by Tracy Clark
“Smart girl. I would like to know, yes.”
“We’ll have to find out, then, because the only talk I could pick up at the party last night was of money and research and it’s making me nervous. What if they’re connected? We already know from Clancy that the Society knows about us. Who else does? What if the Society is behind Dr. M’s research?”
“That’s a worst-case scenario.”
“Those are the only kinds of scenarios I think about.”
“In the five years I’ve known him he’s only ever been good to me. I’ve come here twice before and nothing bad has ever happened. I learned never to simply trust just anybody.”
“So have I.” The hard way. I pushed past him into the sunlight. “So, what did you want to show—” I stopped and gasped.
Our rooms were in a square, as I’d guessed. But I never anticipated what was in the middle on the top floor of this warehouse building. Bright sun shone in through glass panels above us, reminding me of my school’s greenhouse back home. Below the panels, a rooftop courtyard stretched out before me into a spectacular Japanese garden.
Giovanni’s arm brushed mine. “It’s like someone transported a slice of Japan onto a rooftop in Ireland, no?”
“Yes,” I said, breathless. “It’s gorgeous.” A tiny arched bridge led from my patio onto a path, which wound through Japanese maple trees ablaze in gold and red. Small waterfalls cascaded into miniature koi ponds. Rock statues were placed upon the path with water dripping from bamboo reeds onto the stones below. Birds flew in and out of the roof through small holes in the glass. Across a red bridge, a pagoda stood regally in the middle.
I walked barefoot through the garden, stopping to notice a spiral design someone had made on the ground from river rocks. I bent to peer at it, and when I stood, Giovanni’s hand was pressed to my back over the knife marking. My silk robe had slid down, exposing my marking. His voice burned with soft intensity. “So, you got this from the knife that night?”
I didn’t turn around. “Yes.”
His hand radiated a sweeping current over the spot where I’d been marked.
“I hate that the memory is written on my body.”
He leaned in. “I’m sorry this happens to you. Il tuo dolore è il mio dolore…” he whispered in Italian. “Your pain is my pain.”
Suddenly, I felt the soft brush of his curls on the nape of my neck. My breath caught and bumps flared on my arms as he bent and tenderly kissed the marking of the gruesome knife in the middle of my back. Unbidden fissures of pleasure spread from my back and radiated out, but still I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t. Doing so would have been a betrayal to my still-grieving heart, because it wanted nothing more than to turn and see Finn standing there.
That could never be. That could never be.
My body remembered what it was like to kiss Giovanni, to feel the weight of him on top of me and the electric pulse of our energy together. I pushed that memory away. My head needed to have supreme rule over the rest of me.
The pressure of Giovanni’s lips on my skin lightened and I felt his energy recede. When I looked over my shoulder, I knew he’d be walking away from me. Sure enough, a trail of silver wound through the trees behind him. Surprising though, was the dark, tarnished-silver color of pain in the middle of his aura at his back.
He’d been sincere. My pain was his pain.
Thirty-Six
Finn
Hunger. I loathed thinking of it like that, but the sensation was truly—hunger. An empty belly, the need for sleep, the craving for a kiss, a thirst so desperate, you’d suck on bitter green stems of grass to quench it—that’s how I woke. I was need with two arms and two legs. I was a walking, talking appetite.
I bolted upright in bed. Green stems of grass… Nature! Both my mother’s books and the books I read from the store last night had mentioned rejuvenating energy by spending time in nature. There had to be a reason for that, and the only reason I could think of was that nature was a source of energy.
Slipping my legs over the side of the bed, I tried not to curl in on myself. Even though I’d just slept, the fatigue of needing to feed had hit me hard. My body was shaky, off-balance. I put on a clean shirt and shoes and went outside.
It was an unusually cheery morning. Bright sun glinted off every rock, penetrated through every green leaf, warmed my skin as I walked toward the woods on our property. Returning there snapped me back to that night, to the horror of realizing what my uncle had done to Cora and, worse, to her poor mother.
