by Tracy Clark
“Is there any way we can gain access to your father’s work?” he asked. I honestly had no idea if or how we could, certain that the company he worked for would keep its data private.
“Do you believe it’s possible?” I asked. “That dark energy is causing disasters all over the world and causing people to drop dead? I don’t even understand what it is.”
“Your father is not the first to suggest that dark energy is a malevolent force in our system. There have been increases in natural disasters on Earth. Blame global warming, dark energy, or any other fault of the month. I’m more fascinated by the people who are dying and his tests showing that your blood looked to be a remedy, bringing balance back into the cells of the affected. That’s an astonishing premise. That indicates there’s a direct relation to your energy and the mysterious sickness that’s overtaking people. If we run on the assumption that your father was right, then your diminishing breed would be saviors to the whole planet. Good Lord, if the world knew of his research, your kind would be even more sought out.”
“We already are,” I said, thinking of the airport footage. I wouldn’t elaborate.
He dropped his pen and whipped off his glasses, rubbing his eyes wearily. “I strongly urge you,” he said, putting his thick glasses back on, “to stay within the safe confines of this facility.”
“I won’t be a prisoner again,” I said through tight lips.
“There is a distinct difference between being a prisoner and seeking asylum.” When I didn’t answer, he added, “Ultimate safety lies in finding a way to stop them from hunting and killing the givers of light. Our work together might be the best chance we have to do that.” He reached for my hand. “Are you in, Cora?”
He looked so sincere, so eager, so…fatherly. I nodded. “I’m in.”
Setting his clipboard down, he slapped his hands on his knees and rose to his feet. “Let’s get started then.”
“I thought we had.”
He chuckled. “That’s just the beginning. I will summon Giovanni and, with your permission, your mother as well. I want to familiarize you with my biometrics facility.”
Giovanni, my mom, and I were escorted into the biofeedback lab. We ate a private lunch together while Dr. M explained his latest research to us. He had recently acquired sensitive instruments to detect our biomagnetic fields, and I volunteered to be the first to be hooked up to a magnetometer he called SQUID.
“Like an antenna, you project biomagnetic pulses that we can measure and record on our computers. For instance,” he said, pulling Giovanni to stand behind me, “watch the screen. Giovanni, I want you to run your hands over her, but do not touch her physical body. Use energy to manipulate her astral body.”
I couldn’t see Giovanni’s face, but I felt him as sure as if a storm blew against my back. Flickers of increased energy developed around my body on the screen as his hands hovered over my shoulders and slowly ran down my arms. A cascade of bumps flared on my skin. My aura spiked. I felt the tickle of his energy as one hand brushed over the nape of my neck and up over my head. In my periphery, his fingers caressed the air near my cheeks and jaw. I tried to ignore the stroke of his energy as it skittered across my lips. On the screen, my own aura surged with stimulation and blended with his.
Thankfully—as I wasn’t ready to meet his eyes yet—Dr. M moved Giovanni into a small, enclosed room behind a partition for our next experiment. I was told to close my eyes and maintain a receptive attitude and to report whatever I felt, if anything. “My toes tingle,” I reported. “My right knee is throbbing. My—ouch!” My thumb felt like someone had jabbed a needle into it. I opened my eyes and saw that my pain was reflected on the computer—the area around my hand fizzled and spit. I stood. “I want to speak to Giovanni, immediately.”
I’d asked to speak with him privately in an adjacent lab room.
“Dr. M wanted to test how astrally connected you and I were and whether the connection penetrated walls.”
“Did you let him hurt you? On purpose?”
Giovanni smirked and crossed his arms. “Only a little. But I’m appreciating your evident concern.”
“Why would you do that?” I understood the need to run tests and experiments, but I wasn’t willing to let Dr. M get all Dr. Frankenstein on me. It was worse that I was in the dark about the experiment.
