by Tracy Clark
As soon as our heads touched, an urgent blast of memories funneled into me.
Looking down on a bare and fresh baby on her chest, pink-skinned, black-haired, and content to nestle against her mother’s warmth. The baby glowed with pure innocence, the fire of life, and a raging silver aura that was more massive than hers. The most intense love emanated through the memory, and I knew that baby was me.
Flashes of milestones: My first crooked smile. My first sweet utterance of “mum-ma,” wobbly steps on plump, roly thighs into her outstretched arms. Smooshy openmouthed toddler kisses. The sweet, woodsy smell of my curly hair.
Mom was using her sortilege to tell me there wasn’t a moment of my first five years that she’d forgotten.
My head spun with images. I swayed slightly, fighting to stay on my feet despite the heady infusion of feeling and memory pouring from her to me. Tears coursed down my cheeks, but I held in my sobs for fear they’d hear and break us apart.
She was only doing this because her bird of hope had been shot down. I wanted to flinch from the burning of my skin and her hopelessness. But we held on, forehead to forehead, even after the visions faded like burned papers rising up into the sky. Mom and I stared at each other in the torchlight, tears streaming down our flickering faces. Lambent silver danced around our bodies and connected. Yes, we were one. We always had been. When death approached, maybe especially so, nothing mattered more than the love in life and our connection with those we love.
The men yanked us apart and told us each to sit on separate slabs of stone. There were three of them, roughly five feet long, positioned together in a triangle. Intricate veins of carved spirals laced over each stone. The triple spiral was evident on at least two from where I stood. Could these be the three missing curbstones from Newgrange? They looked like they’d puzzle in seamlessly with the other enormous stones encircling the famous tomb.
Rough hands pushed me backward on the stone until I was lying down, sealing a chill through my shirt. The same was being done to my mother. Clancy stood over us, hands folded in front of him, looking immensely smug.
“Creator, sustainer, destroyer,” Clancy said, walking in a slow circle around my mother and I, flat on the stone slabs. I watched his black shadow rise and lengthen on the slope of the curved ceiling like a black flame. “Some say that is what the triple spiral signifies. Some would say God is the creator, the Scintilla are the sustainers, and the Arrazi are the destroyers.”
“So,” I spoke, my voice shaking from the word “destroyer.” “You’re doing what you think you were created to do? Destroy the sustainers? Who would fulfill the Scintilla’s role then, huh? Who will live my purpose after you kill me? Your thinking is totally slanted.”
He reached down and squeezed my cheeks with a rough hand. “Even among supernatural humans, some are destined to do more than we were created for. I am one of those. I know the true meaning of the triple spiral.”
I hated to admit it, but I actually wanted to hear what he had to say. The significance of the triple spiral had taunted me, and even if it was the last thing I’d hear, at least I’d die with one less question in my heart.
“Never could get your three, huh?” I goaded. “So end my suspense and tell me why you want three of us.” At least he might have my mother and me, but not the satisfaction of three Scintilla he’d always wanted. Despite my anger, I prayed Dun, Giovanni, and Claire had made it out of Dr. M’s and were hiding somewhere safe.
Outside, the sound of muffled footsteps approached. Clancy nodded to his bulldog helper and the door opened. I craned my neck, cold stone biting my cheek.
Clancy prowled the dank tomb as he spoke. “The closest the ordinary, ignorant humans have ever come to the truth about the power of the triple spiral is”—he stood over me and looked down with such smug satisfaction that my blood turned to ice—“maiden, mother, crone.”
As the last word left his lips, a tiny old woman was shoved into the earthen cavern. She was small, but her eyes gleamed in the dark with puma-like ferocity as she peered into the murky room. She looked like an old-world villager from a hillside tribe—flowing skirt, apron, multiple rings on her hands, and colored scarves. There was something familiar about the determined set of her jaw, though…
“Mami Tulke!” I yelled, sitting upright, but Clancy stuck his boot in my chest and knocked me backward. My head hit stone with a jarring thud that rang my ears.