It might be a good idea, I thought with some trepidation, to investigate Clancy’s hidden den. If he’d ever tried to keep someone captive there again, I’d want to know about it. I’d want to stop him. He couldn’t enslave another like that.
My inner voice mocked me. No, but he can just kill them? That’s more humane, right? Being an Arrazi was a lose-lose situation. What was the damn point of us?
After walking for what seemed like forever, I came upon the granite wall that had caught my mother and I so unaware the night we found Cora. We’d followed a path worn down over time by the trod of Clancy’s horse and buggy, and by the wear of feet. In the darkness, amidst the thick trees, I had smacked right into the wall. Now, in the daylight, I could see how impressively tall it was. Smooth as glass and impossible to climb. Even if you figured out how to scale it, barbed wire looped around the top. None of us ever came to this part of our property, and Clancy had his own entrance at the opposite side. Still, it must have been quite a production to build his secret fortress. A fortress right in the middle of our very large plot of land. We were lucky to have found it at all the night we helped Cora and the others escape.
The skylight in the ground was hard to find because it was obscured by foliage. But it was the fact that there was a bare rectangle in the greenery that drew my eye. I brushed a few fallen leaves from the glass and knelt to peer inside. Cupping my hands around my eyes, I tried to focus on the dark room below me. Nothing but shadows. For a brief moment, I thought I saw a flutter of movement. I stayed very still and watched, but saw nothing else.
When the sound of cracking twigs startled me, I jumped to my feet and ran as quietly as I could to hide. I listened longer but heard nothing more. Likely, it had been some creature dashing through the brush. Clancy would be an utter fool to use the underground prison again. He had to know I’d be checking to make sure he didn’t. If it were up to me, he’d have been cut from our lives altogether.
I wandered through the knee-deep ferns and tall trees, deciding which form of plant life to experiment on first. I chose a young fern, small in comparison to the others around it. I sat cross-legged on the forest floor, in front of that wee plant like it was an altar, and focused on the spot in my chest where I felt the energy of others enter me. It was a mind game of sorts, imagining a tendril of my energy reaching from my body out toward the variegated fronds. I stared at the curled fiddleheads, marveling at their spirals, noting how many items of nature were spiraled: seashells, snail shells, ferns, succulents, hurricanes, our solar system…
It was like meditating, not that I’d ever been into that sort of thing, but I realized I’d lost my focus and directed my attention back to the plant. A tickle of energy threaded onto my own as I pulled from it. I watched in fascinated horror as the once-emerald fiddlehead curled tighter in on itself and began to turn brown. A light burst of vitality bubbled in my chest, then dissolved. I sighed. It would take the whole damn forest to quench the craving building inside of me.
Trees might be a better alternative. What’s bigger in nature than a tree? The biggest trees I’d ever seen were in the California redwood forest with Cora. I’d love to take a hit off one of those beauties right about now. The albino redwood she showed me was extraordinary. A sour pit of sadness lodged in my chest. I remembered looking at her as she stood on the forest path with giant shafts of sunlight trained on her like a spotlight, and wondering what it was that made her so irresistible. At the time I’d th
ought to myself, she glows from within. Now, I wondered if I’d been sensing her Scintilla spark. I threw a rock at a nearby tree. I’d rather believe in the love story.
Seeing her last night had been cruel torture. Everything in me yearned for her. My love—the beautiful, shimmering half of my soul—was right in front of me. But she was no longer mine; could never be. I never thought I’d see her again. Hurting this way, I wasn’t sure I could take it if I did.
Focus. The tree I finally chose to experiment with was a foot or so taller than myself, its branches more sparse the lower they went. The sun shone from above. Naturally, that was where the healthier, thicker leaf growth was. All living things reach for their source.
Why did my source have to be people?