“Because when he posed the question, I wanted the answer as well. Dr. M and I had a fascinating debate earlier about ‘unity consciousness.’ Cora, we can see with our own eyes that there is less separation between humans than normal people realize. But I feel an even closer connection with you. I wanted to know if it was measurable.”
“Okay.” What Giovanni did with his own body was his business. The fact that my energy responded from another room was interesting. “But do you truly believe this New Age we are one stuff? Why does it matter?”
“Because we are energy, and our entire situation is about energy. Information is power. If it’s true, then our idea of separation is false. If it’s true, then what I do to you, I do to myself.”
Your pain is my pain.
“Are you being all sciencey on me?” I asked, noting the way his aura expanded with light-tipped silver as he spoke about it. I liked his curiosity to learn. My mind was stretching to accommodate the new ideas I’d had thrust upon me the last few weeks. But I needed a more tangible grasp of this slippery idea of oneness. “I believe in connection. As in ‘I feel ya.’ But if I’m holding on to one end of a long rope and you’re holding the other end and you shake it, I’m only feeling your movement on my end. It doesn’t make us one, the rope just connects us.”
“Perhaps it’s more like we are in this limitless pond of energy. Like water, it surrounds us, moves with us, adapts to our shape, and what ripples outward cannot help but ripple to another in the pond.”
“Or,” I said, my hands on my hips, “maybe we are like fish in the pond, inescapable from the energy surrounding us, but we are not one fish. We are many, in the same pond. If this is part of the riddle, I want to solve it, to help us.”
He threw me a smile that doubled as a challenge of some sort. Maybe he didn’t think I could grasp what he was trying to explain. “I shall try a new way to describe,” he said, rubbing the blond stubble on his chin. “Consider me now, the subject, looking at an object of beauty.” I felt heat rise up my neck as he held hard with his eyes. “That’s the first level of experience, that we are physical beings, experiencing each other as separate. Subject, object. See?”
“Go on. This had better matter.”
Giovanni stepped closer, his silver aura reaching beyond his sculpted edges, expanding and contracting with each breath. My pulse skipped, my aura beating in unison with his. “You and I, Cora, we see another level of reality. We see the spiritual essence of people, their feelings rippling through their energy field like watercolors, staining their auras with emotion.”
True. Beautiful. He took another sure step toward me. The look in his eyes made me breathe faster. I wanted to kick my aura’s ass for being so in sync with his.
“I can see your emotion right now. I’m causing you to feel nervous and”—his aura flared and his voice coaxed—“a bit excited?”
I blushed and looked away. “You are not.”
“Science already has proved that there are other levels of reality that people cannot see with the naked eye, not even you and me. With the help of microscopes, we can look closer and see that we are billions of cells vibrating at extreme speeds. Molecules, atoms. Beneath what appears to be two separate beings are really clusters of energy dancing together in this space.”
He stepped even closer now, and I tried to account for my rapid heart rate and dropping stomach. “And the truth is,” he said softly, standing so close I could feel the caress of his aura brush my skin, “molecularly, there is no separation at all between us. My energy field is experiencing and appreciating your energy field, and since our energy comes from the same infinite source, we m
ust be one.”
We stood a breath apart, auras and cells and molecules, or whatever, dancing and swirling. My heart hammered with the energy of it, with the fascinating and bewildering truth of what I could see and feel.
Giovanni’s nostrils flared as his gaze met mine for a few beats, roamed over my face, then fell to my lips, lingering too long there. My body was a storm of confusion. Feelings rose up in me that felt forbidden. My arms tingled. My stomach fluttered. My lips pulsed with want, and I became acutely aware of the tickle of each breath that passed over them.
I had to remind myself that this was our Scintilla energy together. This was no different from what I’d done to Finn. Giovanni and I had no choice but to feel charged around each other, right?
I’d never trust what normal people took for granted. Attraction meant nothing when you were a walking magnet.
