by Tracy Clark
“Are they behind us?” I asked after enough time and distance had passed and when it became clear that Giovanni needed a rest, if only for a few moments. He’d have to keep running though, as Finn’s father’s car was back at the hotel and out of our reach. We were officially on foot, with only the possessions we’d concealed on our bodies or shoved into the backpacks. I looked around, recognizing nothing. I’d never felt more like a stranger.
“I don’t see anyone,” Dun panted, looking behind us. “I slowed that man down with a good kick to his shillelagh. He shouldn’t be able to walk normally for a while, let alone run.”
Giovanni bent forward, catching his breath, then eyed me. “I don’t think they expected five of us. Where’d you get pepper spray? It’s illegal in the UK and Ireland.”
My eyes darted to Mari, who shrugged nonchalantly and said, “You can obtain anything if you know where to shop.”
We turned another corner and walked into a crowded boulevard with no cars, only shoppers and tourists everywhere. I recognized this place. I’d seen it before while walking with Finn from the park to the pub the night we were reunited.
Stupid, meddling fate.
“The church,” Giovanni and I both said at the same time. Christ Church was nearby and would be teeming with tourists. We’d be anonymously concealed in a crowd. “Maybe we could wait there until it closes,” I said. “We have to get off the streets and out of sight.”
We shuffle-walked a bit more, surely looking like a band of paranoid tweakers. The peaks of the medieval cathedral rose in front of us like a granite mountain, grayish-brown and imposing. Together, we stepped forward, but I faltered. “Maybe we shouldn’t go in there,” I said, feeling a flurry of trepidation in my stomach. “There are a lot of people—and—we could be seen. Maybe we should find another place to hide.”
Every choice I’d made since deciding to go to Ireland had led to disaster. I looked at the four other people surrounding me, each of whom I was bonded to. What if coming to the church led to one of them getting hurt, or worse, like my dad?
“Don’t do that,” Giovanni whispered, pulling me aside. “I can see it. You’re wrestling with your demons right now. The real demons were back at that hotel. Don’t doubt yourself. Doubt is the enemy of action, and we have to act.”
I looked up into the steady blue of Giovanni’s eyes. He always seemed so sure. I envied that about him. “I don’t want anyone else to die because of me.”
Giovanni placed his palm on my cheek, his face softening. “What happened to your father was not your fault. No choice has a guaranteed outcome. Your father died because they are devils.”
I wanted to believe him, but loss hammered at my confidence. First my father, and now—grief pressed me—Finn. Did he really go off to die? It hurt to breathe. “When I saw Clancy taking from you, I thought I might lose you, too,” I admitted, and realized as I said it that it would shatter me to see Giovanni’s light go out. How many more people would die before this was over?
His fingertips traced under my chin as he stared intently into my eyes. His look sobered as he curled his fingers into his palm and dropped his hand to his side. “You’re the first person in my life, since my parents, who has cared if I lived or if I died.”
What a sad thing to say.
I reached for his hand and squeezed my fingers around his, wanting him to know he wasn’t alone anymore, and in doing that, I realized that I wasn’t, either. We were lost together.
We nodded a silent, resolute agreement and led the group past the ruins of the chapter house and through the wooden doors of the oldest church in Dublin. Cool air hit my skin and goose bumps flared on my arms. Missing nothing, Giovanni ran his hand down them, the warmth caressing my skin.
Everyone walked calmly and as inconspicuously as possible across the shiny tiles into the large cathedral. Dun and Mari verged away from us toward something that had caught their eye. Neither of my best friends had admitted to crushing on the other, but it was obvious. Perhaps stronger in Dun. The yellow fear that had been so prominent in their auras moments ago faded to a mix of honeyed emotions connecting across the few feet between them. They were never apart, even when they thought they were.
I wondered: if everyone did that, let their auras blend with others, would there be any separation between us at all? How far could people expand their energy? How close did an Arrazi have to be to kill? Seemed that we had run about four car lengths from Clancy to be out of his reach.
“We need to get to a new age bookstore or something,” I said to Giovanni. “I’m not going to spend my whole life running. I’m going to spend it looking for answers about energy until we end this.”
He nodded, a beam of admiration shining from his eyes.
Triangular panels in the arched ceiling stretched overhead like the billowing sails of a massive Viking ship. The more I looked at the pattern, the more it reminded me of the design on the key and on the ring underneath my gray fingerless gloves. I held the underside of my arms out to see the triangle markings again. There was one on each forearm, but facing different directions. Triangles everywhere.
Trailing my gaze past the ceiling and down to the Gothic stained-glass windows, my pulse quickened when I noticed a white stained-glass window inlaid with red glass, forming a banner. In the middle of the banner were two intersecting gold keys. The keys so closely resembled mine, both the real one and the marking on my shoulder, that I gasped. I lifted my sleeve, peered again at the marking of the key, then back up to the window.
My body was becoming a map, but to where? “This has to mean something…”
My mother brushed my arm. “I reckon it might.”
“Your journal said something about the ‘Scintilla holding the keys to heaven.’ That’s what the key is about, right? You think this key will open something that will tell us about ourselves?”
