Deviate

by Tracy Clark

  Too soon, her aura detonated in white.

  I quickly looked from my grandmother to my mom, realizing in horror that there was no beautiful torrent of silver coming from my mother’s chest and rising above her to join with ours. Her silver stream of light was…just…gone, her body still as the stone she laid upon.

  I searched the air above us, watching the clouds of silver like a sailor does before a storm.

  Reaching was like fighting gravity. I couldn’t lift my bound hands from my stomach, but I wanted nothing more than to touch my mother one last time before my own light left me. I could only lift them enough to cross them over my own chest—as I once had in the hospital in my futile attempt to protect my spirit. I watched, helplessly, as my silver aura surged from my body toward Ultana against my will.

  The word “no” barely had time to pass my lips before all breath was sucked out with it.

  Swirling and vibrating with the tempest of violent silver waves, another “no” resounded. Finn’s energy swept into the room.

  Finn leaped in front of Ultana, whose eyes had been closed as she drank from our souls. We’d soon be empty cups. Did he realize she was taking from us? Once her energy hit Finn, she’d take from him, too. I tried to yell a warning.

  Inexplicably, instead of falling to his knees when her rope of spirit latched onto him, the woman was thrown backward, hitting the wall with a terrible cracking of bones. Her head lolled forward. The impact pushed the blade forward. It slipped from her stomach with a sickening wet sound.

  My aura hung suspended above me, then funneled back down, into my gasping body.

  Clancy leaped up, but Finn grabbed the bloody weapon with one hand and savagely pushed his uncle backward. He fell down next to where Ultana leaned, barely conscious. Not dead. If she were dead, her white light would be dead as well, but it burned brilliant white, fueled by the light of my mother’s life.

  I turned my head into the cold stone, sobbing.

  Finn sliced my binds apart with the sword and gingerly slipped the rope from my wrists. I stared at his forehead, which was wrinkled in concentration. He avoided my eyes. Then he untied my grandmother, who rolled off the rock, crawled over, and knelt next to my mother, murmuring prayers in Spanish.

  I fell to her side. Mom’s bound hands reminded me of the handfasting she and my dad had performed at their wedding, symbolically tying them together forever. Now they were joined in death. I bent my lips to kiss her hands. Tears streamed onto the soft pads of her fingers. Too soon, someone lifted her up and away from me.

  I gasped at the silver aura. Giovanni? He clutched my mother possessively to his chest.

  “Where are the other men?” I asked.

  “We drugged them with their own syringes,” Giovanni said and carried my mother out into the new morning that had been her last. I choked with sobs, leaning my head against the stone, and then pushed myself shakily to my feet.

  “Never in your life did you make such an abysmally wrong choice, lad,” Clancy groaned to Finn, who stood between the two Arrazi on the floor and us. Finn was one of them but guarding…us. He towered over Clancy with clenched fists and the sword dripping blood into a small dot in the dirt. “You’re betting on the losing side!” Clancy roared, his deep voice thunder in the small tomb. A shock of his white hair fell over his forehead as he yelled. “Have you given no thought to how this will impact you, our family? You’ve killed us all!”

  Finn’s voice was calm and measured, very much like his mother’s. “I’m thinking more about how this will impact the world.”

  Ultana’s head bobbed up with effort. “Clancy, you duplicitous bastard. You’ve been on the losing side as well—your own. Finn wants to die. After this betrayal, he will surely get his wish.”

  “Not before you do!” I screamed, grabbing the sword from Finn and rushing forward to finish the job. I’d drive it through her so many times my mother’s soul would escape and fly to heaven.

  Finn grabbed me from behind. “No, Cora!”

  “Some—someone needs to pay,” I moaned. “My mother…my father…Mari.”

  “I know, luv. I know. But Ultana has information. More than anyone here, I reckon,” he said against my ear. “If she dies, then what she knows dies with her.”

  I shot a look at Clancy. Everything in me wanted to drive the blade through both of their ruthless hearts. I shook against Finn, fighting to be free. “I want this to be over.”

