so quiet, it was easy to forget her in conversation, and unwise to do so. After thirteen years,
she knew more about Clancy Mulcarr than any of us.

  I turned to face her in the backseat. “Are you okay?” She nodded but stayed reclined on the seat and pulled the IV from her forearm. I winced. “There’s a black market for Scintilla. God, the sickness of it—people paying money for possession of other people.” Then I thought about slavery and how people were still bought and sold in this world. The human trade was alive and well. It made my stomach sick. “Not too hard to imagine, I guess. This is the world we live in.”

  Giovanni’s expression turned dark. “We are human diamonds. People do ugly things for precious gems.”

  “The Arrazi aren’t the only ones who are after us,” I said. “Clancy Mulcarr said we had enemies in places we couldn’t imagine, enemies who’d do anything to keep the truth a secret. He and Griffin called it the Society.”

  “The ring,” murmured my mother.

  Giovanni nodded. “The problem with trying to find out who or what that symbol stands for is that we might open a box we can’t close.”

  I suddenly thought of Faye and her bookstore, Say Chi’s, back home in Santa Cruz. Someone had wanted her to stop looking into silver auras badly enough to vandalize her shop and leave a threatening note. How did they know what she was researching? How would we search for answers without some great eye staring down on us?

  Mom bolted upright. “My box!” She looked frantic.

  “We have it,” I said. “In the trunk with my duffel.” She visibly relaxed. “What’s in it?” I asked, imagining more keys, or research of hers, or bones. I’d only opened it enough to throw the syringe inside.

  “My birth certificate, an old passport,” she answered. “And a bit of money. Not much, though. Not enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To survive. To fly away.”

  “I’ve got money,” Giovanni said. “But we need to go to the airport to get it.”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked. “The airport, the very place where we were filmed fleeing the scene of two deaths? We can’t go there. You saw the news.”

  He clenched the steering wheel. “I’ll go in alone. It’s too important. I have money there, a copy of my passport, and a cell phone.”

  I crossed my arms. “Don’t see what you need a passport for if you insist on staying in Ireland,” I grumbled.

  “Picking fights is your sortilege,” he replied, and turned off the highway at a sign marked with an airplane.

  A smile bubbled up without my permission.

  Giovanni gave me a look then. His blue eyes roved over my hands and the markings there. He reached and opened my palm with his hand. “I’d like to hear more about your true sortilege,” he said softly.

  “There’s not a lot to tell,” I said. “When I touch certain things, I see a memory.” His eyebrow shot up. “And then it marks me.”

  “Does it upset you?” he asked, still holding my hand. The very palpable singe of electricity was becoming familiar. I felt calmer when he touched me, but invigorated, too. I could see how he’d survived all these years on his own. Scintilla energy was a kind of feel-good magic. It had a soft, rolling warmth of happiness.

  I didn’t know what to make of that. My body burned with the memory of our kiss when he’d regained consciousness after nearly being beaten to death by Griffin. But that had been the response of the pure, primal force of climbing back to life by your fingertips when death was pulling your feet. Giovanni hadn’t known what he was doing. I’d been wrong to respond to him the way I had.

  “Yes, it upsets me,” I finally admitted, trying to focus on the conversation. My jaw clenched. “Very much, and some marks more than others.”

  We pulled into the airport’s parking garage. It took forever to find an empty spot. “I still think this is a bad idea. Leave the keys here. In case.” Giovanni got out of the car, then leaned in the window and gave us a meaningful look laced with fear. “Hurry back,” I said.

  My mother and I quietly watched the tide of people coming and going from the airport. I observed and analyzed their colors, remembering the first confusing days of my ability to see auras. The kids at school were a kaleidoscope of bewildering hues and textures. It felt like too much for someone like me—always flypaper for other people’s emotions. I wanted to turn it off, to escape. But there was no escape from this, from the evidence of emotion, the joy of people, the illness, sadness, lust, anger—and love.

  I saw the color of love all over the place: in the old man helping his wife out of a cab, between the mother and the baby nursing at her breast, between the young couple making out at the bus stop like they were joined at the tongues. People dripped with it.

  Love was the most prevalent color in the world.

