Deviate

by Tracy Clark

  “You’re dumb,” Mari whispered.

  “Am not. You are.”

  I could have lain there all night and listened to their stupid-awesome chatter, but I found myself mystified by the zings of pinkish-gold radiance flying over top of me from one to the other. I felt like I was in a love cross fire. When were they going to admit to me that they had the hots for each other? I could deal. Maybe, it occurred to me, they hadn’t admitted it to themselves.

  “How are we going to get you out of here?” Mari asked, bringing us all back to harsh reality.

  “First, we need to get you and Dun out of here and back home.”

  “I’m not leaving this island without your fully realized butt.”

  “If you don’t, Mari, you might never leave at all. This isn’t a movie. This is real life and people are trying to kill us.”

  Dun gently nudged my side. “Is that more of the positivity you’re supposed to be working on?”

  “What do you suppose Dante meant by ‘a mighty flame follows a tiny spark’?” Giovanni busted our little dome of quiet. He stood in the doorway, book in hand.

  I sat up. “Clancy called me ‘little silver spark’ once. If we were the tiny spark, then I suppose Dante could have been talking about the Scintilla being pursued my something much bigger and mightier, if he was talking about us at all.”

  “I believe he was. And in the canto with that quote, he speaks of lifting up a prayer ‘that Cyrrha may reply.’ Cyrrha is widely thought to be code for Apollo, god of light and truth. I want to go back to the internet café and do some looking into Dante’s life.”

  I scooted off the end of the bed. “Let’s go. I want to see if I can find that painting online.” I gave Mari’s leg a squeeze. “You guys wanna come?”

  “Nah,” Mari said, rolling her head to peek at Dun. “Are you taking your mom?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not smart for the three of us to be together all the time. We’re a beacon to the Arrazi, especially together.”

  “Do you think it’s like that?” Dun asked. “That you put off some kind of mojo like one of those silent dog whistles and all nearby Arrazi come sniffing?”

  Giovanni answered. “They can sense us, yes. We’re in danger because we don’t know they’re Arrazi unless their aura is white or we are close enough to feel their peculiar energy—”

  “Energy that I haven’t yet learned how to detect,” I interrupted.

  “You might be surprised,” Giovanni said, looking down at me. “You’ve been attacked by two and have known one other, quite intimately.” He looked away from me, pursing his lips together.

  Intimately. An assumption on his part, but one that still made my stomach cave. I’d never feel Finn’s unique energy again. My father’s and my first love’s distinctive and gentle energies were lost to me forever.

  My mother wouldn’t be put off from going with us to the café. “Don’t make me useless, I don’t want to be separated from you, Cora,” she said, softening my resolve with sadness. Truthfully, I didn’t want her out of my sight, either. I’d worry about her constantly.

  The three of us walked down a patchy grass path from the cottage to the main road that led to the small town. The crumbled ruin of an old home rose up from the knee-high field grass behind a stone wall. Mari had previously taken to exclaiming, “Beautiful random old shit!” every time we passed a decaying remnant of the past.

  I wondered what she and Dun were up to back at the cottage, all alone.

  Giovanni hooked my mother’s arm in his after she slipped on a patch of uneven ground. She smiled gratefully. Content to be alone with my thoughts, I strolled a few steps behind them until we reached the Turkish coffee shop. Orhan, the owner, greeted us warmly when we walked in. Giovanni bought coffee in little demitasse cups and baklava to eat while we worked. There were many more people occupying the row of computers than before. We settled into a booth, waiting for one to free up. When it did, my mother elected to stay in the booth until a computer freed while Giovanni scooted a chair next to mine so we could share the single terminal.

  “Look up Dante’s life,” he said. “What? Why do you purse your lips together?”

  “You’re bossy.”

  “I prefer decisive.”

  “I prefer you to get your own terminal.”

  He laughed. “I prefer your lips when you’re sleeping. Full and parted slightly when you are relaxed. Better than pinched together and telling me I’m bossy.”