  Scarier than feeling murderous toward the two Arrazi who were responsible for the inhuman deaths of my family was the absence of compassion. Hate like I’d never known wound through every inch of me.

  “Kill us, puppet,” Clancy challenged. “But it won’t be over.”

  I kicked my foot toward Clancy. “You killed Mari, I know you did. I want you to die. When you do, who will come after us then? She said it herself, she is the Society, the enemy. Who will even care if you’re dead? If she’s dead, then no one will give any more orders to destroy us.”

  “You can’t kill me, stupid girl,” Ultana coughed.

  Finn coaxed the knife from my hand and moved in front of me. He looked directly in Ultana’s eyes. “You made it very clear that protection, money, and power were to be secured by all Arrazi who do the Society’s bidding, including your own family. If you rule Xepa, then who rules you? Who threatens your family? Or were those all lies?”

  All eyes were on her, waiting for that answer. Even Clancy watched eagerly for her response. We’d thought the Society was the ultimate enemy, but was it? Ultana squirmed and kicked in agony as she clutched her bloody stomach much like my father once had. She was fighting Finn’s sortilege, fighting not to answer.

  But something else I noticed—her light, it was fading, folding into her physical body slowly, inch by inch. She was either very scared, or…very wrong about herself.

  God, let her be wrong.

  Let her answer his questions in time.

  “I believe I know who she protects with her silence,” Mami Tulke rasped from behind me. She shuffled forward, kicking up centuries of dust with her sandals. “She will not tell you.”

  “She has to tell him,” I said. “Finn’s sortilege is to pull the truth.”

  “I see,” Mami Tulke said, looking at Clancy. “You forced me to use my sortilege, my ability to shield, so you could skirt this boy’s sortilege to obtain the truth. You used me to deceive him. But,” she said, pointing a gnarled finger at Ultana, “this woman will not speak the truth against her will. Our powers do not work on her. I tried to shield as she was attacking us and could not.”

  “Christ, Clancy. That’s how you did it, how you lied to me?” Finn said. “I was a fool to think my power would guarantee honesty. Worse,” Finn said, dipping his chin, “I was a fool to want to believe you.”

  “Yet the boy doesn’t have to speak the truth himself,” Ultana said with a smirk. “Why does this girl you’ve risked everything to save think that Clancy killed her cousin? Since honesty is so revered here, does she not deserve to know the truth?”

  “What? What truth?” I asked Finn.

  Finn angled his head to look at me, but his eyes stopped short in a way that made me cringe. What did he know?

  “That key in your hand,” Mami Tulke interrupted, motioning to Ultana. “It does not belong to you.”

  “You know this how, old woman?” Ultana asked, tiredly.

  “I know this because I’m the thief who took it.” Her wrinkled mouth split into a proud smile when Ultana’s eyes grew wide. She nodded. “You know from where I stole it. That’s the truth you don’t want to speak.”

  “Where did you get the key?” I asked my grandmother, my body quivering. I felt so cold that the room undulated, dreamlike, and my body felt strangely disconnected from my head. My mom would tell me to ground myself. Stay present. Be strong.

  Mom.

  Mami Tulke’s hand gave a dismissive wave at my question. “The church.”

  “What church?” Finn asked. “Wh
ere?”

  “The church,” Mami Tulke spat, exasperated. “I took it from the rock, the keeper of the keys of heaven. It comes from the Vatican.”

  “Cristo,” Giovanni whispered. He’d come back in from outside and was listening at the doorway. His arms were heartbreakingly empty. Astonishment rounded his eyes, and his mouth hung open. “The Vatican? She stole the hand of Saint Peter from the Vatican! It’s been an unsolved mystery for years.” He laughed nervously, incredulous.

  “You’re telling me that I’ve been wearing a key around my neck that was hidden inside a hand, a hand that you stole from one of the most famous statues in the world?”

  Ultana chuckled and a bit of blood sputtered from her mouth. The way she appraised my grandmother could’ve been described as admiration. What? Honor among thieves? Her puffed breaths came faster as she clutched her wound. Her astral body was thin as smoke around her upper body and head and diminishing into the air. She gasped and leveled me with old, knowing eyes. “A mighty flame follows a tiny spark. Run, little Scintilla. Run. Because as long as there is a God on their altar, you will always be hunted.”

