by Tracy Clark
“What is that ring?” I asked, wondering if Giovanni had given her one as well.
“It was Ultana’s. My mother had buried it in her garden at the cottage after she cut off Ultana’s hand in a fight.”
“Japers! That’s how Ultana lost her hand? Why do you wear it?”
“It’s Xepa’s symbol,” she said, holding up her palm, allowing me to see the engraving in the gold: two triangles joined at their tips. I’d be looking into that symbol right quick. Saoirse might be able to shed light on it for me.
Cora glanced at the clock on the wall, and I felt the gravitational tug of time ready to pull her from me. “I want to say something before you go,” I said, drinking in her face, her skin, the markings that she wore with dignity and that somehow made her more beautiful to my eyes. “Remember when I said I could feel you in the forest in California? I could. I just didn’t know what I was feeling. I didn’t know it was your aura. I thought that’s what falling in love was supposed to feel like. I felt my heart swell, my mind, too, to accommodate the constant thoughts of you. Your shy but strong spirit, your beauty…”
My mouth went dry, but I pressed on. If this was my last chance to tell her how I felt, maybe she’d believe in some part of her charred heart that it was real for me. “I felt light, like a balloon barely tethered. I felt like the string was in your hands.”
She said nothing in response, but her chin quivered slightly and her green eyes snapped up to mine, but she too quickly looked away.
“Cora, don’t you ever wonder why?” I felt like a whimpering mutt, but I couldn’t help asking. “Why two people who are supposed to be mortal enemies felt so instantly and deeply connected?”
She opened her mouth to speak what I was sure would be the same awful words she’d thrown at me before: that I was only attracted to her Scintilla aura, that what I felt wasn’t love.
May God strike me dead on the spot if it wasn’t.
“I’m going to tell you what I told Giovanni last night,” she said in a measured tone. “It doesn’t matter anymore. If we’re lucky, we’ll all have our whole lives to ponder the whys of love, but right now I have bigger questions to answer.”
She looked at her watch before her eyes held mine. There was so much in that look. Naked vulnerability, anger, regret…and under the coals of that messy fire, love. I saw it like a flag hoisted over her heart.
“But yeah,” she finally said, “I’ve wondered the same thing.”
She stood to go, and my cell vibrated. “Shite,” I murmured, pulling it from my pocket. It was a text from Saoirse.
Where are you?
I neglected it to focus on my good-bye with Cora. She’d once clung to me, wrapped her sneakers around my waist, held me tightly to her, all while whispering pained good-byes between kisses. That good-bye was so beautiful and full of truth, a bud compared to the shriveled pale petals of this one with my cautious kiss to her wet cheek. Still, like then, as I watched her walk away—maybe for the last time—it never truly felt like good-bye.
Chapter Nine
Giovanni
Claire tugged at my hand, pulling me through the Jetway from the airplane. The impression was that of a tiger who’d never been allowed to roam free. The flight had been long and confining. She was ready for action and expected us to be as well. Mami Tulke shuffled behind. I yawned. Children required stamina.
She looked like a wild thing, too, with her flyaway waves twisting together like weeds. What did I know of doing a girl’s hair? What did I know about taking care of her at all? A memory came to me of my father brushing my mother’s hair as she sat on the floor in front of his chair—to warm his feet, she would say teasingly, but I knew it was because of the way her lids drooped as he ran the brush down her blond waves. A sudden ache of missing my parents hit me. It was as unfamiliar as it was unwelcome, because I normally never allowed it. I looked down at Claire through blurry eyes.
I had no idea what to expect once we landed in the coastal city of La Serena, Chile, after the ninety-minute flight from Santiago, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the luxury car that awaited us outside the airport. “I made arrangements with someone I trust,” Mami Tulke said. “I was taken at the airport in Dublin when I went to collect Cora. That’s how the cabrón caught me.”
“How did Clancy know you were going to be in Dublin?”