Mami Tulke threw her body over me, whispering in Spanish. “Oh niña, lo siento mucho. Traté de venir por ti.” She was sorry. She tried to come for me. The man pulled her away and dragged her to the third stone—the one reserved for the crone.
“How did you get my grandmother?” I yelled. “Why?” Every time I thought things couldn’t get worse…
“You led me right to her, my dear,” Clancy answered. “I read it in the journal that was with your belongings. Gráinne’s writings were quite intriguing, especially the part about meeting another Scintilla when she went to Chile.”
“Giovanni?” I asked, hoping to draw out information. Did they have him? Had he escaped Dr. M’s at all? “You no longer need him?”
“He will be sold like chattel on the black market, luv.” Clancy clapped his hands together. “Grand. That settles the how. Now, for the why of it.” He pointed a fat finger at me. “You represent birth, Cora. Dear Gráinne, you represent life.” He stopped at the sandaled feet of my grandmother, who was still spitting and struggling. “You represent death.” His voice rose to an exultant tenor. “All three phases of life itself, in their most powerful energetic form, are offered up before me at the most sacred site of our kind. An Arrazi’s holy grail.”
This was what he’d wanted all along? “Why? Tell me why.” In one swoop, he’d eliminate three generations of my family. How could this be his grail, or anything close to holy?
“Some say that once an Arrazi takes the entire spirit of a Scintilla into his own, he will obtain their sortilege and never have to kill again. Those are nice notions, to be sure, but not nearly enough. I take the life of you three, the symbolic and energetic essence of life’s cycles, and I become free of the cycle—free of life’s cycle. I live forever.”
“Greed!” spat my grandmother. “Who believes in such prophesies?”
“The whole world believes in prophesies,” he said. “What do you think the book of Revelations is, old woman?”
“You actually think that you’ll live forever?” My heart churned erratically with every word he said. “What if you’re wrong? Then you only succeed in killing three valuable Scintilla,” I said, appealing to his greed.
“It’s been done before. One woman has already proven it, and now I will. Every queen needs a king. You three will die, and this time, my lovesick nephew isn’t going to help you.”
I turned my head away, a tear seeping from my eye into the stone. “He’s had chances to help me and didn’t.”
“May it be a comforting thought to you before you die to know that he did try, and he failed.”
I had no idea what that meant. Clancy had attacked me right after Mari and Dun had run into Finn at the waterfront. Finn’s brutish Arrazi friend had attacked me outside the party, and Finn left me to wither away in Dr. M’s facility. If helping me was Finn’s aim, he did fail. Impressively.
A surprised squeak of a scream rose from either my mother or my grandmother, but before I could register what had caused it, I felt the searing rip of the energy around my heart. Clancy stood in the middle of the triangle of stones, pulling our platinum energies out of each of us simultaneously. A vortex of silver rose from our chests, spinning, blooming like a mercury-dipped rose in the air above us.
I tried to scream, but my voice caught in the painful cyclone and swirled away on the wind of his thievery. Clancy’s head tipped back in rapture. His arms slowly lifted up as the energy of the three of us rose higher and higher. His aura was morphing from a grimy reddish-brown, like dried blood, to blinding white. My vision blinked
in and out as I drained. I felt like a vast desert, cracking under the harsh cloak of a frozen, dry winter. I tried to fixate on my mother’s and grandmother’s energies. If I could divert my own to them, could I save them? Buy them time?
But our auras became indistinguishable in the storm. To my eyes, our light mixed and spread out above us, a galaxy of shimmering stars.
When the wind scattered me to the stars…
Fifty-Eight
Cora
Clancy’s aura expanded into a cloud of white as he pulled life from the three of us.
My grandmother turned and our eyes met. She blinked heavily and gave a slight nod, like resignation or permission. Her gaze was suddenly torn from mine to something behind me, and I felt a blast of cold air. For one heart-wrenching instant, I thought it was my final moment, my soul leaving my body forever. But the rustle of black fabric swooshed over my chest momentarily as someone leaped over me. Clancy Mulcarr flew backward. The yank on my energy slackened, then released.
“Ultana?” he gasped, clearly afraid, and in awe. “How—?”