  Fifty-Nine

  Finn

  Ultana Lennon had no more words after that.

  Cora stood, unmoving, and stared down at the old Arrazi. Was Cora aware of how violently she was shaking? I yearned to wrap my arms around her. She needed to cry. She needed to kick and scream and release the pain that rippled from her body so strongly that it hit me in gusts. How was she even standing? I stared at her profile in the flickering light. Cora was the strongest person I’d ever known.

  “Mortal after all,” Cora said, startling me from my gazing. She bent and slid the key from Ultana’s open hand. “Her light’s gone out.”

  “Who ran her through? You?” Giovanni asked me, stepping forward and requesting the sword with his outstretched hand. “I’ll finish this.” He motioned toward my uncle.

  I denied him the weapon. “In actual fact, the blade was in her stomach already when I ran in.” She’d blown back when her energy hit me. That was when I’d seen the sword in her stomach. The only person in the room who hadn’t been tied up was my uncle. “You stabbed her?” I asked Clancy.

  Clancy rested one arm on his knee and ran a hand over his bearded face, tinting it with brown dust. He shook his head. “Cora taunted Ultana like a schoolchild. I can’t believe Ultana fell for it. Truly, I can’t believe she died. How did you know she wasn’t immortal, girl?” Clancy asked Cora.

  Cora’s voice was flat, dead as the air in the room. “I didn’t. But she was alive for hundreds of years. I saw it in her memories.”

  “Well,” I said, “seems that too many years were spent fertilizing her egotistical pride rather than pruning it.”

  I could barely see that Giovanni had a syringe hidden in his hand when he lunged forward with no words and with no warning. He grabbed Clancy by the hair, yanked his head over, and shoved the needle into the side of his neck. Clancy’s eyes were wide with shock before he was overcome by the drug.

  The prey attacked the predator.

  “No!” Cora yelled, too late. “Dammit, G. He couldn’t follow us as long as he was conscious. That’s how he followed us to the shack before. He was put under and was able to use his sortilege. Jesus. He’ll track us until he comes to.”

  Giovanni threw down the spent syringe. “Then let’s finish it.”

  Cora’s grandmother shuffled over and took Cora’s hand and led her outside. They went out into the cool air and stood mournful watch over her mother’s body while Giovanni and I dragged the two thugs into the burial tomb. We went back outside, and I walked over to the door and clicked the lock in place.

  “We should kill them, you know we should,” Giovanni said to Cora. “If we don’t, we’ll face them another day, and next time we may not walk away.”

  “Not all of us are walking away,” Cora choked out, looking down at her mother’s sweet face. That woman had known too much sorrow in her short life. I watched Giovanni stare mournfully at Cora’s mum, too. It was the first time I felt bad for him. This tribe of Scintilla had suffered enough losses.

  “I want them dead, but I don’t want to be a murderer like them,” Cora said.

  Giovanni’s hands clenched into fists. “It’s not the same as what they do. I will do it,” he said. “With no guilt.”

  Cora spun toward him. “You think I’m weak for not wanting to kill them? I do want to. And that’s what disturbs me. I want nothing more than for them to stay in that tomb and never come out.” She held up her hands. “And what of all your talk of connectedness? Of oneness, huh? If vengeance is a volley hit back and forth, how does it ever end unless someone refuses to strike back?”

  “The fear you’ll have in facing them again might be the steep price you pay for peace within yourself,” I said, though I looked at my feet when I did.

  “How do you find peace with yourself, Finn?” Her voice was hard, but I could tell she wanted to know if I’d genuinely come to terms with being an Arrazi.

  Finally, I looked up, feeling a sharp sting when I met her eyes for the first time since we stared at each other through the glass window. “I haven’t. I never will.”

  Sixty

  Cora

  Finn stood with us, but apart.