  He’s studying my lips when I sleep? “You shouldn’t watch people when they sleep. It’s creepy.”

  His head tilted sideways, as it did when he found something I said perplexing. I typed Dante’s name. Giovanni leaned in. “You call for them in your sleep.”

  My fingers paused above the keyboard. I didn’t need to ask for whom. My shoulders curled forward as Dante Alighieri’s history popped up on the screen. Nothing in the poet’s life in the Middle Ages suggested that he’d had special knowledge of other breeds of human. No, it wouldn’t, right? Someone wanted us to be a secret. It wouldn’t be that easy. Banished from Florence for his politics, many believed The Divine Comedy to be a thinly veiled arrow of resentment that Dante launched at the Florentine government while in exile. I pulled up Paradiso on the computer while Giovanni thumbed through his book. As I read, I couldn’t help thinking it was so much more than a poem.

  It seemed a disguised message.

  “Interpretation is always filtered through the perception of the individual,” Giovanni said after I told him my thoughts. “I agree that his writing seems to speak of us, but I want to be sure I’m not grasping for what I want to see.”

  “I don’t think both of us are seeing things in Paradiso just because we want to. It’s not every day you talk about people’s colors changing.”

  “I told you, talk of auras was once very common. Look at the religious art throughout history. Auras galore. But it fell out of fashion. A belief in auras, he very well may have had. But can we truly say he knew of Scintilla or Arrazi?”

  I chewed the pad of my thumb while, with the other hand, I scrolled through artwork inspired by Dante. “No, it’s not proof,” I conceded. “And we might be wasting our time. Though, the connection to threes…” I threw up my hands. “Maybe we’re better off sticking to what heaven this key opens, why Clancy wants three of us, or how the Arrazi are connected to a secret society that wants us dead.”

  He didn’t look up from the book. “Si.”

  An image rolled past on the screen and I stopped, my heart flaring and thundering in my chest like it gave off an audible hammering to everyone within earshot. “G,” I said, barely containing the shock in my voice. “Look at this.” The black-and-white painting that hung in Finn’s house filled the screen. The same two people, gazing up into the sky where the same spiral of whirling angels circled in the clouds. “The painting is by an artist named Gustave Doré.”

  “Mmmm,” he said, glancing up.

  “Look! The name of the painting. It’s called Scintillating Host of Heaven.”

  Twenty-Three

  Cora

  Buzzing. All three of us were buzzing. Yes, we were three Scintilla looking for clues or meaning. Vague perceptions of truth or evidence were bound to happen. They were flimsy strings of ideas we tried to clutch in the wind. But these were more than coincidences. Even my mother, whose sanity had been stripped and sanded with the years of energy-battering, covered her mouth in wonder when we showed her the painting.

  Our silver auras erupted and glowed around our bodies, melding together in a symphony of excitement. We were so potent that I couldn’t calm my racing heart. Thank God the effect of us together couldn’t be seen by regular people. We were walking silver fireworks! I became paranoid when I noticed a woman repeatedly walking past and slowing near us for no reason. We had to get out of public and to the privacy of the cottage. Again, I was glad the airport video showed only my profile with a hoodie over my head.

  On the strol
l back, someone abruptly opened a car door in front of us and my mother gasped, jumping vertical like a startled kitten.

  “What is it?” Giovanni asked, looking around with panic in his eyes.

  “I was taken right off the street,” she answered, breathless. “When I disappeared.”

  Giovanni’s face suddenly became an impassive mask, but his aura churned and spit like a silver fire. I put my arm around her shoulder. “What happened?”

  “One moment, I was walking down a sunny street. I remember hearing a car door open right behind me. I started to feel faint and was having trouble walking. I remember thinking I might be getting sick. I became so weak, like my skin was thin. Then I passed out. I came to and I was Clancy’s prisoner. In one moment, I lost my family. I lost everything.”