“A key is but half a puzzle. We could search our whole lives for what it opens and never find it.” My mother’s eyes turned sad.
“And for how many lifetimes has that key remained hidden?” Giovanni murmured. “It could mean nothing now. It could open nothing.”
“The images it holds mean something, though,” I said to both of them. “I saw the memories in this key. If there was one predominant message,” I said, tracing its shape through my T-shirt, “it’s a vague message about threes. And it’s a warning to anyone who tries to decipher it.”
Giovanni listened with his hands on his hips. “That number again.”
“Yes.”
My mother tapped me on the arm and motioned for us to sit on a couple of the many chairs filling the cathedral. Giovanni and I had done that very thing once, when we talked in urgent whispers, knee-to-knee, one Scintilla to another. That was the day I vowed to continue my mother’s search for answers despite my growing fears.
It seemed a true decision doesn’t happen in one flagrant moment of daring. If you’re tested, you have to choose, over and over again.
My mom patted my leg as I sat down and blew my worries out in a big exhale.
“I married your father here,” she said, her eyes glistening with new tears, her aura glistening, too, as if her whole being was crying.
I squeezed her hand. “I know you did. I found the invitation. I bet it was beautiful.” A frond of longing uncurled in my chest. It would have been achingly sweet to see them sit here now, quietly, hand in hand, reliving that memory together.
My mother’s eyes traveled to the front of the church, watching her own memories from long ago. Quickly, she snapped her gaze back to me with a rare, delighted grin. She clasped my hand and closed her eyes.
My mind twisted into a memory.
The church filled with beams of color from bright sun striking through the stained-glass windows. The church also filled with the colors from the auras of the guests who had congregated to watch the special event. I looked down at bare feet poking out from a ruffled hem of ivory lace. When I looked up, I saw my father stand
ing before me. He beamed at me, or rather, at my mother, with such an expression of pure love that it could be called holy.
Marrying her was his most sacred act, a sacrament of the heart.
My own heart fluttered with the delicate grace of a small bird. Tears filled my eyes as the scene played in my mind. This wasn’t psychometry or object-memory that I was picking up. This was my mother using her sortilege to infuse me with the memory of their wedding.
They clasped hands in front of a metal cage affixed to the wall, which held an old wooden heart behind its bars. They spoke about true love never being bound like that. No bars separated their hearts from each other. They then walked together down the aisle. My father escorted her because she had no father to do so. He was her family now. A tiny woman bound their hands together with a satin green ribbon in a ceremony known as handfasting. I knew her as my father’s mother, Mami Tulke. Hanging from the shimmering ribbon was the key I wore around my neck. It had been a gift from my grandmother to her son’s bride, a rare woman who shone silver—like her.
The vision faded. Tears streamed down my face and dropped onto a lion tile at my feet. She reached up and wiped my cheek. “Thank you.” My words came out through a dam of emotion. “It was like I was there with you and Dad. I’d love to see the wooden heart.”
“It’s no longer here. Someone stole the heart from its cage. I read about the theft a few years ago, in a paper Clancy brought to me.”
Weird. Why would someone steal an old wooden heart from Christ Church? “This key came from Mami Tulke? Did she tell you what it’s for?”
“She didn’t know.”
“Where did she get it?”
“She wouldn’t say. She only said that some people bury with shovels and others bury with keys. She told me to guard it, always, because she took it from someone who’d guarded it for centuries.”
“We’ve got to get a hold of her and ask,” I said. “I saw so many memories in that key. Did you put them there?”
“No. I had it with me when I hid my journal at Trinity Library, and I knew only that that moment was being recorded in the key.”
“When I found your journal, I expected a memory to spring from it. But there was nothing.”
“I had to write the words so that anyone could see the truths I was uncovering. Words are humans’ most powerful sorcery.” Her head dipped. “The woman who wrote in that journal is gone now.”
“No,” I said, ducking to look in her face. “Only if you decide she is. If that woman is gone, then what are we doing? Why not run from Ireland and run the rest of our lives?” I was grasping at the tangled edges of obsession, wanting desperately to have freedom, but also to have answers, an end to all of this. But I couldn’t truly have one without the other. Freedom is a land of answers, not unanswered questions.
Giovanni came to our sides, concern in his eyes. I wondered if he was alerted by the craze in my aura.
“You are doing what I was,” Gráinne said, “fighting for more than yourself. For the lives you might save. For the children you will have.” Her eyes flickered from me to Giovanni. She had the wrong idea about us. “So no more Scintilla will disappear.” My mother had stood again but now slipped to sitting, more like her legs giving out than a purposeful act. “I feel useless. I’m a bird with broken wings.”
Dun wandered back to us and sat down quietly next to my mother as she spoke. He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. I envied the ease with which Dun reached for her, his ease of giving to others. He was practically a stranger to her, but she didn’t seem to mind. Their long black hair mingled. It made me think of auras and how people didn’t realize the ways they touch.
“You were caged too long. Some birds grow to like the safety of their cages,” Dun said to the little bird under his wing. “But not you. Not your daughter, either. My grandmother used to say, ‘A bird has two mothers: the mighty wind, and the one who teaches, by example, to ride it.’”
