The Arrow (Children of Brigid Trilogy Book 1)

by Maureen O'Leary

  She shook the sand off her jeans. He was close enough to hear the denim brushing against her wet skin, to smell the salt in her hair. The rubber cap of the syringe slipped against his sweaty palm. If he pricked himself by mistake, he would be dead in hours. If he could manage to plunge the contents into Fynn’s neck, she would be his slave forever. His breath quickened. He could already feel her weight collapsing in his arms. The time had to be that instant. Now. He bit off the cap and raised the syringe above her shoulder.

  His phone vibrated in his back pocket.

  She whipped around, clutching her top to her chest. He bit his tongue to keep from cursing. She can’t see me. She can’t see me. He backed away, leaving her to study the darkness alone.

  Safe in the driver’s seat, his hands shook over his phone. A text from his mother. Need you at the office. He cursed aloud this time, the last shreds of the witch’s spell falling off his shoulders like dandruff. Of course it was his mother calling, destroying his moment to take Fynn Kildare for his own. His mother destroyed everything.

  He spit the rubber stopper out from between his teeth and recapped the syringe. His heart pounded as he gunned down the road toward the highway. It was okay, he told himself. He would have her. His mother had her own ideas about the timeline of the next couple of months. He had to be patient for just a while longer.

  He cranked the stereo up on a classic Dionysus rock song, and lowered the windows to feel the wind in his hair. Everything would be okay. It had to be. He would have her as his own before long. His need for Fynn was stronger than anything he knew. His need was stronger than his mother and her cheap witch magic.

  His need for Fynn was, in fact, stronger than the goddess herself.

  4. The Family

  A black SUV sat parked in front of Fynn’s house. Her foot itched to press on the gas and head for somewhere else to spend the night. Not for the first time, she wished she lived further away from the Keep. A guard dressed in a black suit waved her down as she approached. No escape. He met her in the driveway.

  “My lady,” he said. Another disciple wearing an earpiece held a post at the door. There would be at least two more on the back balcony. Her mother always did feel the need for bodyguards. Fynn ignored the one holding his arm for her. She could walk by herself. He bowed his head before turning heel with military precision.

  Annoyance rose in Fynn’s blood like mercury. She walked into her own house to find her mother and sister sitting in the front room, heads bent together. They had taken the time to light dozens of her candles, and to make tea that steamed in cups on the low table in front of the sofa. The two of them looked like a pair of butterfly wings in their silk tunics and flowing skirts. The scent of burning sage rose from their fire-colored hair. Her father had surely been telling stories around the hearth that night, terrifying everybody with his endless apocalypse talk.

  Fynn’s sister Liadan jumped from her seat without a greeting. “Have you lost your mind?” she said. “Mom said no healings.”

  “You don’t know the whole story,” Fynn said.

  “I know you healed somebody,” Lia said. “I could feel it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Fynn said. Not sorry. “Did I upset the Force?”

  “This isn’t a joke. Can you at least tell me no one saw you?”

  “One person saw me.” Poor sweet Jasmine. If only her poetry were as delicate as her thin little wrists, it would have been so much easier to listen to.

  Fynn’s mother remained quiet, the candlelight dancing on the hollows of her face. In one shadow, she looked ancient; in a flicker, she appeared as young as Fynn and twice as fierce. Fynn cut her eyes away. It was easier to keep her sense of humor if she didn’t look at her mother. The woman claimed to be over two hundred years old. She’d been around long enough to gather great power in her human form.

  “One person isn’t bad,” Lia said. “At least we can control the damage.”

  “Then there were the twenty or so kids who saw the paramedics take the girl away.” Fynn couldn’t help it. It didn’t matter how powerful they were. Her family made her perverse.

  “Oh, Fynn,” Lia said. “This is so not okay.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Let her die?”

  “Call 911, like a normal person.”

  “She would have been dead before they got her to the hospital,” Fynn said. “Trust me.”

  “I wish I could.”

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  The windows rattled. Lia counted to ten under her breath, as if she were the one who needed patience. It was too much for Fynn.