I put my hand on his chest to stop the forward tilt of his body, but I wasn’t fighting only him. I had to fight myself. Things didn’t need to get more complicated. “If what you’re saying is true,” I said, “then, biologically, on a cellular level, we wouldn’t just be one.” I cleared my throat and tried to shove a deep breath down my chest to calm myself. “Everyone would be connected.”
Giovanni eyed me suspiciously, like a chess player already assessing my moves.
“We’d be one with our enemies as well,” I concluded.
His silver recoiled a bit and he stepped back, blue eyes flashing with annoyance.
“What, you hadn’t thought of that? That it’s not just ‘Kumbaya’ and oneness with those we—we care about. It’s oneness with our enemies, too. It’s being one with the people you most want to kill.”
Giovanni gave a little half shake of his head and his eyes opened wider. I could tell he hadn’t quite thought of that. “I was looking for a way to protect ourselves, for information that might help us. You’re looking for a way to intellectually one-up me,” he said.
“I’m not, I’m just—”
“What then?” His voice lowered as he gazed into my eyes. “Looking to think your way out of what I make you feel?”
He walked out and left me there.
Alone.
Thirty-Eight
Finn
“I didn’t know who to call.” Saoirse’s voice was thin, weary. She’d woken me in the middle of the night from a troubled sleep. My whole being burned with need. “I feel so strange,” she whispered into the phone. “Like I’m hollowed out. A shell.”
I rolled over, tucking my knees up against my stomach. Even if she wasn’t sure what was happening to her, I was. She was turning. I didn’t know what, if any, intense emotion had brought it on or if it was just her time. But she sounded very scared. Becoming an Arrazi was like being told you were a cancer, the ravenous parasite of humanity.
“Please come over, Finn. I’m scared. I don’t want to call my mother on her business trip in Rome, and I can’t confide in Lorcan. He’ll run to her with his big gob. I don’t want to be alone. Christ,” she cried. “I can’t do this.”
What could I say? To tell her to hide away, to do nothing, would be to condemn her to death. She already knew that. I didn’t want to encourage her to kill, either. It was still a reality so abhorrent to me that I’d been wasting away trying to suck the life from groups of innocent pub crawlers and fookin’ trees. Now, to save my new friend’s life, I’d have to help her become a murderer. I’d also have to help myself get through my first murder when I wouldn’t be half dead, semiconscious, and crazed with need. I’d be cognizant and aware.
That was worse.
I also needed Saoirse alive to keep close to Ultana. Guilt swirled in my gut like brackish silt. My head pounded as I sat up and swung my feet over the side of the bed. “Aye, I’ll come. But I don’t know how helpful I’ll be. I’m likely in a worse state than you.”
The Lennon family lived about forty minutes away, and the drive afforded me the time to listen to music and think, and avoid the intrusion of my mom’s questions and seeking eyes. So, Ultana was out of town on business. Perhaps this was the perfect time to pay a call to her house, though snooping with Saoirse and her lout of a brother around might prove difficult.
There was but one light on at the house when I arrived. Following Saoirse’s instructions, I walked quietly to the front door and let myself in.
“I’m in here,” Saoirse called to me from a nearby room. I found her huddled on a large chaise, clinging to a blanket like a child. Her fearful aquamarine eyes followed me as I approached and sat down in front of her.
“I’m not well at all,” she said, though that I could see for myself. Dark circles rimmed her eyes, and her small hands trembled as she curled them into the downy fabric.
“I know. There’s no way around it. It’s ghastly.”
“You really think that’s what’s wrong with me?”
“From what you describe, yes. It’s how I felt. It’s how I feel right now.”
“I don’t understand why this has happened,” she said with desperation. “I’ve done everything right.”
I laughed. Couldn’t help myself. “I don’t think there is a right or wrong. You can’t stave off the inevitable.”
“Ever since the masked ball…” she said, her words twisting my gut into a tight wad. It was meeting Cora that caused this. It had to be. “I felt something stir in me, a restlessness I couldn’t quite put my finger on. My body wouldn’t calm, even in bed. My legs were so damn twitchy, I thought I could run to Galway and back and they would still crave exertion. I’m exhausted, too. I feel like I’ve been leached of all motivation…except one.”