  Giovanni remained quiet after that. We walked in silence until we came upon a little grocery store. He slipped inside for a few minutes and returned carrying a grocery sack. When we arrived at the cottage, he set the bag on the counter and pulled out a bottle of red wine. “I need to relax,” he announced while rummaging through the cabinet drawers for a corkscrew. His aura and body language broadcast high excitement of our discoveries, but also agitation.

  “Research went that well, huh?” Dun asked.

  Giovanni uncorked the wine like a pro. “Mmm-hmm. All my years of searching for clues to our history never turned up something so exciting. Always hints, but nothing that felt so concrete and real.”

  “Auntie,” Mari said to my mother, “when you were researching years ago, did you ever find something that made you feel this excited?”

  Mom pulled a loose string on her sweater and began tying little knots in it like a rope. “Nothing was more exciting than meeting others like me in Chile. I found out I wasn’t alone,” she said, a trace of wonder still evident in her voice all these years later. “I never knew my parents. Until then, I had no idea if I was the only one. It felt so good not to be alone.”

  Giovanni stopped mid-pour. He nodded slowly, but his aura retracted as she spoke. Even if I couldn’t see auras, I could see the hurt that warped his features. He raised his glass to an invisible guest and downed it.

  Hours later, after the simple cans of chili we heated and the bread we used to stretch the meal were eaten, the house quieted enough for me to fall asleep. It wasn’t long before I woke though. I was sure someone had said my name in the darkness.

  “Yes?” I said, but no one answered. The soft fall of footsteps outside made every nerve tingle with alertness. I listened harder. Someone was definitely outside. Careful to stay away from the window, I tiptoed in a half crouch to the kitchen and felt around for the knife we’d used to cut the bread. Holding it at my side with shaking hands, I walked slowly toward the wide-open front door.

  Moonlight cast a disc of white at the front door and to the steps beyond it, illuminating Giovanni’s dirty-blond curls against the darkness. He sat on the step, back hunched, head bowed. My brain thought for a moment that maybe he was reading Paradiso by the light of the moon. But I was wrong. As I stepped closer, I realized his wide shoulders shook with quiet tears.

  I set the knife down and stepped through the door, past him, my feet hitting the night grass, cool air playing on my skin as I stood in front of him. He didn’t look up at me when I bent to place my moonlit hand on his shoulder. Should I go? I started to back up, but his hands circled my waist. He pulled me forward and buried his cheek against my stomach, clutching me to him like a little boy clutches his blankie. My breath hitched. The gesture was so intimate, but so innocent, too.

  The dampness of his tears pressed through my T-shirt to my skin. Suspending my hands above his head, I clenched my fingers, unsure. Finally, I wound my fingers into Giovanni’s curls and cradled his head against me as he cried softly. I imagined he hadn’t been held or comforted much in his lonely life. How sad that was. Everyone needed a trusted friend they could cry with.

  His hands curled into the ridge at the small of my back as he fought to regain his composure. He finally looked up at me, and when I felt the beat of his aura change from small and wounded to something stronger, I stepped back, brushing his wet cheeks with my thumbs as I did. “What’s wrong, G?”

  His hands slid from my back, past my hips, and grazed my outer thighs before he dropped them into his lap and looked away. I shivered from the track of heat his fingers left on my skin. “I was with them when they disappeared,” he said, voice ragged.

  “That must have been awful.” I wanted to hear the story but was afraid at the same time. Too awful, and I’d add it to my rotating mental list of the horrors that might await me. I knelt down in front of him and waited to see if he wanted to talk more.

  “I wasn’t young, like you were when you lost your mom. I was old enough to remember them, to have pictures.” He tapped his temple. “Clear pictures of love and family, of what it was like to belong. I see them every day in my mind.”

  “It’s wonderful that you have those memories with them. My mom was a stranger to me when I found her. We’re just getting to know each other now.” In fact, I felt the first surges of real love for her and it scared me. Would I be strong enough to handle it if anything happened to her?

  “Yes. But no matter how beautiful my memories are, the one that haunts me, the one I can’t forget, is the day they were taken from me.”

  I sucked in my breath. “What happened?”