I smiled at them and scanned the room again, paranoia making it a habitual need. I tracked the clipped walk of a very polished woman carrying a clipboard in front of her silk blouse. She stopped to speak to a church employee near us and leaned in with a practiced smile to whisper, “The cavern looks very well appointed for the party. The Society will be pleased that the church has taken such care to arrange things.”
Every sense amplified. My heart pounded the familiar beat of alarm. My eyes took in the tourists nearest me, assessed their auras. The candles crackled in their votives. The first time I’d heard those two words, a knife had been at my throat. I glanced from the woman to the ring on the underside of my finger. The Society…
Fourteen
Cora
The man’s face showed no emotion as he replied to the woman, “All due to your superb event planning, I’m sure.”
She inclined her head.
“C’mon,” I said, pulling Giovanni up from the bench and across the aisle of chairs toward the pair.
As we approached them, she said, “I will, of course, be back in the hours before the event to check on things and see to it that all runs smoothly.”
“Of course,” the man replied.
“Excuse me,” I said in a squeaky voice while tapping lightly on her shoulder.
The woman turned with a question in her eyes.
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but it sounds like you are just what we need,” I blurted. My hand pulsed in Giovanni’s. I could feel his eyes on me, but was afraid to look at him. I hoped he was savvy enough to play along. If anyone was, it was him. “I—we—are getting married and will be needing an event planner of the highest, um, quality.” Deep breath. I needed to calm down. “Do you do weddings?” I asked. In the history of voices, none was higher.
The woman’s eyes raked over our disheveled appearances with a quick flick of her eyes before she tipped the clipboard forward to get her business card. She pressed the clipboard against her chest too quickly and held the crisp ivory card out to me. Damn! I needed to see that piece of paper.
Giovanni squeezed my hand, pressing the ring against my skin. A whip of energy lashed past me and the woman’s board suddenly dropped to the ground.
“Oh!” Both of us bent to the floor, her fingers hurriedly scraping papers into a pile. She was quick, but not quick enough that I didn’t get the most pertinent details. Bal Masqué. Friday night at 8:00 p.m.
I handed the invitation back to her. The woman stood, obviously annoyed, which she tried to mask with a hasty smile. “I’d be happy to discuss your wedding with you. Give me a call. Best wishes.” She gave a quick nod to the church employee before walking out.
“I don’t know who this Society is, but they have a connection to the Arrazi somehow and I’m going to find out what it is.”
“How?”
I looked up at him and grinned. “Looks like I’ve got a party to crash.”
“You can’t do that.”
“Watch me.”
“If this is the same Society, it’s too dangerous, Cora.”
I slipped my hand from his. “We’re in danger just getting out of an elevator! We’re in danger walking down the street. We are in danger no matter where we go because they are looking for us, everywhere, all over the damn world. Clancy will not stop. Do you understand that? We have to find a way to stop him.”
“But—”
Holding up my hand, I said, “No. Clancy is a part of this Society. Why else would he have a ring with their symbol on it? But by keeping the three of us, he was doing something secretive. He was nervous for them to know what he was up to. If I can find out why, then we’ll have some kind of leverage on him.”
Mari and Dun had come up next to us. Giovanni sighed in surrender. “Then we’ll go together.”
“Bad idea,” I said. “It’ll be hard enough for me to crash the party. And it would be stupid to simply hand them two of us if we’re caught.”
“Party crashing? I like the sound of this,” Mari said.
I turned away from Giovanni’s furrowed brows. “You should,” I said to her. “You finally get to put some sequins on me.”
We got more than a few suspicious glances throughout the early evening from the workers in the church. As darkness fell, we were politely swept out like leaves into a cold wind that smelled of salt and dust, reminding me of the Santa Cruz boardwalk on a rainy day.
“Now what?” Mari asked.
We were all thinking it.
“I say we pool together some cash and find a room off the beaten track, but close enough to town that we can get a party outfit for me and have access to an internet café or a library. We’ve got research to do, and we need a place we can hole up until the party.”
“I’m urging you, Cora.” Giovanni stood behind me, whispering into my ear. “The scientist I’ve told you about, he will help us, and with any luck, find a way to stop all this.”
“I’m not ready to put my trust in someone I don’t know,” I said, turning my face a little too quickly, causing my lips to brush the scruff on his jaw. The familiar sensation set off pangs of hurt. I raised my hand to his cheek. Lips have keen memories, and the sensation reminded me too much of Finn. “You should really shave,” I said.
Giovanni’s brows bent in an amused smile, but he didn’t move. I dropped my hand and tried to look away, but he adjusted his body and tilted his face into my line of sight, forcing me to look into his eyes. Those eyes were a relief because they were nothing like Finn’s. Giovanni’s were the wild ocean glinting in the sun, versus Finn’s honey-dipped earth.
My heart shuddered. He’s surely dead by now. Somehow, I felt it. Like the golden thread between us had slackened. I knew better than to believe anything Clancy Mulcarr said, but hadn’t Finn promised me himself that he preferred death? Even if we were forever apart, I couldn’t imagine a world without Finn in it.