I placed my hands on the cool trunk. My fingers ran over a patch of mossy growth on the shadier north side of the tree. Almost immediately, I felt the energy of the tree rising up through the trunk like a hose, funneling it from the ground. This could work! What if I could siphon enough energy to keep me from needing to kill? I closed my eyes and focused all of my thoughts on the energy running through that tree, imagining it pouring through my hands and into my body. My cells sang!
How long I stood there, clutching the tree like a stiff dance partner, I don’t know. I opened my eyes when my ears registered a sound like the patter of rain, but I was dry. The sun was still out. The sound was leaves, hundreds of leaves, hitting the ground, landing on my head and shoulders. I fingered one. In the dawn of summer, it was brittle and brown. The canopy above me was completely bare.
“What on earth have you been doing?” my mother asked. Keys dangled from her hand, and her purse was looped over her arm.
“Killing trees.”
“Oh, Finn.” She sighed. “Don’t you think that’s been tried before? You’re not the first to try to find an alternative source of energy. There isn’t one. A human soul is our only true sustenance.”
“I’m going to my room.”
She stepped in front of me. “You don’t look well. I’ll have your father take you out later. How bad is it?”
I didn’t respond. My choices were die or take. My stomach turned.
“What happened at the party?”
“Nothing,” I said, avoiding her eyes. She stepped in front of me and turned my cheek toward her. I pushed her hand away. “You don’t have a right to use your sortilege on me just because you can.” The last thing I wanted her to know was that I had seen Cora at Christ Church. The less anyone knew of Cora’s whereabouts, the better.
“Something happened…”
“I met some people. I don’t know what may come of it, but Ultana seems very keen to have me become one of her minions. She introduced me to quite a few of the guests.”
“Arrazi?”
“Many. Saoirse had to point them out to me.”
“Be careful. I can’t say I buy Ultana’s reasoning for being involved with the Society. When she speaks of money and power, it would have to be a great deal more than what she has already. Ultana Lennon is one of the wealthiest women in the UK.”
That surprised me. I wondered how she’d amassed that kind of wealth. “I’m being as careful as I can, but don’t forget,” I said, turning my back on her to stare out the window toward the ocean, “I’m willing to die. Dangerous liaisons don’t seem so perilous by comparison.”
“But we’re past that now, aren’t we?” she asked, hope lifting her words. “Throwing away your life is a waste. There’s so much you can do. Your father and I, we kill because we have to. But we’ve each saved many more lives through our profession. Think about that.”
“After everything, you’re still on about me becoming a doctor? Enough. I know my job, and that’s to help Cora and find a way to end this fooking madness for all of us.”
“If you tell me what’s going on—”
“No, Mum. The less you know, the better. Your brother could inadvertently use you to get to Cora.”
She dropped her purse and keys on the hardwood floor. “Finn Doyle, you are still my child and I won’t be put in the dark.” The toe of her shoe hit an insistent note on the wood.
I would still not look directly at her. “You don’t like being in the dark?” I asked, hoping she caught my sarcasm. “Turnabout’s fair play.”
Thirty-Seven
Cora
The Japanese garden on the rooftop of Dr. M’s was a peaceful refuge from the fresh hell of my life. Because of us, the owner of the cottage was dead. Another life snuffed out by people who believed the souls of their fellow humans were theirs to take. I wish I knew how they’d found us. Ina Doyle’s words from the night Finn nearly killed me were an insistent shout in my head—that girl’s not safe anywhere.
Massive security measures were in place at Dr. M’s. Hopefully, we wouldn’t be so easily found. Hopefully, we could trust this doctor who claimed with a little too much pride to be of Arrazi descent. Some people get off on the idea of being anything but normal. I wanted nothing but. He did seem very earnest about helping, though. Passion for his work was obvious. He and my father would have been thick as thieves.
I wanted to look into my father’s theory about dark energy and the people dropping dead. More accounts were in the newspapers that were left under my door. Worldwide, the incidents were increasing. I still believed it was Arrazi being more brutal and blatant about their killing, especially in light of the fact that their best source of energy was nearly extinct.