“I now know that he was the one who called me and told me my son was dead. He said that Cora had asked him to contact me. He arranged for the car to pick me up and, of course, it took me straight to him. He later taunted me that he’d found out about me from Gráinne’s journal.” A string of Spanish cursing followed, mostly at herself for being estúpida.
A young man in linen pants and a fedora greeted Mami Tulke and took her bag while a weathered older man, who looked like he’d rather be on horseback than driving the black sedan, sucked on a toothpick and eyed Claire and me with unabashed curiosity, especially Claire. I was used to being the stranger and didn’t mind his stares, but my stomach clenched with protective flares that spit like a volcano when he saw her eyes and tried not to look stunned.
Rather than her aura pulling in shyly as most children’s do when met with people they don’t know, Claire’s reached out like another appendage, stroking the energies of those around her. They felt it, and in some cases their aura shrunk back in response. It was an energetic social breach to blend so blatantly with the auras of others, and I chalked it up to her very sheltered existence within the confines of Dr. M’s facility.
About a hundred kilometers east from La Serena we entered the Elqui Valley, a narrow belt across Chile through which the Rio Elqui flowed from the Andes to the Pacific Ocean. Pisco and wine vineyards hemmed the bottom of the arid mountains like a ruffled green skirt.
“I like the way this place feels,” Claire announced.
“It’s said to be the earth’s magnetic center.” Mami Tulke explained the wash of energy I felt all around me. The very air was saturated and charged with it. “This valley is known for its energy. Absorb it, Giovanni. You will feel very at home, I promise,” she added with a hint of mischief, making me wonder what she wasn’t saying.
I imagined there were worse places to hide in obscurity and raise a daughter than this sunny stretch of valley, but I thrummed with a restless desire to be out in the world fighting. Cora was out there, fighting in her own stubborn way, and I felt like a coward, hiding in a South American village as far away from the world of Arrazi and Scintilla as could be.
“Cora said her parents met here,” I said, recalling Cora’s account of her mother’s journal entries. “Why did Gráinne come to this place?”
Mami Tulke stared off for enough strung-together moments of memory that I felt bad for asking about them. “The triple spiral led her to research ancient pre-Columbian spirals. As is the nature of spirals, her search fanned out to key places all over the world. The body of earth is scarred with evidence.” Mami Tulke halted for a moment, and I wondered if we were both thinking of Cora and the evidence marked on her body.
I tenderly kissed those markings once…
“Grace…Gráinne showed up at my door, looking for a place to sit out a storm.” Mami Tulke smiled sorrowfully. “The moment she saw me, she cried. She had never seen another silver one in her life.”
“Weren’t you just as shocked?”
Her old face lit into a secret smile. “No.”
The car stopped at a clay-colored adobe ranch house with a covered portico supported by wooden beams painted the orange-red of an unripe pomegranate. The curved roof tiles looked like stacked turtle shells. It was a modest home but well lived-in, with vibrant colors like the skirts and scarves Mami Tulke wore. Her house was stacked with personal mementos. We were shown to two simple rooms across the hall from each other. Mami Tulke plopped into a worn leather armchair and exhaled loudly. “Mis montañas.” She sighed. Her mountains. Her home. What it must feel like to have a place so deeply impressed on you that you could u
se the sacred word home.
As energetic as Claire had seemed when we got off the plane, she suddenly drooped like an unwatered flower. I put her to bed and went out to talk to Mami Tulke, but she snored softly in her chair with her hands folded over her round belly. I covered her with a blanket and went to bed listening to the crickets and marveling at the impossibly bright moon that turned my room blue-white, and wondered if Cora was gazing at the same light.
“I should be doing something,” I told Mami Tulke. “There are Arrazi enemies out there, and I want to find them before they find us. I don’t want to be on the run. I want to fight.” I’d woken from my fitful sleep, plagued by dreams of Cora, sure that she needed me. Regret was a sour ball in my stomach.
“You feel like a babysitter to an old woman and a child,” Mami Tulke said, sprinkling tobacco in a thin line in the rolling paper perched in her fingers.
“I feel like I should be with Cora.”