“I understand,” I said, feeling that same agitated ache in my own limbs as we talked. I tried to keep my eyes on Saoirse’s, which was difficult because I wanted so badly to look around. Saoirse had said Lorcan was out getting knackered, so it’d be a good time to try. Patience, I reminded myself. “There’s only one answer for both of us.”
The look she gave me was utterly tortured. Huge tears rose in her eyes before spilling over. She closed her eyes, but that didn’t stop more tears from coming. “I can’t.”
Forcing more steel into my voice than I felt, I said, “You will.”
We stared hard at each other, silent, yet I wanted to rail about the unfairness of it all, the unjust position we were born into, the dreadfulness of what we had to do. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
After some time, Saoirse seemed to fall asleep. The blanket drooped around her waist and her mouth parted slightly. She mumbled something unintelligible and rolled her head to the side. I covered her and stood to go see what I could of Ultana Lennon’s home. I didn’t know what to look for. Something. Anything.
I left the sitting room where Saoirse slept and ventured down the hall, my feet creaking on the ancient wooden floorboards as I crept in the dark. I pulled my phone out and held it up as a light. Most doors were wide open to cold, spacious rooms, opulent in the way that only loads of money can buy. Some of the artifacts could compete with the National Gallery.
There were paintings, of course. More interesting were the daggers and swords from multiple cultures and many eons. A locked glass cabinet housed clusters of very old coins that were nonchalantly strewn into a varied assortment of church collection plates. Ultana Lennon was ironic; I’d give her that.
Farther down the hall, an old wooden door bore a full-scale replica of the triple spiral carved into the grain. Obviously, other Arrazi saw the symbol as important to their family history. Unlike the other doors, it was closed. I wiggled the handle. Locked. Fishing through my pockets, I produced a silver guitar pick, but only the tip would fit into the lock and did nothing to work it open. I wanted to kick in the door. How many bloody chances would I have to rifle through Ultana’s private rooms?
Feverish desperation made me trip twice as I went out to my car. There’d once been a multi-tool in there somewhere. If so, perhaps I could get the lock open with that. My exertions were making m
e dizzy and out of breath. The tool was there. I grabbed it and ran back inside.
There were a couple of apparatuses that fit into the keyhole, but neither would unlock the damn thing. My hands weren’t steady at all. I was increasingly nervous I’d be caught by Saoirse or Lorcan, if he arrived home any time soon. My concerns for myself paled when I thought about Cora somewhere out there, being hunted like game.
I thumped my forehead on the door in defeat, the useless tool dangling from my hand. Then I thought of something; it was a risk but I had to take it. I used the tip of the screwdriver to push up the hinge pins on the door, first the lower, and then the upper. With a hefty pull, using more strength than I thought I had in me, the door came free. I’d made a fair bit of a racket, though, and stilled to listen for anyone coming.
Behind the door was an opulent office with a two-story coffered ceiling of wood so saturated in color, it looked coffee-soaked. Within each square was a relief of the three hares. I’ve looked at that image countless times, as my uncle had a boss in the ceiling of the pub with the same design. He used to tease me with a riddle: three hares sharing three ears, yet every one of them has two. Later, I’d learned that it was an ancient symbol but with inconsistent meanings; some called it a hieroglyph of “to be” and yet others believed it represented the holy trinity, as it was often used on church buildings.
The room had the musty smell of old, forgotten things. I was damn shocked to see a large wooden carving of the horned head of the devil staring down at me from the wall behind the desk. Could she really own the devil statue from “Hell” that Saoirse had told me of? It was a rare piece of Dublin history and had to be worth a fortune.
The large mahogany desk lorded over the room and was as imposing and scratched as the woman who used it and the devil who watched her back. I still wondered if the V on her face was truly a birthmark. Why or how would anyone get branded like that?