  It was beautiful, the colors between people and the way they vibrated and danced together. There was something else I observed, though. In many people, there was a noticeable drawing in of their aura, a self-imposed barrier, as if the last thing they wanted was for their spirit to rub against anyone else’s. The separation was sad to witness, but I could understand it now.

  Self-protection.

  It was the hoarding of the most beautiful thing about us. I saw proof that the opposite of love wasn’t hate but fear. Hate reached out and grabbed, kind of like love did. But fear—it cowered in the corner like a small, terrified animal.

  People were afraid of one another.

  Now I knew why.

  I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms, thinking that what most people wanted was for their colors to feel the beautiful hues of another, to mix and blend with them and have life be painted better by it.

  Connection.

  The color of two hearts recognizing each other. I thought I’d felt that with Finn, and I was sure that now my heart beat black with disappointment.

  My mom reached forward from the backseat, put her hands on my shoulders, and rubbed them comfortingly.

  “Could you see it in my aura?”

  “I don’t have to be Scintilla to see you’re hurting.” She smoothed the hair back from my neck. Like—like a mother would. “I can feel you, too. Thoughts and emotions have energy of their own. I feel your broken heart.”

  I turned to face her, dared to let her in. “I’ve been cracked open. I let myself feel more for someone than I ever have and for what?” Guilt’s arrow pierced me. “I shouldn’t be talking about this.”

  She shook her head and a tear flung with it. “What is love but offering pieces of yourself? Falling in love is no tragedy. It simply means you were brave enough to break a piece off and offer it.”

  “I’m so sorry about Dad,” I choked out. How could I moan about losing Finn in the face of that loss?

  “I’ll never regret the pieces of myself that I gave to your father.” My mom stared hard into my eyes for a moment. “He died more whole than he lived the last thirteen years of his life.”

  “Because he found you…”

  “Darlin’ Cora,” she cooed in her warm Irish accent, “because we were all together once again. Even if for a moment, our broken pieces came back together.”

  “I’ll never be whole again.”

  She smiled into her eyes. “Aye. You will. Either with yourself, with another, or with God.”

  “Or all three?”

  “Now that’s the holy grail, isn’t it?”

  I liked talking with her this way, when her cobwebs were clear and she had some pieces of her own to offer.

  A fresh mass of people washed out from the airport doorways, more than seemed normal. “How long has he been in there?” I asked mostly to myself. It had been too long. Giovanni was supposed to go straight to a locker, get his stuff, and run back out. My heart rocked back and forth in my chest.

  I tapped my fingers on my leg and stared at the doors, waiting for a glimpse of his Viking height, his blond hair, his silver aura. A news van pulled up in front of the airport, and a hair-sprayed man and a cameraman got out and ran inside the building.

  I squeezed the dash
board. “No…”

  What if they recognized him somehow; what if they got him?

  My mom shared my worried look as she watched people file out of the airport. She was biting the ends of her hair again. I didn’t know what to do. Wait? Go look for him and risk getting caught myself? Drive away?

  The engine revved to a growl when I started it. My heart hammered. How could I leave him? How could we stay? How could I manage to drive from the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the freaking road, when I barely knew how to drive at all? My hands shook as I placed them on the steering wheel and prepared to put the car in reverse.

  Gráinne and I both yelped when my door flew open. With one hand on the roof of the car and one hand on the door, Giovanni radiated alarm. He understood what I was about to do. His jaw set rigid as he motioned for me to move back to the passenger’s side. I scooted quickly over but grabbed his arm as he folded his long legs into the car. He wouldn’t look at me.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. There were more people leaving the airport than going in. And then the news van showed up—”

  “Volcano,” he said, tossing a pair of fingerless gloves into my lap. He looked over his shoulder to back the car up.

  “What?”

  “Flights were canceled because of ash in the sky from another volcano eruption in Iceland.”

  “Isn’t that totally oxymoronic? Mountains of fire in Iceland?”

  “It’s not the first time. News crews are in there covering the airport closure and talking about the rise in natural disasters.”

  “Oh, Benito,” my mom said to the air. “You were right.”

  I hoped this wasn’t the beginning of her talking out loud to my father. I hadn’t even had time to process the reality that he was truly gone. That I had to leave his body. That I’d never see him again. Hearing his name struck my chest with force.