“Love is just one of the wars you’re waging,” she said, licking the paper and twisting the ends into puckered points. “I’m not sure you’ll win either if you’re too intent on fighting.”
“You’re not suggesting we sit here in these craggy mountains and do nothing? They killed your son, your daughter-in-law. They’ll kill your granddaughter next.” The sour ball grew and rolled as I said those words. My outburst earned me a ferocious look, and for the briefest flash I saw an older version of Cora.
“You assume I’m doing nothing,” Mami Tulke said but didn’t seem to think she needed to explain what exactly it was that she thought she was doing. She struck a match on the table next to her and lit her homemade cigarette. “Come with me,” she said with a puff of smoke and an abrupt scoot of her chair.
We left Claire with the housekeeper, Yolanda, and rode a rickety golf cart farther down into the green basin of the valley. Houses dotted the valley at sparse intervals between pisco vineyards and farms. Soon, a cluster of tiny geodesic domes and small modernistic angular buildings came into view. They looked like individual houses for an alien race. “Where are we going?” I asked.
“To exercise.”
“To what?” Exasperation rose up in me. I wasn’t visiting a country club. I’d agreed to look after Cora’s grandmother, and I knew I had an obligation to Claire, but every second away from Cora, away from doing something important, was wearing me down to a useless nub. “What kind of exercise?” I finally asked, surrendering only because if I ever was going to go after the Arrazi, I might as well stay as fit as I could.
“Qigong.”
I stifled a groan and rode in silence until she skidded to a stop at the top of an incline in the road. I offered my hand to help her down, which she took without comment, just pointing with a finger that we were to walk through a break in the vineyard along the side of the road.
Inexplicably, my heart sped up as we descended along the narrow dirt path. The place truly was an energetic enigma. As we stepped through the trees, I saw one reason why. Approximately sixty people stood, evenly spaced, in a lush meadow. Simultaneously, their arms swooped and dipped in elegant Qigong moves. I stood frozen, openmouthed, and stared.
Above and around the dozens of people were clouds of pulsing, sparkling platinum.
Mami Tulke motioned toward them. Her voice was soft. “This is how I fight. I keep them hidden. I keep them alive.”
Her face beamed as she looked upon the Scintilla below us. A lineage, a continuation of our kind. She saw herself as a savior of our race, and she was. I had to admit, she was. “I believe the energy of this place masks the Scintilla’s energy like auric camouflage.”
I blinked and tried to breathe normally. Her words shoved me back into my worst childhood memory. Mami Tulke was hiding the Scintilla in the same way—albeit naturally and on a much larger scale—that my parents had hidden me in the electronics cabinet when the Arrazi came for them. They’d hoped to conceal not only my body but the pull of my aura as well.
Mami Tulke surveyed her kingdom of Scintilla with pride evident in her face. She should be proud. It was a miracle to see so many Scintilla alive in one place, but when I looked out among them I saw something else…power in numbers, the makings of a Scintilla army.
Chapter Ten
Cora
“My name’s Joe, I work for the dough. If I don’t have money, can’t keep my honey. No honey, not funny. You say my cab go so fast, that’s ’cause I press the gas, slow taxi man can’t last.”
Of all the taxi drivers in Italy, I got the one from India who thought he could rap. The drive through Rome was enough to convert me to lifelong pedestrianism. Mopeds jockeyed for position at the front of every light, and when the light changed, everyone blasted off like they heard the shot of a starting gun. Preservation of life and limb was apparently not on the Italian menu.
Funny, that was all that was on mine.
My two days at the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence to see the tombs of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo had been interesting, though I’d left Florence with a numbing sense that I might never find the answers I sought, like the answers were written on the bottom of a teacup that could never be drained, but I could get flashing, teasing glimpses beneath the murky liquid.
It was no coincidence that Dante and Michelangelo were buried together. Nor did I believe it was a coincidence that Galileo had three fingers cut from his corpse. No freaking way was it chance that carved reliefs of three interlocked rings—Michelangelo’s monogram I now wore on my skin—were prominent all over his tomb.