  “It’s not like they burn girls like us at the stake anymore,” Fynn said. “Besides, this is St. Cocha. The town of peace and love, man. If they find out what I am, the worst they’ll do is make me their queen.”

  “You think this is funny.” her mother said, matter-of-factly. Her voice was the smell of vanilla and spices and redwood forests. It was a fireplace on a snowy night, raging with flames that could either warm the room or catch the whole house on fire. “But you’ve exposed us. There is more at stake here than you realize.”

  “The end times are coming,” Lia said. “Fighting will make us weak. You need to come home to the Keep.”

  The end times. Fynn didn’t know how Lia could take it. Her sister hardly ever left the Keep and she was as zealous as a fresh convert.

  “The Keep is not my home,” Fynn said. But even as she said it, she knew the truth was much more complicated than that.

  “Virus, was it?” her mother asked. An Irish lilt rocked the words in her mouth like smooth stones. Fynn’s heart ached with homesickness. Resentment. Love.

  “Meningitis.” Fynn knew Lia and their mother would feel the hands-on healing through the strange connection between them. It was stupid to think she could get away with it. She hated them and she loved them. Even in the short time she’d had with her mother and sister in her front room, she felt the ties between them knitting together, adding to the power of the Three. But she also felt bound in a sticky web she could not escape. She could never feel at ease with her family. She couldn’t even just feel one thing at a time with them. When she was with her mother and sister, she erupted into her own private mosh pit of emotion.

  “There are demon forces gathering strength,” her mother said, her warning carrying the crackling of wildfire. “I know you have decided not to heed the prophecies, but that doesn’t make them not true. You are in grave danger outside the Keep.”

  “I was in grave danger inside the Keep,” Fynn said. “You couldn’t protect me there, and you can’t protect me here.” Fynn thought of the invisible stalker in the café and after she emerged from the water. She just wanted a hot shower, a cozy blanket, and some time alone. Maybe a glass of wine to help her forget the noise at the beach, the flash of terror that told her that the evil presence had returned right before it just as suddenly disappeared.

  “Someone was following you?” her sister asked, forever on the edge of panic. “Was it an unhuman?” Get out of my head. Fynn struggled to control her thoughts, her tone of voice, the direction of the whole conversation. But Lia’s eyes shone in the candlelight. She turned to their mother. “She can’t see why she must return,” she said. “It’s time you told her the truth.”

  Mother Brigid grabbed Lia’s hand. “Sit down, daughters,” she said.

  Lia sank to the couch beside their mother, but Fynn took the hard chair as far away as possible. Lia’s tears made Fynn want to punch her in the face. She turned to the window, to the moon kissing the water on the horizon. She expected a lecture about the power of the Three, some newly-channeled prophecy about the demon apocalypse. Her family’s urgent truths didn’t have anything to do with her life in St. Cocha.

  “Daughter. Look at me,” Brigid said.

  “Look at yourself,” Fynn said. Lia gasped. Fynn knew that no one spoke to Mother Brigid the way she did since her infection. Thorns covered her since then and she liked it that way. �
��This is ancient history to me, do you understand? Whatever it is you are about to tell me - I don’t care about it.”

  “Daughter.”

  Despite her resistance, Fynn’s mother pulled her in like the quiet moon did with the tide. In her mother’s eyes, purple windflowers bloomed like a galaxy of stars in the expanse of an endless meadow. Fynn saw the craters of the moon, the lining of the planets, the umbilical twinings of a million babies. There stretched hundred-mile desert saltpans, snowcapped mountains, and beyond that, an infinite sky.

  Then a door closed between them and everything was shut from Fynn’s view. She shivered, despite the warm room. Her mother’s voice became less like the falling of a brook over river stones and more like the croaking of a raven. “What happened in the Keep the day you fell from us was no accident, my daughter. I meant for you to get the demon virus,” she said, while Lia hid her face in her hands. “I didn’t plant that sick woman in our midst. A witch did that. But once I sensed her presence, I did not stop you from healing her, even though I knew that the demon virus would crawl into you.”