“You’re a disobedient little peasant,” a woman’s serrated voice said to Clancy. “I counted on that. As if I’d let you have the three.” A medieval blade jutted from her hand, and she had it pointed right at him.
“You’ve been spying on me?” he asked, incredulous. He hadn’t moved from the floor, but sat like a scolded puppy. “So, it’s not true then? The legend of the immortal woman?”
“True, to be sure,” she answered. “I am the White Goddess.”
Gasping for breath and barely able to see clearly, I peered at the back of the person who’d saved us. This lady was immortal? Was it a sortilege? Was it even possible? She’d sacrificed a maiden, mother, and crone before? The woman turned and surveyed us with cold eyes.
The wild bird in my chest fluttered and…fell.
It was the Arrazi woman from the masked ball. The necklace of locks dangled from her neck. She pointed a stump of a hand at my mother like a condemnation.
“I did tell you our day of reckoning would come, Gráinne Sandoval,” she roared in a delirious voice, pulsing with disturbed excitement. “Thirteen years since you severed my hand, and thirteen years I’ve watched that little hovel of yours, waiting for you to return. I have pictures of this girl—your long-lost daughter—there with Finn Doyle. My men almost caught them, too.” Her sneer turned into a cruel smile. “They aren’t the first Arrazi and Scintilla to find themselves drawn to each other. Opposites do attract. However, if I have my way, they will be the last.”
The cavern was quiet but for the spit of the fire in the torches until Ultana spoke again. “It’s been a long time, but it will have been worth the wait when I absorb every drop of your light into mine.”
“Please stop this!” I yelled through a hoarse throat. “She took your hand. You don’t need to take her life!”
“The White Goddess has no need for an eye for an eye. That’s the recompense of the equal, and none of you are my equal.” She spun in a circle within the triangle, her dagger slicing the air above us. “Together, you are the maiden, mother, and crone. Separate, you are nothing but coins in my pockets.”
“Why the maiden, mother, and crone, White Goddess?” I asked, trying to cool her fire with flattery. A walnut of fear blocked my throat. “Clancy thought he’d live forever if he killed us. If you’re already immortal, then why do you need us?”
Clancy appeared as interested in her answer as I was.
She laughed. “I don’t need you, tiny spark. I need you dead!” Her voice lowered. “Every last one of you. When the last light goes out, when the last Scintilla dies, the truth dies with you. That is my tedious job, and I want it finished.”
“What is the truth that will die with us?” my mother choked out. Her voice sounded so far away, like she was half dead already. I tried to send her energy, but it felt like scraping gray dust from the bottom of a well.
Ultana laughed. “It’s genocide, dear. We’ve been eradicating you for millennia. You’re nearly wiped from Earth and good riddance, too.”
Mami Tulke smiled wryly as she stared up at the earthen ceiling. What? What could make an old woman smile in the midst of a bizarre human sacrifice? I had so many questions for her, and despaired that I’d never get the chance to ask.
Ultana’s voice rose higher. “The Scintilla will be smeared from the pages of history, and I will be celebrated for doing so.”
My ability to brown-nose had run its course. “Celebrated by whom? The Arrazi have wanted to use us, collect us, even profit from us. If you’ll be celebrated, that means there’s someone else whose opinion you grovel for. You’ll be celebrated for doing someone else’s dirty work. Whose? The Society’s? It’s not why do you want us dead, but why are you being their attack dog? Why do they want us dead? What is Xepa, and why are they using Arrazi like you and Clancy to get to us?”
“I am the Society, girl. Xepa is my answer to every patriarchal secret society that has ever existed, and I’ve eclipsed them all. Within Xepa’s hierarchy, there is none above me.”
An Arrazi controlled Xepa?
“You still haven’t said why you want all Scintilla dead. Why? How can that be in your best interest if we are a source of power for you? My grandmother is right, it’s greed. It has to be. You want our sortilege. You don’t want anyone else to have it, including your fellow Arrazi. Right?”