  I sighed. He’d voiced my feelings exactly when he said fear was my price for inner peace. Of course he understood, though I doubted fear was his currency. From what he said, to the look in his eyes and his aura, guilt was his currency. He’d had to kill to stay alive. While I abhorred it, I couldn’t deny being happy he was alive. He’d helped us, helped me. Again.

  That meant something.

  Giovanni’s eyes rolled over Finn, but not in the derisive way I’d expected. I didn’t know what had happened between them that they showed up together, but there was something hopeful about an Arrazi and a Scintilla standing side by side in a field of wet grass and sorrow.

  “So, we’re just going to leave them locked up in there? I suppose they could die anyway,” Giovanni said with an optimistic shrug. “Who’d find them way out here?”

  “That will be up to chance, won’t it?” I hardened myself to thoughts of their fate. Hopefully, they’d be trapped long enough for us to get far away—a head start. At least Ultana wasn’t one we’d ever have to worry about again.

  Finn bent and scooped my mother into his arms. How long could we stay in each other’s presence? His aura was colored but weak—water with fine swirls of paint in it.

  Like the labyrinth of lines curving over and over again on the triple spiral, our good-byes were always guaranteed to circle back around.

  In the car, my mother was laid out across my lap as well as Giovanni’s. I found myself roping small braids into the hair around her face. Every so often, a silver strand of hair would peek from among the black and my heart would pulse and swell with a mixture of both love and unthinkable grief. I’d never forget the unique light of my mother. She gave me my own. Seemed like a reckless thing for a Scintilla to do.

  “Why did they have me at all?” I found myself asking no one in particular. “If they knew what I could become?” Everyone who could answer that question was gone. Finn’s eyes jerked to me. “Of course. Arrazi children wonder the same thing.”

  He gave one affirming nod. “Perhaps more so.”

  “Where are we going?” Mami Tulke asked.

  “To lay Gráinne to rest,” Finn answered quietly, pulling onto a road that I knew led to his house.

  “Why would I bury my mother at your house?” But then, where on earth would I bury her? I heard her strained voice in my head saying, Take me home. I couldn’t bury her at the home she shared with my father. It wasn’t safe. Ultana had said it herself—she’d been watching that place for years.

  Finn’s eyes caught mine in the rearview mirror. “We won’t be here long. You’ll understand soon.”

  “Claire is there with Finn’s mother,” Giovanni said. “And Dun. We need to ge
t them and go someplace safe.”

  “Safety doesn’t exist for us,” I said, aware that my voice sounded rigid and skeptical, and I hadn’t agreed to go anywhere with him.

  “Oh, you mean like how you encouraged everyone to go to Dr. M’s for safety when you were profiting from it?” Finn fired at him.

  “On my life I didn’t know what Dr. M was going to do to us. I needed money. He paid me to find others like me. For research. He’d never hurt me in the past. I had no reason to assume he was bad.” Giovanni’s eyes pleaded for me to believe him. I noticed his hands were placed over my mother’s folded hands on her stomach.

  “Okay.”

  Finn slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “What? You’re going to take his word?”

  “Yes. You’re here. He’d have to tell the truth, wouldn’t he?”

  “I’m not so sure anymore,” Finn said.

  “That man,” Mami Tulke began in her jagged accent, turning to Finn. “He said Cora was in another room and he would kill her if I didn’t protect him from other people’s powers.”

  “I wondered how he lied,” Finn said, with a sympathetic look to Mami Tulke. “I was arrogant and too stupid to realize he might have found a way around my sortilege. I’m sorry he used you like that to get to your granddaughter.”

  She patted his arm with her wrinkled hand. “You are a good human.”

  “No. I’m Arrazi.”

  Her chin rose as she appraised him. “Still good.”

  “He comes from good people,” I told her. “He and his parents helped us escape before when—when Dad died.”

  Mami Tulke twisted in her seat and looked at me, first deep in my eyes and then down to my mom’s head in my lap with her black hair cascading over my knees. My grandmother’s chin trembled. “I believe Arrazi are either taught to hate, or they hate themselves for what they are forced to do,” she said. Her gaze turned again to Finn. “Stay with the light inside of you. Light is there.”