  “No,” Fynn said.

  “I speak the truth, young one,” her mother said. “I didn’t protect you. I saw it as the will of the universe.”

  Fynn stood and threw her chair against the wall. Lia cried out and covered her head with her arms. Her mother continued, undaunted. “Your father and I saw the demon war coming sooner than we expected. Our daughters were powerful beyond imagining, but you were both so soft, so pure of heart. We needed an Arrow and a Healer - one of you to be our defender and the other to hold the aspect of healing.”

  “I was the Healer. I did everything you asked,” Fynn said. None of it had done her any good. It was inconceivable to Fynn that they expected blind obedience from her now.

  “Yes, but as powerful as you were at the healings, you were even more so at the fighting. You were like Artemis with the bow, my daughter. You know the story of the moon goddess slaying an entire city of unjust men with one arrow. We saw that same ability in you.”

  “But why try to kill me?” She bit back her tears. She wasn’t weak like her sister, crying like an idiot.

  “It would take more than a demon virus to kill you. I knew you would not die. When I sensed demon infection in that woman, I let you touch her, knowing it would change you.”

  “I did everything you asked,” Fynn repeated. “I was in so much pain, for weeks. I was just a kid.” She felt like someone had punched her in the stomach, forcing the air from her lungs. It was difficult to breathe, let alone speak.

  “You were so pure of heart, my love. Your father and I are too much divine, not enough human, to sire a killer. We had to do something or you would not be mean enough to...”

  Fynn bit the insides of her mouth so hard, she tasted blood, and through the pain, retained her strength. “So you thought you’d give me a dose of demon to carry with me for the rest of my life. Fear, anger, jealousy, shame,” she said. “A real fall from grace.”

  “You are stronger now than either of us ever were,” her mother said, gesturing to Lia. Fynn looked at her sister, so complacent at their mother’s side, and hated her.

  “I was happy before I became infected,” Fynn said. “You destroyed my life.”

  She remembered an entire childhood of afternoons spent on that damn cushion indoors, while everyone else had fun, only to burn for weeks in a nightmare fever that made her wish for death. Fynn far preferred not caring. The injustice of her mother’s revelation was more than she could bear. Her heart felt like it was splitting down a ripping fault line.

  Her mother’s sad smile held the power of a storm cloud. “Your life was changed, not destroyed. Now it is time for you to come home.”

  “I am home. I have a life here in St. Cocha,” Fynn said. “With people who don’t betray me.”

  “You’ve been a big fish in a small pond. You let them give you a Ph.D. in life sciences and call you a prodigy. Of course, you know how nature works. The invention of nature is in your DNA. You are nature,” Mother Brigid said.

  “Please come home with us,” Lia pleaded. “The war is coming and we need you to lead our armies. We need you to defend us.”

  Fynn’s temper flared and she did not hold it back. The guards outside ducked, as the windowpanes exploded with the concussive power of Fynn’s rage. The glass fell in shards onto the deck of the balcony, clattered down the bluff below.

  “Get out of my house,” Fynn said. “Or you will see exactly how mean you’ve made me.”

  Brigid stood slowly enough to show that she was not afraid. Electricity shot from the ends of Fynn’s hair. Lia reached, as though to touch her, but their mother stopped her hand.

  “The Triple Goddess is who you are,” Brigid said. “You must come back to us, my daughter. The demons are already here among us. It isn’t just us who need you. You need us, as well.”

  Fynn threw open the front door, though she stood nowhere near it. The guards called for them from the porch, too afraid to step inside. Her mother and sister went out, her mother’s head regal, her sister’s bowed and weeping.

  She listened to the SUV start and drive away. She slumped to the floor and pushed her face into the couch. It still smelled of sage and fire. She yelled curses until her anger shook the walls and rattled the hanging crystals against the empty window frames.