  “We lived in Cortona at the time. In a hillside villa, a golden dream of a life all together. Olive trees and lemons grew outside the kitchen door.” Giovanni’s eyes turned wistful. “My mother was washing dishes at the sink while I sneaked pine nuts from a jar. Her belly was round with a baby. I remember hearing a car drive up, and her humming stopped abruptly when she looked out the window. A black van had parked close to the door. Three men jumped out. I hid in an electronics cabinet like my father told me to. He said if the Arrazi ever came, to hide there so the frequencies might mask my Scintilla energy. She told me to not come out no matter what. ‘They’ll keep looking for you,’ she said. ‘Never let anyone find you. Never. Don’t trust anyone.’ Her voice was so shaky, Cora. So scared.”

  Like his, now.

  “My father heard them kick in the front door and he came running down the stairs. I was so glad he was coming to save us, but afraid for him, too. I wanted to yell out to warn him, but covered my mouth to stop myself. I watched through the crack between the cabinet doors, but didn’t know what was happening to my mother. Her back was to me, but as she fell to her knees and curled herself around her big belly, I saw the man’s aura pulling her silver from her like a long thread. I hadn’t known such a thing was possible.

  “Their thieving energy hit my father as soon as he skidded into the room. He knew one of the men, said his name as he fell to his knees. I watched his spirit being yanked from his body, too, until soon he was on the floor next to my mother. She lay a few inches from where I hid. She rolled her head toward me. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t seeing me.” Another tear rose in Giovanni’s eye and fell as his voice cracked. “Her eyes were open.

  “I’ve hated myself every day of my life since then. I did nothing to stop them. I hid like a coward and watched as my parents were carried out of the house. The men, they looked for me and then they left. I knew they would come back again. I don’t know how long I stayed in that cabinet. But after dark, I got my backpack, put as much as I could carry inside, and ran away.”

  “You were not a coward. You were brave, and just a little boy. What she told you saved your life. There was nothing you could have done differently except share their fate. God, Giovanni,” I said, reaching for his forearms, which were hugging his knees. “You’re alive because you listened to her.”

  My own throat was thick with tears. I knew the pain of watching an Arrazi pull my father’s spirit from his body. But I wasn’t a little kid. I wasn’t all alone.

  “Yes, I listened to her. I never trusted anybody, and I was never found.�
��

  I leaned forward on my knees and hugged him. With a gentle lift, he pulled me closer, settling me in the space between his thighs. His hug was so hungry, I wondered how many times since that day he’d hugged another person. I said, “I’m glad to have your trust—”

  “I don’t trust you.” Equal parts offended and hurt, I tried to pull away, but his arms held me to him. His mouth was against my neck when he murmured, “You terrify me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Giovanni let me go then, almost a gentle push away from me. He stood, ran his fingers through his wild hair, and began pacing the grass. “I’ve always had to rely only on myself. I had no reason to ever trust someone else. Then, I meet you. You, who are like me, who understands without me having to explain. You, whose mere physical presence lights up my energy in a way I haven’t felt since being with my parents.

  “But I can’t control you,” he continued, his arms waving. “You are your own person—an incredibly willful one at that. You’re taking a risk with that party that I don’t want you to take. And yet, I respect you more because you won’t let me stop you. You never let things stop you. I want to do anything I can to save you from ever being locked up again. And I want to lock you up myself, to keep you safe.”

  “Don’t even joke—”

  He stepped forward. “No, no. I’d never do to you what he did.”

  That pushed an aching sigh from me.

  Giovanni gestured toward the cottage. “I never again thought I’d feel like I have a family. I’m—I’m terrified to lose it again. It’s why I want to fight back against the Arrazi. If I could, I’d kill them all.” His jaw set in a rigid line and his fingers coiled into fists. “You’ve no idea how badly I want to kill them all.”

  “It would be a lie to promise you won’t lose someone again, but I don’t think that waging all-out war on the Arrazi when we’re outnumbered and defenseless is a smart option. And Clancy said they aren’t our only enemy. We don’t even know what we’re up against with the Society.”