I found an attendant who led me to a common area one floor below the garden and our bedrooms. I spotted Mari deep in conversation with Teruko. Their auras interacted in friendly and animated hues. My mother was on the other side of the room, happily rearranging the cut stems of a lovely flower arrangement on a buffet table. Her soft humming grew louder as I neared. She turned before I reached her, a smile already crinkling the edges of her eyes. “I like it here,” she said.
“I’m so glad. I’m going to go find Dr. M. Have you seen him?”
She nodded. “I had an appointment this morning.”
“Appointment?”
“Yes. He had many questions about my time with the Arrazi. He wanted to have a physician examine me. They took blood and—”
“They did what? Be right back.” I hadn’t even had the chance to decide whether to trust this doctor and he was already drawing blood from my mother? I strode to the elevators, seething. Someone from the institute, wearing black and white, stood by the elevator door. “Take me to Dr. M.”
A sterile pause blanketed the eyes of the worker before he nodded curtly, punching in a code in the elevator keypad. I gritted my teeth. After a short ride down, the elevator doors opened to a long corridor with a series of lab and exam rooms along each side. Dr. M strode out from one room, startling us and nearly knocking me over. “Oh! Ms. Sandoval. I’m glad to see you,” he said with a darting look at my escort. “I very much want to conduct an interview with you, run some baseline tests, and—”
“That’s why I came to find you,” I said. “Don’t run tests on my mother without my approval.”
“Pardon? That would be up to her, would it not? She’s an adult. She consented.” He said this with a smile, but the kind that an irritated grandfather gives to his least favorite grandchild.
“She has been through so much and she’s not well enough—”
“Precisely why I wanted to have her looked at. I’m concerned for her well-being.”
“Don’t interrupt me again.”
Taken aback, Dr. M stared, then nodded diffidently the way his workers did. He hugged some files to his chest and waited for me to speak. His aura did not flare with fear or smoke. He was calm, yet highly alert. Curious, even. But I again noticed the holes in his aura. I had no idea what that meant.
“My mom’s body is fragile, and I’m sure she needs care in order to be stronger. I want that. But her mind is fragile, too. And in her case, I think it’s best if you come to me first before you examine her and run tests
. I want to be with her when you do.”
“Yes, yes. I see. This is quite a role reversal, isn’t it? The daughter managing her mother’s care?”
“It doesn’t matter how we started. It’s where we are now. I’m doing what I have to do to protect my mother.”
“Very admirable. I am sorry to have upset you. I sincerely do wish to help.”
“I know.” I didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot. “I appreciate your understanding, Doctor.”
He motioned for me to follow him down the hall and I did, shooting glances at each room we passed along the way. “Is it possible,” Dr. M asked, “that your mother is stronger than you think?”
“What I think,” I said, following him into an exam room, “is that my mother is the strongest woman I know. You try having your energy drained near to death, month after month, for twelve years.”
He shook his head. “I can’t imagine it.” Then his face brightened considerably. “Your strength is apparent. Working with you and Giovanni is going to be very exciting. Two young, perfectly pure specimens to study…” He gazed, daydreamy, at nothing, then snapped his attention back to me. “We are going to find answers together. Trust me.”
“To be perfectly honest, Dr. M, I don’t want to offend you. But trust is becoming a really big hill to climb.”
He led me into a lab room and began with a penetrating list of questions. I would answer only those that I determined couldn’t be used against me. If this were my father, I know he’d want absolute clarity about my history and my abilities, but…this wasn’t my father. I gave the date of my last period, my recollections of the illness that preceded my ability to see auras, and blood samples. I refused to give information on my sortilege and markings. He could start with the human side of me. The supernatural side was mine.
I did feel that Dr. M should know about my father’s theory about the drop-dead people and how he believed the Scintilla were somehow the cure, the answer to the world’s ills. Dr. M sat in a chair next to me and scribbled furiously as I spoke, even though I was pretty certain I was being recorded. A small camera in the upper corner of the ceiling of the exam room was trained on me.