  5. The Good Son

  Cain waited in the cold room. He shot the right sleeve of his Armani suit to see his watch. Everyone else in his company used their phones for the time. When he wasn’t sitting on a beach in the dark, he was an old-fashioned man. He liked an analog watch with a leather band.

  His mother was nine hours late. She called him to the office and then wasn’t there when he arrived. It didn’t surprise him, but still, he didn’t dare stay away when she called. She demanded strict obedience. If she had been there and he kept her waiting...he shuddered. How she would make him pay.

  He hated the office, with its industrial blue carpet and soundproof walls. There were no windows to the outside. Sometimes he would endure entire days without once seeing the sun. Picture windows lined two of the facing walls, but they only opened to two gymnasium-sized rooms below.

  The west side looked down at the pharmaceutical factory floor, where a handful of techs worked an assembly line. Each pill that poured out of the finishers represented money on top of money. Cain Pharmaceuticals generated pills to take for pep, pills to mellow out, and pills to treat symptoms of asthma, symptoms of high blood pressure, and symptoms of cancer. They didn’t develop cures at Cain Pharmaceuticals. Cures would put them out of business. The money was in relief of symptoms.

  Cain Pharmaceuticals was in its seventh year of relief peddling. The family business was thriving. Cain’s mother had been right about getting into drugs. His mother was always right when it came to money.

  The east-side floor told a different story. The space was empty as a cavern, except for three gurneys holding three young men in comas, attached to machines and tubes. They were in the deepest of unconscious sleeps and had been for three years. They were barely alive, his brothers.

  Three women attended them twenty-four hours a day. They wore pure white scrubs. It was an aesthetic issue for Cain’s mother. She needed everything in that room to be white. The floors and walls were painted the same blinding white as the nurses’ uniforms and the sheets over his brothers’ bodies. Cain would never let her know it, but he hated looking into that room. When she wasn’t around, he pretended it didn’t exist.

  He poked his head into the hall to make sure she wasn’t coming. When he was certain he was alone, he opened a computer file marked Real Estate. Adding to this file inspired him. A good fifteen minutes poring through the pictures kept him motivated to stay the course with his crazy family.

  Without his private dream, he would have tried to run. His mother would have caught him eventually, but he would have run anyway. Without the dream he kept in that file, he would have welcomed d
eath.

  Except that his mother would make his death slow and unbelievably painful. She would get much more pleasure from his agony than his death. Cain shuddered again. If he thought too much on reality, he lost his nerve. It was time to think about his dream, instead.

  He opened a photo of a long beach with sands as fine and sparkling as snow. He’d already bought an estate in the Maldives beside pristine turquoise waters.

  He knew the coordinates to the estate. When the time came, he would fly them there himself in one of his planes. He would need to remember to reserve a couple of employees from getting sick when the time came. They would need servants. Fynn wouldn’t have to do any work. Once she was Cain’s wife, her life would be pure paradise.

  When he could stand the waiting no longer, he opened the final image. It was from a recent news article. It came from a photo of Fynn with Mother Brigid and her sister Liadan accepting an award for some kind of breakthrough in infant medicine. Cain had never read the article. He knew that Brigid’s Keep was a world-renowned birthing center, among other things. Cain and his three brothers had all been born there, but he didn’t care about that.

  He had cropped the photo to cut Mother Brigid out. He didn’t care about what happened to Fynn’s sister or her mother. Mother Brigid, Liadan, and Fynn together possessed an unimaginable power. Cain’s mother was a witch and their coven of four was strong, but they were only human at their core. The kind of power that he witnessed in Fynn’s family while growing up in Brigid’s Keep was horrifying. Fynn’s healing touch was only part of the story. She could send an arrow to its mark from a quarter mile away. As for Lia, she cried so hard when her pet wolf died, that the skies above the Keep darkened with a thunderstorm and funnel cloud. He ran to the cellars below the fort in terror. No one should have that kind of strength.

  Destroying the power of the Three was the right thing to do.

  Fynn’s face took up the entire screen. He had to be content to just watch for now. Soon he would get to touch her in person every single moment of every single day.