The facade of the Catholic Church had surprised me because the Star of David adorned the pinnacle. I’d always associated the symbol with Judaism. When I stared at the triangles, visions of Clancy and Ultana would return with emotions so violent, I’d felt nauseated. Actually, I felt that way most of the time. Fear had worn my insides so I felt my gut had been scraped out and carved like a pumpkin.
I’d run my hands all over that church, feeling for memory like a nearly blind person gropes for their glasses. There was much memory in the building and in the monuments but none that illuminated the truth, and none had marked me. A small blessing as people had begun to blatantly stare at my forehead, neck, and hands. It made me want to rip off my shirt and give them some knife.
For the first time in my life, I pondered wearing makeup. “Concealer” sounded exactly like a product I should become acquainted with. Case in point, an older woman in the piazza had asked me if my “tattoo” was of the Borromean rings. She was kind about it, said it symbolized “strength in unity.” The stripped, exposed feeling I had, lifted slightly as I thought about what she’d said. Strength in Unity?
Dante, Michelangelo, and threes… My inability to comprehend the meaning of these repeating coincidences frustrated me.
Also frustrating was my inability to speak Italian. More than once, I’d wished Giovanni were with me to translate and help me get around. In my more still and honest moments, I wished simply for his presence. I missed him: his confidence, his intensity, his…touch. God, his touch. I fought an internal battle over my feelings for Giovanni and for Finn and had to repeatedly tell myself what I told them: it doesn’t matter.
My heart called bullshit and squeezed like a punishment at the thought of never seeing either of them again. “Never” was a hatchet cutting choice to the bone. The only choice I had left was to move forward.
In general, I played the part of the post high-school backpacker on a European jaunt before starting college. I found that talking to other tourists—well, talking and utilizing the play of energy I learned from Giovanni—yielded results: directions, assistance, and information.
I’d been judgmental and skeptical when Giovanni first showed me what he could do with his Scintilla energy, explaining that people would do almost anything for a hit of what they wanted most: happiness. It wasn’t my nature to manipulate that way, but I shocked myself with how easily it came to me.
Because of this newfound ability, I’d had a very fortu
nate exchange with an art historian who’d also noticed the marking on my neck as we stood staring up at the circles on the tomb and asked if it was the giri tondi, which I’m sure made him think I was some kind of fanatical Michelangelo groupie. He arranged for me to tour the Vatican with his friend, Professor Piero Salamone, one of the foremost experts on Vatican art, particularly Michelangelo’s. It would be better than roaming the Pope’s pad on my own, hoping to blindly stumble upon clues or a big door that just happened to have a lock fitting the key around my neck. Arrangements were made to meet Piero Salamone on my second day in Rome.
Ina and Fergus had graciously given me money—quite a lot of it—and a new cell phone, and they arranged for a hotel room for me in Rome. My palms sweated every time I put the key in my hotel door, afraid the Arrazi had Finn’s family under surveillance and had a way to trace their credit cards. I knew my thoughts were dramatic and paranoid, but more than once in Italy, I’d had the slithering feeling that someone was following me. I saw no flashes of a telltale white aura, but I couldn’t be alerted to an Arrazi who hadn’t recently killed unless they were close enough to feel—close enough to kill.
Joe, the cab driver, was now beatboxing, either that or he had a nasty cough. I asked him to drop me at Vatican City, where I made my way through the throng of undulating colors and chattering of various languages to the first place I wanted to go: St. Peter’s Square.
I roamed around St. Peter’s Square, again with the creeping sensation that I was being watched. I tried to keep calm, to swallow the paranoia that skittered up my back like spider’s legs. I was one of thousands of people there. How could anyone but another Scintilla spot me?
Silver had become as elusive to me as those first days of seeing auras and wondering why mine was so different. I missed Giovanni more in those lonely moments, missed the intimacy of having someone like me by my side. How could I not wonder if he was right about Scintilla’s fate to be together? Our fate?