She leaned down, peering into my face with discerning, callous eyes. Her face was so close to mine that I thought I saw the letter V branded into the side of her cheek. “Ah,” she whispered, evading my question. “You’re curious about my scar?” Her fingers lit on it momentarily, betraying a bit of insecurity. She pointed at my forehead where my mother had branded me with love. “You’re scarred, too.”
“You have no idea.”
My body was a minefield of memories. I didn’t know what mark I bore from those precious moments with my mother. I might never know.
“I was branded as a thief hundreds of years ago, back when they used such barbaric punishments,” Ultana said, her hand floating to her marred face and down to her necklace. “I excel at picking locks for which I have no key.” Then, her scrutiny traveled to my throat and she ruthlessly ripped the silver key from my neck. “She wore a key like Janus which opened up the gates to the invisible world. I see I’m not the only thief in this room.”
I didn’t dare look at my grandmother. I still had no idea where she’d gotten the key or what it unlocked. Gates to the invisible world? My mother had been so scared about the key being found that she’d had it buried in the forest. The Scintilla desperately needed to know what that key opened, and now it was in the enemy’s possession.
“The Arrazi are the lowest of thieves,” I said.
Ultana glanced at my bound hands, unfurled my fingers, and slowly tugged the Xepa ring from me. “This is also mine.”
The second she touched me, I latched onto her energy with every bit of strength remaining. I didn’t know if I could purposely summon her memories into me, but I had to try. My present mind faded into the background as pieces of her history surged forward. She had a vault of sortileges to choose from. They spun past my view. Making sense of her many years and many powers was like sifting through shards of mirrors. Ultana was very old—unnaturally, impossibly old. I couldn’t know for sure if she was immortal. Maybe her abnormally long life was a stolen power from a long-ago Scintilla, one of many silver souls she’d ruthlessly killed.
She snatched her hand away with a wary look burning in her eyes. “You are a thief,” she accused. “You steal memories.”
“You’re not immortal. You’re lying. I saw it in your history. Anyone can kill you. Clancy here could kill you for lying to him, for pretending to be more powerful than you are,” I bluffed, desperately hoping he might seize the opportunity. Let them feed on each other.
The anger that exploded from her made it obvious that she was wholly convinced of her sortilege to li
ve forever and that she resented my nerve. “You doubt my immortality? You know of others who have lived as long as I?” she said, reaching for me but catching herself before our skin made contact.
She was afraid of what I might see.
I pressed on. “With no proof, I think it’s easy to say and impossible to believe. Prove how powerful you are once and for all. Who could ever challenge you? Your faithful peasant here will regale the Arrazi with the tale. You have that sword. Use it to silence doubt.”
“I could use it to silence you.”
I fought to keep my voice steady, like I’d run out of give-a-damn. “Great. Let us see the awe-inspiring power you possess before you silence us all.”
She raised the blade. I dared to hope, but she pointed the spiked tip at my chest.
“I don’t believe in you,” I whispered shakily, shrinking with fear now that the sword was piercing the skin over my heart.
Those eyes that had seen so much death showed no trace of fear at all as she whipped the blade away from my chest and drove it into her own stomach. She looked almost pleased, overcome with emotion, as if she’d wanted for so long to thrust a blade into her body.
“You’re not going to live forever.” My heart surged so hard it was almost unbearable to breathe. Seeing the blade protrude from her stomach curdled my own. “You can die, you mortal bitch. And when you do, I hope you rot in hell.”
Drops of fear rained into her eyes until they were full with it, but her smile was still confident, triumphant. “Hell,” she gasped. “Dante’s great icy hell… The Inferno.” My eyes must’ve lit upon hearing his name because she added, “Oh yes, he said the same thing to me when I killed him for trying to cleverly spread the truth with that book of his. Why is it you Scintilla always threaten me with hell? The life of an Arrazi is hell!”
With no warning, and as Clancy did before her, she outstretched her arms and immediately tore through the three of us with her Arrazi energy. The hilt of her sword protruded from her gut and the tip stuck like a fang from her back. My chest heaved forward, her pull infinitely more violent than Clancy Mulcarr’s, or Griffin’s before him. This woman was a ruthless monster and a much more efficient killer. And, despite the gash through her middle, she was devastatingly alive.